This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening, everyone. Lovely to see you and lovely to be here. This time coming to Tassajara feels particularly special to me. because, well, I was here many times with my teacher, Surya Kempo, Great Spirit Manifesting Dharma, Darlene Cohen. And we are studying, our group, Great Spirit, is studying the first thing that I studied with her when I came to Tassajara, which is the mind of absolute trust, although that has different... many different translations, and I'm very grateful to be studying it with my dear Dharma sister, Diane Fitzgerald.

[01:04]

And I'm just reminded, my Dharma sister, Lisa, is here. She and I ordained together. You were Darlene's first Jukai student, if I'm not mistaken, right? And my dear Dharma brother, Stephen, You were in her spot group. She was your guiding teacher for that particular thing. So I'm feeling her energy quite a bit. And probably at her insistence, actually. Do I need to speak up? No, I just wanted to ask, could you tell us who Darlene Cohen is? Because not everybody in the Zendo knows... What a great question, Heather! I thought I would give you a softball question. That's going to be the first three pages. No, I'm just joking. Yeah, no, I'm very much going to tell you a little bit about Darlene. So I'm feeling her energy. And Darlene lived here for many years. And as her student, we came here for many years with her.

[02:11]

And I'm actually staying in the cabin, which was the last cabin that she was in on her last visit here before she died, which is 2B. And... So she was getting sick. I am going to tell more of the story, but just to give you one highlight. She was getting sick. She had ovarian cancer. And she was supposed to teach the Lotus Sutra. And she was quite forlorn that she was not going to be able to teach it. And so she was having us in small groups come into the cabin in order to say her sad goodbyes. And after she... Oh, and I should mention too that Catherine is in the lineage because your teacher was Dharma transmitted by Darlene. So there's a lot of Darlene tentacles here this week.

[03:12]

She's having us come into the cabin and she's giving us these sad goodbyes. And then after she says the first couple of sentences, she pulls back the cover, pulls out an enormous water pistol and starts soaking us all with the water pistols. This is a little bit of Darlene's spirit. A little bit of her spirit. When she first arrived at San Francisco in a hippie... flower-powered VW van, and she was taking a tour of San Francisco Zen Center. She later reported to David Chadwick, the author of Crooked Cucumber, and a great chronicler of Suzuki Roshi, in an interview in 1995, what happened to her when she was taking this first tour of San Francisco Zen Center. So she says, we, and she's referring to her then partner, but soon to be husband, Tony.

[04:13]

We went back to the hallway on our way with our guide, who was showing us around the Zen Center, to tour the raison d'etre of the entire building, the Zendo, the meditation hall where students gathered four times daily for 40-minute periods. As we descended the curved staircase to reach the lower level, we were met by a tiny Japanese man who... flanked on either side by students. He wore traditional Japanese robes. As soon as he saw Tony and me, colorful in our hippie garb, this is in like the late 60s, and feathers and beads, he broke into a huge grin. He came to a full stop on the stairs, put his palms together in front of his face, and bowed deeply to us. Spontaneously, we imitated his bow. It did not end immediately, but The three of us remained bent over in tribute to each other for what seemed like a very long time, long enough for me to enter the present, long enough for me to feel inexplicably, deeply, hauntingly moved.

[05:23]

In that moment, bowing with that kind old man, I understood that it was all okay. I was okay. The world was okay. Maybe not the way I wanted it all the time, but it was the way it was, and I would go from there. My heart opened up and spilled over with gratitude and love. Where did that come from? How long had it been since I'd felt that kind of liberation? When at last we raised our heads in unison with his, his eyes met mine. His gaze was direct and steady. I sensed he knew what I had experienced or at least that I had had an experience. He smiled and went on with his attendance. And then describing this encounter later for some of her students, she said, I felt something incredible in that moment and I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing what he did.

[06:26]

And that is exactly how she spent the next 41 years of her life. So Darlene came to San Francisco in that period of time. She went on, she practiced here, she practiced in Tassajara. She wrote three books, numerous articles, all of which are still very, very current and very meaningful. She was a member of the Elders' Council for San Francisco Zen Center. She co-founded with a handful of people whose names I'll briefly mention because they deserve it, Lou Richman, Grace Shearson, Steve Stuckey, and Gary McNabb, a very innovative three-year low residency Zen priest training seminary that actually went into its second cohort before she unfortunately died.

