Good morning. Good morning. On the way over in the rain, with the rain and the plum blossoms, some still drifting down, made me think of a haiku. I can't think of the writer of it. Something about The sick monk sweeps the walks as the plum blossoms whirl in the wind. Something like that. Contrast between the sickness of the monk and the falling away, the impermanence of things. Nice contrast. The beauty of things. It is said, you know, in the scriptures that all things without exception preach the Dharma.

[01:09]

All the time. I have to remind myself of that when I come here. Because these days when I am asked to give a talk here, I never know exactly what I'm going to say anymore. Because, you see, it's not exactly the same as having a class or a seminar, because in those cases, there's a particular subject, a particular theme that you prepare for, that you develop out of the written materials, commentaries, et cetera, et cetera. But in this kind of situation, by that I mean the Sunday situation, we have people here who have been here for 30 years. We have people that have been here for three years, three weeks, three days, three hours. So the many, many levels of experience around the terminology of what the Dharma is or purportedly means.

[02:18]

And it's always a bit of a puzzle, I think, to all of us when we sit in this seat, the so-called Dharma seat, about how to address things find those words that will meet you. In some sense, you know, coming in here is a little like going to your own execution. A public execution, like that. You sit up here with 150 pairs of eyes staring at you and, you know, you're like one of those stand-up comics or actors and you can die out here, you know, this feeling of I stood out there and I died, you know. But in some sense, a time comes when we have to prepare ourselves just for that. So what? So you sit here and all at once, everything vanishes from your mind. Everything. Listen to the rain on the roof.

[03:22]

There's an old beating of your heart. And in that space... Some light always develops out of events. I've always been able to trust that. Well, not always. In the few recent times I've been sitting here, I've always trusted that when I finally sat down here, something would come forward that I could talk about, that I could fill 40 minutes with before we go for our muffins and tea, which is a real reason we come, right? Okay. It's interesting because, you see, I sit here before you in these robes on this seat in a certain context. That is to say, I come before you as the speaker. Now, the key word in that sentence, I sit before you or I come before you as the speaker, is not I or you or speaker.

[04:29]

The key word is as. In other words, it becomes clear to me every time I sit here, and in fact it becomes clearer and clearer in any situation I find myself in, or one would find oneself in, that we always appear in some role or other. Now I appear as the teacher, or as the speaker. And in this particular situation, we're in these robes, speaking words that I hope to will address something concerning dharma or practice. With you here, with all your energy coming toward me, we create a certain situation. As soon as I leave here and go home and face the situation there, I'm no longer playing this role. Another role. When I'm on the street, when I'm driving, and so forth. And each of us, as we look at this, each of us has this

[05:33]

quality in us, this way of being, playing many roles in our lives, husband, father, wife, mother, sister, brother, teacher, businessman, student, you name it. And when that role or roles are taken away from us, you can imagine yourself, particularly these days, When the roles that we play are threatened or being undermined by the conditions, economic, social conditions, world conditions, as well as personal dharma and karma, karmic conditions, you can lose your roles. Your role as a worker in the world, you're fired from your job, let off from your job. You don't have that role anymore. You go home and you have a note that says, I can't live here with you anymore.

[06:36]

The landlord calls up and says, we have to sell the house. And you panic, don't you? Don't we? You don't know what role to play. Who am I going to be? And the mind, of course, always churning out pictures, always churning out images, always churning out ideas will say, well, you're going to begin to picture situations that you go, oh, I might be on the street. I might not even be able to, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm frightened and so forth. So we can see this. And yet, you know, even when you're not know what your role is going to be and what you're doing, you walk outside and the rain falls, it still wets you. The sun still shines on you. You still get up in the morning because you can't stay in bed all day and do nothing. That's another role. I had a situation once in which I found myself in exactly thus, you might say.

[07:42]

And that was so clear to me that although I was living in a situation that I had always wanted to live in, namely, I was a monk who was living in a little house by a stream away from everyone else, being taken care of by someone else without any proper identity, in this culture at least, I could walk down the Mill Valley in my robes and people, you know, they'd go, wow, this is not Japan. Who was I? What was I? This became paramount in my life. And I noticed that whatever activity I took on for the day, I kind of took care of the place for a while. If I might paint part of the house, I'd say, well, I'm a painter today. I take a hike. I'm a hiker. The mind would automatically be doing this. describing myself to myself. Until such a time as I found an identity, someone I could grab hold of, some idea of myself that would fit me back into a more ordinary commonplace mold.

