This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Morning. Nice to see so many good friends here this morning. Thank you for making the trip. old friends and new friends, in the flesh and online, taking this time to settle and turn towards something. For me, it's turned towards that we don't know what it is, except that it's together, making room for the magnitude of both of those facts.

[01:24]

I don't think I know everyone who's here today. My name is Jiryu. the abbot here at Green Gulch. And it's been wonderful to practice this morning and for so many mornings in this hall, in this zendo, this old barn meditation hall. And Thich Nhat Hanh points out that we tend to not appreciate that we don't have a toothache. Was anybody appreciating among the subset of us who don't currently have a toothache? Or have we been appreciating that today? So I forget to appreciate that I have a zendo that has not burned down. We can't count on

[02:30]

We are not entitled to, like, not get toothaches. And we are not entitled to have zendos that don't burn down. So every day that we don't have the toothache and every moment that we're in a non-burned-down zendo, may we appreciate it. It will burn or blow over or dissolve or be eaten by space aliens or something. The zendo is not here to stay, but it's here right now in whatever form it is. Can we be intimate, appreciate, without assuming anything about the next moment? So many of you know that our beloved zendo at Tassajaras and Mountain Center burned down But a while ago now, we didn't have a talk last Sunday.

[03:37]

I think many of you have heard the news. And I see in the assembly today a number of you from Tassajara. And welcome. Bowing with the whole sangha in respect and gratitude and love for you. who have come up now to be here for a while, and who wholeheartedly cared for each other in that time of midnight, midnight fire in a remote and narrow valley. How terrifying. How precarious. How beautiful. and generous that you were able to take care of each other and some buildings too that the fire didn't spread because the context was cared for so may each of you find the support and the space that you need to take good care of yourselves and

[05:02]

Now that you're out of the valley and to find ways to be with and process and allow to unfold the intensity of what that experience must have been. So this... You could say, you know, this fire at Tassajara was at the close, near the close of the practice period. So kind of like... Always the season changes, you know. It does a hard, but not usually so dramatically. And also at Green Gulch, we have this kind of shift in our season. So we just have come out of at Green Gulch a spring session where we did three back-to-back intensives or retreats. And we're now embracing the sunshine and trying to... tend to the unstoppable force of life that is bursting out unmanageably throughout the valley.

[06:14]

So we pivot now to our growing season, our season of caring for guests. And these three intensives have been really beautiful. And I think we'll try this again next year. And I would encourage any of you to come and try those two or three week intensives out in the spring. I'm not sure I would recommend doing all three of them back to back. Unless, you know, you can't help it. Like some of us. That was so hard. When is this going to be over? When's the next one? Tomorrow. Okay, good. Thank God. So if you do all three back to back, you might find that around April 5th, you'll be deeply, profoundly exhausted.

[07:15]

And then maybe you'll find, looking innocently at your calendar, that on April 5th, it's your turn to give the Dharma talk. And you'll think, I am so tired. I don't think that's going to be possible. And I still don't know. So thank you for your compassion. And it's nice to be with this intimate and familiar group. I'll trust that I have your support, even if I pass out mid-talk here, as teachers sometimes do. It's rare. Often teachers sleep while you're talking to them. but less often do they sleep while they themselves are talking. I was remembering this morning once I was the attendant for our late abbot Steve Stuckey, very energetic and solid person of the way.

[08:22]

And one night in the practice period, he gave this very powerful and clear dharma talk, and I told him after, I said, wow, that was a really good dharma talk. And he said something like, I have no idea how I said anything, and I have no idea what I said. I'm so tired, I think I'm going to die. So this is, somehow the Dharma wasn't obstructed. You know, for Zen students everywhere, all of us, you know, we kind of take this risk on that we might get tired. poor, tired us. There's this old tradition of giving ourselves fully to a demanding schedule and feeling the joy and satisfaction of burning ourselves up in that practice, in that life. And I think almost all of you must have the same feeling.

[09:29]

Who has not just done the three back-to-back? The demands of human life, what's demanding from inside, what's demanding from outside, the way that we're connected to each other, we think that's so beautiful, interdependence. It also means, like, we're depended on, just as we depend on others. We're in this web. Our whole life energy is being called forth, and... So all of us know what it is to be tired, to be exhausted, to be depleted. So I wanted to just share a little bit about how I've been practicing with that in the hopes that it may be, I hope you don't need such teachings. I don't know what you're talking about, Jesus. So our aspiration, part of what makes Zen, in my view, trustworthy, is that everything is included.

