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. Who in here is a father? Would you please raise your hands way up? Who in here has a father? Some didn't raise their hands. But you do have one. And I will propose that your father is a gift. That may be a stretch. That he's a gift regardless of how a father he was.

[01:02]

That you might think he was. Because however he was, he is a teacher. He is teaching you something about reality. And if you look at it that way, he is teaching you or helping you understand how you can relate to that reality in a liberating way, in an awakening way. So on that level, there are no good or bad fathers. That's, of course, Not so easy to get to that place. I would like to dedicate this talk to my father, who died four months ago at the age of almost 95.

[02:11]

And I may or may not say more during that talk about him. We'll see. But he's been that kind of father to me. Not easy at all. And the longer I practice, the more he turns into a big gift. So, we all have had fathers. Either they're present, have been present, or they haven't. We may not even ever have met them, but without them, we wouldn't have this life. which is another gift, even though it may be hard sometimes. So I'm not saying all these things for you to push away any experiences or any feelings you may have.

[03:17]

And I would actually right now like to invite you to take a moment and just see what Father, whether you are a father currently or have just had a father, what does Father right now, today, bring up in you? If you close your eyes, what comes to your mind? Is it the memory? Is it the feeling? Is it the sensation in your body? Is it the mix of many things? And can you allow yourself a moment to just have that take over your whole experiential being?

[04:29]

to just give space to that experience right now. It may even be a blank. To draw a blank. Can you give space to that? Just let it be exactly... So there is a koan in the Zen tradition. It's out of the Book of Serenity.

[05:31]

It's case number 20. And it's called, Not Knowing is Nearest. Or another translation is, Not Knowing is Most Intimate. Fizz has a poem that says, and love says, and love says, I will, I will take care of you to everything that is near. So, of course, as a father, your children are always near. As a child, your father is always near, even if he's not here at all.

[06:35]

He's either near by absence or near by how he is at that any given moment, or by how you remember him, or how he has shaped and keeps shaping your life because our earliest Relationships shape how we experience, how we think about ourselves and the world, and that shapes how we perceive. So in that way, they keep being alive and being effective. Intimacy. I looked it up in the dictionary. besides what we usually relate to it is closeness to another person or sexual intimacy, but it also says closeness of observation or knowledge of a subject.

[07:46]

Having acquired an intimacy with a subject, with a language, with a trade, with a craft, with material, which comes from observation. And that observation means it's a careful, in the terms of our faith, a careful study of what we are dealing with. So a sculptor knows that, that he has to become intimate with the different materials he is sculpting, with the different kinds of rock, because he cannot treat one like the other. Even if he knows the general, that marble is different than soapstone, for example, to work with, each piece of marble

[08:56]

has to be treated individually in that general understanding, so it has to be studied in order for him to be able to work with the material in a way that it leads to a happy ending, which usually is quite different than what he thought at the beginning, but it's still a happy ending. Painters know the moment you put paint on a canvas, it starts speaking back to you. And whatever you had in your mind, you may try to do exactly that on the canvas, but it's not going to work. It's actually going to change with each stroke. And you leave it and you come back to it the next day and you go, wow, what am I going to do with this now? So, being a father, being a parent, being a child, is one of the most direct, intimate, because it goes under your skin, and wonderful way of learning about Buddhist teaching or applying Buddhist teachings.

[10:26]

they invite us and they challenge us and they disturb us and they upend us into hopefully becoming more willing to just start paying attention rather than knowing ahead of time or applying your preconceived your assumptions, which, of course, in your mind, you have a whole lot of supporting evidence for those assumptions. She's always doing it this way. That's what he's thinking. That's what I can expect. Are we willing to know that? Are we willing to be aware of how we think, what the assumptions are, which we usually are not aware because they weigh in the background, but we don't examine them. So then the Buddhist teaching is first, can you take a backward step and turn the light inward?

