This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. My name is Christina Lehnherr, Kiku Oetsu. It's my Dharma name. Oh, it's falling off. Let me try this differently. So. I, in another lifetime, was an abbess here. And now I'm not. Even my Zagug, that I use to bow on, and this okesa that is used when giving talks are not used to being worn so much anymore, so they have to get used to be folded in the way again that they used to be folded and just fell into place by themselves.

[01:19]

So even things start having habits. fabric is like skin. It actually starts having folds that even when you wash them and iron them, they go right back to those folds like skin on your body. So who is, maybe there are some people here that are here for the very first time. You raise your hand so we can all see. Welcome very much. for your time, for being here. And the community here that lives here is right now in a community retreat where they do many different things together. They play together. Yesterday I heard, I think it was yesterday, they had a talk of peace, not talk of war.

[02:22]

And I heard that the abbot, even though he had the work leader on his side and that crew, lost. So they get a chance to practice equanimity in the face of losing. And I hope they're successful. Because everybody expected, I think, them to win. So maybe they did too. So... they put themselves into situations where they experience each other in different ways, in new ways. And that's something I would like to talk about today, about how fleeting, how fluid, how unstable... everything is because it's dependent on so many innumerable things.

[03:30]

So even if you take a moment and think about the miracle, the actually absolutely unbelievable miracle that you are alive here now. When you go back and look what all needed to happen for you to be here, you have to go to the beginning of the universe. There's no place before that you can stop. So you have to go back way before we even know what happened. For that to happen, that finally your parents were born, met each other in this world, and you got born too. And here you are. Here we are. And we forget that. We forget that actually every moment of our lives, an uncountable amount of things have to be in place in just the way they are for us to take the next breath, for us to be able to sit here, for us to be able to walk out of here, for us to be able to listen.

[04:51]

to see everything for our bodies to digest, to breathe, to do their work. And so I would like to talk a little bit about that. And first I would like you to turn to somebody beside you and just greet them. Just say your name, introduce yourself, Thank you. And now, maybe I don't have to give a talk anymore.

[06:22]

Now take a moment and feel how you feel, how you felt in that particular moment. encounter in your body, in your feelings, in what's going on in your mind. Now I would like you to turn to the other side and introduce yourself to somebody else. a second time is fine. Do it over. Hi. Nice to meet you. And now, feel again how it was with another person.

[08:06]

Were you exactly the same? Did you feel the same? Did you say the same? Did you experience the same thing? Or did you experience something big, small, slightly different? Who experienced the difference? Can you raise your hands high up? This is an example of how fluid we are, how we actually are put together in different ways depending on who we meet, what we say, what we hear. That's a dependent co-arising. So you still recognize yourself, you still know I'm Gloria, I'm Christina, I'm Ed, I'm Furley, I'm Sagan.

[09:08]

That doesn't change, but actually how your being is put together and comes forward changes with everything around you. When you do dishes, when you talk to somebody, when you introduce yourself, it all goes both ways. We affect it and we are affected. So I would like to read a poem and it's by Mary Oliver. It's called In Black Water Woods. Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment. The long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds.

[10:13]

And every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year, everything I have ever learned, in my lifetime, leads back to this. The fires and the black river of loss, whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world, you must be able to do three things. To love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones, knowing your own life depends on it. And when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

[11:15]

So Buddhism is not a religion, even though it might fool us. you know, with all the rituals and chanting and robes and priests and lay people. It's not a religion. There is no dogma. There is nothing we are asked to just believe in. It is... a presentation of an understanding how this universe works. And the aim of this Buddhist teaching is a way of life which can free us or liberate us from the suffering we ourselves create. That is not the pains that come with being alive, that...

[12:24]

We have to keep remembering that everything is changing. We're going to age. We're going to get ill here and there. We're going to die one day. We're going to lose people we love by either having to leave them ahead of them or by them going ahead of us. We are losing friends because they become mothers and somehow their life path moves in a different direction than we do, not by ill will or because they choose actually to leave us, but just because their life carries them in a different direction. We lose co-workers, we lose bosses, we love or we hate it. It's all changing.

