This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, Sangha. It's been so long since I've been here. It's just totally cool that we're all here together. Before I officially begin and after I officially begin, happy Pride Month. It's so wonderful to see the rainbow flag flying on both sides of the bay. I come over here from Oakland. Thank you for inviting me. And... Usually when I am always, when I'm asked to give talks to various Buddhist sanghas in different locations, now very easily done through Zoom, and we're beginning to gather together in person, which is a blessing, I feel.

[01:19]

I ask the organizer, the meditation hall official, whoever it is, is representing that Sangha. What is a Sangha interested in? And the answer I am getting these days is always the same. It's exactly the same. That practitioners of the Dharma are eager to explore in what I call learning communities, because in my point of view, we're all teachers, we're all students, we're all mentors, we're all mentees, as depending on circumstances, you are an expert in your own experience, as probably as well as in other skill areas.

[02:22]

And in exploring how we can individually and collectively, and we can point towards society as well, navigate these very extraordinarily difficult and challenging times. My talk today is titled I'm sorry, can I take back my vows? Navigating uncertainty, fear, and despair in 2024. Many people are saying these are quote-unquote unprecedented times with political polarization and turmoil, threats of fascism,

[03:24]

ongoing genocides. And as the polar ice caps continue to melt, I read that Mexico City is possibly facing day zero, what's called day zero, in a few weeks, that day when millions of people in that city have no water, as well as environmental crises around the world. On Facebook, I've been following Palestinian poet Mossab Abu Toha, who was able to escape from Gaza with his family and is now continuing his work as a poet and journalist from Cairo in touch with his family and colleagues, those that are living in Gaza. And he posted a few details. days ago that he had received what he called an SOS, a cry for help.

[04:29]

It said, we are the family of Mahmoud Judah. We live on Zafarin Street in Maghazi, which is a camp in central Gaza. We are stuck under the rubble. So I imagine that was probably texted. As most or all of us know, former United States President Trump was recently convicted of 34 felonies. Many of the news headlines that I read said, what's next? A time-honored Zen answer that I personally was trained in by my original Zen teacher, Korean Zen master Samu Sinem, starting in 1982, the time-honored Zen answer is, I do not know. So we were all trained initially when we went into the fearsome interview room to go head-to-head and face-to-face with the Zen master.

[05:44]

And he would ask some kind of question. I guess it was some kind of adaptation of koan work. But anyway, he would have a question. And... Whatever one answered, it was no, no, no, no, no. And then he would train us to say, I don't know. I do not know. Not as a passive reply, like, and I'll never know, so what the heck. It was, I do not know, and I will find out. I will enter into the inquiry. No matter how long it takes, I will find out. what to do, how do we navigate our daily life. Many of us here, I'm assuming, have taken the bodhisattva vows. And I'm going to read this text, which some of you may not be familiar with as it comes from the Korean Zen tradition.

[06:54]

And it's a text from Master Naong Hiegun, who lived from 1320 to 1376. The title of it is Master Naong's Resolutions. Now, I found this text in my teacher, Zen Master Samu Sinem's room. When I went in, I was sent in to get something. book or something like that, in his original temple, Zen Buddhist Temple, Toronto in Canada. And I found this text as I was going through. It was this tiny room just covered with books and papers. I'm scrabbling around and I found this and I thought, oh wow, I need to have this. It was never brought into our formal teaching. However, I found it and I went and ran and got my journal, which luckily I had. I wrote it in it. So, what to do?

[08:00]

Well, one answer is strengthen bodhicitta and Master Na Ong's great resolutions. I resolve that each time and every place I am born, I will dwell in prajna and never retreat. Obtaining a will as fearless as that of Shakyamuni Buddha. Obtaining the fruit of enlightenment as vast as that of Vairochana Buddha. Obtaining wisdom as great as that of Bodhisattva Manjushri. Obtaining deeds as boundless as those of Bodhisattva Samantabhadra. Obtaining bodies as innumerable as those of Bodhisattva Shittigarbha. Obtaining 32 transformations, as did Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.

