This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome to Green Gulch. He or she isn't asleep, is he? No, good. Tiny, tiny baby. How old is the baby? Five months. Five months. First time? Beautiful. So one of our root teachers here, does this sound okay? in the 13th century, Dogen, who's one of the great Zen teachers of all time, traveled from Japan to China in search of finding a true teacher, in search of wanting to answer his deep

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questions about practice and somehow he kept wandering around and meeting head cooks or Tenzo's. He was very impressed with people who did the day-to-day work in the monastery. And there was one dialogue in which he asked Tenzo, what is Zen? What is Zen? I think it's like asking, what does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to be a full human being? And this particular head cook responded, nothing in the universe is hidden. Nothing in the universe is hidden. And I think that's a really important topic right now, especially you might have noticed this is a hard time to be a human being. I think harder than many other times, maybe not as hard as some others, but it's really hard.

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I've always liked this little tale that I'm sure some of you know. It's about the three bricklayers. So someone goes up and someone sees three bricklayers and they ask the first one, what are you doing? And the first bricklayer says, I'm laying bricks. I'm putting down bricks. And he goes up to the second bricklayer and says, what are you doing? And the second bricklayer says, I'm supporting my family. I'm doing this work to support my family. And the third goes up to the third bricklayer and asks, what are you doing? And the third bricklayer says, I'm engaging in a conversation with God. because we're building a church. And I think this is one of the great challenges and opportunities, even of these really, really difficult times.

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How to, in a way, these three bricklayers represent maybe three activities that we're, well, I think we're often, I think in our culture and in our world, we seem to spend most of our time as the second bricklayer. We do something for some purpose, right? For some purpose. To get something done, to achieve something, to make money, fame, all those things. And there's many kind of, I think, wholesome and unwholesome things in that second bricklayer. The first bricklayer to me is really interesting in that To me, it aligns a lot with Zen practice. It's paying attention to what we're doing. Actually, it's like being in the moment, noticing that we're laying the bricks. Or if we're in the kitchen, noticing that we're cutting the carrots. Or when we're in here, noticing what are you each bringing.

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I think an interesting question is I often... I was talking to someone outside right before I came in, and she was saying how much she doesn't like doing talks. And I said, I don't like doing talks either. This isn't a talk. It's a workshop. See, someone's calling me right now. I can hear it. Yeah. So it's interesting, you know, because I believe I'm having... I feel really lucky I get to have a dialogue with every one of you. And in the realm of these bricklayers, I would ask, I often like to start my workshops with what brings you here and what really brings you here, which I think are really good questions. So you might ask yourself, why are you here? And then, why are you really here?

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And perhaps some of that answer might be having to do with the third bricklayer, that I think we come here to have a conversation with God, or if God's word doesn't work, with Buddha, right? We have Buddhas everywhere. With Buddha, or with nature, or with the sacred, perhaps we come here to see more clearly, to see more clearly. And there's a beautiful passage, again, from this Dogen fellow. And this is something he wrote. Again, this was 13th century. And he says... When the Dharma has not yet fully penetrated body and mind, one thinks one is already filled with it.

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So maybe it's interesting. When we think there's nothing more to learn, one thinks there's nothing more to learn. When the Dharma fills body and mind, if we think something is lacking, Let me try this again. When the Dharma has not yet fully penetrated body and mind, one thinks one is already filled. When the Dharma does fill body and mind, one thinks something is lacking. So when we're not connected to God, we think there's nothing more to learn. When we're filled with the sacred, when we're filled with this sense, something bigger than us, we feel there's something lacking. So it's interesting, the positive spin on something lacking. For example, when we sail a boat into the ocean beyond sight of land, our eyes can see in the four directions.

