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 evening, everybody. What a pleasure it is to see you all, Semi, because I have reading glasses on, so you're in lovely soft focus. I would like to thank the Hanto, Jisan Anathorn, for inviting me to speak. I got the invitation about two months ago, which has allowed me two months to be terribly nervous, culminating in this perfect moment. And I would like to thank my beloved teacher, Ryushin Paul Heller, who has now been guiding me with a calm, warm, and wise hand for the best part of the last 12 years. or 13 years. Thank you so much for you, Shin.

[01:00]

I would like to acknowledge our online practitioners who from all corners of the world are joining us. You all have a very special place in my heart because it was about 10 years ago that I was in Venice in Italy and watching this live stream. And so I feel very close to my heart that those people are not able to be here in the Buddha Hall with us right now. One of the ways that we finish our ceremonies and rituals, I think pretty much every time we do service in this beautiful Buddha Hall or even down in the Zendo, is to chant all Buddhas ten directions three times. And I want to express my gratitude to all the Buddhas, the seven Buddhas before Buddha, the Buddhas that have come subsequent to that, the Buddhas that are in the room here now, all of you, in the 10 directions, north, south, east, and west, northeast, southwest, up and down across the three times, past, future, and the present.

[02:15]

And to our online practitioners, Even if you're watching this years from now, you are watching it right now, and I welcome you. And that brings me to the title of my talk today, About Time. Now, you might think that this will be a wonderfully deep scholarly exploration of Dogen's Uji. But regrettably, I'm not clever enough to do that. So this is more going to be an investigation of the nature of time and what this practice over the years has shown me about the non-dual intimacy of existence and time. And spoiler alert, you are time. I am time. So let's explore it a little bit. First, let's have a look at the direction that time moves in.

[03:24]

I was born in 1972. By 1982, I was 10 years old. Then I turned 20 and 30, 40, 50. And some point in the future, I'm going to be 60 years old. January becomes March, becomes April. This is indisputable. We can see that the time moves. from the past into the present and towards the future. But what about if we look at that a different way? I'm speaking to you now in the present, and that's already the past. What was the future has now become the present, and it's moved into the past. So we can see that time also moves in the opposite direction. And what about if we take a second and for a moment investigate the present?

[04:27]

It's gone already. We can't even grasp that if we want to. The present, it's gone. It's like lightning. It's gone. So where are we sitting exactly in time? The present's already gone. Past and future are moving in different directions. This is something deep to consider. And it shows us time, perception of it, can be pretty fickle. It can be entirely dependent on our perception of it and our considerations of it. Let's look at the length of a minute. Right now, for me, time is moving very slowly. Thanks, Miles, for that joke. But this is something I'm sure we've all had experience of, you know? For me, in a Zen context, this becomes really obvious and really palpable during Sesshin.

[05:40]

Sesshin is a period of intensive practice we do within the Soto Zen tradition. And it lasts anything from three to seven days, sometimes longer than that. And we can sit for 13 hours a day. You know, it's long periods. And you can find yourself sitting and your body's aching. You're sitting there, your knees are hurting, and you feel like you've been sitting forever. And the person that tells the time is taking responsibility. for how long the practice, you know, the period of sitting is going to be. That's called the Doan. And you know that the Doan is going to ring the bell at the end of that particular period of sitting. And you sit there and you're like, it's been a long time. I think something's happened to the Doan. Like, should I have a look? I saw the Eno leave earlier, so maybe like the Doan's fallen asleep and the Eno hasn't seen.

[06:43]

And I just, should I look at my watch? And that can take such a long time. And you're just like, wow. Like how long is this time taking before the bell goes? And from the other side, I've been the door on with the clock timing down. And you know it's the end, like the last period of the day. It's nine o'clock at night. And you're literally watching 59, 58, 57, 56. And it's just phenomenal how long a minute can take when you've got that degree of attention and that degree of concentration. And of course, you know, it can go the other way too. The length of a minute really entirely depends on which side of the toilet door you're on, let's face it, you know. And then we can look at how time plays on our perception. A friend, a very...

