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. For how many people is this the first time you've been to a Dharma talk at Green Gulch Farm? Oh, that's so many. Welcome. How many people is this the first time giving the Dharma talk at Greenville Chafari? Not so many. Well, this is not only for that reason, but For other reasons, this is a very important day.

[01:02]

I'm wearing my glasses so that I can see all the way back, because it's a huge hall here. I live in the city, so it's a bigger venue here than it is in the Buddha Hall, so it's very nice to be here. My day started with a drive from Santa Fe to Albuquerque at 3.45 this morning. And then a flight from Albuquerque to San Francisco. And then my wife picked me up at the airport and we drove to San Francisco. And then just drove here. Somehow I thought that was a good idea at the time. But I was in New Mexico because I wanted to go to Colorado. And there was a very wonderful ceremony at a Dharma center called Crestone.

[02:19]

And this is Richard Baker Roshi's place in the... kind of just on the edge of a very dramatic mountain range, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado. And he has a place there and has for some time. And he decided to, or they decided to pass on the abbotship of that center from Baker Roshi to... another longtime Zen Center practitioner by the name of Dan Welch. So a number of Zen Center people went there. Tenshin Roshi was there. I think he was maybe even functioning as Master of Ceremonies. I'm not exactly sure. Huizu-san, Suzuki Roshi's son and grandson, Shingo, was there.

[03:21]

Abbot Steve Stuckey was there, and a bunch of other long-time Zen Center people were there. And I think it was a really good thing that Zen Center made the effort to be a part. Galen Godwin was there, too. But it was really great, and I'm sure it was very much appreciated by their sangha. For those in the audience who know the history of Zen Center, I think it had potential for a significant healing moment. We'll see, you never know about these things, but we'll see. So this day is important for at least two reasons. One is Mother's Day. Maybe we could just take a moment just to... There's one thing.

[04:37]

We're all different, of course, but there's one thing that unites all of us, right? None of us are different on this one, and that is that we all have a mother. We're all the same. That's the way it works. We don't appear independently of... causes and conditions, and the one key cause and condition there is that we have a mother. Of course, you have a father. He plays a part too, but the mother is like, at least today, the one. So, this Mother's Day is especially meaningful. I mean, usually I think about Mother's Day and it's like, okay, I'm a bit of a reluctant participant. It's kind of, okay, the card marketing people are out there doing their thing, and okay, we have to, you know, I'll call.

[05:38]

And I mean, I love my mother, but one special day, I'm usually a reluctant participant. But today is somewhat special. My mother was diagnosed with lung cancer about two weeks ago. And so pretty much every day since that day has been Mother's Day for me, and now especially. So my sister and brother are there with her, and unfortunately I couldn't be there, but I'm there in spirit. So what I thought we could do, just for a moment here, is just take a couple of breaths. And you can close your eyes or keep your eyes open. It doesn't matter. And bring an image of your mother into your mind right now. And allow her to come into the room with you.

[06:42]

Here. And really feel what that's like. I don't know about you, but a natural feeling of gratitude comes up for me. Deep gratitude. So this day is also the graduation day, I understand, and maybe, yes. the graduation day for coming of age group. And this is young men and young women, right?

[07:48]

And today there will be a ceremony right after this talk. And I'm not sure how many years exactly we've been doing this program, but quite a few. And it's a great program where kids get to be partnered, not kids, young adults get to be partnered with Zen students and they go through experiences over a period of time and they kind of investigate or engage with the question of what would it be like for me to grow up? I was a leader in the third group about 10 years ago with a fellow named Gabe Fields. Some people may remember him. And I was trying to think this morning, do I remember anything from that?

[08:56]

And I only remembered, off the top of my head, I only remembered one thing. And Gabe and I thought, well, it would be really great for our guys. I mean, our guys were kind of like... You know, they were 12 years old, you know, not really connected to their bodies, even though they were, like, moving, like, all the time. So we thought, well, we could do some yoga with them, right? So we talked to a yoga teacher. We developed this whole kind of, like, day-long program with them with the yoga and everything, and we got to. Here at Green Gulch Farm, we were meeting here, and there were about 10 of these young men. And we said, okay, guys, we're going to do yoga today. And they looked at us, and then they looked at each other, and it was like, no.

