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, everybody. My name is Shundo. I'm very happy to be sitting on the Dharma seat again. Lovely to see. I know many friendly smiling faces behind the mask. I want to thank Ana de Tanto for inviting me to give the talk today. I know that she and other people are not able to be here. And it's just, you know, it is amazing to be back in this room again. For those who don't know me, I lived in the temple for about 10 years, over a period of about 15 years. I came back a couple... Since the Zendo has opened up again, I have come for a couple of sessions of afternoon Zazen.

[01:05]

I also came a couple of weeks ago to hear my Dharma sister Kim give a talk. I was sitting right over there where Tim is now. And it was lovely to have that experience, not least because it reminded me what some of the forms are for coming and going. But then, you know, we find as we come back to these things that they're in the body. And even the chant just now, I know that I know the chant, and I hadn't thought about it ahead of time, and it just comes out. And it's wonderful that these things happen. And when I came down for Kim's talk a couple of weeks ago, I was sitting here while the denture was ringing, and I was astonished at the noise that the crows were making. And I was very happy. walking down the hill just now because I live a few blocks up Page Street, and it was wonderful to hear the crows gathering again in the trees outside and making a tremendous racket.

[02:07]

And where have they gone? What happens to them? Why do they shut up at this particular time? It's a mystery. What are they up to? But it reminds me of a wonderful story, one of my favorite koan stories. Xuansha was informally addressing his monastics when he heard a swallow singing. He said to the assembly, this is the profound Dharma of real form. It skillfully conveys the essence of the true teaching. He then descended down from the teaching seat. A monk asked for an explanation, said, I don't understand. Xuansha said, go away, no one will believe you. So when you listen to the crows, how can you miss the point? If the crows are still going, I'd be very tempted to get down and just say, there you go, there's your dharma talk. If anyone came and said they didn't understand, well, we're not allowed to hit people over the head anymore, but metaphorically, you would get hit over the head.

[03:14]

As I like to say sometimes in these situations, everything is expressing its enlightenment, moment after moment. We might as well What do I need to do with the microphone? Is it full or nothing? Oh, okay. Well, I'm sorry, everybody on this side of the room. I won't be looking at you. We have a good old-fashioned directional microphone. I was the Eno when the sound system was put in, and I now work for the guy that... put the sound system in as well, so I'm familiar with its history, if not its present manifestations and quirks. So, yeah, the short answer to Gensha is everything is expressing its enlightenment moment after moment, so why don't we join it? The other thing about Kim's talk is that right after that I started testing positive for COVID, which is not, I think, a result of coming to the talk. I think it was something else, so I had to practice being sick.

[04:15]

For a while, thankfully, my symptoms were pretty mild and I've been testing negative. So, May, thank you. Let me come and give the talk today. So I haven't had any symptoms since Labor Day, but I did manage to have nothing to do over Labor Day, which was certainly not my intention. I had wonderful plans. I didn't get to do any of them. And I didn't even get to clean my apartment, which is normally my great procrastination excuse when I'm preparing a Dharma talk. I think I'm going to clean something now rather than think about the Dharma talk. So my apartment is still dirty. And I've been feeling very lazy and trying not to exert myself, which is not my usual self-image. So I'm practicing with that. And this talk may not be as fully formed as it might have been. So apart from doing nothing over the Labor Day weekend when we had a heat wave, I also got to be doing nothing when the Queen died in England. And I think being English, I should say something about that. But I'm not entirely sure what to say.

[05:19]

There's nothing up close and personal with the Queen, but she was part of the fabric of the nation. She had been around my whole life, for sure. And there was a kind of a backdrop of stability that that offered to me growing up in England. And even when I look back at England, I was actually just looking at the footage today of the coffin being moved. And as it happened... I was in London about six weeks ago and for the first time in my life I think I walked through some of those spaces where the coffin was being brought. Normally it was a part of London I didn't spend a lot of time in. But it was just interesting to note that I had been walking through there and now it was full of the great and good. And lots of soldiers in fancy uniforms. And there's kind of a dislocation that happens with all this stuff. For me, hearing God save the king is dislocating on two levels. First of all, because it's the king, but also for the God stuff. And I'm finding right now, I'm finding the religious part of all the ceremony kind of more alienating than some of the pageantry is.

