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 evening. I've been talking to people here at Tassajara and listening to them and listening to myself and noticing how much we don't know and yet how much we try to rely on what we know and how we almost can't help but do that. We walk around. I mean, we have to. We walk around knowing what we know and living by that.

[01:03]

And yet, there's so much that we don't know and we try to avoid that fact. You know, people like somebody said to me, someone had said something to them that was hurtful to them. And she said, I know I don't know what he meant. But then she proceeded right after that to say, but I'm sure he didn't want to listen to me because her feeling told her this was true. Her feeling said, I'm being disrespected. It feels that way to me. It must be the case. And we do that all the time. We constantly make up the world. according to our best bet, the way we interpret our experience, our internal and external experience, and we make up the world and we might know, I don't know if this is right.

[02:15]

There could be something not quite accurate about this story I'm telling myself, and yet it's so strong. Dogen, of course, talks about this. Dogen talks about everything if you know how to read him. Anyway, one place that he talks about this that I really appreciate is in the Genjo Koan, which we chant here every other week. So most of you will recognize this. The first part... It's interesting. I'll say it too. When Dharma does not fill your whole body and mind, you think it is already sufficient. When Dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing or something is lacking. And then this image, which I think is very accessible to us. When you sail out in a boat to the middle of the ocean where no land is in sight,

[03:16]

And view the four directions. Look all around, the ten directions, the four directions. The ocean looks circular and does not look any other way. We can imagine this. Even if you've never done this, still you can imagine it. Go out to the middle of the ocean, look all around, and it looks like a circle. Then he goes on with what we also know. But the ocean is neither round nor square. Its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time. All things are like this. So we sail out into the middle of an ocean, and we look around, and we see a circle, and... This is how we live our life every single day. We walk around in a circle of an ocean of our own making.

[04:21]

And we see a circle, but it's not a circle, right? It's not round. It's not square. It's infinite. There are all kinds of things in the ocean that may present themselves, but they might not. It might just keep on looking like a circle. And our life is like this. And our self is like this. And in some ways, that's the most crucial and hardest in some ways to fathom, certainly to live by, to be in the middle of my ocean, namely my body, my mind, and look at it, which we're doing. If you're practicing Zen, that's the vow. I will study the self. And we all study the self to some extent because that's our main concern. Who is this person? How can I make this a better person? How can I live my life?

[05:22]

So we're all looking at ourselves and seeing a circle. We see something. We always see a variety of things when we look at ourself. And they're usually familiar things. They seem very familiar. So we know something about them. But to have a sense of how much we don't know, to have a sense of how infinite in variety our world is and even our self is, is crucial to letting the other parts of our self appear, even to us. Sometimes they actually appear more to other people than they do to us, both the quote, good parts and the bad parts are often seen easier by other people. Although they're seen by them as a circle.

[06:25]

You know, one of the things that's continually surprising, but now I pretty much expect it, that if anyone comes to me and says, that person was very angry, If you go to the other person, they almost always say, no, I wasn't angry. No, no, I might have been irritated. I might have been frustrated. But angry? No. I mean, there are some times when people actually say, I got angry. So which one is right? Which one, you know, the person who experienced the anger and knows it was anger, or the person who was giving forth the irritation, frustration? That's where we live. We live in this infinite and variety circle. And to see that, not necessarily to see what it is we're missing, but to know that we're missing, that we can't see the whole thing, is what Buddha calls wisdom.

[07:31]

To actually be able to... live from the place of not knowing, to let not knowing be a major factor in our life. This is, it's really counter to what we've been taught we're supposed to do. You know, we're supposed to learn all the important things and be able to make the right decisions and especially about ourselves. You know, what do you want to be when you grow up? Well, you don't know now. It's okay. Take a little bit longer and think about it. But now, now you should know. What do you want to be? Because you know yourself better and you should be able to figure this out. But this is one of the things that's a mystery. You know, what is it to grow up? You know, when you're 60, what is it to grow up to be 70? What do you want to be when you're 70?