[10:00]

They said, no. They hadn't said that before. And we looked at them, and we go, why not? We thought you guys would like yoga. And they said, Our moms do yoga. That was the end of that conversation. Our moms do yoga. So congratulations to all the young men and women on the completion of your program and the parents too. I'd like to talk today about something that's very interesting to me and it may be interesting to you.

[11:08]

Oh, before I do that, I want to share a practice with you. I'm the president of San Francisco Zen Center. My office is in the city and I work with the officers of Zen Center and the directors of the three practice centers and we basically manage the business of Zen Center because there's a lot of And it's sometimes hard to tell whether it's practice in business, business as practice, you know. Anyways, and I'm in a tremendous amount of meetings. You know, I go to meetings and everybody wants me to be in their meeting and stuff, so I go to this meeting. And that's probably why I haven't given a Dharma talk at Green Girls Farm. I've been in too many meetings, even on Sunday.

[12:08]

Anyways, so I had to learn, sitting there in these meetings all day long, I had to learn, well, how is this a part of my practice? Or how was I going to bring my practice to this moment too so that I could continue through every moment of my day to continue to grow and develop and mature as a practitioner. So I started thinking about these kinds of things and I developed some practices for myself. And I'd like to share one with you today. Because, I mean, this is a very different kind of a meeting, right? But still, this practice can work with any kind of activity, really. sitting, standing, walking, lying down.

[13:11]

And I call it listening with the entire body. That's my name for it. That's what I call it when I remind myself to do it. Oh, instead of just listening with this small little part of myself, that wants to figure out whether that person is right or wrong, or I agree or I disagree, or any other thing, or I like them or I don't like them. I ask myself to just kind of like listen My entire being. And I imagine almost that my listening faculty moves from my ears and my head down lower into my body.

[14:22]

So the nice thing about this practice is when nobody knows that I'm doing it, I'm sitting in a meeting and all of a sudden I'm... And oftentimes it's triggered by getting agitated. I'm thinking, well, I'm tired of this topic. We've already talked enough about this. Or whatever, I'm getting impatient, frustrated. Once I start listening with my body, it's a completely different situation. My body is not so interested in that. It's just interested in being present. So I would recommend that if you'd like to try this out, you could do this now. You could start listening even right now. You could start listening with your body. With your entire being, you can listen. And you're listening...

[15:31]

what comes and you're listening to what appears to be coming from the outside but you can also listen to what appears to be coming from the inside too. This is full 360 degree listening with the body. So as we as I talk this morning please feel free to take up that practice or not. Nobody will be able to tell. When we do listen with the entire body, we allow that which comes, we allow that which feels exterior from ourselves to get folded into that which feels inside of us. And that which feels inside of us to be kind of folded into

[16:33]

that which seems to come from the outside. And we start to relax around what is usually a kind of a hypersensitivity to me and the other person, or me and the condition, the situation around me. When we exchange ourselves in this way, and we listen or we communicate at a deeper level, we allow our innate wisdom, our fundamental nature to actually be listening. And when we do this, Our lives are enriched.

[17:36]

Our lives are enlivened and not depleted because we're participating in a different way in the conversation or in our experience. And the body, the mind is so conditioned by habit responses that when we hear certain things or are in certain situations and sometimes they feel like, like I said, like familiar and like, oh no, now we're going down this track again. I'm doing the same thing. My response is going down the same track. It's kind of a habit response, you know? This is what my small mind wants to do. when I expand and include my entire being, sometimes we call this big mind, then I have a whole range of possibilities in terms of responses.

[18:47]

So I invite you to take up this practice now or anytime. It's especially helpful in times of stress or transition Maybe we're having some kind of repetitive thoughts in our mind to just actually listen with our body, listen to ourselves with our body. If we're in a sensitive situation where we're not sure if we can say the right thing, listen inside before we even speak. Listen to yourself. So I was at this big ceremony yesterday in Colorado. And part of this ceremony, Dan Welsh, it was really wonderful and a traditional Zen ceremony.

