Thank you. An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kaphas. Having it to see and listen to

[01:00]

to remember and accept. I vow to take the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. So, how many people are here for the first Okay. Welcome. Reflectors for you. Okay. And for us. And how many people here are sitting sashin or one day sitting today? Okay. So today is the first day of a seven-day sashin. And sesshin means to clarify or settle the mind.

[02:08]

And it's a period of reflection that's based on the Buddha's example. The Buddha sat still and practiced the middle way. Middle way means the Buddha didn't do too much or too little. And how he got to understand what too much and too little is is a whole other story, which I think that we will be addressing over the course of the next seven days in our own bodies and minds. And through the kind invitation of Abbot Rishan Heller and the support of senior Dharma teacher Zenke Blanche Hartman, who's acting as the head of practice during this practice period. My Dharma brother Michael and I have been leading an eight-week practice period on the teachings of kindness, inclusion, and love on the path.

[03:20]

And this is the last week of that eight weeks. And during this week, Michael said last night, in the orientation that this is kind of a lab test of our studies. Also, this week has been somewhat of a crucible in that our dear friend, maybe known to a lot of people in this room, Marvin Mercer, passed away last Saturday night. And Marvin was quite an example quite an embodiment of the practice of kindness, particularly secret kindness. For instance, I know Diagon laughs knowingly, as do several other people in the room. For instance, 10 years ago, the garden at the Laguna Honda Hospice building looked like one of those playgrounds that there's a lot of ground glass in.

[04:25]

And Marvin said, didn't really know anything about gardening, but over the course of the last 10 years, he somehow turned it into a garden where people go for refuge. And this is what the practice of kindness and offering can do. And so today I would like to talk about welcoming, welcoming awakening. And that just means welcoming whatever happens. But it takes a little while to understand that, maybe 50 years. So today is a good day to start. And several people have a head start on me. So I don't know what it has taken to bring you to this room. So I'd like to start with a... an example of non-welcoming behavior from a sashi that happened a couple of years ago.

[05:34]

And I happened on this by accident on the web. Before I started studying the texts that I thought I would study for this lecture, I googled the words sashi kindness. Sashin kindness. And this was number one on the list. Okay, this is a blog post. My refuge as a Sashin stooge. I'll just read excerpts because it's long. I have a very disappointing Sashin at the city center location of the San Francisco Zen Center. During my visit on July 14th through 15th, 2006.

[06:38]

Before you feel sorry for me, know that disappointment is really good material for working on one's practice if it is approached with the right frame of mind. Don't worry. Difficult and painful as it was, the sashim was very good for my practice. I expected a lot. These expectations bore the fruit. San Francisco Zen Center is the U.S. Dharma home of Suzuki Roshi, whose book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, powerfully influenced me as a young man. It was my first sashim at a photo Zen center. It seemed fitting to begin where my lineage began in the United States. I was going to be sitting zazen, seated meditation, in the same zenda, meditation hall, where three generations of my dharma lineage sat zazen. It's even referred to as beginner's mind zenda, and it seemed a good place to begin.

[07:45]

And he goes on to say that he was in San Francisco on business and had planned a trip. And the CEO for the hospice he was working for invited him to attend and so on. It all went fine. It was a marvelous setup for my session. I was a star hospice nurse representing the staff from a hospice agency receiving a prestigious award. et cetera, et cetera, I felt important and cared for. Oh, the high and mighty fall hard and fast. My first clue concerning the tone of my upcoming experience came during the orientation session on Friday night. I walked down Market Street, Google Map, from my hotel, arriving about a half hour early, and both of the doors were locked. There were people entering who had keys, but no one offered to let me in or required why I was waiting on the stoop.

[08:53]

They just looked at me and did not return my smiles. I started to feel my anger well up. Someone certainly knew I was coming. Someone inside there knew I was coming and knew I was new. I was disappointed. This was the theme of my internal reactions that would be repeated throughout my encounter at Sashim. I felt isolated and embarrassed. Anyway, this goes into his difficulty about... And he had three or four encounters that are very frustrating because people talk to him about the door being closed and it being 7 o'clock, which is the time for the orientation, and then they don't let him in. Or else they let him in and then don't give him an idea of what's happening with the orientation.

[09:59]

Or they come in and start the orientation and then stop a few minutes later and hand it to somebody else. I'm looking at Mark because I'm guessing it was Mark was the person in charge at that time. This worked out. So he says, as I sat with my anger, it dawned on me that I had this unexamined and heretofore subconscious expectation that the center was a collection of fully realized beings. Rather than what it is, a collection of beings in the human realm caught by various amounts of delusion, ignorance, and greed, like the rest of us. One thing this experience helped me understand was that even Sensei put their pants on one leg at a time. Okay, then he says, the Eno's compassion, warmth, and patience radiated out from him in all directions.