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It looks like a circle. No other shape appears, right? So a great image, right? Out in a boat, out in the ocean, you look around. It looks like a circle. He says this great ocean, however, is neither round nor square. It is inexhaustible to a fish. It looks like a palace to a heavenly being. It looks like a jeweled necklace to us. As far as our eyes can see, it looks like a circle. Everything is like this. Everything is like this. Within the dusty world and beyond, there are innumerable aspects and characteristics. We only see or grasp as far as the power of our eye and the study of study and practice that we can see. This is true not only in the external world, but also right under our feet within a single drop of water.

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So it's interesting. It's easy to get caught by the events of the day. And in some way, I think it's important to let ourselves feel, to feel fully, to feel the pain and suffering of the world. To me, this is one of the great questions of our time and one of the great gifts of Zen practice is asking the question, how can I feel deeply, how can I feel deeply and keep my heart open? Which is a lot like Dogen's, the answer that this head cook gave about nothing hidden, nothing hidden.

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So how do we practice that? How do we practice that? In a way, to me, this is, why do we meditate? Why do we practice? Why do we come to places like this? I love this Sudogan's expression. We only see or grasp as far as the power of our eye of study and practice can see. So my great aspiration is how can I see more deeply? How can I see and feel more deeply? How can I allow the pains and cries and suffering of this world but not be completely torn under by it? I really appreciate Thich Nhat Hanh's voice these days more and more. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen teacher who died almost exactly three years ago.

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He lived during what we call the Vietnam War, which in Vietnam they called the United States War. And he talks about, he once overheard a group of American soldiers discussing why they had to kill all of the men, women, and children in a village in order to protect the U.S. soldiers. And he was so deeply, deeply, deeply disturbed by hearing this. So is he, very disturbed by hearing this. He wrote a poem called, the poem is called For Warmth, and he says, I hold my face in my two hands.

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No, I'm not crying. I hold my face in my two hands to keep the loneliness warm. Two hands protecting, two hands nourishing, two hands preventing my soul from leaving in anger. I hold my face in my two hands. No, I'm not crying. I hold my face in my two hands to keep the loneliness warm. Two hands protecting, two hands nourishing, two hands preventing my soul from leaving me in anger. Maybe on a less dramatic story about this conversation, question of nothing hidden. I was thinking of a time when I was asked to facilitate part of a three-day retreat.

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There was a three-day retreat of CEOs who were all on the board of a nonprofit. And they were here at Green Gulch for three days of a strategy meeting about this nonprofit that they were on. I was asked to facilitate a short session in the middle of this three-day retreat. And I distinctly remember, as I was walking into the room, it was over in the Wheelwright Center, someone came out and met me and said, Mark, welcome. This retreat is not going well. We just fired the last facilitator, welcome. And I walked in, and I could feel the tension. And I was thinking, well, what am I going to do? What am I going to do? So, of course, I did. One of the things that I do a lot, I said, let's sit, some meditation.

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And right away, especially there were the women in the room leapt to the front. Some of the men were sitting in the back, like, we've got work to do. Why are we meditating? But we sat for a few minutes. And then I broke them into groups. My son is always teasing me, says what I do for a living is I get people talking to each other in groups, which is true, and I'm proud of it. That's what I do for a living these days. I got people into groups, and I had three questions that I suggested each person ask. One, why am I here on this planet? Two, how's it going? And three, what actions, changes might I make in response to how I answered the first two questions?

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You never know how people will respond, but it turned out they really were ripe to talk about these issues. Again, a kind of nothing hidden, letting, you know, opening. I went around and I noticed there was a fair amount of crying happening in these groups. And then we came back and it felt completely different. And someone raised their hand and said, this is where we should have started. We tried to go right to... We tried to go right to getting stuff done, and we didn't connect. There wasn't a heart connection. I later learned that the rest of the meeting went really well. I also heard there was one of these guys was a CEO of a finance company who had said he didn't really want me to come when they were deciding who was going to come.

