Good morning, everybody, here at Green Gulch. and online everywhere. So this is where I have to look. My name is Anna Thorn, and I'm the head of practice at City Center right now. And I lived here at Green Gulch from, I think, 2012 to 2017. That was my last stay here.

[01:00]

And of course, it's a different world. And Heraclit said, no woman ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river, and she's not the same woman. We cannot enter the stream twice in the same place. And also, I'm very grateful to be here again. It is still this amazing valley of green dragon temple and this beautiful Zendor with Manjushi sitting on the altar, supporting the practice of Zazen, studying the self to forget the self. I feel deep gratitude for this place that holds us and gives us trust in the possibility of deep transformation.

[02:04]

I would like to thank Abbas Fu and Tan Tujirio for inviting me to speak here today. A monk asked Yunmen, what are the teachings of a whole lifetime? Yunmen said, an appropriate response. A response from this place, from this moment, from this breath. A response not from me here and the world out there. A response from just being this, coming to be to everything else. an appropriate response to our individual life, to our relationship, to our sangha and cultural context, and to this world.

[03:12]

And if we intend to give an appropriate response, it must include embracing the complexity of this life and this world, and awakening to presence, which gives room to work with that complexity. Awakening includes embracing and penetrating the mystery of this life as we, and it changes all the time, to understand it as best we can for the purpose of a most appropriate response, moment by moment. Awakening to this life embraces the contradictions of reality, which is always changing and unfolding. How can we know it and not know it at the same time?

[04:14]

How can we experience the world in its complexity and chaos and not get stuck in fear or a fixed view of where we are? A few weeks ago, we had a training here at Green Gulch Farm to prepare us to listen more carefully and wholeheartedly and with deeper understanding to indigenous people who had been the caretakers of the land we live on now before we took over. In this context, it's important To understand our own preconceptions of our relationship to the land we live on and the environment that we are part of. To recognize that our connection to the earth is shaped by our scientific view and our ideas of ownership.

[05:24]

By the end of the training, which was just the beginning of a series of trainings, We agreed to learn how to be a good guest and a good neighbor on Turtle Island. There is no one answer, but there are many suggestions within our tradition of how to take care of the world we live in. One suggestion of how to receive a wider understanding of our differences and our connections is all-inclusive study. Hands on. All-inclusive study is just single-minded, sitting, dropping away body and mind. At the moment of going there, you go there. At the moment of coming here, you come here. There is no gap. Just in this way, the entire body studies all-inclusively the great road's entire body.

[06:30]

As Nishijima Krosh pointed out, hen means everywhere or widely, and san means to visit or to study through experience. So Henzan originally described the custom of Buddhist monks traveling around to meet an excellent teacher with whom they could be satisfied. We are always practicing. with this being right here. We are practicing to let all our ideas of what this might be or should be drop away. Dropping body and mind. This dropping does not happen by moving around, but rather by meeting exactly this moment right here. And this meeting is often facilitated through the face, and the body of our teacher. In the training that I just mentioned before, we had the good fortune to be supported by a guest teacher who identifies as indigenous and who invited us into the healing teaching of mending the sacred hoop.

[07:52]

I understand this teaching as an expression of our deep interconnectedness with all life on this planet. For me, most of this teaching is not given in the language of analysis, but is conveyed in ritual and ceremony. And I think our care and respect for ritual in the Sotizen tradition connects us to the indigenous people. gives us an opening into understanding a culture that is not written, but taught through ritual. Rituals are processes of embodiment and bodily performance. In them, the valid order and values of a community are physically experienced and solidified. They are written into the body, incorporated, that is physically internalized. Thus, rituals create a bodily knowledge and memory, an embodied identity, a bodily connection, says Byung-Chul Han in his book, The Disappearance of Rituals.

[09:09]

During the pandemic, we have been restricted to meeting on Zoom, as we are still now in many cases. And we have felt the elimination of many layers of presence with each other and the reduction to our visual senses. Being separated and safe behind screens has left an imprint. The dominance of the visual sense has been described as a characteristic of the process of civilization. the understanding of Western civilization, leading to the exclusion of the body in many areas of everyday life through the development of technology. Experiencing our world more and more with our eyes and through our computing devices, like phones and laptops, has left us wondering about what this is.

