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. Good evening. And welcome to Zen Shinji, Zen Mind and Heart Temple, otherwise known as Tassahara. It was known as Tassahara first. And to the no race weekend, where everyone is a winner. And... So I want to express my gratitude to you for coming, for being here.

[01:01]

Gratitude to all of the staff taking care of Tassahara and working very hard to support this event. And to our founder, Zen Master Shinryu Suzuki. who was so enthusiastic about this place when he first visited it in 1966 that it was kind of beyond comprehension at that time that this could possibly be available and that the little Zen group up in Japantown could possibly take this on I think at that time there was a San Francisco Zen Center was about four years old and it had an annual budget of $8,000.

[02:03]

So many beings have contributed to finding this to be available to us here this weekend. And then we have the theme of bees. Bees. Bees are actually in need of our help. So we're inspired by bees and how bees work together. And we're so dependent, actually, on the way bees pollinate our many crops. We have a bee teacher at San Francisco Zen Center, Alan Hawkins, and he... spoke at Zen Center in the city a few weeks ago, and he said, bees are really in trouble, and the best thing that you can do for bees is let weeds grow.

[03:10]

So please, let weeds, whatever you think is wild, you know, wild plants. So the worst thing, worst thing for bees is monoculture, having vast fields of one crop. where it's very stressful for bees to be hauled in and then put to work in one location where things are blooming for a couple of weeks and then it's over and then they have to find and it's not a balanced diet for bees. We have beehives on the roof at San Francisco Zen Center now and they're actually doing quite well. The variety of plants in San Francisco are quite nourishing. So anyway, the salute to bees. So I was just thinking, Buddhism sprung up around a particular figure, Shakyamuni Buddha.

[04:21]

We have an image of Shakyamuni Buddha up here on the altar. And so around Shakyamuni there was a gathering. And the gathering is a Sanskrit word, sangha. Basically means gathering or assembly or a congregation. There's congregating happening around someone. And so it's like Buddha's the queen bee. That... Everything's organized. So it's kind of a mandala around the Queen Bee. A buzzing mandala. And that's somewhat similar. I was very interested in the different kinds of communities that people were mentioning in the opening circle. Some of them are communities of proximity.

[05:26]

Some of them are communities of shared interest. Some of them are communities of shared, say, value. Some of them are communities of blood relations, kinship, that were mentioned. And in this sangha, I'd say we have a community that shares many of those things. And there's maybe a fundamental... shared intention or what we sometimes call vow that is the locus for the congregating and for the buzzing communication that happens. So I'm interested in this gathering here.

[06:29]

So right now we could say we are a sangha. The word sangha in India referred first to the group of people assembled around Buddha, the Queen Bee. And then the word sangha then in different contexts maybe has a more expanded meaning. Sometimes I think of it as a system with subsets, and sometimes the system can be understood to be vast and inclusive, but otherwise there are sometimes subsets within the system of Sangha. And it became, I'd say, more broadly defined with the Mahayana, great vehicle, or Maha Sangha, great Sangha. And in China, then when Buddhism moved to China, the community would be sometimes understood to include all of life.

[07:40]

So that we have one of our teachers, one of our ancestors, Dongshan, with a particular koan asking about what's the meaning of the question about inanimate things expounding the truth expounding the teaching of the Buddha and then our Zen master Dogen in Japan who was the founder of this lineage of Zen when it came from China to Japan said that the mountains rivers the entire earth is the true human body. And also that the mountains and rivers and earth are born with each individual existence, with each separate birth. The mountains and rivers and the entire earth are born with each birth.

[08:47]

So this is an understanding of the say interconnectedness it surprises me that this was understandable to Dogen in the in the 1200s because it was only a few decades ago that we could actually see a picture of the whole earth and to actually sense a global community that we could actually picture it but this is part of the understanding of some of our ancestors for many many many hundreds of years, thousands of years, that the Sangha, the Great Assembly, is actually a boundless network, a boundless community. And what we have, community, of course, means something in common. So what do we have in common? What we have in common is our whole, our lives.

[09:53]

our sustenance, our nourishment, mutually interdependent. So this is wonderful to wake up to that. I'm reading a poem here from a Bill Stafford poem. This poem is called A ritual to read to each other. William Stafford, wonderful, very thoughtful poet, quite concerned about communication among people and understanding among people. A ritual to read to each other. If you don't know the kind of person I am, and I don't know the kind of person you are, a pattern that others made may prevail in the world, and following the wrong God home, we may miss our star.