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because what I do is way too woo-woo. And he then reported that if what we did there was woo-woo, we need more of that. I don't know of any other way that we're going to change things other than more sacred connection, more connection with God, more this nothing hidden. Last Saturday, I flew to New Jersey to teach a class at the Rutgers Business School. It was the first time. It's interesting. Rutgers Business School, very successful. particularly in corporate accounting and operations management.

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But they had never done a mindful leadership program. And they were very excited about it. I was excited about it. But when I arrived, I walked into the campus, and the first thing I saw was a picture of Martin Luther King and a picture that was... taken during the depression of kind of people suffering. And underneath it said, the suffering that has been caused in our world by poor macroeconomic policy. And it's true. I mean, this is what I'd really like to talk about, but I'm not going to today. This is another lecture. But I think so much of our suffering is bad policy, bad decisions that have been made.

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If you haven't read the book These Truths by Jill Lepore, it is a fantastic read. I'm literally reading it for the fifth time. And it's a book about, it's the 500-year history of the United States and the line from Columbus to Trump. And it's just staggering. I also highly recommend a book called Winners Take All, also a book about macroeconomic policy. But back to our program about God. It's because God has been left out of creating policy, amazingly enough, somehow that the policies have been geared toward not toward taking care of people.

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There's been other concerns. And I'm very fond of saying that greed, greed, greed, Greed, hate, and delusion have been popular for thousands of years. Starting even from the time, you know, Buddhism and Zen, you could say they were developed and they're here to help us transform our greed, our fight or flight, the way that we tend to scan for threats. We've evolved to scan for threats. And that Buddhism opens up the sacred side and strategies and practices for finding a way to transform pain, suffering, difficulty, anxiety into possibility. This is, I think, the practice of meditation, and it's the practice of bringing meditation into our lives.

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day-to-day lives. Again, the third brick layer, connecting with something larger than ourselves. Or Dogen's image of seeing how, seeing that, it starts, I think, with seeing how our vision is limited, right? Our vision is limited. The ocean looks round. We think, you know, we think that we have a stable self or that things aren't, we don't account for change. We think we can predict the future. And, you know, I love in one of Shunru Suzuki's talks, he says, strictly speaking, the person that I am now is not the same person I am now, right? That we are... And what a relief, right?

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What a relief. And yet, things look, time and space appear, like the ocean, time and space appear, round or predictable or solid. I want to talk briefly about two of my favorite acronyms. I'm usually not an acronym guy. But there's these two that I think are really good to practice with in terms of the practice of nothing hidden. One I call the acronym of suffering, and the other is the acronym of awakening or hanging out more with God. Let's see, which one should we start with? Let's start with the one of suffering. This acronym is SCARF, S-C-A-R-F, and it stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.

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And we all want status. But if you're caught by status, you will suffer. We're seeing a lot of suffering right now with a lot of people being caught by status. Wanting to be better. Comparing mind, wanting to be better. It causes a lot of suffering. I think we're getting a... workshop in the problem of status. The C is for certainty, right? We all want certainty, but if you are caught by certainty, we will suffer. The A is autonomy. We all want autonomy, but we are so interconnected. We are so interconnected that it's recognizing autonomy. The R is relatedness. It's like being caught by our relationships, being overly dependent, kind of grasping at relationships.

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And the F is for fairness, wanting things to be fair. And interesting study was done about these five abilities that when we When we feel a loss of status or certainty or fairness, it lights up in the same part of the brain as pain. And when we feel a sense of status or certainty, it lights up in the brain as pleasure. So I think part of this practice, this nothing in the universe is hidden, is becoming more and more familiar with these. They're all okay. It's okay to want some status, to want some certainty, but to not be too caught by it.