[10:21]

and who we are. I wonder if the primary delusion of me being here and the world out there has been even reinforced in this recent process of sheltering in place. As our ritual community disappeared, our communal body disappeared. Digital communication is disembodied communication. And I think here at Green Garge, you are really lucky that you have your hands in the earth a lot of the time and work with plants and living beings very directly. I think that's a good counterbalance to losing our body in the digital process. During our one-day sitting at City Center last Saturday, with a good number of brand-new participants coming in and with formal meals in the courtyard and dining room, I noticed a young woman taking a picture with her cell phone of the beautiful bowl of her breakfast in front of her.

[11:46]

I had to smile, as this felt like being on a holiday vacation, and capturing the adventures by making photographs, like trying to hold on to the good moments. This is the world we live in now. We prove our experience by forwarding photos. But a photo is not an experience. It is just a testament of something that happened. I'm aware that there is no going back to the world that we think of as the world before COVID or even before that. I also think that this huge interruption of everything is an amazing opportunity to begin again and to explore again and to find out what we want to restore and what we want to leave behind. I feel the need to explore the place where we are right now in relationship

[12:51]

to being our bodies in this practice. Dogen makes a distinction. To study a hundred thousand myriad things only as a hundred thousand myriad things is not yet all inclusive study. To turn a hundred thousand myriad bodies even in half a statement is all inclusive study. For example, To just hit the earth when you hit the earth is all-inclusive study. I will come back to this hitting the earth. But first, I would like to mention that this alluding to studying a hundred thousand myriad things is, of course, very much like surfing the endless access of Internet information. To the pure accumulation of information, Though the pure accumulation of information is not opening our mind, and it is not enticing the mind to move freely, it can easily overload us and put us into a helpless state of burnout.

[14:09]

Thorough exploration is studying with our whole being completely, which cannot be done just mentally. Suzuki Roshi describes all-inclusive study in beginner's mind as doing what we do with our whole body and mind. He says, you should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do. I think there is a big difference between having a burnout through being fried by mental overload and feeling completely used up because we have done something completely with our whole body and mind engaged. There is a difference in the kind of knowledge and information that we receive in the process.

[15:17]

Jung-Chun Han says the knowledge produced by big data escapes understanding. Human condition is not powerful enough. Processors are faster than a human being precisely because they neither think nor understand. They only calculate. Transparency, the imperative of dataism, is the source of of the compulsion to transform everything into data and information, that is, to make it visible. It is a compulsion of production. Transparency does not declare the human being to be free. It declares data and information free. It is an efficient form of domination in which total communication and total surveillance coincide. This form of domination presents itself as freedom.

[16:21]

It is always helpful to come back into our body and to recognize what is going on right now. Breathing in our feelings, in our thoughts. It is our particular gift that we can find our bearings right where we are and pause. Coming back to the moment of hitting the earth, I would like to quote a passage from the physical Dogen Dasnas. He says, For example, when you understand the moment of falling to the ground as Dasnas, you will not doubt the moment of falling to the ground at the moment of getting up. Since ancient times, these words, have been spoken in both India and the Deva world. One who falls to the ground uses the ground to stand up.

[17:25]

One who ignores the ground and tries to stand cannot. The meaning is that those who fall down on the earth stand up on the earth. It is impossible to get up without using the earth. Be where you are is a wonderfully clear response. to our situation of having fallen down, having lost our orientation, having lost our balance and trust. And Dogen goes further in his articulation to make sure to not get stuck in the idea of a locality, of a certain place. And he says, Here is one way to pass of getting up. One who falls to the ground uses the sky to stand up. One who falls to the sky uses the ground to stand up. Without being thus, you can never get up.

[18:30]

This has always been the case with all Buddhas and ancestors. To get up where you have fallen down is something that little children, who are in the process of learning how to work, are really good at if we let them be. It is important to be generous and awake and to let them fall down and get up and not interfere so they can learn to get up where they fall and trust the ground that holds them falling and getting up. During the last two years, I had a number of incidents of falling down. I had two bicycle accidents, and the last time falling happened when I just came back from San Francisco to Frankfurt, Germany last December, using the moving stairs at the airport, holding two big suitcases, and one started sliding away, and I tried to keep holding on to it.