[06:20]

But I appreciate the ritual. And one thing about coming back into this room, this very Buddha hall, is thinking about, you know, ritual is what we do here at Zen Center. And a lot of it we do in this very room. So apart from talks and ceremonies and services, I'm thinking of weddings, funerals and ordinations and shusou ceremonies, and even the mountain seat, which is our own succession ceremony. And for those of you who have a sense of the history of City Center, which I'm going to talk about a little bit, Suzuki Roshi's last public appearance was in this very room in November of 1971 for the mountain seat for Richard Baker, which is about two weeks before he died. So... In terms of articulating my feelings for the Queen, I'm not sure I can really say anything. I have this vague longing that I wish she was still alive because I think that represents some kind of stability, some kind of like, this is how things are and we don't want it to change. In the same way that I have some vague longing that I was fit and young and healthy again, I didn't have to wear glasses to give a Dharma talk.

[07:25]

But that's the way that we suffer. So right now, I'm between teaching engagements at Zen Center. I don't come very often, but I do teach sometimes. And I was just last month teaching a class on Suzuki Roshi with Central Ab Ed. And next month, I'm going to be teaching a class on the Tenzo Kyokun. So I thought I'd reflect those two things, maybe holding them up against each other. Maybe there are some connections, or maybe you can form the connections in your mind. First of all, it was wonderful to be teaching with Ed again. We offered a series in January where we were looking at some previously lost talks from the archive. And for those of you who may not know, Zen Center has an amazing audio archive of about 11,000 talks going back to the 1960s, the mid-1960s, many of which have been kind of put in cupboards

[08:28]

in the building over the years or in other buildings over the years and kind of forgotten about. And many people have done a lot of work to uncover and catalog and digitize that. And I'm involved in the current iteration of that. But there are some amazing treasures, many of which still haven't been digitized. But there's a lot of talks from right here in this building from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s that I think people would enjoy having a chance to listen to. And spending time listening to a number of Suzuki Roshi's talks, which I have over the last few years, it's amazing not just to hear his teaching in his own words. I mean, we read the books and the books are amazing. And Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind was my first Zen book back in 1999. That's part of what got me to Zen Center and encouraged to pursue the practice. But how his sense of building a community was. So, you know, a very brief timeline for people

[09:28]

He came to San Francisco in 1959, but he was here as the parish priest for the Japanese community. And the temple was based up at Sakoji on Bush Street by Laguna. The building is still there. It's been transformed somewhat. But then it was transformed from a synagogue to a Zen temple in the 30s. And the recordings we have, you know, he came in 1959. Zen Center was incorporated in 1962. A recording started being made in 1965, and before then, and I'll only mention this because I know this is the focus of the upcoming practice period, the talks that he gave were just summarized in the Windbell magazine. He mostly talked about the Blue Cliff Record, which is what Ed and David are going to be looking at over the next few months here. And then Tassajara arrived in 1967, and then this building became available in 1969, and that was a direct offshoot of people wanting to spend time with Suzuki Roshi.

[10:29]

So instead of just coming for Zazen once or twice a day at Tassahara, people had the experience of living with him full-time, doing monastic practice, which was incredible. And it kind of helped build the community. And so people went to Tassahara for a year or two, and then they came back and they wanted to recreate that experience. And they wanted a building where people could live together and practice together. And this building became available in 1969 and was bought. And Zen Center has been here ever since. And one of the talks that we looked at in the last class series was one of the first talks that he gave in November of 1969. And he had, or was it December? Anyway, he'd moved in and he'd gone to Tassahara to teach at the Sashinan and come back. And I think everyone else had settled into the building more than he had. But it's very interesting to... to hear what he has to say about practicing in the city together. And also when I was researching for the class, I came across a wind bell.

