This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. My name is Grace Damon, and I'm so grateful both to Fu Schrader over here, the Abbas at Green Gulch, also my co-parent of my child, one-time family member, always family member, and the practice committee for inviting me to speak today. I lived here for about 25 years. I now live at the Redwoods, which is a senior living community. And what I'm going to talk to you about today is what I've learned and discovered about the Four Noble Truths, which are considered the foundation of Buddhism. What are the Four Noble Truths?

[01:00]

Truth of suffering, meaning life has suffering. Truth of cessation of suffering, meaning the suffering can stop. The truth of the... I forgot. Anyway, it's got something to do... The fact that we can all stop our suffering and the way to stop our suffering, our addition to suffering... is to practice the eightfold path of practice. So I'm going to talk about how those have changed for me in the process of my own aging and also living as I do now in a senior... In a senior community. Can you hear that? This is all very familiar to us as seniors. Isn't this what it's like? Can't hear, can't see. Anyway, the way we add to suffering is we say life would be perfect if only, if only the sound system were great, or she did that to me, he did that to me.

[02:13]

Life is going to be great after November 9th, 2020, or everything's going to end after November 9th, 2020. In any case, so what I'm actually going to talk about is how... How do we get away from all the sickness and death we don't? But we can have a recipe for living that makes life and death or alive and dead be joined as they should be at the hip. They are joined, after all. We can't have one without the other. And both require great practice. Now, what does practice mean? From my perspective, it means looking at the contents of your mind all of its aversions and attachments and doing something about its toxicity. Or to put it from the half-full perspective, save all sentient beings. Does that make sense to you? As I mentioned, Fu and I co-parented a child who's now 26.

[03:19]

To make a very long story short, one day we got a phone call and my friend said to me, Grace, are you sitting down? That should have been the first clue. And I said, you know, I'm not sitting down. I don't have time to sit down. What do you want? She said, very quickly asked me a series of questions. She said, we have a baby at risk who needs a home and a heart. Can you do that? And I said, let me talk to Fu. So I turned right to Fu and I said, how do you feel about having a baby at risk who needs a new home? And Fu said, Who said the stupidest thing? She said, can we go see the baby? Which, of course, made me roll my eyes all over the place. And as I rolled my eyes, we then had a five-day pregnancy. Neither one of us were expecting or anticipating or wanting even to have a child. Five days later, we did, in fact, have a baby.

[04:21]

So Sabrina had been born at 32 weeks. up in Santa Rosa. She was drug addicted, she was very sick, but she was also really a fighter. As the nurses said, when we took her out of the nursery, you will not believe the kid that you are getting. You're not gonna believe how strong she really is. We learned that very quickly. So anyway, we went and picked her up on a hot summer day. June 4th it was, I think. She was about four weeks old at that time. She weighed four pounds. And because babies, we thought, wanted to be swaddled, I swaddled her up. She had two blankets around her hot hat, and it was 105 degrees outside. So we took her outside, and she promptly started screaming. And Fu said to me right away, what should we do? Beats me. I have no idea. We had no business being parents. We really knew nothing about kids.

[05:22]

But anyway, We unswaddled her in the back of the car, and she stopped screaming. Thank God. So as dramatic as the story may be, its reality, at least for me, is a lot simpler. We lived in the postage stamp house called Pond House, which is right over there. And at that time, it was half the size it is now. It had one bedroom, two closets, very small. One was 28 inches wide. The other was 24 inches wide. I had the 24-inch wide one. And anyway, on day two of our pregnancy, Sabrina's grandmother, along with her very pregnant daughter-in-law, brought over everything. She was eight months pregnant. Everything that a one-year-old or a baby would need. Three bassinets with various sizes. All kinds of... cloth diapers, because of course we want cloth diapers.

[06:26]

I was fully expecting I was going to have to boil them on top of a pinhole stove that had two burners. But anyway, like my mother had done, why we did that, I'll never know. And all sizes of clothes. And I took one look at the postage stamp of our living room and said, something has got to give. So our house was expanding to fill three. So I took all of my clothes out of my 24-inch closet. I put them in plastic bags, and I brought them over to Goodwill. I was going to store them in Goodwill. Goodwill is located right under the Zendo. And if you need anything, you can just go to Goodwill and find it. So I forgot that I was going to need to get a new piece of clothing every day to go to the hospital. But nonetheless, I did that every day. That's where my clothes sink goodwill. They were very shared with the whole community.

