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. We're a wild band, aren't we? This is one of my favorite energies is before Dharma talk. Everyone's facing the center of the room. Can you all hear me? This is my favorite part of the Dharma talk. was thinking I was trying to think why it's my favorite part of the Dharma talk and I think it reminds me of my first encounter with Zazen which was there is a lot of expectant energy so for a long time when I first started meditating it had this very mysterious rich quality I was so interested in what was going to happen and all the things that were happening and

[01:30]

So this is my first Dharma talk on Sunday. So I'm honored to be here with all of you. And I'm tempted to just stretch out this expectation a little bit. Partly because I don't know what I'm going to say. So I figure if we're all in the same boat together, then... we can be enlightened together. I'm totally supported by my teachers all around me here. So I feel very blessed. And I also feel very blessed to be with all of you. The other half of that feeling of expectation is I wonder if we realize that we're doing it together I think that's been kind of on my mind a lot lately with the news, the troubling news coming in on the radio.

[02:42]

That we're doing this together seems like a really important Dharma insight. The pain and the suffering the joys and the sorrows, the inevitable partings, the saying goodbyes, which we ritualize here at Zen Center, but all of us have our own rituals for parting and coping with grief. There's something about the bodhisattva path, of Mahayana Buddhism, as it's called, that I find directly remedies this feeling of going it alone and having to make our own rituals and deal with difficulties on our own.

[03:53]

And it's my favorite thing about Buddhism. It's called bodhicitta. It's the mind that wishes everyone to be free from suffering. It's the preposterous, wondrous ideal of a practice life. And not to get too interfaith, but I think it's actually the part of all human culture that gets expressed. in different ways. But I think I'm really interested in how we express it kind of right here now in this sort of gathering. I think we have a culture that tends to focus us on Jizo or Kayum or, you know, the Super Bowl.

[04:58]

But But in all of us looking that way, I think sometimes we forget our periphery. We forget that all of the beings around us, my beautiful mentors to my left and right and my mirrors out in front, I think sometimes it's worth reminding ourselves that the world needs us to have peripheral vision, if that's not too corny. So my understanding of Zen, kind of a unique insight of Zen, is that this potential for awakening to peripheral vision that's kind of like an illuminated soft heart is not a special activity. I think that's why we sit with our eyes open. That's why we are like well-dressed lemmings.

[06:00]

In Soto Zen, we move around as a body, merging like milk and water, is the old phrase, I think. It reminds us that we're in it together. I think that's really a wonderful thing to remember. And I guess that's a theme that I've been thinking about, is how, like refugees, we all are. The world is full of refugees, and the news on that blasted radio is not good. Climate change is going to do a lot more destabilizing income inequality. is doing a lot more destabilizing.

[07:02]

So I think our refugee status will not be a specialized thing. I think we will need to really have a wide 360, 10 directions, three times, past, present, and future embrace of other beings in the times to come. And I would say the time that has come. Like, now is the time we've been dreaming about. I wrote a poem at the end of this summer for my farm crew that I was so moved by. And in typical Qayyum fashion, the emotional wave broke. maybe three weeks before they left, after six months of working with me, you know, the full kind of appreciation of who these individuals were, the unique kind of farm body that we had created down on the farm over the beautiful droughty summer.

[08:13]

And what are we doing down on the farm? I think that's what the invitation was to talk about today. What is... the Buddha mind seal as represented in the farm, on the farm work, in the dirt. So I wrote this poem. The Dharma is none other than change. Transformation and interdependence is the way things are. It is who we are. Vibrant responses. Organic dance with the arising and falling away of the world in which we find ourselves astonished moment by moment. These are times of great change. We are beings of change. We are not solid. Each thing happens only once. We are process. it's not all bad news when you get the newspaper I brought a little something I don't know if you got this but uh war is over if you want it happy holidays from John and Yoko I think they released that Christmas song in 1971 I was born in 1974 so uh

[09:57]

I guess for all that intervening time, every Christmas for a bunch of days, they remind us of the potential for a different world. So I thought that was great. I grew up in a Sufi family. So I wanted to say, Salaam Alaikum. Alaikum Salaam is the response. It's an Arabic greeting. It's a blessing that you say when you greet and when you leave company. It means, may peace be upon you. And you say, may peace be upon you too. So you're all most welcome here in this valley, this zen estate.