[11:02]

Okay? Okay. Okay. And then he goes on to, Toshin, you must understand that Toshin is a time when we're silent. And it's very easy to develop ideas about what's going on. So he goes on, I felt as though the rest of the sangha was amused by my ineptitude and clumsiness. as I fumbled around trying to fit in a highly structured environment with lots of rules, without being told what to do, what to expect, or what was expected of me. Perfect comment. I have no idea what was really on their minds. This mindery belonged to me, a remnant of my childhood. But the repetition of the pattern of this particular disappointment that is not being cared for as a newcomer deeply surprised me.

[12:08]

I expected more mindful attention to my fragile ego. And then he goes on. And... talks about the various ways in which he set himself up for disappointment and failure. It's a very insightful letter, and if you want, after Sachin, I'll tell you where to find it. So anyway, the next day, he arrives at 5 o'clock, and he stands outside the door. It's locked. And then the person who's watching the door opens it, and the alarm goes off, and... He doesn't know what to do either, and he says that there were mitigating factors, that he was seated across from what he discovered later were very senior members, that if he had only known they were senior, he would have known how to behave or to follow them, but he didn't.

[13:18]

and tells how he tried to comfort himself. And then he says, It seems neither unreasonable nor inconsistent with the Dharma to provide an absolute novice with a mentor, but with enough information for a minimum level of assurance for the novice that their clumsy action or inaction will not offend. I did not know who to bow to, when to bow, why we were bowing, which way to face, how to enter and leave, nothing. There was a lot of bowing going on. I didn't understand it. The schedule was posted, but it used Xen terms, and I didn't know the definitions. I felt completely abandoned. I didn't know I was doing something wrong or not doing something I should until someone corrected me. Anyway, and he talks about how, even though he's an extremely accomplished practitioner, that this has big echoes with things that happened in his childhood.

[14:30]

And so he talks about how he was conditioned. Anyway, I could go on with a hundred other examples of things I was not told. I made mistakes in every single ceremony, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I was all three stooges. And he says, now I have some emotional distance from all this. It is more than a little bit funny. It is hilarious. I was all three stooges in my own production of Sucker Satshin. One thing I do not regret was that there was a student who actually went out of her way to help me. We spoke verily ten words as we sat next to each other in the Zendo. but her compassion was as radiant as the Enos. I looked for her at dinner to thank her, but did not find her. Okay, so, oh well, chop wood, carry water, get up, sit, see. My refuges are the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, not the San Francisco Zen Center.

[15:34]

But they're in the human realm just as I... I was very happy to have the opportunity to look into my own emptiness, to experience the consequences of my own expectations. I am not upset with the center. I'm happy with the work I did in Sachin. I did a lot of work. In spite of all the pain and struggle, I will always feel a little bit at home here. And then there's a link to a picture of the front of this building. Okay, so then I wrote back to him and I wrote to him immediately and asked for his permission to use this post in Sashin Lecture. And I talked about that I think that his Sashin might have been the week or the week after John King died, who was the greatest example of kindness perhaps that I've ever met and had the opportunity to practice with in my life. And how in my term as president,

[16:43]

a lot of the feedback that I got was about welcoming issues at the front door. And I expect that, Susan, I expect that as vice president, you're receiving a lot of that too. Okay. And thank him for helping us study the topic and that it would give us some help about how seemingly, the impact of seemingly minor interactions in meeting and practicing with the community. And he wrote back, saying a lot of things and how his work as a hospice nurse and what was happening may have influenced how he felt that there was someone dying and there may have been some aversion there. Basically, he says it was a very humble and friendly letter, very kind email that he wrote back. And And he ends, I am deeply grateful for the opportunities to practice that Zen Center has given and continues to give.

[17:49]

Okay, so what makes welcoming so important on the path? So I just want to point to the deeply insightful comments that the man who made the post had about how his life conditioned his reactions to the eyes down, kind of no involvement, silent style here. And it's not to say that we didn't make mistakes, because we can be welcoming at the front door, and it's a big teaching for us. But it was definitely an interaction. And so in terms of nourishment of the senses, which we've been discussing for a couple weeks. Thomas Lewis, in A General Theory of Love, talks about the importance of good nourishing contacts to be able to heal emotional wounds.

[18:58]

He says, describing good relatedness to someone, no matter how precisely or how often, does not inscribe it. into the neural networks that inspire love. Overhauling emotional knowledge is no spectator sport. It demands the messy experience of yanking and tinkering that comes from a limbic and emotional bond. If someone's relationships today bear a troubled imprint, they do so because an influential relationship left its mark on a child's mind. When a limbic connection has established a neural pattern, it takes a limbic connection to revise it. Transmutation consists not in elevating proper reason over purblind passion, but in replacing silent, unworkable intuitions with functional ones.