[07:28]

And there were other things that happened, but it kind of fell apart. But it was just way ahead of its time. She also founded a number of what she called suffering and delight groups. And because she was afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis from the time she was 34 and told she would be an invalid for the rest of her life, when she actually regained her strength through... she attributed to meditation, but also I would say great determination. She founded these groups to help people with chronic pain. And the whole premise of these groups was that non-duality, it's not just pain. It's not just delight, which is why she called them suffering and delight. They coexist simultaneously. And if you can train yourself from using some of the techniques of meditation... of Zen Buddhism, to actually expand your point of view so that you're not stuck in the dualism of just pain, you can actually go on to have an incredibly rewarding life.

[08:37]

I think she had one of the most satisfying lives of anybody I know, despite having everything in her body replaced at least once, hobbling around and limping, and ultimately you know, getting cancer as a result, unfortunately, of the treatment that she took at the end of her life for the rheumatoid arthritis. So she was a very innovative, dedicated teacher. But what I loved about her most, honestly, and what I respected the most about her, is that she was a very, very dedicated practitioner. There was no separation between her and what she did as a student and how she taught as a teacher. And she had a wonderful sense of humor, which you might have gotten some sense of with the water guns. Her last sashin and last practice period was in 2010, and she died in 2011, in January.

[09:42]

And at that sushin, she talked about a handful of things that she considered to be her core teachings, the things that over the 40 years of her life had held her the most in terms of practice and that helped her transform her suffering the most. And one of them was concentration practices. She attributed this to old Buddhist texts, the Anipanisata Sutta, the Satipatanya Sutta, all the things that help us stay in the present moment as opposed to being dragged away by all the myriad distractions. Personal koans. So we all know koans, classic koans, from the Blue Cliff Record and other collections. But what Darlene wanted to have us look at were, what are the koans in our lives that have us standing in our own blind spot? What are the places that are unhealed wounds that are limiting us and obstructing us?

[10:44]

What are the defenses that are so outdated, yet because of the power of habit energy, we find we're still doing them, which are, again, creeping in and choking our ability to have more liberation. She was very, very big on body-to-body practice. The fact that when we sit together, something happens. when we practice together, whether it's for a practice period, whether it's for the 13 or 14 years that a Sangha-like Great Spirit Sangha has been in place, whether it's you've been, you know, at Tassajara for a handful of years or come for one or several practice periods, something happens. Something is transmitted body to body, this energy, right? And this is something that... Roshi Bernie Glassman in the Maizumi lineage calls one-body practice. We ultimately begin to feel this non-separation, that we are one body.

[11:47]

All of the instructions that the Eno gave us when we came here are all designed to help us experience that, to hold us as one body as we move smoothly together. She talked to one of her primary... was about the suffering and delight, non-duality. She also called it Plum Blossoms at Hell's Gate. But the one that I want to talk about tonight and that has meant the most to me in my practice is her teachings on vow. So what she thought was that vow was so important for us in terms of living out this life as bodhisattvas and as practitioners. that on the one hand vow increases our virya, our energy level in order to do this practice, which can be sometimes very demanding, and that vow is a supreme antidote to all the distractions that we face in the world, whether we're in the monastery or practicing in the monastery of everyday life.

[13:00]

And that what vow allows us to access is the stability, the equanimity that we really need to have in order to practice what in our group we were talking about today from the mind of absolute trust which is not having preferences or not picking and choosing what it is that we do in our lives, how we live, what we prefer. This is what Darlene said about vow. Vow is very important in Soto Zen. because so much of the activity we do in Soto Zen looks passive. We sit for long periods of time without a specific object of focus. We respect becoming comfortable with confusion. We let enlightenment unfold rather than chasing it around. And we practice being willing to let the myriad things be themselves. We're not so interested in roadmaps like jhanas or bumis.

[14:02]

So it is very... easy if you are a practitioner of soto zen to get lost somewhere, to be confused about your original intention, the reason you started sitting in the first place. So the vows we make to ourselves, to each other, become very important. They become guideposts. They cut through that confusion. They create samadhi. The power of a vow deeply made is that it works 24-7. and even beyond our understanding. A vow establishes a sort of independence of mind. And what it's independent from is that me, me, me that's always going on. A vow establishes some independence from that. And she goes on to say, in my own experience, my vows to follow the precept trump all my plots of revenge. any intricate strategies I might have concocted when I feel I have been wronged.

