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. Morning. Would it be possible to open the door? I am so hot. Thank you. So today is a very special day. And I tell you a secret.

[01:04]

It's a very special day for each one of us. Because there will be never, ever a day like this again. Never, ever a moment like this again. So it's a very special day and a very special moment. I'll tell you a little bit later what makes it so apparent that it's a special day because sometimes events happen that just pointed out to us what is always so and what we usually just so easily forget. Rumi has some great encouragement to us to remember that.

[02:22]

A wonderful poem. And it goes like this. This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy. A depression. A meanness. Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected guest. Welcome and entertain them all, even if they're a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture. Still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. the dark thought, the shame, the malice. Meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

[03:28]

Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. This poem is a poetic way of expressing what this whole practice is about. All aspects of every phenomena are completely clear and lucid. The whole universe is open and unobstructed. Everything mutually interpenetrating. Since all things are naked, clear, and free from obscurations, there is nothing to attain or realize. The nature of things naturally appears and is naturally present in time-transcending awareness.

[04:39]

The everyday practice is simply to develop The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people. Experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages so that one never withdraws or centralizes onto oneself. So that's another way of describing that the human being, being human, is an activity. It's a dynamic. It's being. We are all being in this moment. We are human being. And it is a guest house. And the everyday practice...

[05:42]

is simply to develop a complete openness to whatever our experience is. Whether we like it or don't like it, whether it's pleasant or unpleasant, because if we are available to our life as it presents itself to us, it's completely unobscured. It's completely clear. It gives us information and informs our next step, which is very different than when we try to think about our next steps. When we think about our next steps, usually we think in terms of gain and loss. What am I going to gain when I do this, and what am I going to lose? and we make lists of pros and cons, and then wherever what we come up falls, we make a decision.

[06:47]

But that is still based on gain and loss. So if we are available, if we experience what we experience, rather than tell ourselves a story about it, but feel it in our body, in our mind, in our emotions, or available to it, then the next step will come to meet us. The energy will move. So today is a special day because five, six people are going to receive the precepts. this afternoon, they decided to take the precepts as a basic guideline for their lives and commit to that.

[07:55]

This is a decision you can't make based on gain and loss. And I think all of them would agree that at some point, you know, it just became clear that the energy was moving in that way. It was just gathering around, receiving the precepts. And then it was dissipating. And then here it was gathering again. And they kept gathering. And at some point, they were ready to start sewing their little bib, Buddhist bib. that we wear. In some traditions, actually, these bibs have little pockets. So I always think you can put your cookies there or something. You know, there is a lot of, in a lot of the Buddhist traditions, we wear the same things. They're just made slightly different. So, and while in

[09:05]

And here we have the sewing tradition where everybody sews their own, which is many, many, many stitches. And the small ones actually, that's to a secret, it's smaller, but it's much harder to sew than a big one. Because you have these tiny little corners and you can't, it's harder to get in a rhythm because the moment you have a rhythm, you're... at the end of your line and you have to start again and then it's suddenly three layers instead of two or four. So it's actually you start at the deep end with the raksu. So Rilke says, when we have a question, when a question comes at us from either outside or from within, He suggests to live with the question like the question where the house you live in.

[10:13]

It's just your life lives in that question, and you let it just live in the questions without trying to answer the question. Because big questions can't be answered by sitting down and thinking about it. If we allow the discomfort to not know, because everybody around us is going to say, what are you going to do? Do you know? And we have to keep saying, I don't. I have no idea. Because everything I come up with when I try to finally have an answer so that I can get on with my life is conjectured. is actually a fantasy because we have no idea what the next moment will bring. I can drop dead in the next second sentence here.

[11:20]

It's possible and it happens to people. It can happen to me. It can happen to any of us. So all that planning and thinking what's going to happen, you know, Sitting here, you put me together. I have no idea what was coming out my mouth, and I still don't. I have a few papers because I have a vague idea about what the topic is. So, which of course fits perfectly my Buddhist name, which is loom of emptiness. So here I sit and you weave, you know, and... and something gets woven on this loom. And then it's taken off, and then it's empty again. So, these people have lived in the house of the question of Buddhist precepts, and what does that have to do with their life?