[07:44]

A good friend of mine went to Las Vegas to do the Jiu-Jitsu World Championship, so I got to go and see her. And it was my first experience of being inside a casino. And it was phenomenal, the efforts they'd gone to to make you realize that time was not passing. So the lights were just kind of crepuscular, so sort of twilight. And you had no sense of... The sun coming up, I mean, we depend, we notice in a very subtle way how the sun will come up and it'll brighten through the course of the day and then it'll go down and we can kind of tether ourselves to a sense of where we are in space and time by that. Even the temperature, you know, the chill of the early morning, the chill as the sun goes down in the evening. And in these places, these kind of liminal spaces in these casinos, they kind of leave you untethered. to being able to tell how time is moving or that it's moving at all.

[08:49]

And so it obviously helps you gamble and things like that. But it's very interesting how you can kind of lose your sense of grounding when you have no sense of the passing of time. Even Ryushin, my dear teacher, told me the story of when he did Tangariya. So Tangario is when you first go down to Tassahara or a very intense, a place where you're going to do an intensive three-month practice period. And to start, you will do a period of sitting. At the moment, at Tassahara, for example, it's five days. And that period of sitting is very intensive. There's no, you know, walking meditation. There's no kinhen. You really are just sitting very, very intensely. But while you're sitting, you kind of are like, okay, this is day one. and then day two, and then day three, and you can kind of count them down, and you know it's five days, and you know at the end of five days you're going to get to have a bath because you don't get to bath at all during those five days. And you look forward to it and anticipate it, and you still kind of tether yourself to a sense of the passing of time, which you've already seen is extremely fickle.

[09:57]

And Ryushin was relating a story to me about how back in the day when he did Tangariyo, you sat for an indeterminate length of time. Some people might get pulled out after five days, some people after six or seven or eight or nine, and I believe the longest was the 10 days. And it was kind of random, he said, I think. And, of course, that would be a very great and very tough teaching on just settling into the present because you cannot set yourself to the sense of time, this practice coming to an end, this moment coming to an end. So time is slippery. moves in two different directions. The present is not constant. And the present moment really is the universe's expression in time. Emptied in an instant, vanished in a flash, is what Ehe Dogen says.

[10:59]

There's no hard and fast reality in that sense. The moment is coming up, it is expressing itself perfectly, and it's... It's disappearing, emptying. The moment comes up, expresses and empties. And this is true of ourselves as well. Come into being every moment, fresh. I'm not the same person I was when I was 10 years old. I'm not even the same expression as I was 10 minutes ago because everything around me has changed and I'm entirely responding to my context. When I'm at my gran's house, I'm a different person than when I'm with my mom, when I'm sitting in the Zendo. I'm entirely different and expressing in a different way according to what's happening around me. So just like the present moment, I'm coming into being constantly, refreshed, new, birth and death, birth and death. And this is what I like. It's birth and death, constant. Even ourselves are constantly being born and dying into the present as a perfect expression of this moment.

[12:07]

showed me that if we are coming into this moment as a perfect expression and then emptying into emptiness, and the present moment is doing the same thing, we are none other than the present moment. We are time. We are an expression of time. Coming into being. Coming into being. Coming into being. The self is freshly expressing this moment. This moment is freshly expressing the self. The non-dual intimacy of existence and time. And we don't observe it from the outside either. You know, language is a tricky thing. And oftentimes you hear in meditation circles, well, you know, be in the present. Come back to the present. But we are time.