[20:03]

So he's talking about how that happens physically So if we have a deeply wounded emotional experience that gives us suspicious intuitions towards the world, the only way to change it is if someone helps us change it by treating us with kindness, compassion, and welcome. And if we want to help someone, all the explaining in the world will not help. The thing that works is to contact them, to touch them. Maybe not physically, but all the senses are arenas in which contact can occur. And if we make that contact a contact of kindness, we're changing the world one person at a time. So speaking of contact, I forgot to credit...

[21:05]

local psychologist Claude Steiner, in my lecture a couple of Wednesdays ago on contact, so I want to credit him with his work in this area on how to heal and what does love mean, what is a nourishing contact. So in terms of Buddhist teaching, The idea of contact involves the treasure house of teaching called the Sangha, the community, which can be the Sangha of cells in our body, but is commonly understood to be the Sangha of people who are practicing the path. And at the wider end, the Sangha can be the Sangha, the community of all beings. So, for instance, when Suzuki Roshi, our founding teacher, looked in anyone's eyes, his talent was that he could look at anyone in the eye and see Buddha.

[22:17]

And because he was contacting Buddha, the person could respond as Buddha. That's incredibly important. This is perhaps the most radical thing we can do in life is to see someone as Buddha and give them the opportunity of helping us. I don't know how many people have seen the movie Pay It Forward. In the movie, I recommend it, not because it's an action movie or romance movie, but because it shows how frustrating kindness is and how subtle are its effects. And in that movie, there's a homeless man who's been fed by a child. And, you know, you have the opportunity to do this if you're not in Sachin tomorrow. Is it tomorrow, Rob? Yeah, and Rob will make an announcement about that later. But in this movie, a homeless man has been fed by a child, and he's unsuccessfully tried to pay back the favor.

[23:24]

or pay forward the favor by fixing the car of the mother of the child. And he scares her half to death because he's in her garage when she doesn't know it. And so he has his ups and downs and then hitches someplace else and ends up on a bridge. The truck drops him off by a bridge. And as he's walking along the bridge, he sees a woman climbing up onto the edge of the bridge in preparation to jump. And he says a lot of things to her. And she says, I'm not worth it. Get lost over and over again. And finally, he looks her in the eye and says, save my life. And she climbs down. So sangha is incredibly important, especially when we notice that our vow to save all beings is actually the vow to let beings save us.

[24:29]

And how do we do it? The nature of the community, when we do this, when there's a mutual giving and receiving of saving in the community, what people see is harmony and a sense of rhythm. And Buddha says that harmony can be realized by following six practices that we follow during the week of Sashin. That we have regular and frequent meetings. As a matter of fact, there's hardly any time when we're not meeting. You know, so we're sharing a space. We're sharing the essentials of daily life. And we're observing the same precepts or guidelines. And we use hardly any words, but when we do, only words that contribute to the harmony. And we share our insights and understanding through having practice discussion or dokasan with a teacher, but also through how we serve food, through how we sweep the Buddha hall.

[25:42]

And the last one is how we respect each other. It says respect each other's viewpoints, but I think it also means respecting each other's bodies and minds. So for instance, between every period of zazen, there's a period of kinhin, or walking meditation. So there's a rule which we can understand as a rule, because if there's a lot of people, space yourself out evenly. And we can understand that as a rule and treat it as a rule. but we think of it as contact, the contact of respect, we'll understand that we're giving each person space to do walking meditation and creating a sense of harmony and rhythm by the distance that we keep. Thich Nhat Hanh also says in a completely different article, and it's one about nourishing the senses,

[26:45]

He says, if you have only one way of thinking, one way of behaving, then you are confined to the limits of your culture. And it can also be to the limits of your personal culture. With your habitual way of thinking, you imprison yourself in a framework of culture and behavior. And you cannot understand the suffering, the difficulties, the dreams of other people, of other races or other areas. If that's how you think, then you've used a rope to tie yourself up and you bind others with that rope and cause danger and suffering to yourself and others. We need to have the opportunity to let go and learn ways of thinking and behaving that are not ours. So this opportunity to come into rhythm with other people who are not you. to come into rhythm with things, with the world that is not you and defines you.

[27:47]

Not you defines you. What you think of as not you defines you. And if not you is nothing and everything is you, everything is saving you, then your definition is the same as Buddha's definition. So this is incredibly important. And Thich Nhat Hanh ends up saying, you have to be free from the prison so you can live with others. That is civilization. Civilization is an open mind. Civilization is a view that is open, an attitude that is free. Civilization is opening your two arms to embrace all races, all people, and all species. And in Sashin, we also say to embrace all moments, to embrace all experiences, to welcome the experiences as part of our life.

