This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. It's nice to be here. I haven't been at City Center in quite some time and I see a lot of old... friends, and also new faces, and who even knows who's out there in the world of virtual connection. My name is Sarah, and as you will find out, I live at Green Gulch Farm, which is another one of the San Francisco Zen Center's temples up in Marin. Yeah, I appreciate being invited.

[01:01]

Thank you, Ana, David. Yeah, to talk a little bit about what I've been thinking about, how I've been turning the Dharma lately. I wonder how many of you are familiar with the Genjo Koan. How many of you have read that or chanted that? Most people, if you haven't, it's really great. Check it out. And there's a line in the Genjo Koan that says, here is the place, here the way unfolds. And I think of it often, I think of that line, because it's just so direct. You know, no matter what I'm doing, what it says to me is just practice. There's no other time and no other place that the Buddha way unfolds.

[02:08]

Here is the place. Here the way unfolds. So it's only here and now that we can wake up to our Buddha nature, our true nature. So as we sit in this Buddha hall this morning or... in our homes, at our computers, or maybe you're listening on some ear buds somewhere. Or as we take care of our families and friends, we interact with our neighbors as we work and play. Our whole life, you know, right here and now, moment after moment, our whole life. is an opportunity to practice the wisdom and compassion of the Buddhas and realize the way of non-separation, you know, and liberation for all beings, all together.

[03:13]

At Green Gulch, where I live, we have a three-week intensive every January. It's kind of a really short three-week intensive. where we sit a lot of zazen every day and we eat formal oryoki meals in the zendo and we listen to dharma talks and we have dharma discussion with people who are turning, you know, how to live this dharma that we're exploring together, how to apply it to their own lives, right? And people come from all over the country. Sometimes they come from internationally to participate. And it's really wonderful, you know, to be with people who share a sense of what the most important thing is, right? And for me, nested in the middle of the January intensive this year, I went to another intensive, a four-day

[04:22]

farming conference called the EcoFarm Conference or the Ecological Farming Conference where, you know, for the last 43 years, farmers from all over California and all over the country and sometimes even internationally travel to Asilomar down in Monterey and, you know, we follow an intensive schedule of workshops and lectures and panels by fellow farmers and by research scientists and sometimes even elected officials, local food systems advocates, food justice organizers. And we eat organic meals together made of ingredients that the participants have grown and donated. And we have lots of discussions about how to apply what we are learning into our daily farming practices.

[05:26]

So for me, the two intensives were seamless. You know, here is the place, here the way unfolds. And in both intensives, in different ways, and this is what I'd like to talk to you about, I practiced and I noticed and I saw the fruit of the practice of confession and repentance. Confession and repentance has been a foundational Buddhist practice since the time of Shakyamuni Buddha.

[06:30]

I found a talk Suzuki Roshi gave about it, and he said, In the time of the Buddha, lay people and monks gathered together to recite Buddha's precepts. At that time, those who have failed to observe the precepts may confess it. And those who do not say anything are supposed to have observed the precepts. This ceremony of precept recitation and confession is the fusatsu ceremony. Do you guys all know what the Buddhist precepts are? Does anyone not know what they are? Yeah, I see. So maybe let's do it together. Let's name the precepts, the 16 great Bodhisattva precepts. Does anyone know what the... Three pure precepts are. You can just shout it out. One of the pure precepts. I vow to refrain from all evil.

[07:33]

I vow to cultivate all good. Or I saw this morning on the Zen Center website, it says, I vow to make every effort to live in enlightenment. And the last one, live and be lived for the benefit of all beings. And then there are 10 grave precepts, prohibitory precepts, telling us what not to do. And then you can imagine from there what you ought to do. Anyone? I vow not to kill. I vow not to take what is not given to steal. I vow not to misuse sexuality. I vow to refrain from false speech. I vow not to lie. I vow to refrain from intoxicants. Intoxicants over there or intoxicating over there.

[08:44]

I vow not to slander. I vow not to praise self at the expense of others. I vow not to be avaricious. Somebody tell me what another way we say that is. I vow not to be possessive of anything. Be greedy. Yeah. And we say I vow not to be possessive of anything, especially the Dharma. I vow not to harbor ill will. And I vow not to disparage the triple treasure. So the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, triple treasure. So those are our precepts that help us, support us to remember and embody the most important thing. You know, our wholeness with each other, our care for one another, our non-separation.