[11:02]

I'm so glad you've come. I also want to say, bienvenidos a ustedes. I feel like we need to call out in the languages the different dialects of love. Of course, I was hoping to be a bit provocative, but this is Northern California, so I probably failed at that. You all probably are Urdu speakers and grew up in Persia, as I know some of you did. Nonetheless, in these crazy days, I thought it was worth going out on a limb with you. It also serves to remind me of my complete reliance on other beings.

[12:06]

I think this is part of my peripheral vision in the practice of Buddhism and maybe any wisdom tradition is it's all about relationships. It's a process and it's relationships and we are not alone. We're not doing it alone and it behooves us, it behooves me to remember this again and again that I think that's what zazen serves a function for me in my life, to sit still and remember that I'm not alone in the world. I'm wholly supported by the human, by the animal, by the mineral, by the seen and the unseen. And every other element of the universe is as precious and profound and cherished as I hold the ones that I know to be, those that I know in my life to be. I love Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

[13:07]

He was a friend of the founder of Zen Center, Suzuki Roshi, as you probably know, crazy wisdom teacher in the Tibetan tradition. He always used to begin his talks, whatever the time of day, by saying, good morning. And I think it stuck because I heard him say it one time in a video. And he had already crashed his car into the joke shop in England and been paralyzed. And he had already disrobed. And so he was wearing a very fine suit. You could see he was limping. And he had a Japanese fan that he was swishing back and forth. And he said, Bodhisattvas always say good morning. And I think it's because he had, well, he had a lot of things, but he knew that the sun rose in the east, and so the east is where things are always new, so by invoking that fresh dawn light, he was basically making the bodhisattva vow.

[14:17]

He was saying the bodhisattva welcomes every new, new, new thing Every moment is new, and the bodhisattva is always up for it. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. In Buddhism, there's this idea of skillful means, a rupaya, and it's our idealistic aspiration to free all beings so they may dwell in peace. And it's about embodying an appropriate response to circumstances so that you can be most helpful. so that when you see someone in your periphery, any being, you can go to it and have an appropriate response. Good morning. I don't know if you've read this wonderful book, and if you haven't, I would recommend you do. It's called The Ohlone Way by Malcolm Margolin.

[15:22]

Has anyone read this book? Yes. Yes. I think there should be a run on this book in the Bay Area. It is beautiful. It's 30 years old or so now, 35, 36 years old. It was one of the first books published about indigenous lifeways in California, Indians of the Bay Area, from the San Francisco Bay down to Monterey Bay. And boy, is it... another world. It's unbelievably powerful. These people migrated in from the cosmos over many centuries and settled all over California. And from the archaeological record, it's guessed, it's assumed, based on very little technological change, that these cultures

[16:26]

were essentially the same with minor operating system updates for 5,000 years. And they were peaceful. They were myriads of tribes, myriads of dialects. It was like Mexico, like hundreds of dialects in California. And why am I telling you this? Because they lived here at Green Gulch. So we are on Coast Miwok land. So again, immigrants. And the Miwok apparently built their temporary structures on a frame of willow. The willow that I notice has got the most exquisite catkins growing on it. If you've been along the riparian area or down to the beach, there are some amazingly beautiful buds happening on the trees. a frame of willow, they got these tule reeds and they made these structures and they oriented their structures so the opening was facing the east and in the morning the sun would rise from the east and it would come in through the door and it would hit the fireplace and there would be a communion of sisters and people wouldn't dare

[17:56]

to pass through the beam of light of these two fiery feminine energies meeting every morning. Isn't that wonderful? I thought so. They also had shell mounds There was all sorts of life in the sea that they lived on for these thousands of years. And they would gather it. They would have ceremonial places. They would gather it in one spot, the empty shells. Giant mounds would form. And those became these power spots. And they would bury objects and their relatives in them. And they were all over the Bay Area. There were some, I think, down here in the big lagoon. Thus have I heard.

[18:57]

But there was a big run over in the East Bay, and I attended a wonderful ceremony there that was reminding shoppers who go to the mall on Black Friday, the best time to shop after Thanksgiving, apparently, that there was a shell mound there, a giant shell mound, and that it was a sacred site to many, many people for a long, long time. So it was bulldozed and now there's brand name items for sale there. And there's also a strange little park where they use strange passive language to talk about how these people no longer live there. Anyway, we're all immigrants, I think is my theme. We're just passing through, carrying around our diverse identities and retelling particular stories about ourselves.