[28:52]

So, does anybody know what time it is? How am I doing? Ten to eleven. Ten to eleven, okay, good. There's a couple of cases. There are a few cases in the Zen literature that talk about this. As a matter of fact, almost every case, almost every poem, almost everything in the Zen teachings talks about this. Here's a case that talks about the different levels of welcoming. This is from a book called The Blue Cliff Records, and it's case number nine. A monk asked Jojo, what is Jojo? Jojo replied, East Gate, West Gate, South Gate, North Gate.

[30:03]

That's the story. I'd better say it again. So a monk asked Zhao Zhao, what is Zhao Zhao? Zhao Zhao replied, east gate, west gate, south gate, north gate. So in those days, monasteries were designed according to a specific architectural pattern. So if you've spent any time in a Japanese monastery, you can see that many of them are designed in the same way, with the main building as the head of the monastery and another building as the heart of the monastery. And some buildings that relate to everyday sorts of bodily functions are the hands and feet of the monastery.

[31:16]

So the monastery is designed as a human body. And so when Jia Zhou replies, East Gate, West Gate, South Gate, and North Gate, he could be talking about the monastery. Like, if I welcome someone at the East Gate, or if I walk to the West Gate, Zhaozhou is the West Gate or the East Gate. He could be saying that. He could be saying, the entire field of the place in which I live and practice is Zhaozhou. He could be saying that. There's also... The senses are also called the sense gates. So eye, ear, nose, tongue, skin, and mental capacity are also called gates. And also in some yoga systems, the apertures of the body are called gates.

[32:22]

So he could be talking about his own body, every cell of his body. There's nothing left out. And so pretty much this is a case about intimacy, about studying the self and studying the world as the self. Joanna Macy has a book called World as Lover, World as Self. So world as lover is one level of intimacy. World as self is another level of intimacy. Self as self. And that teaching is actually part of our transmission. Here's a book called The Record of Transmitting the Light. And this is stories of transmission of the teaching down the generations warm hand to warm hand from Buddha to us. And I'll talk about these more later.

[33:33]

because I want to spend more time on our regular, everyday life. But I'll just read you the story. One of the teachers said to his master, the ancients said, what worldly people love, I love not. I wonder what you love, teacher. And the teacher said, I've already been able to be like this. What worldly people love, I love not. What do you love, teacher? I've already been able to be like this. So that means that suchness, just being as we are, that's what the teacher loved. The teacher was expressing intimacy with life just as it is.

[34:39]

We have Christian and Jewish stories about kindness and intimacy as welcoming. The Jewish concept of mitzvah, a mitzvah is a good deed. The Christian story about Mary Magdalene washing Jesus' feet and drying them with her hair. There's so many stories. So I think that this is a universal experience that when we sit for seven days or when we support a sitting for seven days or even when we know that there's a sitting going on and feel that support for seven days... We are touching that in our lives. That experience is drawing forth the awakened person in us because we're already awake at our deepest level.

[35:49]

There isn't anything about us that isn't of the nature of awakening. But because of our habits, because we only... can see things one way, we don't come into contact with that truth. When we sit for seven days or when we know that someone's sitting and support that sitting in some way, we are expressing with our own body. We are retraining ourselves to 100% express our awakened nature and our awakened mind with other people. Although the man who wrote the blog posting found good in feeling unwelcome at the door, even if the door is closed when you get here and you have to knock very hard, that can be an experience of awakening.

[36:59]

course, don't try to lock the door so that people can't get in. Okay? But if it should happen, people are wise enough that they can make good even of that. And that pain may help them know how to help someone else, may help them understand how to let that other person in trouble save them. So we can't deny the 100% interconnected and awakening nature of everyone and everything. But please, let's just take the opportunity to enjoy it, to appreciate it, to settle the self on the self, to be able to express this with ourselves and with all beings. I think maybe Dongshan's Enlightenment verse would be a good poem for this talk.

[38:09]

He didn't understand for a long time, but then as he was crossing a stream, suddenly, wow. And he said, Don't see the world or yourself as an object, or far from it you stray. Today, as I walk alone, whichever way I turn, I meet myself. He is just me. I am not she or he. If you understand that you as an object is not you yourself, then you have your own true way. Don't see the world or yourself as an object or far from it you stray. Today, as I walk alone, whichever way I turn, I meet myself.

[39:13]

That person is me. I am not that person. I don't define that person. If you understand that the you that you see and feel as an object is not defined by you. Then you have your own true way. Okay, so please sit well, whether you're sitting in a Zendo or whether you're sitting in your car. And let's enjoy the week together. And know that we're connected with each other and we're supporting each other for every period of all seven days. Thank you very much for your attention, your kindness and support. And I'll see you in the zendo or at the door.

[40:25]

every year.

[40:28]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_98.31