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. Happy Father's Day. How many people are fathers? How many people... have had a father alive or no longer alive. That's pretty good. Before we get started, I want you to just really be here. What does it mean to be here right now? So can you feel yourself? This is your seated in the chair or the cushion. feeling the weight of your body?

[01:05]

And can you feel yourself breathing? Are you breathing fast or slow, deep or shallow? there anything that wants to change? Be more alive and alert or more relaxed? To really be here. Can you feel your heart beating? Sometimes we can and sometimes we can't. Starting to tune in your experience. You might notice the quality of your mind, your attention, or your thoughts running around.

[02:26]

That's okay. Is your mind fairly calm? That's okay. Can you feel, what is it like to be here, not just by yourself in a room, but in this very big room with lots of people noticing what it's like to be right here? In honor of Father's Day, I invite you to bring to mind a father in your life or someone who fathered you.

[03:38]

Noticing what you feel when you think about that person. What you feel maybe in your heart. Maybe warmth and openness and gratitude. Maybe also some difficulty. Something bittersweet. Just reflecting on how the gifts of that person helps you be here today in one way or another. And if you'd like, sending wishes of well-being, kindness to that person, whether they're living or no longer living.

[05:01]

Maybe taking a deep breath. And then releasing fully. So when I was asked to give the talk today, my name is Meg, I had great ideas for the talk. And some ideas about practicing and what is practice and... how we practice together wherever we may be and what that looks like. And then I thought, oh gosh, it's Father's Day. I have to talk about being a father in some way or another. Or at least say Happy Father's Day. But as I started to think about it, I realized that the two weren't really that far apart. And they worked together pretty well. And as I was thinking about my own experience with fathers, mothers, I realized that I tend to think fairly matrilineally.

[06:41]

I actually grew up in the... I had a wonderful father, but I grew up in the South. And in the place where I grew up, it was always mother and daddy. It was never father and mommy. And even though the daddies in the world I grew up in mostly were the ones who went out and made the money and did various things and the mothers stayed home, it was the mothers who figured out how to spend the money and the mothers who made a lot of the decisions. And I got to thinking about this word father. And in a religious setting like this, this word father actually comes up a lot. certainly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. And also the word that we use here for the person in charge of all the temples is abbot. And that also comes from father, just like pope. The word pope comes from the Greek papas, so father.

[07:45]

But this word abbot is from the Aramaic, and it actually doesn't mean father. It means daddy. So that kind of way a small child would speak with that sense of love and trust about their daddy. And also in the New Testament, they talk about God also as Abba, as daddy. God the Father is a little bit different than daddy. And in thinking about Father's Day stories with Buddhism, we don't really call Buddha Daddy so much. Or even Father, right? Say God the Father, Buddha the Father. We don't really say that. Even though there's a Buddha sitting up there, it's actually not the big one.

[08:53]

That big statue is Manjushri. who's the embodiment of wisdom. And that's often the figure that's in the Buddha Hall. And it's actually the smaller one, is Shakyamuni Buddha. So if you think about your own stories of fathers, of daddies, of all the things that make a good father, the being there, the taking care of, the countless... lunches and driving to schools and paying the mortgage and all of those things, that sense of being there, that loving. So thinking of the Buddha story or Father's Day stories can be a little bit challenging, actually. As some of you may know, there's a story of the life of the Buddha which comes down to us, and I don't know how historically accurate the details are. I don't think anyone does. but I think it's important to notice what comes down, at least through legend.

[10:01]

So in this legend, the Buddha had a father who was kind of a big deal. He was the head of the Shakya clan, sometimes called a king, but kind of head of a large, prominent clan. And he had this amazing son. And when the son was born, a seer said, this guy is either going to be... a great king in the world, a great political leader, or he's going to be a great spiritual teacher. Now, which do you think the Buddha's father preferred? So we all want the best for our children, or the children that are in our lives somehow. And I think... The Buddha's father, Suddhodana, was no exception. He sincerely wanted the best for his son, what he felt like was the best.