[09:47]

the way things really are, our Buddha nature. So, you know, we observe this precept ceremony, Ryaku Fusatsu, which is like a, Ryaku is like abbreviated. Here at Zen Center, sometimes it's informally called the full moon ceremony. We do it at the full moon time. And at Green Gulch, we also do it at the new moon, twice a month. Suzuki Roshi said, the most important part of the fusatsu ceremony is the recitation of the precepts. When we recite those precepts, we should think about what we have been doing. If we did not observe good precepts, we should say, I didn't, I'm sorry. Then, by the power of confession,

[10:48]

your bad karma will get weaker. The tendency to do harmful things will get weaker when we confess, when we reflect on our actions and how we want to live and whether there's a gap. So we observe fusatsu to purify our mind and to keep the Buddha's way. The character of fusatsu, this is Suzuki Roshi still, are a transliteration of the Sanskrit word posada. Posa means to do something good, to increase the good or positive side. And da means to stop, to stop doing bad. The nature of the precepts is to encourage good practice and to stop evil desire. It is good. It is to encourage. good precept observance, and to put an end to bad, deluded observance.

[11:51]

That is the idea of the precepts. Once again, to doing good things and stop doing bad things, to stop the action that arises from bad karma or evil karma. So while the ceremony is beautiful and can be helpful in it, make offerings, and we bow, and we invoke the Buddhas, and we vow, and we confess and repent, and we bow, and we recite the 16 great Bodhisattva vows, and we bow. So it can be helpful to do this embodied practice, and it can often be abstract. Right? These are just words, maybe, sometimes. And so it's in the particular of our daily lives that our preset practice and the power of confession and repentance comes alive and has the power to transform the world around us and liberate beings.

[13:14]

So right now, my job at Zen Center is to care for the farm at Green Gulch. We're a certified organic vegetable farm. And much of my daily practice involves caring for soil and water and plants and tractors and creeks and animals and people. And so when I reflect on my preset practice, it's often in that context. But for each of you, your daily lives are different, right? Each of us. And so what precept practice will look like will be different. You know, how we, the ground of embodiment will be different. So maybe we can just take a moment, all of us, to call to mind. Activities of our daily lives.

[14:15]

You know, if you have a roommate or a partner or children, parents, you take care of them maybe. We prepare food. We care for the spaces we live and work in. You know, objects, tasks, you know, just what do you do every day? And Does it come to mind for you that here is the place? Here the way unfolds. Do you practice awareness of the sensations in your bodies, your thoughts, how you're handling touching things, moving them, what words you're using? how you are connected to what's in front of you or who's in front of you.

[15:23]

You know, what would following the precepts in each moment look like in your daily life? And because we all depend on the earth, literally the living soil, you know, to live. We all eat. We all live on this planet. We all breathe the air, right? Drink the water. I was hoping you'd indulge me in talking a little bit about the ways that I've been contemplating confession and repentance in this context and how I see it leading to new creative practices in the organic farming community, practices that are rooted in love and generosity and the truth of our interdependence. And I hope that reflecting on this practice or hearing about how others are taking it up, you will be inspired in your own practice that will all be inspired.

[16:39]

So I want to be clear that organic farmers, while I think of them as the Buddhists of the farming world, are not necessarily Buddhists. Very few farmers I know personally have made the vow to dedicate their lives to the liberation of all beings and live in accord with the 16 great Bodhisattva vows that we talked about earlier, you know, that we recited. And yet, there are foundational principles in organic farming that one could point to as the most important thing for those farmers, something that they've dedicated their lives to, the way that we have dedicated our lives to the Buddha way. Wendell Berry, the great farmer, writer, and agriculturalist... in his essay called Solving for a Pattern said, the work of food production occurs within a complete, mutually influential relationship of soil, plants, animals, and people.

[18:01]

Doing that work well will therefore be ecologically, agriculturally, and culturally healthful. description that implies concern for pattern for quality which necessarily complicates the concern for production so he's saying you know rather than farming as a way to get something to extract or produce something like food or fiber or fuel the most important thing is paying attention to learning about and caring for the dynamic process of life itself, supporting the health of the soil, water, air, and life, human and more than human, that supports and nourishes us. Not separating and extracting, but rather connecting

[19:07]

And enriching the whole system based on the truth of the food web's complex interdependence is kind of the job description of an organic farmer. Ecological farmer. An ecological farmer. So this can be enacted in many ways and is, but one thing that all ecological farmers have in common is their devotion to the soil. So as an aside, I don't know if any of you heard all the controversy about hydroponics. Probably not, because you probably don't hang out with a lot of organic farmers, but organic farmers do not consider hydroponics to be organic farming. There's no soil involved. There's no living matrix. It's extractive. So most of the organic farmers I know have dedicated the majority of their lives to studying and laboring to benefit the soil where they live and work.

