And welcome to Green Gulch Farm, Green Dragon Temple, on this day of, you know, maybe pollen in the air. Easter, it's Easter. And it's the first... Sunday after the first full moon, after the vernal equinox. And I looked it up, Easter, the root, Indo-European language root, always, has to do with brightness, something bright. And then it is associated, of course, with the dawn with brightness in the morning.

[01:03]

And then, of course, we have our word east. And in Europe, there was a goddess of the dawn, Austron, whose holiday for I don't know how long, maybe millennia was celebrated at the time of the vernal equinox. So here we are in a Zen temple at this time of some, say, brightness, feeling of spring and some light. So I think of this internally as having to do with awareness, having to do with noticing something, something rising into consciousness.

[02:09]

So this thought of something rising as mind, mind itself. And we have the practice then of meeting, meeting what rises. Meeting in the sense of bringing awareness or just noticing, just noticing what rises. So this is all kinds of, all kinds of things are bombarding our minds these days. It's hard to meet so much. Partly it's a pure, say, volume of the things that we experience. And partly it's that maybe a lot of it we don't particularly like, and so it's hard. So I know that it's the opening of baseball season, and that was mixed, right?

[03:26]

There was a big picture. A big picture in the sports section of the Chronicle, which I hadn't been looking at the paper. I've been at Tassajara mostly for the past several months. But then I opened the newspaper and there's this big picture and it has the baseball diamond with the police. policemen lining all around the infield. And they're acknowledging some of their members of their profession who have died in the line of duty. And then there was some recognition of a rookie pitcher who died in a car crash right after he pitched a game last week, or this week.

[04:28]

After his first professional outing in the major leagues, pitching, I think, very well, and then went out and the car he was in was hit by someone running a red light. And his life ended. So it's sobering. You know, while things are rising in consciousness, Most of it is not in our control, and so it's hard to accept. And it's hard to accept that the experience that we have or the emotional reaction that we have, it's hard to live with, sometimes to live with the pain in ourselves. So that's part of what's happening.

[05:31]

And then there are little things, like yesterday I was at my place in Rohnert Park, and my wife, I was actually thinking about this talk, and my wife comes in and says, do you have a minute? And I said, okay. She says, well, there's this broken faucet. In the bathroom, right? Can you look at it? And I thought, okay. Yes. So this is the practice of meeting what arises, right? In this case, broken faucet. And then going in to see the broken faucet, and then I realized there's more, it kind of took it apart enough to find out that there's actually something broken inside of it. And it's more than I could at that moment fix. In fact, I'm not sure I'll be able to.

[06:34]

But then I had to negotiate. Can I do this Monday morning? And she said, OK. But if I don't do it Monday morning, then she'll hire a plumber. So that'll be expensive. And then as I was continuing, the phone rang, and it was a tax accountant saying, I know that you already asked to file an extension because you're at Tassajara all this time. But even for that, I need some information. So I said, well, you just made my day. Now I know what to do. So all this is part of rising mind.

[07:39]

Every day, and at the same time, sometimes overriding considerations. A week from today, we're going to honor a couple of people at Green's, a benefit event at the Green's restaurant in San Francisco. One of them is Houston Smith, and the other is Angelus Arians. And I thought, well, I should look at a book that Houston Smith wrote and published a few years ago called Why Religion Matters. has something to do, I think the subtitle has something to do about faith in an age of disbelief. And so I haven't had time to read the book, but I just opened it and he said, well, there are three basic problems, three basic problems that human beings can't escape no matter what age we live in.

[08:49]

And the first has to do with engagement with the natural world for our own survival. having something to eat, having some shelter. And the second has to do with how we get along with each other, our social organization and our need to actually relate to each other. And the third has to do with what he called how to relate to the whole of existence, the entire cosmos. And he goes on to say that the first area having to do with, let's say, the natural world and how we survive in it, we've done a lot in the past couple of centuries, particularly with

[09:59]

say, scientific, empirical approaches to knowledge. So we can survive pretty well, right? In fact, have a sense of being able to control our environment to a significant extent. And the second one, he said, has to do... So that's kind of the modernist paradigm. And the second, he said, has to do with a postmodern paradigm. I mean, the area of social relations has to do with, say, deconstructing the, say, ethnic cultural biases that we have, and seeing that there are some ways in which those are all fabrications. Those are not absolute. And then, but the third thing, having to do with the totality of things, he said, it hasn't really been improved on so much.

