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 am very happy to be with everyone tonight in this amazing valley of Tassahara. Since I did my first practice period here in 1995, I feel that Tassahara is one of my homes that I could always come back to.

[01:05]

So I'm very happy that I was invited to fill in for Linda as Tanto for this practice spirit, to give Greg and Linda the opportunity to have a sabbatical. And I also see this as a wonderful gift of reconnecting to monastic practice. to the roots of the past of sitting in front of the wall. I really look forward to meeting everybody and to study and practice with all of you. I had come to Zen Center right before my 40th birthday because I had actually met my root teacher in the Green Gulch Sachin in 94.

[02:07]

My root teacher, Reb Anderson. When I had met him, I decided, oh, this guy can teach me. I have always been somebody who couldn't accept authority. But to me, he was like a very natural. authority a kind of a wise person so on my flight back I decided I would leave my life in Germany my relationship my job my family and come to Zen Center I had studied literature originally and I was active in the women's movement at the university in the end of the 70s. After those studies I had entered art school and I became a jewelry artist and I then had a gallery for jewelry in Frankfurt where I'm now living again and I worked in a design company until

[03:30]

I came to the point where I decided that I would really want to change my life. I was working sixty hours a week and earning good money but also spending it just to be able to go on like a hamster in the role. And coming to Zen Center was not only fascinated by Reb's teaching, but also discovering Green Dolch Farm as an organic farm, trying to farm in a way that is in harmony with nature. And there was also this recognition that there were a lot of relatively many women in leading positions in this organization and then I also figured that there might be some ethical underpinning that really enabled this community to survive quite difficult crises as for example the leaving of Baker Roshi so I was

[05:00]

interested in finding out how this would all come together. I didn't have a lot of knowledge about the rich tradition or history of Zen. But it was palpable that there was something very alive in this community. I would say I was actually pretty naive when I came entering the monastery and I still feel that way despite all these years of training. I remember during the first summer I was sitting in the creek and memorizing the Daihi Shindurani because I wanted to play the makugyo and with that ino of that time, you were not allowed to play the makugyo unless you could recite the daishindrani.

[06:04]

And I was like a child. I was just into doing these new strange things and happy to do them. I also remember that I walked to the bathhouse in the middle of the night in the darkest dark and then suddenly realizing I had no fear. I had been hindered by fear to use any parking garage at night, so this was quite something that this happened. The first summer I was the bath attendant in a relatively new bathhouse. under the guidance of Butch Balut, a very dedicated practitioner from the Philippines who died a few years ago, very early.

[07:08]

And then after that, I went into my first practice period. Studying myself and forgetting myself in the stillness of Tazahara practice periods, I was confronted with a lot of luggage that I was carrying around with me and that kept me prisoner of my family trauma. My father died when I was 23 and the eldest of seven, and my mother had psychotic symptoms until my father died. And to come to today, a few weeks ago, we just met to celebrate the 88th birthday of my mother. She's still living by herself in a house, and this time the whole family came because she thought this might be the last birthday.

[08:16]

One brother was coming from New Orleans, and he has not made it back because of... no water and electricity in New Orleans. So I think my mother has found a way to, we would maybe say meet the moment. She sometimes calls me when there is a deer in the garden and she's very happy about it or she calls me about a sunset or a dinner that she has. I mean, otherwise she calls me and she always repeats the same stories and tells me that another one of her friends has died and there's hardly anybody left that she had known. So from her I learn how it is being or getting really old.

[09:26]

not remembering names or places. So telling the same story just keeps her going. We were not allowed to visit her anymore during the pandemic because you could not change from one state to the other in Germany. But she was pretty resilient in keeping calling us. I like to look at the time of the pandemic as a time of deep learning of impermanence. When Corona started in 2020, my beloved friend and companion Albrecht was still here in the valley. He did the practice period. with Paul. And he would have loved to be here this time too, but he's not an American citizen like I am, so he could not travel with me.