[12:25]

And what are they going to lose? You know, when you think about the precepts, you know, Don't take what is not given. So, you know, all the cookies I sneak on the way past, or what I take from myself that isn't freely given, or from others, time, attention. So you could think, oh, I'm going to lose a lot of things. And the energy keeps going that way. So it's a leap. It's a leap of trust to follow where your life is going anyway. And just be with it. And find out what's going to happen next.

[13:26]

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people. So I'll say this one more time. And I would like you to close your eyes and listen with your body. Just feel, let the words enter your body and let you feel how that affects you in your body. So forget your mind that goes, this is impossible or I wish I could or any of that stuff. Just see what happens. The everyday practice. is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people, experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages.

[15:07]

Can you feel what happens when you listen to that with your body? When I listen while I read with my body, something in me relaxes completely. And it's not that I know how to do that, but something in me, and maybe in you too, goes, yes. Thank you. Such a relief to allow things to be the way they are. And not make them about me. Or if they bring me some gain, or if they take something away from me. Because when we do In our Buddhist vows, we say, Dharma gates are boundless.

[16:14]

We vow to enter them. That means every moment is teaching us about how things are. Every moment is the universe that is completely clear, unhidden, unobstructed, naked. So, taking refuge in the Dharma, is taking the precepts, is also understanding on some level that everything is going to teach us. So every moment is precious, is equally valid, whether it's a painful moment or a difficult moment or a joyful moment and a happy moment and an easy moment. They're all equally precious. And they will be here now, and then they'll be gone. And it will be never a repeat.

[17:17]

Whatever we experience as repeating in our life is a great teaching, because actually we are creating that. It's not the universe. We always think it's happening out there. But we are turning round and round and round because we overlay what's happening the moment it has some similarity with something that happened before that made an impression and go for it. Blindly that it's the same thing over. We fall for the same type of men or women. Everybody's always cheating on us or... You know, whatever it is, when it's repetitive, it's really wonderful. We can just go, wow. You know, that's the power of mind, habitual mind, which just creates that same universe and picks out what fits and ignores what doesn't fit. And it's very powerful.

[18:20]

So the practice... is to cultivate a complete openness and acceptance to everything. That is, of course, another way of saying what Dogen said. We need to study the self. We need to study how we condition, how our perceptions are conditioned by past experience and the interpretations we gave them once we started thinking. and talking. So we keep shaping them and they have been shaped. But we can start seeing that when we start stepping back and sitting still. So a lot of things have happened lately. And one thing for me that was just a wonderful moment and it has happened a few times

[19:22]

not exactly the same way, but with the same quality. And that was a feeling that it is possible to be completely relaxed in the midst of whatever. And that was such a little You know, like a drop falling into a pond, it was so clear those times it happened that something in me knew that's absolutely true. So now, when I'm in a difficult situation, or when I suddenly feel pressured, or I want to make a decision that I can't make, or...

[20:24]

I have a night shift because I'm not ready. I remember that and think, oh, that's an opportunity to see how it is possible, to remember that it is possible to be completely relaxed and to be curious about how is that? How is it possible? and it shifts my whole perception of what before was just like a tower of unmanageable stuff because there's not enough time. And it does relax me. I'm not completely relaxed yet, but it does relax me and then it's just that one thing in front of me, and it's one after the other.

[21:28]

So Mother Teresa was once asked in an interview, how do you deal with the unimaginable numbers of people dying in Calcutta, and you're just one person, you know, or a small organization? And her answer was, it is always only one. It is always only one. It's not number five, number 2,000, or number 10,000 of 100,000. It's always only one. So this instruction about the universe completely naked, unhindered. Dogen says it somewhere, nothing in the universe, in the entire universe is hidden.

