Good morning. This morning we're graced with the young people who are participating in the coming-of-age program that Green Gulch, San Francisco Zen Center at Green Gulch is offering this year, so I'm very happy to see you all. Most of you are in the front. And then we also have some children here, younger people. So welcome, little teeny tiny ones. So knowing that there's some younger children here, I'm gonna start with a story, but this story isn't just for younger children. This is for all of us. This is a very old, old story. Hi. This is an old story from the Lotus Sutra. And the Lotus Sutra was written or created maybe 2,000 years ago, something like that, very old, before the Common Era.

[01:16]

So this is a story about a person who left home So imagine if you were the age where you could kind of disappear from your home and go out into the world. Maybe some of you would like to do that this very moment. So there was a family and they were a wealthy family and the son left home. He didn't want to participate in the family and he disappeared. And the father and mother were very sad, and they looked all over for him, but he really was very skillful in disappearing. And he was gone for years and years and years, and he didn't have a very easy time of it. In fact, he kind of forgot who he was. He got into all sorts of uncomfortable situations.

[02:18]

He was cold. He was hungry. He couldn't find work. And he got... He didn't have any new clothes to wear, and he got more and more shabby. Finally, one day, this son, who is now an older person, was wandering towards this large estate, and he thought, well, maybe there's some work there for me. Maybe they'll hire me to do some work in the gardens or something like that. So as he got closer, the man who was the lord of the big estate looked at this kind of scruffy, shabby person and he said, that's my son. And the son hadn't realized that he had wandered back and things had changed so much over the years that he didn't even realize he was back home.

[03:21]

And so the father was so excited, he sent his foreman. He said, go get that man out there. We're going to have him come. And the son saw this person come running at him and got so frightened, he thought he was going to be beaten and pushed off of the land as a trespasser. So he began to run away. And the father thought, oh my goodness, he doesn't realize where he is. I have to be very skillful. not to scare him away. So he himself got into some old shabby clothes and put dirt on himself and wandered over to where this fellow was kind of hiding now. And he said, hey, I think they've got some work for you over at this big estate over here. You can go and shovel the manure out of the barn, muck around in the barn. I think that's all that you're good for, and you can do that work. The son thought, oh, good, I got a job, you know, great.

[04:25]

And he wasn't afraid because this person was dressed just like he was. So skillfully, the father, he gave him a little shack to live in, and he said, okay, here, just work in this shoveling out the horse manure and the cow manure and working with the compost, those kinds of things. And the son was very grateful to get some work. And slowly by slowly, he would give him more responsibilities. Now, please take care of these other people. You can be in charge. The father changed and would give him, as the lord of the manor, give him jobs, different jobs. And over the years, he gave him more and more and more responsibility. And finally, he had been working there for maybe 10 years, and the lord of the manor began to show him all his personal things. These are where I keep my treasure.

[05:26]

This is where I keep all the records of the business. This is the treasury. Here's the keys to the treasury. Because he trusted this man very much. And slowly, slowly, slowly, the young man, or not so young anymore, took on more and more responsibility. Very gradually, though, He had to take it very slow. So the lord of the manor realized that he was getting towards the end of his life, and he finally thought, I have to tell this man, who's now older, who he really is. So after giving him more and more responsibility, he said, I want you to have this whole estate. I want this to be yours. And then he told him the secret, because you are my son. And the man said, Father, Father, and they hugged each other, great big hugs, and were reunited.

[06:35]

And at that time, the son had fully become who he really was all along. So... This story is not just about some people that lived long ago in another country, but the teaching is that each one of us is, maybe even if we don't know it, each one of us has the fullness and the riches and the... All the gifts of the entire universe are for us, are actually part of our life. And maybe we don't realize that right now. So how is it that we're going to slowly, slowly understand who we really are? That we really are... We are... Very, very...

[07:49]

unusual, special, unique beings. So maybe part one of our jobs is to walk these steps to find out what that means, how we really are those special, unique beings. And I would say that this son went through a long, long, long ceremony. actually a kind of secret ceremony that he didn't even know he was participating in, as he slowly, slowly came into his own life, who he really was. So that's the story from the Lotus Sutra. And I think the young people are going off. What are they going to be doing today, Shoham? Oh, good. So some plants need watering in the garden, and it's up to you to take good care of them.