[11:30]

And those who don't know what the wind bell is, you know, it was the Zen Center magazine. It was published in analog form for many, many years. And you can find the entire archive online at David Chadwick's site, cube.com. And a special shout out to David Chadwick for being, you know, an incredible tireless worker to preserve you know, Suzuki Roshi's legacy and history. So, you know, he wrote Crooked Cucumber and has assembled a huge amount of material, including scans of every single wind bale. And there is a fascinating edition of the wind bale, which, you know, included a lot of interviews with people who were living at the building in the first few months, in the first years. And when you read that, it's amazing, you know, the struggles that, or the struggles or the issues that people were dealing with then are very similar to the issues that I remember from my years in the building. And those of you who are living here may be feeling the same issues now, you know, the how to live together, you know, what it means to live and practice together.

[12:30]

You know, when people complain about doing bathroom jobs or having too many things to do or somebody else isn't doing their fair share. There's the division between people who live in the building, people who don't live in the building. You know, how to be in harmony with the wider community because Zen Center moved into what was already a well-established African-American community here, the neighborhood here. how families fitted in with the practice. And of course, really the bottom line is, what is the practice? What are we doing here? So the questions that people were asking 50 years ago, I'm sure, residents here and people who come here to practice are still asking that question. I'm asking that question still, and I've been practicing for more than 20 years. But what's also interesting is the names in the magazine. I think the cover picture has a bunch of residents. I think Rev is one of them. But, you know, there's... some of the things that he was saying, Steve Weintraub, Peter Schneider, people who are still with us, and some who have only recently passed, like Sojin Mel Weitzman and Yvonne Rand. So these are our Dharma treasures, you know, our Sangha treasures, our ancestors, and we should be, you know, we should be taking the opportunity to learn from them.

[13:37]

I'm including Ed in this, because he was intimately connected with Suzuki Roshi, while we can. I had the... privilege of getting to Tassahara earlier this summer to offer a workshop and while I was there I did a presentation on the Zen Mind Beginners Mind talk which was one of the talks that was lost. And Steve Weintraub happened to be at Tassahara at the same time and he spoke so movingly during that session of how Suzuki Hiroshi impacted him. And just hearing him say that and just seeing the emotion on his face brought exactly home what it is that Suzuki Hiroshi was doing. and why it is that we're still able to live in a building 50 years later because the Seguiroshi was here. So just a reminder that, you know, we live, you live among some of the leading figures of American Buddhism and don't take it for granted. When I first moved into the building, Blanche was the abbess. And she was, you know, an amazing grandmother to everybody.

[14:39]

And what I found most powerful were not her teachings from the seats, or even her zazen practice, which was pretty impeccable. But it was watching her day-to-day as she did things, how she moved through the building, how she dealt with people day-to-day. And so in that wind belt, there was a quote from Suzuki Roshi, which I wanted to share, which is kind of my theme from this half before I go to the Dogen half. He said, our practice is to help people. And how to help people is to practice our way in each moment. That is how to live in the world and how to practice Zazen. Of course, there are no special rules on how to treat things or how to be friendly with others. How we find the way in each moment is to think about how to help people practice in a religious way. If you don't forget this point, you will find out how to treat people, how to treat things, how to behave yourself.

[15:40]

And that is, at the same time, the so-called bodhisattva way. And this is, I think, you know, a very typical way that Suzuki Yoshio expressed the practice, like helping people, being friendly, not having a particular idea about things. And as I've listened to his talks, a number of his talks, I've been very interested in how he talks about enlightenment. And I think my sense is that he felt it was a pretty loaded word back in the day. And the people coming to Zen Center had this very particular idea about this enlightenment that they were going to get. And when they got the enlightenment, that was it. Everything was going to be great. And I'm sure I had that idea when I started practicing too. Maybe some of you did as well. Oh, I'll get enlightened. Then I'll be perfect. It'll be wonderful. Nobody will have any problems anymore. And there's kind of a grasping that comes with that. which is inimical to the practice, I think. And so when you read or hear Suzuki Roshi talking about enlightenment, he's usually de-emphasizing its importance.

