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. Or it may be some other time of day for those of you who are joining by Zoom. Welcome, everyone. Special welcome to anyone who is here for the first time tonight. A special welcome to you. My name is Jisan Tova Green. I'm a resident at City Center, and I use she, her pronouns. Currently, my work practice here is connecting the many Zen centers and sanghas in the Suzuki Roshi lineage.

[01:06]

There are about 75 in the U.S. and 10 in other countries. And it's a dream job. I love doing it. So I want to thank our Tanto, Tim, for inviting me to give this talk tonight. And I also want to thank my teacher, Agent Linda Cutts, And I want to thank all of you as well for coming and coming here, those of you who are here in the room together, and all of you who are watching or watching later after the talk tonight. So the title of my talk tonight is Deep Listening, Words Under the Words. And Words Under the Words is a phrase, it's a title of a poem by one of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihabnai.

[02:11]

And I'll just quote a few lines from the poem. Answer, if you hear the words under the words, Otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones. So answer if you hear the words under the words. And in part I was drawn to the topic of deep listening because very recently our Abbot David gave a talk on the bodhisattvas, four methods of guidance. That's one translation of that. And one of those methods of an awakening being is kind speech. And when I think about kind speech, the parallel in a way is kind listening.

[03:14]

And what does that mean? And how can I listen for the words under the words of So I'll be talking about four levels of listening tonight. Listening to oneself, listening to another person, listening in a community, and listening to the cries of the world. And I'll touch on my Dharma name, which has to do with listening, the various names of the Bodhisattva, of great compassion, Kuan Yin, who listens to the cries of the world. And I'll share Aizen's story as part of my talk. So, deep listening for me has to do with listening with my body, not only with my ears, listening with my eyes, listening

[04:24]

with my heart, listening and noting body language of the person who's speaking, listening to the feeling tone of a voice. And I'm aware there's a member of our sangha, Keith, who lost his hearing. And he listens with his eyes. And he communicates so beautifully with his facial expressions as well as through the ASL that he teaches us every morning at work circle. So deep listening, listening to oneself. I'll start there. A number of us in the city center community went to Green Gulch Farm last Saturday to join the Sangha there in a one-day sitting.

[05:39]

And Tension Reb Anderson was leading the one-day sitting. And as we settled in the first period of Zazen, he said, be silent and still. And in that silent and still, space I was really able to listen to my body and that's what I appreciate about Zaza and even when it's not still in the streets outside I can find some stillness inside my body and sometimes my mind and not always but just paying attention what I'm experiencing moment to moment and many fewer distractions than during the rest of the day.

[06:41]

And also in listening to myself, listening to the voice with which I speak to myself and can I find that kind voice that acknowledges. Sometimes things come up when I'm sitting. Oh, I wish I hadn't said that or I didn't do that exactly the way I had hoped I would. Can I recognize those mistakes sometimes, they think they're mistakes, and be kind to myself about them and let them go as I'm sitting, not dwell on them. There's a book that I really appreciate about, so I will be talking about Kuan Yin, who is the bodhisattva

[07:49]

compassion. And I reread a section of Tiger Leighton's book, Faces of Compassion. He talks about many bodhisattvas that are important to our living in the world. A bodhisattva is an awakening being, and it's also an archetype. And the bodhisattva of compassion, Quan Yin, is present in many... Quan Yin is androgynous. I'll talk more about that But Taigen Leighton said in his book, in the section on Kuan Yin, that we cannot offer compassion to others if we're not able to be compassionate to ourselves, accepting and forgiving of ourselves as we are.

[09:08]

So listening to oneself is a place to start, and then listening to others which is not always easy, especially if we're listening to someone with whom we disagree, if someone has a different point of view. And what can help in listening to others is being curious and trying to understand where the other person is coming from, allowing space for feelings, practicing empathy, trying to really pick up the other person's feeling tones, and also recognizing my own fixed views, which can get in the way of my listening to someone, especially when it's a perspective very different from my own.

[10:12]

And listening in a community setting, one of the things I appreciate about our community and many other Buddhist communities that work with communication agreements, agreements that help us be mindful of how we are communicating with others, whether we can There are basically nine communication agreements, and we had them on the wall in the dining room in 300-page. They may still be there, but we don't have access to that building now. And we have also used them... in classes and in settings where we're together as a group.