[08:53]

Okay? So everybody who's going with Shoal, thank you so much for coming. Thank you. So this story from the Lotus Sutra is a story of waking up to who we really are. And it's a parable. There's many parables in the Lotus Sutra. This one, there's a lot of different parts to it.

[09:56]

The skill of the father in... knowing just how to approach this person without scaring him and adding little by little more responsibilities and more. There's some places right down in front here if you want to sit there. And up here, you can climb up here. So the young people in the coming of age program will be participating in a ceremony next month, a ceremony that marks some, not the end of anything, but maybe, sometimes these ceremonies are both an end and a beginning at the exact same time.

[10:56]

It marks some ending. and some work that you've done together, and also the beginning of something new. So ceremonies are very powerful in that way. So I was asked to talk a little bit about ceremony, and that's what I wanted to do with the young people and just for all of us. And I wanted to do this also in the context of Something that, I just came back from Tassajara where I led the winter practice period and it was gone for 90 days. And we studied for the 90 days a little, they're called fascicles, it's like a little chapterette from a work by Zen master Dogen Zenji, Japanese Zen master who lived in 1200. And this particular chapterette, this fascicle, it's called

[11:58]

is called the Genjo Koan, or actualizing the fundamental point. And we looked at this and turned it and memorized it and recited it, and people did creative things like drawing pictures and making banners, and we approached it from all these different ways, and all the sashins and all the lectures turned on the Genjo Koan. So I want to talk about ceremony and also in the context of this work, the Genjo Koan, okay? So that's my plan for this morning with you. The word ceremony in Chinese and Japanese, the character has this combination of the words in English, person and meaning. So a ceremony gives meaning to a person and a person who has meaning can embody, fully embody life to its fullest when you have meaning in your life, right?

[13:11]

If life is meaningless, you don't have a sense of where it is that you're stepping in your path, you can become very confused and getting to lots of difficulties, troubles. So in Chinese it's pronounced, the word for ceremony is Yi, and in Japanese it's Gi. So our ceremonies, I would say that there are ceremonies that are maybe secret ceremonies, like this Lotus Sutra story where the son really didn't know what was happening to him. He was being, taken care of, watched over, cultivated, and his life was being refined in ways that he just, with sincerity, was just trying to do his work and respond to whatever was happening.

[14:12]

But his father was working with him, seeing what was needed, and it was a ceremonial activity. And I think when we do when we enter into a program like a coming-of-age program or we do a retreat or a tussar practice period for sure, I would say we enter into ceremonial space. We enter into a relationship of meaning with our activity that's conscious, probably more conscious when we choose to enter something. but also we may be in ceremonial space not being so aware of it. The other parts of this Japanese character, Chinese Yi and Japanese Gi, also can be translated as right conduct, loyal, faithful, public-spirited, and duty to one's neighbor.

[15:22]

We don't usually think of ceremony and those other activities, those other practices. In English, the word ceremony comes from the words sacredness or religious rite. So I think we associate it more with that, that ceremony has to do with a formal act or a set of rituals or actions that are prescribed in a certain way, and you need to follow them in a very particular way, and some kind of customs or traditions. And ceremony, we often feel that, I think... Sometimes we feel that ceremonies are empty or they don't have much meaning for us.

[16:24]

When there's an empty ceremony, it's just ritual going through the motions and it doesn't meet us. It doesn't actually touch our lives. And in some ways, ceremony may have a bad, not such a good connotation for us. We might think boring or meaningless, actually, rather than that is actually... putting together a person with meaning as ceremony. So sacredness is to make sacred. How do we make our life sacred, all of our activities sacred? So I wanted to go now to A couple sections from the Genjo Koan. And this particular piece of writing was a letter to a lay practitioner that Dogen had.

[17:29]

Dogen was a Zen priest and he had many monks and some nuns, not that many, but some who were his disciples and worked with him. And he also had lay followers. And the Genjo Koan was written to a lay follower as a letter. And... It's very poetic. The imagery is very beautiful. And the depth of what he's able to put in these paragraphs of writing is quite marvelous. When Dogen, just another word about this fascicle, when Dogen edited his masterwork, The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, the Shobogenzo, He put Genjo Koan first in this particular edited version because he thought it should go first, even though he didn't write it first. So he really thought highly of it himself.