[10:48]

Nothing is excluded. So all of the dimensions of who we are and what we are and what we need and how we might care for ourselves, all of that is included. So, for example, if you're tired, you should take a nap Being tired is not a spiritual problem. And the Zen tradition isn't saying that there's like a spiritual solution to your tiredness or really to any of your problems. It's not that you're having a problem. And it sort of breaks my heart when I hear... Buddhism kind of characterized in this way. I think it's an easy misunderstanding to fall into and I don't know if I'll be articulate enough to express kind of what's at stake in this mix-up. Buddhism, nowhere does Buddhism say that you're suffering, you're having problems because you're doing life incorrectly.

[12:08]

If you were more spiritual, then you wouldn't be tired. If you were more spiritual, then you wouldn't be grumpy. If you were doing what the Buddha taught, then you would feel good and be at one with everyone and always say nice things and everything would be perfect. But you're practicing wrong. And so you have these problems. Does that make sense? Does anybody think that Buddhism says that? And then we're looking back as the Buddhism is telling us how we got here. Namely, that it's our fault for doing it wrong. This thing that we didn't even ask for and don't know how we got here and don't know what it is. And now we hear the reason it's hard is because you're doing it wrong. But the Buddha Dharma is offering that we have a moment right now that we're stepping right into. Are we curious about how we're meeting that? How can we meet this next moment that's coming? in all of the ways that that's asking to be met.

[13:12]

And so Zen is not excluding any of the ways that we might meet the requests and the needs and the opportunities of this moment, psychological, financial, interpersonal, all of that included. Zen is just sort of specializing in or pointing out, while you take care of your life in all of the areas that it needs care, There's a fundamental layer of how we are relating to our being alive. There's this fundamental layer that also should be and can be included in how we meet our life and how we meet our problems and our difficulty. Zen is inviting us to sort of check our... As we go about our ordinary life in our innately wise and compassionate way, trying to overcome and work through the various obstacles and hindrances that we encounter inside and outside, Zen is asking, can we look also at this fundamental posture of how we are relating to this fact of being alive?

[14:34]

with the insight that there's some things happening at that deep level of how we're relating to being alive that will impact how it is that we're managing and working through our life in all of these other levels. Does that make sense? So the way that our... founder of Soto Zen in the 13th century Japan, Dogen Zenji, a way that he describes what this posture, what this deep posture might be. He says, to carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion, is confusing. To carry yourself forward and meet the myriad things. to carry yourself forward into the world that's separate from you.

[15:41]

That the myriad things come forth and realize you is awakening. So part of what I want to offer this morning is just a little deep posture check. Is there a lean? in the way deep down that you're relating to being, that is something like, I'm over here, the world's out there, I'm carrying myself through, meeting it, navigating it. And then if you are tired, you might wonder whether that attitude is contributing. Or... Is the posture more like, I see this great arising together. Everything that's here is arising together, giving me life. My own life, my own activity is like carried by everything.

[16:55]

So it's like, you know, I'm tired because I don't sleep much. You know, I'm not tired because, you know, I'm carrying myself forward instead of letting the mirrored things arise. And yet, Buddhism has this wonderful language of leaks, leaking, leaking. There's like this big water pipe. We have these big water pipes underground at Green Gulch. No one quite knows where they are until they explode. And then we kind of have the ballpark. And maybe our... Deep postures are kind of like that too. So there may be, you know, so then the water system is a water operator here for a while. And the water tank, you know, is losing water at some alarming weight. And you tell everybody, you know, to like take short showers. Meanwhile, you know, that's kind of like take a nap. Self-care. That's like take short showers. Meanwhile, underground, there's a giant crack in the pipe that's draining thousands of gallons a day.

[18:20]

And that's in this attitude that I'm separate from the world and it's up to me to carry myself forward. I'm making my life. I'm doing my life. If I stopped making this effort to be a human being and do it right, then the whole thing would fall apart. That's this big... root leak that's just not helping with our caring for our life. It's not helping our thriving and our meeting. It's not helping us to be available for and be peace with each other. A couple of years ago, I went backpacking near Tassajara, with my older son, maybe he's 14 or so. And it was a little bit last minute kind of trip. And it's a trip that I'd done before, but I hadn't been backpacking in a while.

