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. This afternoon we're having an ordination ceremony here in the Buddha Hall. The translation of... The name of the ceremony is called Entering the Way While Staying at Home. It's interesting, we usually say, we usually call it Jukai, which is precepts, but that's actually what it's called, Entering the Way. Is this light enough? You can hear okay over there? Yeah? No. Could you turn it up, please? Could you try?

[01:06]

Let's see. You don't have to get up, Valerie. Just let's play with it. How's that? No? You're sitting a little behind the speaker, but why don't you try it a little louder anyway, please? How about now? Okay. Good. Okay. So we're having an ordination ceremony this afternoon. And that's what I'd like to talk about. And as I thought about what to say about it, I saw that the impulse in myself to translate it into the stuff of our lives. You know, really spiritual practice is trying to get at the central theme of our life, how to make it conscious, and how to have that conscious relationship to the theme of our lives express what we think is important.

[02:20]

That the intentionality we bring to that theme of our lives holds our values, our intentions, and... and that that helps us to support us, to guide us in living those lives in the whole variety of circumstances that appear for us. So that's what I'd like to try to talk about, that theme, and how to sustain... the involvement, the conscious involvement in that theme. So a couple of weeks ago, I taught a workshop at Tassahara, a yoga and Zen workshop with the yoga teacher. And she came up with the title for the workshop, which was Diving into Devotion.

[03:25]

And I must admit, when I first heard the title, I thought, What? Diving into devotion? That's not very Zen. The teacher's name is Janet, and the photograph she sent us of her to do the promotion was she was in her fashionable torn jeans and her hip boots, and I was thinking, well... why couldn't she dress like an ordinary person like me? Where my mind went with it was this interesting, you know, you could say, you know, the word Zen comes from the word Chan, comes from the word Jhana, which is about immersion, in what's happening.

[04:28]

The central theme of Zen practice is to be immersed in what's happening now. And what's the relationship between that and devotion? When you look at the early Buddhist texts, there's this exquisite map of human consciousness as it orientates and engages and immerses in the moment. What the ingredients of our consciousness, how they come alive, fall off, as they become immersed. And for the most part in the texts, there's a dispassion.

[05:31]

And I think there's a strong aspect of traditional Zen that this immersion is indeed just as it is, just as it is, but some implication of this dispassion. the stuff of life, the vicissitudes, the desires of life are set aside and something, some kind of pure immediacy is immersed. The being we are is immersed in a pure immediacy. And then if you think about devotion, to my mind at least, and I think to most of our minds, it conjures up a different notion. It has more sense of appreciation, more sense of positive involvement.

[06:44]

So it set my mind... into an investigation. Immersion, devotion. And the connecting thread or the common feature of discipline. Discipline, disciple. The person who follows the path. And how much this is the theme of this afternoon's ordination. A follower of the path, entering the way, entering the path. And it has a discipline. And what do we... What kind of associations do we have with discipline? Okay, there's a dedication. There's diligence. And...

[07:52]

in response to, maybe we could say usually, given the karmic forces of our life, that's instructed, inspired, encouraged by what we want and what we don't want, in whatever variety of ways brought us here this morning. What is that momentum? What is the request of that? that agenda that has arisen. And then as we engage practice, we start to discover it's not so much my agenda as the agenda of practice. It's not so much what do I want from practice as it is what does practice ask of me? What is the patience? What is the compassion? What is the openness? What is not holding the fixed and rigid attitudes and understandings about life?

[09:01]

You know, this kind of shift. And then what is it that sustains that? As I thought about this, I thought, there's actually a wonderful, complementary, character to this dispassionate immersion and maybe what we could call this passionate devotion. Even in sitting upright and following your breath, if it's just some dutiful thing you're doing to be a good person, to, I don't know, create the right karmic consequences that will support your life, or however you want to formulate it. If it's just on this side of take your medicine and get the right results, take your bitter medicine, take your boring bitter, go to the Zendo and suffer.

[10:20]

At least when the bell rings, you'll have a moment of awakening. Oh, thank goodness that's over. But to recognize, the practice asks and offers something more than that. It asks, what is this working with our being that... initiates, that enables a softening, an opening, a healing, a nourishing that enlivens our being, that somehow stimulates a willingness to engage, an appreciation, an enthusiasm. And we can see even within those attractive features, I mean, who doesn't want that?

[11:33]

Who doesn't want to be softer, more open, less wounded, more enthusiastic and curious and engaged in their life? But even within those attractive attributes, there's a challenge. And part of Zen is to turn it into a question. What would it look like in your sitting, in your engagement in sitting, if you were not only being diligent and determined and taking the bitter medicine for the sweet result? What if right in your sitting, the nature of your effort, of your involvement, was enabling those qualities? So whether you want to call it immersion and devotion, it doesn't really matter.

[12:36]

But I hope you can see in what I'm trying to say, there's this combination, there's a balance between the two. And I would say it's important that we hold that. If your practice becomes too determined, to austere, then quite naturally something in your being will rebel. You need to go somewhere outside of practice to be nourished. Somewhere outside of that austere practice for some part of you to be fulfilled, taken care of. And then we can watch, when we move into that way, in a very interesting way, some kind of self-indulgence gets added on.