[20:01]

And he has a new robe on, and then he ascends up onto a platform that's called the mountain seat. And then people come up and they ask questions. And this person now, as the abbot, meets the person who's asking the question. He says, dragons and elephants, bring me your questions. So the dragons and the elephants come up one after the other and they ask a question. And there's one that... impacted me particularly yesterday. And Paul Disco, an old Zen student who some people may know, and I don't know if he's a dragon or an elephant, but maybe, yeah, maybe he's a dragon. So he came up to Dan and he said, the trees are

[21:09]

grow by themselves. The rocks are rocks and they know how to be rocks. What is there for me to contribute to that? So Dan, it doesn't miss a beat. And he comes forward, and Paul's kind of this big guy who's right in front of him. He comes forward and says, sometimes I cut down those trees. And sometimes I move those rocks. But I always do it with the spirit of practice that we share. And then they bowed. And I thought that was just, it was just great.

[22:16]

It was for people who know Dan, he was so bright and intensely happy that it was wonderful to see. And in that moment, he reminded me and others in the group that as human beings, we do things. You know, we cut down trees and we move rocks. Sometimes a lot of rocks. Sometimes chop off tops of mountains, you know. Sometimes we clear whole forests. So as human beings, we do things and we have the capacity to do great things that are hugely positive. for the world, for society, and we also have a potential to do things that cause great harm, more so than any other living being on this planet.

[23:26]

So the question for us is when we do things, because we can't get out of the fact. I mean, we try to do as little harm as we can, but we do things. So it's like we focus on, to a great extent, on how we do things. How we do things. So I'd like to tell a couple stories about that and also about kind of appreciating this coming-of-age group, I'd like to tell a couple of stories about journeys, the human journey, the seemingly endless transition from moment to moment, event to event, this process that we're all involved in as human beings, and we can't, even if we'd like to, we cannot step out of.

[24:38]

So my first story. You know, where are the young men and women who are in this program, are they here in the room? No, they're out doing something. Okay, good. They're coming of age. As we speak. So... So the model, the Buddhist model, archetype, way of seeing somebody who lives and does things and interacts with the world and has an aspiration to be a benefit and pay attention to how they're doing what they're doing is the bodhisattva. That's our kind of model.

[25:52]

And kind of the fundamental aspiration or vow of the bodhisattva is to awaken for the benefit of all beings, all of life. Sometimes that looks like listening for the benefit of all beings. For those of you who are familiar with Avalokiteshvara, Kuan Yin, the hearer of the cries of the world. But there's all kinds of different ways to manifest this vow or intention. So the Buddha, sometimes people think about the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha. Before he became the Buddha, he was a bodhisattva. He had aroused in himself some deep aspiration to benefit all beings with his actions.

[27:03]

He had gone out into the local village and seen a sick person, a dying person. Well, sick person, a very elderly person, and a dead person. And then he came back to his temple. And within a period of time, he decided to dedicate his life completely to engage in the question of what is the cause of suffering? And is it possible to find an end as human beings to our sufferings? So sometimes this story is presented rather kind of tersely. And it's almost like he came back and he had his wife in the palace.

[28:08]

His wife, Yasodhara, is in the palace and she's just given birth to a young boy, Rahula. And her mother is there, Mahapajapati, and the Buddha comes back and sometimes it looks like, kind of like, well, see you later. I've got more important things to do. Or maybe not even that much of a conversation, you know, gone. Not looking back. And, you know, that's never felt so great to me. How does that? How does that work? And the mother of his child? Could there be something more important than that? And it feels like, well, he has to abandon them to go do this other thing.

[29:09]

So I've been thinking about this and trying to understand it, and as my understanding evolves, I think that actually the way to see this is that the Buddha, the Bodhisattva, at that point, went back and didn't actually abandon his family. that his journey actually included his family. Even if he wasn't in the exact same location with them. I think it has to be like that. And I thought about, I was thinking about my mother. And I was thinking about how I actually, at some point, I needed to leave my mother.

