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. It's wonderful to be here. be a human being, seeing light and hearing sound and having sensation and having the feeling that there's other people nearby, warm and seeing light and hearing sound and feeling sensation. And it's wonderful to be at San Francisco Zen Center. I've heard so much about this place.

[01:02]

So my name is Ji Ryu, and I'm the abbot over the bridge at Green Gulch Farms End Center, where we still have wires on our microphones. And I haven't been in this seat since the renovation, and the building looks really beautiful. Thank you for all your care. These tatami are almost too nice to walk on. Maybe we should just... wall off the room, you know, rope off the room, just peek in. So forgive me for scuffing these. And it really is a very moving day for me and a great honor and privilege and deeply humbling to be on this seat. Nearby, at least, where our dear founder, Shinryu Suzuki Roshi, taught and taught us this practice of zazen, of just sitting and being ourself without knowing what that is.

[02:25]

Upright and side by side. Just sitting. And then his disciple, Sojin Mel Weitzman Roshi, who also an abbot here and sat around this seat now and then over his many years of teaching, humbling also to be... sitting where he sat and trying to express and keep alive that same dharma, the same light of teaching that these great teachers taught. So you maybe know that San Francisco Zen Center just released a new book of Shinryu Suzuki Roshi's teaching.

[03:30]

And I want to tell you about it. And the problem is every single line is bottomlessly deep. So settle in, because it's kind of a long book. And each line will take about a lifetime or so to really meet. It's amazing. I've been working on this book. for, I don't know, seven years or so with my teacher, Sojin Mel Weitzman Roshi. And even still just today coming over, listening to the audio book by Peter Coyote, who so kindly did the narration for us as Zen teacher and actor and voice actor, you know, really beautiful voice with full of understanding. And again, feeling like, oh, that's a good point Suzuki Roshi just made. I wish I had understood that before.

[04:36]

But I will try anyway not to say too much and really just to celebrate here together. I feel that's what the opportunity is of this morning to celebrate Suzuki Roshi and celebrate this book. Becoming Yourself by Suzuki Roshi. This is a collection of Sojin, Mel Weitzman, and I worked on collecting some of Suzuki Roshi's talks that had not yet been published and putting them together in this new book. It's been over 20 years since the last book of his teachings, and so it feels like a big moment for us and certainly for me. The cover is by our good friend Kaz Tanahashi, the character for Enjoy. enjoy this light and sound and sensation, this being yourself without knowing what that is. The knowing what you are is a little heavy, you know, but forgetting all about it and just being in this life is also sometimes heavy and can be extremely deeply joyful.

[06:00]

So, since we're celebrating, we should have a Zen party. And when we want to celebrate in Soto Zen, we have a way transmitted through the ancestors, which is to sit upright, rock our body right and left, forward and backward. Feel that lower belly center. Just a little bit of energy, a little bit of push into that lower belly center to ground your body, ground your breath. And growing this upright column from that grounded base.

[07:04]

As Susity Roshi says, letting the head hold up the sky, this upright, strong, And feeling our breath flowing all the way out from this low belly center. Flowing all the way into it. Letting our mind quiet down. Just setting aside anything extra. anything in the mind that's not about right now. Suzuki Roshi says, you know, these things in your mind, these thoughts, they're not garbage while you're using them, but...

[08:26]

If they don't have a use, you just let them go. So grounded and upright and quiet in our mind, we open our eyes and open our ears, open the whole field of this moment, and notice, Suzuki Roshi says, This moment, everything here is sharing its feeling with us. And we have the opportunity to share our feeling, this feeling of being alive that we have. We share it with everything that's around us. So just sitting in this kind of intimacy where we're sharing the feeling of being alive and sharing in the feeling that everything in this field is offering to us. That's why we want to clear our mind. Because there's something calling. There's something asking to be met here.

[09:29]

It's trying to share its feeling with us. Maybe you know what I mean. Intimate with what's here. One of the points that Suzuki Roshi makes about our sitting is that just sitting, being ourself, includes everything. So it's not like we're sitting here as some little part of things. Our sitting here includes everything.

[10:30]

All of the light and sound and sensation, all of the beings, all of the objects, all of the thoughts and feelings, everything is included. That's sort of his instruction on sitting. Just sit, being yourself. Everything is included. I don't know those of you who did zazen instruction, if that's what you heard this morning. You just sit down and be yourself and what you are includes everything. So I wanted to read a little bit about that from Suzuki Roshi and then I'll say a little more about the book. Our way of sitting... is for you to become yourself.

