This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I would like to begin tonight by... I have a new book that just came out. I'm very charged up about my new book. So I'm going to read you a little bit from this book. Just a little. It's called Escape This Crazy Life of Tears. Japan, July 2010. And it's actually a sort of a, what would you call it, a diary poem about going on a pilgrimage to Japan in 2010 with a bunch of everyday Zen priests and senior students. And we went and did a very high class. Ceremony, among other things.

[01:02]

We did a very high-class ceremony in the two big headquarters, monasteries of Soto Zen. So, on the trip, I kept a poetic diary. So, that's what this book is. And I'm just going to read a little bit, a few pages from it. Hojo-san. East, West... A person of zazen is the same. Grandmother mind, the kind heart, is imagination. Feeling for another, see them as yourself, takes imagination. Imagination expands the heart. One day, woke, heard, sound in both ears. Sudden... Hearing loss, my eyes don't work right either. Age is slowly melting my body with each loss there's gain.

[02:06]

My ears, my eyes, more mine now than ever, before not. So, when I lose my life to death... Will my life be owned by me more than it ever was? July 18, 2010, Yaizu, or Rinsoin. Eheji Zuisei. So this is actually a description of one of those ceremonies that I was mentioning. Eheji Zuisei. Bowing to Dogen. Purify robes with incense. Arrive. Rehearse. Bathe. Eat. Sleep. But Koei-san seems not to sleep. Arrives late. Rises early. Sleeps on back. Unmoving. Summer heat. Killing. Robes soaked through.

[03:08]

Asa. Zagu. Needs. Sewings. Hard to grip. And slides off arm. Hosts. Flips. tassels dangling just as instructed. Long, long Eheji corridors, many steps, sizes, steep and steeper, stopping, bowing, going on in little red slippers, paying respect to past. Mr. Generation, today's Tendong Yojo's day, sun comes out after night of thunder and rain. Early morning Jodo hall as monks sit. All this written before. And again and again. They were life. I am here. You will be there. Here. Times specific and eternal. Not external. No outside in time. No outside at all.

[04:10]

Ashes, ashes. all fall down, rise up, sidestepping, three steps, bow to guest director, no mistakes, just as if nothing happened. Flowing movement in hato, under golden parasols, golden lotus offerings, murmured, chanting, heart throb, drum, bow and leave, shingyo, durani, incense, many bows, Hose flips. Koei and I in perfect time together. Short and tall. Big and small. Old and young. Together. Photo. Photo. Red kimono and white okesa. It's Hojo-san. Abbot's representative. Congratulations. Congratulations. Now congratulations. Bow and receive. Temple administrator. Zazen is for... Happiness for all people, everywhere, none left out.

[05:15]

Congratulations on becoming a priest. Sweets and tea, plum and sweet water, it all makes sense once you see the logic. Logic gone wild in detail and respect. Young monks shout and clean, race down hallways, bow and breathe in a blur. Japanese snack area on highway, a cacophony of vending machines, deep-fried junk food, paper cups of hot green tea, free with any purchase, garish lights and crowds, bikers, children, cool air machine, blast in parking lot where earnest cops direct traffic with their wands. At the top of the this mountain, there's a spirit protects this place.

[06:20]

July 19, 2010, Yaizu Rinso In. Everywhere you look, something. Someone. Never. Nothing. Always. Koei and Michiko, his mom, bringing eel cookies. Famous eel cookies. Sit, drink tea, compare Rakasu's family connections. My father's teacher was your grandfather teacher's sister's husband. Imagine. Last night's Zazen sudden flash of inner... Light in full robes, humid heat, all pores blaze sweat and fires in the organs then, evaporation's cooling effect.

[07:27]

Time drum and bell. Boom, boom, boom. Dong, dong, dong. Old serene sound of ancient mountain. Ants, up and down the tree. The children always want to kill them. A fun thing to do. Move small thumb and all ants fun. Done. And you can do it. You are big. Hojo Grandpa says, no, don't do that. Laughs as they do it all the more.

[08:29]

Ants that speak in smells, that make chemical trails, that make intricate houses, whose queens lay eggs 20 years, highly intelligent, efficient, lovely ants, busy ants, somehow gone. But others now resume their business. Children go on to other joys. So that's a little bit from that book. And I have no doubt that it has something to do with what I want to talk about tonight. Because lately, and I see that even in 2010, I was already thinking about time I've been thinking about time for a long time how strange time is and how much we think we know time even though really we have no idea what time is in the nick of time

[09:47]

in the nick of time, for the time being. Time and time again. Just in time. Wasting time. Time on my hands. Short. On time. Nothing but time. Out of time. On time. overtime, extra time. It's about time. I had a hard time. I'm buying time. Won't give me the time of day. A good time. A rough time. The time of your life. Time's on your side. Killing time.

