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. Say good morning, earthlings. Fellow earthlings and bodhisattvas. Earthling bodhisattvas. Can't hear? Somebody must have been able to hear. But it's not on? Now it's on. So good morning, earthling bodhisattvas. I don't know if I can even say enough what either of those mean. I showed a picture to the kids in the art lounge a minute ago, a few minutes ago, of this flag.

[01:16]

And I don't know, do we actually have this flag anywhere? Do we? I thought, well, I could go for this flag, actually. I could support pledging allegiance to this flag. I have trouble with most of the other ones. They don't seem big enough, but maybe this is big enough. And I also told the kids that when I was a kid, we didn't have this picture. And immediately the four-year-olds know, oh, that's earth. It's quite familiar to have this image now. And yet it's relatively recent. So earthling, I want to talk a little bit about being earthlings and also about our practice of the bodhisattva

[02:23]

which means beings waking up, wisdom beings. In China, where Zen began, with Buddhism coming to what was already understood in China, there was a a conversation that happened where a student asked Zen Master Zhao Zhou, what is the meaning of bodhidharmas coming from the West? And Zhao Zhou, Master Zhao Zhou responded, the oak tree in the courtyard. The oak tree in the courtyard. So bodhidharma was the... the founder of Zen in China. Maybe not everyone here knows that.

[03:27]

How many of you are here for the first time? Well, welcome. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. So we all bring our beginner's mind, which is a kind of a fresh, we should be taking a fresh take on things, right, every moment. So Bodhidharma is the founder of Zen, bringing this practice of zazen, of sitting, to China. The same question might be here. We could say, what's the meaning of Shinryu Suzuki bringing Zen to America? We could say, the maple tree in the courtyard. The maple tree in the courtyard. So how is it, what's our understanding of our own life in relation to the maple tree in the courtyard?

[04:37]

Is it one life? Is it something separate? Is it something confusing? In this case, the student, the monk said, please don't teach me with reference to external objects. So Zhao Zhao said, I don't know exactly what he said, he said, okay, ask me again. And he said, I don't teach with reference to external objects. And so the student again asked, what is the meaning? What is the meaning of... Suzuki Roshi coming to America. And Bodhidharma said, or this morning I'll say, the maple tree in the courtyard. So we may have some idea of being one with our environment.

[05:50]

And we have a lot of information these days teaching us about how we are completely interconnected with our environment. But I don't know if we know it in the same intimate way that Zhao Zhou knew it, actually. Because the information about it that we carry in our heads is not the same intimate feeling as actually knowing. What is the life of the maple tree in the courtyard? So I want to maybe just recognize that to even talk about being an earthling bodhisattva is a practice of confessing one's own erroneous views and assumptions. and one's own, confessing one's misdeeds in the past, the ways in which one has, say, caused some harm to any living thing.

[07:12]

So we say, when we do our repentance chant in this tradition, we say, all my ancient twisted karma. from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, I now, born from my own body and my speech and my mind, I now fully avow. So I think this is a good practice for earthlings, to avow our misdeeds. We also say in... In Zen, there's a saying that our practice is two things. Zen practice is two things. One is zazen. And the other is tending the garden. So, if we do these two things every day, sit zazen and tend the garden. And tending the garden, we say, garden can be any size.

[08:20]

And garden... may be understood as literal garden, and it may be understood as a kind of expression, a metaphor for everything that nourishes us. How to tend the whole benevolent field of nourishment. This is not so easy for us to understand, but I think that we can do small things. that we should at least do the small things we can do. And maybe we can understand some of the bigger ways. Like maybe it's a big thing, I don't know. It's a small thing, but it's kind of a big thing to break up the sidewalk out here in front of Zen Center. So it takes a lot of organization, people working together, to agree that we're out of balance, that we have more concrete than we need.

[09:28]

And so to make some change of that is kind of a big deal. It takes crews of people and thousands of dollars and agreement with city agencies. But I want to salute Fuff. Hail to Fuff. People know Fuff. The signs out there say Friends of the Urban Forest. Friends of the Urban Forest. So people were talking about Fuff. I thought, I don't know, what's Fuff? But Friends of the Urban Forest have helped. At Zen Center, we had signed on to this request. So maybe in this way, we're a little bit bringing this street into better balance.

