This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Welcome to the Zen Center Dharma Talk on a Saturday morning. First of all, thank you, Brian, for that wonderful introduction. I don't know what kind of pedigree I have, but... He and I did go on many adventures in the mountains more than a decade ago. We're a little bit older now, not quite so fast. Maybe even a little wiser, although I don't think either of us would actually claim that. Thank you also to Nancy, the tanto, for inviting me to give a talk this morning. Also to Zachary, my current teacher. I know that he and another of other senior people at Zen Center are off at Tassajara today. celebrating Kodo, who many of you know, who was recently the Eno at City Center, who has been the head monk, the Shuso, down at Tassajara.

[01:00]

His ceremony is today. I'm happy to step in while senior teachers are celebrating a brand new teacher in the making. This is actually my third weekend in a row wearing robes. So last weekend I had the privilege of coming into City Center to celebrate my sister Kim's Shuso ceremony, her head monk. student ceremony at the end of the practice period at city center that was a wonderfully joyous occasion i look forward to seeing her on the dharma seat again soon and the weekend before that i was actually officiating a wedding on a beach at montara it was a beautiful afternoon for a wedding i think i have the sand out of my best soon now um so this is my life as a priest out in the world um i trained at the zen center for 15 years and now i do other things and i try to reach people where they are And these days, for me especially, that involves engaging on social media, which I do somewhat reluctantly, but I'm also happy to try to spread the Dharma where I can.

[02:03]

And I want to start with a quote that I posted recently, which is one of those Zen quotes that always makes me feel when I read it, yes, this is how it is. This is the kind of thing that maintains and fuels my... faith in practice in what we're doing here at Zen Center in the tradition of the teaching that's being handed down to us. It's a quote from Dogen, the Japanese founder of Zen. It's from his early work, The Bendo Wa, The Wholehearted Way, which is a fantastic piece of writing, some of which is very accessible, some of which is very deep. I know my teacher, Zachary, was just offering a class on it, which some of you may have attended. This quote is, when you let go, the Dharma fills your hands. It is not within the boundary of one and many. When you try to speak, it fills your mouth. It is not limited to vertical or horizontal. And, you know, often when I post a quote, especially a quote by Dogon on Instagram, you know, I have a conversation with some of the people that follow me, some of whom, you know, sincere students of the way.

[03:16]

And. In one of those conversations, I came up with the phrase, ease should be easy, which is the working title for this talk. And even just saying ease should be easy, there's a voice in my head, you know, the skeptical, cynical English side of me that has not died away even after more than 20 years in California. But wait a minute, there's a war on. There's a pandemic on. Things are not great. Why are you talking about ease? And, you know, it can be simplistic. You know, there are many times I see things on, you know, from Dharma practitioners on Instagram, like, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, and say, come on, you know, let's also acknowledge some of the difficult things that are happening. And, but this is the world we have to engage in. And, you know, my constant exploration of practice is how this practice, the traditional practice that has me wearing these beautiful black robes,

[04:19]

the formal practice, how this enables us to engage in the way and engage with the world as it is right now. One of the people I have connected with on social media, who's currently sitting Sashinyan and Gringoch as a new student, expressed their frustration in the early days of the war that they were sitting there doing oryoki training, which seems self-indulgent when the war was breaking out in Ukraine. And I said, what else would you be doing? What would you be doing if you weren't at Green Gulch? I remember being at Tassajara when the second Gulf War broke out in 2003. And Linda Ruth, the abbess at the time, who was leading the practice period, you know, we had wonderful conversations about what it is to be in a monastery, which feels secluded and isolated. It feels like you're away from everything. What it means to be there when other parts of the world are at war. But for a moment, let's just go back to that Dogen quote.

[05:25]

I want to read it again. When you let go, the Dharma fills your hands. It is not within the boundary of one and many. When you try to speak, it fills your mouth. It is not limited to vertical or horizontal. And so when you let go, this is the starting point. When you let go, this is the important action. What are we letting go of? More to the point, what were we trying to get hold of? When we tried to grasp, what is it we're grasping? What is it that we can let go? How can we let go? There's an energetic quality of this opening the hand. We think of Kosho Uchiyama's phrase, opening the hand of thought. How is it to open our hands, to let go? What does that feel like? What is it that we're doing? And, you know, in keeping with the theme of my talk, you know, I want to suggest that what we can let go of is the kind of striving that we usually subject ourselves to.