[09:05]

Nowhere will I not manifest myself in all the ten directions and far and wide help all beings to enter nirvana. Those who hear my name will be freed from the three evil paths. Those who seek my appearance will be delivered from passions. I will thus teach and instruct for countless kalpas till there be neither Buddhas nor beings in the end. I desire that devas, nagas, and all the other protectors of the law of Buddha protect and do not forsake me. Let there be no difficulties where there are difficulties, so I may accomplish my great resolutions. May these acts of merit thus performed now reach out to all, that we and other sentient beings may all attain Buddhahood.

[10:13]

That was very inspiring to me and still is. Sets a pretty high bar. And if we say that Master Na Ong's great resolutions are one end of a very human spectrum of endeavor and, excuse me, of, I don't know, of living. living the vow of raising up Bodhicitta. So for me, there's like this spectrum. And then on one end, the high end, there's Master Naung's resolutions. And then there is the other end. And with a venture into the colorful land of the vast land of the Vajrayana, I was invited last year to give three classes.

[11:33]

I don't know if actually there will be enough registration, but we're doing our best to give three classes by Zoom for the Tara Mandala Tibetan Lineage Buddhist Center in Colorado. Hopefully that will happen in July. And that meditation center was started by the very well-known Tibetan Buddhist lineage teacher Siltram Alione who wrote a book that I read a long time ago. It was kind of a bestseller in Buddhist world when it came out called Women of Wisdom. I believe women mystics in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition or in venerable Siltram Alione's lineage. She has apparently established a beautiful center in Colorado, and they have a lot of retreats and teachings, and like most centers, they also have extensive online offerings now.

[12:49]

And they said, so if you'd like to get to know our Sangha, you can take... some of our online courses or participate in our Sangha activities with us and you won't have to pay a registration fee. And I thought, that's really nice. So I looked on my calendar and I looked at, that was last fall, and I looked at... their website, and sure enough, there was a weekend retreat online. It was two half mornings, Saturday and Sunday, and I could do that with one of their senior teachers, Lama Chandra Easton, who, as it turns out, lives in Berkeley. And I was able to get together with her afterward for coffee. Wonderful teacher, very clear, very senior. And each of the two mornings, Saturday and Sunday, Lama Chandra Easton, who has been trained in this particular, I would call it a psychodrama, very therapeutic practice, that comes from Lama Tsultram Alayani, their founder,

[14:15]

she led us in two sessions of this. It's called Feeding Your Demons practice. They call it FYD, and it always says trademark after. Because they do train people to do one-on-ones when it goes deeper and becomes quite intensive. This was a kind of Feeding Your Demons light practice, an introduction. My understanding is that it comes from what in Tibetan Buddhism is called the traditional practice of chod, C-H-O-U-M-L-A-T-D, and is an updating for those of us in this time. They made it a little less drastic. It's a visualization practice.

[15:19]

And also these days, everyone is into like semantics, which as far as I can tell means body awareness and moving around, incorporating movement into our practice in a conscious and mindful way. So it's very good. And as people are selling embodied practices my personal thought is, well, if you can do your practice without a body, then that's something I've never actually heard of. You know, embodiment is like saying breathing air or something like that. And it points to some things that are quite valuable. So it's an embodied, embodied practice in which one does a grounding and centering and some meditation and then the teacher or the facilitator of this feeding your demons practice, says now you're invited to visualize somewhere in your space one of your demons that you want to work with.

[16:34]

And of course, in this session, there was an invitation, very wise, don't pick your worst demon, pick one of a sort of doable demon. since we were doing this online and without being in a direct connection to a particular trained spiritual teacher in a one-on-one basis. And I'm pretty good at visualization because my original career or career my path that I was destined to become on before I ran headfirst into Zen, when I was around 28 years old, I guess. My original path was that of poetry and writing and teaching poetry and creative writing. I naturally work through image and sound and...

[17:42]

through image and sound and rhythm. And so I thought, well, I have seen those Tibetan Buddhists, many of the incredible variety of art and figures and amazing demons, demon-like figures. So to my great surprise and humiliation and chagrin, what materialized my demon that materialized I was sitting on my futon bed, looking at the teacher on my laptop, and about three feet away from me, on the bottom end of my futon bed, there materialized a giant five-foot-tall white chicken. And this was really horrible, you know. So it was very large, And the worst thing was that I didn't feel physically threatened, but it just kept staring at me with this unblinking, reptilian, beady gaze.