[20:02]

I'm happy to be seated in front of Jizo Bodhisattva, who is quite tall, quite a remarkable being. He's one of the four main bodhisattvas that came from India along the trade routes, encountered different cultures, did a little gender bending along the way. Samantabhadra, Avalokiteshvara, Manjushri. Jizo is in Sanskrit called Kishitigarbha, which means earth womb, which appeals to me as a farmer. The idea of a bodhisattva who's got a womb full of earth. The mission of Jizo Bodhisattva is to work tirelessly to empty... all hells, and they won't stop.

[21:11]

They won't relax into enlightenment until all the beings suffering from hellish conditions have been relieved. Isn't that something? I had this experience of being in hell recently that maybe some of you have experienced.

[22:14]

I have a very developed inner critic and the critic is extremely smart. Maybe smarter than I am because When this critic gets going, it's hard to remember that I'm not alone. I'm not sure what to say about that. I think I don't want any of your inner critics to get the better of you. And if that does happen, I would really like to help you out. Some of the critics, especially juicy lines, were, you're not good enough. You've made such huge mistakes in your life that you're never going to be able to make them right.

[23:18]

You've actually been wasting your whole life. You're a fraud. You're a coward. You should probably not be giving the Dharma talk on Sunday. That was a zinger last night, because I did have to give the Dharma talk today. I called Reb this morning. Reb talked me down. He suggested I call Fu. I called Fu. She laughed me down. I'm glad you all came and you haven't left yet. I think the hardest part of our lives, of course, you know this, is that we don't want some of the things that are happening to us to happen.

[24:26]

And maybe the second, well, I guess they probably toggle back and forth, but the other most difficult part of our life is that things we really don't want to end just keep ending. They keep going away. Or they do like those comets do and they kind of come close for a long, long time and then... So in the Jewel Mirror Samadhi that we chant in the Zen Do during morning service every week, part of it says, turning away and touching are both wrong, for it is like a massive fire. Just to depict it in literary terms is to stain it with defilement. It is bright just at midnight. It doesn't appear at dawn. It acts as a guide for beings. Its use removes all pains. What is this?

[25:31]

What is the jewel mirror samadhi? How do we use it? Can we use it? this thing to remove all of our pains, what would that look like? What would we need to do? What conditions would we need? What aspiration vow would we need to take? What notes, like I have all over my house, would we need to put up to remind ourselves? My late teacher, Abbot Milgen, Steve Stuckey, some of you might know, his two-year death anniversary was the end of December. He wrote two lines on my rakasu, which is a lay robe.

[26:38]

We did a beautiful ceremony in this zendo, and he offered me the precepts of a Bodhisattva in this lineage. And one of them that he wrote were words from the Genjo Koan written by Dogen, the 13th century founder of Soto Zen, a Japanese ancestor. It says, when you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. So, our awareness is never apart from where we are, right? Our life is never actually anywhere but in that moment.

[27:44]

I think we have a grandiosity about the human mind and the human life, because we have a quick mind. We can move around lots of things. It seems like we can multitask. I think there's those studies that say that many people think they can multitask. And no one can really multitask, right? There's a study. Buddha Dharma Sangha, I think, has brought you here today. Buddha, in this case, I would argue, is your own innate knowing, your own awareness that you're never apart from. You've come to a beautiful, sacred hay barn in a really, really, really beautiful valley.

[28:47]

on an exquisite day. You could say that's the Dharma. And the Sangha are those warm bodies right next to you, as well as all of the sentient and insentient beings that are constantly colluding on our existence. So, I really appreciate Steve for putting that on my rakasu and reminding me of that every time I put it on. When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. I think the fundamental point is that practice is occurring when we kind of wake up from the dream and come back, come back again and again. He also wrote another line that says, A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies, there is no end to the air. My Dharma name is a blue phoenix.