[06:34]

What Linda Ruth called in the talk, you know, she spoke about a couple of weeks ago, Gringotts, these gaining ideas that we all have. It's a wonderful talk I encourage you to listen to. Dogen and Suzuki Roshi are always going on, letting go of the sense of attainment, trying to get something. We can let go of the kind of mental convolutions, the getting caught up in conceptual distinctions, as Dogen talks about, very close to this passage in the Bendawa, in a wholehearted way. We can let go of the idea that what we're looking for is something else, somewhere else, or someone else. I think we carry around these notions in our heads. There's something out there. There's some different person I can try to be. There's some way of being that's easier than what I'm going through right now. And we can let go of outcomes. This is something that has been a theme in many of the talks I've given since the beginning of the pandemic.

[07:41]

Like we want resolution. We want a sense of this is how it's going to end. And there are no resolutions at hand. Even if we think we're out of the pandemic, we're not. We don't know how the war is going to turn out. We may all get completely engulfed in it. The whole world may be completely changed, devastated by what's about to happen. We don't know. And our minds want to know. So can we let go of that kind of striving, that kind of clinging, that grasping for certainty in a world that is always uncertain? But the second part, when you try to speak, it fills your mouth. Again, I had a conversation with somebody after I posted that. And when I first read this many years ago, I kind of had the feeling that it was more like if you're trying to speak, the Dharma kind of stops your mouth. Like you can't say anything about the Dharma. You cannot say anything that is completely true. So even trying to express it, you're already missing the point.

[08:45]

But I think there's also a way we can look at it, which is that Everything you say is the Dharma. Everything you say is a part of the reality that we're living in. And this kind of statement always comes with a caveat. It doesn't give you license to say anything and say, but this is the truth. You know, our actions of body, speech and mind should always be upright and in the goal of reducing suffering rather than increasing suffering in the world. We should be based on the understanding of Prajna Parameter, the wisdom of emptiness, that nothing has an absolute level of truth. But the reality is that this is the world we live in, the pleasant and the unpleasant. In the war, we think, I don't know if we know how many casualties there are, I just tried to look up a figure today, maybe 30,000 people have already died in a month or more. And this is just one war, as my dumb sister Jean pointed out a couple of weeks ago.

[09:49]

There are many wars in the world, most of which aren't on the front pages. We have different relationships to these wars because of our alliances, our predilections, but they are still causing suffering around the world. What we have discovered in these few weeks is these twin tendencies that human beings have always had on the one hand towards violence, aggression, what we call in Buddhism, the three poisons, greed, hatred, and delusion. On the other hand, we see many examples of wonderful, compassionate, altruistic activity, which has always been the case in human behavior. So these things are always going to add tension. I was reading also in terms of the pandemic that in the UK, where I'm from, they're currently recording the highest number of cases of the whole pandemic. Now, thankfully, these cases are not on the whole as serious, but nevertheless, the pandemic is not over, even as the government over there would like it to be over.

[10:52]

And I spoke last year in January on the Dharma seat for Zen Center, and I was referring to the death toll at the time in the U.S., which in January was 828,000 people. I was comparing that to the population of San Francisco, which is slightly more than that. Now, Three months later, the death toll is 979,000 people. And we also have, which has been somewhat pushed to the back, but also somewhat foregrounded by the nature of the current war, the climate crisis. I read a quote from Bill McKibben, the veteran activist, the other day. He pointed out that fossil fuel pollution in 2020 killed three times as many people as COVID did around the world. as we all worry about the price of gas. And just yesterday I read a figure from the International Energy Agency and said if SUVs were considered as a separate country, they would be the sixth most polluting country in the whole world, putting out 900 million tons of carbon dioxide into the world.

[12:03]

So none of this is good. This is the world that we're living in right now. It's painful. And We can also maybe affirm that even in the few weeks of the war and certainly in the years of the pandemic, we somehow inured ourselves to the worst of it. We maybe shelter ourselves from the worst of the news. We tune it out. I know I limit the amount of news I take in, but this is a tendency we have, like we start to get used to things, start to wish they were over or that something else was happening. There's a behavior called narcotization, which... I know rings true for me. I was this morning, early this morning, watching some football, soccer from England, and that's one of my favorite ways to tune out and enjoy myself with no thought of, you know, the difficulties in the world. We all have ways that we do this, and they're essential parts of our self-care, of moving through the world. But is that what I mean by ease? Is this the ease we're looking for? I think we know the answer to that is no.