[16:46]

And in some of the talks from the first Sesshin at Tassahara, which I found fascinating, which were again were some of the talks that had been kind of lost, he says, okay, you may have new experiences during Sesshin. You may even get a bit scared from some of these experiences. They may be very powerful experiences doing monastic practice and sitting long retreat for a few days. But what I'm going to tell you to do is continue your practice. Just continue your practice. Whatever goes on in your head, whatever you think is going on for you, just continue your practice. And that was his style. And there are some words that come up over and over again that I want to highlight this evening. And I was thinking of these as his skillful means for conveying the essence of the true teaching. And one of those words is calmness. There's a chapter in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind called Calmness, and one of the talks that we looked at this time, which was a totally lost talk from a 1966 one-day sitting, talking about calmness.

[17:50]

Now, anyone can be calm during Zazen, but can you be calm in the midst of activity? And that, he says, is true calmness. He also talks about confidence. Confidence in your actions because you know they're being informed by practice. So we sit Zazen and when we move from Zazen, we move from the non-dual world into the world of precepts informed by Zazen. We can have confidence in our actions when they're informed in that way. And I think my favorite word is composure. And I was discussing with Ed... before our class the other week, but I think he was using composure as a way of kind of taking the pressure off the idea of enlightenment. Instead of like, oh, am I enlightened or am I not enlightened? Like, is there composure? I know that Sojourn Mel Weitzman uses this word a lot in his teachings as well over the years. So thinking about what composure is, what that means for you. And to me, it's like, it's not the kind of the insecurity

[18:56]

where we want to fit in, we want to be liked, we want to get everything right. It's not fear and anxiety of the unknown and how the mind kind of spins what might happen. That's when we can replace those things with a sense of equanimity that what is happening is okay. The difficult things that I'm feeling are okay. And it's also the mind, you know, it's not the mind that is always selecting and judging. But the ability to say as he did, well, not always so. Maybe like this, maybe not. Or to the extent that this is true. So as he says, our practice is to help people. And to help people is to practice our way in each moment. If you don't forget this point, you will find out how to treat people, how to treat things, and how to behave yourself. And so he was bringing up over and over again his calmness, the confidence, and composure.

[19:59]

And he was also very explicit in these first talks in Page Street about finding an American shingy, like an American set of rules and regulations. Now, he was very skillful talking about rules. He always wanted to say they weren't kind of impositions, but just the sense of a guideline. But even though I think he said in one talk, I want to get someone to investigate how we can have an American set of Shingi, but I'm not sure that we've actually done that yet. We have our own regulations, but a lot of them, and especially if you go to Tassahara, you'll appreciate how much of them come directly from Dogen. So this is where I'm going to transition to talking about the Tenzo Gyokun. Now Dogen was also, just like Suzuki Roshi, a pioneer. bringing Zen into his country, he did it slightly differently in that he went to another country to find what he thought were the true teachings and then brought them back to what he often referred to as a barbarian nation. And I'm part of the Dogen study group with Chikido and several other people in the room here, which is a wonderful resource.

[21:10]

And we've had some speculation like the monks that Dogen was writing his amazing work for, you know, may have been incredibly uneducated country boys, you know, very young, kind of rough and ready. And of course, Dogen had a very aristocratic background, so we don't know exactly what he thought of his monks. But nevertheless, he was very interested in transmitting the true teaching to them and building a structure through which they could experience and practice that teaching, just in the same way that Suzuki Roshi did, you know, coming from this shared building at Shizukoji to building a monastery at Tassajara, you know, establishing a monastery at Tassajara and then establishing a building right here, the building that we're sitting in. And so as part of Dogen's writings and earlier than much of the Shoburg Enzo, you know, he wrote his Guidelines for Temple Administrator, the Ehe Shingi. But the great thing about them is that, you know, they're not just written for 12th century temple administrators, they're good for everybody.

[22:12]

And part of that, part of my confidence about Buddhism is the feeling that the wisdom traditions never go out of date and that the kind of wisdom that Dogen is talking about, you know, we don't go very far from the essential workings of the human condition. And he's dealing with those things. And just as a sideline, one of the things I managed to do when I had COVID was rewatch the Dogen movie that came out, I think about 10, 12 years ago. which is kind of wonderful and silly and inspiring and somewhat fictional, but also kind of amazing as well. If you haven't seen it, I recommend it as a pretty good entertainment. The Tenzo Kyokun, I'm going to do a three-part class, and I'm thinking of how to break the Tenzo Kyokun into three parts, the instructions for the cook. The first part really is, you know, what you do day and night, how the hours of the day are divided and what your responsibilities are in each day. And there's a phrase in that that has stuck with me for many, many years where he says, day and night, excuse me, day and night things come to mind and the mind attends to them.