[07:29]

And the social worker had indicated to us on day two, we were visited by the social worker, said, you guys are not in your right mind. Never, we let a baby go to foster care when the parents don't know anything about foster care, about anything about separation anxiety. anything about the whole legal process that you're not going to be involved in. But anyway, one thing we could remember was the social worker told us, you're going to need a pond. You're going to need a fence around your property so that the baby can't crawl into the pond. How this four-pound old baby was going to crawl into the pond, I had no idea. Anyway, we went to the community that day. That was day two of our pregnancy. And we got full permission to both have the baby come. They built, of course, the fence in one day, because that's what living in a sangha is like.

[08:30]

So it was truly wonderful. So actually, what we both had done on day one, do you remember that? We each had gone to the zendo after we'd met Sabrina on a Sunday. to sit with the question of whether or not we can provide hearth and home. And both of us came out from that saying, yes, if not us, then who? So that was what prompted all of the support to come forward. And we really did find out that once you really say a full yes, the universe provides. It really did in our case, in Sabrina's case, And I can't imagine my life without having been a parent. Can you imagine your life? No. And anybody who's been a parent, I'm sure you feel the same way. Really, really, really.

[09:33]

We just took our chance and we said yes, and life presented us with the opportunity to fulfill that yes. So now she's 26. She goes, you know, she's on her own, theoretically. She comes home all the time to tell us exactly where we're messing up. It's amazing. She just has left and she's leaving today. But I can't, can't totally love it that we lived into that yes. And then fast forward to about 11 years ago, and Sabrina and I were in a horrible accident on the Golden Gate Bridge, an accident from which... None of the doctors, including myself, could figure out why I'm here today, but nonetheless I am. You know, the universe conspired to do something different, and everything worked out once again perfectly because Green Gulch once again provided us with support.

[10:35]

They gave Fu two years off to be primary caretaker, and I don't think she's ever had two better years in her life. I was the primary care recipient. I never had two worse years of my life. I can say that. But nonetheless, I managed to heal enough so that I could minimally be discharged to the Redwoods where I could minimally live independently. So now I'm living in the Redwoods and it's actually was kind of freaky when I first went there. I was then 68 and The youngest person in my section was then 89. So they were 21 years older than me. That still goes on today. I'm the youngest in about a category of 300. Not quite the youngest. I think there's one person who's younger than me. But the average age in my area is 20 years older than I am.

[11:37]

And so I felt totally freaked out. that nobody had lived through the 60s when I had, and that, number one, and that, number two, they'd all been having children. Number two, if I was going to live anywhere for the next 20 years, which I couldn't imagine, it definitely should have other amenities than this place had. So I was really not being gracious about, not moving into yes, not following the Buddhist path, not... having right intention, I had nothing. I had none of that. Just a big no. And that sometimes does happen. But anyway, and just like Green Gulch, at the Redwoods, there's a big turnover. You know, Green Gulch has many students who come in each year to do the apprenticeship programs, and then they either go back to their life in the real world, or they go back to the...

[12:39]

do a practice period at some more serious practice place like Tassajar. Anyway, there's about a, Sonia tells me there's about a 12%, 13% turnover each year within the community. Same thing at the Redwood. 50 out of 300 people die each year. You can tell it every morning because there's a red road sitting right on the right at the secretary's desk in the lobby, and you see the birth date and the death date. Everybody, I've come to hate red roses. That I can say. Most of us hate red roses. But nonetheless, it's a really good sign and symptom. So we've got about the same turnover, but it matters. Somehow it matters that those of us who are there, The future holds mostly the Four Noble Truth, old age, sickness, and death.

[13:45]

That's what the future holds. So how is it that we make ourselves more buoyant against that? And that's really important. I'm so grateful for the time I had a green gulch so that theoretically I could avoid unnecessary pain, meaning the suffering that I add on top. by the stories I tell myself. You can see how successful I was in the move. I was totally not successful initially. Now I love it. Now I'm so happy where I am. But recently I had a close friend at the Redwood who died. She was a great life force, and it made no sense to me that she died when she did. She loved life. She just loved life. She developed cancer. She decided to have it surgically removed, even though she had heart problems. So she had it surgically removed, and she left the hospital, came back to the Redwoods, then went back to the hospital, died two days later.

