This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. You all know what happened last time. Zen Center entrusted me with the task of giving a Dharma talk on a Wednesday night. And for those of you who don't know, basically I... blew it in the most lame, unbelievably irresponsible way and didn't even show up. So here's what I considered for this talk. I thought I might just come in and spend the next 45 minutes apologizing. Like I could just go like, I'm sorry, and then wait a little bit and then say it again. Because here's the thing. I'm so sorry that thinking about it, just the shame of it takes my breath away.

[01:13]

So I really am sorry. But I thought maybe apologizing for 45 minutes would bore everyone. So let's not do that, shall we? Yeah. Yeah. So it's just after the 2,500 and something or so anniversary of the Buddha's enlightenment. And it's the sort of tail end of the 50th anniversary celebration at San Francisco Zen Center. And so it might be worth asking the question, you know, first of all, saying woo-hoo, and second of all, asking the question, so, you know, how are we doing with that, right? With this project to save all beings from suffering, right?

[02:19]

And as it's come down to us, something about saving all beings from suffering through this... this kind of program of intimate self-study that in the end reveals how the self is not separate from the whole world. And the self is a process that starts at the beginning of the universe and runs right through to the end without interruption. So how are we doing with that? The bad news is that everyone's still suffering extravagantly, right? All you have to do is... So I had a job interview today, and as a result, I spent about an hour and a half in the car driving down to Palo Alto and about a little under an hour and a half driving back and listening to the radio.

[03:33]

And it's just astonishing how much... kind of wrangling and awfulness at all scales. It's not just the big wrangling and awfulness, right? It steps down from the big wrangling and awfulness down to sort of mid-level wrangling and awfulness, down to this kind of dissatisfaction and everyday kind of dissatisfaction and kind of poison that we all experience and that all of us experiencing it together can move mountains and it usually moves them to the wrong place. It's astonishing how problematic it is. And in the last few years since I've been involved in teaching this stuff,

[04:37]

It's not every day, but really regularly people come up to me, often just out of the blue, and say, something like, my life is terrible. And these are not people that you'd pick out. You walk down the street and watch people walking this way and that. And some people you look at and you go, that doesn't look so good. It looks like they're not having a great time. These are mostly people that you'd look at them and go, wow, they look like they're sort of enjoying life, right? But life, they'll say something that boils down to, you know, life is practically unbearable and I want to know if Buddhism can fix it, basically. It happens so often. It's really remarkable.

[05:44]

So that's the bad news. The good news is that we live in a unique and wonderful time. 25 years ago, the majority... of Americans, I think, thought that Buddhism was this weird, exotic construction and it contained so many ideas that were kind of inaccessible to Westerners that to claim that you were studying it was a form of mania, right, or maybe, and that the best you could do is you could kind of be a religious tourist as a Buddhist, right? as a Western Buddhist, right? And you know, every now and again, you run across somebody that still thinks that, but it's not so true anymore. People don't think that so much anymore. I think that the Buddhism as a philosophy, as a set of ideas, as a practice, has really woven its way into the

[06:59]

into the fabric of modern Western culture, right? It's great, and these ideas, so you, I remember reading a book by a philosopher from Berkeley, a guy named Alvin Noe, pretty great book, really short, very polemical, but basically his thesis, he lays it out in about the first chapter of the book, is something like, the self can't exist without, it's not just the body, without the whole world, right? Wow, how do you get that? That's pretty great. If you compare that to the philosophical position of people even 50 years ago, people would have laughed him out of the room with something like that. And he goes on to explain it in pretty great detail. It's good. And so on. So... The ground is somehow prepared, right?

[08:02]

And people are interested. And even better, if you look at the Benda Wah, you read the Benda Wah, not so much in the main body of the text, but in the Q&A session at the end, Duggan makes it pretty clear from a logistical perspective what he has in mind, right? He basically says, everybody should be doing this. It can benefit anyone. And that includes lay people, you know, monks, you know, peasants, aristocrats, women, men. He's really sort of bracingly democratic and modern about it, right? And one of his... One of his justifications for this is he points to Song Dynasty China, and he says in Song Dynasty China, everybody's practicing, right?

