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. You know, I've never carried one of these things before. It's very discombobulated. It's like, what? So, which... leads me to something about the topic of this talk, which is there's this koan. It's my favorite koan. And always kind of has been my favorite koan since the first time I read it. And it's, you know, the Hermit of the Lotus Flower Peak. So I probably talked about this with... everyone and their brother here.

[01:02]

So forgive me for this. But in any case, so what I really wanted to do, so in addition to this really fabulous, incredibly beautiful object that was made by Elliot up at Tassahara, really, really nice, I also received this giant staff. And what I really wanted to do was bring in the giant staff. It's as tall, or actually a little taller than me, and it's made out of, I think, a piece of sycamore that has a whole bunch of bark beetle boring in the surface, and it's smoothed down, and it's really, really gorgeous. But I had to come here on my bike, so I couldn't figure out any way to bring my staff. So I brought this instead, and the reason for all that is that here's what the Hermit of a Lotus Flower Peak is. Imagine that this thing is a staff, this sort of... Gandalf-sized staff, you know, eight feet long or seven feet long or something like that. He holds it up over his head, and he would do this, apparently, whenever anybody came to visit him.

[02:03]

So people would come charging up the hill from down below in the valley, and they were like, we're going to visit the Hermit of Lotus Flower Peak. And they'd get up to Lotus Flower Peak, and they'd walk up to his little hut, and he would come out, and he would hold his staff up over his head. And he said, hey, you. when the ancients got here, how come they couldn't stay? And usually, in fact, always, according to the commentary, either the visitors couldn't say anything or they said something really lame, right? And so the Hermit of the Lotus Flower Peak would say, you know, no. It's because... they didn't gain any strength on the way, literally on the path. In some ways, that's a metaphor, right? So you have these people walking up this mountain, and what are they when they get up to the Hermit of Lotus Flower Peaks, a little hut way up on the mountain?

[03:07]

Well, they're tired, right? But there's more to it than that, right? And then he would say, okay, so now how is it? still no one in the entire history of the Hermit of Lotus Flower Peak living on this mountain and asking these questions over and over and over again. Did anyone come up with a satisfactory answer? So he would say, with my staff across my shoulder, I go into the Myriad Peaks. Oh, especially important. With my staff, across my shoulder, I pay no heed to people and just go into the myriad peaks. So that's what he says. So here's the thing. I'm not going to talk about this koan.

[04:12]

I'm mostly going to talk about why it was my favorite koan as a way of getting at something else. And that's going to involve a kind of mini way-seeking mind talk. So forgive me for that. But I finally, unbelievably recently, realized that the reason I like this koan so much is that I kind of recognize somewhere in it this kind of idealized version of me. Right? Right. And I thought, and it kind of made me feel good about that idealized version. And it's something about the pay no heed to people, something about the going into the Myriad Peaks. Those of you who know me know that I do a lot of going into the Myriad Peaks, usually these days on a bicycle because it turns out that I fell off a cliff

[05:17]

20 years ago and smashed my left foot up so bad that it's hard for me to go into the Myriad Peaks on foot, although I still do it. And there's something in there about the paying no heed to people that I'll get to a bit as well. How do you even get started? So I guess I should preface this many ways thinking mind talk with a disclaimer that goes like this. I was raised here on the West Coast by people white middle class parents who really, in many ways, were marvelous and who were unquestionably doing their best in a brand new place, in a brand new world.

[06:41]

They didn't really understand what the... labels on the bottles meant and all the rest of that sort of thing. And I know that lots and lots of people who grew up only a few miles from me had much harder lives. I understand all that. And I acknowledge it as freely as I get up in the morning and brush my teeth. But nonetheless, and yet, I spent pretty much the first part of my adult life sort of trying to run really hard to stay ahead of something.