[14:52]

And I could watch the ripple effect inside of the Redwoods because she wasn't ready to go. Everybody felt it. Everybody felt it. and felt it in a really nice way. Nobody was particularly scared. Nobody was angry. They just felt the loss of a great bright light, like a firefly. That's what we are for each other. Massive fireflies come down to light the path for each other. She was gone. But I didn't make up a story about it. It was enough that just she was gone. What is it that I actually think about suffering caused by death? I actually am looking forward to dying just because it's one of the few things that I haven't done in my life, although I did come close. But I was unconscious, so that really doesn't count. Really, really, really doesn't count.

[15:54]

But I was a physician, AIDS physician, in the beginning of the epidemic, and I sat with about 1,200 my friends and patients who died. And what I developed at that point was a real appreciation that the cost of death doesn't have anything to do with what we lose or what somebody loses, meaning in the sense of losing each other. That's going to happen anyway. We suffer losses every day of our life. But what it really has to do with is lives that have not been fully lived, including our life. How is it that you're fully living your life? What is it that we're not doing? And I think that's the important thing. And yet, this was a woman who loved good margaritas. She loved music. She was really happy going to hear music. She was the mentor for a lot of young musicians.

[16:58]

She really loved life. And I can remember... that for me, I have no idea where she wasn't living. And I'm thinking about it because I've got to give her eulogy next week. So I'm really trying to figure out where wasn't she living. But it doesn't matter. It's not my business. She didn't tell me. I do know that where I'm not living now since my accident is because I can't move easily. I can't move at all. basically. I've developed a real fear of falling, which makes sense because I don't want to hit my head anymore. After all, I lost many too many brain cells already. I don't need to lose more of them. But that fear of falling has come inward on me, so I'm kind of afraid, and I'm really trying to look at that. And I know at the Redwoods, for example,

[18:02]

that people often develop a lack of fear of dying. They become totally unafraid of dying, which is aging very well. I can remember last year I was head student, and I sat right here. I never thought about the problems of being chuseau. I only thought about whether or not I was going to knock over the kabaku, which is the incensor, right back here. How many toes I was going to run over. when I had to make the jundo in the morning, how I could avoid my teacher's bare feet, how I could make sure that he got to his jundo on time. Did I have to race around the zendo? If I went in two, I was really putting everybody at risk. But if I didn't go at level two, if I only went at turtle mode, then I was too slow. Anyway, I spent two months worrying about exactly this kind of stuff. I should have been worrying about, was I doing a good job?

[19:03]

Was I really encouraging my younger students, which was my job? And, you know, when you can't do stuff, the can-dos become much more important. So what's a normal person able to do? What should they be doing? Now, this is all my story, once again. They should be able to eat. They should be able to... tie their shoes. They should be able to sit cross-legged. And if they're practicing, they should be able to sit zaza. I couldn't do any of that. But nonetheless, I was doing all of that. And when there's so many can't-dos, then the can-dos become much more important. So what now is important to me? What's important to me is dying well. And by dying well, what I mean is living well, living right up until the end. And what does living well mean? For me, for example, it means knowing that I've loved well.

[20:08]

It doesn't mean dying with no pain. It doesn't mean not taking drugs. It doesn't mean not taking my own life. That's what it comes to. But it does mean living well right up until the end. And so how do I know that I'm living and loving well? Well, for me... that would be loving with some kind of wisdom, meaning it's not enough just to be compassionate or to try to be sympathetic or give people anything without real wisdom. And I don't know how am I going to know when I have that. I'm not going to know. But I'm going to ask this person over here, and I will ask all of the sangha, And you will let me know when I'm ready, when I know enough to know, that I know enough to know. And as to what I have to teach, I learned from that year that I spent in the hospital that just this is it.

[21:12]

Just this very moment is it. Nothing more, nothing less. After all, you know, I can say blithely that I'm going to talk to Fu. I'm going to talk to... Sam over here, I'm going to talk to Nancy down there. But, you know, they're all sangha. We've grown up together. Sangha is a big part of the triple treasure. It probably is the most important part to me. Sangha is what makes the leavening so that we can all grow together. Here I am talking to you. You may be listening to me, squirming if you like, trying to imagine what it's going to be like if and when you, your partner, or your dog dies. It will hurt a lot. Trust me, it's going to hurt a lot. And I would consider you lucky if it hurts deeply.

