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 evening. I didn't scroll through all the little boxes, but I see old friends from Zen Center. I see old friends from far-flung places. And I know that some of you are listening right there in the City Center Building, where I've spent many happy hours practicing. And Brian, I want to thank you for that introduction. Little do you know how much Darlene is going to feature in this talk. And I'm really honored to be asked to speak. I feel like Zen Center is one of the centers of the universe, and it is truly a great gift and honor to be part of the great mandala of San Francisco Zen Center.

[01:16]

I'm speaking to you tonight from Urbana, Illinois, from the monastery of my little home. And I thank all the many causes and conditions that make it possible for us to be together tonight, for me to be with you, even though I'm not in San Francisco, and for you to join with me tonight. spiritual territory, landscape, journey of illness, sickness, and pain. I know some of you are probably thinking, oh, goody, that just sounds like the cheeriest sort of talk ever.

[02:22]

But, you know, for some of you, this subject may be highly relevant. And for others, I am so happy that this is not your current territory and landscape. But believe me, it will be relevant. Maybe it already has been in your life and it will be again because it is intrinsic to our humanity. Sickness, old age, and death are seen in our Buddhist tradition as great teachers, as great messengers. The last couple of weeks, as I've been thinking about this talk, I realized that they make a very satisfying acronym, sickness, old age, and death, which is SOD. And so tonight, we're going to be talking about

[03:29]

the first part of Saat will leave old age and death for other talks. And it is important to remember that they are messengers. They are teachers. And I want to be clear that this talk is not theoretical. This talk is not an intellectual exploration of sickness and pain. I'll be speaking from my own lived experience as someone whose life unexpectedly for the last 20 years or so has involved a dance with physical difficulty.

[04:31]

And I'll say more about that later. But I just want you to know, actually, even as I speak tonight, I'm still recovering from COVID, which hit me really hard earlier this summer. And so if I'm a little confused, please forgive me. Know that I'm bringing my heart to you, whatever may be useful to you tonight. I want to begin with a famous quote from the Vimalakirti Sutra, which is one of our truly beloved Mahayana sutras. And just to give you a little background, although the sutra we think was composed sometime hundreds of years after the time of the Buddha, but it takes place at the time of the Buddha. And it's... hero or main character is a layperson, not a monk or nun, but a layperson whose name is Vimalakirti.

[05:40]

And Vimalakirti is a highly unusual and unique character in our Buddhist literature. Really pretty wild. But in this sutra, it begins with the news that Vimalakirti has fallen ill. And the Buddha is with his assembly of monks and nuns and bodhisattvas. And he wants someone to go visit, make a kind of visit the way you would to someone who is ill to see how he's doing to his beloved disciple, Vimalakirti. But no one will go. Because as they explain to the Buddha, as he asks one person and then the other person, they've all had humiliating experiences with Vimalakirti in the past, where his unconventional wisdom has left them nonplussed and embarrassed.

[06:51]

And so no one will go. Until finally, Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, whose statue is on the altar, at Green Gulch, says, okay, even though I've had similar experiences with Vimalakirti, I'll go. I'll go to offer my good wishes and have a conversation with him. So Manjushri goes to visit Vimalakirti at his house, and Vimalakirti is in a tiny room with just a bed in it. But magically, Not only monastery, but the entire assembly, who've all come along to see what happens, fit in this tiny, tiny room. And as an aside, to this day in Zen monasteries, the abbot's room is known as Vimalakirti's room. Because just like Vimalakirti, it may be a small room, but vast goings-on can occur within it.

[08:00]

great moments of meeting and awakening. So, Manjushri gets there, along with all of the Buddhist assembly, in Vimalakirti's small room and inquires about his health. And Vimalakirti says, and I'm going to read this twice, Manjushri My sickness will last as long as do the sicknesses of all living beings. Were all living beings to be free from sickness, I also would not be sick. Why? Manjushri, for the Bodhisattva, the world consists only of living beings and sickness is inherent in living in the world. I'll read it again. Manjushri, my sickness will last as long as do the sicknesses of all living beings.

[09:02]

Were all living beings to be free from sickness, I also would not be sick. Why? Manjushri, for the Bodhisattva, the world consists only of living beings and sickness is inherent in living in this world. In other words, Vimalakirti is sick because the world is sick. Because we as living beings are sick. And he is also a bodhisattva. His whole life, as highly unconventional as it is, is to be a benefit to others. In fact, it turns out later on that really he's feigned sickness in order to help others wake up. A bodhisattva does not float somewhere in nirvana above the world, but is, paraphrasing here in the words of Dogen, covered in mud and dripping wet.