[29:52]

I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, so it's kind of a funny blue phoenix, a cord bow. So a bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies, there is no end to the air. So these are Buddhist... Imagery. This is Buddhist imagery talking about our life, talking about waking up, talking about sadness. This wisdom glimpse of actualizing this basic truth of our dependent co-arising in the universe is the same disarming gesture of welcoming that I think a bodhisattva is always enacting. You find your place where you are, this wisdom glimpse, this glimpse of insight. It doesn't come about through habitual thinking. I think that's what all these paths are about.

[30:56]

That's what making regular appointments with yourself is about. It's not a habitual thinking. You're making space to open up so that the unexpected can arise. You can be astonished. by how rich the world is. And as far as other people go, my favorite line about relationships is by Allen Ginsberg and it's, candor ends paranoia. Isn't that beautiful? How many people I feel paranoid sometimes. Anyone feel paranoid? Just kind of an existential paranoia, like, what is going on here? I think the practice of silent sitting, meditation practice, is an opportunity to cultivate candor with ourself.

[32:06]

We don't turn away from the parts we usually would turn away from. We turn toward them, relax with them, let them be, no problem. Big problem, that's okay too. Let them be. Even paranoia can be really frankly welcomed. Like, yeah, I'm totally paranoid. How are you doing up there? heard it said that Buddhism is a tradition that thinks about death a lot. It's more death oriented than life oriented. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I am always inspired to I think it's part of our practice to dedicate

[33:22]

to dedicate things and our aspiration vows, we really try and cast a wide net. And I think that does include a lot of dead people. A lot of people who are really close to us and had a lot of meaning shaped us in a significant way. And perhaps the teaching of impermanence, the recognition that actually the passing away is constant, that we are passing away. So maybe we are a little death-obsessed. And there's a cool moon energy that's predominant in Zen, I think. At any rate, I want to wish a happy birthday, a little belated happy birthday to Daigon Luke. Wherever he is, he passed away last year. His birthday was January 27th. His Dharma name was Great Vow Accomplished the Way, which I think... When I read that translation, I thought, oh, who does that not apply to?

[34:26]

All of us have great vows, and the narrative, the sort of perfect narrative of human life is that they'll all be accomplished upon death. We'll look and say, yes, that life was complete. Of course, It's not that easy. I also heard another woman passed away. Her name was Conchita, and she had lived in a makeshift structure. We live at 1601 Shoreline Highway, and she lived at 1601 Pennsylvania Avenue. which is right across the street from where Barack Obama lives now.

[35:30]

And she lived in, I guess you could say it would be like a modern Miwok structure. It looked like it was PVC pipe with foam and tarps since 1981. And she was protesting nuclear proliferation. And she was born in Spain, so she was an immigrant too. She's doing well. Did you all hear about this Oxfam report? That 62 people in the world... have as much wealth as 3.6 billion people, the poorest half of the world's population?

[36:40]

I've been really moved the last couple of years by the proliferation of non-violent actions that seem to really be possessed of a bodhisattva spirit, a clarity and a willingness to creatively attempt an appropriate response to the world as it is today. I'm thinking of the, a lot of these groups also have been started by women, which I'm really moved by. Women leaders. I'm thinking of Idle No More, and of course, are the lights dimming? Oh dear. I won't mention the sixth grade extinction. I won't talk about the farming conference I went to, which was full of

[38:12]

Alarming news, I will mention this film called Cowspiracy, which I'm sorry to bring up all these terrible things on the Dharma seat. I'm going to end with a beautiful poem by Wendell Berry. But if you haven't seen Cowspiracy, it's really quite eye-opening. The short version is that human caused climate change Over 50% of the emissions in the atmosphere that are driving this climate change that's transforming our world comes from livestock. So secondhand feeding, something I never heard expressed. the impact on the land and the water and the sky and human culture from animal livestock operations is truly astounding.

[39:26]

I think 70 to 90 percent of the grain grown in the United States feeds animals. The other thing I heard at the farming conference was a man named Mikhail Tila. The other German is laughing. Mikhail Tila was a resident here and he is a biodynamic, spiritual beekeeper. And it was the most amazing presentation about life I've ever seen. It was a two-part workshop. The first part was a dry scientist from UC Davis who was clearly really into bees and knew his stuff and talked numbers and everything. Had a slideshow, it was really lovely. And then Mikhail Tila got up and it's almost like he did what the Zendo just did, like the lights dimmed, he began speaking

[40:37]

And it was like Bodhisattva's speech, it was like, bees are not insects. I know you'll think I'm crazy, but bees are mammals. So we were all like, okay. Okay, what's next? German mystic. He turned the lights a little lower and began playing a film that he took of the inside of, he makes, there's some here. We have stopped harvesting honeybees in our Langstroth style, you know, the square boxes, vertical beehives. We've stopped that. We have a few left. Now we've become a bee sanctuary here at Green Gulch. It's so beautiful, guided by Mikhail Tila.