[13:25]

All the time. And we're living in a time where we also hear almost every day of people losing other people by sudden acts of violence and distress and hate. That seemed totally unrelated, and that can happen to us too. So we live in a very... resilient and very fragile life. It's both, all the time. So Buddhism is giving us one way of life. There are innumerable ways of life that can liberate us. So I'm not promoting Buddhism as the one true way.

[14:26]

Because we are so many different people, there are so many different ways we can understand how to live in a harmonious and life-affirming way in the midst of everything that's going on. Buddha instructs us to examine what his teaching is and to find out for ourselves... if it's relevant to our life. So he says, don't believe anything. So he says, don't just believe the teachings. You have to examine my teaching. See for yourselves if they are true for you. So it's an activities inviting us to. It's not the passive kind of knowing in our heads. It's actually a... looking in our life and applying it and finding out, is this useful to me? Dogen Senji, the founder of this school of Buddhism, says, to study the Buddha way is to study the self.

[15:37]

To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. So you have just been actualized by the people you've turned to to introduce yourself. That's what is meant. You turn to them and looking at them and hearing their voice and speaking to them, you are actualized in that particular way you have been. That's what it means to be actualized. And we are actualized all the time by myriad things, by all the things some of us A few we can see maybe, and most of them we can't. That's the myriad things. The Indian teacher Chidu Krishnamurti says, truth is a pathless land, meaning there is no one truth that we can speak in a sentence.

[16:46]

There is truth, but it's... so multifaceted that we can't say Buddhism is the only way, Judaism is the only way, Islam is the only way, Catholicism is the only way. We can't. I mean, we can say it, and it leads to suffering all around because it becomes very divisive. So we can say it, but it's not... it's not what really is meant in any of those traditions. It's a misunderstanding. Truth is a pathless land, that's Krishnamurti. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through philosophical knowledge or or psychological technique.

[17:48]

We have to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of our own mind, through observation, and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. the poet Rainer Maria Rilke says, we have to live everything. And that's true. If we become able to be present and live fully with everything that is occurring in our lives, then we learn how life works. Pema Chodron, the Tibetan teacher, says, learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, which means all aspects of our being, is important.

[19:01]

The reason it's important is that fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts, And the Chinese character for heart and mind is the same character. So when we look in our own hearts or when we look in our own minds and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn't just ourselves that we are discovering. We are discovering the universe. So Mary Oliver says, the three things we have to learn is to love what is in our life. There's a poem by Hafez that goes, and love says, I will, I will take care of you to everything that is near.

[20:16]

So it's this paper. It's this lectern. It's Ed. It's former Abbas Paul. It's Tova. It's what's going on in myself. It's what's going on around me. I will take care of you to everything that is near. How do we do that? But when you listen to that, I think you can feel in your body how that makes you feel. I will take care of you to everything that's near. I will take care of you. So Mary Oliver says, to love what is mortal, which means what is...

[21:18]

What is the word? It's not forever. It's changing. It's bound to leave us one way or the other. Or we leave it. It's just to love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones, knowing your own life depends on it. That is understanding that it's part of what makes you what supports your life to keep living. And when the time comes to let it go, to really let it go. When things change, they sometimes change very imperceptibly.

[22:23]

I mean, we all have family members or friends or have experienced it ourselves. You know, we go along and we feel fine and we feel fine and they feel fine and everything feels fine and then they feel not so fine and then they find out or we find out that actually we have a life-threatening illness. Boom. And it didn't just happen that day when we go to the doctor, but the changes were so subtle that we didn't notice them for a long time. Sometimes they're very obvious, the changes. And we see how they happen. And we can even see them coming. So... In this tradition, we do practice with intentions and with vows.

[23:27]

And so intentions and vows actually can be very helpful to help us meet the changes. So, for example, and... they can also mislead us into identifications. We cannot identify with a vow in terms of what that should look like. But it's like an ongoing question, how does my vow to live for the benefit of all beings manifest Now, for example, for me, in my quite mundane, unpriestly looking, manifesting, you know, I'm not wearing robes, I'm not doing services, I'm just living a householder life.