[11:34]

Katagiri Roshi always says, to settle oneself on oneself, to be yourself. When you become you yourself, at that moment, your practice includes everything. Whatever there is, it is a part of you. You practice with everyone in the future and in the past, That is our practice. But when you do not become yourself, it doesn't happen in that way. When you sit, you are sitting with everything, including animate and inanimate beings. The Soto Zen founder Dogen Zenji said that if your practice doesn't include everything, it is not real practice. You may think that after practicing for a long time, you will attain enlightenment, and that then your practice will include everything and everyone. But actually, your zazen already includes everything.

[12:41]

If you think that in two or three years, after your practice improves, then your zazen will be perfect enough to include everything, that is a mistake. Something is missing in that understanding. The sincerity is missing. Here's a key. When you practice forgetting yourself, forgetting where you are and how long you have been here, then your practice includes everything. When you say, I am practicing Zazen at Zen Center, I and Zen Center are extra. you are limiting your practice by the idea of Zen center or my Zazen. When you say my practice, the practice is very small. When you say Zen center, the practice is very limited.

[13:45]

When you forget all about those kinds of ideas and just practice, then at that time your Zazen is perfect and includes everything past, present, and future. That is the point of Zazen. It's not like a mystical truth. I think that's his point. Like, oh, someday I will become one with everything. It's just open your eyes. This being alive is intimate with everything that's here. This is my problem, you know. So wonderful to work with my teacher, Sojin Roshi, who wasn't so complicated in his thinking or his teaching. So I want to explain, you know, what including everything means.

[14:53]

But Suzuki Roshi just says it, you know, and Sojin too. Just sit as yourself, including everything. Part of what's so amazing about our teaching and Suzuki Roshi's words is that even though he was teaching in this very particular time. And I love this, you know, working on this book, looking at the transcripts and listening to these old lectures by Suzuki Roshi, who's teaching in the 60s and 70s here in the Bay Area. And you just feel this. It's a beautiful moment in history, you know, to feel and the intimacy and the energy of this new community blossoming up around this great teacher. And I love that. I love the kind of feeling of that reflecting on or feeling into that moment of history.

[15:58]

But the point of Suzuki Roshi's teaching, it's like the lamp that he was caring for has nothing to do with 1960 or 1970 or 2025 or 1250 or 450 BCE. It's about being a human being. It's about noticing that we're alive and caring for that in the most direct and immediate way. So this teaching really is for us today, and it's for anyone in any time. Our founder in Japan, Dogen Zenji, says, there are as many minds as there are persons.

[17:01]

Each of us has a different mind, but we can all negotiate the way. We can all do this practice of just sitting, forgetting, and being our life. You're all very still and silent, thank you. A perfect party. We could throw confetti. The Zen scholar Richard Jaffe was recently visiting, and he shared he's working on D.T. Suzuki, who Suzuki Roshi called the big Suzuki.

[18:03]

Suzuki Roshi said, I'm the little Suzuki. And Dr. Jaffe shared with us this line from D.T. Suzuki about the Buddha, at his awakening, had an outburst of consciousness. That's so cool. An outburst of consciousness. So that's like throwing confetti at our party. We could have this outburst of consciousness. Maybe if you know what that means, I think maybe you can feel what that means. This kind of like blossoming of, oh wait, I'm alive. This is so cool and strange. Throwing that confetti and feeling that confetti of these outbursts of consciousness. People walk by the building, you know. coming from the Buddha hall. So it's been so moving to feel the great support of so many people on this book, past and present.

[19:12]

You know, probably half the book is just the acknowledgments. So many people for so long have cared for, taken good care of Suzuki Roshi's teaching. starting all the way from Marion Derby in 1965 or so, who said, could we record this? There's like some beautiful stuff emerging from these outbursts of consciousness that you're having and sharing with us. Could we record it? Of course. And then people cared for those recordings and people transcribed those recordings. And over the decades, taking such good care of Suzuki Roshi's teaching, and living it out and nourishing a sangha dedicated to keeping this fundamental, eternal, timeless practice and truth alive and present to feel the support of so many people. You know, we see, of course, the publisher loved this, but I also was just very touched that His Holiness the Dalai Lama sent a word of

[20:23]

appreciation for Suzuki Roshi's teaching, recognizing also this is not like a 1960s thing that happened in San Francisco. This is actually the true Dharma passed down through the millennia and across the continents. To feel the support of so many people who have been touched by Suzuki Roshi's teaching, not limited. When we say Zen center, our practice is very limited. all of these people, and that the publisher, which is an imprint called Tarture, an imprint of Penguin Random House, picked up the book, and that there's been interest really all over the world in Suzuki Roshi's teaching. Already before the book was published, we had 12 rights already in 12 countries and 11 translations. So the sense of like something about our time is calling for Suzuki Roshi.