[13:06]

You know, ease... It's not that. It is not tuning out. But I think what our practice, particularly our practice of zazen, of sitting upright in the middle of everything, as we do, as often as we know, however much you do it, is a good practice. This practice stands us in better stead to manage all these difficult situations, to manage the pain and the suffering of the world. When I was giving talks to groups in England at the beginning of the pandemic because I'd been unable to visit in person, it struck me that many practitioners seemed to be dealing with lockdown a lot better because they were used to just sitting there with not very much going on. We talked a lot about the tools that we develop of equanimity and resilience, finding a way through things.

[14:06]

And this is not just about tuning things out. It's doing our best to stay present with whatever's happening, the good and the bad. And the things that, as Dogen talks about, go beyond the one and the many, the things which are not reached by our consciousness. We just, we stay with everything. This is our immeasurable body practice of Zazen. And Christina, in her talk last week, close by saying the body intimately knows interconnection. So while we might think that sitting in meditation again somehow isolates us from the world, in the same way that we might think that living at the monastery during the war isolates you from the war, when we sit we are connected with everybody intimately. Dogen posits in the wholehearted way that we're sitting connected through space and time with everybody. And this is not something that we can grasp with our minds. Again, I think a lot of us practice trying to get our minds around these amazingly complicated things that Dogen says.

[15:13]

And we can't. But we can sit with them in our bodies. Where the mind wants a resolution, the mind is always striving, claiming the body can sit, even uncomfortably, with what is going on. So I don't know what to do about the war myself. I'm not living in Green Gulch, but, you know, I still have very little influence, very little power. I have been fundraising and donating to the World Central Kitchen who are feeding people in Ukraine and the diaspora of refugees. And we just don't know exactly how it is that we can respond. But we trust through our practice, through our understanding of Prajnaparamita, that our intentions are going to be to respond in ways that reduce suffering. And this is the world that we're practicing with. I want to read a story. It's a long story, so I want to read it in full.

[16:13]

It comes from the book, Zen Chinese Heritage, which has many, many hundreds of amazing stories from the golden age of Zen in China. And it's one that has always resonated with me very strongly. It's about two Dharma brothers who I think had many adventures together. Zhuifeng and Yantu and their seppo and ganto in Japanese. This version gives them their Chinese names, so Zhuifeng and Yantu. When Zhuifeng was traveling with Yantu on Tortoise Mountain, they were temporarily stuck in an inn during a snowstorm. Each day, Yantu spent the entire day sleeping. Zhuifeng spent each day sitting in Zen meditation. One day, Zhuifeng called out, elder brother, elder brother, get up. Yan Tu says, what is it? Zhuifeng said, don't be idle. Monks on pilgrimage have profound knowledge as their companion. This companion must accompany us at all times.

[17:15]

But here today, all you're doing is sleeping. Yan Tu yelled back, just eat your fill and sleep. Sitting there in meditation all the time is like being some clay figure in a village's hut. In the future, you'll just spook the men and women of the village. Zhuifeng pointed to his own chest and said, I feel unease here. I don't dare cheat myself by not practicing diligently. Yantu said, I always said that someday you'll build a cottage on a lonely mountain peak and expound a great teaching. Yet you still talk like this. Zhuifeng said, I'm truly anxious. Yan Tu said, if that's really so, then reveal your understanding, and where it's correct, I'll confirm it for you. Where it's incorrect, I'll root it out. Zhou Yifeng said, when I first went to Yang Guan's place, I heard him expound on emptiness and form. At that time, I found an entrance.

[18:17]

Yan Tu said, for the next 30 years, don't speak of this matter again. Zhou Yifeng said, And then I saw Dongshan's poem that said, Avoid seeking elsewhere, for that's far from the self. Now I travel alone everywhere I meet it. Now it's exactly me. Now I'm not it. Yantu said, If that's so, you'll never save yourself. Zhou Yifeng then said, Later I asked Daishan, Can a student understand the essence of the ancient teachings? He struck me and said, What did you say? At that time, it was like the bottom falling out of a bucket of water. Yanto said, Haven't you heard it said that what comes in through the front gate isn't the family jewels? Zhuoifeng said, Then in the future, what should I do? Yanto said, In the future, if you want to expound a great teaching, then it must flow forth from your own breast.