[11:38]

So your daughter is going to go out, you know, make up to the hills, and you go like, yikes. And what is she going to do, or how is it going to be? And can you step back, leave her alone for a while, and just look, what is triggered in me? And can you own it? Can you not make her the object of what you feel, even though it got triggered by what you perceive? So part of Buddhist practice is to leave everything alone. Just leave it alone. Leave it alone what you feel, what you think. Leave it alone what you perceive out there. Just give it space. Let it be. Hard to do.

[12:41]

Get in there metal. Because... We don't like it, so then we want to rearrange it out there so we like it. But if someone does that to us, can you just feel how your hackles go up and you kind of go that way? So, can we leave it alone? In that koan, you know, oh, I want to take it with me because I can never remember those things. One guy, one teacher, I think the student goes to the teacher and says, I'm going, goodbye. And the teacher says something like, where are you going? Why are you going? Where are you going? And he says, I'm going on a pilgrimage.

[13:44]

you know, what's the point of the pilgrimage or why are you going on a pilgrimage? And the answer is, I don't know. And the teacher says, not knowing is most intimate. A pilgrimage is a journey. It's actually in some ways a quest. Our life is a journey every day. from beginning to end. It has a beginning in this form, and it will have an end in this form. That's the only thing we know for sure. So, when you're stuck with an idea about your daughter, your son, your partner, your co-worker, yourself, Go on a journey.

[14:48]

Go for a walk. Go for a long walk. When your body walks in the hills, in the city, on the beach, wherever it is, but with your own feet, you walk. Keep walking. Your horizon, your view, continuously changes. You suddenly see, if you walk on the hills here, you maybe suddenly see the bay in front of you, or the ocean, or the next hill, or a tree, or a dog, or a deer, maybe a cougar. Your view continuously changes. Your horizon continuously changes. And you discover that at some point, your thinking starts to change. You become able to think beyond the boundaries where your usual thinking stops.

[15:53]

My father was a very, very principled person. Very high ethics, which he put into place. He loved to climb mountains. And I think it had something to do that it helped him keeping, first of all, it's a big effort to climb a mountain, but the change of view, I think, helped him to get a bigger picture of the principle than when it was shrinking down in his everyday life. As a father, He, as a person, he was generous. He was not knowing. When we brought home people, which we always could do, friends, to our big family of seven kids, he would be very curious about their thinking, how they thought, why they thought that way, and then he would explain to them his viewpoint, and they would have these wonderful discussions.

[17:10]

When we came up with exactly the same ideas, he would get totally upset and say, where did you pick up such stupid ideas? Which, of course, for me as a child meant, he doesn't love me. I'm stupid. So, which one is the true person? So when we are parents, it's hard to be as detached as you might be to children that are not your children. So can you start watching that? When my father had died, the wake was at home, he had two completely different sides to his face. When you stood on one side of him and when you stood on the other side,

[18:12]

Those two sides were right there. It was amazing. One was that principled, like I don't know what, you know, face that was completely intimidating, which is actually another side of intimacy, and unapproachable. And the other side was... humorful and alive, and like he was on the verge of breaking into a smile because he was very, had a wonderful humor and quick, could turn on the word and generous to a default and hospitable and present. So there they were both in his face after he had died. So, which father do I keep in my mind?

[19:19]

So as children, we also, we can let go and can step back into not knowing. Because not knowing is in some ways keeping it open to possibilities. To not settle. To not settle down anywhere. It says, a bodhisattva has no abode. So in that koan somewhere it says, When you affirm, affirm completely, but don't settle in affirming. When you deny, deny completely, but do not settle in denial, in denying. It's not that at a given moment we have a response. Can we be that response fully and then let go? settle down and say, well, that's now, from now on, this is how it's going to be. That's the trouble. So that has to do with the not knowing.

[20:23]

Don't settle anywhere. We love to settle. Pema Chodron says somewhere, human beings have such a pull to be comfortable. And it's so nice to be comfortable. And at the same time, it's so sad because to be comfortable in that way, to be settled in that way means we have removed ourselves from life, which is mysteriously, completely unpredictable, very unsettling. Because whatever we count on may or may not happen and it's completely out of our control. even if we think it is in our control. We can drop dead right now, in here. Somebody can have a stroke, a heart attack, or something else.

