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. So thank you for inviting me. It's nice to get to jump lineages sometimes and talk with people in other robes and outfits too. So, of course, when you give a talk, sometimes they ask you to come up with a title quite some time ahead. And so you do the best you can to come up with a title that is interesting enough, enticing enough, specific enough, and yet also vague enough that when it actually comes to the time of having to do the talk, you can actually do something that is in the realm of the topic of the talk, too.

[01:06]

So I think that... as I have reflected on this topic of faith and courage, which are dimensions of life and of practice and dharma practice that have been compelling to me and interesting to me for some time, my own understanding of them has changed. And even what I decided I should share with you has changed, too. So here's a story from the... Samyutanikaya that some of you may be familiar with, a story of a little exchange the Buddha had with a certain deity, and it's called the flood. You know this one, the flood? No. So someone came to him and said, how dear sir did you cross the flood? And he says, without tarrying and without hurrying did I cross the flood. And he says, but how, dear sir, without carrying and without hurrying did you cross the flood?

[02:09]

And he replies, when I tarried, I sank. And when I hurried, I was swept away. And so, friend, without carrying and without hurrying did I cross the flood. So for me, this resonates very much of this. a practice of how do we even move through life? How do we move through life? How do we move through our practice? There's good advice in this little story. So I think of tearing as the hanging back, the sometimes being lazy or sometimes being a little reluctant. And then the hurrying is the leaning forward dimension, the pushing, that energy of wanting something else to come quickly. And even physically, you can feel that when you're doing either of those things.

[03:13]

So I always appreciate that the Zen people have very nice posture. So I'm seeing you with nice posture. But if you have a posture, so like lean back a little now, like if you were leaning back. Like lean back, lean back. It starts to feel a little uncomfortable after a while, right? Okay, so then come back to your regular center. And then lean forward. Exciting. What's going to be said next? What's going to happen next? But if I kept you there too long, you can come back. That also gets tiring, right? The leaning forward, the falling back. And you had so much of the time in life for actually doing that. I noticed myself this tendency of that. The tearing and the hurrying. So I think this is related to the sense of faith Because why is it that we tarry and why is it that we hurry? Why do we lean back and why do we lean forward?

[04:14]

So leaning forward sometimes is like, I want something else to happen besides what's happening now. Or like something else better is going to happen soon. Or I'm bored of what's happening now. And then tarrying sometimes feels like, oh, I don't know what's going to happen and I'm scared of it. Maybe I'll just hang out here a little bit more. Maybe I'll just try and lurk here, see if that works. So a sense of faith comes in of being able to understand what it is that we can really rely on and to actually be grounded, to be centered, to know that which we can actually trust, this quality of what we can trust. And sometimes I feel like that's what the Dhamma practice is all about, is understanding what is it that we can trust. Like, what can we rely on? And my understanding of the Dhamma, the teachings are that the good news is that it's not like a teaching, an esoteric teaching that Buddha came up with, that he's trying to have us understand some abstract, abstruse philosophy.

[05:28]

But actually it is the way things are. So naturally the way things are. And so we can actually... learn about the way things are and then try to live in accordance with that and try to be grounded in that, which is true, then that's the place in which we can rest. So sometimes I liken it to understanding the law of gravity. So the law of gravity is sort of a natural law in the world. And it's a law that most of us here have adjusted to. in our life and accepted as part of the way things are, right, on Earth at this moment. So, for example, I noticed that, you know, the shoes are all nicely lined up out there, so it doesn't look like people tried to place their shoes in midair. So when you do try and do something like that, let's see if I have something I can drop without it being too bad.

[06:31]

Like, you know, you try and place the napkin in midair and then it doesn't work. It falls. I try and place the chanting sheet in midair. Sometimes I think, oh, maybe that was just a fluke. I'll try it over here. So also it falls. So you can see that babies and small children are developing this understanding. We're not necessarily born with this understanding. So they sit in their high chairs and they sort of toss things off the side. And they'll experiment. Like a pea or the spoon. And watch it fall. then try something else, try something else. And then they watch the adults come and fetch it too, right? It's part of the game. But eventually, like, you learn about this law of gravity, right? So this law of gravity is that, you know, when you place something, it's going to be drawn to the ground. And it actually is not personal, and it's not necessarily a problem, as long as you learn to live in harmony with that, live in accordance. So here I want to place my watch on something.

[07:31]

I'm going to place it on this table. that's in accordance with the law of gravity, then I can look at it and see how long more I should talk. Otherwise, if I decide I'm going to be rebellious against this law and try to place it here, it's going to fall. And it's not actually one of those things where you have to take it personally and be like, why me? Why this time? Why now? It's just the way things are. And the more that we learn to live in accordance with that, then the more harmonious our life is, the less messed up shoes and broken glasses and lost watches we have in our life. So similarly, the teachings of the Dhamma is about the way things really are, the truth of the way things are. So for example, in the world of impressions, sense impressions, in this world, everything is always changing. So impermanence is part of the things that we can notice and start to live in accordance with.

