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. Good evening, everyone. Was that sound? Yeah. Down. So welcome. This is the second talk of a month-long intensive that we are engaging here at City Center, at the temple. And the intensive is on the theme of finding true refuge And the question that I'm turning and inviting all of us to turn together is how do we find true refuge in a world on fire?

[01:09]

In what I described last night as the age of decline of what's called mappo in Japanese in a time that we see a breakdown of the social fabric of our world. That is, as I was describing to the group last night, both similar and different from the time of the Buddha, who also lived during a period of tremendous social and political and spiritual and economic upheaval. I find that information useful because it gives a bit of gravitas to his teachings. The fact that in the midst of what Paula Arai calls in the midst of the mess, in the middle of the mess, that he said it's possible.

[02:18]

It's possible to wake up. It's possible to be free. It's possible to find refuge. But it turns out that what we think we know about what refuge means, or maybe what we imagine refuge might mean, and what is really being pointed to here, there's sometimes a bit of a gap. So I have been describing refuge as requiring, finding true refuge. I hear a little bit of a... Try that. finding true refuge as requiring a kind of reorientation. That the places that we go and look for refuge, for safety, for happiness, are not the places that the Buddha pointed to that we would find them.

[03:28]

And refuge itself is not, as we might imagine, some kind of safe haven, some kind of place where we can retreat from all of the difficulty and withdraw and find a place of quiet, like a place of peace. But rather, refuge is about how do we find that? How do we find that stability, equanimity, generosity, creativity, right at the heart of things. And I've been describing that for many of us, we are looking for love in all the wrong places.

[04:28]

That we imagine that if we just get what we want, and get away from what we don't want, that we gather lots of pleasant experience and get away from lots of unpleasant experience, then we would be happy. Then we would find peace. Then we would be free. Then we would have refuge. And this I described yesterday as being rooted in this idea that many of us carry that there is somewhere this island where it all works out. And we may move toward and engage in our worldly lives in an effort to try to find that. And we often transfer that effort, that striving, into our spiritual life. So if it didn't work to have the right job, or partner, or money, or home, then maybe if I just wake up, maybe if I meditate, then...

[05:32]

then we'll get to that place where there's 24-7 enjoyable experience. So the problem with this fantasy of the island, especially if we don't recognize it, is that it keeps us constantly searching, grasping after, pushing away. And many of you probably already know, or you wouldn't be here, that that strategy, it doesn't make us happy. It doesn't bring us a sense of refuge. It just makes us tired because it's endless. So the teaching, and tonight I want to talk a lot more in detail about what is refuge and what do we take refuge in? and to hold all of that as a reorienting, as a way of reconsidering what it might be, what that might be for you.

[06:46]

So let me give you some definitions. The word, the Latin word, refuge, is refugiae. And this is important. It really points to the heart of something really essential about refuge. So re, in any word, to remember, to repeat, to return. Re means again. Refuge literally means to fly back. It's to take refuge is literally to turn around. It's not about going out to find something, the island where it all works out, or whatever it is you think is gonna make you happy. It's about reorienting ourselves to land here. This reorienting is very essential to understanding the shape of spiritual life, the shape of our practice.

[08:03]

that we are letting go of what Suzuki Roshi called the gaining mind, the mind that's constantly wanting to get and get away from, and instead we are coming home. We're returning to ourselves. This isn't a passive process. And in the Pali we say refuge is buddham or saranam gacchami. It has this spirit of going for refuge. But that going isn't about an effort or striving. It has a very full heart quality to it. It has a quality of devotion. We're going for refuge. We're giving ourselves over to something. And in the Japanese, we say namu kiei butsu.

[09:05]

Namu kiei is the same, but in the Japanese language. And kiei was described to me 30 years ago, maybe, when I sewed my first rakisu, a small robe that many people in the room are wearing. And when you sew a robe, With each stitch, you recite, namo kie butsu, namo kie butsu. And you give yourself, it's such a beautiful exercise. I give myself to the Buddha. I give myself to the Dharma. I give myself to the Sangha. And I remember Blanche Hartman, who was the sewing teacher at that time, And I said I would do a shout-out for Tim Wicks, our tanto here, who has taken up the mantle of that beautiful practice, the sewing practice, and has continued to share Blanche's words and teachings.