[08:57]

In other words, I'd come back to the monastery. And I can feel a story coming on. Years ago, I think this story is germane to what I want to talk about a little bit. Years ago, I had a house, I was living in Fairfax, and I was already coming to Zen Center on weekends like you. I was sitting out there never dreaming I would be in this seat, so be careful. It's maybe one of those risks you have to take, you know. And I was doing different things at that time. I can't remember everything, but I was keeping body and soul together by a number of different things. And one of my... I would get up in the morning and sit by myself, and then I would go down to the bakery in Fairfax in those days, kind of a gathering place for people to get together and have a cup of coffee and meet your neighbors and friends and kind of hang out before everybody went on their way.

[10:04]

And there were a couple of men down there who ran the... newspaper franchise, dealership, the Chronicle dealership out of San Rafael. And one of them one morning turned to me and said, you know, Dave, in those days, that was the worst day. How would you like to have a little job, extra job? I said, well, what would it be? It was just the time that the, what was the paper called? USA Today. Remember that? Came out somewhere in 1980, something around that time. And the Chronicle was putting out this campaign to stuff the Chronicle into any kind of nook or corner that they could in order to meet the competition. And the job was, he said, for five mornings a week, Monday through Friday, between 6 a.m., or 6.30 a.m., and 8.30 a.m., I'll give you 100 chronicles.

[11:11]

You'll go to 4th and Heatherton, which in those days is where all the buses came in the morning for the rush hour, and everybody came. And you will stand there and sell the 100 newspapers, or however many you can sell. And in those days, they were a quarter, 1.25 cents. They give you a little smock with quarters, dimes, and nickels in three pockets with chronicle written across the front of them. And my first impulse was, what? Me? What? Selling newspapers on the street? I couldn't do that. I mean, I have a different kind of identity. And then a little voice said from the side, take it. Do it. This is another part of the lesson. Whenever something comes from the side like that, that you've never expected, listen to it very carefully because some of the greatest things can come out of it. Anyway. I heard myself agreeing to it, and sure enough, there I was, standing up in the street. Not actually in the street. Under the overpasses, all the buses came in, bellowing, and all the smoke and the smog and the dust and the commuter swarm about me, and I would stand there with my 100 newspapers.

[12:25]

People would come and buy them and go on their way. And I realized after a while that I was the one stationary thing in this movement around me. And before long, people would just stop to start talking to me. I would just stand there, and people would come up to me. I have to say that I was practicing the Heart Sutra, because I was trying to learn these things that I had heard at Zen Center, and I was hoping one day to come here. So I was going, oh, yes, 25 cents. People would just, and they'd come up, and they'd simply begin to tell me. One guy came out of a bus, and he came right straight up to me, and he said to me, right under my face, he said, she left me. She took the car and left me the cat. What do you think of that? I loved it. There was a whole lifetime story. She took the car and left me the cat. What do you think of that?

[13:26]

It didn't even rhyme. But a newspaper went on his way. In time, a number of people would just stop to kind of, before they got in line together, and we would chat a little bit, and I got also to know some of the street people at that time. And so it was a very colorful mandala that I found myself in, and I thought, if I were to design a course called Humanities 101, Rubbing Elbows with the World, this would be it. Because of all the lives around me, and everybody came up and had a story, or something to, tell me, something to leave with me. And I begin to see it as a kind of unintentional street ministry, that all you had to do was stand there and people and listen. People were hungry for someone to listen to them. And among some of the most interesting stories came from those who were the most destitute, or we would call them derelicts, I suppose, you know, or even more uncharitably bums.

[14:32]

And they got to know me after a while. And one of them, I would call them according to their attributes as I would first see them. This one limped, wore a black coat, hair down on his face, always scowling, deep and dark, would always shuffle up to me and not have to stand back because the smell of urine was overpowering. And he would start to talk to me about the news and so on. And he would always, always hit me up for some money for coffee. And as soon as he got his what was it, SSI or whatever it's called, the check they get for maintenance, he would say, I'll pay you back. I'll pay you back. And at first I was glad to do it, right? Feeling charitable, feeling big. After all, I want to be a bodhisattva, right? And I'm giving him, but pretty soon I notice I begin to resent. I see him coming, I kind of want to turn away from him. And one day after this has gone on for some time, he comes up to me and says, put out your hand. I put out my hand. And he goes, watch.