[21:25]

It's possible, and it does happen. So, and it's totally exciting. And it's totally scary. You know, it's not just safe at, It's actually a wilderness out there. And we get tastes, more tastes of it. You know, Japan, radiation, you can't see it. And it's life. It's always been dangerous. It's maybe more dangerous now than it was, but I'm not. truly sure. I think in the dark ages it was a danger. It's just the dangers come in a different way. The unpredictability. Everything is in a flow. So not knowing is nearest. Not knowing is most intimate.

[22:30]

So how do we get to not knowing? One way is Interestingly, by knowing. By really being willing to take space to know what's going on in your body. To know, being interested in what's going on in your heart. To know, to be curious what's going on in my mind. And then, to know triggers me. What are my buttons? And to own them, you know, take responsibility for them. So, also, you know, we are very intimate in a family.

[23:37]

It just happens because we are around each other all the time when we're growing up. So often we confuse intimacy with thinking, oh, then I can relax and be casual. With my intimate friends, I can be casual. I don't have to be careful. Actually, I will propose the more intimate we are, the more intimate we are in need of deep, deep respect. You know, in the olden days, they actually, you know, in the old country, Europe, in France, the you that you have in the English language that you say to parents, to friends, to, it's just everybody calls each other you or calls each other here by their first name, which is totally shocking where I come from, in different generations.

[24:41]

You do not call somebody else's father John or Jim and you. You call them Mr. whatever, and you call them, I don't know what the word is here. Thou? Yeah. I mean, it's not the thou as the god here, but it's And in even earlier time, partners, couples, married people would call each other that way, which is much closer to what Rilke writes in his letter to a young poet, that actually being married means to entrust your partner with guarding your solitude. So the task of the partners is to guard each other's solitude and make sure that they have it.

[25:48]

And I would say that's the task of the parent too. Because we're all absolutely unique, incomparable, indescribable, uniquely individual events. We're all human. That's what we all share. We all want to be happy. We all want to be free of suffering. We all want to be safe and nurtured and sheltered. And at the same time, we're uniquely, extremely alone. Nobody can live your life. Parents, you cannot live your children's lives. So what can you give them? You can give them space. You can give them support to discover who they are rather than you telling them who they are and what they can and cannot do.

[26:55]

You can give them support to try out things and find out and learn support to make mistakes because that's how we learn. To not know and slowly start to find out. We can do that for our children. We can do that for our partners. We can do that for our parents. And we can do that for ourselves. That is universal. We can do it for our co-workers, our boss. Everything, our dog, our plants in the garden. So, giving an unobstructed loving space to experience what is being experienced.

[27:55]

Because if we can fully experience what is in a moment, or better to say, the more fully we can experience what is happening in a moment with this being, without knowing everything, not needing to pinpoint everything or explain it or just how it feels. Even if it feels confused, how does that feel? The more that's possible, the more the information, what an appropriate response is to the moment, will come up from the experience. It doesn't come up from thinking too much about it. It's not thinking it's bad, but thinking is tricky. We can tell ourselves stories that bind us, and we can still tell a story that liberates us. And we can feel it in our bodies, which one we do, if we start paying attention.

[29:00]

And then we can just go, oh, I dropped that one. Makes me tight, anxious, you know, angry. Can I just let it go? Not so easy. But if we continue doing that, our body will kick in and help us. Because it immediately responds to whatever we think. or hear, or pick up. You know, somebody said, you're stupid, do I have to pick it up and think about how stupid I am? Maybe, maybe not. Depends. You know, one artist once was interviewed in a radio, and she was a young artist, and the interviewer said, it must be really hard to get all these, you know, critiques. Sometimes they build you up, sometimes they... put you down, must be a roller coaster. And she said, my father told me very young to read them carefully in terms of do they say something, is something in what they say, the good ones and the bad ones, equally, is something

[30:22]

what they say helpful for me in what I want to do? How I want to be, what I want to express. Do they say anything that's helpful for that? And she said, so there are no bad or no good ones. And it's not a roller coaster. You know, being a father archetypally A father kicks in a little later than a mother. At the beginning, he can just enjoy the child. You know, that's a stereotype. But the mother can breastfeed, and the child at the beginning says it wants mommy when it's sad, if it's, you know, very often. The father's task is to accompany... and support the child's moving into the world.