[19:41]

I was very lucky that the people behind me on the stairs immediately stopped the fall by putting their luggage in the way. But it was a real shock to my body that registered as a strong trembling and I just started to cry, which was very helpful in being able to readjust and find my bearings again. In the falling down and the getting up, there is usually a moment of coming to the end of falling down and to begin the getting up. It is a tiny moment of closure and new beginning. And this is the same if you use the sky to get up. My impression is right now that we are stuck in the falling down and have difficulty. in finding closure, to be open to a new beginning.

[20:47]

I see many reasons for this. One reason is that the pandemic imprinted us like a trauma, which means the experience of what happened was beyond our capacity of being present or digested. We closed the doors to be safe. which we never are, and we got a little stuck in this safe unsafeness. Other reasons are that the pandemic was just one layer of traumatic disruption of all our daily life and rituals. The result of climate change and catastrophic weather situations and the inability to work together on a global scale to repair or counteract these situations is another layer of deep insecurity in our life. And I don't even try to mention the war in Ukraine and its huge repercussions all over Europe.

[21:57]

I feel I cannot even find the language to talk about this and tell some kind of truth because I'm in delusion, throughout delusion. This delusional process of imputing selves on everything as an effort to permanently reconstruct our own selves can be released in deep stillness and presence. Zazen can be being one with everything, where our fear of existence, or fear of birth and death, falls away. When we can trust in just being, being still, without any grasping of any outcome, when we develop an awareness of our process of perception through mindfulness, can we interrupt the patterns of communal reproduction of delusion?

[23:07]

I talk as if there would be something that is United States, Ukraine, Europe, women, indigenous people or else. But of course, this is only my story or our stories about our world and not the whole reality. Wisdom is seeing through delusion and being at ease with being not knowing. And it is not realized intellectually, but experienced and to some extent unspeakable. This experience is not an experience of a self, but rather a non-dual event. Dogen describes it as to carry yourself forward and experience myriad things as delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves as awakening. When actualized by myriad things, the body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away.

[24:14]

No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly. One of the essential Buddhist teachings is the teaching of the three Dharma seals, or Dharma mudras they are called. Thigna Tan names the three seals according to the Samyukta Agama, impermanence, non-self, and nirvana. Everything is changing all the time. Nothing is permanent. Things cannot remain themselves for two consecutive moments. From the perspective of impermanence, there can be no permanent independent self. And when we look more deeply, we can see that everything exists only because of everything else. Understanding impermanence allows us to understand non-self.

[25:18]

Impermanence and non-self allow transformation. Nirvana, the third seal, is the ground of being. It is the complete silencing of all concepts. While impermanence and non-self are instruments of practice, instruments to understand reality, nirvana is the basis. It does not exist separate from impermanence or non-self. Thich Nhat Hanh says, if you know how to use the tools of impermanence and non-self to touch reality, you touch nirvana, in the here and now. Nirvana is the extinction of all notions. Birth is a notion. Death is a notion. Being is a notion. Non-being is a notion. In our daily lives, we have to deal with these relative realities.

[26:23]

But if we touch life more deeply, reality will reveal itself in a different way. I think we are here to touch life more deeply, to touch the ground of our existence where separations and discriminations fall away. We practice to let go of our stories about ourselves, which is also to see how many different beings we are and everyone else is. We can bow to each other, and the deep unknowing and the deepest respect at the same time. When we bow to everything at the same time, when we don't pick and choose, we can find gentleness in this gesture. Gentleness with everything and everyone around us. Vulnerability and openness with what is.

[27:26]

And this is the great potential of these poems and rituals. We repeat them, we lose them, we return to them. They are to connect us to communicate beyond words and definitions. They have lived longer than a few hundred years, and thus they carry wisdom like very, very old trees carry this wisdom. They have been scripted and defined, and still again and again they come to life in their own way. We have a commonality with indigenous people in communicating through ritual. Rituals bring about a community in which resonances occur, one that is capable of accord, of a common rhythm. rituals produce socio-cultural axis of resonance, along which may be experienced three different kinds of resonant relationship.