[10:26]

And it was sort of seared into my mind, her description of this. And she said, kiei means literally, namu kiei butsu means literally to throw yourself into the house of Buddha. So you can feel the spirit of this. When we say we take refuge, we're not actually taking something. We're actually giving something. We're giving ourselves over to something. And this spirit, you can hear in it that refuge is not, there's nothing passive about it. It's not a withdrawal. It's not a, I take refuge as a way to get away from what's unpleasant. This spirit of kie, of throwing oneself into, has the flavor of this quality of wholeheartedness, which is so...

[11:27]

much a part of the essence of this particular lineage of Zen. Dogen Zenji, the founder of the lineage, in his, called the acupuncture needle of Zazen, in his description of meditation practice, he says, realization, I'll abbreviate it a little bit, realization is effort. without desire. It's a beautiful, succinct way of describing the quality with which we practice, that we make a wholehearted effort not to get somewhere, but to be right here. And we do that without assuming, wanting, grasping after a particular outcome. We don't know how it's going to turn out, but as I was saying to the class last night, we do our best, and that doing our best has this quality of full engagement, wholeheartedness.

[12:35]

I remember years ago hearing a quote from the poet David White, and he said something like, The solution for burnout, and we might adapt that to our time and place and say the solution to overwhelm, to despair, to a sense of hopelessness is not a vacation. It's not a withdrawal. The antidote to burnout, to despair, to hopelessness, he said, is... full engagement. And we find when we give ourselves in this way, when we devote ourselves, not with a kind of striving effort, but with this heartfelt quality, that the giving and receiving becomes reciprocal.

[13:42]

That the more we fully engage with the world, the more the world fully engages with us. So this begins to give you a bit of a flavor of the quality of refuge, what this means, which, at least for me, is very different than I might have imagined. I always thought of, you know, shelter from the storm, right? Refuge is a place where you go and kind of hunker down and stay dry. That's not what's being pointed to here. So... After having just said that there's not really a place that's called refuge. It's more of an attitude. It's more of a how we engage with life. I'm going to contradict myself and tell you that there actually is a place. Do you feel the island pop up in your mind? A place.

[14:45]

Where is it? It's actually on an island. There is a place called the city of refuge. It's an actual physical location on the big island of Hawaii. I visited there. And it has a really interesting story behind it, which I think also helps illuminate the meaning of refuge. Again, not so much as a location, but as in the spirit of it. So long, long ago... the native peoples who lived on the big island of Hawaii had a ritual in which if someone in the community behaved badly, did harm in some way, that if they could get themselves to the city of refuge, which is this little spit of land, and this is not an easy trek,

[15:48]

This is hours on the hard lava, you know, earth, under the beating hot sun, probably pursued by whoever it is you did harm to. So this is a treacherous journey. But if you can make it to the city of refuge, you're forgiven. And this to me feels so much like the essence of what refuge is. It's that ability to recognize that, as I said last night, we're all doing the best we can. We do our best knowing we're gonna mess up. We're gonna botch things. We're gonna forget things. We're gonna do harm. And It is in the spirit of refuge that we recognize that we can be forgiven. Primarily, we begin by forgiving ourselves, right?

[16:52]

That instead of, as we talked about last night, piling on more arrows, judging ourselves, criticizing ourselves, that we recognize the harm that's been done, and we begin with forgiveness. This... This quality, this capacity of beginning again. Beginning again. We fall down, we get up. We fall down, we get up. We begin again, over and over and over. This is the nature of awakened life, actually. And it includes an attitude of humility, a willingness to shift from the idea that I'm trying to get it right to understanding that I and you and all of us, we're doing the best we can and we're going to mess it up.