[08:34]

What do you want to be when you're 70? What do you want to be when you're 40? How would we do this? How would we let in the unfathomableness of everything? How things go together. What do they make when they go together? We have this wonderful event that happens here. It's happened for, I don't know, a number of years. eight or ten summers now, where two very good old friends of mine who were students here at Tassajara now work with veterans, and they bring them to Tassajara. Mostly they've brought women vets to Tassajara. They work with both, and sometimes they bring some men, but mostly they've brought like a group of, this year I think they had 24 women veterans who come here, and it was very coincidental that

[09:36]

I think it was coincidental that they came just before Memorial Day. And it's always really intense when they're here. They spend a lot of time processing and they have a lot to process. And this year, especially they had a lot of combat veterans. They usually have several service animals, you know, dogs, cats, things, animals that come. And this year, They broke into small groups and needed several areas. I think, you know, they had the retreat halls and they went to the Kaisando and they still needed another area. And last summer when we had the Sobranas fire, summer and fall, we came into the possession of, we bought and paid for a lot of expensive fire equipment. So we are... now trying to take care of this equipment until hopefully the next fire never comes.

[10:42]

But it will. So anyway, we're trying to take care of this equipment. And those of you who have been here for a number of years know that the old bathhouse on the other side of the creek has been just kind of a storage area, but mostly the ruins of the old bathhouse. So now we're turning that area into a storage area for all this expensive fire equipment, and it's not finished yet. So somebody, I don't know who, got the brilliant idea that they could use that storage area. It's like the old bathhouse where the plunges were and everything in the old bathhouse. So they went in there, and it was great for them in a kind of terrible way. It was just like a bunker, and there's like the cement. walls and floor of the old bathhouse. And so they have a lot of processing to do, right?

[11:42]

And a fair amount of it is about things like bunkers. So it was very useful in their small group. Different groups of them went to the bunker to process whatever came up for them. So that's a kind of aside. While they were here, the two women who were who are running this program. It used to be called The Path of the Warrior. Now it's called The Path of the Veterans, I think. But it's Lee Klinger and Chris Fortin. And Chris gave a lecture when she was here. That's the point I was getting to, to get back to tonight. And she read something from Suzuki Roshi's book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And it really struck me. So I'll read it to you now. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes out to the outer world. The inner world is limitless.

[12:44]

The outer world is also limitless. We say inner world or outer world, but actually there is just one whole world. In this limitless world, Our throat is like a swinging door. The air comes in and goes out, like someone passing through a swinging door. What we call I is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves. That is all. This image of the inner world and the outer world mixing when we breathe, is such a powerful image. You know, we live with both those worlds and they're real to us. We can be chopping vegetables and we have to pay attention to chopping because we've got a knife in our hand and also because the guest cook wants, you know, the vegetables a certain size when they're done.

[13:51]

So you pay attention, you know, chopping, pay attention to the outer world. Pay attention to, you know, if you're cleaning cabins, you pay attention to knocking on the door to see whether there's a guest there before you go in to clean the room. There's all kinds of things in the outer world to pay attention to. At the same time, our inner world calls to us. Sometimes it's pretty quiet, but sometimes it really calls, like something is happening in me that needs my attention. So we divide our attention, you know, between the inner world and the outer world. And that's one of the things I think Tassajara really, if you're a student here, really helps us to do is how to stay devoted to the inner world and the outer world both. How to take care of them both, not leave dessert one for the other. not just get involved in your outer world and making sure that you're doing a good job and all that.

[14:57]

Often at Tassajara, your inner world gets very large. People are sometimes surprised to see, you know, what kind of dreams they start having. And, you know, we've sometimes said, if you have a problem with your mother and you come to Tassajara as a student, I think you guessed this probably won't happen to you so you don't have to worry about it. If you have a problem with somebody, mothers are always good for that. If you have a problem with your mother, and you come to Tassajara, she'll be here waiting for you. You will probably find her. It might take three weeks or so, and then there she'll be. She won't think she's your mother, but you, your inner world, might get activated in this way that is familiar to you. and says, pay attention to me. So somehow you have to keep chopping, chopping, chopping, setting the table, pouring the coffee for the guests carefully, and also have this inner world happening.

[16:06]

And sometimes it's strong enough you have to just do one or the other. You have to actually tell the other one to wait. You have to leave your job for a little while and go to your room and lay down. Or you have to say... I'm not going to pay attention to this right now. I'm going to pour the coffee and do the dishes. But a lot of the time, it's actually possible to be there for both of them, especially because we're not trying to figure it out. It's just offering our presence to them, just a kind of devotion. I will be with them. This whole wide world that is the inner world and the outer world, where the air is going back and forth, in and out. And while that air is going back and forth, we are becoming the outer world, and the outer world is becoming our world.