[18:30]

So one of the parts, it says, when you ride in a boat and watch the shore... You might assume that the shore is moving, but if you keep your eyes closely on the boat, it will be clear that the boat moves. You can see that the boat moves. Similarly, so just to stop there, so you're riding in a boat, let's say you're out on some kind of a kayak or boat, and you're going along, or this happens in a car too, or a train, you're going along, or an airplane, and you look out the window, or you look out over the, and it looks like the shore is moving along. Right? Or if you're in the car, it looks like the trees are zipping past you, or in the train, like the, because you're inside this train, or you're inside your boat, or the airplane, and it feels like you're just sitting there nicely having your cup of tea, or whatever,

[19:38]

So this is a confusion. So it says, when you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving or that the scenery is moving. But if you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you'll notice, oh, it's the boat that's moving along, right? Have you had this experience? Similarly, so he uses this as a kind of image. Similarly, if you examine the myriad things, the myriad things are... anything you can think of basically. Myriad things are the 10,000 things. All the things that you see, hear, think of, touch, smell, those are the 10,000 things, the myriad things. So if you examine the myriad things, all the things that we can see, taste, touch, with a confused body and mind, you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. You might feel like you're kind of unchanging and permanent, And everything else seems to be shifting around.

[20:42]

And then this line, when you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self. So we have this sensation of, gee, I'm not changing. I'm just the same old me. I've been me since as long as I can remember. And we identify with that I or that me or that mine and we have certain preferences and we like certain things and we don't like certain things and we like certain clothes and we like certain music and we like certain people and other people. And it's all very set. We might have that feeling. And we look at the myriad things and they're all changing. But when we practice intimately and return to where we are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self, meaning we are not some permanent entity that's going along in the midst of a world that's changing.

[21:56]

We ourselves are ever-changing, constantly changing, impermanent, and actually there is no... separate, solid self that won't change ever. Now, we kind of know this intellectually. We're growing up. We've, you know, we can see our baby pictures. We know that there's been changes. And as we get older, the changes come maybe a little quicker. Or we don't like the changes. Maybe when we're young, we're kind of excited about the changes. But when you get older, we're not so happy about the changes. Anyway, But even so, we hold on to this idea that we're kind of not changing and that we're permanent or constant or that everything else is kind of moving and we're staying the same.

[22:58]

This is a very basic misunderstanding or confusion. So he says, similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind, you might suppose... that your mind and nature are permanent, but when you practice intimately and return to where you are, you will see nothing at all has unchanging self. So what is this practicing intimately, returning to where we are, practicing intimately? There's a song that my uncle, who's a jazz pianist and lyricist and singer, his name is Dave Frishberg. He has a cult following. Maybe some of you know him. Anyway, and he wrote a song called Oklahoma Toad.

[23:58]

Oklahoma Toad. And it sounds like it's a country-western song, but actually it's got these chords that make it a kind of jazz song. Anyway, And the lyric is, Oklahoma toad. On a dusty, dusty road. Just sitting there and thinking. Oklahoma toad. There's an... The next line is that there's a fat bug crawling. And it's crawling right in front of you. And if you don't act, that bug is just going to disappear. And it will soon be yesterday. Soon be yesterday. Soon be yesterday.

[25:00]

But the toad is just sitting there. And this fat bug is crawling. And he's kind of sitting there and thinking. And then it goes to, in the cold Oklahoma dawn, you'll find that black bug gone, that old, that bug gone. And he won't be returning. That bug won't be returning. And it will soon be yesterday. It's yesterday now. It's already, so the time is flowing. So this, it's a wonderful image, you know, of this. Have you seen those oak low tomatodes? Some people have seen them. They're kind of big and kind of greenishy, I don't know, all these different greeny, browny colors, and just plunk there. And thinking a lot, you know, about, hmm, what might I do with my life, you know, or

[26:06]

Maybe I'll get to that someday. Gee, that would be good if I... Yeah, but, you know, I've got things to think about here. Yeah. And it would soon be yesterday. And for the young people here, that, you know... For me, this is my 60th year, right? So I can... You know, I have this feeling very, very physically how... fast, how soon yesterday comes. So practicing intimately and returning to where we are, right there in the middle of a dusty road, how do we want to live our life? How do we want to take up our life? What matters to us? What gives a life meaning? Because it will soon be yesterday. if there's an opportunity, you know, like something to eat, like a lunch, then let's go for it, you know.