[11:03]

And in his worldview, that meant a lot of success. That meant a lot of wealth, a lot of political power, a lot of admiration, a lot of health, the best of everything. And who of us really doesn't want that for their children, in a way? And so to, in a way, subvert this potential prophecy of the spiritual leader idea, he really tried to protect the young Siddhartha, not letting him see anything that was unpleasant or would upset him in any way, protecting him from old age, sickness, death, etc., But ultimately, he couldn't do that. That actually, Siddhartha got outside the palace walls, outside of our protected view of what's going on here.

[12:07]

And the amazing thing for us is he really looked. He looked really hard. And he saw, oh my gosh, everybody gets sick. And oh my gosh, everybody gets old. Me? Yeah, me. You? Yeah, you. And he saw a corpse. What's that? His attendant said, Lord, that's someone who's died. What's that? Me? Yeah, me. You? Yeah, you. So he looked around and he saw that as much as his father loved him, as much effort and skill and resources that his father was putting into creating the perfect life for him, the happiest possible life, that his father did not have the power, that no one has the power.

[13:21]

to change just these basic facts of existence. And the tendency is to just put on the blinkers and say, okay, we'll think about that later. Or not at all, if we can help it. And as a young man, really in the prime, really the prime of his life, he let himself be touched. very deeply by what he saw and felt. So much so that he said to himself, I really have to investigate this. In addition to seeing someone who was sick, someone who was old, someone who had died, he saw someone who was a wandering mendicant of the time, someone seeking a path.

[14:26]

And he thought, well, maybe I should do that too. His father did not approve of this plan. To make it more complicated, around the time that this was happening, He had gotten married to a really beautiful young woman, Yashodara. And even beyond that, they had just had a baby, an infant son, Rahula. So the good father, of course, would stay and be with his family, care for his family. That's a good father, yeah? But instead, he, according to legend, kissed his wife and son goodbye as they were sleeping in the night and slipped through the gate.

[15:40]

Cut off his hair, gave his horse to his attendant, put on robes, and started walking. No cell phones. No telephones. Maybe not even a good postal system. You know, once you start walking in the ancient world, you're out there. You're just gone. How do we understand this? This is our model. You know, this is put up as the founder of the school. And we're here in a Buddha hall celebrating Father's Day. So what did he go to find out? He really wanted to ask, what are we supposed to do here?

[16:43]

We're all in this really kind of challenging boat together, right? How, given these situations that we really have no control over, Really. We can go work out. That's recommended. But ultimately, you know, there's not much you can do about it. So how do we live with ourselves? How do we live with each other? If we have children, what do we teach them? What really is the good life for ourselves and for our children? One thing he saw is what's been called the first noble truth of Buddhism, which is usually translated as suffering, which sounds like kind of a downer. And as you may have heard that word, suffering may not be exactly all of it.

[17:48]

A sense of unsatisfactoriness, or even if something is really satisfactory or even super great, just the fact that it's not going to last. You kind of feel that kind of pang a bit and that everything that we're experiencing right now is changing. We don't notice it too much because it's subtle, but then sometimes we get a really big change and it's kind of a shock. So it's looking at this nature of existence and the idea that if we try to hold on to something that can't be held onto because it's not a solid, unchanging thing anyway. But if we get confused and we think it is and we try to grab it, ow, it really hurts when it goes away. So he stepped back and he said, okay, all right, people, let's get real here.

[18:51]

This is the situation. We can try to pretend that it's not, but it is the situation. That everything is shifting and moving, and we can't make it be the way we want it to be, as hard as we try. Or maybe it's that way for a little bit, and then it's not. He also said one of the aspects of this suffering or difficulty in life is sometimes we have to be with things and situations and people that we don't really want to be with. That's part of it. But another part is the people that we love the most with our whole heart that we would do anything for we're going to be parted from that.

[19:56]

So the person you're sitting next to today, maybe who you came with, you're going to be parted. Your child, your spouse, your parents, your friends, your dearest friends, You will be parted. And somehow, this is the good news. How is this the good news? The proposition is, by really taking this seriously, by investigating deeply, by being with things as it is as Suzuki Roshi used to say that there's actually a profound joy and freedom in that because the thing is you already know all of this what I'm telling you you know it somewhere in your bones and denying that takes a lot of energy and makes us feel not really so settled because we know there's something we're not

[21:26]

looking at what if we look at it what if we feel whatever feelings might come up when we consider that what if knowing that makes us able invites us to be even more fully here more fully here in this ever-changing, unbelievable, miraculous moment. Just right now. Buddha sat down and he saw this.