[11:03]

And then the rest of the book is all about that. The rest of the book is whether that's true or not. But looking for, as he says, looking for the little bits of, say, gold dust in panning through all of the religious traditions. So that's maybe something to reflect on. And when I heard the last part of it, I thought, well, this is so similar to my own understanding of the bodhisattva vow. The bodhisattva vow has to do with living in accord with the totality of things, living in accord with the totality of all the phenomenal world. So in our Zen practice, we have maybe some way of cultivating our approach to that that is really needed to balance out the limitations of the other two views.

[12:15]

We are getting in a lot of trouble in the environment today because we have so much control. We have so much control over our environment, and then the feedback of that is coming back to show us that we are harming things without being aware. We aren't aware of the consequences of much of our activity. Before I go on, I just wanted to invite people to, if you haven't already, make plans to go to Greens. next Sunday, and we will invite Houston and Angelus Arians. Angelus Arians is really working in the area of the second, say, postmodern, multicultural ways in which human beings who have diverse backgrounds can live peacefully with each other, can understand each other.

[13:21]

Even in this room, you know, There are so many different backgrounds, although we have a lot in common, whatever it was that brought each one of you here today, and yet a room full of diverse beliefs, understandings, ways in which you respond to the things that do arise in your mind. Suzuki Roshi, founder of San Francisco Zen Center, once said that trees, birds, everything is thinking. Trees are thinking, birds are thinking. So when they think, they grow, they sing. That is their thinking. And there is no need for us to think more than that.

[14:24]

If you see things as it is, just see things, just see things, that's pure thinking. This kind of pure thinking is the mind we have. This pure thinking is the mind we have in our practice. And in this pure thinking we have freedom. We have freedom from ourselves. So it's not a matter of thinking something's true or false. It's a matter of just seeing what rises in mind. So we say that each moment something rises in mind. That's how we know a moment. It's hard to sit through this. Did you come thinking this was going to have a children's program this morning?

[15:36]

Oh, I'm sorry. It's on the website? Oh, yeah? I thought that it was the first Sunday of the month. Last week was Hashim. So now... And you're sitting right in front of you, too. Are there other children? Bigger children. Mostly bigger children, yeah.

[16:41]

So do you sometimes listen to how trees think? Do you sometimes listen to how birds sing? Yeah. And here, actually, when I got... When I came from the office to here this morning, I heard the quail, California quail. And I thought, this is so wonderful to be at Green Gulch. At Tassajara, in the mountains in Tassajara, we don't have so many quail. So you're deciding you've had enough of this. Thank you for sitting so long here. So this is an opening, right?

[17:56]

For anyone else who feels There is a house. You know, there's sunshine out there. Yeah. Is there any more children hiding in the corners? There is a children's program outside the door. So this mind of just seeing what is, it's hard for us because we immediately begin thinking about what is.

[19:00]

One of my occasional teachers, Patricia Ryan Madsen, she taught at Stanford in the theater department for some years. I think she's retired right now. Maybe some of you know her. But she wrote a book, Improvisational Theater. And she says, the subtitle is, don't prepare, just show up. So usually we're going around preparing. And we have things that we think we know, that we've prepared, we've thought out, we think we know, and we approach life with that. So in her improv practice, she's been working on how to free people from from that kind of life, of thinking that you know what life is.

[20:11]

She herself came to improv theater through a devastating experience for her, where she was teaching in college and university, and she was determined to get tenure. Tenure track, as they say. She was doing everything right and being very careful to do everything right. And she was pretty confident that she was going to get tenure. And so she was making arrangements to buy a house and really settle in for the long term at this university, which is somewhere back east. And she had the meeting with the committee and then the result came back and they said tenure denied. And she was just devastated. She couldn't understand why tenure would be denied after she had done everything right. And then it occurred to her at some point, that's why.

[21:17]

She'd done everything right. She hadn't done what she really felt like doing She didn't even know what she really felt like doing. She hadn't really opened up the creative possibilities of her life. And so then she went on a kind of a pilgrimage of discovery, finding out what could life be if she didn't do everything right, if she wasn't always prepared. And so that led to a career in teaching improvisational theater. She says one of the tendencies that she notices right away, if they're in a situation of being asked to play a scene in improv, then first people come with some fear and tend to take a position then.