[15:35]

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Here's an extra buck. Don't think you know it all. A really humbling experience. A very opening experience. But perhaps the one that made the biggest impression was this person that I first in my own mind called the leper, the total pariah, the total untouchable. This person was as far from soap and water as a human being could get. This person's face was grimy, the clothes were out of rags, essentially old sneakers with toes coming out of in front, and this person dragged himself along with a kind of limp and shuffling gait and was difficult to look at.

[16:45]

And would go up to every computer, standing in line, and put out his hand. And then go to the next one. And then the next one. And then the next one. And I became very interested in this. In some computers, most... People would turn away because here was an image of the very thing nobody would ever want to be. And this person almost seemed to defiantly rub our noses in it. As if there was a really purposeful defiance in his actions. So one morning when Lindy came up to borrow some more money, I said... Oh, this person disappeared for a couple of days. And I said, where's the guy that always comes around and begs? And he says, oh, you mean Sharon? I said, who? He said, Sharon. I said, that's a woman? Oh, yeah. Didn't you know? I said, no, I thought it was a guy. No, no, no, that's Sharon.

[17:48]

She's been around quite a while. She's been through the roof. She's got multiple sclerosis. She's trying to kill herself, drinking herself to death. And he told me something. She had been molested. She had been raped. She had been brutalized and so on. And she was constantly being picked up by the police, taken to the tank for 30 days, brought back and so on. So I began to become interested in this person, just watching. And every day, Sharon would show up. Sometimes she'd be sleeping on the park bench or the bench there when I would get there. And she would get up and shuffle about and then she would go up and start hitting everybody for this money. I remember one time somebody must have said something to her and she did this right under the face and did this little jig and danced right under this. And so as she walked by me, she had never stopped to look at me. I said, where did you learn to dance like that? And she kind of turned her eyes and looked at me and just shuffled on.

[18:50]

But the next day, maybe two days later, she came up. And she said, she talked like this. She said, paper. And I gave her a paper, and she threw down a dime. It was a quarter, but I thought, what the heck. She took the paper. I don't know what she did with it. She didn't read it. And she went on her way. And over time, she would come up and look at me in the eyes with watery, bloodshot eyes and nose running and mouth drooling. And stare into my face, very, very uncomfortable. Like she was scrutinizing me to see what kind of person I was. And then she put out her hand, and I'd give her something. Never said thank you or anything. She'd just look at it, put it in her pocket, and go away. And this went on for quite a while. Now, when this person didn't show up, when Sharon didn't show up, people began to come over and ask, where is this? Where is the leper? Where's Sharon? Where is she? And I said, well, I guess, in fact, the police...

[19:52]

would come. When the police came, she would simply put her hands behind her back. They would come put the cuffs on her, shrudge their shoulders and take her away, dry her off for a month or two months, bring her back. And when she came back, sometimes her hair would look a little bit washed and she'd look a little cleaner. And within two days, she'd be back in the same condition, even more defiant than ever. Then one day, people would be very interested. Then one day, She came up to me and actually, we did have some conversations of sorts, but she came up to me and she said, Dave, what's going to happen to me? And I said, Sharon, I don't know what possessed me to answer this way. I said, do you know what a cadaver is? No, I guess not. I said, well, one of these days they're going to find you, you're going to lie down under the culvert or... under the overpass or some room or on the street, and you're not going to wake up, and they're going to come along and pick up your body and take it to the morgue, and if nobody claims it, they're going to take it over to the university medical center, and they're going to lay you out naked on a table under a lot of bright lights in a kind of theater in the round where several hundred students will be looking down at you, and the professor

[21:15]

of anatomy will have a scapula in his hand and he will lay you open from here to here, reach in and pull out your swollen liver and hold it up and say, see what alcohol can do? She looked at me and she said, Dave, you always make my day. Well, this made her even more interesting to me. Because in some sense, she never complained about it. She was 100%. The role that she played, she played utterly, completely, all the time. And with no self-consciousness, it seemed at all. This is who I am. Like it or leave it, this is me. And at one point, as I recall, she even had a boyfriend. Little better condition than she was in, but not much. One day at work. when I was there selling in the midst of the man swarm, the swarm of computers, commuters, I saw a scene that stopped almost everybody in their tracks.

