This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzz.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. There's lots of space here in the front, so if you want to come a little bit closer, feel free to do that. There was also some chairs, but it's also fine where you are. Can everybody hear me? Yes. I want to start, I gave a Dharma talk just

[01:07]

two weeks ago at the city center, and I started with a wish or a dedication or an intention that Pema Chodron wrote down, the teacher. And I want to read it also today because I feel it is very appropriate to the times we're living through. May the roots of suffering be diminished. May warfare, violence, neglect, indifference, and addiction decrease. May the wisdom and compassion of all beings increase now and in the future. May we see clearly how all the barriers we erect between ourselves and others are as insubstantial as our dreams.

[02:17]

May we appreciate the great perfections of all phenomena. May we continue to open our hearts and minds in order to work ceaselessly for the benefit of all beings. May we not turn away, but have the courage to go to the places that scare us, or we could say become intimate with the places that scare us. Throughout my life, until this very moment, Whatever virtue I have accomplished, I dedicate to the welfare of all beings. So my name is Christina Lehnherr. My Dharma name is, one of them is Kiku, that means loom of emptiness, the loom, the weaving loom.

[03:28]

And I'm very happy to be here today. I want to thank the practice period leaders for the invitation to come and speak. Tenshin, Reb Anderson, who leads the practice period that has started 11 days ago, is my teacher. And everybody else... who I encounter has started to be my teacher, whether I like it or not. Thank you all for being here. Maybe you could actually look around because we have different, people are here in different ways. Some of you are long-term residents that live here for an open-ended amount of time. Some of you are here to participate in the eight-week practice period, our residence for that time.

[04:37]

And some of you have come from near or further away just to be here today. So maybe you could actually look around and maybe say hello to your neighbor and maybe say how you're here today. So who did not get to say hello?

[05:44]

Ino-san, you ring the bell, please. Thank you. Just take a moment to see how your body feels right now. And I would like to know if somebody did not get to say hello or speak to anybody. Can you raise your hand if that happened? Because I would like to say, did you get to say hello? Okay. I wasn't sure. Because we just had very recent, in the last few days, three very violent events happening in this country. One was the shooting in the synagogue in Pittsburgh.

[07:04]

Eleven people died. and it was during a naming ceremony for a baby. Fourteen bombs got sent to various peoples in the mail that could have gone off and didn't because the postal services detected them in time. And another shooting took place in Louisville, Kentucky, where a person went with a gun to a black church, but the church was closed, so he went to a convenience store and shot two black people. These are very challenging times. And how...

[08:07]

How does this practice maybe offer us something to help during these times? And that's why I think those intention for all beings, that the root of suffering may be diminished, that warfare, violence, hate, neglect, indifference, decrease, that wisdom and compassion may increase, that we all, each one of us, may see clearly how the barriers we think are there between us and others are as insubstantial as dreams. May we become to really appreciate every single phenomenon in its perfection.

[09:09]

May we continue to open our hearts and minds in order to work ceaselessly for the benefit of all beings. So this eight-week practice period that has just started 11 days ago is the title Kenshin Reb Anderson gave it was... I don't think I brought that page, but I think I can remember. It has to do with the practice of sitting still in solitude... And compassionate social action, compassionate action, and how they inform each other and how they interplay with each other.

[10:18]

Is that about it? Yes? Okay. So, Zen practice is all-inclusive practice. That means... its very basis, it's a practice that does not exclude anything, but includes everything. And that already kind of blows, keeps blowing my mind. I don't know what it does to you, but it's like, how? How do we include everything? all these events that are going on, and some of them are really horrendously destructive and creating enormous suffering. It's a never-ending, Zen practice is a never-ending, continuous practice, and it's never-ending because

[11:30]

The basic of our life, of this reality we are born into, is that nothing is permanent. Nothing is non-changing. Everything is a process. There's nothing that is not a process that means it keeps changing. In that sense, there's no place to land. There's no place to have it figured out, and now we can just hang out there, and it is figured out forever. It is not. We have to keep finding our way. We have to keep looking how to respond in this moment, in these circumstances, in the most life-affirming, life-supporting way. And what is appropriate in this moment is maybe radically appropriate in the next, or two moments later, or two days later.