[27:18]

And instead of hesitation and should I, shouldn't I, or maybe tomorrow, or maybe next year, or I'll thank that person later, Or I'll say, I'm sorry. Well, it doesn't matter so much. And then, you know, the opportunity is, it vanishes, you know. Nothing at all has unchanging self. Nothing will stay put. And then the cold Oklahoma dawn, that bug's gone, you know. So, this practicing intimately and returning to where we are, when we return to where we are, we see that it's ever-changing, that life is unfolding moment after moment. There's nothing permanent to hold on to that's going to stay put. There's plenty of things we can have confidence in, and there's plenty of things that we can trust, but we can't trust that they're going to be unchanging and permanent.

[28:30]

Even those things that we rely on so strongly And this is the nature of our life. This is both the grief and the gratitude of our life, this quality. So keeping your eye closely on the boat is keeping your eye closely on this life that is not a separate life that's unchanging all by itself, but is, just like that sun found out, is filled with riches, partakes of the universal, interconnected life of the entire universe, is what our life really is. Not just a separate, small life. It's both small, it's partial, and huge, universal, at the exact same time.

[29:33]

This is the... the riches that were children of riches, this kind of riches. So this other section of the Genjo Koan that I wanted to bring up is also about boat, also about an image of the boat, of a boat. So Dogen says, he's talking about when the truth or dharma doesn't fill your body and mind, you think that it's sufficient. You think it's already sufficient. Now this seems very counterintuitive, this part of the Ganjo Koan. When Dharma does not fill your body and mind, you think that it's already sufficient. When Dharma does fill your body and mind, When Dharma fills your body and mind, you understand something is missing.

[30:37]

So when Dharma doesn't fill your body and mind, you think it's already sufficient. When Dharma fills your body and mind, you understand something's missing. And then he uses this image. For example, when you sail out in a boat in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight, The ocean looks circular and does not look any other way. Dogen went to China actually in 1223 when he was 23 years old. This was a huge trip, very dangerous, and he left the shores of the Japanese islands and went off into the China Sea. by the Japanese Sea and the China Sea, and was out there with no land in sight. So he's on this ship.

[31:40]

When you sail out in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight, and you view the four directions, so you look all around you, and what do you see? The ocean looks circular. It looks like a big circle, and it doesn't look any other way. It really does look like a circle. For those of you who have been out where there's no land in sight, even in the bay, Well, no, you can't do it in the bay, but out in the, through the Golden Gate, you can do it. With no land in sight, the ocean looks circular and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round nor square, right? Its features are infinite in variety. Whole worlds are there. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. So we have this ocean, right? And the ocean, for those of you, probably some of you have studied it in school about the ocean, it's infinite in variety, right? Under the ocean, there's so much to learn about under the ocean, over the ocean, and the different kinds of waves and the weathers, and the ocean is infinite in variety.

[32:51]

But we, when we sail out, when we look around the four directions, it looks like a big circle of water, right? So this is our limited view. And we all have limited view. We all see because why? Because of the way our eyes are constructed, the way this body that we have and our sense perceptions and our karmic life, a life created by our own actions and our own thinking, we see things in a certain way and it is limited. And we also realize, we might feel this When people sometimes look at us and have a lot of ideas about us and label us or call us names or dismiss us because they're not interested in us, because why? They look at us and, oh, they wear this outfit or they live over here, they don't live there or whatever. This is, that hurts, you know, that hurts us very much, actually, when we feel because

[34:00]

how people put us into a box, put us into something that's so small when we know that we're so much bigger than that. In fact, we're infinite in variety. We're constantly changing. And yet we can feel the pain of somebody having an idea of who we are. And I... So... If we understand in ourselves that we have a limited view, so when Dharma does not fill our body and mind, we think it's already sufficient. If we don't understand the truth of how things operate, how things... And one of the main truths is that we have a limited view. And to hold that truth... I have a limited view. I see a circle of water. I look at somebody, I have a whole bunch of views about them. That's limited. Drop it.