[15:06]

And I don't even consciously know ahead of time that what I'm going to do is not take that revenge on this person. I personally plot all the revenge that I can for this situation, and I have no idea that I'm going to be kind instead as a response to betrayal or hurt. In fact, I always think just the opposite, that I'm going to go ahead with all these strategies and plans, and I'm going to satisfy my Scorpio's lust for revenge. But just as I'm rising to the evil that lurks within me, Some kindness comes out instead. I'm always startled. It's as if some process is going on in me that is just going on and deepening and it just hasn't worked its way through all my systems yet. It hasn't altered the old programming completely yet. I'm not conscious of it, but it's very, very effective. So this idea that there's a power to vow...

[16:07]

that she recognized and that she felt, has been echoed by so many other teachers in our lineage. And I want to talk a little bit about that. The one thing that she said that, well, many things she said that stuck with me, but she would say in terms of vow, she said, when you live a life of vow, there is no more misfortune. It's all just grist for the mill. which kind of echoes the favorite koan that I off-repeat from Yumen or Wumen. What is the great teaching of a lifetime to which he responds, an appropriate response? There's no more asking about the whys and wherefores of things. Rather, it becomes how. Vow helps us to respond appropriately. with appropriate behavior. How do I respond when I feel I've been wronged, when I think life is fair, when I'm nervous, when I'm scared, when I'm upset?

[17:07]

So I think personally that this is part of the magic that happens when we enter practice, when our own intention or vow gets married to zazen. the ineffable, mysterious way in which zazen works. And we find ourselves over time actually rearranged in a way that we couldn't have imagined when we first started. Oh yes, I'm going to get my, that person's going to get their comeuppance, I'm going to do this or that. And instead we find ourselves acting in surprisingly different, wholesome and upright ways. Suzuki Roshi said, To take vow is very important. To believe in Buddhism means to take vow. If you don't take vow, life will be life of karma. Only when we take vow, our life is life of Buddhist. I'm quoting directly, by the way. To take vow is with maybe the most important point.

[18:15]

And I think that what he's pointing at here is my own understanding of what happens when we do enter into this life of vow, when we do make these very deep and profound intentions. You don't have to do it formally, but I think if you do do it formally, there's an extra... kick to it shall we say in terms of the powerful ritual container that's held when we take jukai or tokudo or dharma transmission or on the full moon ceremony all of these occasions we make this profound transition from having lived a life out of our karma just being buffeted around pushed and pulled by all the things that happened to us in early life unexamined And out of all that habit energy, we're just kind of run amok. But when we start to examine it, and when we organize it, it becomes organized by this principle of vow-taking, then we start to move from living karmically to living dharmically, to living intentionally, right?

[19:26]

Out of vow, with much more clarity, with wisdom, with compassion, but with intention. I have time to quote Suzuki Roshi more, so I will. Why not, right? He says, why we observe precepts or why we take vow is to actualize Buddha spirit. Buddha spirit. So I take vow. You know, this is the way. Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. The sentient beings are numberless, you know. If it's numberless, you know. How impossible is it to save them? And he laughs. And then he goes on to say, but the purpose of it, if you understand the purpose of observing the precepts, the purpose of taking vow is to rise Buddha mind. Then when you say, I will not kill, at that moment you have Buddha mind.

[20:30]

There is no need to think. So to arise, to be a Buddhist, moment by moment, we take vow. Robert Aiken Roshi wrote in his book on the... I believe that this is Taking the Path of Zen. He said, I have heard people say, I cannot recite these vows because I cannot hope to fulfill them. Actually, Kanzayon, or Avalokiteshvara, the incarnation of mercy and compassion, weeps because she cannot save all of these beings. Nobody fulfills them. Great vows for all. But we vow to fulfill them as best we can. That is our practice. So here we are just taking these incredible impossible vows. I think Blanche Hartman summed it up best when she said, we just put our best effort forward on every moment. That's what we try to do.

[21:32]

But when it is informed by vow, it's a very, very powerful thing. Dido Lurie in his book on the precepts talks about echoing this kind of this ineffable power of vow and vow-taking. He says that when we intend something or when we make a vow about something, we actually set in motion the karma of that vow, right? You know, so imagine you're a person in recovery and you vow you're not going to drink, abuse your credit cards, sex, overeat, whatever, and you start... embodying that vow, you have this vow. And before long, you have embodied the karma of that particular intention. I like Jan Chosen Bai's writings on vow.