[22:24]

It's kind of easy, actually, to take a critical posture. Someone comes up to you and says something, then you can take a critical posture and react to it from that place. The second way is that people tend to maintain some objective distance. Something is offered and they try to see it as something neutral. But she suggests the notion of... of seeing whatever comes up as a gift. To imagine that whatever comes up as a gift. And then, of course, in improv workshops, people always try to set up situations that are unusual. You know, like, what if you walk out your door and there's a wildebeest in the garden? What do you do? She says, no one ever makes a suggestion like, what do you do if you're in an office and there's a computer?

[23:25]

So, there's this notion that, oh, it has to be something unusual to get your creative juices flowing. But she says, regard everything. Everything is a gift. So, And if you begin to do that, if you begin to take that approach, this is a rising mind. This is bringing your open mind to whatever the situation presents. At Tassahara, this past training period, we've been studying the Jewel Mir Samadhi, the Song of the Jewel Mir Samadhi, which is composed by Dongshan, in the ninth century in China.

[24:27]

Dengshan started his practice exploration or investigation quite young, as a young person. Some of you may have heard of the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra has the words, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue. And when he was a little boy, he said to his teacher, Why does the sutra say there's no eyes? I have eyes and no ears. I have ears. So he had this spirit of inquiry. He wasn't intimidated by the sutra. He was willing to investigate and question. And then he went on with various questions. When he was leaving his teacher, Yunyan, he said, So if someone later on should ask me, what is the essence of your teaching, what would you say?

[25:33]

And Yunnan said, just this. Just this. Sometimes he says, just this one. And Dongshan wasn't so sure. And then as he was walking, continuing on his travels, and he looked down into the water and he saw a reflection. He saw a reflection in the water. At that point, he had this sense of meeting and this sense of realizing that what was reflected back to him wasn't truly a gift. Not only was it a gift, it was he himself being reflected back. that there was actually no separation and that what he was perceiving was how he could know who he is. How he could know who he is, not by some conceptualization, not by thinking about it, but by the direct experience of this reflection.

[26:46]

So he wrote a poem about it, the various translations. And the poem says, if you seek understanding from another, you will be far away from your true self. I go on Alone. Meeting it everywhere. It is exactly me. I am not it. You must understand in this way. To be at home in dustness.

[27:48]

to be at home in the way things are, you must understand that it, what is reflected, is me. So this is, when we talk about feedback, understanding that we're all in some kind of an interactive system. And it's through the feedback, then, that we know, say, who we are. Now, Suzuki Roshi commented on this experience, on this poem of Dungshan at some length in one of his talks that he gave, I think I have the date. In 1971, which was his last year of teaching.

[28:51]

Is that right? Yeah. Early in the year, in January 1971. So he made a number of observations that come from this experience of Dongshan. And the first one is encouraging people to say, he says, walk on your own legs. First of all, Very important practice in Zen is to take responsibility for your own life, your own practice. Walking on your own legs. Dengshan says, I go on. Don't expect to get this information from someone else. Don't expect to get understanding from someone else. And so... Then in Suzuki Roshi's discussion of it, he wants to point out that there is some limited value in objective information.

[30:06]

That you can go on and on and on endlessly collecting information and miss your life. Just like Patricia said, was getting all the information about how to qualify for tenure and doing it correctly and missing her life. This is very important for practitioners of Dharma. Your life is not something that is laid out in advance. It's not something that has been determined in the past. although there's a lot of, say, influences that contribute to your life from all the karmic streams in the past. Still, that does not define who you are. So then, as Suzuki Roshi says, it's so important to notice how you are struck by things.

[31:18]

He gives the example of someone else who's sitting zazen and you're impressed by their posture. And you see her sitting there and you say, she's really, she's really practicing. I'm so inspired, right? He says, that moment when you're struck by her practice, that moment is completely beyond her and you. That experience of just being struck, that experience of just having that direct noticing and that direct feeling in yourself, that's beyond objective mind. And that being beyond objective mind is something we often lose because we immediately start trying to interpret it.

[32:23]

Or we might start comparing. Oh, gee, I'm not so good. She's looking so good and I'm not so good. Or maybe she's not really so good. Maybe she only looks good. The mind starts trying to compare. Trying to get a handle on it and try to say, well, where am I in relation to this? And try to define oneself in relation to that rather than appreciating, fully appreciating, just this experience of being struck. So then he says this is so important to practice with other people because this is how we know who we are. This is how Dung San knew when he saw the reflection. Suddenly he knew he's water. Even if he can't see his image in the water, He sees water. Even if you can't see something so clearly, you have some experience of maybe in the darkness, just something a little bit luminous.