[17:55]

But we can be forgiven. We can begin again. So we enter with a spirit of humility and we develop a quality of of resilience, of this ability to keep coming back, to keep flying home, returning, over and over. So all of what I am pointing to is an attempt to help us reorient how we think about refuge. not as an escape, not as a withdrawal, not even as a place, but as a way in which we engage with ourselves, with each other, with the world, that invites us to engage wholeheartedly, knowing that music will come out of who knows where, knowing that we can engage wholeheartedly and we're going to mess it up sometimes.

[19:08]

but we can begin again. Especially we begin again if we give ourselves fully to what we're doing, but we don't withdraw. You know how tiring that is to hold back the kind of tightness of spirit? It's exhausting. It takes a lot of courage. It takes a lot of heart to give ourselves in this way. knowing that we're imperfect, knowing that we're going to bungle and boggle things, right? But repeatedly to build this capacity to return, return, return. Probably my favorite passage from Dogen Zenji, and also one of my favorite descriptions of this spirit of reorientation comes from Dogen's Genjo Koan.

[20:21]

And I mentioned last night the Genjo Koan as a translation of it could be the koan of what's arising right now. So moment by moment, Our taking refuge means we find a posture, an attitude, a way in which we meet the moment. We meet what's arising right now. Here's what he says. And I invite you to let the imagery of these words bubble up as I speak rather than just listening to the kind of words themselves here it is when you sail out in a boat to the middle of the ocean where no land is in sight and view the four directions the ocean looks circular and it does not look any other way but

[21:37]

The ocean is neither round nor square. Its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as your eye of practice can see at this time. All things are like this. Part of our humility is recognizing that no matter how much we can see, that our circle of seeing is limited. That we are always only seeing as much as our practice eye can see at this time. And when we recognize this, we maybe are willing to loosen the grip on insisting on our tightly held views and opinions.

[22:39]

about ourselves, about each other, about the way things should be. I was recently on vacation, which I don't do very often or frankly very well, but I went on a vacation, real one, to the Galapagos Islands. It was quite something. And during that vacation, I lived on a boat for about eight days So I spent a lot of time in the middle of the ocean. And it's true. If you're on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and you have enough elevation to look around, it looks like a big circle of water. So this is what he's pointing to. And for most of us, this is the way that we live in our life. We're looking across the surface of things. we're taking a horizontal view.

[23:41]

And when we take that view, what's most interesting is getting from here to there. We spent a lot of time on my trip on this boat. What did they call it? We're going to do navigation tonight. Tonight, that would mean we're going to get from this island to that island. So we spend a lot of our time trying to get from one place to another. But every day that we were on this trip, we had an opportunity at least once a day to put on a snorkel mask and get in the water. So instead of looking out at the ocean, we actually got in the ocean. And for anyone who's ever looked underwater, right? So we're shifting our gaze here. Instead of looking across the surface, we're dropping down. We're shifting. and looking under. It's like a palace.

[24:44]

It's like a jewel. There are whole worlds under the water. I saw fish and stingrays and sea lions and sharks, dolphins, penguins, pink flamingos, And for me, the optimal moment, my favorite moment of the whole trip was communing for about 15 minutes with an octopus. Extraordinary. So this is a metaphor and it's also a directive, it's a direction that we engage in our practice, we shift our gaze from looking out across the surfaces to dropping down. This is what we practice. We practice unhooking from the view that we usually hold in which we're looking out, trying to get from point A to point B, and we reorient ourselves with a full and wholehearted invitation to be

[26:03]

right here so one of the things that's interesting to me about Dogen Zenji so some of you know that he is said to be responsible for bringing these teachings from China to Japan and he was a prolific writer a philosopher, a deep practitioner, a poet, a word maestro. In all of his teachings, he emphasizes very strongly the practice of what we call shikantaza, of just sitting. Just sit, just sit, just sit. Over and over, he underscores the importance of this. As Dogen approached his own death, as Dogen was confronted with his own mortality, he didn't sit in meditation.