[22:15]

But it's not going to be the end of the world. It's not really going to be the end. I had no idea. what it will be like for you or me when we're actually dying. No idea at all. But this I know. We all will die. And I feel so lucky that I lived for as many years as I did in this valley. I was kind of an iconoclastic practitioner, if you will, in that I drove out each day, went to work. I worked as a physician. I fell outside of the confines of the schedule. I had meat in my house. If I wanted a drink, I had a drink. If I wanted ice cream, I drove out for it. If I wanted a change, I drove out for that. So anyway, I was not a good Zen practitioner, but I did. And I took from the institution and the Dharma my version of Buddhism and all of that willful appropriation, of course,

[23:19]

changed in an anisek, as did my ability to go out and change. And I'm so grateful that I actually had spent some time in the Zen before that. I would start many days coming down here once Sabrina was old enough to be able to be by herself. And I learned from that time, I learned to relax, and I learned to actually see the world The world was a little bit brighter every day as I came out of the Zendo early in the morning and walked the various walks, sometimes to the pond house, sometimes up to the bullpen where Emela and Fu now live, sometimes past Mick and Suki's house, sometimes to Juryu and Sarah's house. And the slant of light would change. The buds on the trees would be changing. The days would be getting either

[24:20]

ever so little bit shorter or ever so little bit longer, depending upon whether we were, seasons were, whether we were moving towards summer or towards winter. And I remember also that sometimes the air would feel heavy with dew. Sometimes it would feel crystal clear. It was always different, but I could feel it against my face. And that, having that air having that world seem just a little bit lighter and clearer, that made life truly magnificent for me. And I was especially grateful after the accident that I'd spent so many day fours of a seven-day session either in bliss or in dramatic misery. That's the only way I have to say dramatic, very dramatic misery. I learned totally, and we all learned this totally, that nothing lasts forever.

[25:25]

Nothing lasts for even a second or a nanosecond. The only thing that changes is outside the Zendo, the slant of light might change as the day gets longer. But inside, you're sitting on your Zafu, everything is changing. Everything is changing so rapidly, so rapidly. We're so overwhelmed by waves of grief, desire, pain, and joy. This is getting to notice the content of your own mind, getting to change them, hopefully. Because the more you notice that this is what happens inside, the less you're able to project that outside, hopefully. I spent a year in the hospital after my accident, and what still stays with me to this day is not so much... or the anxiety, but rather the lovely fullness of life itself and of the people who were helping themselves.

[26:30]

I felt like life loved me. I felt like people loved me. I remember my first shower in four months. I can still remember the feeling of each drop of water. So delicious, so vibrant. So much, so much fullness. And I still feel exquisitely blessed by the vitality of that life that I felt way back then. I feel that somewhat still today, not the intensity so much, but still the existence of it. And I'm grateful that I learned something about Buddhism, something about the Four Noble Truths, something about the vows that we take repeatedly At the end of this lecture, we're all going to chant, beings are numberless. I vow to say, now you're going to chant this too. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless.

[27:31]

I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. It was so great to have a path of practice. And I'm so grateful to have been the head student because I really got to practice, and I did the schedule completely, meaning I didn't go out, meaning I didn't change, meaning I didn't drink, meaning I didn't have meat, meaning I just followed the schedule completely. And meanwhile, everybody acted as my arms and my legs. They got me food, they got me up in the morning, they got me to bed at night, and they allowed me to do my job, which was to encourage them back to the present. So the Redwoods is no longer boring, I'm glad to say. But at the end of life, people are all doing the same kind of thing, meaning we're all asking the question of what does it mean to live decently?

[28:36]

What does it mean to love with full awareness, with open-handedness, with true giving nature? I don't know. I don't know, but I'm certainly trying to find out. And I do notice that people who are closer to death are paying a lot more attention to these issues right now. They move more slowly, perhaps. They watch the flight pattern of the geese more closely, perhaps. They're doing this in the midst of the first noble truth, which is the truth of suffering. in the form of old age sickness and death. At one point, for example, while watching the news recently, one person said to another person, I overheard that, all of us grandmothers, we should rent a bus, we should go down to the border town, we should get arrested, we should go to jail, we should go on a hunger strike, we should die.