[33:36]

Or in the light, just the experience of light. This is something that we, often don't notice because so quickly the mind of conceptual mind takes over. So the reason Suzuki Hiroshi was making this point was because it's so important, so important not to miss your life. It's so important that we have a practice of stopping and sitting zazen so that in this time of sitting zazen we can get a little taste just to appreciate that we don't even have to think.

[34:41]

We don't have to plan We don't have to protect ourselves. We actually can just be peaceful for a little while. And if you can do it, say, each day, sitting each day for a little while, being peaceful, not having to solve any problem, this is a beautiful experience. But then you may notice that inadvertently your mind is trying to solve some problem. You're trying to figure out, no, now that I'm sitting here, what am I doing? Or am I getting anywhere? Is this helping me? People who have been sitting for 10 years come up to me and say, I'm ashamed to say how mean-spirited I am

[35:48]

I just discovered, I just discovered that when so-and-so did that, I started having angry thoughts about them. And here I've been practicing for 10 years, so it must not be doing any good. I'm still having angry thoughts. And then I think, 10 years ago, you wouldn't have even noticed. You wouldn't even have noticed. I have that experience myself. Many, taking me many years to notice so that I'm beginning to have when angry thoughts come up. Or many years of having some tightness in my shoulder and not realizing that that's an old grudge I'm carrying.

[36:53]

And now it's beginning to soften up. And now it really bothers me because now I'm much more aware of it. So it's very interesting. This whole notion of, well, we want to get better. We want to improve ourselves. And Suzuki Roshi is saying, you don't have to do that. You don't have to improve yourself. Just sit and appreciate what is. Just see what is. That's okay. Then you may or may not do something about it. You may or may not go back and apologize to someone. Where did that come from?

[37:56]

I wasn't thinking I would talk about apology. I think it came up because this notion of wherever I go, I meet myself. And then meeting myself and then someone else reveals to me how I misunderstood that. Someone else tells me, oh, you didn't listen to me. And it's like there's this movie I'm kind of fond of called Local Hero. I don't know if anyone's seen it. How many people have seen the movie Local Hero? There's a few hands up there. There's one scene, this is set in Scotland, where this oil company... Representative goes to buy a big piece of Scotland for the oil company in Houston.

[39:01]

But they're sitting there at some point later in the movie, and there's this music going on and going on, and there's a point of tension in their negotiations. Someone says, would you turn off that music? And the other person says, what, you don't like the music? No, I don't like the music. You mean you never liked the music? No, I never liked the music. All this time, they thought they were offering them wonderful music, right? Offering this wonderful music and not knowing that the other person was annoyed by it the whole time. So sometimes our lives are like that. We go along thinking, oh, I'm offering this to you. I'm offering this to this person. I'm offering this to this person. I'm being so helpful. And then they say, why don't you just stop that? Just stop it. You didn't like the way I've been helping you?

[40:04]

This is often the case with parents and children. I myself, as a child, often did not like the way my parents were helping me. And then as a parent, I noticed that there are times that my children did not like the way I was helping them. And so it was a point of, say, bringing a rising mind to meet that. Oh, you don't like the way I'm helping you. And usually it's not expressed like that. Usually it's expressed like... Or it's not expressed. Someone just turns away. So this rising mind then has to do then with, say, how to pay close enough attention to even see what you're seeing, to not just see what you think you're seeing.

[41:22]

So when you notice then that, oh, now I see that what I thought I was seeing is not the right way, What I was seeing is not who you are, actually. Either you've changed, or I've changed, or I was mistaken all along, but now I see, and so now I have to apologize. So I apologize for not, for not seeing you. I apologize for being blind. I apologize for the ways in which I was helping you that were not helping. I apologize for the ways in which I had a smaller view of you than you really are. So this is hard to do. Hard to apologize, right?

[42:27]

It's hard to apologize because I feel then I'm being faced with my own humiliation that I've been wrong. I've been brought low. Humiliation, the word relates to humus, the earth, being brought low. And at the same time, I found that this is a wonderful liberating practice. Once you're willing to be brought low, once you're willing to be low, and you can find some composure there, find comfort there, then it's okay. You don't have to expect... anything except to be a simple potato in the ground.

[43:34]

And how marvelous that is. Just one more thought. Potatoes, how did potatoes come up? We just welcomed a group of new farm apprentices at Green Gulch this week. About 10 people who are here. for the next few months to work in the farm, the garden, and I don't know if all of them even have had the essential potato experience of putting potatoes in the ground, covering them up, and then months later, sticking a fork in the ground and turning them up and finding these wonderful treasures of nourishment, right? So being brought low, opportunity.