[22:28]

And he thought, he realized, everybody has this potential to see this. But then he thought, but it's too hard. I'm not going to teach. People won't get it. This is too hard to deal with. This sort of innate sense of wanting to hold on to what's there. We're kind of biologically programmed to do that. And then legend has it that actually a god came down and said, no, no, no, no, no. There are some people who have but little dust in their eyes. You know, if you speak, if you teach, there are some people who will listen to you. So why are you here this morning anyway? What brought you here? So you may have had a story, hey, it'd be kind of cool, go to Green Gulch, it's pretty.

[23:31]

Nice thing to do on Father's Day. But you could have just gone and wandered through the gardens, they're very nice. Instead you decided to actually come into this big room with everybody and sit down on a cushion or a chair and explore all of this together. Already in you, there's something of that young Siddhartha going, what the heck? What am I supposed to do? Maybe there are other people asking this question too. Maybe there's some people who've thought about this before. Maybe we should come together and talk about this. in thinking about this question of what do we teach our children?

[24:50]

What do they really need to know? This is not a theoretical question for me, as I have a daughter who just graduated from eighth grade and is about to enter high school. And the day after that, she's going to college. I know it's going to happen, and I can't control it. And I'm thrilled. And there's also, ugh, right? Even though I'll continue to see her, and even after she goes to college, I hope there are many vacations. The situation of being together every day is going to change. We will be part of it. And in this way, in a wonderful way of her moving into her life. but nevertheless. So what do we teach our children? And I tell her, I'm giving you the best I know from the conventional map that I was taught and I experienced.

[26:05]

Education is very important. Get a good education. Be healthy. Get cultural experiences. Make good friends. probably you'll go to college, then maybe graduate school, maybe a good job, who knows, family. This is the best I know in terms of a conventional way of life. And I try to give her the resources and the path. And there's a kind of faith that if you follow the steps, things are going to turn out okay, probably. But I tell her, I really don't know. I don't know where our world is headed, really. I really don't know what to make of this issue, say, of climate change. People say it's serious. What does that mean? How serious? How will it affect her in her life? How will it affect her children's lives? How will it affect other populations even more than us?

[27:11]

What is her responsibility in that? It could be all bets are off that this path I'm telling her is the path to go in a conventional way towards well-being and happiness. Maybe it won't work in a changing world. I don't know. So really the best I feel I can offer her, in addition to these conventional ways, is how do I help her be more resilient more kind, creative, compassionate, open, listening, learning. How do we teach our children that? How do we invite them and ourselves to live in a way that's more in tune with the way things really are?

[28:14]

The Buddha's Father Day story has somewhat of a happy ending in that eventually he returns home and reunites with his wife and child who then, the child of course is much older, and they join him in the religious life. So that comes around. How do we open to this? Originally, the idea of a sangha, monks and nuns practicing together, and then also the lay supporters supporting the monks and nuns to practice, the fourfold sangha. But can this sense of sangha, of people practicing together, keep getting bigger? For all Buddhist practitioners,

[29:25]

whether you're in the monastery or out, or you're mostly out but sometimes come in. But can it get even bigger, even if you don't call yourself a Buddhist? Because Buddhism is really not about Buddhism. It really isn't. It's about looking. What is going on here? It's about considering the human condition deeply. And it's been incredibly rich and skillful... in developing practices to help us do that. So is your practice, is this questioning of what's going on here, does this happen only when you come here on a Sunday? What is your practice in your daily life? And what is your practice, not just your practice, there really is no such thing as your practice. What is our practice together? What is our practice in whatever worlds we function in? With our family, with our work, with our friends.

[30:30]

How do we live in a way that is awakening, opening our eyes together? One thing that helps is just to sit down. This whole hall is created as a really great place to sit down. Because sometimes our lives can be so scattered and busy and full, sometimes with difficult things, sometimes with really wonderful things, that it's hard to remember to stop and pay attention. It's hard to remember to stop and ask these questions of ourselves and with each other. So simply stopping.