[19:21]

In the future, your teaching and mine will cover heaven and earth. When Zhou Feng heard this, he experienced unsurpassed enlightenment. He then bowed and said, Elder brother, at last, today on Tortoise Mountain, I've attained the way. So I always felt I was Zhou Feng in this situation. When I lived at Tassajara, when I lived at City Center, I was always diligently practicing. I was always trying my hardest to learn this. profound knowledge, or to grasp this profound knowledge that accompanies monks. And I thought that Yanto in this situation was being lazy and disrespectful. How could he not be diligently practicing? And I remember Tenshin Roshi, Rabbi Anderson, I think talked about this story at Tassahara one time when I was there, and he added the fact that Yanto wore out nine Zafus in his search for enlightenment.

[20:25]

I've tried to look for this story online. I can't find any reference to it anywhere. But if Tenshin Roshi said it, I'm sure it is true. And in those days, during the talks at Tassahara, there was time at the end to go up, leave your seat and go to the teacher's seat, stand there in front of Tenshin Roshi and ask a question. So I went along and said, Tenshin Roshi, I've been sitting for six years and I have this Zafu. I have still not worn out my first Zafu. What chance is there for me? And he said, well, I would advise you to skip over the Zafu wearing out part and concentrate on the part where it comes out from your breast and covers the entire universe. I still have the same Zafu. I still have not worn it out. I'm not sitting on it today. But it's still here, 22 years on, from when I first moved to San Francisco, showing signs of age.

[21:26]

But I took Tenshin Roshi's advice to heart. I have been working on how to make this practice my own practice. How to find within me what can cover the entire universe from my own breast. And this is what everyone can do. And I noticed in the parts, the story he's talking about, he points to his own chest. It's not a mind thing, it's a body thing. How can your body align with the teaching? How can you embody the teachings? It reminds me of Lou Hartman, who some of you know, who died some time ago now, who lived at the city center for a long time. And on his rakasu, was the line from the precept ceremony, to expound the Dharma with this body is foremost. And it really does mean making this body the vessel of the Dharma.

[22:32]

Not this mind, this body. Practicing wholeheartedly, authentically in whatever we're doing, whether we're living at the monastery or living out in the world. Whatever it is, how can we practice wholeheartedly and authentically for us, not in anybody else's teaching? We are always going to be ourselves. We cannot fail to be ourselves. Can we discover ourselves? Can we be fully ourselves? We don't know what the result of that is going to be. We can maybe let go of our ideas about ourselves. and just be completely who we are. And I know that I'm speaking here as a middle-class straight white man, and that confers many privileges as I move through the world.

[23:40]

It's very easy for me to get up and say, I can be authentically myself, even though, frankly, from my culture growing up in England, there are things that weren't necessarily recommended, showing emotion, showing vulnerability. These are things that I have learned how to do. But everyone should have the space and the safety to feel encouraged to explore what it is to be authentically themselves. And this is our work as a Sangha to encourage this and to hold space for this. I know that a couple of days ago it was Transgender Day of Visibility. So I know what I can do from my seat is do my best to be a supportive ally whenever I can. We know that in the country, don't say gay laws are being written. Other repressive laws are being written. And my job is to do my best to be a supportive ally in these cases as well. Our liberation is a collective liberation.

[24:44]

We're not separate. I don't feel separate from any of these people. I'm also not separate from the people who are waging war and who are writing repressive bills. It's just that my energy is going to go elsewhere. As Brian mentioned, I've been working a lot with the Suzuki Roshi archives. It's an incredible treasury of teaching, of audio that we've been working with. And just recently, I've been studying what Suzuki Roshi said in the first session, the first week of intensive retreat after Tassahara opened. And Tassahara, if you don't know it and haven't been there, is an amazing place in the wilderness, in land from Big Sur. And it was... bought by Zen Center in the mid 1960s and opened as the first training monastery outside of Zen Center, outside of Asia in 1967.