[22:38]

This guy says it, it's from the Tibetan tradition, from a text that's called The Great Perfection, wonderful text. Rumi says it in his poem, It gives us instructions to just be relaxed, to just greet everything as a guest that pops up or that's put in front of us that needs, is here. And Brother David Stangle Rust has another way of saying it. So if you're coming more from the Christian tradition, there you are. It's there too. and actually comes from his book, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer. Ordinary happiness depends on happenstance.

[23:42]

Joy is that extraordinary happiness that is independent of what happens to us. Good luck. can make us happy, but it cannot give us lasting joy. The root of joy is gratefulness. We tend to misunderstand the link between joy and gratefulness. We notice that joyful people are grateful and suppose that they are grateful for their joy. But the reverse is true. Their joy springs from gratefulness. If one has all the good luck in the world but takes it for granted, it will not give one joy. Yet even bad luck will give joy to those who manage to be grateful for it. We hold the key to lasting happiness in our own hands. For it is not joy that makes us grateful, it is gratitude that makes us joyful.

[24:52]

So when he says, yet even bad luck will give joy to those who manage to be grateful for it. You know, if we take everything as a guest, maybe a sorrow that sweeps our house violently clean of everything, all the furniture, as Rumi puts it. Or if we understand that every moment is teaching us about the reality of life. And Pema Chodron says, in your everyday particulars, in the particulars of your situation, always, always, all the ingredients to be fully human, fully awake, and fully alive or there.

[25:57]

There is never one ingredient missing. Right now, right now, for each one of us in our very particular lives and in our very particular bodies and everything, everything is here to be fully alive, fully awake and fully human. That's the same thing. It's, if we can relax, when we're joyful, we're usually relaxed. So, from very different places, they all talk to us to, in some ways, just relax and experience, give yourself the gift to experience what you experience without immediately making an interpretation of what's going on without spinning a story about it.

[27:07]

See if you can feel it energetically. What is happening energetically in this body? Because if we wake up, we don't wake up somewhere else than where this body is. We actually wake up with this body. It's the body that is the fruit of many lives, that is the vehicle of our life. So today, this afternoon, six people are going to take a leap from the 100-foot pole. and will vow, vow, make a commitment, marry themselves to the precepts, until death does your part.

[28:10]

And it's inconceivable, because it's not something we can do, but it's like something that will help us be alive, awake, human. Be the complete solitary being we are while also being absolutely, inextricably interconnected with everything. Both is true at the same time. Kodos of Aki Roshi says you can't fart a fart for somebody else. You can't take a breath for somebody else. And we share the same air with the people in China, in India, in Afghanistan, in Japan. We share the air. We're completely affected, way beyond what we can conceive by what's happening everywhere.

[29:24]

Reb Anderson used to say, you are 100% responsible for what's happening anywhere in the world. And everyone is 100% responsible for what happens in the world. So it's not you have to lift the world and carry it around. It's more like when we are 100% here, Here is the place, here the way unfolds. It's not unfolding somewhere else, where we create alternatives in our minds. When we're here, completely, we are as naked, as revealed, as transparent, and as unobscurred. so the energies can flow through us like in Indra's net. We don't stop it, so it helps everybody.

[30:27]

So taking the precepts is one way. It doesn't need the precepts to be here. They're one form, one way to support some people. But it's not like the ones that take the precepts are better practitioners than the others. Maybe they need more help. Who knows? So it's not a hierarchy. It's not a statement of attainment because there's nothing to attain or realize. Don't forget that. Relax. Relax. can really relax and appreciate that we are alive. That is just beyond, you know, that we all sit here. I mean, you all came here today. So this is also one body that in this configuration will never be again.

[31:43]

And because I'm going to stop and then we're all going to mill around. And then we go our ways. And then even if you come back here, if everybody would come back here, you wouldn't come back as the same person because you would be changed. Your hair would get a little grayer or fall out or you have one more wrinkle or, you know, lost some weight or so. That's why I want to read the poem by Rumi one more time to you to end this talk today. It's called The Guest House. This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.

[32:44]

A joy... a depression, a meanness. Some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all, even if they're a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture. Still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. Maybe it's a she. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[33:52]

Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost 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. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:12]

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