[07:42]

And then the next 10, 15 years, a lot of it here, trying to slow down enough to let it catch up. And when it finally caught up and expressed itself to me, when the voice that I'd been arguing with for the last 50 years or so actually got a chance to speak, it said something like this. It said... You're unsafe, unwelcome, and fundamentally incompetent. I could tell some stories about how I might have gotten that idea, and maybe one or two of them are are in order.

[08:43]

Maybe not, but I'll tell one or two, right? So, you know, when I was 14 or maybe 13, my mom and another mom and a bunch of kids in ages... 14 down to about eight, maybe nine of us or something like that, spent a lot of the summer in Round Valley. I don't know if you know where Round Valley is, but it is an incredibly beautiful place in the eastern Sierras, right? I mean, it really is gorgeous, right? And we are in this little tiny house in this vast open, it's actually much more developed now than it was then, vast, open space, bang up against the back of the Sierras, that in that place you stand on the ground at something like 3,500 feet and you can look straight up at peaks that are 14,000 feet plus high.

[09:52]

It's unbelievable. It's so gorgeous. So we were there and did lots of fun stuff. But in the end, the... the centerpiece of the whole experience was we were all going to do this big camping trip together. And we packed everything up and we started off into the mountains. And after a few days, the moms said, you know, got up in the morning and said, you know, we don't really like doing this with you. You're really not all that much fun. You argue all the time. You're... you're annoying, et cetera. It's hard to decide what to do. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to go off and enjoy ourselves, and we'll see you at the roadhead in, I forget exactly how many days it was, something like five days. And we were way out in the middle of the highest high Sierras. I mean, really out there.

[10:53]

And again, 14 down to eight. And we were like, okay, and they left, and we spent the next five days wandering around and did some really crazy stuff, but in the end, none of us heard anything or fell down a cliff and died or anything, and we walked back to the roadhead. We decided we were tired of being out there, and it was a full moon night, so we walked back, probably 13 miles to the Redhead by moonlight in the middle of the night, and arrived back at Lake, I think it's pronounced Sabrina, but up above Bishop anyway. And they weren't there, and they actually were about a day late, and we were completely out of food, so the other oldest guy and I hitchhiked into Bishop, and we pooled our pitiful resources, hitchhiked into Bishop,

[11:59]

and came back with, like, peanut butter and jelly and things like that, and we sat out and waited for our moms to show up and dined on peanut butter and jelly and swam in the lake and so on. So, you know, in some ways, wonderful experience, right? In some ways, felt like kind of abandonment. And by... By high school, I was coming home on Friday afternoon and going, okay, mom, I'm off, and hitchhiking by myself to Mendocino from Mill Valley and spending the weekend camping on the beaches and wandering around in the woods and so on, and then coming home and going back to school, right? So, you know, into the myriad peaks. And into lots of difficult, life-threatening, troublesome situations that don't even bear going into, except maybe the one that's local is once I was hitchhiking here from Santa Barbara, came down off the freeway that used to run into, was it Fell or one of those streets, riding behind, you know, with a driver who was

[13:30]

could not have been higher on prescription drugs and he accelerated through three lights and then finally we got hit and flew up in the air and went spinning around and hit a light pole and I think the guy that hit us died on the spot and I just got up and walked away. That sort of thing. So something like that. Something like unsafe, unwelcome, incompetent. And some idea that by the time I was in my 20s, some idea that asking for help or saying I didn't know was just going to be treated as evidence of further incompetence and ridiculed. So, like I said, running from that for some large portion of my adult life and then landing up here and trying to slow down and trying to slow down and trying to slow down enough so that it would catch up and express itself.

[14:53]

It's kind of the work of a lifetime. Which leads me to the real topic of this talk, which is Dharma transmission. When I got the instructions for Dharma transmission, mailed, I think, from Tassajara as a PDF, Paul said, don't read this part, this part, this part, or this part, because there are all these secret ceremonies that you're not supposed to know about, but you should read the introduction and the ceremonies that you do need to know about now, and so I obeyed, and the first thing I read was that it was a 21-day ceremony, right? And the second thing I read was what I was supposed to do in preparation for it.