[11:06]

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break, sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood, storming out to play through the broken dyke. And as elephants parade, holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders, the circus won't find the park. I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote, important region in all who talk. Though we could fool each other, we should consider, lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

[12:13]

For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep. The signals we give, yes or no or maybe, should be clear. The darkness around us is deep. So, appealing. Now, when I read this now, because my wife, Lane, is so involved with elephants, and I know this refers to circus elephants in a line, right? So I thought if Bill Stafford was writing this today, he'd have to maybe have a slightly different image, that elephants are moving together in a concert, you know. by kinship or affinity that elephants are moving together and if one wanders it's not that the circus gets lost but that the whole group becomes stressed and somewhat disoriented so that every member of the body that the elephants are moving together as one body that they're all tuned into each other and so

[13:40]

This is an image that I think works better now. Appealing to the very high level of organization of the wild natural world. Actually, what may sometimes include chaos, but in totality... is highly, highly organized. I'll come back to this poem in a minute, but I've just been distracted by thinking of Aldo Leopold, because we had, during Earth Week at San Francisco Zen Center, we had a film that we showed of Aldo Leopold, who, maybe everyone knows who Aldo Leopold is. How many people know who Aldo Leopold was?

[14:47]

Well, not everyone. So maybe I can just say a little bit. Aldo Leopold, I can say he was the author of a book called Sands County Almanac and other writings. He was born in Iowa, and then this was, he went to school at Yale University. He was the first class, I think it was in the late 19-teens, like 1919 or something like that, that they had, I'm not sure about the date, but about there, that Yale University had its first graduating class of foresters. So he was a forester, and the United States actually created a Forest Service about that time. He was sent out to evaluate mostly the forest commodity potential of the woods in Arizona and New Mexico.

[15:56]

And later he moved back up to... Madison, Wisconsin and then he bought a little place out in in southwestern Wisconsin, Sands County and had a little shack there that he visited regularly and made careful observations of the natural world and wrote about it but he didn't have a big audience in fact this book was published after he died first published in 1949. So the movie that we saw was called Green Fire. And the story of Green Fire is that when he was in New Mexico, he and his party of surveyors would go out riding their horses out and then and take measurements and count trees and so forth, map things, evaluate this whole forest potential.

[17:07]

They were primarily involved in looking at what could be, say, the value of the lumber and what could be the recreational value of a national park or woods. They were having their lunch. So he and his group, his crew, were having their lunch up on a ridge. And they saw, looked down, and there was this river below. And they saw some animal, which they thought was, first they thought it was a deer, a doe, kind of coming across through the current of the river. And then as the animal came out, they shook off the water. They could see that it was a wolf. So they immediately got their rifles out. So when the wolf came out of the water, then a whole kind of young pack of wolves came out to meet this wolf. And so there was a group of wolves, and the trigger-happy foresters got out their rifles and started blasting away.

[18:23]

And the wolves were scattering, it turned out to be the mother wolf, was down. And so then when they ran out of lead, they went down the slope. And now the Leopold went to the wolf, and he was struck by the eyes of this dying wolf. which he later described as embers of green fire that were fading. And as he saw this dying wolf, he had a strange feeling that somehow this was wrong, that what they had just done in shooting the wolves, which was the common theme at the time, the idea, and he writes about this in an essay called Thinking Like a Mountain.

[19:28]

So in the essay, Thinking Like a Mountain, he says, at the moment I saw that the green fire and the wolf's eyes dying, I felt that the mountain did not agree with what we had done. And then later in his observation, he sees that the assumption that they made, basically they were hunters and they thought... The more that the wolves were gone, the more that they killed the wolves, that would mean that there would be more deer for the hunters. And so that kind of simple calculation was the common thinking at the time. And so it would be very strange for anyone to pass up an opportunity to shoot a wolf. But then he observed after they had gone about cleaning out the wolves as much as they could in this mountain range, he observed that over the next few years the deer population increased and that the trees started suffering.

[20:44]

That the seedling trees were being killed by the deer and then the deer were browsing more and more higher up the branches of the trees. And then in another couple of years, the deer started dying because some of them were starving or they were getting disease. And he began to understand that the action of taking out one part of the whole equation was a big mistake. They hadn't understood. And so through the course of his life, he began to understand more and more how we are all interrelated. So when I'm thinking about the theme of community, I'm thinking about how we are all interrelated. And part of being awake, which is what Bill Stafford's talking about here, is to acknowledge the fact. Go back to that here.

[21:50]

I call it cruel. Cruel. and maybe the root of all cruelty, to know what occurs, but not recognize the fact. So sometimes we, in this case, when did Aldo Leopold know what occurred? When he saw the green fire in the wolf's eyes, he knew something. But it was hard for him to actually understand what he knew. It was hard for him to hear... the voice of his own body, which was, maybe we could say, that Dogen would say, that this was actually the body of the mountain. The body of the mountain in his own body. But that didn't resound in his mind as a voice. It resounded in his body as a subtle feeling. So it actually took him years, it took Aldo Leopold years of coming back to this before he had more of a complete understanding of what that meant.

[22:59]

And so the writings over his lifetime show a gradual, evolving understanding of what he then called the land ethic. And the land ethic is... Understanding that we as human beings are participants in a whole community of being. And that if we take some kind of severe action on any part of it, we should be very careful to attend to the consequences of what we are doing because we don't necessarily see it right away. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote, important region in all who talk. So something shadowy. So I'm thinking with Aldo Leopold, this was something that was kind of shadowy, but he did not ignore it.

