This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Welcome to Green Gulch. And who is here for the first time? Welcome to the newcomers. And welcome to everybody who is coming regularly to explore the Buddha's teaching here at Green Gulch. Welcome to this beautiful valley with many opportunities to wake up to the mysteries of our life together. My name is Anna Thorn, and I'm in the position of tanto Head of Practice here at Green Gulch, just for a few more days before I leave residency to return to Germany.

[01:08]

I feel very grateful for my time at San Francisco Zen Center, more than 20 years. I started here at Green Gulch in 1995 with a practice period with Tension Rep. Andersen. At the time, it started in January. We didn't have the intensive yet. After that, I went to Tassahar Zen Mountain Monastery for a few years and returned to Green Gulch briefly. And then I moved to city center with my husband and had a number of senior staff positions. I lived there for more than 12 years. Then I returned to Green Gulch five years ago. And now is the time to leave. I would like to thank this Sangha for practicing together.

[02:23]

I would like to thank all the students who come through and so enthusiastically and encouraging me look and explore their path. I also would like to thank my teachers, particularly Tension Rep. Anderson as my root teacher and Christina Lehnherr, whom I'm studying with right now. for their guidance and care and support through all these years. I think in our tradition, the emphasis is clearly on Zazen, sitting in stillness, facing our life. And this is very necessarily

[03:24]

accompanied by an intimate meeting between teacher and student. The teacher-student relationship is the most important part in this tradition. Otherwise we would just go off on our own stories and movies. We need somebody facing us and helping us to understand our delusions. So I would like to bring up a small story about such a student-teacher relationship. And that is the story of Bai Zhang and Ma Zhu. And Ma Zhu is the teacher in this case. Baijiang and Mazhu were walking along and a flock of wild ducks passed by.

[04:36]

Mazhu asked Baijiang, what is it? Baijiang said, wild ducks. Mazhu asked, where'd they go? Baijiang answered, they flew away. Mazhu gave Baijiang's nose a sharp Bajang cried out in pain. Ma Zhu said, So you said they've flown away? Upon hearing these words, Bajang attained enlightenment. Bai Zhang had missed the moment right here, right now. He got hung up on the white ducks of the past for a second, getting lost in a dream as we easily do.

[05:45]

That is the moment when we separate from the universe that presents itself to us unveiled. We lose contact with what is coming to us, what is right in front of us. And start the story, which makes intimacy and immediacy into history. Reality is completely available right here. It is not hidden, not flown away. Mazu pinches Bai Zhang's nose, a direct physical action to wake up Bajang. Today, this would count as physical harassment. So we find other skillful means to point out where we are hung up, where we stand in our way. It is actually the diligence and the intimacy

[07:01]

this kind of face-to-face meeting that is important, that opens us to become real with our life, to become open to what is up for us, to see where we stand in our way, and not put the layer of insulation between us and what is at hand right now. Clone away functions like a buffer zone or illustrates the separation that we fall into. We fall into this all the time when we perceive reality as object out there and us here. We become present to everything else. We are able to wake up if we don't put this insulation between ourselves and reality, if we can't completely trust what is happening.

[08:08]

Recently, I was on a bicycle tour in Sweden with a friend, and we came upon stairs in our path. And my friend advised me, just hold the bicycle straight and lift yourself up and roll down the stairs. And so I did. And it worked just fine, rolling down the stairs. But I noticed how I was inclined to let my fear come in. I just decided to just try to just listen to what he said, just do it. When I did, this enabled me to do something or to experience something that I would not have experienced otherwise if I had given in to this discussion of what is safe, what is unsafe, and not just trusted my body and moved forward.

[09:21]

So often we forget our intention to be mindful. of our body, to be in our body, to remember our body? The Buddhist term, translated into English as mindfulness, originates in the Pali term sati and in the Sanskrit counterpart smirti. According to Robert Scharf, the meaning of these terms has been topic of extensive discussion and debate. Smirti originally means to remember, to recollect, to bear in mind, as in remembering sacred texts in the Vedic tradition. Sati also means to remember. So to be mindful of our body is to remember.