[16:01]

And the funny thing is, it was almost nothing. It said, like, pack. And it was pretty clear about what you need to pack, like a whole bunch of underwear and enough outfits so that you can do a lot of ceremonies and not, you know... smell horrible, and some white footwear, and if you own calligraphy supplies, bring them, and be fit, which I thought was really great. And I had no idea why that would be true. everybody got to experience, I think, why that's true, which is that among the many things that you do during the course of every single day, and when I was here, I was doing it twice a day, you have to, as fast as you possibly can, bow and offer incense and ring a bell and then come all the way back up to standing for each of the male and female ancestors.

[17:11]

And it's amazing how What a workout that is. And after about five days, my thigh muscles have never been so toned, really, in as long as I can remember. But anyway, so that's what it said. And I was like, okay, pack. Calligraphy supplies. Decent shape. Yes. But that was really all I was supposed to do. And yet, 21-day ceremony, lots and lots of, you know, gear, setup, all sorts of mysterious stuff, you know, ceremonies that are supposed to happen every day, and then some days, and then this sort of trajectory where the trajectory is you essentially do a bunch of the sort of... walking around the monastery and bowing, and bowing to the Buddhas and ancestors as I was doing here, and doing a kind of personal service where you chant a bunch of stuff.

[18:26]

You do that for the first 14 days, or I was doing it twice a day to kind of make up time. And then once you get to the last week, there's all this other stuff that gets laid on, all of which requires... silk and decorations and decisions about what version of the ceremony you're going to use and all the rest of that sort of thing and in principle I wasn't supposed to be doing any of that it's amazing it's like I was just supposed to pack show up and be able to do calligraphy and we'll get to the calligraphy part later but so Everything about the ceremony, once you get into it, requires, it would be a mistake to say it requires asking for help.

[19:26]

It's not like that, actually, because it's not like, when you say asking for help, it's like, I'm doing this thing, and I would like you to help me with it. It's not like that. It's more like, it's just this activity that everyone does together, and fundamentally, Over time, I felt like I wasn't doing anything at all. I was just woven into this fabric of group activity that was supported on all its corners by bodhisattvas. And then, most of what you do when you're going through this process is stuff that almost literally beats you over the head with the names of the Buddhas and ancestors and the female ancestors.

[20:39]

And even better, the... the guardian spirits and bodhisattvas that are stationed around the monastery, both here and there at Tassajara, in order to smooth the practice, make things work well, and knit up the fabric. That's what it's for. And so you're looking at this... multi-millennial fabric that extends into the deep past and that's woven together to include the present moment and the beings in the present moment and in principle extends into the future. And all that's going on is that the nature and – well, first of all, the existence, and second of all, the nature and – Third, the kind of activity of that fabric is just constantly being communicated to you in the strongest possible way.

[21:43]

And again, it produces this sensation like, even though if you look at it from the conventional perspective, I'm doing really a lot. In fact, I'm really not doing anything at all. It's just being a part of this fabric. And there's a bunch of... There's a bunch of symbolism around that, the most obvious one of which is this, right? Fabric. And, you know, who made this? Well, it'd be, you know, a lie to say that I made it. But, you know, I certainly put a bunch of stitches in it, but that's not really how it is, right? And then the other thing set of symbols and metaphors has to do with this, you know, those of you who have taken Jukai or priest ordination or both, right, have this, have at least one Kechimiyaku, right, which is this blood vein, right, and it mainly outlines, let's put it that way, the connection between

[23:03]

the ancestors in you, but more fundamentally, right, it kind of gives life to this feeling of connection that we all have, yes, with our teachers, but with everyone, right? It's really just the blood vein, right? It's like the, it's the, the Dharma coursing through us, right? And so, I had this kind of incomplete understanding of what transmission was when I started this thing out. The usual story that shows up all over Dogen and everywhere else is the Buddha picks up the flower, the whole assembly is sitting there, he twirls the flower, Mahakashapa is the only one that really even responds, but Mahakashapa smiles, and the Buddha goes, okay, Great.