[24:07]

He actually attended to that. So part of what we're doing here at Tassajara, and I think we could say that our vow... that we share is the vow to be awake. That this is what Buddha, and the word Buddha actually means, is to be awake. And so if we, you may not like to use the word Buddha, sometimes it's kind of, even in Zen sometimes we say, well, don't get caught up in the word Buddha. If you, you know, there's a Zen story. If you meet the Buddha on the road, what do you do? Oh, kill the Buddha. So this is not to have a particular, say, frozen, objectified view of something, but to actually be awake within your own self and your own consciousness. So perhaps we could be a community of those who are awake, right?

[25:16]

a community of those who value being awake and make that a kind of, that becomes our vow. And so we have this kind of community, which then I think relates to what Bill Stafford is calling for, saying, though we could fool each other, we should consider lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep. So, awake people, how can awake people be awake? It's important, he says, important for awake people to be awake. So in our lineage of teaching, Dogen is saying, Zen Master Dogen, in the 1200s, is reminding us that being awake is not just something that you do once.

[26:31]

Being awake is the practice of everyday activity. Whether you're sitting or you're working, or you're in conversation, or you're listening. Throughout the day, this is the practice of actually being awake. So people who have this vow or this intention are called, say, to actually manifest it and realize it again and again, moment, moment, moment, moment. The signals we give, yes or no or maybe should be clear. The darkness around us is deep. Maybe so. Maybe the darkness around us is deep. Maybe we live in a world with a lot of confusion. And so the least we can do is to support being awake and give clear signals to each other.

[27:43]

So whenever I read this Bill Stafford poem, I'm reminded of the importance of this kind of the service of this community that's actually offering a service to the whole mandala, the whole global community. that it's calling a high level of responsibility. So bodhis, we call it the bodhisattva vow. Bodhisattva beings. Bodhi means enlightenment or awake. Enlightening beings remembering that that's actually what we are. And we don't feel so good if we're not true to that.

[28:47]

Let's see. I know that part of being awake is getting a good night's rest. And one of the... Well, I had a few other things here that came up with this. I thought if I sing the same song that I sang the last time I was here, that would be boring. But, of course, many of the people here are not. And then many of the people who were here the last time were probably asleep and wouldn't remember anyway. so I'm tempted to do that. Maybe I have time to do both.

[29:54]

I wanted to read a Joanna Macy prayer. So I'll do that, and then maybe I'll... So this will be going into Joanna Macy, and then maybe we'll do the Pete Seeger song. But anyway, this is... You know, this moment that Dogen's talking about, in which the mountains and the rivers and the earth are born, this... has its own complete past and future. That it includes 360 degrees in all directions and it includes the entire past and the entire future. Past has all the action and karma of the past and future has all the potentiality of everything that's already brought to bear at this particular moment. So for us to be awake means to take in that and to know that the actions that we take now are the actions that contribute to the future as it unfolds.

[31:05]

Joanna Macy wrote this prayer for future beings. If we take good care of now, then... eventually we become indigenous. That's what I say. That's not what she says here. Here's Joanna Macy's prayer. You live inside us, beings of the future. In the spiral ribbons of ourselves, you are here. In our rage for the burning forests, the poison fields, the oil-drowned seals, you are here. You beat in our hearts through late night meetings. You accompany us to clear cuts and toxic dumps in the halls of lawmakers. It is you who drive our dogged labors to save what is left. O you who will walk the earth when we are gone, stir us awake.

[32:07]

Behold through our eyes the beauty of this world. Let us feel your breath in our lungs, your cry in our throat. Let us see you in the poor, the homeless, the sick. Haunt us with your hunger. Hound us with your claims that we may honor the life that links us. You have as yet no faces we can see, no names we can say, but we need only to hold you in our mind and you teach us patience. You attune us to measures of time where healing can happen, where soil and souls can mend. You reveal courage within us we had not suspected, love we had not owned. O you who come after, help us remember we are your ancestors. Fill us with gladness for the work that must be done.

[33:13]

Oh, you who come after, help us remember we are your ancestors. Fill us with gladness for the work that must be done. Yeah, still time, still a minute. So it's a Pete Seeger song that sometimes is associated with... a person dying, called For My Old Brown Earth. But there's a line in it that says something about a human chain, which I'm translating as wild terrain. And see if I can remember it. And if you know it, you can join in, and I'll do it twice, and you can join in the second time if you don't know it the first time. For my old brown earth and for my old blue sky, I now give these last few molecules of I. And you who sing and you who stand nearby, I do charge you not to cry.

[34:46]

Guard well this wild terrain. Watch well you keep it strong as long as sun does shine. And this our home, keep pure and sweet and green, for I am yours and you are also mine. That's it, so you can join in, right? For my old brown earth and for my old blue sky, I now give these last few molecules of eye. And you who sing and you who stand nearby, I do charge you not to cry.

[35:46]

Guard well this wild terrain. Watch well you keep it strong as long as sun does shine. And this our home, keep pure and sweet and green, for I am yours and you are also mine. So that can also be your lullaby tonight, right? I am yours and you are also mine. So thank you for listening and sleep well. We have a big race tomorrow. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge and this is made possible by the donations we receive.

[36:49]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[36:59]

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