[31:35]

And when we sit down, we're simplifying the situation quite a bit. Being in a quiet place. This is really terrifying for some people. Maybe it's been for you. It's kind of radical, really. Especially when we're going so fast all the time. To simply stop. What is it like to be alive right now? What if I open to the entirety of my experience right now? there are actually three kinds of learning, three kinds of wisdom, three levels of wisdom.

[32:41]

One is you listen, you hear it or read it. You're hearing other people who've thought about this before. So you hear it, you read it, and then you actually think about it. You ponder it. Does this make sense to me? Does this ring true? What questions do I have? You critically think about it. Maybe talk to others about it. And then you sit down. And you let it enter your body in a deeper way. You know it in your bones. You know it in your heart. And you are different. You still live your life, but the orientation is a little different.

[33:44]

I learned recently, even some studies, you know, neuroscientists are starting to try to figure out what's actually happening up here when you meditate. And the field is about this big. It's just barely started. So they can't say much really at all. But one thing I have heard is there's some suggestion that with a regular meditation practice, the activity in the midline, center part of the brain that's associated with our sense of self starts to decrease. Our sense of isolated self that needs to be protected storyline self, that relaxes a little bit. And our sense of self actually gets bigger. You're not going to disappear. Don't worry. You still get to go to work on Monday. Make your kids lunches. But that sense of, I've got to protect this, that starts to relax a little.

[35:02]

And I know that there's a way that we're intimately attuned to each other, just naturally, as human beings. So if you see someone in pain, there's part of you that actually feels that pain. Your brain actually lights up in the same place. That's empathy. that feeling, that emotional resonance or joy, you actually feel it yourself. You may have ideas about it, too, but there's a feeling in the body. There's a great Zen story of someone named Lehmann Peng. How many people have heard of Lehmann Peng? Anybody? Not so many. He was a monk in China, had a family, and especially they talk about the father, Lehmann Peng, and his wife and his daughter. And they were kind of great, and they all practiced. And he was quite wealthy and well-to-do, but then he decided that he just wanted to really focus on practicing, and his wealth might be a distraction, so he put it all in a boat and sank it.

[36:17]

And they went around practicing together. And there are wonderful stories about this family. But one of the stories, this is another Father's Day story, one of the stories is that he was with his daughter, and the layman fell down. And his daughter saw this and she threw herself down next to him. And he said, what are you doing? And she said, I'm helping. And he looked at her and he said, it's really good that nobody else saw that. And I thought, what does this story mean? That there's some sense of we feel it, right? We feel it. We want to be there with each other. A couple of weeks ago, I had the fortune to go to a conference on mindfulness and compassion. It was held at San Francisco State University, and San Francisco Zen Center was actually one of the co-sponsors, and our abbot, Agent Linda Cutts, was one of the people helping to organize it, and it was somewhat unusual

[37:24]

I learned in that there were some really top-level scientists and psychologists and theorists and Dharma practitioners. Linda talked, Ajahn Amaro, Robert Thurman also was there, a Buddhist scholar, and also some Zen poets, Jane Hirschfield, Gary Gough, and it had this really alive feeling to it. And I talked to one person who often goes to scientific conferences, and she said, you know, I think people were actually listening to each other. There was some way people were willing to hear, what is your experience? What are you learning? How do you understand this? But I learned a new concept or a new idea, theory, which I love. It's called brain-to-brain coupling. And I did not make this up. Brain-to-brain coupling. And the idea is that when I speak, There's something going on. I have a brain pattern. I speak it. Sound waves go na-na-na-na-na-na-na to you.

[38:27]

And that same part of your brain lights up. And if it's really, really quick, like almost instantaneous, like I say something and my brain goes nyeh and your brain goes nyeh and it's almost the same time, then you get it. You feel like I really understood that. You know, that feeling of clicking with somebody, like, oh, that person just, we just click. your brains are actually lighting up at the same time. And if you really, really click, then sometimes the listener's brain will light up before the person actually speaks the next thing. Like they actually anticipate what the person is going to say. And one of the researchers was saying, you know, we're not doing it the right way in studying meditators in isolation, like as if they were an individual in isolation. because there's something that happens when we all get in this room together, right? We're attuning to each other in bodily ways and mental ways.