[18:59]

There was no mammalian warmth, no empathy, no mirror neurons that could be firing like, yeah, I see you, I see you, I see you, I see you. Nope, it was a giant chicken. looked very, very strong as well. And that chicken represented that demon was. I thought, you know, things are so messed up right now. I am overwhelmed. I'm getting older. And I really just want to kind of consider chickening out on my bodhisattva vows and precepts. Like, could there be a sort of like a take back? could I back off and take back my vows? So I said to this demon, we had to ask a number of questions, and I said, what's your name? And again, this was really embarrassing, and I did report it to the teacher, Chandra, later, and she laughed for about five minutes.

[20:04]

So I said, well, what's your name, demon? And the demon said, was the chicken... And this had to do with bodhicitta and bodhisattvas. So the demon said, my name is Bodhicitkin. As one of my friends says, that requires very precise enunciation. It's not Bodhicitkin, it's Bodhicitkin. And I stared at Bodhicitkin, Bodhicitkin stared at me. It was basically a stare-off contest, and I thought, well, can I renounce my vows, or will this giant chicken do something terrible to me? And then the next part of the exercise was we were asked to, and the teacher said,

[21:09]

totally important, you can't just think about it, is to get up and go and sit in the place of Bodhichitkin and then stare back at the place where I was and look back at the place where I was. And then there were some questions around that. And then we changed places again and went to our original places. And the instruction was that we could visualize our bodies sort of melting down into a sweet and nutritious nectar that flowed toward the demon. And questions we were asked to ask the demon were, what do you want and what do you need to be fully satisfied? What do you want and what do you need to be fully satisfied? Really good questions. And then we visualize our body turning into this nectar, and it flows. into the demon, toward the demon, and into the demon, and the demon is, at least for the moment, fed.

[22:17]

Now, I did not anticipate this at all. It was quite humiliating, as I said. And in other words, instead of getting a really fabulous demon, I got this chicken, and I thought, what a mess. I mean, really, what a mess. I am a mother of an adult child who lives with me. And although some forms of Zen culturally are biased toward extreme neatness and tidiness, it's okay in my book, at least, to say I'm a mess. To look around and say, as I do, This country is a hot mess. In Vipassana meditation style, we could, as they say, note, hot mess is arising. It's arising.

[23:22]

Dharma friends, I perhaps, like you, feel profound love unease, anxiety, and on most days, the deepest sadness, grief, and anger that we human beings as a species have failed to create a more sustainable and equitable world. I'm not asking for perfection here. And as many of you know, and some of you may not know, the direction that my Dharma path has taken has been to work primarily in historically excluded communities of black, indigenous, multi-heritage, and peoples of color, low-income folks,

[24:34]

race and class always arise, co-arise interdependently, and also people with disabilities, chronic illness, chronic pain, I myself am a disabled person. And it is from that point of view, that experience, that I do feel this profound, profound anger and grief as a mother, as someone who's worked with lots of kids in the Oakland Unified Public School District, that I feel that we as a species have failed to create a more sustainable and equitable world. And In the Zen, which, as you know, is a Japanese word for our practice and our tradition.

[25:42]

And Chan, it came from China, from Chan. Son in Korea. And I'm not sure I'm pronouncing this correctly. Tien or Thien tradition in Vietnam. In Zen, Chan, Son, Tian traditions, there is a wealth of examples of practitioners following what my Green High School in Ohio many years ago, football coach, Coach Cullum, used to say, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. When the going gets tough, the tough gets going. Or, as my Zen teacher friend Nelson Foster, whom some of you may know, one of the Dharma heirs of my old friend, his teacher, my old friend Robert Aitken Roshi, who was sometimes called the Dean of American Zen.