[24:04]

So I have the treasury of the true Dharma I and I'm passing it on to Mahakashipa. And my understanding of that story was always that it was kind of like the Buddha as a teacher had spent the last N years of his life explaining to a he was a fish, and he had spent the last 10 years of his life explaining to a whole bunch of fish that they were all breathing water. And finally, Mahakashipa was like, oh yeah, I'm breathing water, pretty good. And there was this kind of shared understanding between the Buddha and Mahakashipa, and the Buddha, recognizing that, a shared understanding said, you know, Mahakashipa has my blood.

[25:06]

And passed on the robe and bow to Mahakashipa, and that was the succession there. So that was kind of my understanding of it. And I think there's merit in that, but I think that understanding is incomplete. And there are hints about the ways in which it's incomplete in various commentaries, including by Dogen, on on transmission. He also makes it clear that even this kind of explosion or slow growth of shared understanding isn't sufficient. It needs some kind of special acknowledgement or... a vent in order to cement it, right? And there's even a commentary somewhere that says, you know, the ink and silk on the Ketch Miyaku is directly carrying the Buddha mind, right?

[26:16]

It actually says that somewhere, right? So there are these kind of hints about it, but you don't really, it's hard to get it until you actually see Well, until you're beaten over the head with it, at least in my case, right? The function of the whole ceremonial event is to, for me at least, and given my particular history and this thing about going into the Myriad Peaks not asking for things not being exposed was just a constant injunction to open up to this

[27:26]

fabric and this flow of the Dharma from the multi-millennial past down through today and into the future and to recognize that in some sense I don't have to do anything and even if I find myself doing something I can't possibly do it by myself it's not me doing it myself in any of the senses that I originally thought that was the case. Which... Once I got over my last vestiges of discomfort with that, it was actually kind of marvelous. And a real relief. Because it leaves room for a bunch of stuff. like, for example, suffering.

[28:32]

So one of the things you do when you do dharma transmission is you do this calligraphy. Mako and I, I got to do this thing with Mako, which was fantastic, because Mako is fantastic, and it was wonderful to be able to do something like this shoulder. to shoulder with somebody as great as she is. And we were like that a lot. Like eight hours a day doing this calligraphy for five days, roughly. And for me, it was like taking an overly hot bath in some kind of highly caustic, poisonous substance.

[29:34]

I said that to somebody at one point, and they said, you're not selling it. But that's what it was like, right? So, I mean, when I found out I was going to have to do calligraphy, I thought, okay, well, I'll study calligraphy. So I took a... workshop with Kaz Tanahashi. And then I spent about a year practicing on my own, studying calligraphy and learning how to dig out the sayings of the ancient masters from the Blue Cliff Record in classical Chinese and figure out how to be pretty sure that that's actually what the characters were that I thought they were saying. And then writing them down and doing it over and over and over again and practicing the exercises and... Kaz's book and doing the character renderings in Kaz's book and then finally when I realized that it was just me not so much going into the Myriad Peaks but paddling my little raft on a trackless sea I thought well okay I'll get a teacher and I found this really great calligraphy teacher in the East Bay and been studying with her for a while now and in the end

[30:55]

it's not something I'll ever be good at, but I ended up feeling okay about it. It was marvelous. I've been writing the same thing with my teacher for the last probably three and a half, maybe four months now, and it's Dharma gates are boundless. I've done it, I don't know how many times, hundreds and hundreds of times. It'll never be perfect, and and like I said, I'll never be good at it, but there's something wonderful about the kind of seeing that requires, and every now and again I look at something and I go, yeah, that seems okay. None of that prepared me for the kind of calligraphy you have to do in Dharma Transmission, which is essentially writing in Romaji little tiny Roman characters with a brush and hand-ground ink, all these names and phrases.