[25:51]

And so the first sesshin, you know, at the end of the first period of monastic training was Suzuki Roshi's chance to really express his teachings about monastic practice and how the value of traditional monastic practice that have come through from Dogen over seven or eight centuries could help the people that he was working with at the time. And so the audio for that has just been rediscovered, and I've been listening to this audio. In one of the talks, he talks about four stages of practice that we can go through as we try to figure this out for ourselves. There's a belief in the teaching. This is the motivation that brings us to the cushion, that brings us to the practice. This idea that... all the teachings have a value and I want that to be reflected in my life. There's the stage of intellectual understanding. So where we read, it's not necessarily easy to read Dogen and have intellectual understanding.

[26:53]

Even when I first read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, I didn't have an intellectual understanding of it. But there are some parts of the teaching that you can intellectually grasp. There's the practice stage where you work, diligently, as Shui Feng was doing, sitting, taking in these teachings, trying to understand for yourself through practice. And then there's the verification stage where somehow everything falls into place and you understand that what you're practicing is the same practice Buddha's practiced, that the ancestors practiced, and that we're connected with them through that. And reading, hearing Suzuki Roshi talk about this, rang a bell, I knew that I'd being exposed to this at Tassajara. And again, I searched deep and wide for where this might have been mentioned in Dogen. It was actually Wendy Lewis, who edits the website for Zen Center, who actually pointed out that it comes from the Lotus Sutra, which I know I studied with Linda Ruth at Tassajara.

[27:55]

But Suzuki Roshi goes on, like we can talk about four stages, but they're not necessarily sequential. And maybe they're not even stages. So don't kind of think that it's just a step by step practice. This is what Zen was very clear about as it developed in China more than 1500 years ago. Any of these things can happen at any moment if we allow ourselves that opportunity. Dogen reinforces this point with his notion of practice enlightenment. When we wholeheartedly practice, we are already manifesting enlightened activity. And again, this is something we can't get our heads around. Not me, surely not. I'm just sitting there diligently on the cushion trying to understand something and I don't understand anything. So how is it to proceed from this faith, from this embodied faith, from this embodied feeling that when I read that quote from Dogen that I quote at the beginning, that gives me an inkling of it, a shimmer of like, yes, this is how it is, these moments that encourage us to go on.

[28:57]

And so it doesn't mean as we continue to practice, it doesn't mean as I'm sitting on the Dharma seat that I have everything figured out. You know, this is the key point. It's like maybe, you know, if I wear out enough Zafus, I'll attain that perfect enlightenment and I will have everything figured out. But that hasn't happened in 20 years. But I'm continuing to practice. I'm continuing this truthful practice, as we say in our precept ceremony. As they say, even after attaining Buddhahood, will you continue this truthful practice? Yes, I will. Yes, I will. Yes, I will. This is our affirmation that we can take on as we practice. So we're messy. I'm a messy person. I make messes. We accept our own messiness. That's part of the letting go. Letting go that we can be some perfect, ideal person who doesn't make any mistakes, who everybody loves. It doesn't happen. Can we accept that even our teachers can be messy sometimes? I have been messy as a teacher, and I continue to apologize for the messes I have made. So I've been talking about Tassajara and I'm lucky enough to be going down there in a couple of weeks.

[30:12]

I'm very excited about that. I haven't been since 2019. I attempted to get to Tassajara over New Year. I was driving down with some monks who were going back to attend the practice period that was about to start. And we got as far as Salinas and we were told there were still trees on the road and the road was inaccessible. So I came back. Didn't make it to Tassajara that time. But I noticed, and I spoke about it last time I was on the Dharma seat, the composure of the monks. It's a quality I'll talk about in a minute. But as we rebuild the Sangha in real time, as we start connecting in person again, there are certain parts of Tassajara that I think are really helpful for this. Certainly how it's informed my practice and how my practice expresses itself these days. And the first point I want to make is that we go back to human speed. At Tassajara, we're just walking around.

[31:13]

Nobody is moving very fast. It's a very profound change. I notice almost every time I drive into the valley, like you go over the mountain top, you drive all the way down to the bottom of the valley. Beginning, it seems very, very enclosed. The mountains are all around you in this narrow, tiny little space. And I often feel for the first half an hour, I'm just rushing around compared to everybody else. And then eventually you slow down. And this slowing down, this human pace, I think is an important thing that we can all practice. I've noticed it other places I've been like Wilbur Hot Springs. Again, beautiful landscape and also perhaps not coincidentally somewhere where cell phone signals are not available. So we have no distractions. We are disconnected from devices. So instead we have presence and connection. We have, in both locations, a beautiful, incredible landscape to connect with.