[27:18]

The story goes that what he did was he inscribed the characters Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and he wrote them on a pillar, and he circumambulated around and around. I take refuge in Buddha. I take refuge in Dharma. I take refuge in Sangha. Budam saranam gacchami. Dhamam saranam gacchami. Sangam saranam gacchami. Namukie butsu. Like this. This was his practice. He was deeply devoted to the refuges. Some of you know that Dogen created sort of a unique way of laying out the Bodhisattva precepts, the 16 Bodhisattva precepts that we hold in this lineage.

[28:22]

And if you look at the whole arc of those 16, what you'll notice is that at the beginning and the end, it's all about refuge. So the first of the sixteen precepts are the three refuges. And the tenth of the grave or essential precepts is the admonition not to abuse the triple treasure, the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. So this teaching for him was essential. And actually the teaching of the triple treasure, the three jewels, is consistent across all schools Buddhism you'll hear it as I did this morning in morning service or if you do a meal chant you'll hear reference to the triple treasure to the three jewels consistently and

[29:28]

I remember the first time I, it wasn't the first, it was one of the first times I sat Sashin. It was out at Green Gulch Farm. And every day we were doing the meal chant in which we said, we venerate the three treasures and give thanks for this food. Three treasures are the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. This is what we take refuge in. So if we're talking about reorienting, instead of taking refuge in pick your poison, whatever it is that you think will make you happy, the direction is turn toward this. Turn toward Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. So we venerate the three treasures and give thanks for this food. This kind of... reciting and appreciating of the three treasures shows up all the time. Anyhow, I had been doing oreo-ki meals in the meditation hall and reciting this meal chant multiple times a day, and I had no idea what the three treasures were because I was relatively new.

[30:44]

I just was saying the words. And then one day, the teacher, the abbot, gave a talk, and he talked about what the three treasures are. Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And I remember the woman who was sitting in the seat right next to me, she sort of leaned over like this and said, I thought the three treasures were breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So for those of you who have ever sat for a while, a day or more, you will appreciate the humor, right? Because the meals are the treasures. The meals are the only sort of relief that you get in the course of the day. So for those who maybe will be sitting your first one day sitting this Saturday, if you need a moment of comic relief, you can recall that story. So I want to talk a little bit about each of these treasures.

[31:51]

to give us a sense of where it is that we're reorienting to. Where are we placing our wholehearted devotion and care? So each of the refuges can be understood in a variety of different aspects. There's kind of a traditional historical way that each treasure is understood. And then there's also a way in which sort of at that horizontal plane that we widen out and understand it beyond the more narrow historical context. And then there's that vertical descent. There's the essence. What is it that this, I was going to say precept, what is it that this refuge is really pointing us to? So we take refuge in the historical Buddha Gautama Siddhartha, the human being who lived 2,600 years ago, as I've been saying, in also very difficult times, who woke up.

[33:03]

Some of you may know the story about, it's probably a bit of a mythic story, but the story is that after the Buddha's awakening, he's walking along the road, looking particularly glowy and happy. And for anyone who's ever sat for a while, you may know what that feeling is like or have seen it in someone else. There's sort of this radiance that can come. Anyway, he's looking pretty great and someone notices and says, wow, you look really great. Like, what's the deal? Are you a deva? Are you some kind of a god? They ask him these questions and he says, no, no, no. And they finally, they say, well, what are you? And he says, I am awake. And it's important that we recognize this human dimension of the Buddha because this path and this possibility of a kind of radical reorienting is possible.

[34:12]

It's a human path. It's here for us. And if you're the person in the room who's going, not me, yes, you. The Buddha, as a young man, had a very rough time, actually. His mother died very soon after his birth, and he was being slotted to become the next kind of head of the clan, which he was terribly ill-suited too. He was more of a poet than a leader. And he struggled quite a bit. And it was out of that human struggle and his wholehearted dedication to finding a way, to finding a way to understand suffering and the end of suffering, it's from that that he offered these teachings for us. human beings like him.

[35:16]

So we take refuge in this human potential embodied by the historical Buddha, and we take refuge in the fact that there have been many awakened teachers over time, that it wasn't just limited to one person, but that these teachings have been passed warm heart to warm heart, as we say, across time and place and culture and language, all the way to now. And that the invitation to step in, the invitation to take refuge, to turn toward, to remember this possibility is here with us as well. And maybe the biggest reorienting in taking refuge in Buddha is in the essence of it.