[21:28]

What do we need? What does the world need? What does our society needs? Some of us are saying, Suzuki Roshi. We need to now and then forget everything we think about what this life is, come into our body, sit side by side, and just be ourself, feel this being alive together. We need this kind of authentic being and this kind of intimacy. And we need this moral ground, this moral center or direction. That's also a lot of what this book is about. is about the, you could say, Buddhist ethics or the way that we, Buddhist precepts, the way that we live in harmony together with each other.

[22:32]

Just because it's party, I'm going to share with you these different countries that will be reading this book. So there's a British edition. to having it seen, but it's published. I don't know. I guess they just add use. I think maybe literally if they change the cover and then add some use. So that's, I don't know if that's a gig, if you could be like a full-time translator where you add the use. So then South Korea and Spain, which has the worldwide Spanish rights, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Hungary, Turkey, the Netherlands, Romania, France, and Poland, and of course for a very special, Japan. So Suzuki Roshi came from Japan and he says in Becoming Yourself, there's a chapter where he says a little bit about his life and his path and how his deep ambivalence for Zen.

[23:49]

And Buddhism, which is so wonderful. I think that's part of why he was such an inviting teacher in the United States, because he was very ambivalent about organized religion. It's like, yeah, these Buddhists. So I saw something so bright and vital and true and like the deepest thing, the most beautiful thing for human life. And then all of this nonsense, you know, that's like organized religion, right? So he said, you know, he wanted to share this very traditional thing, even though he wasn't sure about it. So he says, I want to establish Buddhism here in a pure form. So just this feeling that Suzuki Roshi came from Japan with these teachings to give us and then cultivated this way of... co-dependently, you know, arising teaching with the sangha that was here, people very open, beginner's mind.

[24:55]

And then the way that that teaching took shape is now of interest and inspiring to practitioners in Japan, just as their practice continues to inspire us. And that's been part of the opportunity of the book, too, to stay close to the Suzuki family and have back and forth with them and to feel their support in this. So Mel Weitzman had for a long time been collecting snippets of Suzuki Roshi's teaching that he wanted some time to publish. And then I think that he was having trouble sort of getting organized. A lot of great Zen teachers are not so organized, you know, because it's like they just got here on the planet, you know, that kind of freshness. So they say, well, it's in the spreadsheet.

[25:58]

I sent you the link yesterday. And they're just like, I just got here. There's light and sound. This is so amazing. I love you. So it's hard to keep a project going. So then it's good to have administrators and people who are good with spreadsheets. In all humility, I'm decent with the spreadsheet. So Ed Sadezan, actually knowing that, said, Mel, you know, if you really want this project to go, you should connect with Jiryu. Of course, I was very close to Sojin. I had received Dharma transmission from him. We had studied and practiced together for a long time. And Mel thought, oh, that's a good idea. So then I would just work with Mel. This was in about 2018. Just sit down with Mel whenever we had the chance. and just read over some of his folders, you know, all these kind of annotated, marked up transcripts or windbell articles, you know, pieces from Suzuki Roshi.

[27:08]

And we'd go through and try to polish, try to find the essence of what Suzuki Roshi was trying to say. So deep gratitude to Mel, really. a great privilege of my life to be able to do this study and work with him. And gratitude to Ed, to Abbot Ed Zadazan for having, in some sense, initiated this. And to Sozan for his support and to the Abbot's and senior Dharma teachers at Zen Center. So Hiro and we're navigating all of this with the Suzuki's. So part of what is so, to me, I guess, magical and poignant about this new book of Suzuki Roshi came out on Tuesday.

[28:16]

And then on Wednesday at Green Goats Farm, we had a ceremony ceremony of departure for our senior Dharma teachers, Tenshin Roshi and Adrian Roshi, Reb Anderson and Linda Cutts and their partners, Steve Weintraub and Rusa Chu. So these kind of founding generation practitioners of Suzuki Roshi's way sort of leaving residents at Green Gulch... while this kind of new blossom of Suzuki Roshi's teaching is emerging. So we didn't plan that, you know. This is just the magic of our interdependence and a little overwhelming for me. Now, these pillars of the Green Gulch Sangha, 55 years, you know, Linda Cutts was in the first group of five people going to sort of homestead at Green Gulch Farm in 1972.