[12:39]

So it's a never-ending, continuous practice. Suzuki Roshi says this really beautifully. He said, everything that takes shape, like you, me, this lectern, everything is a tentative form. I just love that. It's such a sweet way of looking at things. Your partner is a tentative form. Your children are tentative forms. Your plants are tentative forms. So, what is today's shape? What is today's form? What how can we carefully relate to these tentative forms? It's an all-inclusive practice. And somehow the fundamental and pivotal requirement

[13:54]

is the ability to be responsive in the moment, to become as fully human as we can, to develop our human capacity of kindness and compassion to the best degree. And that too is a continuous event, it's continuous practice. So in this practice period, the people that are doing it and the people that are living here at Green College, there's a structure that supports sitting in stillness. There's a schedule that every day you get a chance and the opportunity to sit in silent solitude, which is, you could say, which is taking refuge in Buddha. because we all have that seed of the capacity to be fully awake, fully human, and fully alive in us, just because we're born, because we got the extraordinary human opportunity to be a human, born as a human.

[15:23]

It takes courage to sit still, because when we sit still, we start to have to pay attention to this, the being that's sitting still, and what is going on here in the body, in the feelings, in the mind. And for many of us, that is almost the hardest thing to do, to give ourselves, because sitting in silent solitude means sitting in an open, non-judgmental space. That is underlined, highlighted, non-judgmental space. We have all these opinions when our feelings or our sensations in the body or our thoughts come up.

[16:31]

There is something judging them, saying that's good, that's bad, I like this, I don't like this. And that's not what we're doing. That's what we keep letting go of and letting go of and letting go of as we sit. To give that kind of space to ourselves is for many of us the hardest thing, the most difficult thing. Many of us are much more capable of making space for other people than making space for ourselves. We often live with double standards. we apply to our friends and one we apply to ourselves. And the one to ourselves is often, you know, close to sending bombs to ourselves or, you know, shooting ourselves or thinking we're not worth anything, hating ourselves.

[17:38]

So how do we keep letting go of that and just be still enough so we've been begin to acknowledge what we are feeling, what the thoughts are, what the sensations are. So sitting still, taking refuge in Buddha, sitting in an open, non-judgmental space, acknowledging being aware of what's arising in that moment in our bodies, in our feelings, in our minds, and just be with it with appreciation and compassion without spinning a story around it and without identifying with it.

[18:48]

So, Sadness is arising. It's just a visitor. There's this beautiful poem by Wumi that's called The Guest House that invites all the things in, but also lets them go. It's a visitor. It's not, I am a sad person. There is sadness here. And maybe it's all there is right now, but it's a visitor. There's joy here. It's a visitor. There's happiness here, it's a visitor. There's anger here, it's a visitor. But it's here right now, so how do I treat it with respect? What means respect with anger, with sadness, with joy? It means really getting to know it on an energetic level. I don't know if you all have seen all those innumerable Tibetan tankas.

[19:53]

There's one in Cloud Hall of, I think, the White Tara, if I'm correct. They have innumerable figures. They all depict different energies that we humans can experience. And they have a practice of visualizing them Becoming them and by becoming really intimate with that particular energy, fierce or compassionate or whatever it is, will help us understand how to, A, first, we get more resilient. We can stand them because they're intense. We don't have to immediately act them out to... dilute or diffuse the energy. We learn to actually hold intensity in our bodies without being driven into action to diffuse it.

[20:55]

And we learn to use them rather than be at the mercy of them. But that takes patience, that takes courage, that takes... staying in the not knowing because we don't know what to do. But also the nice thing is we don't have to do anything when we're sitting still. We have actually the wonderful opportunity to just kind of check it out, feel it, hang out with it, not do anything about it. and we will see how it arises and how it leaves or is replaced by something else. So that's part of the sitting still. And if we do that in a non-judgmental kind of kind way, then we start to know

[22:05]

our own darkness, our own pain, our own joys, our own sorrows, our fears. And out of that arises compassion and loving kindness. And there's a beautiful poem by Naomi Shihabney. I don't know how she spells her name. Sorry. and it's called Kindness. Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things. Feel the future dissolve in a moment, like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go, so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness.

[23:07]

How you ride and ride, thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever, before you learn the tender gravity of kindness. You must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow, You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth.

[24:12]

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore. Only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread. only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say, it is you I have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend. So the compassion, when we study the self, Dogen said, you know, take the backward step, turn the light inward, study this self.

[25:18]

That is taking refuge in Dharma. That allows compassion to arise because... when we look inside ourselves with a non-judgmental attitude, in a non-judgmental space, we start seeing the whole universe. All the good and all the dark that is in it, we start also seeing in here. And as Naomi Nye says, then we start seeing the sorrow that runs through the whole world, that is not just ours, that is human suffering, the suffering of humanity, and you catch the threats of all sorrows, and you see the size of the cloth, which is immeasurable.