[10:33]

If we have more concrete than we need to shift that to more topsoil. At Zen Center, we do make an effort. to educate ourselves, and I think it's a combination of science and poetry. So if we have some scientific understanding, that may be helpful, and we also need some poetry. Most of our poetry is silent. Siddhingsazen is a kind of poetry. And it's also a kind of music. I have to diverge for a moment because I grew up, I feel very fortunate growing up in Kansas and I had very near to my house there was this cottonwood tree that had been there for I don't know how many hundred years already.

[11:46]

But my ancestors came and lived and acquired land in Kansas in the 1870s. And only later did I realize that this was just after the buffalo had been killed. And I feel some sadness, actually, some pain. But there was an understanding, or maybe a misunderstanding, and a very aggressive wave of humanity coming across America, killing other humanity, disregarding other forms of life, say, that were there. And still, some things were left, including this cottonwood tree. And when I was little, with other kids, we would get around this cottonwood tree, and we'd see it would take seven or eight of us touching our arms to go around the base of this tree.

[12:51]

And I was back there a couple of years ago, and what seems to me true poetry is the sound of the leaves. The wind, if any of you have ever heard the sound of wind in the cottonwood tree, it has somewhat leathery leaves that rustle in the wind and have a a sound like no other sound. And so that sound, to me, is the poetry of the rivers and streams that flow through the Great Plains. And now, whenever I go, actually now we have cottonwood trees at Green Gulch, thanks to Harry Roberts, and we have cottonwood trees that grow along One place along the horse pasture trail at Tassajara.

[13:52]

And whenever I go past that spot and I hear, oh, I feel like I'm really a true earthling. So there's some ways in which the tree in the courtyard speaks to us. And some ways in which we need to rekindle our connection. in order to know how to conduct ourselves. So tending the garden can mean an ongoing investigation, an ongoing inquiry into how do I take care of this place? When the gold rush happened in California and the 49ers came looking for gold, without much hesitation at all, they basically killed everything, obliterated everything that was in their way.

[15:00]

Millions of grazing animals in the Central Valley, whole tribes of human beings who had been living here for many millennia. And how does that actually weigh on us? How does that actually invite us to acknowledge our ancient karma? Now we have, I think, there are signs that we're learning. but maybe we're learning a little late. I don't know. There's a poster up on the wall for a film, which will be shown here tonight. I hope you can all come back 7 o'clock tonight and hear Green Fire or see the movie. Newly released film.

[16:03]

So this is about the life and teaching of Aldo Leopold. How many people here have read the book Sand County Almanac? Only a few. I can probably count, maybe not on one hand, but two hands. So, I hadn't really thought about the Sand County Almanac, but I had read it in 1969 or 68 or 69, I think. And I thought that the statements that were made, the realization that Aldo Leopold made shifted his own life. And his life was kind of a confession of having been involved in misunderstanding.

[17:06]

As a Yale, a graduate from the Yale School of Forestry, he was involved in managing forests. But he thought of managing forests was something to control and for the benefit of human beings as resources. He had a kind of a commodity idea that the forest is a commodity and that all of the resources on the planet were really kind of commodities to be managed. But he realized as he was a person who was listening and paying attention and he realized that he had mistaken views. And so he, over the rest of his life, I won't tell you the story about green fire. How does green fire, what does it mean? I'll only tell you that it has to do with a wolf. The teaching he learned from a wolf.

[18:08]

But anyway, he learned from a wolf to reconsider his views. And in reconsidering his views, he began to cultivate an idea of what he called the land ethic. And the land ethic is basically that every living thing, every form of life has its own equal value and that all forms of life on the land are participating together and that to simply state it, An ethical action is one that sustains the integrity, the stability, and the beauty of the ecology of any particular area.

[19:10]

So that all of the different forms of life are always in some a close, balanced relationship. So that any action that a human being takes would be with the ethical value of contributing to stability, contributing to beauty, and contributing to the overall health of that ecological community. Now we are at this age and development of a highly technological civilization and it's very hard for us to know the consequences of our actions on a large scale. Each of us takes small actions, and I think each of us has a responsibility to attend to as much as we know what's the impact of our small actions.