[32:00]

Sometimes you have to write it so small that unless you're really careful, it just looks like you went blah with your brush. And sometimes I did just go blah with my brush. And it was so hard. And can I see a show of hands? How many people had good handwriting in grammar school? So some, cool, that's great. Not me, right? So the entire time, my grammar school teachers were leaning over my shoulder going, oh, your handwriting is so bad. And then... And so you're dealing with that, and then you start making mistakes. And usually, they're actually pretty big. And you're doing this stuff on silk, and so you can't go back and just, you know, like if I'm working well on a piece of hansetsu paper, even expensive hansetsu paper, and I screw it up, I go, oh, like that.

[33:09]

But you can't do that with this stuff. So you've just got to live with it and fix it. And usually the fix... is much uglier than the mistake was, and you just have to be there with it, and so I was constantly just like, oh, so bad. And at the same time, every morning I'd show up after Busorai, and Maka and I, Maka, who was one of those people who had excellent handwriting when she was, when she was in grammar school, Mako and I would settle down, and I would step into my too-hot, caustic, poisonous bath and just sit there for eight or nine hours, right? You know, with a short break for lunch or something like that. But it was a lot of time, and we were going to bed, you know, well after everyone else went to bed, and getting at it pretty early in the morning, and...

[34:14]

So Darlene Cohen has this thing in her book about living with chronic pain where she says sometimes the old saw that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional is true and sometimes it's not. When it's not, then what happens is the difficulty, whatever it is, rises up and goes through the paths and mental formations and emotional responses and so on that lead to suffering. And that has to be included in your practice as well. That also is the Dharma, fundamentally. That suffering is the Dharma. It's as much the Dharma as sitting in... in blissful zazen where every molecule and cell of your body knows how to sit.

[35:19]

And in the end, it feels like life. It feels like being alive in some fundamental way. So this kind of melting of the self and leaning back into the fabric of the multi-millennial fabric of practice leaves room for that. And it also leaves room for imperfection. No one will ever accuse me of having had a perfect dharma transmission ceremony. It's just not in the cards. And everyone is just doing their level best to bring it forth.

[36:30]

But is it perfect? No. Why should it be? Why should any of it be perfect? Why should it be reach some standard of success or perfection that I cooked up years before I even knew what I was talking about. It leaves room for doing things in a way that's wholehearted and all in even if it's not perfect. And it calls forth and leaves room for love and gratitude. The surprising thing about all of it is that in the end, mostly

[37:41]

I had a clearer idea of what love is. Unconditional attunement, admiration, connection, intimacy, all of that. All the words that we use to sew that term up. How could I not? It was so great. How could I not be grateful? We're all woven into this multi-millennial fabric and the last thing that you hear in most of the ceremonial contexts that arise during Dharma transmission are, don't let it be cut off, right?

[38:57]

Yeah, exactly. So how can we together extend this fabric into the future, right? It's what we're doing, all of us, right? We're doing it right now, and then we're doing it in the next moment. to continue that is what we're all taking on, whether we know it or not. Interestingly, I have exactly enough time to read this poem that I wrote a while ago, and some of you here have already heard this, but I thought it seemed like it was appropriate to the occasion, so I'll read it. My half-brother lives a sunken life.

[39:59]

His house is the sea-green ribcage of a wrecked ship. Most days he wears a diving suit and spends hour upon hour drifting with the current, tethered only by a thin line stretching away towards some unknown surface. At night, far off, he can see great slow fish, each one lit up like a whole city. Once a fish swam close and he could see its eyes were on fire. Once his breathing tube got tangled in some seaweed, he put something complicated in my hand and said, here, hold this, but don't ever touch it. A while, or maybe 50 years later, I decided to have a look. We were standing in a round puddle of yellow light there on the threshold, and he said, this is the skull of a starling. if you put it up to your ear and listen very carefully, you can hear an evening sky and violet air rushing through the door to be born on the other side of the world.

[41:10]

Anyway. So, yeah, classy. Thanks for listening. 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.

[41:55]

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