[26:59]

He had grown up in Hawaii, and then I think he went on to become a high school English teacher somewhere in California. And he and I shared a great love of poetry when we got together. We used to be able to recite poetry in English from heart. He loved children and was one of the distinguished babysitters of my son. that would have been like 34 years ago, around 34 years ago. He always felt a special connection to many children, and my kid was kind of raised with him in many ways. I therefore became friends with some of his Dharma heirs, including Nelson Foster, who is...

[28:04]

the teacher or one of the teachers at the Ring of Bone Zendo outside of Nevada City up north of here. It's in the old gold mining country, Ring of Bone Zendo. I hope if you haven't been there that at some point you will have the opportunity to visit because it's a beautiful place I think, very, very special Zen Do, and was built by the poet and Zen practitioner Gary Snyder, who still lives on one of the properties adjacent to the Zen Do land, and Gary's friends and family. It is gorgeous. It's remote. It looks out on a, it's in, I guess, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

[29:06]

And there's a meadow. They have had bears. And so they lock the food up and the kitchen is like double padlocked. They have to put everything away. They're very, very careful about anything that a bear would want to break into. And I remember the first time that I visited Ring of Bones Endo many years ago. Before, I think that they had a sort of official teacher who was in residence. It's very rustic inside, simple and beautiful. You can see all the hand carving, the marks that was made by loving hands very sturdily. And on the altar, there were some of the usual figures. And then there was a very handsome hand-carved wooden figure about this big of Smokey the Bear. I think he was holding some kind of Vajra weapon in one of his hands, bringing to mind Gary Snyder's famous poem, which I believe is called the Smokey the Bear Sutra, or Sutra, Smokey the Bear Sutra, one of my favorite poems.

[30:27]

Nelson has been living on that land and teaching for quite a long time. And I called him in late 2018 when I hit what my son calls a rough patch. My friend Arthur McGee, Art McGee, who was, I don't know, he was like a member of my family. And he lived in Oakland. He was called the father of the black internet. And he'd gone, burned out completely at a certain point and went to live and just be, and he withdrew from all of his anti-racism and nonprofit work. He had originally worked for the Department of Defense at some point. He was a brilliant tech genius. And he went into hiding.

[31:32]

I connected with him. He was a worker. I guess he wasn't the manager. He was a worker at a local DVD rental store that was near my house that we used to go to all the time. Art died at the age of 51 of probably a massive cardiac arrest. in his apartment in Oakland in July, I believe, of 2018. I always remember that he said to me at one point, I'm always angry, and for very good reason. I was grieving this loss and simultaneously the wildfires that were burning, making the air unbreathable, I believe that fall, and the crushing weight of more awareness of climate crisis fully descended on me.

[32:51]

So I called Nelson and we discussed this And Nelson said to me, I'm doubling down on my practice. I'll pause here to put in a tiny brag, not about myself. Nelson Foster does have a forthcoming book. I feel it is a magnificent book. I'll mention it here so that you have a chance to look out for it. You can pre-order it, I think. So September of this year, 2024, Shambhala Publications is publishing Storehouse of Treasures, Recovering the Riches of Chan and Zen by Nelson Foster. And it's the result of Nelson's lifelong life. and study as a translator, as a scholar, as a teacher of Zen, of the confluence of Zen and Daoism and Confucianism in China, and then how that spread came into Japan

[34:16]

I think that San Francisco Zen Center and all of the affiliated centers in this Shinryu Suzuki lineage are part of that stream of Dharma, of Buddha Dharma. So Nelson said to me, I'm doubling down on my practice. And I thought, I have to do so as well. In my own original lineage, Son, Korean Zen, my teacher, Venerable Samu Sinem, in the early 1980s started a small Buddhist journal called Spring Wind. I'm a really fast typist. I did a lot of work as a secretary. And so I would be sent on the train up from Ann Arbor, Michigan, the daughter temple that we were we were starting at that time, to the Mother Temple in Toronto, Zen Buddhist Temple, Toronto, and I did the word processing for this journal.