[09:06]

And he was probably talking about the people in the kind of bureaucratic elite or something like that, and he mentions a few examples of people that are in that group. But in some ways, that's kind of the way it's going here, Thierry. The... the way Buddhism in general, including, say, Vipassana, but also Zen in particular, has caught on here. There's something about everybody should be practicing in it that's really kind of wonderful. And increasingly, people have this idea that, this correct idea that practice is helpful, right? In a day-to-day context, right? So that's all marvelous.

[10:08]

So what's the problem? First of all, if it's so off-fire great-wise and everybody a fully realized Buddha already, and second of all, Is there anything in the way, right? So here's what I'd say about that. And it's something that's kind of snuck up on me as I've been trying to teach. And it kind of goes like this. So I taught a year of UPP. I did a sort of intensive, medium-length training session of, so that was several months of teaching meditation to homeless clinic patients in the tender line, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'd come here and teach Zazen instruction on Saturdays.

[11:10]

And the thing that's striking about it is for how many people the first thing that comes out of their mouth is, I must be doing this wrong, right? And it took a while for me to catch on what was going on there, but here's what I think is going on, and here's the problem, right? There's something in us, something kind of primal and ineluctable or something that sizes up both the present moment, the causes and conditions of the present moment, and the truth of our response to it, and its immediate reaction is not good enough.

[12:18]

it judges the current causes and conditions. It judges the only thing we have in the world, right? The, you know, the famous formulation is if you have a staff, which I don't, you balance it on your finger and you say, do I have anything? You say, well, so, you know. Past mind is ungraspable. Future mind is ungraspable. And right here, this is all we all have, right? It's it. This is where it is, right? And in particular, this thing that we all do takes a dim view of that, right? And Lord only knows how that happens. I don't know. It's so mysterious to me, and it seems so... primal and immediate that it just has to be some kind of adaptation to living in the world or something like that.

[13:22]

But taking that aside, because nobody knows why, right? And it doesn't even really matter. What happens after that, right? So after we've judged the present moment and our response to it in this way, in this kind of harsh way, what do we do? We cook up ideas about what would be an improvement, right? And those ideas are often so loaded up with emotional quality, this idea that somehow that's what's going to fix everything, that we really pursue them with a vengeance. And it's funny, if you look at the world of the Buddha and you look at the world today so um it would be you know who knows how much people were suffering back then and how much people are suffering now but it would it seems like it would be hard to make an argument that somehow people are suffering a lot less now right and in some ways we're we might be close to um to you know

[14:36]

eradicating life as we know it on Earth. That's not too good, right? And this in spite of the fact that in that intervening period, thousands of years, people have had a number of really, I think, excellent ideas, both on a sort of practical and technological perspective, in the practical and technological domain and also in the philosophical domain and maybe political domain about how to make life better. We've had all these marvelous ideas about how to make life better and some of them have been pretty successful. Plus toilets. Awesome. The notion of universal equality and civil rights. Awesome. Those are good. Those are good ideas. They've improved life a lot but What they haven't done is eradicate this kind of basic, they haven't eradicated the first noble truth, right?

[15:47]

Life is still suffering, and suffering still arises from this kind of clingingness, the tendency of our self-construct to judge this harshly and want something else, either or not want something that's here, want something that isn't here, and so on, right? And the funny thing is, you know, not ha-ha funny, funny peculiar, is that a lot of the ways in which we've caused ourselves to suffer the worst have been exactly around those ideas that we're supposed to make life better, like religions, Marxism and so on, right? There's been because, exactly because those ideas are so powerful and the emotional load on the thoughts that come along with them is so heavy and so compelling and they impel people to action so well, sometimes destructively.