[10:12]

And yet, do we really live with this understanding of this shared sickness? I think for most of us, and I'm speaking for myself here as well, sickness seems like an aberration, something that's gone wrong in an otherwise non-sick life. Something to be cured by the right medication, the right diet, maybe the right way of thinking about things. Many years ago, I... did a retreat with the wonderful Buddhist teacher of death and dying, Stephen Levine. And I remember one of the things she said is, if that was true, if you thought the right way, that would mean you could be free from sickness, then all of us have failed in the end because we all die in the end. So he wasn't highly convinced by that idea.

[11:19]

And for some of us, whatever our age, there is really no ducking this reality. I want to just give you a little sense of what I'm speaking about here from my own life. So back in 1998, after having practiced at Green Gulch and probably a little bit even at City Center at that point, I had an opportunity to go to Tassajara and do a practice period there. It was a life-changing experience. But about a year later, I, for some reason, hadn't caught mononucleosis when I was younger, and I caught it, and I was in my mid-30s, and it made me really sick. And then that brought in a kind of cascade of autoimmune problems that became a real powerful force in my life over the next 11 years or so. A lot of pain. It would come and go, so I would never know what I could trust about my body.

[12:25]

I couldn't actually do Zen practice in the way that I loved because of the unreliability of my body. I had a wonderful job, and I eventually had to leave it because I was getting sicker. And so it became a really primary practice. for me how to live with this situation. And then it went into remission for about 10 years, nine years. And then out of the blue, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, another kind of autoimmune illness. And once again, Illness has, you know how they say puppies help you get rid of things that you thought you wanted or needed?

[13:26]

Illness does the same thing. And so although I had gone to seminary, I had become a Unitarian Universalist ministry, I had a wonderful job, I needed to leave that position in order to try to take care of my health a little less than about nine months ago. So I've been working with this, the co-on of illness and pain for a long time. But luckily, I haven't been alone in that. There are guides going all the way back to female curative, but others as well. And actually, I want to dedicate this talk to Darlene Cohen, the late Darlene Cohen, who was a Zen Center-trained priest and teacher and who would probably be laughing at me right now if she could hear this.

[14:28]

I'm going to say that she is the closest thing to Vimalakirti that I've ever encountered. And I was lucky enough. I really can't say that I was one of her students. She has wonderful students and Dharma heirs who are continuing her work. But her writings and my contact with her have really informed my own life and practice. And so I'm deeply grateful to her. There have been many unique and powerful teachers to come from Zen Center, but I think most people would agree that Darlene was one of a kind. She developed rheumatoid arthritis in her early 30s with a very young child. She was practicing at city center at the time. I think I might just share her own words from her book, Turning Suffering Inside Out, about what her experience was at that time, this young woman. When the disease first struck me, I was forced to stay in bed.

[15:30]

I lost 40 pounds. I couldn't dress myself, hold the phone receiver or get up from the toilet unassisted. I was completely overcome by unremitting pain, fatigue and despair. In four months of deterioration, I lost everything that meant anything to me. Reliance on a strong young body, my achievements and the sense of self-worth they brought me, my pleasure in being a sexually attractive woman, my identity as a mother, and my ability to do the required practices and sustain myself in the community in which I lived as a student of Zen meditation. I became isolated. from everyone I knew by my pain and fear, and ultimately, even by the consuming effort I had to make to do any little thing, like get up from a chair, pick up a cup of tea. So that's where her journey started.

[16:33]

But it's not where it ended, because she learned ways of being with her pain, radical ways. She continued to practice. She continued to develop. And ultimately, she was able to use her own suffering and her own powerful honesty to really help others. And she continues to do so through her writings and, again, her Dharma heirs who carry on her work. So I know that there are many people listening today who never had a chance to meet Darlene. So I'm going to try to give you a sort of sketch of her so you can have a sense of her in your own eye, in your own mind's eye. I want you to imagine a sort of impish person, a mischievous person with brilliant eyes and a little topknot on top of her head, which she had towards the end of her life, which made her look like a Tibetan bikini, which she acted like.

[17:40]

at times, her hands and much of her body gnarled and frippled by arthritis. Someone completely unafraid of talking about anything, whether that was sex or rage or despair or fear, the whole nine yards of being human. She called the work that she did with others suffering and delight. And she lived a life of suffering and delight. Another little quote from her book. I think many people have a skewed idea of what accepting pain is. If you have the idea that coping well should resemble serenity or equanimity, something like the proverbial grace under fire, then you think you should resign yourself with a big cosmic grin, no matter what horrors are being visited upon you.

[18:51]

Actually, accepting fails to convey the tremendous energy and courage it takes to accept physical pain as part of your life. Truly accepting pain is not at all like passive resignation. Rather, it is active engagement with life in its most intimate sense. There are a lot of ways of talking about sickness and pain. It's a huge country. But tonight, I want to explore three ways Three different frames that one could inhabit, that one does inhabit when this is part of your life. So for tonight, here we go. These are the three.