[31:26]

So that's why very often they kick in, they start having trouble when their children get a little bigger and go to school. They get more upset often with them. And then before when they're small. But that task to support the discovery of the world that's outside the family. How am I doing with time? What time is it? Eight minutes? Okay. Woo! Um. So I said before, the willingness to step back and be curious about what's going on in your own inner being is also a willingness to bear what you feel.

[32:42]

To be willing to feel your anxiety, your worry about the child, or about something else. to be willing to bear that, to stand it, to be patient, to not settle on preconceived notions, to know what they are and then can you create space around them and go, well, let's see what else is going on. It's a generosity. It's actually an act of generosity. It's like... Henry David Thore said, if you sit on a clearing in the woods still, if you sit still long enough, all the animals of the wood will come and present themselves to you. You will get to know them intimately because you're not moving.

[33:50]

You're not running after them. You're just still long enough. We don't like not knowing. This culture does not value not knowing. I have a nephew who is on the Asperger's syndrome range. He goes to school. He finds his own way to solve a mathematical problem. He solves it. The result is correct. The teacher gives him a bad grade because he didn't solve it the way he thinks he should solve it. That is a wonderful example of how thinking you know something can make you

[34:53]

like hell. And it makes you miss the result for being stuck on a particular way it has to get to that place. It discourages my nephew no end because he doesn't know what else to do. And he's absolutely brilliant. We know today that what students learn and know, the knowledge they acquire will not help them by the time they go to work because it's long past. It's long being replaced by new knowledge. So what we can teach, what we can support is being curious, being able to be in a process rather than be it has to... I have to get there and this is the only way to get there.

[35:55]

It takes faith. It takes the willingness to listen. To listen and let the explanation your child gives you just be there, not argue with it. And you really... in someone else's shoes. That was one of the things that one of the co-workers of my father talked at the funeral, and he said he asked him what his success was in his business. And he said, and how come he was always able to settle things when there was a will and there was a lot of strife in the families, my father was always capable to find a solution that left the family in peace. He said, I tried, I put myself into the position of each of the people and tried really to see, look at the situation from their place.

[37:12]

and point of view. And that helped me to find a solution where everybody felt seen, heard, appreciated, and getting what they needed. Which may not have been equally exactly the same thing. So, listening. Letting it be. Not making something out of it. Not... a story, or a future, or a prediction, or just let it be, the way it is. Appreciation. Eight minutes are up, huh? Okay? This afternoon, a whole group of people will start sowing a ruckusoo in... or on their priest robes, this here. And the ruckusou is a smaller version of this here.

[38:15]

In getting ready to make the precepts guidelines for their life. That is a journey into not knowing. Even though you may have ideas what's gonna happen, something Different will happen. So love says, I will take care of you to everything that is near. So that love is not a feeling. It's the willingness to take care. to be full of care, to know what that care should be, you have to take time to look what it is that's in front of you.

[39:26]

In our family home, which will be undone over the course of this year, I found myself polishing silver. Suddenly I found myself, you know, we had taken everything out of the closets and looked at. Suddenly I started polishing silver. And it was an amazing process. The things started to be beautiful, shiny. what they were, the craft that had gotten into them. And it was lovely to do it. It was like giving them back to themselves, to their best self. It'll get dark again, but it doesn't matter.

[40:28]

Everything is impermanent. Giving them back to themselves. And what was the amazing thing us, then it was easy to let them go. Much easier than before. So, how do we take care? What is taking care of this child and of this child in this moment? It will tell us if we are full of care and and patient, and not in a hurry. So that's what I would like to end with, and that is not knowing is most intimate. And to be willing to not know, but to let things, people, the world tell you,

[41:34]

from you or doesn't need from you, then you have free time. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org. and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:12]

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