[26:29]

But that also brings up immeasurable compassion, immeasurable kindness, because it's the only thing that makes sense. So now, what is the interplay between sitting in stillness, having the courage and the tolerance and the patience to meet the being that you are, not the person you think of yourself as being you, but actually the being that you are. And being is such a beautiful word because it is at the same time a noun and it is a verb. So we're all beings, and we're all being, continuously being, and we're being beinged by everybody.

[27:34]

You know, you don't know it, but you're actually participating and collaborating in this talk. It's very different what I'm saying to you than what I wrote down, even though the thread's there. Because it's called forth by the energy in this room, which is created by each single one of you being here exactly the way you're here. And that's always such a... wonderful experience, actually. So I do feel like a loom and you're all weaving. You know, I have a structure and you're the threads that are weaving on it. And it's a discovery. And it's a collaboration. And every single one of you is a participant. No one is left out in exactly the way you are. You are a participant. this. So how does the sitting still and becoming intimate and becoming more relaxed with this ever-changing being that has all these different feelings and thoughts and some... To become really intimate with that, how does that relate and interplay with action?

[29:03]

with leaving here and going in the car or going to the dining room and maybe not being able to sit beside the person you had thought you would or being sidetracked by something else or having exactly what you wanted? How do you... How do we interact? How does sitting still and what we learn there help us with how to meet our neighbors, how to meet all the different people around us that have different views, that have different ideas about what the world is? Because one thing also that happens in the stillness is that actually we see reality and how things are not any longer based on the ideas we have created around them.

[30:10]

We have a bigger chance to actually see them exactly the way, or better the way they are, not exactly, but better. So, social action. compassionate action, is taking refuge in Sangha, is living in harmony with all beings, nobody excluded. It's a big order, tall order. When we are working with our own unwanted for us seemingly unacceptable stuff, and we have to let go of our escape patterns, of distracting ourselves, whichever way we do that, of consuming things, of dulling our senses, of going to sleep, of running away, of whatever we do to escape, we have to let go of that.

[31:29]

When we become able to be open what arises, regardless of whatever thoughts we had about it before, we will begin to see and hear and feel who others really are, because we have learned to see and feel and hear how this being is. and how it's changing continuously. And this seeing and hearing and feeling is less obstructed by our very own versions of reality, which we all have and which we so often try to convince others to see the same way. Or we only hang out with those who think the same way, because we think that makes it more stable, more true, more real, which is, of course, not so.

[32:38]

So then, the social action, compassion, is actually relating to everything as equals. The moment we think, oh, poor you, I have to help you. It's not relating between equals, and that's not compassion. Compassion is a relationship between equals. So that means internally we have to treat with equal respect all the different feelings we're having with no judgment. anger, joy, love, hate, confusion, irritation, impatience, everything gets equal respect and doesn't get judged.

[33:45]

So then when we can do that better, it translates when we're out in the world because compassionate action is always a collaboration. It's never a power over. It's never my view is better than your view. It's finding the place where collaboration can start. So we want to not have, for example, have oil pipelines go through native territory and through beautiful landscapes, so we fight for not having them. Does our fight and our view include the thousands of people who, when that pipeline is not built, will lose their job and maybe lose their livelihood?

[34:49]

And how? What are we going to do that that doesn't happen? Because if we only don't want the pipeline and we fight for it and we celebrate when we won, but it leads the casualties and the collateral damage is not considered and not taken into account and not taken equally seriously, like all the miners that have no jobs. We have maybe a little cleaner air, but we have a lot of people who have no jobs have no livelihood. So that will be collaboration. So then when we start thinking that way, it also makes it clear there's no simple answer to anything. It's complex, and it will take time, and it will take effort. And if we only do one thing, we create suffering and the difficulty on the other side, which will...

[35:52]

eventually come home to roost, because we're all in one boat. There's not two or three or four boats. There's one boat we are all in. Everybody on this planet is in one single boat. And we don't see that, but it's true. And sometimes we can feel it when we really pay attention. That's how when we really meet our own sorrow, open-hearted, we start feeling the sorrow and the suffering of the whole world, not just our own. And that takes a lot of support to stand. We don't have to identify with it. All we have to do is just feel it, not push it away, and not know what to do, because this not having a solution, which we so often want to have, because we think then we don't have to feel it, then it's going to be solved.