[20:25]

So, for me, every day that I can contribute to creating topsoil is a good day. And I call it apple core consciousness, actually. You know, when you eat an apple, usually you don't eat the core. Most people don't eat the core. Although someone told me that Suzuki Roshi ate the whole apple right down to the seeds, right? But most of us, we peel a banana and we have the peel. So I always look for a place to put the apple core or the banana peel. a place where it contributes to building topsoil. I know that much of our agricultural practice in the country destroys topsoil. Not just our agriculture, but our building of roads, our building of strip malls, our building of whole suburban developments,

[21:40]

topsoil is often scraped off and then the rains come and wash it down and it silts up the creeks and silts up the rivers and washes out to sea. We don't usually factor that in when we eat our lunch. We don't usually acknowledge our debt to topsoil. We don't usually find a way to balance the ingredients of our lunch with the loss of topsoil. So I invite everyone to take up this practice of Zen, sitting and tending the garden. And tending the garden is also these small acts that we do every day. And we are becoming, I think, as a society, becoming more conscious, but I think maybe not fast enough. Aldo Leopold talked particularly about the land, but then it's important to extrapolate it even further to... Because he died before there was a picture of the whole earth.

[23:00]

He died in 1948. And his book was published just after... He finished it just before he died and it was published just after he died. So... this picture of the Earth actually seen from space, so we can actually have an image of the whole Earth, it helps us understand, I think, who we are, but it's hard to get that and translate that into our own daily activity. To think of... So one of the scientists who was doing a project with NASA... James Lovelock came up with a view of looking at the whole Earth as one living organism and eventually called it the Gaia hypothesis and then the Gaia theory. And it's been subjected to scientific criticism and scrutiny for some decades since he first published in the 70s.

[24:09]

It's very hard because of the way our minds work, it's very hard to comprehend the whole earth as a living system. Because usually we're thinking of things in terms of linear causation. One thing follows another thing that follows this causes that and that causes the next thing. So we're usually thinking in terms of linear causation. The Gaia hypothesis looks at the whole complex interrelationships over some billions of years that actually support our life now. So to be an earthling now, it's good, I think, to honor our ancestors. According to Lovelock,

[25:17]

There were living organisms about 2.8 billion years ago that started photosynthesis. Photosynthesis meaning receiving energy from the sun and being able to form carbon compounds by taking the carbon out of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and releasing oxygen. And over billions of years, this completely changes the atmosphere, going from a high concentration of carbon dioxide to, what do we have, about 20, 21% oxygen, which is different from Mars, for example. Mars has almost all carbon dioxide and almost no oxygen at all.

[26:22]

So I count as my ancestors. In Buddhism we say, we venerate the Buddhas before Buddha. So Buddha, this Buddha that we salute up here lived about 2,500 years ago. But Buddhas before Buddha, before Buddha, before Buddha goes... me back to algae, bacteria, and slime. So we're living on these lives. These are all our ancestors. We're living on these lives of these billions of years that have actually then created the atmosphere that's breathable. So I want to come back to Shakyamuni Buddha. This Buddha, who is up here in this image on the altar, we call the awakened one.

[27:33]

And when the awakened one was about to awaken, he decided he would sit still and not move and not turn away from anything that came up in his consciousness. So this decision to not move meant that he had all kinds of fears come up. And he was, I could say, capable of great stability and concentration. And he stayed there no matter what kind of fears came up. But one of the fear that came up was his right to exist. Do I have the right to exist? In the legends, we say, a demon challenged him.

[28:39]

A demon came up and challenged him, saying that you don't have a right to exist. So how can you sit still when you have the fear as to whether you have the right to exist? So this Shakyamuni Buddha, we say, reached down and he touched the earth. What's the meaning of that, touching the earth? Touching the earth. And the earth gave a little tremble of agreement. The earth said, because of your practice of being very considerate to other beings, your practice of generosity and your practice of being willing to extend compassion to all other beings, because of that, you are completely at home, right where you are.

[29:50]

So sometimes this is represented with a goddess of the earth underneath. There's one image at the Asian Art Museum that's a bar relief sculpture showing the little earth goddess reaching up and touching her fingers to the Buddha's fingers, right at the surface of the earth. So this is a recognition that this life that each of us has is supported actually by the earth and by countless beings. Countless beings. Sometimes we say all beings are enlightened together. The maple tree in the courtyard and you are enlightened together.

[31:00]

You wake up together. There's no way that you can exist without the maple tree. Usually we don't feel that way. Usually we feel, oh, there's the maple tree and there's me. Or we feel that there's you and there's me. And usually I'm concerned about me. Much more concerned about me than I am about the maple tree. or about whether there's topsoil, or whether there's water or air. It's scary to realize how much this life is dependent upon all other, if we say other, about all forms of life. It's scary to realize how much we're dependent. We make up all kinds of stories about how important we are as human beings.

