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. I'm very happy to be here tonight talking to you. My name is Greg Fane. I'm the tanto at Tassajara. That means head of practice. Um, And you can also call me zenshin. That means undivided heart. There's a couple of things I want to say right at the outset. First off, I want to thank and acknowledge my teacher, that old Buddha, Sojimel Weizmann Roshi, abbot of Berkeley Zen Center, my home temple. all-around great guy.

[01:01]

And I also want to say that my talk is just to encourage you in your practice. So I don't have any other agenda. If you learn something new and interesting, so much the better. But really, I'm only here to, as best as I can, encourage you in your practice. And on a practical note, I forgot to bring a timepiece of some kind. That might come in handy if you don't want me to just go on and on, which I'm probably capable of doing. So thank you, Ino-san. Thank you, thank you. The Great Assembly thanks you. I'm really happy. Probably if I have a big grin on my face today is because this is the first time I've ever done two yoga classes with Darcy Lyon in one day.

[02:08]

So that feels pretty special to me, leading this retreat with my actual yoga teacher, Darcy Lyon, who teaches in the Anasara tradition. She became my yoga teacher when I was living in San Francisco and practicing at City Center. And I don't know, sometime... Last year, I guess, I said, we should do a retreat at Tassahara because, you know, Anusara, Tassahara, they rhyme. Yeah. And I just, I really connect with Anusara Yoga. I really... kind of also imprinted, sort of, on Darcy. There's Hayes Valley Yoga Tree, mostly Anasara Yoga there, many teachers.

[03:11]

So she's not the only teacher I've been to, but I sort of imprinted on Darcy like a little baby bird. But Anasara sometimes is called heart-opening yoga. I can't say, this doesn't always happen, but sometimes I'll be finishing in a class and laying there on my yoga mat doing shavasana, you know, corpse pose, and then the little tear ducts open up. So wild. They just go, blip, [...] and then make the two little puddles on my yoga mat. What's that about? Very mysterious. Maybe I like that aspect because that's like Zen practice. I haven't figured Zen practice out either. What's going on with Zen practice? I don't know. I think it's no mistake.

[04:18]

It's pretty not remarkable. that the most retreats, the most popular retreats we have in the summer guest season at Tassajara are some kind of Zen and yoga retreat. I think they just go so well together. Zen and yoga go together like two things that go really well together. They're both body practice, you know, body practice. People sometimes get funny ideas about Zen practice that, you know, what they think is going to help. It's just body practice. It's just chopping wood, carrying water, sitting zazen.

[05:20]

So, also I think Darcy and I are really working well together as co-leaders of this retreat. She calls herself a yoga geek. I call myself a zen geek. I thought maybe we could call the retreat geeking out on yoga and zen. But in fact, what we decided to call the retreat is the retreat is called Going for Refuge, a zen and yoga retreat. And the little blurb, we wrote our copy together. That was a lot of fun. I guess that was... last year or maybe January. I can't recall. And we wrote, come explore what it means to take refuge in our own open hearts. Because Anasara is heart-opening yoga. In our own open hearts through the practice of Anasara yoga and Zen. So, you know, Darcy's been leading these amazing classes and talking about the philosophy of Anasara.

[06:26]

and I've been talking about Zen practice, and I've been talking about taking refuge in the triple treasure, which is Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And this is very foundational, very fundamental. This is fundamentalist Buddhism. It's totally basic to all schools of Buddhism. All schools of Buddhism say, go for refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, the sangha. When we do our evening refuges, after evening zazen, we chant the refuges in Pali, which is the oldest language in which Buddhist teachings were written down. Even before Sanskrit, Buddhist teachings were written down in Pali. And so we chant, buddham saranam gacham mi It's like a lullaby.

[07:38]

So sweet. They don't do this in Japanese Zen temples. This is American Zen. This is Zen Center Zen. And I love it. I just... Love it. It's one of my favorite things. Maybe second only to the rogue chant. I just love chanting the refuges at night. It's like our lullaby. Before we go to sleep, remember, remember, this ancient way, this ancient way, taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. So I looked up the word refuge. It's a noun. My dictionary says, it's a condition of being safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble. He was forced to take refuge in the French embassy. That's what it says. That's what the dictionary says. He was forced to take refuge in the French embassy.

