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. Signed working okay? I think most of you who are sitting right here in the Buddha Hall know we had an opening ceremony for the practice period this morning. And that's what I would like to talk about this evening. The nature of ceremony. how it's engaged.

[01:05]

So, at the end of Zazen this morning, we processed through the building from the Zendo up through this floor and up through the next floor. And back down to the Buddha Hall. And in the process. We stopped. At the various. Places of activity. We went from the Zen Do. To the shop. And we offered incense. And bowed. And then we went from the shop up to the kaisando, the memorial hall for the finder on the second floor. And we went to the bathroom.

[02:14]

And we came down to this floor and we went to the kitchen, the hallway, the dining room, the office, and then into the Buddha hall. Since I was the doshi, the priest who was offering the incense for the ceremony, I stood there and I said something which is part of the ceremony. And here's what came out of my mind. From the zendo to the shop, to the kaisando, to the bathroom, to the kitchen, to the hallway, to the dining room, the office, to face to face with Buddha. Each place has its own character and activity, and yet all follow the principle of practice.

[03:25]

When you find yourself where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. Maybe it's too much to say engaging each place creates a sacredness. Or maybe it's not. So. That's what I said. Each place where we stopped and offered incense and bowed, it plays a particular role in the daily, weekly, monthly, yearly activities of the center.

[04:37]

Each place offers itself to the practitioner to become part of the activity. And in the process of becoming part of that activity, to discover, to experience directly what it is to be immersed in that activity. And often in Zen, we call that coming face to face with Buddha. And then for those of you who are listening in online, I'm assuming you weren't at the ceremony this morning and you don't live here, but you live somewhere. And you have your own modalities.

[05:47]

of activity. Even the very question that one of the guidance we're offering is in setting up a home practice. The where, the when, the context, and who needs to be consulted. It illustrates your life has a context to it. That within your life, within the life of the temple, within all of our lives, there is a context. Can we remind ourselves that even though the context of our life has its utility, No, we go to the kitchen, we cook the food so we have something to eat.

[06:50]

We go to the bathroom to wash ourselves when we need to. We go to the Kaisando to remember what it was that Suzuki Roshi brought from Japan to San Francisco. our respects and offer our gratitude for that. So this is each of our lives. It has its direct utility and then it offers us an opportunity. It offers us this what's called in Japanese, kanodoko.

[07:53]

This possibility of engagement in the activity of the moment, whether it's just yourself in a cooking pot, whether it's yourself and the rest of the kitchen crew. In that shared activity, as Dogen Zenji said, that quote, a piece was a quote from Dogen Zenji, the founder of Soto Zen in Japan. When you find yourself where you are, practice occurs actualizing the fundamental point. What are the, maybe we could say, the essential points of Zen practice?

[09:02]

Engaging the moment just as it is. Sometimes we say, there is seated Zazen, and then there's active Zazen. The nature of ritual is that we enact something and in the process of enacting it, it takes on an expression of reality. In some ways we could say our life is all ceremony. Certainly in the Zen world, we have formal meetings and sometimes even informal meetings.

[10:12]

Each morning at 9 o'clock, we have a work meeting. And the work leader offers incense and we bow. And then the work leader says, if you're newly arrived or returning, please say your name. And we'll go around clockwise. Are any of those details necessary to enact the moment? Maybe not. But there's something in the purposefulness that reminds us to give over to what's happening. And often there's something in ceremony of the repetition. It also reminds us to give over.

[11:16]

Something in the familiarity of it evokes a sense of connectedness or intimacy. was a time when we were opening practice periods where we would actually go to each person's room. I think we stopped it because it just took too long. It was kind of wonderful to go into each person's room and discover within that room who the person was. Did they have a small bookcase, a large bookcase? Did they have a Buddhist statue or many Buddhist statues? It's always remarkable how, as you walked into the door of the room, the physical world that the person lived in spoke to.

[12:30]

So this is an expression of this phrase, kanodoko. The world is always offering itself, expressing itself. And how do we make ourselves available to meet it? How do we make ourselves available to engage it fully? You know, so often we can find ourselves engrossed in an inner world. You know, the internal dialogue is so adamant, so persuasive, so dramatic, so psychologically significant that we forget

[13:37]

We avoid, we dismiss the intimacy of being in some context or other. And so in Zen practice, the nature of ritual is to remind us of a kind of purposefulness. Not so much, interestingly, because we're trying to make some particular result. But actually the very nature of the purposefulness and the engagement evokes something. And then this is the thread of purposefulness that sows together. all the things that we do in a practice spirit.

[14:44]

We have classes, we have sittings, we have meals. We take on various work activities. As we engage them, quite naturally, For each one of us, they take on a certain description. The world, according to me, imposes itself on what's being experienced in the moment. And this nature of ceremony, this purposeful engaging in whatever's in front of us, in this purposeful face-to-face with Buddha.

[15:51]

And how can we carry that from situation to situation. And then in the Zen world, we do that by attending to the details of the ceremony of that moment. You know, I was sitting upstairs, thinking of what I was going to mention this evening, you know, taking some notes. And then I heard, the meal chant. And that has happened to me many times when for one reason or another, I've been outside listening to the chanting of the assembly. And I was struck by... that arises when we engage in activity together, especially when we chant.