[28:40]

Vertical, to the gods, the cosmos, the time, to eternity. Horizontal, within one's social community. And diagonal, with respect to things. Rituals also include collective feelings. And the bearer of these feelings is not an isolated individual. For example, in a ritual of mourning, the mourning is an objective feeling, a feeling held by the whole community. Such collective feelings consolidate a community and release the individual. This is most important in working with transgenerational trauma like genocide, which cannot be held by an individual. The community is the subject that takes on the mourning that needs to happen to find forgiveness and closure.

[29:49]

In the process of sheltering in place or closing the temple doors, We also had to give up a number of rituals that bring us together. And we are still discovering how important these rituals are as a physical experience of being a community, of being a Sangha. Sitting together and listening to our story is one way of supporting each other to understand what is going on. And we feel that we are not alone, that we are together. in this life and that this is a great gift I'm glad to be here again with all of you and I would like to hear your response to what I said thank you very much may our intention equally

[30:53]

Thank you. Don't make sorrow about this. I don't mentor them. Buddha's way isn't so possible. I vow to become. No, some of you may be signing off before questions and I wanted to just offer that online you can. Raise your hand.

[31:58]

If you do have a question, please send a chat message to Green Gulch Zendo. And I wanted to let folks who may be longing for some embodied practice at Green Gulch know that we do have spots in next Saturdays, one day sitting if you're in the Bay Area and want to come out, please go to the website calendar. We're sitting next Saturday and monthly into the future. Questions or comments for Ana, please put in the chat. Yes. You change, the river changes. So you've been away, and now you're back to the river. This one is changing. And I'm wondering how you see where the water's going. Do you have any sense of where we're going now?

[33:00]

I mean, it seems very hard to tell. What's our next commitment? What's our next effort? Whatever you have to say. It just came to me, and that was kind of in the talk, that I really would like to go back to the ceremonies and the rituals more deeply. I also read Zen Ru's book, The Shamanic Bones of Zen, which I have a different perspective, but I think there's a lot in there that is very vital. I think we have lost it in the last two years. It has been like swept out the door. In some ways, just because we needed to just communicate online.

[34:05]

We couldn't communicate directly. But I think it's a big potential to activate what we do in our ritual again like you know this was the first time for me to offer incense at sea center we don't have incense anymore because of allergies and stuff and there's a lot in there like um fire fire is in all kinds of rituals and all kinds of cultures um has a whole array of meanings. It's like extinguishing, making very strong transformation into ashes. And I have the feeling right now I would like to taste more fully again what we actually can find in our forms and rituals to activate that.

[35:09]

And that's just one piece. The difference that I've noticed coming back after five years is a very strong emphasis on DEIA and on environmental issues. To some extent, I feel it's and that's probably different at city center also. It's even stronger than the basic practices. So to keep that in a balanced kind of situation, I feel it's very important. Otherwise, we lose our ground. Otherwise, we lose the connection to our ancestors and to what we have received.

[36:11]

And I think we need to really take care of that. That's coming to mind right now. Yeah. We have a question. Yes. And it says, thank you for your wonderful talk. I am very moved by getting up by the sky. And I noticed my mind wanting to be able to grasp it. Is there an understanding of the meaning of that that you could share? The meaning of Dogen's sentences to me is that he always rattles our set perceptions. So when we make such a point of standing up on the earth, standing up where we have fallen down,

[37:15]

We easily grasp that the earth is the real thing and substantialize it. And then Dogen comes around the corner and says, it's also the sky that makes you get up. So he just dances you around so that you don't get fixed in one of your perceptions. That's my understanding of this phrase. And we have another question from the chat. You lived in a society where there was no poverty. You have come back to a society where poverty is a huge issue. How does that affect you? By the way, there is strong impoverishment going on in Europe right now.

[38:24]

So don't worry about that part. I don't want to be cynical, but it's a very strong change going on right now in a number of European countries. You always think there's social security there, but it's actually not. When you see the huge movement of immigrants or immigration, that happens. in Europe, people coming from the African countries. Yeah, it's a big, big challenge. But I have to say, coming back to San Francisco, I was really shocked about how that has developed. It's a really rough city now.