[19:24]

And it sort of came together quickly. And so the preparation was subpar. So I just like threw a bunch of stuff that I thought we would need into some backpacks, you know, and it was lovely. We went on the trail and then we started looking around, you know, as we were hiking with these really heavy backpacks. We had like all kinds of stuff sort of like hanging off of our bodies. And we kept walking by people who just had these little compact, you know, like ultra light, like well cared for situations. And some of them were like literally sort of doing double takes as we passed. Like where are these people going? Are they like, are they building a hut somewhere? So of course, we're going to be tired, right?

[20:32]

We're climbing up a hill. But do we need confidence quite as much as we're carrying? Do you need quite as much as you're carrying? Why do we carry what we don't need? Why do you carry what you don't need? Open your hands and walk innocent, letting go of hundreds of years. Entering the mountains with our absurd pack and finding in the realm of our life, in the spiritual realm,

[21:51]

The trees are filled with fruit and the streams are overflowing with fish. And yet we're laboring under this giant pack. We thought we needed to bring this all. We thought we needed to carry ourselves forward into this thing. What can we let go of and put down and allow the arising together? the way that I think that I need to do my life and make my life, I want to practice curiosity about that. Let the cracks show in that way of living. And give reality the opportunity in practicing the letting go.

[22:55]

Give reality the opportunity to support me. that actually we are arising together with everyone. And we can't see it. I need my pack. Because if I didn't have it, you know. So how do we just relax enough that we can see that actually we are arising together with the whole? So these practices that I've been exploring these last months are around the practice of ease and joy and or ease and wonder. These are related in the teachings. If you already know what's happening, which is that you're over here and the world's over there and you've got your big pack and you're going into it, there may not be so much room for the wonder, the wonder at what is.

[23:59]

And as we open to the wonder, what is this being? What is this aliveness? What is happening here? The idea that it's something we have to make and do and carry is kind of like undermined. So to practice ease and wonder, ease and joy for me have been nourishing and enriching practices. In this last retreat, Gil Fransdahl was generously guiding the assembly and he offered this image that, you know, generally we think of our walking the Buddhist path or just our living as a kind of walking a path as though it's a path up a mountain. And I even have this, there's a beautiful drawing that my teacher in Japan did of this snail climbing Mount Fuji.

[25:07]

He really loved this poem. He was a sort of fierce and energetic practitioner who just said, just continue just like that little snail. If you don't give up the little snail, we'll get to the top of Mount Fuji. So he drew this beautiful mountain with a little snail on it and says, just step by step, you know, you'll get there. This kind of idea that the path, I'm on the path up the hill. That can be encouraging, wonderful energy. I'll overcome the obstacles. But Gil offered, really, what if the Buddha path, what if our being alive path was more like a stream flowing down the hill? I thought, well, that would be nice. That'll never work. You don't understand. I have to climb through life. If I just let go, easy for you to say. I remember saying this to Mel Weitzman, my root teacher, who also taught in this frustrating way.

[26:15]

Just like let go of everything, just flow downhill and everything is taken care of. Like, no, it's not. You don't understand. It's not. If I stopped making it happen and doing it, it wouldn't happen and it wouldn't be done. It's like, do you ever get mad when someone tells you to relax? That's like a good test, I guess, if someone's relaxed. You tell them to relax and they say, thank you, that's a great idea. Then they probably didn't need to hear it, you know? Don't tell me to relax. You relax. And I get that we're suspicious of people telling us to relax. It's like, well, what are you going to get out of that? What are you telling me to relax? Like, hmm. That would be nice for you if I relaxed so that you could continue your shenanigans. But I'm here not relaxed to hold you accountable. And I used to feel this, you know, in the practice of the Buddha Dharma.

[27:26]

Like this practice is so important. Liberation of all sentient beings from suffering is really important. Seeing what this life really is and becoming fully the deep potential of it is really serious and important. And we say, you know, has this kind of transformative power for all living beings. That's like, don't tell me to relax. I'm doing something serious and important. The way Suzuki Roshi says it is like, it's so important how we live together, how we care for our heart, how we practice ethics and virtue and wisdom is so profoundly important that we better relax. I think of it like an ancient vase.