[17:10]

We are adding to the outer world. This is how we actually live. And then when we look around, we see a circle. We see some kind of a circle. We see our mother. We see not our mother. We see that person was being mean to me. How to know, how to experience deeply enough the truth of what's happening that the unknowing can be part of it. That what we don't know... can actually be a physical presence in our life. Our idea of our future is so strong, it's so based in our experience, that we rarely really question whether it's there. But if you think about it realistically now, try to think about,

[18:15]

Okay, here I am, right here, and I've had a past, and some of that past is, all of that past is with me, and some of it I remember, but it's all here. And the future is actually not here. It's not here. We don't know what is going to happen one minute from now. We think... oh, well, eventually Leslie's going to stop talking and we're going to get up and walk out of here and we all have some idea of where we're going to go. Back to our room, go to the baths, whatever. We're going to go on with our life as we know it. But really, we all know that we don't know that, that anything could happen between now and then. And that... thought, if we really let it in, is a little disconcerting. It's like, well, what do you do about that?

[19:19]

And there's really nothing to be done about it. That's the way life is. It's always been that way. We've never really known. And yet, we make our plans and we get ready. In the winter, when we come to Zazen at this time of night, a lot of people get their hot water bottles ahead of time and put it in their sleeping bag. So it's there waiting for them at the end. So it's okay. You can make a plan. None of you have hot water bottles and you're sleeping in your beds tonight. But that kind of, okay, I'm coming back for you, hot water bottle. Be there waiting for me. But we honestly don't know. I was talking last night in Carmel about some of this same... the same things. And Shogun, who some of you know, was there and he was in the Peace Corps in Africa, in East Africa. And he said, in East Africa, you know, we talk about that our past is behind us.

[20:24]

I just said this. We had the past and it's part of us now. And then there's the future out in front of us. He said in East Africa, they actually talk about we're facing the past and our future is behind us where we can't see it. which is very interesting, another truthful way of looking at life. So in this study of the self, this study of life and the inner world and the outer world and the whole world, the one whole world that we are part of, If we don't admit that we don't know at some level, you know, really admit I don't know, there isn't room for us to start to know a little bit more, something different than what we've already identified and figured out and have kind of made our own in some way and then expanded it so that it

[21:39]

becomes the world. So we have to shrink that a little bit and still function with it, still take care of things in the way that you know how to do and yet leave space for a crack in your certainty of how things are. That things might be different and then some room to... explore that, to leave room for it to manifest in a different way. And as I said, in some ways the hardest thing and the most important thing to do that with is ourselves. Every morning here we do the refuges, the confession and refuges, and we repeat it three times. And it says all my ancient, we say twisted karma, Some years ago, Mel Weissman suggested that we say tangled karma, and we did while he was here, but then we went back to twisted karma, and that's okay.

[22:44]

Twisted is good. It is twisted, but I kind of like, you know, twisted is so twisted. I kind of like tangled because it also is very tangled. You know, it's like we're tangled with everyone and many, many things. All my ancient tangled karma... From beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. And we say that, we chant it, so it takes even longer than saying it. I now fully avow. So we're not saying, I will now fully get this under control. I will now stop doing that. It's saying, you know, all this karma that is going on in the past and in the present, it comes from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion.

[23:46]

You know, not just mine, but my parents and my species, all of it coming together in me, my ancient tangled karma. born through body, speech, and mind, right here in my body, in my mind, in the things I say, I fully avow it. To me, if we think about that in the right way, if we leave space, we don't know what that is. We don't know what that karma is. We don't know what that speech is. We don't know what those actions are. We sometimes see them, and sometimes we see them and say, oh, Please, could I never do that again? Could I never get into that particular argument with that particular person again? And especially if it's someone who's close to us, then we tend to really get into ancient tangled karma that repeats and repeats and repeats.

[24:55]

And sometimes we can't help but see that. And then we're saying, how would I stop that? Let's say leave room for not knowing. When it starts to come up, if you see it, if you can make some space, if you can do something different, just leave a little, okay, I don't know what I should do, but I know I shouldn't do this. I should not say those words again. To leave some space for not knowing. It's a pain. Okay. There's a part of a poem that speaks to this.

[25:59]

It's in one of the koans, and it says, Do you know the self or not vaguely like a moon through ivy? crescent at that. Do you know the self or not? Vaguely, like a moon through ivy, a crescent at that. So we see ourself through all the things that come to us, all the inner world things that arise, all the outer world things that arise. We see ourself and it's like... Who are you again? Why are you like that? Just a crescent. And yet, there's a whole moon there. There's a whole being there that somehow fits. It somehow fits in this world, in this ocean, where things are swimming around.