[37:06]

That is the ground on which collaboration can happen, on which we can start to hear what the others are experiencing, what their fears are, what their what the consequences are on their side, and how do we collaborate to move everybody forward, not just our own agenda. So, when we practice in stillness and that capacity grows, we will be able to also be more relaxed with ambiguity and paradox. the fact that there's not a simple answer, that it's such a complex web that we have to move very carefully and practice hearing, including other views, to see what might be a step forward for everybody.

[38:09]

When we are able to see our own darknesses, our own pains, our own sorrows, our own joys and happinesses. And then when they appear outside of us, we will be able to meet them. We can relate to them because we have met them in us in a nonjudgmental way. So then we won't be so... drawn or pushed to judge them when they appear outside. So, you know, we all have to go, or have to go, we all have the honor, or most of us, I'm not the citizen, but most of us have the honor and the capacity to actually collaborate by voting, by taking the time to think about what

[39:49]

you want to support, who is out there available to be elected to that you think is capable for collaboration, is capable to further the things you think are helpful. And it takes time, it takes careful consideration, and You know, sitting still is very important. It's the taproot, but it's not the end of the stories. If it's not translated into our everyday actions at home, with the kids, with the co-workers, with your partner, with yourself, with the things you own, it's not worth much. That's why it's taking refuge in Buddha. Nature, we all have the capacity to be fully human, fully awake, and fully alive, taking refuge in Dharma.

[40:58]

The reality of how things are so interconnected and interdependently arising that only kindness makes sense. That only compassion, which is not pity, which is not soppy, which is seeing clear, makes sense. And then taking... Refuge in Sangha, the original meaning of Sangha means the group of people that practices what you practice. The Sangha I'm talking about is the Sangha of all humans, regardless of race, gender, orientation, age, where they come back, But from background, all humans, all sanctioned beings is the Sangha I'm talking about right now.

[41:59]

So I'm stretching the definition of the word. So Pema Chodron also says something. She relates a little story here that I thought was really interesting. A nice story because there's so much fear happening right now in different areas and on all sides. And so the story goes, once there was a young warrior. Her teacher told her that she had to do battle with fear. She didn't want to do that. It seemed too aggressive. It was scary. It seemed unfriendly. But the teacher said she had to do it and gave her the instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student warrior stood on one side and fear stood on the other. The warrior was feeling very small and fear was looking big and wrathful.

[43:01]

They both had their weapons. The young warrior roused herself and went forward, prostrated three times and asked, may I have permission? to go into battle with you. Surprising, huh? Fear said, thank you for showing me so much respect that you ask permission. Then the young warrior said, how can I defeat you? Fear replied, my weapons are that I talk fast and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don't do what I tell you, I have no power.

[44:04]

I have no power. You can listen to me, and you can have respect for me, You can even be convinced by me, but if you don't do what I say, I have no power. In that way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear. May three frustrations to the things that scare us. and ask, may I have permission to go into battle with you? Fear says, thank you for showing me so much respect that you ask permission. Then the young warrior says, how can I defeat you? Fear replied, my weapons are that I talk fast and I get very close to your face.

[45:11]

And I would add, and I draw horrendously frightening pictures of the future that is coming if you don't do what I say you should do. Then you get completely unnerved and you do whatever I say. If you don't do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. but if you don't do what I say, I have no power. In that way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear. And so it is with everything, fear, hate, sorrow, pain, happiness, joy, asking permission, prostrating. Can I get to know you?

[46:13]

Can I find out how to not be ruled by you? And you will get an answer. Now I'm going to end this talk. I think the people that live here have a structure around that supports being still with themselves and practicing doing that in a nonjudgmental space. But you who go back home may not have an outside structure so much, but you may... Know in your life things that help you be still, calm down, be quiet.

[47:19]

And those you can engage, particularly when you get activated, when there's strong feelings or confusion or fear or whatever arising. See if you can engage those. Go for that walk through that. park you know or sit on a bench or sit down in your office and just turn inward and see if you can just be curious and open hearted to how you're feeling not what your mind is telling you or the feeling is telling you what you have to do those also talk very fast and get in your face and to treat them respectful as visitors. They're not here to stay. Even if they keep coming back, they don't stay. So, I wish you all a very good rest of the Sunday.

[48:26]

Thank you for making the talk, collaborating, and... Take good care of yourself and each other. 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.

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