[10:51]

killing time, spare time, wonderful time, wish you were here, keeping time, borrowed time, making good time, pressed for time, pressed for time, playing for time. It's high time. Once upon a time, Time heals. Time is money. Time will tell. Ahead of your time, behind the times, when the time is ripe, time out. A race against time. Running out of time. Running out of time. Running out of time.

[11:52]

But no time to lose. And time flies. Time is of the essence. Time's a wasting. Times are a changing. Two-timer. Big time. Call time. In the fullness of time. Time's up. We have a wonderful student in our group in Mexico. Her name is Arhelia Garcia. And I want to tell you a story about her. When she was young, she had a

[12:57]

a child, a son, I guess he was two or three years old. One day her son was crossing the street with his father and he was hit by a car and died. And this event, as you can imagine, completely shattered Arhalia's life. Before too long, the marriage broke up. And with all that pain and suffering, she took up practice. But she never stopped wanting to be a mother. She never stopped missing her little boy. And she was looking all the time for another partner so she could have a child again, but she never found the right person, and many years went by. A couple of years ago, I saw Arhelia, because I go to Mexico a couple times a year, and I usually see her down there. And she astonished me by what she told me.

[14:01]

She said, my son's not dead. He's alive. I said, but how is that possible? When you told me the story, you told me there was a funeral, there was a burial, the whole thing. How is it possible that your son's alive? How could that be? And she said that her husband and her husband's family... had wanted so badly to take this child away from her that they actually staged, can you imagine this? They staged a burial in a funeral that she attended full of tears and there was no child in the coffin and the whole thing was fake. And they told the little boy that his mother had died. So the boy grew up thinking he didn't have a mother. Like about a year ago, somehow or other, because Arhealia is all over Facebook, right?

[15:10]

Somehow her son figured out that his mother was still alive and he reached out to her. Can you believe this? After all these years, Arhealia was a mother again. It wasn't... exactly simple because at first the boy, although he had reached out to her, he was not sure about her because he had been told so many bad stories about her, you know, from his family. When he said, you know, I found my mother, she's not dead, then they said, well, we told you she was dead because she abandoned you. She didn't want you, and that's why we didn't want to tell you that, so we told you she was dead. So he didn't know if that was true or not, and there were many back and forth complications, but And the last time I saw her, she sent me a picture, actually, before I saw her, of her and her son together. One of our priests there has an apartment in Mexico City, and she and her son were now living together temporarily in Mexico City, reunited and happy to be together and fully healed.

[16:19]

Can you imagine? Another student of Everyday Zen, who is someone also very, very dear to me, is named Lois Diller. We first knew Lois because Lois' daughter, Ami, was a student here at Zen Center when we were young students together. Probably Paul remembers her from our days together. She was, for a long time, the girlfriend of Frank, who was Paul's best friend still. So, yeah, so Lois Diller, we got to know through her daughter, and we became very, very close to Lois, and Lois was practically part of our family. She lost her husband, Ed, when she was young, when she was maybe in her 40s.

[17:22]

I think Ed died of a heart attack, I don't remember exactly. And Lois somehow never put her life together after that happened. She was a person who was so unsure of herself, so full of a kind of floating non-specific guilt and self-doubt and self-blame. She felt like her children didn't really love her and she had been a terrible mother. she felt like she just could never sort of get a handle on what it was to be Lois. And she tried all kinds of psychological things. She even went as far as trying Zen practice. And she practiced Zen for a long time, actually. She received Jukai from me probably in the late 80s or early 90s and was very serious about her practice, but nothing helped.

[18:26]

She never had a moment's peace. When she was in her late 70s, she got Parkinson's disease. And little by little by little her body started shutting down. Until at the end, she could barely move and she could no longer speak. But for a long time, you know, leading up to this, she and I would have phone conversations. And I always kept up with her. And about a month before she died, somehow, in some way that I don't really understand, she finally had some kind of breakthrough. She finally found some kind of peace and some kind of totally satisfying happiness. Just as her body and mind were completely breaking down, she found her true power.

[19:32]

her true freedom in her real life and she was for the first time in her life really really happy and she spent the last couple weeks of her life Ami told me because Ami was with her doing nothing but listening to Dharma talks you know on the computer one Dharma talk after another all the time she was awake in the last conversation I had with her when she had a little bit of a voice left and a little bit of an ability to speak, she told me how happy she was. How great it was that she finally could understand what it was to really and truly and completely be alive and how much peace there was in that and how much freedom and awakening and opening there was in that. And she said, and I'm happy to die now. It's perfectly all right.