[36:18]

So the essence of taking refuge in Buddha is taking refuge in the possibility of awakening. But at the heart of that, we're taking refuge in our own Buddha nature. This is a radical thing for those of us, many of us, who grew up in Western culture, where regardless of what your religious or spiritual upbringing has been, you are familiar with the idea, it's kind of infused into the culture of original sin, that we are fundamentally flawed and we have to work our way toward salvation. Buddha nature offers exactly the opposite perspective, that all of us, we're fundamentally good, It's just that we're kind of mixed up. We get disoriented. We get confused.

[37:21]

We end up imagining that what will help us, what will be useful to us or to others, we look for that in the wrong places. And so the teachings are pointing us back. They're pointing us back to the right, to the useful places to look, and they're pointing us back to our own fundamental goodness. It's because of this fundamental goodness that we can fall down and get up. And fall down and get up. Because when we fall down, it's not because we're a bad person. We don't have to riddle ourselves with arrows. We fall down because we lost our way for a while. We forgot to come home. We forgot who we are. We forgot to take our seat. And in any moment, in that spirit of refuge, of flying back, we can return.

[38:26]

We can remember. We take refuge in Buddha. We take refuge in Dharma. So in the historical context, the Dharma are the Buddha's teachings. And the Buddha taught for different versions, about 80 years, perhaps, a long time. And he talked a lot. And nothing was written down that he said for about 400 years. His teachings were passed on in an oral tradition. They were ostensibly remembered by his disciple, Ananda, So if you read the Pali Canon, it begins, the suttas begin, thus have I heard. That's Ananda's voice remembering the words of the Buddha. I have some doubts myself about some of the accuracy of what was written down.

[39:30]

Because the people who wrote it down had particular positions of power, of privilege, and a certain orientation. that they wanted to maintain. But if you read the teachings, you can begin to glean the spirit of it. And there's a beautiful interaction in which someone asks the disciples, the Buddha's disciples who are grieving the death of their teacher, and they say, well, now that your teacher is gone, who's going to replace him? You know? Do you have the next person to step in? And they say, no, we don't have another teacher. The Dharma is our teacher. So in a broad way, the Dharma, beyond just the specific words of the Buddha recorded in the canon, the Dharma means truth. And it is the radical premise and promise of this path.

[40:36]

that if we're willing to sit in the middle of what we refer to as things as they are, the genjo koan, the koan of what's arising moment by moment, if we're willing to do that, the truth will set us free. And I'm not talking about a truth on this page, or a truth in the Pali canon, or a truth in any book somewhere. I'm talking about a living truth. It's really about a practice in which we're shifting from believing our ideas to trusting the immediacy of our direct experience. The Buddha said over and over, ehi pasiko, come see for yourself he invited us to discover in our own direct experience what's true it's a pretty radical thing in the world that we're living in today to take refuge in the truth in a world in which there's so much spin and deception and intentional distortion and it

[42:04]

It's no wonder that the world, the ground feels, you know, it's sometimes hard to find your feet because, but if we put down the 24 seven news cycle and social media and all of our words and views and opinions, and we just sit and notice and pay attention to what's actually happening, this is what it means to take refuge in The living truth. I remember once I was living at Tassajara and Mel Weitzman was the abbot and teacher of the practice period. I was sitting in a ceremony. Someone asked him, What is the truth?

[43:07]

And he had this great answer that I still remember. He said, I invite you to do this as I give you the answer. He said, truth has many faces. Look around. Truth isn't up here. Truth is... what we see, what we hear, what we smell, what we taste. This is where we discover, this is what Dogen called the Dharma written on shells and leaves, the living world that our practice invites us into. All right, one more, one more jewel, the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. I think it was two nights ago in the orientation for the intensive, several people said that it was sangha community that they were really seeking, that that's why they had come.

