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. Well, good morning, everyone, and welcome. Welcome to those who come in person and those who are online. Can you hear me well? Is this mic working? Great. This is the first lecture I've given down here in the Zendo since it was remodeled. Looks wonderful. I'm really looking forward to the whole building being opened up. I want to thank Tim for inviting me. Where are you, Tim? Over there. Thank you. Right there. Oh, in the tanto seat. Excellent. And how many of you here for the first time? Do I see a hand?

[01:02]

Welcome, special welcome to you. My name's Ed. For those of you who don't know me, I'm a teacher here at Zen Center. And happy to participate in giving a lecture during the practice period. A practice period is a 10-week, sometimes it's a 12-week period where we intensify our practice. And the theme of this practice period is Welcoming Beginner's Mind, and the text is by Galen Ferguson by the same title. It just warms my heart to think of a title Welcoming Beginner's Mind since Suzuki Roshi was my first teacher in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, his famous book on Zen. He was really the person that introduced Beginner's Mind to the American discussion. Such a great concept. What's a Zen mind? It's a beginner's mind, a ready mind, an open mind.

[02:07]

Well, we really don't know what a beginner's mind is. Maybe it's a kind of exploration. I remember one of the first things when I came to Tasar back in the early days is there was a, down at Tasar, there was a brochure. They were raising money for Tasar. And it says a little quote, and there were many little quotes, but the one that I remember from the brochure is, Zen is to enter each moment free of attachment to anything or anywhere. To enter each moment free of attachment to anything or anywhere. Maybe that's another way to think of a beginner's mind, a mind that gives you that kind of flexibility and freedom to experience a moment. And the other part of welcoming beginner's mind, the term welcoming is wonderful. So the Qurayshi seemed so welcoming to all of us strange hippies and beatniks back then who must have looked... I showed up very excitedly, wandered into Tassar with a long beard, and for Zaza and I dressed up in my cleanest red T-shirt.

[03:26]

So I don't know. Anyway. I remember this comes from a little book that David Chadwick wrote on a little saying, little events that had happened with Suzuki Roshi. So this is a story. At a Sakoji lecture, a distraught woman said she had been rejected by a Zen teacher in Los Angeles. Suzuki Roshi told her that if she went back to the teacher, he was sure she would accept her. said, now you reject me, she cried. Oh no, Suzuki said with sincere sympathy in his voice, you can stay here. And with his arms opened and his long robe sleeves hanging by his side, he took a step forward and added, I never reject anybody. So a little short story about the welcoming feeling Suzuki brought to the founding of this temple.

[04:28]

There's so much going on in this world now, so much suffering and confusion. The bodhisattva vow is to live for the benefit of all beings. Does this unrealistic goal make any sense? How do we do this? I think the answer is yes, because it is the only practical way to approach life. when we realize through practice and careful observation of our life that only through giving up our own self-centered desires to help others can we truly be fulfilled. It is only through recognizing our deep connection to all beings that we can become free. In Ferguson's book, he has used the 10 ox-herding pictures as a description of the path of the bodhisattva. For those not in the practice period, you can kind of think of the ten pictures with their verses as describing the ten stages of a practitioner's progress towards awakening or fully living the life of a bodhisattva.

[06:04]

You can think of it as an arc of a life. You know, we start practice totally confused and lost, wondering what is Well, this is hopefully at some point when you wake up to how confused and lost you actually are, which is usually what brings one to practice. And you wonder, what is the meaning of my life? How do I handle this amazingly complex and confusing life full of suffering? And you start to find a way. You have a kind of sense for the direction. sensing the ox. Anyway, through various stages, you find a little more direction in your life. Maybe you find a teacher. Maybe you go live for four years in a Zen monastery or sit 20 sashims while you're working your daily life and maybe start to get some sort of sense for how things are going and how one should go forward.

[07:11]

And then at some point in time you realize that the enlightenment you sought was just in the practice expression of each moment of your life. And that's kind of where the ninth stage of the oxygen herding pictures end up. We also cycle through all these stages back and forth too. You can get to the ninth and tenth and then go back to the first the next morning. So that's quite typical too. So I've chosen the ninth stage to talk about today. And it's a picture which I'm sure if I hold it up, nobody will be able to see it. But anyway, I'll hold it up anyway. It's a beautiful circle with a tree. Looks like there's a background possibly. Well, that's not a mountain. Those are just the limbs of the tree. Birds are flying around. And there's a marvelous stream that runs by going on. It's a picture of nature, nature and the wonderful feeling that nature brings to practice.