[17:25]

And so often our ceremonies, we chant together. And we say in our chanting, Chant with your ears. Listen to the collective sound of the sangha. Then a very interesting thing happens. Your voice harmonizes with what you hear. And it's not something you figure out. It's something within our human organism. this harmony arises. This is kanodoko. This is this innate quality of harmonizing with our connectedness to being. It's not that we're doing something wrong

[18:37]

or something deviant when we become absorbed inside our narrative or the narrative that's evoked by the world according to me. It's more that in having ways to step out of that world and that preoccupation helps us see it more clearly. Practice is an interplay. This interplay between the world according to me and when I forget the self and let the moment define this being, this interbeing, then something, another version of reality appears.

[19:44]

And from that counterpoint, I can start to invite the world according to me into a larger context. The ingrained version how the world, according to me, is usually motivated and dictated by what I want and what I don't want. And if you reflect on it for a moment, you can easily see that when the mind is caught up in that way, Often we feel there's a long list of things we want and what we don't want. And even as we're attempting to pay attention, the mind shifts from one topic to another.

[20:54]

I remember reading once, Mr. Suzuki Roshi said, Nirvana is following one thing through to the finish. I remember the first time I read that, I was really struck by it. Because having practiced in Theravada and Buddhism, I had read, considered, and practiced a different notion of nirvana, the notion of renunciation and extinction. But in the Zen way, this engaging and becoming part of what's happening now, this is how we discover to follow one thing through to its finish, to its conclusion.

[22:08]

we walked from altar to altar, you know, as we went from the founder's hall and all the reverence and symbolism of bowing to our founder and around the walls of the Kaisando are pictures of the lineage of teachers who all the way to Suzuki Roshi, his teacher and his teacher's teacher. And then we go from that venerable building, our alcove, to the bathroom. This is where we shower and use the toilet. But it's also... an opportunity of just being, an opportunity of meeting the moment, an opportunity of being fully present for a part of our lives.

[23:30]

When I was reflecting on this earlier, I was thinking of a line from a poem by Mary Oliver. She's saying, it doesn't have to be the blue iris. It doesn't have to be some exquisite, pristine moment. Any moment. And as we practice this stepping out of being engrossed in the world, according to me, because when we're engrossed in it, I think anyone who's sat zazen or meditated for more than a couple of minutes discovers there's just times when conditioned consciousness becomes dreamlike. Sometimes we can be engrossed in some kind of thinking and then come back to awareness.

[24:48]

and not even have a memory of what we were engrossed in. And this practice of being connected to the moment helps to create the capacity within consciousness to stay present, even as the mind is still continuing to generate what it's generating. As we become more familiar with it, the interplay between the two helps to illuminate the constructs that arise from our conditioned being. to follow something through to the finish.

[25:53]

And then within the structure of Buddhism, being willing to do this, being willing to be awake, being willing to accept experience interbeing. This is taking refuge. Usually we take refuge in our yearning and our aversion. And practice offers us an alternative to that. It offers us a process of just seeing what arises for us. And not just seeing it, but being able to experience how that ripples through the complexity of just being a person.

[27:08]

We see the constructs, the conceptualizations, but we also... We feel our responses to it. We start to see the heaven energies of our thinking and our emotions. We start to see the landscape. We start to see how our own psychological being takes shape. what kind of persistence it has. And often what happens for us, it feels like these two versions of being

[28:15]

are in opposition. The world, according to me, often fueled by what I want and what I don't want, feels in opposition to this opening to a different kind of being, a kind of interbeing that's not so tightly defined is do I want it or do I want to avoid it? And the challenge is to discover how to let these two versions of reality, how to let them harmonize. process in relationship to that from the times of early Buddhism through all the different varieties of Buddhism is to take refuge.

[29:35]

We take refuge in the process of awareness. We take refuge in the craft of establishing, restoring, deepening, and extending that awareness. We learn about the self, and we learn about going beyond the self. And we take refuge in the intimacy of our interbeing. And as we do that, the teachings tell us and we discover for ourselves, I suspect that in one way or another, everyone in this room has experienced some version of growing trust in practice.

[30:48]

as our desires and our aversions are, something in us knows that that kind of narrow, selfish agenda doesn't serve us. Something in us knows that when we open, when we connect, when we interbe, That what arises for us is a more trustworthy version of being. So as we open the practice period. We ceremonially enter the different dimensions of our life.

[31:59]

And I would encourage you to think about, well, okay, there's the altars that we went to and the dimensions of activity that are part of the temple life. But what else would you add to it from the particulars of your own life? maybe the particulars of what you work at, maybe significant relationships in your life. Any realm of being that's frequented, that's energized, that has a significance in your life, what would it take?

[33:06]

What kind of purposeful would it take to be more present for it, to learn how to be in it in an aware way? And to remind yourself It's not an imposition. Practice is about liberation from suffering. Practice is about discovering a way of being that's nurturing and trustworthy. It's asking us to bring to ourselves and to bring to our relationships a benevolence, a kindness, an appreciation.

[34:14]

So as you engage your intentionality for the practice spirit, I would encourage you to remind yourself to hold it in that kind of regard. And to watch out for any intention that has in some way a self-criticism. Oh, I should be a better person. Maybe rather than be a better person, the notion of... Could it be that I lessen how I suffer? How could it be that I lessen the ways in which things become afflictive for me?

[35:25]

How can I embrace this human life in a way that's nurturing, that a way that invites me to appreciate, to have gratitude, not as an act of coercion, as a way of opening to what's already there. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving.

[37:01]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:04]

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