[44:44]

Being brought low is an opportunity. This is Patricia Ryan not getting tenure. Being brought low is a kind of an opportunity to return to the earth Returning to the earth, you find your nourishment. You find that all the beings that you don't even know about, many beings are supporting you. You're finding that your life is a gift. It's not something that you invented. It's not something that you can control. And so you have a chance to receive it. This is then part of Suzuki Roshi's commentary is to say, this is emptying your mind, giving up everything.

[45:52]

Giving up everything is a little bit like being a seed potato going into the ground. You don't know. What will emerge? You give up everything. So our practice is like that, actually, to moment by moment give up everything. Give up your idea of who you are. Give up your idea of what you're going to do next so that you can fully appreciate this moment as a gift. And as a gift, it's It's workable. A new beginning. It's workable not because of your own skill, say. But it's workable because so much is already provided.

[46:54]

There are resources that you don't even know. So we find this in the practice of zazen, sitting and stopping and noticing how we're holding on to things and then letting go of what we're holding on to, which takes great courage. It actually takes great courage to live in the unknown. So you have to meet your fear and notice, oh, okay, here's fear. Often there's fear at the end of the out-breath, sometimes through the whole breath. Breathing in, I know I exist. Breathing out, oh, that breath is going away. It's not so clear that I exist anymore.

[47:57]

I wonder at the end of the out-breath, Maybe there's a sense of disappearing. And you may notice then, oh, you think, oh, I want to take another breath. So part of this practice then is to trust that the breath will come, that you don't have to take it. Most of the time, all day long, you're not thinking about it anyway, and the breath comes, right? When you start thinking about it, you notice the way in which, oh, I'm not so sure. So it was a big, for me, as someone who's supporting other people's practice, at the last sashin, at Tassahara, last practice period, just a couple of weeks ago, someone reported

[48:59]

that they discovered their outbreath. They discovered that they could actually be present with the outbreath. Up to that point, this is someone who's been working at this for some years, right? Up to that point, always feeling that they had to kind of keep some distance from the outbreath to see that it was there. But to be willing to enter it completely means no separation, which means that you disappear into the out-breath. So for this person, that was a relief. Of course, then the danger is, and you want to hold on to that. So...

[50:02]

Tassajara is blooming now. We had the fire last summer. We had some rains, mild winter, and now we have many, many, many, many wildflowers. Whole mountains covered with color. Some people are there now for the work period, helping get Tassajara ready for the summer. And at the same time, they're still black, burned mountains. Appreciating the rhythm, it actually takes some years after a fire. So we're learning also the ecosystem that's adapted to fire, having a chance to observe that. So I encourage those of you who have a chance to sometime visit Tassajara and notice where things are still burned and black and where things are green, where things are flowering, over the next several years.

[51:25]

It's just a great opportunity to see this regeneration to see that the way trees and shrubs and seeds are thinking. Their thinking, their mind, is the way they express themselves. And then at the end of the practice period, Sonia, who is being my Jisha, Jisha-ing, reminded me of the song, Red Red Robin, which I know senior Dharma teacher, Tenshin, Reb Anderson, was fond of singing. And I never quite learned the words until yesterday.

[52:34]

So those of you who know it can sing. I think it's a good song for spring. When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbing along, along. There'll be no more sobbing when he starts throbbing his old sweet song. Wake up. Wake up, you sleepyhead. Get up, get up, get out of bed. Cheer up, cheer up, the sun is red. Live, love, laugh and be happy. What if I've been blue? Now I'm walking through fields of flowers. Rain may glisten. And still I listen for hours and hours. I'm just a kid again, doing what I did again, singing a song.

[53:43]

When the red, red robin comes, bob, bob, bobbing along. Okay, we'll do it one more time. When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bob, and along, along, there'll be no more sobbing when he starts throbbing his old sweet song. Wake up, wake up, you sleepyhead. Get up, get up, get out of bed. Cheer up, cheer up, the sun is red. Love, laugh, and be happy. What if I've been blue? Now I'm walking through fields of flowers. Rain may glisten, but still I listen for hours and hours.

[54:44]

I'm just a kid again, doing what I did again, singing this song. When the red, red ramen comes, bob, bob, bobbing along. Written by Harry Woods in 1926. Thank you for listening.

[55:07]

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