[08:24]

The verse says, the endless river flows tranquilly on. Image has the feeling of our practice, how our practice flows. smoothly and endlessly on from a beginningless beginning, supported by nature, supported by all existence. All seeking is forgotten. So this rushing around, this seeking for everything, needing so much at the early stages, now you're relaxedly enjoying the abundance of nature, existence and your existence and your connection to all that exists. Dogen sometimes call that practice enlightenment, no separation between your practice and awakening. This also hurting picture also shows a return to origins.

[09:29]

Trungpa Rinpoche called, titled the stage, reaching the source. Daido Roshi calls it returning to the source. Martine Batchelor says it's returning to the original place. Probably when we were in the womb of our mother's womb, we were connected to everything, and everything was probably going quite smoothly, and then this abrupt change happened. We got quite confused and tried to figure out how to live life. And as we got older, it got even more confusing, and we decided to really figure out what's going on here. So we spent decades going to retreats, sitting zazen, sesheen after sesheen, banging our hand against the wall, trying to settle down.

[10:33]

And then in the end, we find out we end up just back where we started. recognizing we had everything there all along anyway. But somehow we have to do this. I don't know why it is. It seems like we have to kind of really, really get back. It's right there all along. Our awakened mind is with us all along. But somehow we have to do these things to find it again. There's another verse that's attached to this image that goes, too many steps have been taken returning to the root and the source. Better to have been blind and deaf from the beginning. Those little Chinese guys, they were pretty tough. These images were created in the 12th century.

[11:34]

So it reminded me of that beautiful ending part of the Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot. We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. Wonderful T.S. Eliot quote. And then I'm on this sort of theme of returning to where you started. So Bob Dylan, in one of his songs, I was born very far from where I'm supposed to be And so I'm on my way home. And I'm also reminded of an old story about two Dharma friends, Yentu and Xue Feng, who had practiced together for many, many years, probably two decades with their teacher. And they were off on pilgrimage and they got caught in a snowstorm and retreated to a small village.

[12:37]

And I think it was... Shui Feng was busy sitting all night trying to get to the center of everything, trying to really find enlightenment. I think Yanta was the one that was just sleeping and eating and waiting for the snowstorm to pass. And he said to him, why are you sitting like this? Why don't you relax a little? And he says, well, I haven't solved the fundamental problem. So he says, asked him, well, you tell me, you know, what's concerning you? And he describes, well, he met this teacher and learned this thing, and he met that teacher and learned that thing and had this experience. And then Anto said, don't you know what enters through the gate cannot be the treasure of the house. If you want to propagate the great teaching, it must flow point by point from in your own breast to cover heaven and earth. The treasure of your own house is here. in your own heart, mind.

[13:39]

We need to help other people, obviously, but it's there, and it's there for you to enjoy your treasure. So in thinking of this beautiful setting with the trees and the flowing stream, I was reminded by this poem, an early early Zen poem, probably influenced a lot by Daoist, was by Wang Wei, 7th century poet, four centuries before the Ox Herding Pictures were created. In my middle years, I became fond of the way. I make my home on the foothills of South Mountain. When the spirit moves me, I go by myself to see things that I alone must see. I follow the stream to the source.

[14:45]

I sit there and watch for the moment when the clouds crop up. Or I may meet a woodsman and we laugh and talk and forget all about going home. I love that. In my middle years I became fond of the way. Sort of a more relaxed approach to practice. I'm not really practicing art. No, I became fond of the way. Way comes from the word Tao. When Buddhism came from India into China mixed with Taoism. Zen really is kind of a mixture of Taoism and Indian Buddhism. And they really adopted this term, Tao translated as the way, the way, the path, the way of Zen. So I become found to the way of Zen. And I made my home in the foothills of a mountain.