[13:55]

So this attending to the devotion, attending to the nourishing, the softening, the opening, the enlivening, it carries its own request. It asks us to discover how can this life... with all its trials and tribulations, with all its difficulties and challenges, how can it also carry that quality of nourishment, that quality of opening? If you look within zazen, this notion that zazen

[15:04]

is go there and sit through all sorts of pain and difficulty and there's some virtue achieved by that that supports your life. You know, it's actually, I would say, after all these years of sitting, it's a dangerous notion. I would say you need to discover something about sitting comfortably before you can immerse in sitting with discomfort. The request of Zazen is to soften into the contraction and let it find ease. And maybe in a way we can say that's our typical of softening into the contractions of our life, whether they're within our thoughts or feelings, within our relationships, within our attitudes about us and them.

[16:19]

Can we soften into them and let something open? Can we discover the mutuality of existence? someone sent me a paper, a long paper, a 30-page paper, written by a sociologist who had worked in Zen hospice and then interviewed Zen hospice volunteers. And what he was looking at was, what did they say about what they were doing in relationship to supporting people in the tender process of living and dying close to the end of their life? And what came forth was this mutuality of existence. It isn't, I'm this wonderful person helping you, you enfeebled, misguided person, to do the right thing.

[17:27]

It's not who we are when we're practicing. It's not the virtuous part of us trying to drag the resistant, enfeebled part of us along the path. There's a mutuality. And so he interviewed many volunteers, and this is what came forth. That in engaging with the people in hospice, they discovered something about humanness, about how it encompassed themselves and the person they were taking care of, and how, as that's attended to, it teaches us how to live. It teaches us this delicate balance between acceptance. We are going to die. And as Mary Oliver would say, and too soon.

[18:37]

This is our life. This is impermanence. Something about that, that dispassion, and something about the tender beauty of how we're moved in this fragility of our lives, how it comes forth and instructs us. It moves our heart, and our heart moves our mind, and the ways in which we grasp at certainties about ourself, about life, loosens up. There's something about the nobility of our life that draws forth our devotion. So this aspect of practice.

[19:41]

And the person who wrote the paper, he contrasted this with other experience he's had. And interestingly, what he was contrasting it with was not some bizarre expression of how to be of service. It was simply saying, this is different from having the notion of, I know what you should do, and I know what I should do, and I'm here to help you do what you should do. You should be strong, you should be resolute, you should be courageous in your dying. In this mutuality of existence, the image in Zen is, we feel our way along. we sort of discover as we live it. We discover as we get in touch with it. We discover this quivering balance between this passionate acceptance and this passionate involvement in the stuff of a human life.

[21:03]

This is the... The essence. So with this as a theme, with this as an aspiration, we enter the way. It's a delicate balance. Yes, there's discipline. But the discipline encompasses two sides. Yes, there's diligence and dedication. And the ceremony starts with trusting we're already Buddha. Trusting we're Buddha, we enter Buddha's way. What is Buddha's way? Buddha's way, according to me at this moment...

[22:09]

Buddha's way is engaging and awakening within this mutuality of existence. If you think about our usual functioning, how we set up some sense of separation to perpetuate our own well-being. And the striking irony of it is usually the very separation we're setting up is a big part of our difficulty and our suffering. But it's what we know. We don't set up our defenses We don't contract.

[23:17]

We don't separate for any reason other than we think it will lessen our suffering. So it's a tender process to start to look at that, to start to explore going beyond that, to look at it with a radical honesty. to look at the ideas in our head, to look at the emotional habits that are part of our being, to look at the behaviors. And if you only look at it with the stern eye of dispassion, it leaves us prey to self-criticism. we have to also hold it with the tender heart of devotion.

[24:23]

That we want to be happy. That we want to be alive. That we want to live in mutuality. The intimacy of it, the connectedness of it, is nourishing. Start to see that tussle within ourselves, the contraction, the separation in the service of predictability and safety from this wild world and this yearning to open and engage and to be nourished. So our path is a path of exploration and discovery in this way of looking at life.

[25:40]

This awakening and being part of. as Thich Nhat Hanh uses a beautiful phrase, this interbeing of life, this mutuality of coexistence. Something in us knows it. Something in us is with the program. Something in us says, yes, I will. Something in us... is waiting for the opportunity to express its devotion. So the ceremony begins here. Then we acknowledge the teachers, the formal teachers, the great sages, the personal teachers, that have taught us... And something in their teaching has become part of us.

[26:47]

How amazing. What have our teachers taught us that has become part of us? How amazing we had teachers. How amazing there's teachers we know we had and there's teachers we don't know we had. But nevertheless taught us. inspired us. If we look at it psychologically, if you look at the way in which we have ingrained psychological defenses, these are defenses against suffering. These are And then they take the place, they take shape in fixed habits of thought and feeling and behavior.