[28:27]

If you were given some fragile ancient vase, It's like so precious and important that you need to not crush it. I'm taking care of this face. It's really important. It's so important that we need to hold it lightly. Can we let life live us? It's already what's happening. There's just this overlay. There's just this dream that if I weren't doing it from my personal, separate, independent power, then it wouldn't be happening. But actually, that independent, separate, personal power is just a dream and has been the whole time. The fullness of your life energy, everything you're doing and making is actually arising together with everything.

[29:28]

You have not done anything by yourself. So you could stop trying, and then it's not like you would just never get off the couch. You don't understand, you're you. If I stopped trying, I would not get off the couch. You would. Everything together lifts your body, moves your body. That's how your body moves. This is the teaching. Somebody recently sent me, I think they were trying to give me a hint, So they sent me a bag of these things. You know, these finger traps. This is like... This is your mind in delusion. It's like, don't tell me to relax. Are you saying it's not important for me to have my fingers? I need my fingers to do all the good that I need to do in the world. Don't tell me to relax.

[30:30]

Because it's so important that you have your fingers to use to give gifts to others. Relax. This pull, this doing, this making. So I've been practicing the ease and the ease that comes from the wonder, the ease that comes from the what is this being alive? And is it actually something I'm making? Or is it something that is arising altogether? And can I trust that? Can I rest in that? I think today is Easter. And I remember our late Abbas Blanche Hartman, joking about her husband, Lou Hartman, who was a wonderful Zen teacher, just like Blanche was.

[31:37]

She said some Easter, and I think now that it was maybe part of some interreligious dialogue or something, and Lou... gave a talk on the theme of Easter and said, oh, in Buddhism, we also have death and resurrection, but it happens on each breath. And the way Blanche said it, it's like it didn't go over great as a kind of expression of the oneness of our faiths. I don't know what Easter means. But I know what Lou meant by dying and being born on a breath. And if you ever doubt, you know, if you ever think that you can't trust letting go, arising with, taking off the pack, letting go of hundreds of years, opening your hands and walking innocent, arising together with all things.

[32:59]

If you ever don't trust that, then there is just a simple practice of exhaling fully and stopping making and doing and being anything. Exhale fully, letting go of everything you think you are, everything you think you need to do or need to be, forgetting everything you know about this impossible, ungraspable situation and just dying on the exhale. A miracle happens there.

[34:08]

which is that by some power, completely not your own, an inhalation is received. Who made that right there? The Dharma gate of ease and joy. That in breath. So Suzuki Roshi says, practicing in this way, you just surrender, let go, die on that exhalation. you're still alive, the inhalation will come, bringing all the light and form and color. And you will know that you are in the lap of the Buddha, that you are in your mother's lap, that you are nourished and held and being lived together with everything. You know, stopping in this meadow, the trees full of fruit, the stream overflowing with fish, the stinky, heavy backpack next to you, you could pick it up.

[35:36]

Or you could continue to walk and take care, let the taking care of everything that life is asking to be cared for. But without that doing, being, making, this is the point that the Buddha Dharma is you could say maybe most interested in that we think we interpret what's happening here as being an independent and separate self that is the owner and operator driving this peddling this thing up the hill. When we enter that ease, when we open to that wonder, we see that what is here is not owned and operated by anyone.

[36:45]

It's arising together, and we can trust that, and we can rest in that. So that's how I've been trying to practice step by step, feeling the clenching, feeling the doing, and letting it release, and feeling that we are held, has got us. It doesn't mean it's going to go well. We don't get to have it go well. That's another weird idea that we add to this situation. I know what it is and it's supposed to go well. As long as I'm doing it right. But how it's going is not what we think is bright and intimate and alive and is together. Oh, thank you for your kindness and compassion this morning, opening to this teaching, I hope. As Suzuki Roshi always says, we always say the same thing. Can we trust this practice of ease?