[08:34]

So because everything is always changing, there are actually no things. There's no solid solidity, no solid things to be trusted in this world. And because nothing is really solid, then you can't cling on to them and expect them to stay any more than you could expect a cloud to stay or smokes to stay or something like that. So understanding and living in accordance with these laws would be to live a life in which we're letting go, letting go, letting go, or not clinging to things, because we can see, oh yeah, the truth is that everything is changing. It's like hourglass of sand just flowing through. It's not personal. It's not like a fluke that it was like that yesterday, but maybe not today. Maybe if I do it over here without looking, something different will happen. It's just the way things are. So developing our understanding and living in harmony with that, living in accordance with that, gives us a more harmonious, happy life, and gives that also to those around us, too.

[09:40]

So as we practice, we align ourselves more and more with that. So in the meantime, though, we have this natural urge to seek this kind of happiness and security in the world. So we want to find something that we can put faith in. And it's very natural. It's good to have a lot of compassion for ourselves and others when we notice ourselves in this quest. So this constant quest for some security in changing circumstance. So sometimes we only notice it when the thing that we've put our faith in fails us. But we put it in, for example, relationships. Like this relationship is where I put my security in, this person, this person staying the same, our relationship staying the same. We put it in security of having a certain amount of money or finances.

[10:41]

We put our faith in identity. In increasingly subtle ways, we can see that in who we are, who we believe ourselves to be, which is also part of this sand, shifting sand. Now externally we can see that there's a lot of shifting happening in the environment and in our world. So I'm kind of a fan of cities and architecture and kind of urban planning. And there's an interesting article I read about how you could see from the way architecture has changed what the most important institutions have been at different periods of time. So at one time, if you go to, say, like a small European village or something, you'd see like the church steeple as the highest thing, right? There's all these little houses that then, boom, the church steeple or temple, you know, in other countries. Then there's a certain point in which government rose.

[11:48]

So you get these really ornate government buildings. So like City Hall, you know, just close by here with the gold leaf and all ornate and things like that. So the government buildings were that. So you have trust in the government, you have trust in the state. So now what is it? It's like the Trans-America Pyramid and going through Oakland, there's like the Ask Jeeves Tower or something. So corporations, those buildings are the largest and most powerful. So even as our government defaults on debt and so on, there's companies that actually are worth more than the U.S. government, right, at the moment. So there's an unsettling there, and yet there's a sense of constantly seeking comfort, seeking something to rely on, seeking, like, what can we have faith in? So in uncertain times, we try and go towards sort of the strong, you know, what seems to be a protector.

[12:53]

In some ways, I feel like now we're in a period of time in which it is kind of like a sort of feudal Europe or something. And the corporations are like the big feudal lords. So as serfs, you try to take refuge, build your small hut under the auspices of the powerful feudal lord that will look after you. So then you can get your health care from there, money and protection and the wars between the other feudal powers. And yet, even that, too, is quite temporary. So employment is temporary. Identity is temporary. The stock market, of course, is ups and downs every day, thousands of times. And it's really disappointing to us, right? There's something very disappointing about that, the constant seeking for something secure externally.

[13:56]

or even internally and not finding it in the world of experience or in the world of institutions or in people or in relationships. So the Pali word for faith is about sadda. It means placing the heart on. So what can I place my heart on? I feel like as I have matured more in practice and started to place my faith less and less on something external. It kind of shifted more and more, not even to internal, but to a sort of balance of trusting some inner quality, like trusting the sense of being present. Trusting, I mean, it's kind of ironic, but trusting like the lack of knowing, right? Like that itself more than trying to know something. So having faith in possibility.

[15:00]

And then the other side of that is courage, actually. So courage to take risks, courage to be present with the not knowing. I think in courage there's an energy and there's a joy. There's a possibility of seeing through our old stories of how things are. our old narratives, and actually being able to step into this sense of the way things really are, like the truth of the way things are, which is actually even more incredible than our ideas about how things are. So I understand that In the community here, there's been a tragedy recently of one of your friends and community members having taken his life. And Lee had told me about this, and I felt very sympathetic towards that.

[16:12]

In my own path of life and practice, I've had a very close friend also who has taken their life about 12 or 13 years ago. So I'll tell you a little bit about my own trajectory around this, too. So as Leah mentioned, I started practicing when I was in college. I started practicing, actually I started reading Zen stuff when I was a young teenager and then kind of came to practice when I was in college. I studied religion and then realized what I was looking for wasn't like the mind's way of understanding, but actually here. So I started practicing in the Vipassana-type style. And then when I finished university, went off and spent several years in some monasteries and retreat centers just practicing. And meanwhile, my closest friend from college was someone who had taken a different trajectory.

[17:16]

And she went to law school and studied away there. And when I came back, I worked for a while, but continued my practice, and then eventually went on to graduate school, too. And during this time, this really good friend, whose name is Sonia, was having a lot of trouble in her life. So she was having a lot of turmoil, and she actually lived out here. I was living on the East Coast. And she ended up moving back to actually be close to me and some other friends. and we tried to help her through the struggle she was going through as best that we could. But finally it was too much for her, and she took her own life. So this is about 13 years ago and still is a very profound event for me of my life.