[08:42]

Or, I sought refuge in drink. It comes from Fugere. which means flee, like fugitive, means to run, to flee, and re, back, to go back, to return, to flee back quickly, to safety. And, you know, I feel very safe in Tassajara. I think that Tassajara is a refuge in that sense. We were just a... A couple days ago, when Abbot Paul was down here, he was leading a workshop just for the students. And this is a continuation of something he'd done for us in the beginning of the summer practice period. And we were doing different experiential things, one of which was a sensory awareness exercise, where half of us

[09:50]

were laying down on the floor. This was out in the tent yurt. Half of us were laying on the floor with our eyes shut, and the other half were walking around and putting rocks on various parts of people's bodies and just letting the rocks stay there. We would just be aware of that sensation, sensory awareness, sort of taking us out of our usual ways of thinking. American Zen, you know. Pretty neat. But the thought came up for me. Okay, I'm laying here with my eyes shut and letting random people put rocks on me. I feel very safe here, you know. That's actually okay. I'm safe, you know. It's a little weird, but why not? It's okay, you know. I was actually able to open up to that. So in early Indian Buddhism, going for refuge basically had this classic meaning of going back, fleeing, returning to safety.

[11:05]

It's very similar in the way we use it in English, to shelter or protect an asylum. And taking refuge in the Buddha meant, originally, The Buddha, you know, because he was walking and talking and teaching. And then, you know, the historical Buddha, the enlightened one. And the Dharma means the teachings of the Buddha and the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Pentacle Rising, what have you. And Sangha was originally, you know, the order of monks and nuns. practicing together. One fun thing about giving a talk is looking stuff up. So I found the story of the first going for refuge from the Vinaya, the Vinaya Pataka. It says, Later, after the group of five ascetics heard the Dhamma and became Arhats, Yasa, the son of a rich merchant, came to the Buddha.

[12:13]

When the Yasa's father came looking for him, The Buddha made it so that he did not see Yasa and preached on the Four Noble Truths. Then the merchant saw and reached and found and penetrated the Dhamma. He said, Magnificent Lord, Magnificent Lord, the Dhamma has been made clear. I go to the Blessed One for refuge and to the Dhamma and to the Sangha of Bhikkhus. Beginning from today, Lord, let the Blessed One receive me as his follower. who has gone to him for refuge as long as breath lasts. And he was the first adherent in the world to take the triple refuge. So this is, like I said, fundamental. It goes all the way back to the time of the Buddha. And in our tradition, the triple treasure, taking refuge in Buddhadharma and Sangha, is the beginning of our 16 Bodhisattva precepts. So we have the three refuges, the three pure precepts, and the ten grave precepts.

[13:15]

So we practice taking refuge in the triple treasure as precept practice, as how we live our life. Going for refuge is part of how we commit to live our life when we receive the precepts. I take refuge in Buddha, my own true nature. What is Buddha? What do we mean by that, beyond the historical Buddha? I think that Buddha is all of us. Buddha is our awakening minds and hearts. Our founder, Suzuki Roshi, said in a Dharma talk he gave 41 years ago at City Center in 1969, July 15th, 1969, he said, to take refuge in Buddha looks like to escape from this world and to go to Buddha, you know, refuge, to flee to.

[14:36]

But it is not actually so. To be one with Buddha is to take refuge in Buddha. Or to be Buddha, you know, is to take refuge in Buddha. There's no special home for Buddha, you know, or for us. The home is always within ourselves. So it is not to go to Buddha to find out Buddha nature within ourselves. To find out Buddha nature within ourselves is to take refuge in Buddha. I was eating in the student eating area with a couple of students, and they were asking me about the lineage of Buddhas and ancestors that we chant, and especially the Buddhas that come before historical Buddha, that come before Shakyamuni Buddha, you know, these Bibashi Buddha, Danyosho, Shiki Buddha, what's up with that, who are they? And I said, well, they're mythical, actually. They're mythical. They're not.