[29:16]

So to feel this kind of new growth as the old transforms. Okay. I think we have some back and forth later. Yeah. Sorry, this is so one-sided. Or no-sided, hopefully, you know. Everything is included. I want to read us something about that. But I want to tell you everything about this book because it is an awesome book. It's called Becoming Yourself. And it's Suzuki Roshi's teachings. There are some just tremendous things in here. You know, this thing of sitting as just a practice of being yourself. I think really is a bottomless thing that we can study.

[30:18]

This sitting practice is just being ourself. So he has some chapters about that. He also, there's this kind of theme in the book, a couple of chapters on this topic of don't try to figure out who you are. It's like become yourself. Okay, so who am I? And then I'll become it. The best is to not try to figure out who you are. Don't separate from this being alive. That's who you are. If you try to know it, then you're stepping outside of it and you're going to get very confused. It's just this feeling right now. It's not going to be more complete later. Does that make sense? So don't try to figure out who you are. Please. At least if you wish to know who you are. I guess if it's never occurred to you to... wonder who you are, then maybe you could try to figure it out for a little while. But then stop.

[31:20]

So by the time you're here, don't figure out who you are. Feel what it is to be forgetting me, forgetting Page Street. What is this being alive? And this chapter, maybe my, I shouldn't say favorite, but this teaching of sharing the feeling, he says... Zen is the practice of just sharing this feeling with mountains and trees and each other. You can do that. The feeling of your life, just share it with everything that's around you. And then everything else is sharing its feeling with you. That's the piece where he says, the Buddha's enlightenment, the Buddha saw the morning star and they shared their feeling. He says, I don't know if it was the Buddha sharing his feeling with the morning star or the morning star sharing its feeling with the Buddha, but anyway... They shared their feeling together, and that was the Buddha's awakening, this intimacy with what's here. He has some teachings on zazen practice, on the body of zazen, one of which is a wonderful image.

[32:32]

He talks about the brush artists who hold the brush in their right hand. So you might think that they're working their right hand, but actually they're working their left hand. with the brush in their right hand. They're working their whole body almost except for the hand that holds the brush. Isn't that a wonderful image? The whole body is concentrated and the brush is light. And that's the feeling of our practice too. The whole body is concentrated and then there's this light tip. And then there's a section about kind of everyday practice. He has a wonderful, I was mentioning this morning, a wonderful teaching about money because I think some of the people in the Sangha maybe thought money was like embarrassing or dirty or a problem addict in some way. Kind of spiritual people, you know, maybe like have the thing about money. So he has a wonderful teaching about the way that we support each other, the way that our energy flows together and to go beyond.

[33:37]

He says, your idea that something is dirty is the dirty idea And teachings about harmony and respect and desire. A lot about taking good care of our desire, including the story of this Zen master who was on, I guess, begging rounds. And he was on this hillside mountain, and there was a beautiful fog overlooking this Japanese village below. And he had some time, and he smoked a cigarette. And it was the most... perfect cigarette, imaginable, and so he never smoked again. And Suzuki Roshi said that he understood desire. He understood taking care of himself. It's a wonderful, wonderful story. He has this little exploration of how come at the Buddha's death, all kinds of beings and all of the disciples of the Buddha,

[34:41]

And all of the animals came to pay their respects when the Buddha died. But there were no cats. The cats didn't come. He said, nobody ever explained to me why the cats, there's no cats. The cats didn't come to say goodbye to the Buddha. So he explores that. You know, his lightness, his humor, his joy in the practice. He says, you know... Our zazen practice teaches us that it just opens this joy and this lightness. So Suzuki Roshi is always sort of laughing with himself and with the sangha. The core, so I have four minutes now to say what I most want to say. So I'll slow down. This is a book about the Bodhisattva precepts, the 16 Bodhisattva precepts.

[35:46]

In other words, how we actually live out our practice of Zazen. Our oneness with everything is not like a feeling that you have. First of all, it's just the reality of our life. Secondly, it's something to enact by how we take care of each other, by not killing each other and not lying to each other and not exploiting each other and not... praising ourselves at each other's expense and not talking about each other's faults, etc. So this teaching of the precepts is like, really, as we become more serious and sincere in our practice, it becomes almost the most important thing. Not what kind of feeling am I having in zazen, but how am I living out and acting for all of us this oneness with life, that everything is included. So I thought that we could call this something like Suzuki Roshi's teachings on bodhisattva precepts. And the editor says, nobody knows what that means. Also, you can't use the word precepts.