[10:36]

And he's also still recovering from a very bad COVID infection in April of this year. We actually were really grateful that we could sit together during this year of the pandemic, every day in the midst of this changing turbulence that turned our world upside down. I think it's a great relief to find again and again a way to be with what is instead of with what you would like it to be. And I think there's a very nice picture Kafka gives about this being quiet and listen.

[11:49]

There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don't even listen. Just wait. Don't even wait. Be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you and be unmasked. It can't do otherwise. In raptures it will writhe before you. not looking for an alternative to this particular being here, not looking for an alternative world to the one that opens up when we are not urged to change it because of dislikes or likes. Just recently I had another opportunity of staying at my table and listening.

[12:50]

When I arrived at City Center on the 24th of August, I seemed to have symptoms that put me under the protocol for students with symptoms at City Center, which means go to your room and be isolated. This was the most comfortable prison. with my own bathroom, and I was really well taken care of, but I had to isolate. I've been a lot in quarantine and lockdown since Corona started, and I had hoped to come to San Francisco and finally see friends, not only on Zoom. I had given up my plans of meeting friends and organizing things and just be at my table and listen again, listen to the city.

[14:09]

Completely agreeing to the permanent transition we found ourselves in is letting go of plans and hopes. I had wished to be in the Zendo again with everybody. And here I was on Zoom again for early morning Zazen and watching David Zimmerman doing morning service in the Buddha Hall. Was I in a movie? Can we leave the movie behind? Or will we never get out of this series of waves of this pandemic? Can we get closer to our fear of death and not have the delusion that we can be in control of this life? Death and dying are excluded from the midst of our lives. Although we all know that we have to die, we try to sanitize death out of our life.

[15:21]

I just want to make clear I'm not against masks or vaccinations. And I think we need protocols to be able to do what we can to protect those in danger to die from this disease. I have seen that very clearly when Albrecht was sick and I got really scared when we couldn't connect anymore. on the phone because he had a heavy fever and couldn't talk anymore. So I also hear the Heart Sutra that tells us every morning that there will be no fear in realizing that everything is empty. To realize emptiness, we need to completely calm down. and open our heart to living and dying without grasping, without looking for safe ground.

[16:25]

We need to understand how each moment and each being and each feeling is coming and going, is coming together and falling apart unceasingly. We need to be unmoving to be able to realize this. In Zazen we become intimate with our body and mind so they may drop off. We completely let us be and experience this one being as it is. In learning to be with our fear, anger, sadness, frustration, love and joy without getting eaten. and responding according to long-established patterns. We learn to be there when fear comes and when it goes. We learn impermanence.

[17:28]

It takes patience and empathy. Learning impermanence is liberating, trusting in every single moment, in every single being. You have seen the fire come and go. You have seen the guest season come and go. You have seen the word period come and go. Tassajara seems to be a catalyst of these changing life experiences. We train in different positions and let go of them. Goyo has done a wonderful job of director in this turbulent time, and now he's leaving. Thank you so much, Goyo, for your strong commitment to practice and also for leading in this tender way.

[18:39]

And welcome to Lauren. to this role of director. Not grasping the seat that we sit in and not wishing for things to remain in their familiar place, but deeply respecting every new ground we touch on helps us to acquire the flexibility needed to welcome every moment. We need to always remember loving-kindness towards ourselves and everyone else around us, to open to groundlessness, to open to impermanence, to be in this moment. In the traditional teaching of loving-kindness meditation, we direct the following thoughts, first towards ourselves,

[19:43]

then towards our teacher or a very good friend, then towards a neutral person, and finally towards an enemy. May you be free of enmity. May you be free of affliction. May you be free of anxiety. May you be well and happy. The meditation is intended to open our mind heart with each step and release emotions like anger, fear, hatred, and make the mind open and pliable to whatever comes towards us.

[20:44]

on and open our mind of like and dislike to the mind of just being. If we apply this state of mind to how we relate to a situation, we let go of our stories and be at ease with whatever we encounter. More and more, we can take care of every situation without preference in the same caring way, and we become able to bring out the highest potential. And this is different from hoping for the world to be different. And at the same time, it is not caring for the world. Loving kindness is not producing a certain state of mind, but rather enabling and awakening our ability to attend to what we meet.