[15:50]

I was raised in the mountains of New Mexico, so I've always loved mountains. And I've walked in mountains my whole life. Probably why when I first arrived at Tassar, I loved It's so much because of the power of the mountains and the solidity of mountains, how strong they are. Well, we all can kind of appreciate mountains, I think. When the spirit moves me, I go off by myself to see things that I alone must see. I think when Buddha was passing on, they were asking him, well, how is this going to work after I'm gone, your teacher? And he said, all of you be a light unto yourself. Kind of a radical idea. But it is true in Zen. Your practice is your responsibility.

[17:00]

Your practice is yours to manage and sometimes you have to go off by yourself to see things that only you can see in fact most of what's going on in your head only you can see I mean sometimes you spout it out all over the world and they can see it but most the time a lot of it is just going on in there for you to puzzle about and to figure out for yourself what to make of this conscious mind you have. Of course, there's a kind of paradox there. You need, of course, the support of a lot of things. Sugiroshi used to say, group practice is the shortcut to awakening. That reminds me, in the early days there was a student I ran into who had gone off into the woods around Tassar and had sat a hundred-day sashim by himself.

[18:06]

This is, you know, going off to see what only you can see by yourself. And I asked him, well, does Sigurji have anything to say about that? And Sigurji said he thought it was a little selfish. I don't know, sitting a hundred-day sashim by yourself sounds pretty brutal to me, but it could be pretty selfish, too. You're just All you have to deal with is yourself. When you sit sashins with 50 other people, you have to deal with all of that, which is both supportive and adds the complexity of all those crazy other people in the world. You know, the one that sits next to you, you get assigned seats at Tassara, so there's always... And at the beginning of each practice period, you'd see the list. and you'd go down to see whose seat was next to yours. And then, not her, not him. I could sit next to anybody, but he moves too much.

[19:12]

You know how it goes. But you sit next to them for three months, and pretty soon you kind of love them for the way they breathe and the way they are and who they are. So yes, you do need You are on your own quest, and you do need the support of everybody. Because in the end, it's only through connection to other people, warm hand to warm hand, that you actually can realize your awakened mind. Moving on to the source of the stream. I follow the stream to the source. I don't know, just out of curiosity, how many people like hiking in the mountains? Yeah, like pretty much everybody, right? My wife's from Manhattan. It took her a while to like hiking in the mountains.

[20:15]

She was perfectly happy walking down streets in New York. I would never walk down, but hiking in the mountains, little scary animals could jump out. But anyway, so I used to, I hiked a lot by myself. before I got to Zen Center. And I used to like to follow the stream to the source. Sometimes it was tricky. You know, sometimes the stream would go through certain areas that could go around the bushes or climb up a cliff. But you could eventually get to the source. Maybe it was a crack in the granite somewhere, but it was like a... The stream brings... It's the water that brings the life to the mountain, to the forest. And to sit by a stream with a... Usually there's beautiful flowers in the springtime around streams and butterflies floating around. Follow the stream to the source. There's a kind of mystery there. But the source they're talking about here is not just the source of the stream, but the source of everything.

[21:25]

Where does everything come from? What is the source of your thinking mind? What's the source of your life force? What is the source of it all? We don't know. We have fancy words like emptiness. You know, great, the source is emptiness. Can we know emptiness? Not really. That's why we call it emptiness, because you can't know it with your mind, you can't experience it, but something's happening here that is much bigger than my thinking mind, much bigger than anything I can experience that's the source of all of this. We call it impermanence that's going on. It's always changing. So... What makes the change?

[22:27]

Why is this moment new, this new moment? Where does, how does this come from? So, of course, it becomes particularly, it's kind of, you know, we send, you know, probes out into space to find out the source and we learn that this galaxies upon swirling galaxies, galaxies and galaxies, you know, the more we look, The bigger it gets, the more we look inside, you know, with our magnificent machines, the inside of the atom and the inside of what's more and more in there. It's the same with our mind. The more we look at it, it's, wow, this consciousness, really something. So I follow the stream to the source.

[23:32]

I'm looking for the source, and I sit there. I sit there and watch for the moment when the clouds crop up. Of course, on one hand, when we go hiking in the mountains, we sit by the stream. Nothing better than on a warm summer afternoon to just lie down and watch the clouds come up. Oh, that looks like an elephant. But at the same time that you're watching the clouds come up, there's the thinking going on in your head, which is really what this poem is about. The clouds coming up are the thoughts in your mind. And it's kind of a metaphor for sitting zazen. We don't have to go to the source of the stream in the mountains. We can come into the zendo. We can bow to our krishnan and bow away. We can take our posture. A couple of breaths.