[13:14]

I remember when I was in Venice, when I lived in Italy, I'm an artist and I had a wonderful little art studio selling my paintings. And Venice, as many of you know, is a very tourist-heavy city. A lot of tourists, literally 21 million a year. And I cannot tell you how often the tourists would come in and they'd be like, There are so many tourists. And I'd be like, you're the tourists. You know that you're the tourists, right? But tourists are other people to them, you know? It's the same with traffic. If my wonderful husband will sit in traffic and he'll be like, oh, there's so much traffic. This traffic jam is just full of all this traffic. We're the traffic, you know? We are time. We're not outside of it. We don't need to bring ourselves back to being in the present. We are the present. Even Ryushin said last week during his Wednesday evening talk, he said, immerse yourself in being what is happening in the moment.

[14:17]

And that's the truth. You are what is happening in the moment. This moment is the universe. This moment is none other than you. You are the universe expressing itself perfectly in this moment. I remember Ryushin gave a wonderful teaching. This might not have been his intention at Tassahara a few years ago when I was doing a practice period there. Now, at Tassahara, you would sit Zazen in the morning, and then sort of mid-morning, the abiding teacher will give a lesson, give a teaching, and then typically there is time to go back to the Zen Nova for like a... half an hour sit before lunchtime service and then Oriyuki meal. And Ryushin gave his teaching, it was wonderful and rich, but it went long. And so there was only like five, seven minutes before it was going to be, you know, lunchtime.

[15:21]

So we got out and I was like, awesome, time for a cup of tea. It's just like, just time for a cup of tea. We won't have to go in and sit like a pair of zazen before service, you know, have a brief break. But Ryushin was like, to the Zendo, Zazen. So we're all like, ah! And I was just like, oh, it's ridiculous. There's only like five minutes. It's crazy. But we're very diligent Zen students and, you know, at the appropriate speed and pace and with the due attention, went back into the Zendo and, you know, engaged in all the beautiful ritual in order to take our seats and sat and, you know, do your stretches and then like... And then like in 20 seconds, bing, the end of Zazen. It was so perfect. And for me, that was such a teaching in the nature of time because that could have been 30 seconds or that could have been three hours because I was sitting Zazen being the moment expressing itself.

[16:24]

And it was a wonderful teaching. Thank you. But sometimes, I don't know, If you think you're not living in the present because, you know, you're thinking about the future, or you're thinking about the past, or you're daydreaming, they've got news for you. You're still in the present. You can't get away from it. You're just missing it. If you miss your appointment with the present moment, you are missing your appointment with your life, and this is a very serious matter. That's what Tekna Tang had to say about it. So if we can see clearly the lack of a hard and fast reality, we can actually understand the ephemerality of life, time, the preciousness of life. This is the first and last time you will hear me speaking like this. This is the first and last time you will ever embody this very moment right here.

[17:27]

It's never going to happen again. It's extraordinarily, phenomenally, excruciatingly rare. Form and substance are like the dew on the grass. Destiny is like a dart of lightning, emptied in an instant and vanished in a flash. This is our friend, Ehe Dogen Zenji. And its expression is like the striking of the taiko in the morning when we're sitting Zazen. Boom! This is your life. Pay attention. Don't think for a second that when you're sitting zazen and someone's striking that drum to tell you the time, that they're under any illusion that you don't know what the time is and that they need to tell you the time. That taiko is striking to remind you that this is your life. This very moment is happening and it's dramatic and pay attention. You're going to miss it. It's another wonderful quote from Dogen talking to this point.

[18:31]

do not exist independent of the present. They are contained in the present. Firewood becomes ash, but ash cannot turn back into firewood again. However, we should not see ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the Dharma position of firewood, and has its own before and its own after. Although there is before and after, past and future are cut off. Ash stays at the position of ash, and it has its own before and after. The non-dual intimacy of existence and time. Now, it's also important to understand the nature of time, and that we are time, because it provides... the richest of refuges. It allows us to find home.

[19:33]

You know, we can sometimes feel a bit lost, but when you realize that you are the present moment and you come back to being present, being the present moment, you're home. You are with yourself again. So practicing being time, is a skill that you can learn through Zen practice. It's not something that's so easy to read and understand, although I entirely encourage you to go and read Dorgan Zenji's Uji, which is one of the most foremost texts on the nature of time and being time. And there are many other books, so I encourage you to go and read them. But really... What is so helpful about this particular tradition and practice is the ways that we teach our understanding of being time.