[35:27]

So I got to read these articles that the teacher wrote, including one about the little known, as far as I know, I don't hear this mentioned in Zen circles, Tripitaka Kariak, Wikipedia says the Tripitaka Koreana, literally Koryo or Goryo Tripitaka, or Palman De Jong Byung, which translates as 80,000 Tripitaka, is a Korean collection of the Tripitaka, Buddhist scriptures and the Sanskrit word for three baskets, as many of you know. So it's a Korean collection of the Tripitaka carved onto, hand carved onto 81,258 wooden printing blocks in the 13th century. This was originally hand carved and then all of the blocks were burned by Mongol invaders.

[36:38]

Following Master Na Ong's great resolutions and Nelson's sentiment, I'm doubling down on my practice, Coach Cullum, when the going gets tough, the Korean Buddhists said, we'll start over again. And the second Tripitaka Koreyana was carved starting in 1237 AD. It is currently stored at Hayin-sa Temple, one of the great treasure temples of South Korea. I myself have never seen it in person, but I've seen movies and images of it. It's pretty amazing. Zen monks and other Buddhist architects, craftspersons, thousands of people, including lay people, guarded these blocks, these wooden blocks, from invaders and occupiers. up to the present day.

[37:45]

I often think of their steady and collective efforts, their just unquenchable willingness to begin the impossible. I often think of their skill and their devotion. All of these nameless, unknown to us people, thousands and thousands of people. I really invite you to go to Wikipedia and read the history of the Tripitica Coreana. What they went through to even get the wood ready to carve is just incredible. Maybe some of you from your own backgrounds, your own cultures, your families, your ancestors, both blood ancestors and spirituals, have similarly, this is a human endeavor, have similarly made these great efforts to begin over again and again, to demonstrate their commitment,

[39:09]

to what they feel is most valuable, and although everything is impermanent, what they hope will be enduring in order to be of benefit. Perhaps you have these examples, I'm sure you do, from your own backgrounds. And I would love to be in a sharing circle where we could hear your experiences and we could learn from one another. So that might be something that could be a Dharma project, according to Adrienne Marie Brown's emergent strategy. So I often think of those wooden blocks, 81,258 wooden printing blocks. They're about this big. And they can be used to make prints whereby the contents can be shared.

[40:18]

I believe they have been shared in the form of the printed matter to Japan upon the request of Japanese Buddhists. And therefore, the question that I leave you with is this. how are we, however you define that we, preserving and embodying and carrying the Buddha Dharma into the near future? Let's just say the rest of the 21st century for the sake of argument. So how are we preserving, preserving and embodying? That means expressing, manifesting through our actions. through our words, through our eye contact, Koreans call it nunji, eye chi, eye energy, through our bodies, through the work of our hands and our communications, and carrying the Buddha Dharma into the near future.

[41:27]

Knowing that everything, our temple buildings, so much work going into our buildings, our bodies, our institutions, that everything is subject to the fires, the floods, the rising sea levels, to wars and invasions, these days to cyber crimes. Knowing all of this, I might ask, we might ask, what is at the very heart of what we are doing now? What is our faith? our path, our purpose. In addition to structures and traditions, what are the invisible and everyday transmissions that school children and unhoused persons and undocumented immigrants and people with chronic pain and illnesses and disabilities might be touched and comforted and illuminated by?

[42:33]

What are the invisible and everyday transmissions that those who are most vulnerable might be touched and comforted and illuminated by? Today, what is the most important thing that we and I and you, this will not be the same answer, need and want to do and can do? What is the most important thing for each of you? That's my meditation question that I'm offering you. I do work with some more people who are pretty deep into their practice, and we've done a couple of private retreats. And I've formalized this particular practice.

[43:37]

It's called WITMIT. It's an acronym. W-I-T-M-I-T. And it stands for what is the most important thing. I personally think it is all right to hold I do not know, we do not know, as a burning space of open inquiry? We don't need to know. We probably can't know just on the spot. Or if you can, contact me through my website immediately. I want to know what you know. Can we hold this as a burning space of open and very active inquiry? Because if we are stripped, of all of these robes and bowls and beautiful Buddha figures and offerings and meditation halls and bowing, what is the living water that unnamed, unseen, makes its vital and unhesitating and sleepless way?

[45:00]

following the course of gravity toward the great ocean of compassion. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dormen.

[45:34]

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