[11:20]

And they encourage listening, deep listening, speaking for oneself using I rather than we, which I'm trying to do in this talk. And sharing the space, if we tend to speak a lot. drawing back some, and if we tend to be silent in a group, taking a risk and speaking up, trying on new ideas, don't have to wear them, but it's that way of being open as we listen, and also being aware that our intention may not always in a conversation, even though we may intend no harm, sometimes what we say may land in a different way.

[12:23]

So being open to hearing that the impact of what we said was difficult for someone. Then in a community setting also sometimes formats like a council where Everyone in the, we sit in a circle and everyone has a chance to speak. Sometimes there's a talking object that's passed around. It's another way of listening in a community setting where the agreement is to speak from the heart and to listen with openness to what others are saying. And then, you know, listening to the cries of the world, the cries of our planet, the cries of our neighbors. I find it helpful to work with three tenants, the Zen Peacemaker Order.

[13:34]

It's a group of socially engaged Buddhists that does things like street retreats and pilgrimages to Auschwitz every year. And their three tenets are not knowing, so having an open mind, beginner's mind, bearing witness, being able to be in a place where there's suffering and to... stay with the feelings that arise. And then compassionate action. So from what we learn in bearing witness, to find a way to respond. And Taigen also says, in talking about Kuan Yin,

[14:39]

Just to be present, to remain upright and aware in the face of suffering is an expression of compassion. Sometimes we may want to do more than that, but being present and listening is a good place to start. Ji San, Myo Cho. Ji San is, Ji is compassion, and San is mountain, mountain of compassion. And Myo Cho is wondrous or subtle listening. And this is the name Linda Ruth, my teacher, gave me when I was ordained as a priest. And she said, It had to do with the way Kuan Yin listens to the cries of the world.

[15:42]

So I've really tried to understand more about Kuan Yin. And in 2005, Linda Ruth and both her friend and Ruth Rusa Chu. Rusa lives at Green Gulch, and she and Linda Ruth have known each other for many decades. And Rusa is Chinese heritage, and the two of them led a Kuan Yin pilgrimage to China in 2005. There were 33 women who went. There are 33 aspects of Kuan Yin. I don't know if that was an accident, but it was... quite wonderful. And we visited many temples dedicated to Kuan Yin. And it's an island called Putuoshan, which is said to be Kuan Yin's island.

[16:48]

And off Putuoshan, a smaller island where Kuan Yin is said to have been born. And there are many monuments to Kuan Yin. A huge statue of Kuan Yin at the main port of Putuoshan. We took a boat from the mainland to get there, and there was this amazing statue of Kuan Yin when we arrived. So initially in the Sanskrit name for Kuan Yin, Kuan Yin was recognized in India. It's Avalokiteshvara. And there are a number of translations, but a common one is one who hears the sounds or the outcries of the world. Or sound, another way of thinking of the name is sound that illuminates the world.

[17:53]

And so Avalokiteshvara is the same name as or guanyin in Chinese, and then kanzeion or kanon in Japanese, which can also be in Japanese. Kanzeion can be translated as watchful listening, the one who sees or hears all. For me, that has to do with the way we listen not only with our ears but also with our eyes and our bodies. In Faces of Compassion, Taiga and Leighton talks about some of the qualities of Kuan Yin and he describes Kuan Yin as fluid, sometimes male, sometimes female. I'm going to use the pronoun they because of the

[18:58]

fluid nature of Kuan Yin. They appear in more diverse forms than any other bodhisattva. The colorful variety of Avalokitesvara is itself part of their message of compassion, as compassion takes on any form that might be beneficial to beings. Quan Yin is often described as having a thousand hands and eyes. There's an eye in each hand. And sometimes I've seen statues of Quan Yin that have 13 heads, and some of them are smiling, and usually there's at least one that is... angry about it. It's a depiction of fierce compassion. We tend to think of compassion as kind and gentle, which usually is.