[16:53]

So I have a little story about this. And it's kind of personal. I'll try and defang it as much as possible. But it goes like this, right? So there was a period in my life where I was involved with someone who was a marvel, right? She was kind of, you know, smart, energetic, beautiful, intensely creative, and had this kind of wild mind and spirit. And we would make things together. We made a lot of things together. We made art, we made furniture, we made other things like that. The way it would usually work is that I would say, oh, why don't we make something? And we would start in on it.

[17:53]

And I would be kind of clunking away on it. And she would come in and just make it beautiful. She was... so awesome. And she was visionary and special in all these ways that are just basically indescribable. And also, she was an alcoholic, right? And we delved into it, and we delved into it, and what I came to realize was that In some ways, what was motivating her was this thing where something about her experience around alcohol was so compelling that she would rather die than give it up, right? In spite of her wanting for nothing in her life and having a life that was by all...

[18:55]

really all measures that you can, external measures that you can imagine, a marvel, right? She would rather die than give it up, right? And so things went on, and that's the end of that part of the story. So maybe, and, you know, maybe 15 years later, I was sitting at Sushin at Tassahara, and I was struggling, right? And... There was something about, it was a marvelous sashim in the winter and so incredibly beautiful, misty trees, the slanting rain, the quiet of the zendo, the creek. It doesn't get much better than that. And yet, there was something so unsatisfactory about it. And I worked on it and I worked on it day in and day out. And I just, all of a sudden I had this, I saw what was going on.

[20:01]

What was going on was that I was so attached to having my mind be a particular way and my experience of Sashin being a particular way and my physical state being a particular way in sitting and that I was unwilling to experience that comfortably or tolerate any other experience than that. And what immediately came up for me was, oh my darling. So there it is. That thing, that kind of way that we can poison ourselves, it infects everything and it infects practice too. It can lead us, that's why delusions are inexhaustible because that proposition can reframe itself over and over and over again as many times as we need it, as it wants to reframe itself, right?

[21:03]

And so when you tell a whole bunch of people, okay, so this is how you meditate, right? What happens? Their first reaction is, I must be doing it wrong, right? I hear, my mind is supposed to be quiet, right? Why is my mind not quiet, right? I hear, this can't be all there is to it, and so on, right? It just goes like that. So that's what's hard. This is kind of a special case, or maybe the general case, but Suzuki Roshi says at the beginning of Zen Mind and Beginner's Mind, he says what's hard is not, it's not necessarily hard to meditate, although some people, to sit and zazen, although some people find it difficult, right? It's not even hard actually to get enlightened, right?

[22:03]

What's hard is meeting that thing and keeping the practice fresh in the face of these ideas that arise out of that primal function in the human condition and not letting them get tangled up in this way that keeps us from just meeting the moment as it is. This is enough. This has to be enough. It's the only place that could possibly be enough. So to just keep coming back there and It's hard to practice, right? But... So here's where the... Here's where... Here's why formal monastic practice is good.

[23:09]

Well, there are a lot of reasons, but one reason why it's good is that it gives you... Gives the monk... something to be with and to give a set of procedures to execute, which are constantly bringing the practitioner here and letting them meet the requirements of the moment as wholeheartedly as they're capable of doing, right? That's great. So that's the good thing about formal monastic practice. The thing that's really difficult about doing that as a lay Zen student, and so all these people that are out there going, my life is terrible for me and I want to know if Buddhism can help.

[24:13]

What they don't have is that. They don't have a framework and container of formal practice to show them over and over and over again what it is to be here and what it is to start to appreciate here as a thing in itself and as our only opportunity to embody and execute that realization of the self, right? So when I was teaching this homeless workshop, there was a guy, right? I came at teaching the workshop with a... with the mind of someone who'd mostly been teaching people who are very busy and kind of lead a, you know, sort of middle-class urban life or something like that, right?