[32:06]

I don't know if human beings have caused so much damage already to the environment that the whole biosphere will collapse. I don't know. I'm pretty convinced that we've created enough damage to the environment that it'll be very hard for our civilization to continue. So I think we need to be as attentive as we can, as resilient and flexible as we can, and to do everything we can, small acts and large, of tending the garden. Back in the time of the question of the monk asking Zhao Zhou about Bodhidharma coming from the West, they did not need to have Earth Day.

[33:14]

I think they were all really directly connected with the source of their nourishment and their lives. But these days we need to have Earth Day. We need to have Earth Week and we need to maybe make more Earth Days. And each person needs to take up the practice of, say, of honoring, compassionately honoring our own life by doing whatever we can do. And that includes study. It includes scientific inquiry, it includes poetry, it includes listening, especially listening to trees. You might have another favorite source of wisdom, but for me, I recommend listening to trees.

[34:29]

Find the particular tree that you visit regularly and make friends with and listen to. And if that's too hard to get to, then it shouldn't be too hard, actually. There's a tree right out here. You can make friends with a nearby tree. But you can also make friends with weeds. We had a meeting here on Wednesday, and I learned that the best thing we can do for bees is to allow weeds to grow. I'm afraid we'll have an argument whether we should let weeds just grow out here in front. Or whether we should... make some decisions about some other plants. But our beekeeper teacher, Alan Hawkins, many of you know Alan.

[35:40]

He's a Zen student and beekeeper. He said that monoculture is killing the bees. Basically, it's monoculture. In other words, having big fields of only one kind of plant. And it's getting worse, he said, because almonds have become so popular. And as a food, and California grows so many almonds, there are more and more almond orchards being created. And the management of almonds is, the way we tend to do it is to wipe out all the other plants in the whole hundred, thousand acre area and just have almonds. And the bees suffer greatly. They have to be brought in so it Probably most people here find it stressful to move, right? And if you have to move from one apartment to another, it's a little stressful. So for bees to be trucked in from some other place and plunked down, it's stressful for them, for the colony.

[36:45]

And many colonies died just because of that. And then they find there's only one kind of flower available. And actually they need the almond flowers. So they do get busy pollinating almonds, but they need other nutrients from other kinds of flowers. And so our beekeeper said that the best thing we can do is allow weeds to grow, because the weeds have a whole variety of flowers, and over time, things are blooming at different times of the year, so there's a succession of different kinds of flowering plants, and different kinds of flowers have different kinds of nutrients, balances that bees need. So wherever you can, we might not do it out in front here, wherever you can, allow weeds to grow. I'm going to go back and talk to my wife and say, can we let more weeds grow here?

[37:49]

So this is just to point out that we need to bring a practice of humility. to being an earthling bodhisattva. An earthling bodhisattva recognizes that we actually very seldom really can clearly see the consequences of our actions. We need to study carefully. We need to learn from looking at things that we can see, that we know that are problem, that are problematic. So study the writings of Aldo Leopold. Study the writings of James Lovelock. And even study the writings of Stuart Brand. His 2009 manifesto, what's it called?

[38:54]

Whole Earth Discipline, I think. Whole Earth Discipline. which is fairly recent, 2009. Very controversial. I think he errs on the side of humans being able to actually manage what we create. But he's thought about it a lot, and we should study. Those of us who have thought about it a lot should study those who have studied even more. And for those of us who are Zen students, to cultivate our understanding, what does it mean to have this balanced practice of sitting? When we sit, we become one with the environment. When we sit, we let go of all of the conceptions that divide us from things.

[39:59]

We actually do what Zhao Zhou, when Zhao Zhou said, I'm not teaching with reference to external objects. When I point to the oak tree in the garden, I'm not referencing an external object. So do you realize when you drop off your own closely held selfish conceptual attachments that you are at home? And then when you get up from the cushion and take up your day's activity, do you realize that you are, in everything you do, every moment, you are actually tending the garden? I think that Pretty good timing.

[41:02]

I think that bell means I should stop. I'll read one poem of Wendell Berry's, though. Wendell Berry. I had other things I was going to read. I'll read one poem. Because Wendell Berry does this kind of practice. In this case, he doesn't go and consult a tree, but you can see what he consults. This is a poem called The Peace of Wild Things. when despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be. I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things. who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

[42:06]

I come into the presence of still water, and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free. Thank you 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.

[43:01]

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