[35:02]

Find out who they are. Listen. Look at them. Just be with them. Allow them to come forward and, this is another part of the Ganjo Koan, allow them to come forward and realize themselves through me by my being there without all my views about who they are. If we understand that, then we have a chance. That's when Dharma fills our body and mind. We understand that something's missing. To realize something is missing when I meet a person. I don't know them. I don't know all about them just because they wear that kind of shoe, you know? This is so painful. And it's, I think, the basis of... prejudice of all kinds, racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia. And it's, I think, the basis of our ecological disaster also is not realizing we have a limited view.

[36:03]

We don't understand. We have to study. We have to, with great humility, take an action or say something about another person or... dismiss someone or have even opinions, an opinion. You know, we're very proud of our opinions, but our opinions, we have to hold them very, very lightly because we just see a circle of water. We don't know the depths of who somebody really is, where they've come from, what they've had to face, you know. So this... when Dharma doesn't fill our body and mind, we can be very arrogant, you know, and think it's already sufficient. When I first came to practice, you know, lots of ideas, you know, or you read a little bit about Zen, you think, I know all about Zen, I know all about sitting.

[37:09]

Or you study it in school a little bit, take a comparative religion class or whatever, I know all about it. And there's all these things. And, of course, the longer you study, the more you study, the deeper you go, the more with anything you realize that worlds upon worlds are there with art, with dance, with music, with any kind of study. There's two times this week I came upon this little factoid that it takes 10,000 hours for a human being, minimum, I think, to study. master a craft or a language or a music or pottery, whatever, 10,000 hours. It doesn't seem enough to me, actually, 10,000 hours. So someone was saying, okay, 10,000 hours, eight hours a day for 50 weeks? Would that do it? I don't know. I can't do the math. But they were talking about doing meditation. If for 50 weeks, eight hours a day, you practice, this is a certain kind of mindfulness meditation they were talking about,

[38:15]

you'd have maybe a chance of engaging fully, you know. But, oh, there was an article in the New York Times about pitching. I don't know if you're a baseball fan, but, you know, pitching over and over and over again, pitching 10,000 hours minimum to pitch, right? And this is the case with anything that we really take seriously and want to try. to learn a language. We have to give ourselves completely. But we often, when we dabble, like a dilettante, we first start out, oh, I know all about it. Painting, pottery, sure I know. See, I made a pot. And we don't realize the depths that are there. So to have this kind of humble sense or sense of our own limitations means that we're open to other people, we're ready, we have a flexible mind and a compassionate mind that gives people a chance.

[39:22]

So to remember that we see a circle of water, what we see is limited, always, and it's limited by our very, this body and this optic nerve and the fact that there are no colors externally, that we make colors in our brain, You learn something like that, that in the external, so-called external world, there's not color, that we, this particular eye consciousness, creates color in the brain. This is, we have a circle of water, you know. So... to encourage ourselves and our friends and each other to remember that we have a limited view and to walk kindly and with non-harming on this earth. This week they canceled the salmon fishing.

[40:29]

I don't know if you heard this in the newspaper, the salmon fishing for this season in northern California, Washington, Oregon, I guess. No ocean salmon fishing. And this is going to be devastating for the fishermen and fisheries anyway. And just knowing that not too long ago, you know, 100 years ago, 75 years ago, there was so much salmon that the Native Americans said you could walk when the salmon were spawning. There were so many salmon coming to spawn that you could walk across the rivers on their backs. And through our... you know, actions of greed, hate, and illusion, you know, these, and overfishing and overmining and overforesting, cutting forest trees, and through our not realizing we see things with a circle of water, actions have followed with

[41:40]

grave, grave consequences of harming, you know. Actually, in this stream, Erin, who was one of the leaders of the Coming of Age group, a couple years ago now, was walking down to this beach, and she heard a kind of slap, plop, plop, slapping noise, and went over to the right, to Redwood Creek, and saw a salmon in there, right? Two, two salmon had come up, our creek had come up. And then I don't know how much longer we found the little baby salmon that they had spawned. So the healing of the earth and the remedial work that needs to be done is endless and And ceremony is part of this work.