[18:22]

such a great loss for me from that event. And I have gone through many different emotions and feelings around that, of feeling a lot of guilt about could I have been a better friend for her, of feeling at sometimes anger of her leaving, of feeling a lot of loss, certainly, of just her absence in my life, who was my closest friend for age 17 to 27, about 10 years. I think some of the things that I learned from that experience, one is just to be very patient in the process of whatever it was that I was going through in that. And again, back to the lack of map. There's no map. The mapless map we were talking about at

[19:28]

So anytime you have an idea, like, oh, I should be feeling this, I shouldn't be feeling this, I should be over this by now, or I should not be over this by now, we're letting go of those thoughts, seeing them as thoughts, and actually just allowing yourself to be with whatever it is that is actually true and present. So dropping into that as much as possible. I think also one of the lessons for me in that was that, you know, my friend really had felt at a certain point this lack of connection and difficulty, which led her to that choice. But pretty soon, immediately upon her death, it was so clear how interwoven all of our lives are, which she couldn't see or feel at that moment. And, you know, she had gotten, like, kind of isolated and things like that, but I remember going to her... memorial service.

[20:29]

And I knew that I loved her so much, but hundreds of people were there. And I wasn't even surprised by that, but it stayed with me that we don't know how many people our lives touch. We are all inextricably part of this web of people and affect each other and notice each other and are in each other's lives. So my friend, for example, she worked in this She had given up being a lawyer. She had at first posited the problem on being a lawyer, you know, and left that. And then she went to be a bike mechanic. So she's working in this bicycle mechanic place. And so, of course, the whole, you know, people who are all bike mechanics and bike messengers in the community came out. And people who knew her from college came out. And teachers came out. And people in the coffee shops that she went to and hung around in and wrote brooding poetry, you know, came out. And so many people like whose lives we touch in this way all the time not knowing it.

[21:31]

So it's impossible for us to be removed from that web. And that too actually can give us a sense of, you know, what can we have faith in? So even when we don't see that visually, like when we don't know that mentally, being able in some way to tap into that. Like knowing that, even from seeing that about other people, like every single person in this room here is part of that web of life. You can't divorce yourself from it, right? It's impossible. Like even the fact that we're all here means that we've eaten and drunk enough nutrition, right, that we're actually alive and sitting here. And all of that food and water has come to us from the sky and nature and people picking the food and the food coming, being shipped here and people cooking it, including people in this room, I'm sure. And without that, we wouldn't be here. So as much as we might feel separate and want to be separate, we're just not. It's just an illusion when that comes up.

[22:49]

And then sometimes you're in the places in which You're feeling very, very vulnerable, very broken-hearted. And it feels like it's actually very difficult to go on. So that's the time when the courage can come in. And I think it's helpful to remember that there's kind of a help function in the universe. So kind of like if you're using a computer program and you get stuck, you don't know what to do. Sometimes you start to curse at the screen or get really frustrated. But there's actually this little help thing you can click on. And sometimes it actually does help. Sometimes you can actually put in your question and actually get some help from it. So it actually is possible to use this help function in the universe. And For me, the way to access that is connecting to the heart, actually.

[23:52]

Connecting to the heart and actually allowing yourself to touch into that vulnerability of our lives. So as the sage Carly Simon says, don't mind if I fall apart because there's more room in a broken heart. So trusting that, even though it doesn't look like, you know, like trusting the brokenness, trusting the not knowing, as actually being connected with also the truth of the way things are, which is that there is no knowing, there is no security in the world that we see. And the more that we can let go of that and rest in that, the more we can touch into that which is reliable, that which is true, and actually live our lives from that place. So I invite you for your own reflection to notice, both now as you're sitting here and then as you go through your life this week, what is it that I actually put my trust in?

[25:09]

What do I seek refuge in? What am I looking for reliability in? Like both conceptually and actually. What is it that once it shifts or if it does shift, I feel betrayed by it? And just noticing that and having compassion for yourself in that. But the more that we notice and can see that, the more we can sort of let go and drop in with courage, which develops our sense of faith in this truth of the mapless place to be, the mapless map. So this mapless map is kind of like in, if you go to like a shopping mall or something, there's a map and it says, you are here with the dot, right? And then it has all the stores around, like here's Macy's and here's Bloomingdale's and here's... except you only get the dot, right? So you only get the you are here dot, right? That's it. But it keeps refreshing itself all the time. So that's the map that we're going for.

[26:10]

That's the map to keep looking at. So I'll close with also some words from the Satipatthana Sutta, which I find inspiring, and about the path of practice. And it's similar to this idea of this not carrying, not hurrying. So where is this leading? So this is the direct path for the purification of beings, for the surmounting of sorrow and lamentation, for the disappearance of pain and grief, for the attainment of the true way, for the realization of Nibbana. So that's the promise of following the mapless map. You are here.

[27:10]

You let go of sorrow and lamentation, disappearance of pain and grief, and attainment of the true way. So I wish for all of you this. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. 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.

[27:47]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_93.48