[20:13]

Devoting their time and labor and creativity to adding organic material, you know, basically carbon and nitrogen, the building blocks of life, to the soil in the form of compost and cover crops and mulches in order to feed. microorganisms that make nutrients available to plants and to allow for air penetration and respiration of those same microorganisms to prevent loss of habitat and nutrients due to erosion and increased drainage and the water holding capacity of the soil to benefit the life growing in and on the earth. ability to study the soil ecosystem has advanced leaps and bounds in, I don't know, the last 10 or 15 years due to basically our ability to quickly and cheaply sequence DNA.

[21:17]

So we can take soil samples and figure out who's in there and how many of them there are by looking at their DNA markers or RNA, I'm not quite sure. And we now know what this amazed me. I learned that plants and animals and all of the creatures we know about and can see make up like a tiny, tiny fraction of life on earth. We're just, you know, there's kind of a new tree of life and bacteria and fungi are like the trunk and the canopy and the leaves and the branches. And we're like one little tiny like life that we have. Thought made up the whole, you know, plants and animals and fungi and... We're just this tiny little portion of it. And if you're really interested, there's a cool graphic you can find online. If you Google the new tree of life, it's in a journal called Nature Microbiology.

[22:22]

I saw it in many slide decks at EcoBarb. Everybody's totally into it. You know, so... scientists in addition to just understanding or like getting a glimpse into starting to imagine like this vast universe in the soil that we're caring for and depend on we have also been able to observe things that we weren't able to see before and I don't know if it's because we weren't looking or we didn't have the ability to to see it but in any case there's you know one of the things we knew was that there are like millions of miles of microscopic fungal hyphae. So hyphae is a fungal cell that is like a tube and they connect to each other and make networks throughout the soil. They're also called mycelia, mycelium, right? So this is like the fungal body.

[23:24]

And mushrooms that we see are just the fruiting body of that. They're just one part of that whole organism. And what we found out was that certain funguses have symbiotic relationships with certain plants. Some plants don't have fungal relationships, but a lot of them do. And it's actually the fungi and the bacteria that... give the plants the nutrients. The plants can't access them themselves. And they saw that bacteria actually use the fungal hyphae as like a highway, like a highway to get through the soil because if you can imagine being a little microscopic being and like soil particles are these huge things, you know, to have a way to travel through it really quickly. And they also learned that

[24:26]

that water travels up the outside of the hyphae. And I think it's like so little, like the molecules of the water are so little, it's actually like through electric charge that they climb up. And so water way down in the soil is made available to the plant roots through these fungal networks or on the outside. So this increases plants' ability to access water in dry conditions, you know, and really increases the resilience of the plants that we all depend on. And so many of you have probably heard me talk about this before, but the more we learn these things, the more it appears that many of the farming practices, conventional and organic, having to do with tillage, which is where we cut into the soil and turn it, right, disturb the soil, which is beneficial in some ways.

[25:32]

But we see that when we understand the richness of this ecosystem, it's not really in accord with our aspiration to support the health and resilience of the soil ecosystem. So to actually meet what is, to let in the truth of suffering, you know, of this world we live in that is on fire, you know, think of things that we see or read about every day, war, displacement,

[26:33]

You know, not enough housing for everybody. Mass extinction. The literal poisoning of the planet we live on. To meet all of this and to let it in, the truth of it. In addition to just all of the small daily manifestations. of greed, hate, and delusion, to me at least, can seem overwhelming sometimes. And the capacity to settle and open and meet what is has never been more vital. Right? Because in order to transform our karma, to stop doing bad things and to do more good things, we have to settle and see clearly.

[27:42]

We have to have the presence of mind to remember the most important thing and come back to the precepts So we can think about what we're doing. So that if we did not observe good precepts, you know, we can say, I didn't. I am sorry. And this is how we come back into integrity and into right relationship. based on the truth of our connection with each other and all of life. So over the years, when people would mention the problems with tillage, tilling the soil, these practices, to me, the volatization of carbon...