[41:43]

He's leading us on the road to liberation. Bees should be considered mammals because they're warm-blooded. And then he had this footage that he showed. It was silent. It didn't have any sound. And he really did turn the lights down at this point. And he played it on the screen. And it was the inside of one of these bee hives that he carves out of big pine trunks. And the bees just go in there and do their wild bee thing. And it's exquisite. And he doesn't use smoke at all. He doesn't wear any... He doesn't wear like those radiation suits that beekeepers wear. He just stuck his hand in, apparently, with a smartphone and took this footage of the bees. And he's like... Let's watch... We're... Pay close attention. Let's watch this life form. Let's just watch this life form. And it was like... It went on and on and on.

[42:54]

It was like you had never seen a bee before. It was like, bees? Of course bees are mammals. It's like, yeah. And then he would point out things. He'd say, notice the dance of the bee on the lower right. And you'd go, oh my god. Oh my god, look at that. And then he'd go, and watch, this is the moment when the lower, there's levels of them. They're on top of each other, and they're moving. It's just this vibrant, fractal, living thing. And he's describing what they're doing. He's like, oh, and watch as this happens. And he's like, oh, and there's the queen. The queen is making an appearance all loud to her majesty. The queen, I didn't realize this when I was filming it. I'm like, well, yeah, you just had your hand in a tree trunk with a smartphone. But there's a queen bee, like, promenading around, visiting the huckers.

[43:59]

He called them Apis Sophia, the wisdom of the bees. And he called it the visceral integrity of a bee hive, of a colony like that. And the idea of this natural beekeeping is, it's natural. It's like acknowledging that there's life. It's welcoming. Good morning. Good morning, bees. This life. And not imputing some idea of what it's going to do. We'll stick it out in the almond grove and it'll run around and then we'll ship it down to Texas and we'll do the alfalfa and then we'll run it over here. It's like, no. Bees like to be 15 feet up in the air, apparently. They like to make their nests in hollow trees. They like this. They don't like that. He whispers to them. They're warm-blooded. They're mammals. That was the other thing I learned at the farming conference. Okay. I wanted to say about two more hours worth of things back when I wanted to give the talk.

[45:11]

Then I didn't want to give the talk. This is so human, right? I wanted to give the talk. Sure, Ana, the new Tanto. Thank you, Ana. I will do the Dharma talk. That sounds great. That's a month and a half out. I can't even imagine that. The night before, I can't sleep. I'm terrified. I have night sweats. My cat is freaked out. She doesn't know what's going on. I must be spraying pheromones that are very confusing. And now here, I just want to keep talking to you. This is called A Vision. It's by Wendell Berry. It's a bodhisattva vision. If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it, if we will make our seasons welcome here, asking not too much of heaven and earth, then a long time after we are dead, the lives our lives prepare will live here, their houses

[46:26]

strongly placed upon the valley sides, fields and gardens rich in the window. The river will run clear as we will never know it, and over it, birdsong like a canopy. On levels of the hills will be green meadows, stock bells in noon shade. On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down the old forest, an old forest will stand. Its rich leaf fall drifting on its roots. The veins of forgotten springs will have opened. Families will be singing in the fields. In their voices they will hear a music risen out of the ground. They will take nothing from the ground. They will not return, whatever the grief at parting. Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove, and memory will grow into legend, legend into song, song into sacrament.

[47:40]

The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light. This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibility. I want to dedicate our time together, our collective intention to soften our own hearts and love and welcome the stranger to be compassionate in difficulty, and joyous in the easy times. Let us feel deeply the suffering of others and work tirelessly to free ourselves and all beings from difficult circumstances and become a causal force for change in the world. Thank you all so very much.

[48:42]

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 sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[49:15]

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