[19:53]

The sufferer, the warrior, and the bodhisattva. And I do not want to talk about these as some kind of hierarchy or with judgment that somehow one is better than another. They each have their gifts. They each have something to teach us. And there are shadow signs as well. So let's explore. The sufferer. My, this one is so familiar to me. I wrote an essay for Inquiring Mind years ago on what I called dancing in the dark fields or what it meant to live with illness. And this is a little paragraph from that. I've cried a lot of tears of self-pity in the last few years.

[20:55]

And I wonder why self-pity is such a pejorative term. To feel pity for the person in pain, me, has been the first step towards really understanding that this is the human condition. I'm getting a taste of it a little sooner than most, a little later than some. I know a sweet little girl who developed a rare autoimmune illness just before her sixth birthday, and I watched her parents suffer as she struggled for breath. My friend Michael, this is the late Michael Sawyer, another wonderful Zen Center character, lies in his bed with Parkinson's, not able to speak, his eyes locked on mine. Our tears mingle together, a big invisible river circling around the world, and through my tears of self-pity, I join everyone who cries. This summer, I have felt a little bit Job-like.

[22:00]

So I take some really miraculous medications that were not so available to Darlene, actually, but have really helped my rheumatoid arthritis, but they basically mean that I'm immune suppressed. And so I got COVID despite every possible precaution. And then I took Paxlovid and I got the Paxlovid rebound, which meant I got COVID again or continued to have COVID. And then I got through that and then I got pneumonia. And then I got through that with the help of antibiotics. And then that triggered a whole bunch of other lung inflammation problems and having to use steroids. And I am still recovering. And it felt terribly unfair. So I was thinking about Job. And a friend told me, I hadn't known this despite having studied, that Job is actually a wisdom figure that even predates the... the Hebrew Bible.

[23:02]

And there's an incredible lament in the middle of the book of Job. And I just thought I'd share some of it with you because maybe you have felt this way in your life. After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. He said, may the day of my birth perish and the night that said a boy is conceived. Why did I not perish at birth and die as I came from the womb? Why were there knees to receive me and breasts that I might be nursed? For now I would be lying down in peace. I would be asleep and at rest with kings and rulers of the earth who built for themselves places now lying in ruins, with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver. Or why was I not hidden away in the ground like a stillborn child, like an infant who never saw the light of day? There the wicked cease from turmoil. And there the weary are at rest. For sighing has become my daily food.

[24:05]

My groans pour out like water. What I feared has come upon me. What I dreaded has happened to me. I have no peace, no quietness. I have no rest, but only turmoil. One of my very first sermons as a seminary student before becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister was about the big waves of life. And those waves that hit you, how we can ride the waves. But then sometimes waves are bigger than we are. And they tumble us in the sand. They smash us down. And what do we do then? Humility. Humility. And another quote from Darlene. People sometimes ask me where my own healing energy comes from. How in the midst of this pain, this implacable, slow crippling, can I encourage myself and other people? My answer is that my healing comes from my bitterness itself, my despair, my terror.

[25:13]

It comes from the shadow. I dip down into that muck again and again, and then am flooded with its healing energy. So those are the gifts of the sufferer. But if you have been a sufferer in whatever form it's taken, you may have noticed that if you spend too much time in that place, that like Job, everything grows dark. And since some of you are people drawn towards Zen, maybe all of you, you might be drawn to another archetype, which is the archetype of the warrior. And the warrior archetype is our favorite societal archetype. to talk about illness and pain, just read the obituaries. You'll see things like, she fought the cancer bravely, or his struggle with pain took great courage.

[26:14]

We love stories of bravery in the face of adversity. And Zen, our DNA is full of this warrior energy. As my teacher, Norman Fisher says, Zen was invented for arrogant young men who needed a little school of hard knots. But it does take courage and strength to sit upright in the middle of the fire. There is real courage and strength that develops through Zen practice. And there is power in the warrior. The warrior is what can get us up in the morning. The warrior can keep us looking for what Maybe even all the doctors say they don't know that you're going to find the way through. You're going to find the way through your life. But it has a shadow side as well. One of our warrior practices is Tangario. And anybody who's been to Tassajara for a practice period knows about Tangario.

[27:18]

It comes from the tradition of sitting outside the gates of the monastery as an aspiring monk until the... Gatekeeper will let you in. And for us, Tangario happens inside the gates of the monastery in the Zendo, but it's five days of just sitting. Nothing else happens. No walking meditation, no talks, no nothing. Very powerful practice. Also very possible to hurt yourself in this practice. In my tangario, there was someone who actually did permanent damage to his sciatic nerve because although you don't walk, you can stand at your seat. And he sat like a warrior. And that was the last time he sat on his afu. He had to sit on a chair from then on because he had hurt himself. So that's the shadow of the warrior, not paying attention to the body, not listening to the body. Here's something I wrote from again in Dancing in the Dark Fields.