[27:00]

There's a whole ocean there that's us. So we can keep... just looking at that moon through ivy, looking at ourself, looking at what we see with this kind of open-heartedness, really, that we don't, it's not like, I know how I should be. And we do this with, you know, even with Zazen, we do this, like, you should sit Zazen in a certain way. You know, you should count your breath. You should stay awake. Well, of course, we try to stay awake. We try to sit up straight. But what's really going on there? Really, we don't know what's going on. My teacher, Reb Anderson, once said a couple of things that I want to say now. One is, I did not do this. I'm not this kind of person, but he is much more this kind of person, and maybe some of you are, where when he started sitting, he was convinced that the thing to do was to count his breath and that he was going to count his breath.

[28:10]

He was going to make himself count his breath. So he would say to himself, you are going to count your breath during this whole period, and don't forget. Don't miss a breath. Be there for every single breath. Count your breath. And he did that for a while. And maybe he was successful. I don't know. I can't hardly even imagine it. But eventually he noticed that this didn't feel so good. This wasn't the kind of attitude that he wanted to be developing. This didn't remind him of Suzuki Roshi, the way he was feeling. It didn't remind him of the stories that he appreciated about Zen masters, and he started thinking maybe this is really not the way to sit Zazen. Then some years ago he said now he thinks of Zazen, I don't know how he thinks about it now, but a few years ago he said he thought of it sort of more like if you were following your three-year-old around an airport.

[29:17]

So, you know, it's a big empty space. Mostly they're pretty safe. You just let them go. But you stay with them. You just stay there and you follow them around. With that kind of open-heartedness, curiosity, and, you know, diligence, yes, devotedness. But that kind of, who is this person? Who is this person? Why are you so upset about this? And when we say why, it doesn't mean figure it out. It means have a curious mind about it. What's going on here? What's so painful about this for you? So that's my recommendation to you tonight. Do any of you have anything you'd like to add or ask? That was abrupt. Sorry. The poem, again, is Do You Know the Self or Not?

[30:22]

Vaguely, like the moon through ivy, a crescent at that. Now, do any of you have anything you want to say? And if you don't, that's okay. Yes, Benton? You mentioned a few times the self and studying the self. It seems as synonymous with and studying personality, and I'm wondering if there's any alternative to identifying with personality because that seems to be a pretty dismal option. Yeah. Well, I don't know if it's so dismal. I mean, identifying with anything is limiting, right? So you could call that dismal if you want. I didn't mean just the personality. If it sounded that way, I'm sorry. That's part of the mystery. And it becomes apparent in something like zazen, which is a very physical practice.

[31:27]

How do you actually sit with this particular body for half an hour, 40 minutes? What's happening? Why is the tension so strong in the back of my shoulders? Not why, like, figure it out, but what's happening there. And what happens in relating with people or even with things, but much more with people, is not just a personality, you know, it's like it's visceral what happens. It's body. It's like attraction or revulsion. Not always, not with everybody, thank goodness. But sometimes, yes, or even when it's not that strong, still there's irritation or trying to please, things that aren't... I mean, I guess you could call them personality, but they're more embodied in us and buried in us than that.

[32:35]

Does that make sense to you? Yeah, it does. Is there any alternative to... Identifying with something limited, like the body and mind. And personality. Well, identifying is where part of the problem lies, right? That we think, I need to know who I am, and so therefore I must be, you know, a short woman, a tall man, whatever. I must be whatever I think I am. And that gets us into trouble because we aren't. We are something much more mysterious than that. So that's the alternative is to have some sense of... And we get that sense if we're just open to it because it's the truth. We are not just whatever we think we are. So if we open to it, it starts to appear like, oh, why do I have dreams like that?

[33:37]

Why do I always... You know, forget my... Why do I always come late to Zazen? What's going on there? Anything else? Yes, go. It takes a lot of courage to face all that I know. Yeah. What's a good source of courage? Well, you know, part of it is it... Supposedly takes courage, but since we have no choice, I mean, really, it takes a lot of energy to avoid it because that's where we are. We actually are in the unknown. And once we notice that, our keeping that at bay takes a lot of energy. So in some ways, it doesn't take so much courage. It's just like truthfulness. But it can be scary. And then if we start... trying to get away from that dis-ease, then we can work ourselves into a kind of mess.

[34:47]

So really, it's mostly just stay grounded, like notice where you are and just be willing to be there. And then the unknown is plentiful. It does sound like patience. I actually think zazen is patience. It's just the practice of patience. Thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[35:32]

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