[24:33]

And quiet down. Be still. Something hard to do normally in our life. And watch those thoughts come up. We watch it from our body. We pay attention to our breathing. We pay attention to our posture, which moves our focus of our consciousness into our body and our breathing, which gives us a different view of our thoughts. And maybe our thoughts, it quiets down enough that you can actually see the space between the thoughts. Maybe you get a sense of the source of these thoughts. We don't emphasize any particular special breathing techniques in Zen.

[25:47]

We say we want to let you find your breathing, you know, let the breathing settle into the way it wants to breathe, the way you want to breathe, without trying to control it. So we don't usually do that. There's many, as you know, yogic techniques of breathing at different pace, breathing, focusing on it where it comes into the nose, or breathing from the upper part. But we do, what the one thing Suzuki Roshi would emphasize from time to time is exhaling fully. And you would say, fade into emptiness when you exhale. This source I was talking about. You become one with everything after you completely exhale. And then an inhale comes. Oh, I'm still alive, fortunately or unfortunately.

[26:51]

I always loved that sentence by him. I'm willing to give it all up. Let it all go. Dogen would say, drop potting mine. Just give it all up. And an exhale is a kind of way of doing that. Oh, and here I am. I gave it all up and it came back. The interesting thing about this is this emptying and becoming one with everything is really the source of compassion. It's the source of our kindness. That connecting to something enormously bigger than ourself is the birth of compassion. Reb Anderson in his book Warm Smiles from Cold Mountain says, He uses this poem in that book.

[27:53]

To be present at the moment before thoughts arise is to witness both the inevitability of thought, the inevitability of thought, and its illusory nature. This is the birth of compassion when we observe the production of phenomenon and understand their source. really interesting thought I mean it's you know I thought about this where does this compassion come from of course there you know there's been a lot of neuroscience on that now I remember there was a book called a general theory of love came out in 2000 Thomas Lewis was the author he and two other professors at UCSF studied this question where love comes from you know and naturally they came up with a biological and evolutionary idea, which makes complete sense.

[28:59]

I mean, you're very connected to your mother and connected to the people that are your caregivers. And that connection is the foundation of love. It gets confused later on, but it's always there. And so that's their argument. Our argument is it's in the fundamental nature of life itself, of consciousness itself. That would be a Buddhist perspective. Since I'm on this theme of walking in mountains lately, I've been, since I've stepped away from most of my responsibilities at Zen Center, I've been having time to walk in the hills around my house, and I often come across a bench. Since I'm supposedly partly retired, I just sometimes sit on the bench for 15 minutes, watch the clouds go by.

[30:02]

In that supportive environment, you can really watch your thinking and thoughts of other people and yourself and have a kind of kindness towards it all when you're supported by something big. The source of the stream of experience is completely calm and serene, and then something comes up. Being willing to give up that calm and to become involved again in particular thoughts is compassion. This is the bodhisattva way, willing to enter the world of confusion and suffering. So I'm going to share a little bit of guidance from Suzuki Roshi on this. He started one of his lectures titled, Be Kind with Yourself. I want you to have the actual feeling of true practice. So we put emphasis on warm heart, warm zazen.

[31:17]

The warm feeling we have in our practice is, in other words, enlightenment, or Buddha's mercy, Buddha's mind. We start this warm-hearted practice by paying attention to our breath. Sukiroshi emphasized being kind with your breath. If you are very kind with your breathing, One breath after another, you will have a refreshed, warm feeling in your zazen. Maybe that's all we have to do, is we just have to sit down and just be kind to our breath. Well, of course we're kind to our breath. But no, we sit down and the first thing, we're going to mess with our breath a little bit. It's, I'm not breathing deep enough. I don't know what's going on with my breath. Well, maybe just, oh, I think I'll just... just decide to love my breathing for a while just be kind to it maybe I'll then have some warm hearted fresh feeling towards my body and my life and my mind after I start having a warm feeling to my breathing maybe I could have a warm feeling towards this crazy thinking mind all this

[32:44]

karmic life I have to live. Maybe I can give myself a break and have a warm, kind feeling towards the life I've been... I mean, you know, everybody has our own karma. We have to practice with it. But we want to practice with it with a kind, warm-hearted feeling. And if we can practice with our own karma with a kind, warm-hearted feeling, we have a better chance of practicing with everybody else's karma, with a kind, warm-hearted feeling. So I think I'm going to finish up with one more nature poem, because this beautiful image with the tree, with the river flowing through, has captured me. This is a poem by Sudangpo, 11th century Chinese poet.