[20:36]

It's part of the skillfulness that Soto Zen Training and Practice offers, and it enhances the way that we engage with life. So how do we develop this awareness of being the present? Well, the most obvious practice that we have here in the Soto Zen tradition is sitting Zazen, which I might loosely refer to as this specific tradition's meditation practice. But the purists amongst us, of which I am one, don't really like to call Zazen meditation because it really is a practice of just sitting. It's extremely ascetic and, as a result, really quite tricky, although very, very simple. but it does afford the wonderfully unique opportunity of resting in the moment and reflecting on where you are and what is coming up, this wellspring of life.

[21:37]

So within Zazen, the practice is basically to constantly bring yourself out of the dreaminess of the future or the past or lunch or what somebody said to you 10 minutes ago and just return to being present. So you see how I'm using the term being present? Be present. This is your birthright. And so Zazen teaches us that and it's a wonderful teaching and tradition within the school and we hold it as the most important of all the rituals and the most ancient of all the rituals within Buddhism. But the other training is ritual and form. And I can imagine just like, yeah, but what's that got to do with being present? It's like all these forms and all these rules and how you come in and how you sit and how you bow and how you do all the things. It's wonderful. I am what is referred to in this as a form queen.

[22:40]

I completely love the forms. And it's not just because I'm slightly on the spectrum. It is because it is such a perfect Dharma gate into the present moment. So let's take, for example, a gashow or a bow. So this would be the gashow. There's a lot to this. You know, that you've got your hands closely together. You've got your fingers closely together. I have always bend my little finger as a bow to my teacher who's got a broken little finger. So that's like my little honoring my teacher. But that's just like a weird personal thing, which you probably shouldn't do. And your thumbs don't stick out and your thumbs are in. And then your elbows are up. And this is straight because that expresses like a willingness to learn, you know, as opposed to being like this when you're kind of more senior and you can kind of relax into stuff. But if you're a novice kind of like I am, you have this up. that, you know, and then your head back and then your chin down. And then if you bow, you don't move any of that. You just bow like this, you know, and there's all of that going on.

[23:42]

And when you first start practicing Zen and come and join us, and I hope all of you do and come and join us in Zazen, all these rules about doing the smallest thing, it's like, oh my God, there's so much to remember. But what it does is it offers up the opportunity to By having a very prescribed way of doing things, you don't have to think about how you want to do them. So otherwise it's like, oh, well, you know, I like my yoga hands and I like to do it like this. You know, you have all your personal preferences, which makes your mind extremely busy. And so having these really like simple and prescribed ways of doing things allows us to give over to the physicality of the gesture. You don't have to think about it so much. And you can give over to the body. And if there's one thing that is always in the present moment without grumbling about it, that's the body.

[24:43]

Our head can, you know, even though our mind is in the present, we can still be dreaming and drifting off, but the body is always right in the present. And so it is a skill to come into the body and just like be in the body and just like, do this gesture. And once you've done this gesture for a few years, it just gets into your body, it gets into your muscle memory, and now I can do it, and it just becomes a really simple body practice. Learning how to be in the body is also a part of skill. When I first started sitting, I was terribly anxious, and I was up here, and I was in my head, and if my knee hurt, somebody would say, well, you know, send your mind to your knee, and warm it up and send it compassion. And I'm like, I don't know how to send my mind to my knee. What are you talking about? My mind's up here, you know? But it took me time. It took time. And eventually I could learn to drop into the body and the peace and the ease that is there because the body is present and it doesn't have any agenda and it's just chilling.