[29:38]

And I said, great, great. This is exactly what I want to do. Let's all go and do it. I want my life to mean something. I want my death definitely to mean something. But then somebody pointed out that because I would be the doctor there, then pretty much all of their deaths would be on my hands. And I thought, not on my watch, over my dead body. Am I going to do this on my watch? So that's another story. On the other hand, many mornings consist of hysterical... Things like the other morning, well, I'll call him Harry. Anyway, Harry offered everybody at the table a banana. He didn't realize that he'd just finished his banana. So two people said, yes, we'd like a banana. And he reached out his hand to give the peel to that person. And neither one of them recognized that it was only a peel because nobody could see well enough. And by that point, we were all laughing so hard that we couldn't interrupt the bite of the peel.

[30:43]

So old age, sickness, and death really do produce and require a lot of humor. And this brings up... And how, when the end is near, am I going to know that I have loved well? Again, I will ask people around me. I'm also going to ask my daughter, who's going to be... horrible judge. And I will also ask the sky above and the earth below, have I done enough for you? This brings up one of the more wonderful aspects of living with people in community, especially old people in community. We were having a meeting the other night. How many people have watched the TED Talk by Greta Thunberg, you know, the Swedish girl who came over here? She wouldn't fly. She's become a great activist, climate activist. She and AOC are really good friends.

[31:46]

Watch it, please, because she's got Asperger's. And among other things, she now has decided that she really has made friends, because she's speaking out. As she said, I can't help but speak out. I don't speak out often. When something's wrong, I have to speak out. So anyway, she's coming to the UN climate meetings on climate. And so we were talking about what our community could do for climate change. And somebody said, this 94-year-old woman who's a drama teacher, college-level drama teacher, spoke very dramatically and said, let's all imagine that we are the world. Our small community is the world. Let's make ourselves the world. And let's, for example, plant enough trees so that we can draw down CO2, make sure that the refrigeration units are good, make sure that we stop eating meat, stop eating dairy, share our cars, and then finally we can march up Miller Avenue and announce all of that and get good press covered.

[32:58]

And I thought, way to go, way to go. Way to go. This was so thrilling. Just imagine that our little world is the world. That's a really great bodhisattva activity. So now I'd like to talk a little bit about the Dharma, which variously means Buddhist teachings, koans, stories. In any case, I'm in a koan study group at the Redwoods. And recently we read case two. on the Book of Serenity. This is what Aiken has to say about koans. Koans are folk stories of Zen Buddhism, metaphorical narratives that particularize essential nature. Each koan is a window that shows the whole truth, but just from a single vantage point. Anyway, so the koan goes like this, and I'm reading it to you. just because I got in a big fight with a Bodhidharma as a result of this koa.

[34:04]

He doesn't know it, but I'm just really in a fight. Can't stand him. Emperor Wu asked great master Bodhidharma, what is the highest meaning of the holy truth? Bodhidharma said, empty, there is no holy. The emperor said, who are you facing me right now? Bodhidharma said, don't know. Bodhidharma subsequently crossed the Yangtze River, went to Shaolin, which is up north, sat facing the wall for nine years. He was anything but friendly in this koan. And why was I so tripped up by his being anything but friendly? He's supposed to be fierce. He looks really big. I was just pissed because in his In Buddhism, we're always taught that out of dialogue comes enlightenment or nirvana, that only a Buddha talking to a Buddha can discover really what enlightenment is all about.

[35:11]

It doesn't have to be a Buddha with the Buddha. It can be you, Buddha, me, Buddha. But anyway, I was being cut out of this dialogue with Bodhidharma. So that was what I seemed to be having trouble with. But then I had to think more clearly, thought, Grace, what is this all about? And I thought, here I am talking to you. I can talk to you about the eightfold path of practice, right view, right intention, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right meditation, and you'll listen to me. Why won't Bodhidharma? Listen to me. Why is that not enough? I didn't want to hear that it's not true, i.e. that there is nothing holy. Is that literally true? I don't know whether it's true, but all of a sudden I do know this.

[36:12]

I felt busted by my own lineage. Why am I so interested in having a path of practice? Why not to mention an antidote for not really living? especially me. Why is it so important that there is something like zazen practice? I can't really do it. Why is it so important? And this raised a whole series of other questions for me, which is where do we get our information on life from? Where do you all get answers to the question of living fully? Do you think about that? Are you with it? Do you do it? Is it your bucket list? Was it something more profound than even that? Very much has to do with settling with life just as it is. Why was I having such a problem with Bodhidharma? Because I so wanted something to hang on to. I could just feel it fine.