[28:50]

that was in the soil, going up into the atmosphere, the damage to the soil structure, disturbing these fungal networks. It was really hard to let it in. You know, I didn't want to look at it, actually. I was afraid to look at my practice, my farming practice and my Zen practice, you know, same practice. I was afraid to be a bad organic farmer and to be a person in the world that is causing harm. And so, you know, in subtle and probably not so subtle ways, I would deflect and defend, right? Blame the messenger. Oh, you don't really know about organic farming. You've never really done it, right? Like, you don't know. how hard it is or how, why we need to do that or minimize the harm, right?

[29:55]

It's not so bad. You can't get out of, you can't avoid birth and death, right? We can't get out of it. So, you know, over years really of reflecting of this kind of process of letting this in, I was able, through some kind of grace, to turn inward and be silent and still with what I knew was the most important thing. What the most important thing was to me. The healthy functioning of the soil ecosystem. And not killing, but supporting life. And through the power of practice, through Zazen practice, I was able to hold myself compassionately while examining my actions.

[31:06]

Wow, there's a lot going on outside. I live in the country. It's quiet. So holding what is and how we are responsible for it with compassion. To confess and repent. Yeah, so it can be scary to admit our shortcomings. And when we recite the precepts, proclaim how we aspire to live, and reflect on our actions and shortcomings, it can be painful. in our bodies, viscerally painful. And I think this pain of remorse is key to repentance, to transformational pain, to transformational change.

[32:13]

The pain is transformational. The word remorse is made up of two parts, re, again, and morse, or to bite. So to feel remorse is to bite or taste, to actually feel experience in the body our actions again. Tasting is a direct perception. Nobody can taste something for us. Someone can tell us that a food is bitter or sweet, but to know the truth of it, we must experience it directly. So only you know through your own senses, your own body and mind, whether in retrospect, your thoughts or actions have the bitter taste of remorse.

[33:18]

And you have to have the courage to experience. experience it. And I say this because not all confessions are transformational. You know, you can say, I'm sorry, and not feel remorse. You know, you can apologize and not change. And I think, you know, we've probably all experienced that, either giving the apology or receiving one that didn't feel sincere or grounded in real reflection. So confession has many layers, and sometimes we can confess something, say the precept we violated, and still not really understand the precept, or how we violated it, or how to practice it, how to live it. You know, so we can say it and think it, but we can't yet do it.

[34:21]

Or be it. And sometimes that's the only confession we can make. We can see and understand only what our eye of practice can reach. And still, Suzuki Roshi tells us, by returning to what we value most and how we aspire to live, reflecting on our actions and saying, I'm sorry. we are creating the conditions for doing more good and doing less harm. So when we stay in relationship with the precepts and keep looking at our practice, keep settling and opening, we create the conditions for insight and understanding and practice. And when we know the cause of our sorrow throughout the body, When the bitter taste of remorse penetrates to the marrow, the experience is transformative.

[35:28]

Whether sudden or gradual, bad karma is abandoned and fresh possibilities for life and for dynamic relationship open. So... The more I practice confession and repentance in this way, the more humility arises and the more sensitive I become to the truth of our interdependence and our shared life and my wish to be of benefit. And there's a kind of freedom, a release of energy that comes through acknowledging what is and through sincere confession and repentance. This letting go of self-concern and meeting what is and remembering and acting from our connection and care is really invigorating. So that's what I want to leave you with.

[36:34]

You know, at EcoFarm, about 75 farmers spent a whole day together discussing how we're taking up the challenge of practicing and caring for the earth. with no-till and low-till farming, you know, and we've been, people have been taking up experiments and collecting data and playing around and comparing notes and trying new things in new ways. And I felt a huge amount of joy and faith in practice as we turn this colon of how to fully create and and be created by the patterns of health and connection in the soil and on our farms and in our communities. You know, it was really encouraging, right? And one more example that I'd like to share with you of this kind of renewed awareness of connection

[37:48]

And how connections have been broken, how we're living in this broken world that we've created. Is this work that I learned of that a group of scientists and researchers and farmers are doing in the Sacramento River Valley, directed by an organization called California Trout. So in the early 2000s, there was a scientist at UC Davis who, you know, I don't know if it was a soil scientist or an aquatic scientist, but he was, there had been a flood event and he was just poking around trying to find something interesting to look at or think about. And he found this kind of flooded section of a farm field with standing water in it after this huge rain event. And he found a baby salmon in there, a baby fish. and thought it was kind of interesting.