[36:48]

It's a book about precepts, but we can't use the word precepts. So anyway, it kind of prevailed there. It didn't make the title, but it still says precepts a lot. Sometimes we say ethical precepts or ethical principles. So for me, the resource here of Suzuki Roshi's special teaching on the precepts, Mel, Sojin Roshi, felt that he really wanted practitioners to understand Suzuki Roshi's teaching on the precepts. And so that really became a focus of our work together. Where can we find in the archive teachings from Suzuki Roshi about the Bodhisattva precepts? There are some wonderful books, important books to study for us about the Bodhisattva precepts. that tend to go one by one through the precepts. And we can kind of analyze each of the precepts, not killing, not lying, etc., as a kind of gateway or lens through which to study our life and see, am I practicing zazen in all of these areas?

[37:52]

But Suzuki Roshi says, you don't practice them one by one. They're all just this expression of zazen. The precepts are what we already have. They're our own nature. They are innate. It's our natural loving heart. It's the way that we already include everything. So Mel really wanted people to understand that and he wanted me to understand that. And I think Suzuki Roshi did too. So I really can say a lot about that. And maybe I'm speaking also tomorrow at Green Gulch. And that also will be online. Hello to my online friends. So maybe I won't have much time, thankfully, to explain. Here's Suzuki Roshi. Now here's like my convoluted explanation of Suzuki Roshi. Log in tomorrow for that. But now, because I think it's okay to go maybe two minutes over, and I just want to read a little bit that I think is kind of the essence of Suzuki Roshi's way on precepts, which to me is kind of the most important part of this book, even though there's wonderful teachings.

[39:06]

on many dimensions of our practice in it. So I'll just read these in closing. And with your gratitude for your kind attention. I don't intend to explain the Zen precepts or ethical principles in a traditional way, but in a way that helps you to understand that the precepts are something everyone has as their own nature. They are not something that was decided by Buddha. Precepts are what make Buddha be Buddha. Precepts came first and Buddha came next. Before Buddha appeared, there were precepts. Before anyone comes into this world, there are precepts. Everyone has these principles in their true sense. Instead of putting emphasis on individual precepts one by one, we put more emphasis on our original human nature or Buddha nature.

[40:21]

Our intention in transmitting precepts is to reveal what our original human nature is beyond our various ways of life and interpretations and to understand how each precept is related to this original nature. And he tells a story which I won't read in full about one of his teachers as a young boy who was tasked with getting some tofu from the store for lunch and is running late. You know, the temple bell is already going. Lunch is going to happen. And so he runs to this tofu store, gets the tofu, runs back, realizes he doesn't have his hat, runs back to the store, yells at the shopkeeper, give me my hat, my hat. And the shopkeeper is perplexed and says... Your hat is on your head. You know, this moment that we all kind of have, where are my glasses? Where are my glasses? I gotta go. I gotta go get a dermatologist. Where are my glasses? So it's the hat is on our head. So he goes into this, the precepts.

[41:24]

How do I live a good life? It's on your head. It's in your belly. It is what you already are. Don't look outside for some moral code that's going to tell me how to live. Connect with this innate loving nature that includes everyone. The hat is already on your head. This one is bottomless. Okay, one more and then I'll close. This is about the practice of not separating or thinking that anything, the way that we live in harmony with each other is by understanding that we actually are in this life together, that nothing is separate from it. So for real, I'll close with this. When my English wasn't good enough to read Alan Watts' book on Zen, he expressed its point to me like this. When a stone is completely a stone, that is a real stone.

[42:25]

That is how he put our Zen into words. When a stone is completely a stone, that is, when a stone is completely a stone through and through, that is really a stone. Not only is it really a stone, But when it is really a stone, it includes everything. When the stone is really a stone, it cannot be picked up by anyone. When it is not a stone, someone may pick it up. But when it is really a stone, no one can. No one can do anything with it. When a stone is really a stone, even if you think you are picking it up, you cannot. It is part of the universe. and you cannot pick up the whole universe. To pick up that stone or to pick up the whole universe, you would be outside of the universe. You would be a ghost. Nothing exists outside of the universe. All that exists is within the universe. To think that you can pick up a stone is a big delusion.

[43:29]

The way to receive the precepts is to understand this point and sit zazen. That is the only way to observe perfect precepts. There is no other way to observe the precepts. We are not interested in explaining the 250 or more precepts because the point is not to observe those precepts one by one, one after another. The point is to learn how to be yourself, how to be a person in the way that a stone is completely a stone. When you are just a person, you will have the complete precepts. Even if you keep all of the many written precepts, you may not be completely a person. The best way to observe precepts is just to be you yourself, and then the precepts are always with you. In short, to be yourself is the purpose of our practice and is the way to keep the Buddha's precepts.

[44:32]

Thank you for celebrating together. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[45:09]

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