[42:44]

And I brought an article by Gary Snyder, Pulitzer Prize winner and writer and poet, and he talks about ceremony in terms of ecology and taking care of our world. And I just wanted to say a few things that he says. He says the artist and the writer has a particular job in terms of defending our planet and taking care of this earth. And the writer and the artist and the dancer and the arts themselves, they're not coming from wanting anything, you know, in terms of, it's a gift. What they give is a gift, and they can show and mirror what's happening, and they also can bring compassion.

[43:46]

He calls it the mirror of truth and the heart of compassion. So one of the things that human beings can do that animals don't do necessarily, although bees do, songs, I mean dances, and whales sing, and animals do some of this, but human beings in particular, song, story, and dance are all very fundamental to every culture, song, story, and dance. And at one time, song, story, and dance and drama were complete, was ceremony, was ceremony and sacred ritual. It wasn't like going to the theater to watch a play. It was one thing, and it was part of the religious life of the community, and in some cultures, of course, it still is. So this kind of ceremony, sacred ceremony of song, story, dance, and drama can still be activated and brought forth by the artists.

[45:08]

In Native communities, there's, who are hunters and fishers, fishermen and women hunters, ceremonies of gratitude go along with taking what they need for survival and elaborate ceremonies of gratitude. So often ceremonies include gratitude, like thanking and remembering when we eat, where this food comes from, taking the time to even imagine all the different people who have been involved in planting the food. And even before that, figuring out what wild things are edible and what wild things weren't edible. Our foremothers and fathers, at the risk of their life, figured out, found out, not figured out, experimented and found out what could be... eaten safely in what couldn't be. So we owe to them the grains that we have and the different vegetables that we now have.

[46:14]

So all of that and the people who planted the fields and cultivated and stored, figured out how to store and then cooked. Do we bear that in mind when we're eating? Do we take the time to know how this food comes to us, the innumerable labors. So this is a ceremony of remembering to feel the gratitude and allow our mind to contemplate this. This is a kind of ceremony. And I would say saying grace, you know, before meals or saying something is very, you know, it's cross-cultural, it's everywhere. So ceremonies of gratitude And there's also ceremonies of grief, ceremonies of joy, ceremonies of commitment, ceremonies of vow, times when something has happened internally to us that we need to enact for everyone to see or just for ourselves to see.

[47:28]

We may have our own personal ceremony. a Native American woman asked him, it was a college student, he was teaching college, and he said, humans have made such good use of animals, eating them, singing about them, drawing them, riding them, and dreaming about them. What do they get back from us? What do the animals get back from us? Which he thought was a very interesting question. And what he said was that the Ainu, which is a Native American in Alaskan area, no, the Ainu are Japanese, say that the deer salmon and bear like our music and are fascinated by our language.

[48:33]

So we sing to the fish or to the game and we speak words to them and we say grace. We do ceremonies and rituals. So we do ceremonies and rituals not just for ourself but as a way to give back to the animal world and all those beings plants and animals who are supporting us. We couldn't exist without them, right? This is one circle of giving and receiving and supporting and being supported. And performance is currency in the deep world's gift economy to perform. So... human contribution to planetary ecology, says Gary Snyder, is our entertaining eccentricity, our skills as musicians and performers, our awe-inspiring dignity as ritualists and solemn ceremonialists.

[49:47]

Because that is what delights the watching wild world. I found that fascinating, you know? That particularity of human beings that we can do ceremony and ritual and sing and poetry and drama and art is a way of giving back and acknowledging everything that's been given to us and it's appreciated, so he says. And perhaps the greatest thing that we can give is our kindness and our non-harming and our compassion to the world. And that can be a ceremony, a daily ceremony, a daily ceremony of non-harming beings, non-harming ourselves, for starters, non-harming beings, and giving our compassion and wanting the best for others.

[50:55]

as well as ourselves. So... Maybe that's enough for today. I feel complete. How about you all? Yeah? You ready? Okay, thank you all very much.

[51:27]

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