[38:51]

And so a bunch of grad students, PhD students, and scientists started going out there and looking at the fish and measuring the fish and paying attention to what was going on. And they were really excited to find that the fish in the flooded fields were like three times bigger than the fish that were in the Sacramento River, right? So the fish that got washed out into the floodplains and were hanging out in these flooded farm fields grew really big. And it turns out that when water moves slowly over a floodplain, it creates a great deal of habitat for lots and lots of bugs. You know, it kind of makes this like bug soup. And lots of bugs make baby fish really fat, you know. They started calling them floodplain fatties. And the baby salmon and, you know, fat baby salmon going out to sea are more likely to survive, right?

[39:57]

And return to their native streams to spawn. You know, the ocean lives of Androna, and I never see this right. Anadromous. Anadromous fish, you know, steelhead and salmon, they're born in a freshwater and then they live there for about a year and then they swim out to the ocean and they live there for three years. And then they, when the rainy season comes and the rivers and creeks break open the dam to the ocean, they smell their natal waters and they swim back to the creek where they were born and they spawn and then they die. And the ocean part of their life is kind of a mystery to us. We don't have a way to really see or know where they're going or what they're doing. So there's been a lot of questions in the past few decades about the causes of the decline in these fish populations. Salmon are now endangered.

[40:59]

You know, and there's been lots of hypotheses about warming ocean temperatures or lack of food or pollution or things like that. But nobody thought about, you know, that they were starving in the rivers on their way out to the ocean or how big a factor it might be. And if you look at a satellite photo of the Sacramento Valley, It's basically one big floodplain coming down from the Sierras. And the farmland around the river maps onto that floodplain. That's the rich soil. And the river itself has been more or less channelized in its banks. More than 95% of the Central Valley's floodplains are cut off by levees built to protect cities and farms from flooding.

[42:07]

So there's fewer opportunities for it to slow down and create fish food and habitat. The relationship of the water and the floodplains, the water and land and the fish and food has been severed. through our human actions. You know, our delusion that we could do one thing, prevent flooding, without impacting another, right? The bugs and the fish. And now farmers and ecologists were devoted to this ecological and agricultural health, have, I think, kind of courageously turned towards the unpleasant and uncomfortable truth of how we have caused and are participating in this disconnection. And by remembering what is most important and confessing and repenting, they're taking up new practices to restore connection, you know, taking responsibility and practicing anew.

[43:25]

An article in the New York Times reported that some farmers are now flooding their rice fields once the grain has been harvested so that the depleted stalks can decompose in the water, thereby making those nutrients available to bugs and plankton, which then serve as food for schools of growing salmon. Puddles of muddy water, it turns out, are excellent batteries for life cycles of salmon and rice. This is what the Sacramento salmon actually look like when you re-expose them to the conditions they were adapted to. A real river system is the interaction between water and the landscape through which it flows. And when you mimic those interactions, that's when you ignite the explosion of natural productivity that allows for environmental abundance.

[44:32]

So this is not the only project farmers are taking on to reconnect water and land, river and floodplain. They're doing it, flooding farm fields in order to allow the underground aquifers to be recharged, right? Restoring the relationship between above ground slow water and below ground slow water. And this is happening, I think, because farmers were willing to look at their practice and look at what What is to let it in? And then to confess and repent. Don't kill is dead precepts, Suzuki Roshi said. Excuse me is actual working precepts.

[45:42]

Do you understand? If you read the precept or say or think, okay, I will do that. That is natural and the actual working precepts. And when you feel that you violate them, you may say, oh, excuse me. That is also quite natural. You know, living precepts in our human life is to come back again and again to what is most important, how we aspire to live and be in relationship, to practice confession and repentance, and then to make our best wholehearted effort to practice more. Let's close with this line from Ehe Dogen's great ancestor Dogen's verse for arousing the vow.

[46:50]

He says, we melt away the root of transgressions by the power of our confession and repentance. This is the pure and simple color of true practice, of the true mind of faith, of the true body of faith. On behalf of the great earth and all living beings, may it be so. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[47:42]

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