[28:23]

It's easy to fight and resist, but I've learned the hard way how resistance increases the suffering. Instead, there has to be a kind of surrender. The body is firmly in the lead and my job is to follow it. That's what this dancing partner has taught me. Finally, I think there is a third way. And again, there are a thousand ways, but in the way I'm thinking about it tonight, there is a third way that includes, does not exclude either the sufferer or the warrior and is bigger than both of them, deeper than both of them. Remember what Vimalakirti, the Bodhisattva said, Manjushri, my sickness will last as long as do the sicknesses of all living beings. Were all living beings to be free from sickness, I also would not be sick.

[29:28]

Why? Manjushri, for the Bodhisattva, the world consists only of living beings and sickness is inherent in living in the world. In this way, there is spaciousness. There is room, just like Vimalakirti's little room. big enough for the Buddha's entire assembly and for goddesses and all kinds of other things, if you ever read the sutra. But within the bodhisattva way, there is room for everything, for self-pity, for being overwhelmed, for being caught up in fighting your circumstances, even though you know it's probably not going to help, for your courage and for your care of others. And for remembering that sickness and pain are inherent in living in the world. We are bigger than all of it. Our awareness can hold all of that and more.

[30:31]

We can even dedicate our own suffering to the well-being of others. This is a Vajrayana practice. To, when suffering, to offer it as a... as an offering for the well-being of others, as a prayer for the well-being of others who are suffering in the same way. The bodhisattva knows two things, never forgets two things. This is a teaching in the Perfection of Wisdom teachings, where it says the bodhisattva is like a bird with two wings. Of course, a bird can't fly with just one wing. The wings of the Bodhisattva on one hand are wisdom and on the other hand are compassion. So the wisdom is this spacious mind. And the compassion is knowing that even though we are all interconnected, even though we know that birth and death are stories, still,

[31:43]

We suffer and others suffer. And the only possible response is to let your heart break open to your own suffering and to the suffering of others. And the most incredible thing is that we can use our sickness to help others. There's an old story about this from the Book of Serenity, great selection of koans. When Dongshan was unwell, a monk asked, you are ill, teacher, but is there anyone who does not get ill? Dongshan said, there is. Even though Bhimala Kirti said, it's everyone. The monk said, does the one who is not ill look after you? You know, the idea that there's like, there are the well people and the sick people and the well people look after the sick people. But Dongshan said, I have the opportunity to look after him. So when we're sick and in pain, often we feel useless.

[32:47]

We feel isolated. As Darlene described, we feel separate from others and from the world. But we really can show up to benefit others through our sickness, through our pain. One last quote from Darlene. The world that opened to me through engaging the physical suffering and mental anguish caused by my disease. has turned out to be inexpressibly rich. Because if we can engage with our suffering, connect with it, dance with it, tease it, coax it, curse it, as well as trying to change it, just consider it our lives, experience it as our lives, the only lives we have. It changes the quality of that suffering. It's not just our suffering. It's everything. When we look at it that way, We can't make the usual divisions. We feel connected with everything. It's strangely comforting, paradoxically, paradoxically comforting.

[33:53]

In the moment that we can embrace our own suffering, the barrier between ourselves and others is gone. So part of the reason that I was invited to give this talk is that I'm going to facilitate a class, a four-part class in September and early October on dancing in the dark fields, working with illness and pain. And I formally invite you to consider joining if you feel like it would benefit your life in some way. And I say facilitate rather than teach because I think anyone, any human, who has been in the territory of illness and pain, has wisdom already to offer each other as well. So I'd love to see you there if you feel so inclined.

[34:54]

And I want to close with maybe the most famous Bodhisattva prayer of all time, which is the prayer of Shantideva. Bodhisattva's way of life a long, long time ago in Northern India. If you want, you can put your hands in Gusho. I am going to, as I read it, and I dedicate this talk not only to the spirit of Darlene Cohen and how her work goes on in the world, but to all who are suffering and ill. May I become at all times both now and forever, a protector for those without protection, a guide for those who have lost their way, a ship for those with oceans to cross, a sanctuary for those in danger, a lamp for those in the dark, and a servant to all those in need.

[35:58]

As long as living beings exist and suffering afflicts them, may I too abide to dispel the misery of the world. May I be a guard for those who need protection, a guide for those on the path, a boat, a raft, a bridge for those who wish to cross the flood. May I be a lamp in the darkness, a resting place for the weary, a healing medicine for all who are sick, a vase of plenty, a tree of miracles. And for the boundless multitudes of living beings, may I bring sustenance and awakening. enduring like the earth and sky until all beings are freed from sorrow and all are awakened. 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.

[37:01]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dormon.

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