[39:30]

There are ways that we can think here together that we can't, literally can't think when we're off by ourselves. This field is shaping us. We're shaping each other. We're creating this experience together. So it's not me up here giving you the Dharma, right? It's us coming together to ask, what's going on here? Who am I? Who are you? What's happening? And there's something about being in this space that supports us to do that. You can do this in your whole life, too. How do you create your life as a practice place with your family, with your work?

[40:35]

And there are people out there experimenting with this. So where I work, we have a staff meeting once a week, and we sit in silence together for 20 minutes first. And then we go around, and we hear from each person. How are you? Or some question. What's most alive for you right now? Also, even when we have shorter meetings, almost always we'll come into the room and stop and sit in silence for just a minute. It doesn't take long. A minute. That allows everybody to be present. And maybe a quick, how are you doing? And if someone says... You know, I didn't sleep well last night. I have family stuff at home. I'm really kind of just not present, kind of having a hard time. That helps everybody else to know that. So that if they're really grumpy and down on a project, it's like, well, maybe it's because of this other thing going on. Or if someone's really excited and feeling great, that's also helpful to know. So how do we start to communicate and be present with each other wherever we are?

[41:42]

What is your path of practice also? Do you need to make more time to just go sit down? To maybe sit down with others in a retreat or one day sitting? How does that affect you? A long time ago when I was first starting to practice, I found myself kind of unexpectedly in a Thai monastery. And it was at the very end of a long trip in Asia, and I had a plane ticket to get back on the plane and go see my parents, who were very ready for me to come home. And I realized, being there, that I needed to stay longer. It was really a month-long program, and I only had a couple of weeks, but they let me stay. But I realized it wasn't enough. I needed to stay longer. And I was wrestling with this. Can I disappoint my parents by telling them I have to stay here and do this odd thing.

[43:06]

And I went to see someone there, and what he said to me stayed with me. He said, you know, you're not just doing this for yourself. You're doing it for them, too. So whatever we're doing, whatever we're doing, the way that we're not doing it just for ourselves, but we're doing it for everybody. Finally, in honor of Father's Day, I'd like to share a poem. This is kind of a special poem for me because my husband wrote it. And he wrote it on June 2nd, 2002, so some time ago.

[44:15]

And there are a couple of references here I'll just mention so you can get it. One is Dogen. So Ehe Dogen was the person in Japan in the 13th century who brought Zen, Soto Zen as we know it. some form of soto-zen from China to Japan. So he's considered the founder of soto-zen. And then oryoki are the, when we're eating formally in the zendo during retreats, we have three bowls that are nested and they're wrapped up often in white cloth. Very, very beautiful. And then also Hakuen was a monk who, the story goes, a local village girl got pregnant and didn't want to reveal who the father was. So she said, it's the monk. And the parents came very angry and said, take this baby, it's yours. And Hakuen said, is that so? And he just took the baby and cared for the baby deeply for a while. And then eventually the girl confessed, like, no, no, no, it's actually the farmer's son.

[45:17]

And they said, I'm so, so sorry, can we have the baby back? And with great equanimity also returned the baby. So those are some. contexts. And then around the time of deciding to have a family or not, we were also deciding whether to ordain as Zen priest or not. And my biological clock started ticking rather loudly. And in Zen priest training, you're engaging deeply with forms. And usually diaper changing is not one of the forms. So we decided on the baby, and happily, the Zen priest training actually did come a bit later. So here's the poem. Zen and the Art of Changing Diapers. As far as I know, the Buddha left no discourse on the art of changing diapers. No guidance on how to direct my mind when my daughter screams.

[46:19]

as I put her down seems to have passed his lips. Nor did Dogen expound the dharma of this daily rite of mine. Orioki was his preferred use of white cloth. Not even Hakuen mentions his illumination the first time he cleaned shit off the tatami. There's no story of a wizened master who pricks his finger on a safety pin and awakens with the oozing of blood. My teacher, too, left no doubt on this point. I'm not going to change diapers, he said. The Zen ancestors do not inspire faith that this devoted act of mine will liberate. When I ask my heart about this way, I do not worry about the silence.

[47:22]

Thank you all for being here today. by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[47:54]

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