[22:34]

She wrote a book that may have been put into a second edition, I'm not sure. She talks about the vow-powered life. I think that's actually the... the title of her book. And she says, vows act like a conduit for our life energy. If we do not have a clear and underlying purpose for our life, our life energy can become scattered and subject to being frittered away. Vows prevent us from reaching the end of our life and looking back with the sad question, what happened? How did I wind up here? Vows keep us from acting unconsciously. Again, acting out of that unexamined karma. From becoming puppets jerked around by karmic cause and effect. They act as a compass to help us set a clear direction for our life. Like our own internal GPS system that we can check when we feel confused or when we feel lost with our life direction.

[23:35]

A vow can become a kind and a patient voice inside that says... please go straight for five more miles or for five more years. It doesn't get upset when you've taken a wrong turn. It says, you've wandered off course. Please return to your path to reach your destination. Vows act like a gyroscope, which is a device that helps to maintain the upright orientation of a ship or an airplane, regardless of the motion of that vehicle. It stabilizes a vessel and keeps it upright in conditions that could disorient a human being, such as thick fog. When difficulties arise in our life, it is easy to become confused, frozen in indecision or depression, to lose track of where we're headed, and to begin to wander aimlessly. Recollecting our vows can help us regain our equilibrium so that we can move back to our life again, our life path.

[24:37]

And then she says... You cannot discover your vows by thinking. Your vows lie within you. So to me, that last sentence speaks to the fact that vows, like wisdom, like compassion, are things that we already possess inside of ourselves, but they just need to be activated. We need to find them in ourselves and to activate them, which is, of course, you know, reference to... Dogen's great teaching, if we're already enlightened, why do we have to do this? Because we have to practice in order to actualize the vow. If you aren't familiar with Jan chosen by, she's the abbot of... a monastery that she actually calls Great Vow with her husband. She's co-abbit there. And so vow is obviously very important to her. But she was a student of Maizumi Roshi and kind of a counterpart of Suzuki Roshi, but a different lineage.

[25:42]

And Maizumi went south and started East LA Zen Center while Suzuki Roshi came to the San Francisco Bay Area. And she talks in a very tender and endearing way about understanding something about Maizumi that she didn't understand when he was alive. So she wanted her students to get a sense of what he actually looked like and sounded like. So there's very little video footage of him. But she found some video footage where he's actually being interviewed by somebody. And the person asks him, Christians believe in a soul that continues after this life. Do Buddhists believe in something permanent that continues after death? Maizumi Roshi considered the question for a moment and then he replied, no. Then he instantly understood

[26:44]

Sorry. He replied, no. Then he added, rather we believe in vow. And then quoting Chosen By, she says, my late teacher's words struck me to the core. I instantly understood what I had been trying for many years to understand. I understood the power of vows. It becomes a force that continues after we die. perhaps forever. Just as fragments of our physical energy, the calcium in our bones and the carbon in our flesh, do not disappear when we die but go on to form the bodies of new beings, so our psychic energy also continues after death and has an effect on minds and bodies well into the future. Thus the energy of a strong vow does not die with the person but moves through time. changing as it is picked up by new people, always continuing to bear fruit.

[27:47]

Time check, what time should I be done? 20th? Huh? 8.45? Okay, thank you very much. So, that understanding that she came to I think is so powerful for me and so palpable. Sitting right here right now, we're sitting here because of the vows of other people. The way that that energy has lived. All of the energy of Suzuki Roshi and his early followers, Baker Roshi, all of the people that built Tassahara, all of the people subsequently still alive and those who have passed and left their physical form. We are here because of the energy of their vow to do this, to make this place, to continue the practice, to pass it on. It's really, really quite beautiful and quite powerful. And in certain ways, I mean, I would say because of our direct ancestor, and I'm looking at my beloved Dharma sister, we are here because of Darlene's vows, right?

[29:00]

And we are here and we are passing it on to those people we have the privilege to work with as well. And they will pass it on in known and unknown ways to all the people that you all meet throughout your lives. So, this power of vow, and particularly what Chosen talks about when she talks about vow being a gyroscope, that no matter what the conditions helps us to stay upright, to find our equilibrium, I think is worth contemplating right now. I don't know if you've heard. There's some stuff going on outside these walls. And it's kind of a turbulent time for a lot of people, right? A lot of change going on. A lot of things that make us feel like we're having the rug pulled out from underneath us. A lot of unknowns. a lot of uncertainty, all of which can raise our levels of anxiety, of fear, depression, great concern.