[25:37]

To not be caught by it, but to be really curious about it. So the antidote, or an interesting antidote to these, is another acronym which is the acronym STR, S-T-E-R, which stands for selflessness, timelessness, effortlessness, and richness, right? Selflessness, right? So this is core Buddhist Zen practice is becoming familiar, not skipping over self, becoming more and more familiar with self. And in some way, this other acronym, SCARF, is a really good way to become familiar with self, is to really be curious about, you know, status. I mean, I used to, when I was running my last company, it used to really bother me that people cared so much about titles. And I realized, I don't care, as long as I'm the CEO, I'm fine.

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And it's like, oh, status, yeah, yeah, I do care about status. Certainty, yeah, I want, I'd have my predictions about, I want, you know, we all want, so I'd be fooling myself. So it's an interesting practice to attempt to not fool oneself and to see how we do it again, again, and again, right? But... one of my favorite book titles, right? I Heard God Laughing. God is always laughing. It's like being able to laugh, to cry and laugh, to cry and laugh. And Thich Nhat Hanh's writing and poetry is so much about crying and laughing. But selflessness and timelessness, right? Realizing that the way that we look at time is mostly made up. It's convenient. We need time, but it's it's just like looking at thinking the ocean is round, thinking that past, present, and future, that we're so caught by it.

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So in some way, meditation practice is a chance to step out of time, just for some time every day, let it go, and then bringing that into our day-to-day lives. Effortlessness is a really interesting one. I'm often laughing at myself for Noticing extra effort and seeing if you can, trying on, what if it were easy? What if it were easy? What if it were even a little bit easier? The last one of the R, richness, richness. Richness is, I think, a lot like a beginner's mind. Seeing a great experiment is, you know, when you leave here, when you go outside, try seeing everything as though you're seeing it for the first time. And the good thing about that is you are seeing it.

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You don't have to make it up. We are changing, and everything is changing. So this practice of richness, I think, is a tremendously beautiful practice. I think I've already broken my 20-minute rule. No one should talk for more than 20 minutes. But I think I want to just... I'm trying to decide. There's two poems. Maybe I'll do both of them, but really briefly. One is a beautiful, profound poem... by Thich Nhat Hanh. Some of you may know. Please call me by my true names. And I'll just read a little bit of it. He says, Don't say that I will depart tomorrow.

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Even today I am still arriving. Look deeply. Every second I'm arriving. To be a bud on a spring branch. To be a tiny bird with still fragile wings. learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I still arrive in order to laugh and to cry, to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that is alive." And then he goes into a whole number of And just one is, I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo and sticks, and I am the arms merchant, still selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

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So this ability, to me, this is a godlike, that we have these amazing imaginations, that we can imagine what it's like to be in another person's shoes. And this is one of the definitions of compassion. And God or Buddha or emptiness as a force of compassion, of feeling others' feelings, cultivating understanding and this aspiration to help. And Thich Nhat Hanh talks about these, you know, the miracle, the miracles of mindfulness, the miracle of... feeling another person, cultivating our understanding, wanting to help more. So in this poem, he says, my joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom all over earth. My pain is like a river of tears, so vast it fills the four oceans.

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Please call me by my true names so I can hear all my cries and laughter at once. so I can see that my joy and pain are one. So, how do we practice this stuff? How do we practice? This is the great question. I think, you know, I suggest keep staying with the three bricklayers, especially the first and the third one, but they're all good, right? Paying attention. Noticing why are we here? What is our motivation? And this hanging out with God or emptiness or the sacred. And I have in my, I really, I highly recommend poetry and I've been trying to memorize poetry of late.

[33:04]

See if I can remember this poem. This is a part of a Mary Oliver poem where she says, this is what we were born for. This is what we were born for. To look, to listen, to lose ourselves inside this soft world. And then the end of, this is a poem called Mindful by Mary Oliver. And she ends it with, oh good scholar, I say to myself, How could I not grow wise with teachings such as these? The untrimmable light of the world, the ocean's sheen, and prayers made of grasses. Prayers made of grasses. So seeing God everywhere. Seeing God or seeing the sacred everywhere. This not avoiding pain, not avoiding laughter.

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Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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