[25:51]

It's just hanging out. And when you can tap into that, that's wonderful. And then the... The forms that we have give us a prescribed way of tapping into that and navigating a sort of monastic setting while practicing. So I'm not saying that, you know, you need to bring that kind of mind of extreme attention out into the world all the time, but it is a wonderful practice, kind of like going to the gym. You know, you go into the Zendo, you bow in a certain way, you enter with a certain foot, you turn clockwise. There's all these ways that allow us to enter into the physicality of the body, and it becomes a practice in selflessness. So we can step into being the moment and the physical expression of the moment and just give over to it. So it's really quite liberating and quite freeing. And when you first start, you know, with all these forms, it can be... A little bit like a musician, you know, like you're learning something and you have to concentrate really hard.

[26:56]

Like I was saying, I first started, it's like I do this and I do that. And where's my head supposed to be? And what foot am I supposed to enter the room with now? And it's kind of like being a musician. You've got your music there and you have to concentrate hard and you're looking at the notes and you're figuring them out and you're kind of hunched over and you think in and it's like, think, [...] think. But then as you get more and more masterful and better and better at it, you know, you're sitting up and... you're playing, and eventually you can throw the notes away and the music is liberated. And it's exquisite. It's a beautiful thing because it's selflessness and the body is giving over to the present and it's expressing perfectly. So this is what happens with forms as well. So that is why I feel that our ritual and our forms are so very important. For me as a practitioner, I get to practice being in the moment by giving over to being in the body, and the body is in the present moment. And these are ways that our tradition teaches us to be present, to be time.

[27:59]

Don't be the past, don't be the future, be present. When you see masters of the craft of presencing, you see the Zen masters who have been practicing this for 40, 50, 60 or 70 years, the way they move speaks volumes. It is so utterly present. There is nothing left. Everything is burnt up with that. And that is what this tradition has taught me about the nature of time and presence. It's a quote from Suzuki Roshi, who was the founder of this temple. Right at the center of the universe, right at the point of eternal time, if you have some idea of space and time, then that practice is not true practice. Live in this moment, on this point, moment after moment. It's how to actualize the teaching. When you have oneness of teaching and practice, oneness of enlightenment and practice, when you fix your mind and practice our way, there you have renunciation.

[29:08]

You have the true feeling of Zen. And that renunciation is kind of what I was talking about with the practice of the forms. You renounce and you give up your own busyness around wanting to do things the way that you want to do them, and you just give over to the request of the form. And it just allows peace and ease, and it allows for the present moment to just express itself very simply and with spaciousness. Another teaching that I was given that taught me about the nature of time was... about ringing the bell. So you heard our Eno sounding the bell for the beginning of the talk. And I remember when I was learning to be a Doan, I had to ring the bell for the end of Zazen. And so I rang it, but it went like, it was way too soft. And I was like, and I was about to hit it again. And the Eno put the hand on my hand. It's like, you cannot re-ring the bell. It's like, it's done. It's all very dramatic. And it's true.

[30:10]

It was a wonderful teaching in the gesture that is made is the gesture that is made. It ripples through time as is what it is. And it's unencumbered. It's not a mistake. It's literally the moment expressing itself. And of course, I can go and ring the bell again. There's no drama. But the beauty of Zen is how it teaches us how every gesture that is made is this expression of this moment. It cannot be redone. That's craziness. It's this perfect expression. As it is, and it's unencumbered, and it is unhindered. I remember when I was with Ryushin Paul Heller's Jisha for a number of years, and another one of the teachings he gave entirely inadvertently, I'm sure, was, this particular one is inadvertent, was one day we were coming down to lead service on a Saturday morning. And this is before the COVID pandemic. So, you know, it was full of people.