[37:14]

I wanted somebody to say, yes, there is something holy, and it's practice. But if I dig more deeply into this koan, I see that Bodhidharma is actually was answering that totally. What is the highest meaning of the Holy Truth? Bodhidharma says nothing, nothing holy. What does it mean, nothing is holy? Well, it could mean that everything is holy because nothing is holy. It's all both and. It means that nothing has intrinsic existence because everything is changing. nanosecond by nanosecond. The only constant is change. Therefore, if nothing has inherent existence, nothing really exists in that way. So there isn't anything holy. Fine. That I could get beyond. But he still won't satisfy me by giving me anything to hang on to.

[38:15]

There's another koan which is very much like that, but it's got a whole different flavor. It's called the condolence call. It's Dawu and his student, Jian Wan. They go to make a condolence call. Now we make condolence calls by going to see people who have died. So Jian Wan, the student, goes into the house and says, hits the coffin with his stick and says, alive or dead. Now we're not expecting the corpse to answer. He's asking his teacher. And his teacher said, won't say, won't say. And Jian Wan gets totally agitated and says, why won't you say? Please, why won't you say? Meaning clearly wants to know. And Dao Wu says, won't say. And then Jian Wan says, I'm going to have to hate you. And he does. He takes right up and hits him.

[39:17]

And of course, then he has to leave the monastery because you can't get away with hitting your own teacher. So we go several generations. John Wan finds Dao Wu's successor called Xixuan. And he tells Xixuan the whole story of his interaction with Dao Wu. Xixuan says, I won't answer. I won't answer. And he doesn't. And then all of a sudden, John Wan is enlightened. He just sees the answer. He had a chance to repeat his question over two generations, over much time and over much activity, and it really helped him. And I think the reason I'm not pissed at Dao Wu is because his answer makes some sense. It's still in dialogue. He's still connected to his student. He's still connected. acknowledging presence, still loving, if you will, still very concerned about his student.

[40:22]

And so if the foundation of Buddhism is the Four Noble Truth, probably the foundation of the Four Noble Truth, ontologically and cognitively, is emptiness and don't know. Seriously, think about it. I had to think about this a lot. I'm not sure I fully believe it, but I do think it's true. I think, because how can we know anything if nothing exists? Seriously. How can I know who I am, who you are, who you are, who the sangha is, if you don't exist, if I don't exist? We're all changing all the time. That's my open question. I would suggest, oh, so... And sangha provides the leavening, I think, because sangha provides the contact, the container in which we work all of this out.

[41:25]

So what is the vehicle for you? Are you alive or dead? Are you seeing your world and your family and your work as the little world that becomes the big world? Are you, for example, what is your vehicle What is your path that you use when you become overwhelmed by sadness? I would suggest that it can come from just saying a big yes to life itself, to not knowing, to not, and in the process, making your world the world, and certainly making it your children and grandchildren's world. The yes is the vow, the love, the commitment we all had to offer. and provide, especially with the attitude of dead or alive. All of this, of course, happens in the context of the Four Noble Truths. There is suffering. It does exist. We don't want to add to it.

[42:28]

We can figure out how not to add to it, which is to basically turn the light around and look at the contents of our own mind. I'm so grateful to Zen Center, Green Gulch in particular, for giving me the three things that I most needed. Number one, Dharma and Sangha. Number two, space and support for a child. And number three, space for my health to recur at least to the extent that I can now be minimally self-sufficient. And as I watched the people at the Redwoods, they also had this deep intention to make the world a better place, at least for their own families. And they have an awareness that There is another way to live that sometimes will involve deep commitment, and it's fed by yes. And I remember when I was Chusot and I sat out, Chusot's look out on the whole community that's sitting zazen, and you guys would all have your backs to me and your faces to the wall.

[43:33]

And I remember loving everybody so much and loving your desire to practice so much. and loving your commitment so much. And in the process of writing this talk, I did make friends with Bodhidharma, after all, because he taught me. First of all, I, of course, have a lot to learn. Second of all, he taught me about emptiness and not knowing, which is about love, and that makes practice deep, thrilling, and fun even. So thank you very much for your kind listening. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. 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.

[44:38]

and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[44:42]

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