[23:23]

At one with them all, diligently carry on the way. And this doesn't mean that we're on 24-7. Day and night things come to mind does not mean you have to worry about things day and night. It means at a certain moment something comes up. When that thing comes up, meet it. meet it with calmness, confidence, composure. At one with the way, at one with the more diligently carry it on the way. So whatever comes up, day or night, whatever arises, can you meet that in a moment and meet it with practice? In the second part, Dogen talks about being a young monk just arrived in China and his meetings with former Tenzos or established Tenzos. And they're wonderful stories and those are beautifully illustrated in the movie, very movingly. And Dogen asks one Tenzo, what is wholeheartedly engaging the way? And the Tenzo says, in the whole world, it is never hidden. And this is the crows outside on the wires.

[24:27]

This is Gensar hearing the swallow. This is everything expressing its enlightenment moment by moment. Can we drop our idea of enlightenment being some amazingly special thing that we have to grab and be there with it? In the whole world, it is never hidden. Moment by moment, every circumstance. Then in the third part, he talks about the three kinds of minds, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. The first of those is a joyful mind. He talks about how joyful we should be to be born a human. which these days might seem a little less joyful than it might have been previously, but remembering that Dogen was born in a time of famine and civil war and probably very short life expectancy and a lot of disease. As he says, if you were born in heaven, you would cling to ceaseless bliss. So, you know, in the human realm, we have just the right amount of suffering.

[25:32]

The Dharma is relevant to us. So with joyful mind, can we find gratitude? Can we find pleasure and... I think another word to go with that, but pleasure in what we have rather than dissatisfaction with what we don't have. The second mind is parental mind or sometimes called nurturing mind or grandmotherly mind, which we can think about how we take that mind of the parent. and extend it to beyond the family, to community and beyond. And if any of you have been paying any attention to the tributes paid to the queen, you know, everyone has talked about how she spent her life in duty and service to others. Questions I'm not going to answer is, does that make her a bodhisattva? We can think about that. I'm also going to invoke Blanche here as the archetypal grandmother of Zen Center.

[26:34]

And caring for everybody, And the third is magnanimous mind, sometimes called the great mind. And again, this is the mind of composure, the mind that can take a step back from getting enmeshed in the situations and scenarios we find ourselves in and see the whole picture. As he says, the four seasons cooperate in a single scene. We're in this cycle of birth and death, whether we want to be or not. It comes and hits us in the face from time to time. How can we meet that? with composure and calmness. And so Dogen's question, how do we wholeheartedly engage the way, brings his notion of practice enlightenment to the fore.

[27:37]

And this is again de-emphasizing the idea of enlightenment by itself and instead replacing it with the practice enlightenment of each moment. How do we approach this idea of practice enlightenment in each moment? Wendy gave a lovely talk about the Genjo Kohan a couple of weeks ago where she talked about the practice in practice enlightenment as the shila, samadhi and prajna. Ethical conduct, the concentration and the wisdom that often thought of as the three wings of practice. also a way that we can divide up the Eightfold Path. And I was thinking about that, I was thinking that that's one way we kind of put a lens on the ineffable. We're always having to put lenses on the ineffable in order to see something. And in this practice we deal with the ineffable, but not as the ineffable, we deal with it as each moment arising, as the crows on the wire, as the swallow singing. There are other ways that we can do that in our practice moment by moment.

[28:46]

And especially since the pandemic in my teaching, I've been thinking about the Paramitas and the Brahma Viharas as practices. Qualities that we can cultivate, ways that we can behave, ways that we practice, ways that we meet people. to come back to Suzuki Roshi, there are ways that he kind of approaches. He talks about practice enlightenment without necessarily using those words because he spent a lot of time paraphrasing Dogen for people who had no idea who Dogen was. Even when he directly talked about Dogen, he was doing a lot of work paraphrasing to make it simpler for people who were just beginning their practice. But there are phrases that he comes back to again and again. One of them that we looked at in Our recent class was making practice your own. So how do we make practice our own?