[24:36]

When I go to the market, nobody knows that I have taken vows. So it's not... manifest in an apparent way, but how do my vows to live for the benefit of all beings manifest when I go to the market, when I talk to the contractor that's just undoing our whole house right now, and the workers there, to my spouse with which I'm now living in a very tiny little cottage in the back of the house, It's an ongoing question, how do the intentions and the vows inform and support how I meet the changes? That some of them I engender, some of them I'm just the collateral damage of, or I'm just suffering from, they happen to me unasked for.

[25:41]

How do I, they help me Stay on track in something that's continuously changing, in something I cannot count on. In the Samdi Nirmorjana Sutra, I didn't know I was going to say that. It's not on there, Sarah. I'll give it to you later. Does somebody know the translation of the title? Samdi Nirmorjana. Yes. Greatly. Because I'm saying this now because Sarah is writing for Keith, who can't hear. So she's verbatim. And I tried to give her all the special words I might be using, but sometimes something comes in from the left field unknown. So in that sutta it says that it's...

[26:47]

unstable, unreliable, and not worthy of confidence. So every phenomenon is unstable, unreliable, and unworthy of confidence. And it's so interesting. First we think, oh my God, then what do I trust in? Where do I orient myself? But if you listen to it in your heart, All phenomenon are unstable, unreliable, unworthy of confidence. It has also an incredibly freeing aspect to it because you can start looking at how it is now and how it is now and, oh, look, now it's slightly different and my spouse is suddenly not... the person I expected her to be, or it's an opening.

[27:50]

And when we have a vow, a commitment of quality of meeting rather than stability of shape or form or appearance, but quality of meeting whatever we're meeting, it's very liberating and becomes also very exciting. and very wonderful because totally unexpected things happen, and what also happens is you start actually feeling supported by everything. You know, right now I can't remember, somebody a long time ago said, I feel supported by everything. Maybe it was Reb Anderson. And I heard it and I thought, that's right. That is true.

[28:55]

That is a truth, that everything supports us. But I can't see that that way. I still feel supported here and not supported there and definitely not supported over here. And now that has changed in my life. So when I felt like I'm not supported... I would usually, when I had a good idea that filled me with excitement, I would not share it. Because I was afraid somebody else would meddle in it or take it away from me or do it first or all these different, you know, funny things. Then I discovered suddenly, after a few years of practice, that actually when I had an idea... I started to float the idea. I started to say it. And I watched. I watched what happened with the energy of that idea. Sometimes it started to gather energy and it led to something that manifested.

[30:01]

Like, for example, one of the first examples was I was sewing on my... my black, my first okesa, and suddenly at Green Gulch Farm, and suddenly I felt, had this urge to go home to Switzerland. And it's strange, kind of surprising, ooh, I should go home. And I didn't quite understand it. So I was working in the garden at that time, and Wendy Johnson was the gardener. And so... I said to her, you know, I start having the feeling I should go and visit in Switzerland. I have a big family there. And she said, oh, now is the perfect time. So within 10 days, I was in Switzerland. And in that time, before going, I realized I want to go home because I want to ask my siblings and my parents

[31:06]

if they will put in a few stitches, and some of my friends in my ocasa, which you sew by hand, these things you sew by hand in our tradition. Many stitches. And I thought, I have no idea if I can ask my father to put in stitches. My father is a very dogmatic, or was a very dogmatic Catholic. So Buddhism, that I kind of left the church It was for him like, I'm losing my salvation. I'm for giving up my salvation. It was difficult for him. So I didn't know if I could ask him to put in stitches. So I decided not to ask him till I felt I have to ask him. So I didn't. My mother put in stitches, all my six siblings put in stitches, my friends put in stitches.

[32:08]

And one day he says to me, aren't you going to ask me to put in some stitches? And I said, yes, I would love it if you put in some stitches, and he did. So when we start floating ideas and watch what is supported by innumerable conditions to come forward and what just isn't. So for example, for a while the idea of returning to Switzerland was very alive after I stepped down as the abbess here. And it was floated. And Marsha and I went several times to Switzerland. We knew where we would go if we go.