[39:28]

kind of favelas growing in different places, you know, like really like tent villages. Every morning there's people lying in the entrance of Zen Center who have slept there overnight. And I still think that San Francisco is a much richer city than Frankfurt, for example. The kind of difference is much bigger here. Like it's so extreme, the wealth on the one side and then the poverty on the other side. So on one of my first days here, I came out the back door of Zen Center and there was like...

[40:28]

backpack with all kinds of things spread out on the street and it looked kind of different and then I later on kind of checked it and the money was missing but everything else was there and I called the people who owned this backpack and it had just been stolen out of a car at Land's End so It was funny, it was German visitors. And they were very happy to get their papers and everything back. Yeah, there is this more challenging environment, I would say, that I met when I came back. And I'm still getting, trying to adjust to it. Zen Center feels like an oasis in San Francisco.

[41:35]

Like a very calm, peaceful place in the middle of turmoil. You said something about... like the ancient rituals, like holding the wisdom of like an ancient tree, something like that. And it was touching something for me, like I guess my feeling of growing up in the United States and what I feel like I've seen is a lot of people very disconnected from roots, like either through immigration or colonization or and people really hungry for that and looking for some kind of ritual and how that can cause problems like you're talking about reconciling with indigenous people that I think often people go you know want to take those traditions and it's tricky even in this lineage you know I wonder about that like it's not my direct ancestors and I do also feel that people have a need and

[42:57]

I don't know. It's not a need in some way to connect through ritual and ancestry, but I'm curious about if you have a thought of how rituals develop or people looking to create new rituals or develop a connection without how does that process happen or does it need to be connected to something ancient even if it's not from your own Yeah, that's an interesting question. There was a lot in there. One was the notion that many people are cut off ritual or have left ritual behind and that there is a strong hunger to kind of connect to ritual or re-enliven ritual. And that we have to also be, that's maybe already interpretation of what you said, be very careful when we meet indigenous rituals.

[44:10]

So to not try to appropriate it or to take it on, but rather respect it as coming from a very different ground. Can you repeat your question? Yeah, I think there's just another piece of like, what is your vision of coming home to ritual and how do people find that when it's messy, there's not like a pure way to do it or do we create our own or do we call on? Yeah. Yeah, we have to be very careful. That's true. And I mean, one of the wonderful things in that workshop was that The person who came as a guest teacher told us that we had very well respected them as a good neighbor and that the ritual also bowing to each other was Suzuki Roshi, which he had done as a little boy and had seen his family happening.

[45:24]

That was very helpful. in keeping the connection and always meeting again and learning from each other. And I think these are the possibilities that we, that we have to connect. We have to find meeting points and we have to let each other in on what we have received. And we have to always be very careful not to just try to get something And I think there's also the possibility of developing ritual, finding new ritual. I mean, that we have thrown everything out is not very healthy. I mean, for example, just eating together at a table and waiting until everybody has food on their plate.

[46:30]

And not just grabbing the food and eating it was always for me a ritual at home, which I felt was actually very nice and respecting. But that's something you rarely need anymore. So, yeah. I think we have to just find out what we want to restore and what we... need to help us live together as community. And there's many, many forms. And it doesn't always have to be coming from an ancient string. But I think what comes from an ancient string is our recognition of when something is ritual, you feel there's a an authentic kind of centerpiece in it.

[47:34]

And there's a beginning and a closure. And usually there is a clearing of the space where the ritual takes place. I mean, like here, for example, the cheating, setting up the altar before we start doing the service. We have all these elements that we take for granted, but they are very important in sanctity or the seriousness of the ritual. So I think that's what we learn from older traditions. Okay. So maybe that's it. Thank you, everybody, very much for coming.

[48:50]

I'm sorry that Ana didn't get to all of your questions. Appreciate your presence and kind attention. Excuse me. I'm putting now in the chat a link. If you feel able to make a donation to Zen Center, please know that we really do depend on your generosity in that way. And if you would like to unmute and sign off, please do so. Thank you. Thank you. Have a lovely day, everyone. Thank you so much. A wonderful talk. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.

[49:55]

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