[29:49]

He talks often about our inmost request. How is it that we get in touch with that? How do we know when we've got... I talked about this with a young student. They say, how do I know that I've got to the inmost one? Well, keep looking. Keep looking, keep looking, keep looking. And Suzuki Roshi says, go through and through. This is a phrase he used quite a lot. Through and through. It's not just looking at something, but looking at it through and through until you see it in its true sense. Another of his favorite phrases. So we're holding a slight paradox here. In the whole world, it is never hidden. And how can we find our inmost request? How can we make this our own? How can we do it through and through? So I think in Zazen we get to tune in to some of this. We get to tune into all the flavors of ourselves.

[30:55]

And sooner or later we get more comfortable with all the flavors of ourselves. And there's an amazing twist that happens where as we become more intimate with ourselves, as we get... maybe a little closer to that inmost request as we start going through and through. We can start embodying practice when we're out from the Zazen cushion, out in the world, meeting others. And I think there's a connection in my mind between the wholehearted practice and authentic practice. And that authentic practice is what is in line with your inmost request. And a reminder that authentic or practicing wholeheartedly does not mean practicing flawlessly.

[32:05]

It's good not to forget that everybody, every teacher, Everybody practicing makes mistakes and it's full of flaws. I have made mistakes of my own. I vow to not make those mistakes again and I still don't know if I'm going to get that right. The important thing, as Suzuki Roshi says, no matter what you experience, no matter what happens, is to continue your practice. As Dogen says in his section on joyful mind, you should engage in and carry out this work. That's the work of looking after the monastery in this case. Engage in and carry out this work with the vow to include 1,000 or 10,000 lives in one day or one time. So give yourself wholeheartedly to the practice. So I'm sitting here on a Dharma seat that teachers had been sitting in.

[33:12]

sitting on for more than 50 years since Zen Center first moved into this building. Right now, there's a very particular flavor. It's the first time I've ever given a talk to a room full of master people. Zen Center has its own particular struggles and issues dealing with at the moment. We can also look back 50 years to read and hear what people were working with at the time. I'm part of what's called a Gen X teaching group and I was looking at some notes from an online meeting we had last year and people were thinking about how Dharma centers are becoming decentralized or de-emphasized as things move online. And that may be true and You know, nothing can replace this face-to-face transmission that we're doing right now.

[34:19]

Sitting down in my apartment in front of a screen can never replicate being on the Dharma seat like this. So how do we incorporate all these things? How, in the not knowing, what is it that we can hold closest? Can we find this real calmness in a noisy place? And those of you who sat Zaza in here, even at 5 o'clock in the morning, know what a noisy place it is, crows or no crows. I want to finish with a quote from this talk in 1966 where, you know, there's a very strong sense I get from this talk. There was a kind of a settled community. Tassajara was not yet open, but there were people who were sitting regularly with him. And Suzuki Roshi starts by acknowledging that he wants to be kind of consistent in his teaching. He wants to kind of give a broad sense of what the teaching should be. But then he says, but for me and for you too, systematic philosophical answer will not be necessary.

[35:28]

But the mutual understanding and friendship between us is more important. So I think Suzuki Roshi had this consistent message. through his years. Yes, we learn about practice. Yes, we study. But the important thing is practicing together, being together, sharing this practice space, even the online practice space. And I forgot to say hello to Kim at the beginning of this talk. Hello, Kim. I know she can't be here because she's quarantining. Sharing this Dharma space, sharing this moment, the moment that I had with the crows on the steps, is informing this moment here. The moment that you all had earlier in today, whatever it was, is informing this moment here. So no matter what happens with Zen Zen, no matter how many people are living in the building or what the financial future is, we will be able to practice like this.

[36:29]

Dogen gives me faith that this is the case. Suzuki Roshi gives me faith that this is the case. Everybody here gives me faith that this is the case. And so even if I didn't get a chance to fully flesh out the talk in the way I wanted to, because being a little brain dead during COVID, the title that I first thought of when Anna asked me to give the talk was Forget About Enlightenment, Just Try to Be Kind. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge. And this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:27]

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