[25:27]

And so I was constantly talking about how you do this, you kind of connect with the, with pause and connect with what's happening right now in the midst of, you know, I usually said something idiotic like, you're a busy day, right? And finally this guy, really fantastic guy that was in the group, really, sharp as a tack and marvelous. He looks at me and goes, my whole day is one long pause. So how do you take someone whose whole day is one long pause and work out some way to hang that experience of coming back over and over and over again to just this on earth? It's a big question, right? And how do you take somebody whose day is not one long pause, in fact, whose day is a whirl of being completely lost in incredibly involving activities that, as far as they can tell,

[26:43]

Don't admit of even a moment's mental pause. How do you take somebody like that and in that life hang, connect, connect, connect. Where do you do it? I don't know. So that's the thing that's great about City Center is that it's uniquely situated in the middle of a city. Just because that's what the name says. If anyone's going to figure out how to do that, it's going to be in a context like this. We have this opportunity to do that, and it's the opportunity of... Zen Buddhism in the 21st century West.

[27:44]

That's it. And what we're up against is the human condition. That thing. That way we all have poisoning the only thing that we've really got. right in the midst of our everyday life, right? And what's on offer is freedom from that. So does anybody have any questions? I don't have a clue what time it is. Has anyone known? Great. Thank you.

[28:53]

Well, I mean, I totally forget what I did say, but it was like having the, not just the rug, but something like, as though I was standing on a thing that looked like a floor, but it was actually just a trap door over a thousand-foot drop. And somebody just went, it was a real shock, right? So I think what I said was something like, that... is a tough one, a tough nut to crack, and I vowed to myself to come up with a better way of talking about it. Here's what I'd say about that whole group. When I was planning to do this,

[30:03]

this workshop, I would go down and talk with the clinician that I was setting it up with, and I'd meet people, and I'd just think to myself, what could I possibly say to this person about sitting zazen? I didn't have a clue, and so I didn't know what to do, and when I went to give the workshop, I was totally flawless about what to do, and here's what I discovered. Everyone in the group sat like a mountain, right? And when it came time to ask questions, they asked deep, compelling, powerful questions about how it works and how they should do it. And they totally got how it related to their personal suffering. So it was mainly a matter of me kind of not saying foolish things, but My experience with it is that, and this doesn't, nobody in that group failed to get this, that there's a difference between

[31:32]

actually being here and kind of pretending to be here, right? And in fact, this guy once even said that. It's hard for me to tell the difference between being here and pretending to be here, right? And that the rigor for them was mostly about being on the side of actually coming back and not just sort of going, am I here? Oh, well, we'll do the next thing, right, or something like that. And that's something that doesn't require language about pausing or something like that. It's mostly, it's about how you experience that kind of fabric of that moment. And we all get that because we all have the experience of the feeling of the fabric of the moment shifting radically, even over very short periods of time, right? We can be totally lost in some wrangle about work, and then step outside and it all goes away.

[32:34]

Poof, like that, right? Amazing, right? We can be walking down the street, you know, not really thinking about anything in particular and pass someone on the street and all of a sudden a story comes into our head. They don't really like me because this, this, and this, and so I don't really like them either, even though it's a total stranger, right? These things happen. mysteriously and magically, and we all know what that's like. Whether our whole day is one fragmented and busy world or our whole day is one long pause. And even if we sit here all day long and stare at a wall, it's the same thing. The fabric of everyday experience changes moment to moment. Sorry. and having a difficult time with it. And part of the reason why it was so difficult was that you were attached to having a certain experience and had a desire for this experience.

[33:42]

You kind of came to the conclusion that maybe you needed to let go or accept things as they were. Yeah, so almost everything about sitting has to do with letting go. There's a few things that have to do with trying to sit up, but even that actually is mostly about letting go. That's been my experience with it. It's about always to always be sitting, which is the thing that makes it possible to sit comfortably hour upon hour. The the thing that's necessary is to keep letting go, right, over and over and over again. And so, yeah, absolutely, that's right. So once that idea had presented itself, it wasn't so much of a problem.

[34:44]

It's just like, ah, gone, right? Has that idea ever come up again? You bet, right? Do I recognize it better than yet? and it's not so much of an issue. But yeah, the funny thing about that activity is that it seems to operate at its most effectively when it's kind of slightly secret, right? And it kind of operates under the covers a little bit. It's like it works best at running the show when... you don't really notice where the poison goes in and where the ideas come out, right? And to see it in action is actually tremendously helpful. Just that, right? Just to see it in action is helpful, right? And then to meet it with this kind of grandmotherly mind, like...