[32:15]

There's a profound connection in nature that happens at Tassahara, which is, I think, one of the main reasons that Suzuki Roshi chose that over many of the other places that Zen Center looked at over the years. So this walking around at human speed in nature is hugely restorative. It's our natural home. And I know that many of us live in cities now where things don't happen so fast. But as Brian mentioned, I do mindful hiking in the city and even spending an hour in the woods of the Presidio or Mount Sutro or in Golden Gate Park. You can slow down. You can feel that slowing down. You can feel that connection to yourself and to the environment. Maybe when you step out of the woods and see cars moving by again, it feels fast. It feels loud. In the same way as when you come out from Tassajara, suddenly the world that we usually take for granted seems incredibly high-paced. So, you know, this is, you know, the things that we've managed to do in the last couple of hundred years are very alien, I think, to most of human evolution.

[33:26]

I think any time we can get back in touch with the natural environment, with this human speed of walking, of sitting still, being surrounded by nature, I think is beneficial to us. This is something that we can do for our practice even if we're not sitting on the cushion. My practice is as much walking around as it is sitting in the cushion. I also ride my bike a lot as many of you probably know and I was up on San Bruno mountain just a couple of weeks ago and being San Francisco it was pretty foggy up the top and wasn't especially pleasant it was cold and damp but I was riding down the mountain just getting to the place where the fog line stops and you could just start to see the sun coming through and the sun shining on the bay. And I thought about the kind of connections or the qualities that make enjoyment of the world possible even when things are hard. So the first quality is awareness.

[34:28]

Just being aware of the surroundings, aware of what's going on. Noticing. You know, we spend so much of our time, you know, with our nose down in our phones or looking at screens, we're not necessarily noticing things. I make a big practice of watching people when I'm out in the street, looking at people, trying to connect with people, even if it's just to smile momentarily, because that's a human practice that, you know, it's been harder for us to maintain during the pandemic. And I think that's one reason we're suffering from it, but that we can all undertake. So awareness and then curiosity. What is it that we're seeing? What is it that we're hearing? Staying open to whatever it is that arises. You know, our mind is often, you know, our mind has evolved to kind of sift through all the sensory information and say, I'm just going to focus on this. The rest of it I don't care about. But can we keep that openness to whatever is arising?

[35:33]

And within that openness, within that curiosity, we can find beauty. And even descending on a bike on a cold, damp, foggy morning, there's amazing beauty in the fog in the trees and the sun on the water. And from that appreciation of beauty, we can find awe. And that awe, I think, is what keeps us moving in the world, what keeps us engaged and alive, keeps our life force present. So even when Times are really hard when things seem very negative. It's not just that. It's not only that. There's always more. When we stop trying to put things in boxes, we can be clear-eyed about exactly what is happening, the good and the bad. And our sitting allows us this composure to do that. And as a reminder, both Dogen and Suzuki Roshi lived through incredibly harrowing times.

[36:34]

And Dogen, I'm not a scholar of Japanese history, but Dogen lived through times of famine, war, regime upheavals, incredibly difficult times. And even though he had an aristocratic life, I don't think life was guaranteed in those days. And Suzuki Roshi lived through the Second World War and then came to America 15 years later. So while we might want our life to be easy, It's, you know, we have to acknowledge that it's not always going to be like that. And can we still live, you know, with this awareness, this curiosity, this beauty and sense of awe about what is happening? And as it happens, you know, right now is cherry blossom time. I saw some beautiful photos from Japan this week and also went into Golden Gate Park a couple of times this week and saw beautiful cherry blossoms. And up on Twin Peaks, the California poppies are blossoming.

[37:45]

And the phrase that came up for me, and those of you who've done residential monastic practice will know exactly what it is, comes from mindful of transiency, pursue the path with diligence and care. We always have to remember that life is fleeting. Life is precious. You should pursue the path with diligence and care. Ease even within that transiency. Let go and let it fill your hands. And remember that you are exactly you. And this is always the teaching that we have. And I think I'll stop there. Thank you very much. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[39:01]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[39:04]

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