[10:28]

our body, but remembering the body seems to also be a negation of the body, making the body into an object of thought. So my question is, can we be aware of the body without thinking? What does it mean to remember the body? And at this point I would like to bring in a legend about how the art of memory, the art of remembering, originated. Just to bring in some aspects of how we understand this in the Western culture. In the 5th century common era in the Greek society of chaos, A banquet was held, and the poet Simonides stood to deliver an ode in celebration of Skopas, a Thessalian nobleman.

[11:41]

When he sat down, a messenger tapped him on his shoulder and pointed out two young men on horseback waiting outside to talk to him. Simonides stood up and walked out of the banquet hall. When he passed the threshold, the roof of the banquet hall collapsed and fell down in a thundering plume of marble, shards, and dust. The laughter stopped, and silence prevailed when the first rescuers came in to find the bodies of their loved ones. The corpses that were pulled out of the debris were mangled beyond recognition, and nobody knew who had been inside and where they had been seated.

[12:46]

At that moment, Simonides sealed his senses and moved back in time. In his imagination, he recreated the scene of the banquet and reassembled the hall. Simonides caught a glimpse of each of the guests at their seat. He recreated the images of the scene he had been part of to recognize and remember where each person had sat. Then he opened his eyes and took the devastated relatives one by one to the place in the rubble where their loved ones had been sitting.

[13:50]

This is an act of compassion, helping the relatives in their despair to locate the remains of their loved ones. so they can bury them according to customs. The legend of how the art of memory was born demonstrates how we orient ourselves in space and carry a lot of local and visual memory without even realizing it. So we could probably remember a lot of spaces where we have lived and the shops in the neighborhood that we used for our errands with an enormous amount of detail. This is a reason for memorizing numbers or to-do lists or stacks of cards or whatever we have to remember, linking them

[14:55]

to locations and images to use the implicit memory of space and location that we carry. This phenomenon is also at work in the latest development of memory storages. We have outsourced our memory to external devices. The trust in our memory has suffered. We are out of training in the sense that memory training was an essential part of education and transmission of cultural wisdom. We don't train our memory in the same way. We train it more in a different way. We use it more and more to remember where things are stored. We spend more and more time to organize the larger amounts of things that we keep in memory storages.

[15:59]

But it is still the body and its memory of location and place that holds us, that helps us to orient ourselves. In being mindful of our body, we come into our place. When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point, says Dogen in the Genji Koan. When you find your way at this moment, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point for the place, the way is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others. The place, the way, has not carried over from the past, and it is not merely arising now. Accordingly, in the practice enlightenment of the Buddha way, meeting one thing is mastering it.

[17:05]

Doing one practice is practicing completely. Here is the place, here away unfolds. Our practice of mindfulness opens this place. Mindfulness, sati, is understood as awareness of the present moment. Mindfulness of the body is at the same time remembering the body and being present in the body. The mental state in which sati is established well is characterized by a breath instead of a narrow focus of mind. It is the ability to hold various elements of the present moment coming into being with a collectedness that enables memory and being present at the same time.

[18:23]

The more we start to place awareness on a certain place, on a certain area in our body, the more we are able to see within the body. It is as if we disregard the sharp, clear focus and receive what is happening in the boundary, the boundary of awareness, of awareness and also the boundary between the body and the mind. The more we follow the body, the more we find ourselves in the twilight awareness of the body, we become the body itself. This morning, I followed a feeling of tension in my belly. You can guess why. And I had this image of standing on a very high jumping off place, like a jumping board above a swimming pool, which I used to stand on as a little girl to jump despite all my fear.