[35:52]

And it turns out it's not so hard to let go of it. Go ahead. Yeah. And yet that could be so discouraging and turn people away. And so how do you encourage people to be willing to Like, be patient and just try it knowing that you're not gonna get it. Yeah. Well, you know, so my kind of model for that is the Tang Dynasty Koan literature, right? So, or Song Dynasty Koan literature. It's so full of these aspirational formula, right? And they're aspirations, right? And so as aspirations, they also...

[36:57]

they also miss the boat. If you can frame them in words and aspire to them in that way, then by definition they miss the boat. But they're not unhelpful. And to say to someone, well, I mean, probably the single most famous one is the one sort of at the beginning of the of the Mumon Khan where he goes, wouldn't you like to walk along with Mumon, right? So that's a little specific for someone who hasn't read the Mumon Khan, but to say something like, well how would it be to meet everyone, even the difficult people in your life in such a way that after the encounter, everyone feels more alive than they did when they started, right?

[38:01]

Yeah, why not? It's how it is, right? But yes, absolutely. So the way I got into this stuff was I did this really geeky exercise where I kind of looked at my life and I thought, here's how my life pencils out. I'm not sure I actually wrote this stuff down, but I might, which would have been like super geeky. But anyway, here are the factors that... that go into my life just from an abstract perspective. Here's how my life kind of stacks up. And here's my moment-to-moment experience of living. And the disconnect between them was so vast that it was just obvious that there was something wrong, like something really, really wrong. And not only was there this disconnect between the way my life stacked up as a PowerPoint presentation and the moment-to-moment experience of living, but also it was clear that I was both making myself miserable and making pretty much everyone that I cared about equally miserable, right?

[39:03]

So that's bad, right? That's a bad setup. And I was filled with a desire to fix that. And so is that... Is that bad? No, clearly not. Does anything about how things have worked since then follow this program that I'd set up about how to fix it? No, of course not. It's all different. And that's kind of a matter of continuously letting go. But to frame that intention and to have some hope is kind of a funny word, but have even some hope that that's possible is okay. You have to know when to let go, but it's also okay to frame a hopeful intention. And again, the koan literature, full of that stuff.

[40:06]

It's got all these great formula about, first of all, about what it's like to be a suffering human, and second of all, what it's like to be free. So that's what I'd say. Okay. That's the way it feels like. There's a separation between having woke it up and making this one wrong mistake.

[41:09]

I don't hear any stories about Buddha after he woke up making any mistakes. There's no sense. The Buddha said, oh shit. I thought that. It's hard to know how much to believe the ancient literature about that, right? So, you know, you might imagine that all the situations where the Buddha forgot to give a Dharma talk or something like that have been redacted from the record. And even so, people that talk about this sort of thing hand a little bit about the part where the Buddha is talking to, I think it's Ananda, and goes, you know,

[42:21]

I don't actually have to die. If you ask me to kind of stick around, I could stick around, right? So it's not sure, I'm not sure how that pans out with respect to the ancient literature. If you look at the Colin literature, The message is incredibly clear, right? So, you know, this old monk doesn't abide in clarity, right? Or why didn't the ancestors stay here when they got here? Well, because they didn't get anything out of it. So what do I do now? I just put my staff on my shoulders and I walk into the myriad peaks, right? Does... Nothing about that says I do it perfectly. It's just to meet each moment, including the moments where you forget to give the drama talk as wholeheartedly and with as much grandmotherly mind as you can possibly muster, I guess is what I'd say.

[43:43]

But yeah, it's a great question, right? the notion that seated meditation practice is the direct embodiment of Buddhahood. Yeah, I think that's true, but also walking around in your robe in northern India, you know, giving Dharma talks is also the direct embodiment of Buddhahood, because that's what the Buddha did, right? So it's a good question. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. 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.

[44:46]

For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

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