[27:49]

And not to set those up as the enemy, because if anything needs your compassion, it's those fixed habits. but to let the light of our commitment to practice hold them, illuminate them, and teach us to hold them in a different way. And this is the avowal of our karma. Okay, I am such a person. And here, in the tradition of Zen, there is a neutrality. It's not saying, and it's all bad. It's simply saying, it is what it is. If you grew up in an English-speaking country, you think and dream in English.

[29:07]

Just how it is. If your parents had certain genetic codes, well, you got some from each of them and you have the genetic code you have. And within that, there's an enormous mutuality. You're linked to your parents, to your grandparents, to your siblings, to your society, to the people who were the village. your early developmental life so all this we acknowledge with more of a tender appreciation than some sense of resentful rebuke or there's something there that's intrinsically wrong and needs to be fixed this quickening of the human heart.

[30:14]

We want to be happy, and so often in our life we see suffering. We just look at it and acknowledge it. Okay. I now fully avow. And as we do that, we take refuge. take refuge in this theme of opening, in this theme of following a path that will indeed illuminate the path of happiness and help us discover how to not cause more suffering for ourselves and for others. There's a being of it. there's a teaching of it, and there's a mutuality to it.

[31:18]

We do it together. You practice with the people in your life, whether it's your partner, your family, your neighbors, the people in your workplace, the people in your sangha, or the people of the planet. And then out of that comes some trajectory, some basic attitude. Don't time, do good. Come at it with a response to the question. What is it to live life in a way that nourishes and heals and softens and opens? What is it to refrain from the attributes that contract, that harden, that produce reactiveness, that create an entrenched us and them?

[32:37]

This is the basic modality. Don't harm, do good. And then from there, we look at the particulars of our life. That each one, each situation, each relationship can become a teaching. And in this process, there's something in the identity of self that shifts. And that gives me a good excuse to read a poem. It's from Mary Oliver's book, The Leaf in the Cloud. First, this snippet. Everything is participate. This is a world of doing.

[33:42]

This is a world of mutual being. Everything is part of the world. We can see, taste, touch, hold on to. And then in this shift of identity, in Buddhism, in our tradition, we take on a name. Your Buddha name. Your Buddhist name is... And then it carries these two wonderful characteristics. The first characteristic is the first part of the name is something fundamental. And often the first part of the name is drawn from nature. mountain, river, cloud, tree, lake, moon, sun.

[34:47]

There's something fundamental about what we are. We are indeed part river, mountain, cloud, tree, sun and moon. Just try living without what they have created on the planet. See how long you can last. So this is the fundamental part of the name. But it's also touching us, it's also drawing us back to something fundamental in our human existence. Whether you want to say our impulse to be happy and to avoid suffering, whether you want to say our impulse to enliven and experience freedom, in contrast to contract and feel trapped and lessened.

[35:54]

So attending to something fundamental. And then the second part of the name is... to do with aspiration. As we come from this fundamental place and we turn towards the question, what does practice ask of me? How amazing we can do that. how amazing, in the midst of all the things we want and we don't want and we're annoyed by and we resent and we're saddened by and disappointed by, something in us can declare a courageous nobility and say, what does practice ask of me? And as we ask it, it takes some shape.

[37:05]

It takes some image. It takes some formulation. And that's our guiding star. We are not going to become perfect. We are not going to be the ideal being our mind might want to conjure up. But our aspiration can be the guiding star to our intention. to our vow of practice. Okay then, in the midst of the life I'm living, I will return to that aspiration. In the midst of the many ways, I become burdened by frustrations, annoyances, disappointments, sadnesses. In the midst of those, to remember that intentionality.

[38:09]

And this is expressed in the second half of the day. Something fundamental, some expression of aspiration. We make, in our tradition, we make a miniature Buddha robe. We give it to our teacher. Our teacher writes the name on it and gives it back. Gives us back what we've always owned. Gives us back what arose from the efforts of our practice. But in the giving process, and receiving something... I was going to say the word blessed, but I was thinking I have to find a more Buddhist word.

[39:25]

Something is blessed. it expresses so wonderfully the mutuality of our practice. It expresses so wonderfully that aspect of devotion that's about giving. You give attention. You give your heartfelt involvement. You give your energy. And the marvelous thing about devotion is we receive so much. As the person interviewed the hospice volunteers, he said, so many of them talked about what they had received, the great gifts, the great support, the insight.

[40:35]

We give and we receive. It's not a trade. It's not the nature of devotion. We give because giving completely makes sense. And in that moment of openness, we receive. We sow the rakasu. We give it over. Because this is completely making sense. And then we receive. And not to say, I hope it's clear, that this is the way to do this. This is the way to engage a human life. But just to say, It's our typical of some life-giving process where we give life to the life we're already living.

[41:53]

And let me end by another snippet from Mary Oliver. Drawing it all back to the breath. Something fundamental, something elemental in this great matter of birth and death. What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? I don't think that's a wonderful way to do zazen. I am breathing for all of us. What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want. Call it whatever you want. It's happiness.

[42:56]

And it is another way to enter the fire. This great heat, this great energy. of being alive. Thank you very much. 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, please visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:43]

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