[19:53]

And immediately the koan of the 100-foot pole came up. This is a koan from the gateless gate, number 46. And the main question of that koan is, how can you proceed on further from the top of a 100-foot pole? I felt stuck in a place that was just in my mind, of course. I had a strong bodily sensation of fear. I was afraid to jump as I was when I was a little girl. And I know that this is nothing, that there is nothing to jump away from. There's only embracing this fear and going through it.

[20:57]

This koan is the invitation to let go and completely find ourselves in unhindered interaction with whatever is coming towards us. Suzuki Roshi comments on this koan. Actually, you cannot jump off, he laughs, where you are. It is not possible. And even though you try to stop on top of the pole, you cannot stop there because it is growing. Continuously, he laughs again. So you will be continuously, you know, higher and higher. You cannot stop here. But you think it is possible. You should forget all about the understanding the misunderstanding, when the place where you are is right now.

[22:03]

Do you understand? You should, you know, forget this moment and you should grow to the next. You should extend yourself to the next one. And I find this an interesting observation that he says, you should extend yourself to the next moment because we have this This very strong idea like being present to this moment, which also then leads to like holding on to this moment. What is that? It's just being flexible, being in flow, being with what is happening. It is a picture of the body in the body that dissolves. when we emerge ourselves in body meditation. For example, when we sit Zazan. And this is exactly the body we practice with, nothing else.

[23:10]

Our body is the place where we find and lose ourselves at the same time. To be enlightened is to be fully and completely embodied. I would like to quote Reginald Ray. To be fully embodied means to be at one with who we are in every respect, including our physical being, our emotions, and the totality of our karmic situation. It is to be entirely present to who we are and to the journey of our own becoming. To be entirely present to who we are, we open more and more layers of tissue and of experience in this practice. We discover areas and landscapes of our body.

[24:13]

We travel into the depth of our body and receive feelings and sensations and images. we start to see that our body is completely interconnected. We come into complete calmness to integrate what has arisen and passed through us. In becoming completely one with each moment of bodily feeling, we become our body without anything extra. Our body is a karmic being. Our body carries all the imprints of our ancient twisted karma. Our feet know our world from walking. All the anger that has arisen at moments in our life is inscribed, has left traces in our jaw, in our neck and face muscles.

[25:28]

Nothing that we do, think, or speak is without consequences. Each little gesture reverberates throughout the universe. And to take responsibility for these consequences of our being humans, we find rituals. We practice rituals. to align our body to our intention to liberate all beings. In bowing, we find us again and again in the motion of devotion, remembering to let go of egocentric holding and craving. We bow first thing in the morning when we get up from sitting. We bow before we avow our karma, chanting, all my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow.

[26:49]

In this brief chant, we have all the elements that we reflect on when we reflect on karma, and understanding karma. The three poisons, greed, hate and delusion, lead to karmic actions of body, speech and thinking. Again and again, we look at the karmic structure and the karmic consequences of all our actions and thoughts and vow to turn to wholesome action and thought. Karma means, it's a Sanskrit term, and it literally means action and doing. And in the Buddhist tradition, karma refers to action driven by intention, which leads to future consequences. And these intentions are actually considered to be determining the kind of karmic consequences.

[27:58]

that the action has. The same action can have different karmic consequences depending on the intention that is behind the action. For example, if someone breaks into a door, in the first case it could be a firefighter saving a disabled person that cannot move. That would be, I guess, a wholesome action. In another case it could be a burglar going into a house and robbing and that would probably be unwholesome action. Just to clarify, it's really the intention that makes the action into, brings the action, leads to a certain consequence of the action that we do. So in the Buddhist context, each individual has a responsibility and decides between creating wholesome karma or unwholesome karma.

[29:03]

And at the same time, we have the understanding of an individual that's an illusion to be an individual doer, that we are not independently existing beings, but that we come together through everything else. So our practice is exactly between this situation of not being an independent being and being completely existing through everything else. So we negotiate causes and conditions that come to be our life and as much as possible avoid wrongdoing. Karma is understood as action of body, speech, and mind, and the result of how we live, and we are never without the consequences of karma.