[31:12]

And Saturday is the day that we kind of opened to the public. And so there were people kind of milling about. And we had the procession down from upstairs where Ryushin's office is. And I'm following him with the flower petals and terribly formal and taking my job very seriously. And I'm following him down the stairs. And when we get to the bottom of the stairs, he would turn right and he'd come to the Buddha Hall where the room is full and waiting for service. Well, actually, no, he must have been giving the Dharma talk, so either way. The point was, we came down to the bottom of the stairs, and then there was this little girl and her mum at the bottom of the stairs. And Ryushin just, the little asked Ryushin something, and he just stopped and started talking to her. I was like, there's people waiting for us. We have a talk. What are you doing? In my head, naturally. Otherwise, I looked perfect. I was like, what are you doing? You've got me talking. You've got me chatting now. But Ryushin was giving me a wonderful lesson in the fact that there is no hindrance to this moment. This is how the moment is expressing itself.

[32:15]

This little girl asked Ryushin a question. He wasn't going to be like, oh, I have some other idea about time and where I have to be. So I'm going to be honest, like this is what's happening right now. And I'm going to respond to this moment's request. This is the moment and this is how we're going to do it. And it was a fantastic teaching for me. He spoke to her for quite a while. We came on into the Buddha hall and there was no drama. There was no hindrance. There was no hindrance to the moment perfectly expressing itself. You know, I might have an idea about, you know, wasting time. There's no time to waste. There's no time to save. There's no time to spend. There's this moment expressing itself. That's it. Even with... And Jisan Anna Thorne, she gave me a wonderful teaching entirely, I'm sure. And inadvertently, when I was leading service for the first time, she very kindly offered to be my Chico and follow me with the flower petals. And she went to collect them, but it was time to go. And she was moving at an ordinary pace and collecting them.

[33:18]

And I reflected on how there's no need to rush. There is just no need to do that. Just be with the moment as it's presenting. There was no wasting of time because, like I said, there's no time to waste. And it's a little bit like doing this practice and training in this tradition. It's a little bit like going to the gym. You know, when you go to the gym and you work out, your muscles get flexible and you get strong. And that means that if you fall... or you slip down some stairs, you're much less likely to get injured. And really getting to spend some time understanding the nature of time. And it's not to say that time doesn't pass and we can't be late. Of course we can. That is very true. That is true. It's part of our constructed map of how we navigate the world. And it is entirely valid. But there's this other side that we tend to forget because we get too caught up in the map and we forget about the territory that we're actually living in. So that is what's so great about the Zen training, is that it can be a little bit, give you those muscles so that, you know, when you're stressing or you're fretting, it's like, remember, this is simply the moment presenting itself.

[34:31]

There is no hindrance. You know, it's a little bit like Dogen said, if I'm already enlightened... well, why do I need to practice? I was like, well, if I'm a ready time, why do I need to be present? Well, friends, I will leave that with you. So how does this make you better? Well, it doesn't. It's not why I practice Zen. Zen and practicing Zen is about the actualization and realization of the non-dual nature of reality. And... That is the beautiful essence of this practice and this training. It's not about self-improvement, and it's why I fell in love with it, why I fell in love with it. This is your life, the entirety of it right now. The future is ungraspable. The past is ungraspable. The present is ungraspable. We just have a couple of minutes, and I'm going to finish with this quote.

[35:35]

by Suzuki Roshi. He says, the past has already gone, so it does not exist. The future has not yet come, so it also does not exist. So the past and the future are nothing, no time. Then is the present all that exists? No. Even though there is a present moment, strictly speaking, the present is nothing because in a moment it is gone. So the present is also nothing, zero, no time, no present, no form of the present. But that nothingness is very important. Nothingness means total functioning, just functioning energy. When the present is no time, it is interconnected with all sentient beings in the peace and harmony of timelessness. But when nothingness functions, there is a pivot.

[36:37]

and it becomes the present. At that precise point, the intersection of time and space, which is called right now, right here, all sentient beings come together into the moment, and a vast world comes up, past, present, future, earth, trees, planets, moons, suns, you, me, squirrels, and cats. In one moment, Every possible aspect of human life, everything we can be spreads out, unfolds, and a huge world comes up. That is called interdependent co-origination. Life is always at the pivot of nothingness. It is always right now, right here. Right now, right here is the eternal moment of the real present. Rest in the mystery. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[37:54]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:57]

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