[37:53]

Gil also had a wonderful, he has a wonderful expression. Once you taste that ease, he says, why would you sacrifice that? Why would you give that away when you feel how sweet that is to let yourself be held, be lived by everything? Why sacrifice that just to like do the angry email or whatever? Why give that away? Why pick up that backpack? And yet we do. So then we notice. we study again and again, clenching and releasing this intention of ease and joy, ease and wonder. Not just for our own well-being and comfort, although how beautiful and valuable that is, but so that we can live in real intimacy,

[38:58]

without that extra baggage available for, present with each other and the suffering world. Violence and the destruction in the world, in our own lives, comes from that absence of ease and wonder. always has that quality of self carried forward into separate world. In that ease, all the precepts are observed. Does anybody have any comment or want to offer a question? We have a few minutes. Anybody carrying or letting go of anything?

[40:06]

How do you maintain that sense of ease and wonder and joy when things aren't going well and there is, you know, I don't know, violence, loss, and things like that? Thank you. Yeah. I don't have a practice of maintaining anything. That sounds stressful. and I have enough stress in my life. For me, the practice is renewing the moment it's available to just renew it. When you drop it, you've dropped it. When you're asleep, you're asleep. When you're in that pit, you're in that pit. People say, well, how do you practice when you're in that pit? You don't. You can't. That's why it's a pit. The point is, are you... Are you really still in the pit? When that first light, you know, when that first light comes, are you there to meet it, renewing the practice? So it's not about not clenching.

[41:08]

It's not about maintaining ease. It's about remembering the ease. It's about clenching and releasing. It's about finding that exhale. And no matter, that's what this teaching, this practice, this Bodhisattva behind me, Jizo Bosatsu, goes with this practice into the realms of hell, terrible suffering and violence and confusion, breathing out and letting go. That's what the ease is for, so that they can be fully present with what's there and respond. So anytime you can, to just notice... When we train, we can start to train our sensitivity where actually the suffering and the clenching is like the sound of a bell that calls us to the releasing. And that's a wonderful turn in our practice where then the obstacle starts to kind of become the fuel. And then you feel like, wow, this practice really will have a lot of fuel because there's a lot of confusion and suffering.

[42:16]

Instead of the suffering tipping into like the spinning and the anger and the usual, The suffering is like, oh, sweetie, you have to breathe out. You're in the carrying yourself forward. So, thank you. Any little gap, any little crack, any little ease to please celebrate wherever we can find it. And then just to see, to let the joy of it register. That's another thing that the Buddha's teaching emphasizes. When we do finally relax, you know, For a second, most people, I think almost everybody is more relaxed than me. So this may just be like, why are you talking to us about this? I'm new to the calling, you could say. That is so sweet and trustworthy. The person who's mad at being told to relax is not in touch with the sweetness of what that ease feels like.

[43:20]

And so when I have it, I want it to fully register so that I know that's a gift that I can give to myself and others. And so then I want to, you know, when I'm suffering, to touch that. Thank you for that question. Comment in the back? Thank you for your talk. I wanted to offer an image by the Japanese poet Basho, who has a little haiku about spring. And it goes, spring, a cricket singing, floating down the river on a twig. And I find this image almost... ridiculously joyful and it just brings to mind the idea of joy and ease embodied and something to aspire to thank you and why not you know this question has been coming up for me in my own body and I mean there's reasons habit layers of kind of encrusted habit I guess

[44:43]

and a sort of misunderstanding of responsibility and vow. But like, really, why not just be the cricket floating down the river on the twig? Is it because things won't get, the dishes won't get washed or something? They will. They'll get washed by the little cricket on the twig. Why? You have the day you have anyway. You know, you have your, like, difficult life anyway. You know, why add? I might as well approach it like the cricket on the twig, you know, so... I think there's some idea like, well, you don't understand, I don't have that kind of life that can have that kind of ease. And the Buddha's teaching is, yes, you do. Do you have a life that's not actually powered by yourself, but is given by the arising of everything together? Yes, you do. So you can drop the person who thinks they're doing it, and the same stuff will be happening. Your co-workers will not notice that you have dropped off body and mind. Except they'll say, wow, it's been like... A few days since I got an angry email from so-and-so.

[45:45]

Spring, will you say the poem again so we can all remember? Spring, a cricket singing floating down the river on a twig. The Dharma gate of ease and joy. just to be ourselves, everything included. But in the lap of the Buddha, in the lap, given life by everything. Sorry to be a flute with one note, but anyway. May the merit of our gathering be of benefit to the tense and reactive and conflictual world. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[46:55]

Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[47:21]

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