[22:26]

It was so, well, it was so striking. She was sitting on the bench, and he was knelt in front of her in his scruffiness, and he had this handkerchief in his hand, and he was wiping it, and... taking her face and wiping her face with such tenderness and complete concentration that I thought for a moment, everybody's just kind of paused to look at this. It was like there was just the two of them in the world. It seemed like utter and complete devotion. I remember that so well, and I thought, it stirred up more and more thinking about what is this thing called human life? Who are we? Who knows how the bodhisattva comes? And anyway, I left the job after a certain amount of time, maybe a year and a half or so, and before that she had disappeared. And it was a number of years, I think I was living here when I heard, maybe it was Tassajara actually, somebody came to Tassajara while I was there that remembered me from those days, that role, the newspaper guy role on the street.

[23:40]

and said, oh, by the way, Sharon died, you know. And I wasn't surprised at the moment. But that night, I think I was sitting Zazen, and suddenly my eyes welled up with tears, and there was a smile on my lips at the same time. I was both smiling and feeling tears in my eyes. And I thought, indeed, you know, how do we know how the Bodhisattva comes? The Bodhisattvas, we, you know, formally study as the one who practices to become a Buddha, one free of all attachment, and so on. And by vow, stays in the world of suffering with other beings to help them. But, for a moment at least, it appeared absolutely clear to me that every human being, in fact, everything without exception, everything, everyone without exception, at some point or other, practices the bodhisattva vow, unbeknownst to him or her. There are moments that we're always doing that, that it is not a person per se, it is an activity, a dynamic activity alive in our lives, already the case.

[24:47]

In fact, as soon as we become conscious of it and think that we are performing something, we miss the point. It's when we're unconsciously doing this. And then I realize that all things are practicing the Dharma. All things. Again, without exception. Rocks and with the plum blossoms, people, paths, so on. So we don't know where our lessons are really going to come from. But if we listen very carefully from moment to moment in the midst of all of our own self-glorification or self-absorption or all of our plans and worries and so on, something comes from the side. and whispers in our ear, hey, would you like, why don't you try this? And because of our images, because of our ideas about who we think we are, in some role or other that we feel we must manifest through, we miss the point, we miss the chance.

[25:55]

How many chances have we missed in our life not listening carefully to that voice that whispers to us? And of course, It isn't only people that whisper to us. The rain on the roof can whisper in this mysterious way to us. The sound of the valley streams, as we say. The wind and the trees all has a message to listen. It's all practicing, all preaching Dharma. And what is Dharma? That's the question. What do you mean by Dharma? Capital D. Well, what it means for me at such moments, at the moment, in fact, that night I sat with the memory of a person who, by all accounts, was a pariah in our society, that brought tears to my eyes that were not necessarily sentimental, that brought forth the fact that there is suffering in the world of incredible dimensions, and at the same time, enormous wonders and glory of being alive in it.

[27:04]

that at that place, at the point, where all descriptions, all definitions, all explanations, all explications, all instructions, suddenly come to an end. And what you're confronted with, yeah, it's an abyss, but It is not an abyss filled with darkness. It is an abyss that's filled with light. It is an abyss of not knowing. Not finally having any understanding or knowledge left. You're simply open to what is. You have always been. We have always been open to just this. This moment. This time. The only moment. Just this. And there was no way to grasp it. There was no way to... to delineate, to describe, to explain what the Dharma was.

[28:07]

It is what we already are, what everything already is. And, of course, it can only be known direct by direct transmission, by direct experience, which life has always given us. Life is the teacher. You are the teacher. You and I and our relationships with our experiences is the teaching. But, of course, there's a problem, and the problem is that we don't see it. And why we don't see it is because we have all these ideas and opinions about the roles that we should be or others should be playing in the world. And we're always confronted with these roles. We're always judging these roles. We're either above them, below them. They're not adequate. They're too adequate. We can't handle them. Whatever our story around them that we generate out of thinking and out of the emotions that charge our thinking, we dramatize our event to such an extent that we don't see something that's obviously going on at the same time.

[29:17]

And when we see it, even for a moment, you can't but gasp in wonder at it all, and it fills you with joy, actually, to be alive, to be human. In this dimension, in the three dimensions, even though we may be five, ten dimensions going on, but even within these three dimensions, the bodhisattva is always coming forward. That practice is always available to us if we can listen to it. Did I say if? This guy I'm telling you about, Limpy? Limpy used to come up to me and say, did you say if? If is the longest word in the English language. Don't say if to me. If is nowhere. What is? So what is without the ifs?