[20:33]

And she felt so happy that she could, after being terrified of death her entire life, she could now say, it's fine. And then she said, I think now is the time, and I'm going to stop eating now. And she stopped eating. And she died. And she... in this last conversation she just said to me I just want to tell you how happy I am and how grateful I am and thank you very much for our friendship and goodbye I'll never forget that conversation Dogen writes about time in his essay Uji the time being And in this essay, which I've studied many times, he says a lot of strange things, seemingly strange things about time, that make you realize that the way that you understand time is probably wrong.

[21:44]

And we appreciate this when we do Zazen. Because when we sit in Zazen, we are living in time differently. than we usually do. We're just sitting. And time is passing. Or is it? When you're sitting in zazen, you know, it's hard to say whether time is passing or not. So the question is, should Arhelia regret? all those lost years with her son? Should she spend the next decades angry and upset? Should Lois feel like she wasted her entire life with guilt and unhappiness? Or does a moment of true happiness and true love pervade all of time?

[22:59]

turning the whole of a life, in all of life, around forever? Do we ever run out of time? Are we ever really pressed for time? Is time ever, or maybe is it always, the fullness of time? And is it possible that we could imprison ourselves with our unexamined and unrealistic ideas about time and self? I seem to be specializing tonight in death stories. I'm sorry. But last conversations, you know, the last conversation I had with Peter Matheson, we talked about his death that was coming.

[24:11]

He had cancer and he knew he was going to die. He was 89 years old. And he could talk about it quite easily. And he said he was fine with it. He had had really one of the most remarkable lives that anybody could have. a long good life and it had the end so this was fine and then we talked about the novel that he was just about to publish it was I guess I was talking to him in March the novel came out in April and I think he died within a couple days of the publication date of this novel and he talked to me about this novel in paradise which John gave me to read when we were at Upaya together and I just read it and I really felt darn I wish I could call Peter up and talk to him about this novel it's a wonderful novel I recommend it although it's not fun to read exactly because it's about a pilgrimage it's a novel but it's based on a pilgrimage that Peter took with Bernie Glassman to Auschwitz

[25:26]

So it's a pretty sad novel. And Bernie always takes groups to Auschwitz in the most dismal time of year. Maybe Auschwitz in the spring is pleasant. I don't know. But he only goes to Auschwitz around Thanksgiving time, late November, early December, when the weather is bitter and there isn't even any picturesque snow on the ground. It's just rotten, kind of muddy. The novel is full of muddy streets and uninspiring views. It just sounds like a terrible place to visit, at least from the novel. I've never been there. And you would think, wouldn't you, that a group of pilgrims going together to bear witness at Auschwitz would find at least some solace in their common humanity and in their shared grief over what has got to be the saddest event in all of human history. You would think, right?

[26:29]

But no. According to Peter's novel, there's nothing but guilt and bitterness and misunderstanding and recrimination and a total inability to connect. And the novel ends with the main character, who's a Polish-American, in a church in Krakow, weeping with a broken heart. So maybe you don't want to read this novel unless you're ready to be depressed. Peter said, people are not going to like this novel, I know that. But the reason I'm bringing it up, because, I mean, I don't want to get you depressed right before bed here, but the reason I'm bringing it up is because I want to read for you the poem that is the epigraph for the novel.

[27:33]

It's a poem by Anna Akhmatova, who lived in that part of the world and had a pretty rough time of it herself. She lived through the Revolution, and her family was... not treated so well by the revolution. She lost relatives, had relatives imprisoned. It was pretty rough for Anna Akhmatova. And so this poem was written, I think, in 1921 in the midst of her travail. And here's the poem. Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold. Death's great black wing scrapes the air. Misery gnaws to the bone. Why then do we not despair? By day, from the surrounding woods, cherries blow summer into town.

[28:37]

At night, the deep, transparent skies glitter with new galaxies. And the miraculous comes so close to the ruined, dirty houses. Something, something, not known to anyone at all, but wild in our breast for centuries. something not known to anyone at all, but wild in our breasts for centuries. I know that everyone here has a feeling for this something that's wild in our breasts, even though maybe we don't really know what it is.

[29:47]

Somehow we know it's there. We can sense it. It's our human birthright. It's what saves us. It's what keeps us alive. It's what enables us to withstand all of the world's suffering and our own. And we come to a place like Tassajara We think we're coming for the food or the sound of the bell. Or we don't even know what we're coming for. But this is what we're coming for. We come here to encounter it. To make friends with it. That's what we're all doing here. Thank you very much for listening to my talk.

[30:52]

Take care of yourself. 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.

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