[44:18]

And we definitely live in a world in which our sense of community, certainly post-COVID, but even before, can feel very fractured. fractured, divisive, lonely. We have an epidemic of loneliness, I'm told, in our country. So sometimes Sangha is called the forgotten jewel. It's the one that we overlook. The Buddha and the Dharma seem kind of cool and sexy, but the Sangha, maybe, maybe not. That may or may not be true for you. And there's a story in which Ananda, the Buddha's attendant, the one who remembered everything, he comes to the Buddha all excited and he says, I understand. I understand. The Buddha says, what do you understand? He says, the Sangha is fully half of the holy life. Ananda's expecting a gold star.

[45:21]

But instead, as is often the case, Ananda kind of plays a foil often. the Buddha reprimands him and he says, don't say that, Ananda. Don't say that. The Sangha is the whole of the holy life. So in the early history, the Buddha did this radical thing of creating this wildly inclusive Sangha in a very strict caste system. Everyone was invited in, even women, eventually. but we'll get to that later in another talk. It may be as hard to imagine how radical this was, what he did. That people who weren't allowed to look at one another or touch each other's shadows were invited to come and practice together as we are here. Stunning that he did that.

[46:24]

And when we broaden from that original, what he called the fourfold sangha, monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen, all equal participants in the community. When we broaden out, we understand sangha as any intentional community that comes together, like us. That we come together in service of something that we love. that we care about, that matters to us. I have a few more things to say and not a lot of time, so I'm choosing which one. Well, many of you know this quote from Margaret Mead, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world.

[47:25]

In fact, it's the only thing that ever has. This is the power of Sangha, the power of coming together. And I've had the great benefit of studying with, and most recently last summer, teaching with Professor Jan Willis, who was a student and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. And she tells this beautiful story about marching with Dr. King as a teenager when she was in high school. And she tells a story that has just inspired me so much, you know, because we live in a culture in which we tend to uphold the leaders, you know. those key figures who are in charge, and we forget. We forget that it takes a village.

[48:27]

We forget all of the other people behind the scenes. I felt this so much being here in this role. There are so many people who are helping me that I couldn't do it. It's very clear. There's no way. Not possible. I would be in a pile somewhere, exhausted, but I have all of these wonderful people. who are attending to and caring for all of the details. Anyway, she tells the story that as a teenager, she would go to march and that there was this invisible, unseen group of what she called the church ladies. And the church ladies, their job was literally to vet each person who was gonna go out and march because these people were likely going to face very difficult circumstances, you know, dogs and fire hoses and insults and police batons and all kinds of potential violence.

[49:35]

And they needed each person to, they needed to ensure that each person wouldn't flip out, basically get reactive, that they could hold their seat. And that was their job. And no one ever hears about these women. And this is an example of the power of Sangha, that behind any great movement, any change that we want to enact, it takes all of us. And some of us may get on the marquee, but you can be assured that there are many, many people behind whoever that is. who are also doing their work. So this is the essence of the Sangha Jewel, is this understanding that we are deeply and inextricably interconnected. This is the essence of that truth, of the Dharma, is we're part of a web of being.

[50:41]

It is understood in the Bodhisattva vows that it's not really possible for any one of us to wake up and be free while others suffer. And this understanding is rooted in love. And this is the essence, the real heart of what sangha is. And I don't mean love as a feeling or an emotion. I mean love as a force. Love is that thing that holds us together. It's the force that we need in a time when things seem to be falling apart, coming unraveled, shattering left and right. When we take refuge in Sangha, we take refuge in our capacity to engage together in this way because we are together. Just as we take refuge in Buddha because we can trust in our own innate Buddha nature.

[51:45]

And we take refuge in dharma because we understand that the truth that we're seeking is right here. It's not someplace else. We find it as we give ourselves to sitting right where we are, to returning, to flying back, to coming home. So I thank you for indulging me and running a little bit over. And I hope that these words and images and my effort to help all of us reorient and turn toward these jewels that are well worth our care and devotion. that it will help us find our way together.

[52:48]

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.

[53:13]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_98.1