[30:13]

In our tradition, there is a famous story. It's another story about Bai Zhang to reflect on karma. Bai Zhang was the one who got the nose twisted. And in this story, Bai Zhang has become the teacher of a monastery. So every time Bai Zhang gave a Dharma talk, an old man would come to listen. He usually left after the talk, but one day he remained behind. And Bai Zhang asked, Who is there? The man said, I'm not actually a human being. I lived at the time of Kshapa Buddha and I taught on this mountain. One day a student asked, does a person who practices completely still fall into cause and effect?

[31:24]

I said to him, no. Such a person does not fall into cause and effect. And because I said this, I was reborn as a wild fox for 500 lifetimes. Could you please speak a turning word to free me from this wild fox body? And then he asked Bai Zhang, does a person who practices completely still fall under cause and effect? Bai Zhang said, do not ignore cause and effect. And immediately, the man had great realization. Bowing, he said, I am now liberated from the body of the wild fox. I will stay

[32:28]

behind the monastery on the mountain. Would you please have a funeral for a monk performed for me? And Bai Zhang asked his assembly to prepare for a monk's funeral. And he showed the assembly the dead fox behind the monastery. Do not ignore cause and effect means that everything we do, think or speak, has an effect. It means that there is nothing that would be outside of practice because every moment of action of body, speech and mind has consequences. There is nothing left out to practice with. There is no inside and outside of practice.

[33:30]

Our founder, our Japanese founder, Dogen, comments on this case. Clearly know that those who deny cause and effect are outside the way, whether they are living worldly or renunciate life. They say that the present life is unreal and that their transient body is in this world, but that their true nature abides in enlightenment. They believe that their true nature is mind and that mind and body are separate. Mind and body are one karmic being we practice with. To be able to fully realize our capacity we need to completely enter our karmic being and embody wholesome action.

[34:33]

The more we are aware of body, speech and mind, the clearer we can discern unwholesome and wholesome action. And it takes lifetimes to realize the simple teaching of all Buddhas. refrain from unwholesome action, do wholesome action, purify the mind. This is the teaching of all Buddhas. In Zazen, we enter into oneness with our body, oneness of body-mind. So being one with our posture, being one with breathing. To hold our awareness and our breathing is not just allowing the mind to settle and concentrate.

[35:45]

It is also the place where the mind can analyze. It is the place where all insights and moments of awakening can arise while the mind is aware of breathing and how we relate to breathing. We can, for example, see all the little manipulation that we put on the breath when we try to be aware of our breath. We can make an effort to come closer and closer to just be the breath, but also see how we hold on to ideas of how we should breathe or how we breathe. As breathing is just going on and continuing, whether we are aware of it or not, we face that we are lived and not the doer of our life.

[36:57]

In this recognition, has many levels. We then make an effort to let go and soon see new places of holding. We can return to awareness of breathing on every level of meditation as it holds the complexity of the particular and the formless in a single gesture. something that we cannot know but only experience. Breathing allows us to fully realize how life is changing in each instant. It is one of the stronger expressions of impermanence. When breathing stops, our life has turned into something completely different from living. I would like to close with a few words by Agnes Martin, a contemporary artist who can be visited in the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

[38:12]

She says, happiness is our real condition. It is reality. It is life. In this life, life is represented by beauty and happiness. If you are completely unaware of them, you're not alive. The times when you're not aware of beauty and happiness, you're not alive. When we see life, we call it beauty. It is magnificent, wonderful. I feel blessed that there has been beauty again and again to hold me on this path. That it has never lost its mystery of leading right into the intensity of life and death.

[39:17]

To be awake meant again and again to see what is right in front of me and enjoy the beauty of an apple tree or a head of lettuce, or a face in front of me. Agnes Martin says, fate is kind. I think it is the kindness that we open to when we have been receptive enough to embrace the gifts and welcome what we meet, including our own suffering. Thank you very much for listening. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[40:25]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:27]

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