[21:45]

In her book, When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron says about hope, if we were willing to give up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated, then we can have the courage to relax with the groundlessness of our situation. This is the first step on the path. In this pandemic, it seems that we are far from giving up hope that insecurity and pain can be exterminated. We are very much into building stories of how we can be in control again, which we never were and will never be. We just have the habit of thinking that it should be so, that we are supposed to be in control.

[22:49]

In San Francisco, I noticed, like at Safeways or at Walgreens, they had put a lot of the stuff they offer behind plexiglass windows, and you had to call somebody to open the window, get something to buy and I thought this is really a weird situation and then I found out that shoplifting is four times higher than nationwide in San Francisco and 17 Walgreens shops have closed already because of this it seems to be organized crime that's going on there and yes this is out of control And it might be interesting to understand where this comes from. And there are other things out of control. There are 712 deaths from overdose last year, which is 30% more deaths than the number of deaths from COVID.

[24:03]

But COVID is the absolute centerpiece in the theater of news. It is the best entertainment to keep us under control. There is no ease and balance in how we deal with COVID. There is a lot of grasping in how we respond to COVID. It is very hard to be in the unknown, to be unguarded, to be in the groundless openness with COVID. We have to shield ourselves. All day long we are in protection business, at least when we are outside of Tazara. Every human being seems to be a potential virus distributor to us. And this is not going to go away so soon. We will not be able to control it. But we can learn to live with our fear more intimately. Learn to see how it is empty.

[25:10]

Learn to return to this moment and not get caught in panic. We can learn to look each other in the face again, unmasked. Looking into each other's eyes and open our hearts and be each other's friend in the groundlessness. Develop the gift of fearlessness in the midst of uncertainty. Groundlessness and uncertainty are not a special situation, but they are part of every being and place and a very fertile ground for practice. One of the essential Buddhist teachings is the teaching of the Three Dharma Seals or Dharma Mudras. Dignathan names the three seals according to the Samyukta Agama, impermanence, non-self, and nirvana.

[26:12]

Everything is changing all the time. Nothing is permanent. Things cannot remain themselves for two consecutive moments. From the perspective of impermanence, there can be no permanent independent self. And when we look more deeply, we can see that everything exists only because of everything else. Understanding impermanence allows us to understand non-self. Impermanence and non-self allow transformation. Nirvana, the third seal, is the ground of being. It is the complete silencing of all concepts. While impermanence and non-self are instruments of practice, instruments to understand reality. Nirvana is the basis.

[27:15]

It does not exist separate from impermanence or non-self. Thich Nhat Hanh says, if you know how to use the tools of impermanence and non-self to touch reality, you touch nirvana in the here and now. Nirvana is the extinction of all notions. Earth is a notion, death is a notion, being is a notion, non-being is a notion. In our daily lives, we have to deal with these reality, reality of realities. But if we touch life more deeply, reality will reveal itself in a different way. I think we are here to touch life more deeply. to touch the ground of our existence, where separations and discriminations fall away.

[28:19]

We have these wonderful conditions of this monastic framework to let go of our stories about ourselves. which are also the conditions to see how many different beings we are and everyone else is. We can bow to each other in the deep unknowing and the deepest respect at the same time. Suzuki Roshi says about bowing, when you become one with Buddha, one with everything that exists, you find the true meaning of being. When you forget all your dualistic ideas, everything becomes your teacher, and everything can become the object of worship.

[29:22]

When you're just yourself, you bow to yourself in its true sense, and you're one with everything. Only when you are yourself can you bow to everything in the true sense. When we bow to everything at the same time, when we don't pick and choose, we can find gentleness in this gesture, gentleness with everyone and everything around us, vulnerability and openness with what is. And I'm sure I will come back to bowing again and again. But for now, thank you for listening. And if you like to bring questions, I think... There should be some time, right? Okay. Thank you. 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.

[30:26]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[30:36]

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