[33:11]

And for two years, it carried a lot of energy. It was out in the world. And then it just wasn't supported enough to live. It just didn't. gather enough energy. So it's like a plant that can't thrive. And when you notice that, then you have to take it to the grave. So, you know, you have to grieve it, you have to let it go, but it also helps you because you see it would be a forcing of something to make it happen. And it wouldn't It's not livable. It doesn't have enough for whatever reason, not out of bad will or anything. Just some of the ingredients just weren't there to make it viable.

[34:12]

And when we live that way, when we start looking what is supported and what is not supported, and we make our effort, but then look... then life becomes much easier. And it's not like, oh, they're against us. There was nothing against me moving to Switzerland, but there wasn't enough that just came together in the right way to make it a viable, livable situation. So then we have to maybe grieve a little, because we have to say goodbye to something that would be really nice, and we... would like, but also there's the support of realizing it's nobody's fault, it's nobody's bad will, it's just not supported enough. So we can peacefully shift maybe our job or not move to Switzerland for the time being or do the next thing that is actually alive and supported.

[35:24]

And the process of looking at that actually works also transformed something. I'm here now in a different way. It's not like, oh, I should have dispensed of that whole idea and effort around that idea because it didn't lead to the result I imagined at the beginning. No, it actually, dealing with it and doing our best changed me and I'm here in a new way. It's not like I wasted my time. So the vows to, or living vows, or the intention, when we live intentionally, it doesn't have to be a vow, helps us to see how we meet what we are meeting and how how the meeting then helps us find our way.

[36:30]

And it may be a very windy road. It may be a very straight road. One isn't better than the other. If you are following your life, where is it supported? Where is it expanding? Where is it getting deeper, fuller, even through narrow passages? It's like a river flowing. So a commitment or a vow helps us to keep looking where life flows, what is supported, what is not supported, and not take it personally. But to just see this wasn't supported enough.

[37:32]

I mean, everybody was excited about it. Not everybody, actually. Some people were absolutely not excited about the idea, but a lot of people were excited about it. So, but everybody, you know, nobody said, well, you're thinking of moving to Switzerland. Well, I stopped talking to you. I don't like it, so goodbye now. Right? You could have. I mean, people could. And sometimes people do that. But everybody hung in there and watched and went, ooh, if she goes, it's terrible. Or, ooh, yes, if she comes, it's wonderful. It's very simple. That doesn't say it's not emotionally maybe complicated or... or challenging. But there's something very calming and very relaxing when you start engaging the whole universe in the process of your life.

[38:41]

And just watch what is supported and what is not supported despite your best effort. And if it's not supported despite your best effort, then can you just... give it a nice funeral. It's important. You have to grieve it. You have to say goodbye. You have to think about how can I let this go? How can I honor this effort and let it go in an honorable way? It's not like, well, it didn't work, so forget it. That's not taking care of your heart and the energy you put into it. But it's just not supported and it's not because anybody Most of the time, it's not because somebody has a bad will. I mean, if you don't get the job because your boss hates you, then maybe you can say, well, with this boss, I can't get this job. That's a possibility. But most of our life, big things have much more to do with such an amount of innumerable things that make it possible for it to happen or make it just are missing an ingredient for it to happen.

[39:51]

So then can we grieve, can we allow ourselves to grieve and say goodbye and put it to rest, and then see where life takes us, because life is not stopped. So, I think this is enough for today. I read you the poem by Mary Oliver again. It's called In Black Water Woods. Look, look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment. The long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds.

[41:01]

And every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year, everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this. the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world, you must be able to do three things. To love what is mortal, to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it. And when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

[42:03]

Thank you all for being here. Thank you all for making this talk with me because it always comes from all of you. I never know what from my notes will come to life. And it comes to life through your individual beings listening, and how you're here. So thank you very much. I wish you a wonderful rest of the day. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[43:22]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:25]

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