[33:48]

Apparently, he sat up all night outside the temple next to a stream, and in the morning he wrote this poem to the abbot of the monastery. The sounds of the stream are the teachings, the broad, long, long tongue of the Buddha. The sounds of the stream are the teachings of the Buddha, The colors of the mountains are nothing but the pure body of Buddha. All night long, I hear 84,000 verses. That's a lot of verses. Tomorrow, how can I tell them to others? Sit by the stream at the foot of a mountain and feel the teaching of the Buddhas. And how do I tell that to anybody else? So mountains and streams are expressing the essential nature of reality and are constantly expounding their teachers, their teachings.

[35:00]

This, of course, inspired the very first line of Dogen's Mountain and River Sutra. Dogen is the founder of our Soda school. And the first line goes, these mountains and waters of the present are the expression of the old Buddhas. These mountains and rivers of the present are the expression of the old Buddhas, are the teachings of all the Buddhas, the mountains and rivers of the present. But it isn't just the mountains and rivers of the present. Everything is the teachings of the old Buddhas. Everything you're experiencing is the teaching of the old Buddhas. You yourself are not separate from the mountains and rivers, and so you are the teachings of the old Buddhas. Your body, your mind, your emotions. I'm sure all of you feel completely that way, don't you?

[36:09]

It's so hard to to grasp that concept. Sigeroshi would say, to practice is to open yourself up to everything you see as the embodiment of the truth. To practice is to open yourself up to everything you see as the embodiment of the truth. Everything you see out there, everything you see in here, is the embodiment of the truth. This is why we practice zazen, why everyone can join our practice, and why practice includes every activity of our life. Part of why I, of course, bringing so much of Zikershi into this lecture is I practice with him and he was a complete inspiration to my life and also it's titled Beginner's Mind so I want to do that.

[37:20]

So I want to sort of end with two kind of comments Zikershi made that have been like koans that have carried with me throughout my life. To end this the lecture. One, I was down at Tassara, just one of the funkies, you know, digging ditches and, you know, probably being an irritant to the senior staff down there. And the senior staff, I apparently had met with Sigourish in the afternoon and he'd been very strict with them because they were complaining about all kinds of things, I guess, maybe the guests and what various things and complaining. He'd been very stern with them. kind of like almost angry, which is very rare for Suzuki Roshi. So that evening, this was down when the lecture hall at Tassar was down by the river where the students eat now, he gave a very short talk and then he said, I suppose some of you have some questions.

[38:23]

And one of the senior teachers, senior students, I think it was maybe even the director, raised his hand and said, Suzuki Roshi, I've been practicing for five years And I find it very hard to be kind with people. Kind of an apologetic statement about his complaining. And St. Kirschi said, five years is nothing. You don't know how hard it is to love some people. And I just remember sitting there and how quiet the room was. because even I, who had only been there a short time, had felt touched by Suzuki Roshi, like more than almost any person had for me. His capacity to essentially love everybody.

[39:24]

It's when I learned that Zen, with all of its wonderful talk about enlightenment and wisdom, of course it takes great wisdom to be able to love people, really love people. It's really that. It's about love. It's about opening your heart and mind to that capacity that is your born birthright so that you can express it. But what about all my problems? How can they get in my way? So I'll tell one more sort of koan I carry around with me from my days with Shiziguchi. He looked out at us and he said, sometimes I think you think your problems are more important than the fact that you're alive.

[40:28]

Sometimes I think you think Your problems are more important than the fact you're alive. Yeah. When I'm involved in one of my problems, my problem is the whole world. It's everything. Until I solve this problem, I can't even experience my life. But he's suggesting maybe that even in the midst of your problems, you can open up to a bigger reality that's going on, that bigger reality that allows you to touch compassion. 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, please visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:34]

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