[30:23]

No ifs, ands, and buts. What is it Shelley says in one of his poems? We look before and after and pine for what is not. Our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught. Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Interesting in our language, even in our language, embedded in our language, are these dualities, positive and negative duality. The positive always being the first of the two, for example, good and bad, right and wrong. We absorb these as we grow up and actually begin to divide the world into such categories as good and bad, right and wrong, yes and no, with the negative category always being the second one.

[31:27]

That's already there in our culture, in our language. We don't even think about it. And then there's Ikkyu Zenji who said, We plan for a life of tomorrow ephemeral, though we know this life to be. That is the habit of our mind, which passed away yesterday. The habit of the mind. At least the habit, according to cognitive scientists, one half of our mind is always plotting, planning, preparing for the future. using information coming from the past. Now, the other side of our brain, apparently, is more intuitive, embraces the greater whole that we are. For one side of us is always embracing the world and one side is always trying to strategize and figure out how to stay ahead of the game, how to play the games of life successfully.

[32:36]

how to give validation, recognition, how to have authority over our own selves, even though, as we all know, when we look for the self, we can't find it. All we find is a lot of ideas about it, about it, about who we think we are. And thought is always telling us, you're a Buddhist. You're an Aquarian. You're an American. You're not a Republican, are you? You're on the right side. You're trying to find the right way to live. All this internal dialogue going on, ad infinitum ad nasum. And by sitting still, a little bit of the time, we begin to notice these tendencies that we have to block out what is actually happening and fill in the stories. by which we think, we think we live.

[33:46]

And it's great fun. And great pain. Isn't it? Suzuki Roshi used to say, just being alive is enough. Is it? How would you like to be Grace today? You know, Grace Damon. That's where food is today. Grace is having another operation. Grace can't move her arms. Her legs are still. She's immovable. Grace said to me, the day I will be happy is the day that I can wash my face again, that I can wipe my own bottom. Grace is just being alive enough. I don't know. I scream every day, but I'm still here. I still want to live for other beings. You know how much capacity that we have, that life has, you see. But is just being alive enough? That's a really good koan for us all. Or change it around, change the modifier around, in being just alive enough.

[34:48]

I've said to people many times when they come with all their complaints, I come with my complaints to myself all the time and to my wife and others. What would we do if we know tomorrow morning for sure that we're all going to be taken out and shot? Or that you're not going to be here? How would we live? What would be important to us? Because we don't know. It could all end anytime. We don't live that way, do we? We don't live as if we would. We plan as if we live forever, maybe, but we should live as if we're going to die anytime. Which means fully, completely. giving total attention to the details of our life. That's all that practice is really about, is giving total attention and details to what is arising now, since that is just life as it is. And then, of course, it's changed. Everything changes. And now it's something else, and now it's something else, and now it's something else. And we begin to think, maybe there isn't such a thing as a person, place, or thing,

[35:57]

But there is only change. And we just view it from now this point, now this point. But there's only this flux of which we are parts. There is not even a thing to be changed. There's only this change. Constant flow and intermingling of all energies. Does it help to know that? Next time somebody says you lose your job, you lose your wife, you lose all those things that make life possible, will just being alive be enough? Well, we don't know how to answer that question, you know. Depends on how much pain we're in. When I was in the Army, I remember people who begged to be put out of their misery. So was just being alive enough of that? No, I don't think so.

[36:58]

So you see, any answer we come up with, any final definition, any place you finally come to that you feel settled in, it's going to change. It's going to be its opposite. Pretty soon. Now we got it good tomorrow. You're sharing. Or I am. Will we recognize the Bodhisattva in each other when we come? You see. I hope so. I devoutly hope that I will have my eyes open for the rest of my life for those moments. And I know that, of course, I'm going to miss most of them. And it'll be all right, David. You're a good guy. Finally, we've got to love ourselves, don't we? Got to finally just say, you're okay. This not good enough business that we bought somewhere in our life has got to go. You are good enough.

[38:02]

As the poem goes, you are a blessing entrenched in this earth. Do not let others determine your worth. Rise and shine. Rise and shine. Thank you.

[38:19]

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