[30:10]

But here we have something that is very, very palpable, that is tried and true, that we can rely on. And none of us would be sitting here in this room tonight if we already did not possess a at least the very seeds of vow, but I suspect it's far more deeply rooted in each and every one of us. So just to remember, since we don't talk about vow much, and in the context of living in the diffuse monastery of everyday life, we don't often stop to reflect that we have in some fashion or another, formally or informally, made a very, very deep intention to this practice, to ourselves, to the core vow of doing no harm, right? And then trying to find skillful ways to embody that in these times that are very uncertain and quite different and more than a little troubling.

[31:14]

One of the things that I love, and I can't remember where it is exactly in the liturgy, but I don't think it's in Jukai, but it's something like I take refuge in Buddha. I have taken refuge in Buddha. Now I have taken refuge in Buddha. It is done. Somebody remembers that? It sounds vaguely familiar. Thank you, Mako. But in that, even though I cannot remember the source of it, is an important message. It's done. We don't need to perseverate about what we're going to do. We've taken this vow and it's something that's tried and true and deep and real that we can rely on in our lives. And so then the question becomes, as Darlene said, it's not a life of misfortune. It's just a question of how do we handle all of these practice opportunities. For me, you know, I find that there's kind of a

[32:20]

a bi-directional process with vow. I take vow, but vow takes me. Vow works me every bit as much as I work vow. And I can trust that something happens there where it doesn't become a transaction. It's kind of like Donna. It becomes this unending circular loop, right? Where vow and I are just always working together in order to try and find the right path. Um... For me, there's kind of two key pieces of vow. And sometimes we don't bring this forward as much, particularly in preparation for ceremonies like Jukai. Not only are we taking this vow, but we're simultaneously, because these are impossible precepts to uphold, bodhisattva vows to uphold, we're taking the vow to return to the vow. So we know that they're impossible, right?

[33:23]

We know, you know, I vow not to kill. And yet every time I get into my car, hybrid though it may be, I'm killing the environment, I'm participating in fossil fuel, other energy depletion sources, extraction of our dear planet, right? So I take the vow, I find myself over here, and now I return to the vow. Whatever this, what I call this cognitive dissonance between how far I find myself away from that original vow of doing no harm, that's the distance that I have to return to. And the longer we practice, the shorter that distance becomes, simply because this is an embodied experience and it just feels so lousy when we're out of vow, right? It just feels when we're out of sync like that. So, I have some other quotes, but I think I'll just end by referring back to dear Darlene.

[34:40]

One of the enduring images that she gave in this teaching of vow was to present it to us as a staff. That vow is a staff that is always with us. No matter what the waters of our lives, whether we're walking through bucolic streams, slippery creeks, whether the waters of our life are raging, or we find ourselves in what feels like a tsunami, this staff of vow is always there for us to hold on to, to rely on, to call upon. And because there is a certain ineffable magic, I will say, to this whole process of vow-taking, over time the staff grows stronger and the staff grows stouter and we can rely on it ever more, ever more. So as we journey forward on our lives during these

[35:49]

very interesting times. Whatever the situation that may unfold before us, be it some sort of internal, closer in the first circle of our lives, or be it the far-reaching, outward, endless, concentric circle of our lives, the global situation, the poly-crises that we find ourselves in, or just in the more intimate, realm of dealing with relationships with people that we love, we can always call upon this vow not to necessarily find the perfect answer. It is not about perfection. But finding the appropriate and authentic response to actually meet life on life's terms. As Suzuki Roshi said, I can't say it as he said, but things just as they are, right? Things just as they are.

[36:50]

This vow is deeply rooted in us. It grows stronger. It takes root more deeply. Every time we make an intentional act, and it is something that we can really bring forward, into this world in small and large ways. This is a world that sorely needs to see people living in such an upright, wholesome and wholehearted fashion. Living by a very, very different understanding of what it means to be a human, to understand suffering, to be interconnected. This is what we can model. for people rather than being caught and tossed around endlessly and suffering in that karmic buffeting, right? We can actually bring forward this dharmic way of living as a model for a way of living that is truer and a way of living that is infinitely saner and a way of living that I think like Darlene illustrated and illuminated for those of us that were her close students and

[38:08]

infinitely satisfying as well. Thank you all. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, 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.

[38:34]

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