[20:02]

But there's a fierceness sometimes that can be equally compassionate. So Quan Yin is the subject of a chapter in the Lotus Sutra. The chapter is called The Universal Gateway of the Bodhisattva, Regarder of the Cries of the World. And in that chapter, Avalokiteshvara, Kuan Yin, I may use them interchangeably, Avalokiteshvara's limitless compassion is expressed in their amazing ability to help all beings who turn to them at times of extreme danger, including natural catastrophes.

[21:05]

So the idea of having these thousand arms and hands, and sometimes they're depicted holding different tools that can help in any situation, so an ability to use skillful means, whatever is appropriate in the given situation. The chapter of that Lotus Sutra describes some of the ways Kuan Yin intervenes and She saves people from fire, from drowning in the ocean, from violent attackers or predatory or poisonous animals, from imprisonment, execution, or other terrors. And when we were on that pilgrimage, there were a few places on the island.

[22:18]

It was an island of fishermen. And where there were monuments to Kuan Yin and stories of how Kuan Yin rescued fishermen whose boats were grounded on rocks. And there are many stories of how Kuan Yin or thinking of Kuan Yin has helped people in difficult situations. There's another wonderful source of a very scholarly book about Quan Yin written by a Chinese scholar who escaped from Vietnam with her family. And she wrote that they were on the shore waiting for a nightfall and a boat that was going to take them out of Vietnam.

[23:20]

And she was the child and was with her family, including her grandmother. And her grandmother, as the night came on, had this vision of Kuan Yin standing on a boat and indicating that they shouldn't get on the boat. And the grandmother shared this with the family and they decided not to take the boat. And later they found out that the boat had run into some mines that were in the water and had sunk. And they probably would have died if they had got on that boat. So we might think of this as superstitious, but for many people this sense of Quan Yin is very alive and meaningful. And so that brings me to the story in The Book of Serenity, it's one of the koan collections in Case 54, just simply called Avalokiteshvara.

[24:32]

And it's about two brothers. This is from 9th century China, two brothers, Dao Wu and Yun Yan. And they literally were brothers who both became monks and teachers. Yunnan was the younger brother, and Yunnan asked Dao Wu, what does the bodhisattva of great compassion do with so many hands and eyes? And Dao Wu said, it's like someone reaching back for a pillow in the night. Yunnan said, I got it, I got it. And this is a translation by Kaz Tanahashi, a contemporary translation. And it's maybe a little more slang than you may, if you know this story, than other translations.

[25:37]

I got it, I got it. And Dao asked, what did you get? And Yunnan said, all over the body are hands and eyes. Dao was responded, you have said it well, but it's eight or nine out of ten. Yunnan said, I am just this. How about yourself, brother? And Dawu said, wherever the body reaches, it is hands and eyes. Or another translation is throughout the body, hands and eyes. So we might think that maybe throughout the body is better than all over the body. But Dogen, the founder of our school of Zen, wrote about this story. And he said, between all over the body, yunyans all over the body and daoos, wherever the body reaches, it is not that one has expressed thoroughly and the other has not.

[26:43]

Their responses cannot be compared to each other. Each one has expressed it thoroughly in regard to so many hands and eyes. So whether it's throughout the body or just on the surface of the body, it's still an incredible expression of Kuan Yin's compassion. So... I'm going to offer some closing words because I hope that you'll have some questions or comments. We can have some discussion. So the last line of Chapter 25 in the Lotus Sutra is eyes of compassion observing sentient beings assemble in a measurable ocean of blessings. Eyes of compassion observing sentient beings, assemble an immense ocean of blessings.

[27:50]

We all have so many hands and eyes all over our bodies, throughout our bodies. May we use them for the benefit of all beings. Answer if you hear the words under the words. And Finally, Taigon Leighton's take on this story from the Book of Serenity is, the entire universe is not other than Avalokiteshvara's myriad arms and eyes, reaching back for the comfort of their pillow to bestow compassion, by sharing their pillow with all beings in loving embrace. So it's the hands and eyes are everywhere, connecting us with everything.

[29:02]

And this comes from or can help bring about the sense of our connectedness with all beings everywhere and a wish to respond to the cries of the world in whatever way we can. So thank you for your attention. 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 Dharma.

[29:56]

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