[30:18]

I needed to. But I didn't leave her. I probably wanted to leave her in my young rebellious state. I probably had a pretty simple idea about it, but I needed to leave the safety and protection of that relationship. And I needed to... go beyond somehow that world that my parents had created for me. And I needed to take a chance with my life. And that chance was going... I needed to step out into the unknown. And that was going to require that I left the safety of my mother. But my mother didn't let me leave her on some level because Because she didn't let me abandon her.

[31:21]

Because she kept loving me. So in some ways, we've never left each other. And I am still in relationship to her. Even though I had to... Go do something else for a while. Now, the Buddha's story, he actually was some time later, but actually his wife, his stepmother, his son, all became part of the Buddhist order. They were all, you know, this Mahapajapati is a Buddhist ancestor, Rahula. He was one of the Buddha's ten enlightened disciples. Was he thinking that it was just a matter of time, that this was how it was all going to work out when he left? Who knows?

[32:27]

But I think he must have had a big view of it like that. I mean, so what is it for each one of us to change and... grow and develop ourselves even now and not abandon those that we love the most or those that we're connected with the most? This is a big question for me. So here's my second story. It's called Joshu Stonebridge. It's a traditional Zen story. A young monk having heard of this famous teacher, Joshu.

[33:30]

Now, Joshu started practicing when he was 40 years old. He practiced with his... teacher for 20 years, and then he went traveling around China for another 20 years, then he was 80, then he finally settled down someplace and lived there as a teacher until he was 120. So he became very famous. And so monks would travel across China to go visit Joshu. And there was a story that at Joshu's place there was this famous stone bridge. So the young monk She travels all the way across China. She gets to Joshu's place. She approaches Joshu, this old, spindly old man. Maybe he's 100 years old. And she says, the stone bridge of Joshu is widely renowned.

[34:34]

But coming here, I see only stepping stones. And Joshu looks at her and says, you see only stepping stones? Actually, there's no question mark in there. I think it might be, you see only stepping stones. Maybe he's just agreeing with her, right? You see only stepping stones. The other day, my wife and I were having a difficult conversation. She said, I want you to repeat what I just said to you. Word for word. Yes. So I did my best.

[35:36]

See, I was listening with my body at that point. Thank you. So Joshu says, you see only the stepping stones and not the stone bridge. And so the young monk, she was like, oh, OK. I guess I was heard. So what is the stone bridge? And Joshu says, it lets donkeys cross. And horses cross. I just saw some virled brows now. But the monk was, she was profoundly enlightened at that moment. Of course. Right? You know, I just realized that my watch is on something like New Mexico time or something.

[36:49]

Do we know how much? more time we have before I get too involved in this story? Oh, it's 11 o'clock. Joshu received her listening with his entire being. And in that moment, The donkey could come. The horse could come. The monk could come. It didn't matter. Joshu was accepting what was happening for what it was. When we do that, when we listen, not with our judging mind,

[37:53]

with our mind, which has the capacity to focus in, and this may be our most positive qualities too, but focus in and actually attach to what we think be happening or what we create some kind of expectation for ourselves that okay well this is going this way and and i am looking for the stone bridge when we listen with our body it doesn't matter whether the next step is on a stone bridge or little stepping stones The next moment allows all beings to be who they really are.

[39:00]

Dragon, elephant, donkey, horse. This is the spirit of our practice. This is the spirit when we cultivate our practice, the spirit in which we move a rock or chop down a tree. We are listening completely to our experience and paying attention to the innermost request in that moment. I'm going to end with a quote from Suzuki Roshi.

[40:01]

The most important thing to do for others and ourselves is not to build something beautiful or to help them in some materialistic way, but to help others by giving the true spirit of how to live in this world. So we don't know exactly how to live in this world. But we can certainly explore a question. We can engage with the question, engage with our experience. of what it is to be a human being living in this world, responding to this situation, if we're present for it, if we're listening deeply.

[41:07]

So thank you very much for your attention today. And are there parents here in the Dharma talk of the children who are the... young men and women who are going to be in the ceremony? Yeah? Could you raise your hands? All right. Okay. Thank you. Let's give them a hand. I know it's a real commitment for you, too, and it's really great that you're thinking so much about your kids that you've gave them that experience. Thank you. Thank you and have a wonderful Mother's Day. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive.

[42:13]

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.

[42:34]

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