[15:38]

They weren't actually, as far as I know, as far as I can tell, kind of like Paul Bunyan Buddha. So I started teasing them and I said, you know, the lineage actually ends with you. No, wait, the lineage begins with you. Before there was Paul Bunyan Buddha, there's you. I think that's our understanding, you know. Practice begins with enlightenment, actually. Our senior Dharma teacher, Blanche Hartman, said that when she knew Suzuki Roshi, and he used to say all the time, you're perfect just the way you are. You're perfect just the way you are. A lot of people have heard this, and they always want to say, and you could use a little improvement, right? Everyone remembers that part. because it speaks to the part that says, no, I'm not. But actually, Blanche said, he said, you're perfect just the way you are all the time.

[16:46]

And he said, and you could use a little improvement that one time. And she said, when she used to hear him say that, she would say to herself, well, I just got here. He doesn't know me. I think we're all like that. It's hard to accept, actually. It's hard to accept. So we need to take refuge in that possibility. And I think that Suzuki Roshi, in his compassion, spent a lot of time reminding us of this. Another thing he said, which I'm very fond of quoting, is he said, maybe you think you are green apples hanging on a tree, waiting to ripen so that you can be Buddhas. But I think you are already ripe, perfect Buddhas now, ready to be picked.

[17:54]

I take refuge in Dharma, the truth of all existence. What is Dharma? It's the teaching. The Buddhist canon is vast and wide. I will never... They say that Dogenzenji read the whole Buddhist canon, but then, you know, he probably had an IQ of 250. I don't know anyone who has. It is a lot. And, of course, only a small part of it has been translated into English. And I don't have much hopes of learning Chinese or Japanese, so count me out. I'm not going to read the whole Buddhist canon. I do like to study, and I get a lot of encouragement in doing that, especially from Sojin Roshi. You should study more. So I do that. But the Dharma is being preached to us all the time, if we have ears to listen.

[19:03]

Going to Dharma for refuge is opening our ears to the teaching of crickets, the teaching of mountains and rivers, the teaching of this body. Darcy, in a class today, she said, don't take what I'm saying, you know, on just... face value. I can't remember exactly what she said, but worse to that effect. And she said, you've got to check it out for yourself. And I thought to myself, Buddha said that all the time. You've got to check it out for yourself. You have to open your ears to hear the Dharma. This is taking refuge in Dharma. One of my favorites, Kodosuwaki Roshi, he said, the law of the Buddha, that's one of the translations of the word Dharma, is the law, the teaching, the law.

[20:09]

He says, the law of the Buddha teaches how to become a lion. That is to say, how to live authentically one's true nature. Thanks to this, we can lead a life worth the pain of having lived. I take refuge in Sangha, our common humanity. What is Sangha that we take refuge in? Well, Tassajara is pretty obvious. It's pretty easy. We have these body of students. In practice period, it's even more obvious We all enter the practice period together. The names are read. This is it. These are the people who are going to practice together. This summer is a little more interesting because people are coming and going all the time.

[21:11]

But still, it's pretty obvious. We are the people who are committing to practice together and support each other. Okay. Bodhicandra, a student here, gave a class on the Heart Sutra. I didn't realize what a Sanskrit scholar he is. And he said that sangha, the word sangha in Sanskrit, has the meaning of bound together or even nailed down. I've been nailed down to Tassahara. He said, it's like the family, you know, that you're stuck with them. But we commit to it, you know. Taking refuge in sangha is committing to practicing with the people you're practicing with. And what really is your sangha? You know, like I said, people are coming and going all summer long. And then they leave their email addresses, and they friend you on Facebook, and they say, let's get together, or you bump into them in city center, you know.

[22:15]

Yeah, the sangha is vast and wide and mysterious. Sangha is all of us. The Sangha is planet Earth. You know, when oil is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, ow, that hurts. You know, that hurts. Because it's our body. That's our body that we're taking refuge in. That's Sangha, too. And even, you know, our workshop, one weekend, much too short, 25 people, and Darcy and me, You know, I'm not even going to get to know all these people. 25 people in so short a time. And yet, we come into the place of practice. We're taking up this practice of Anasari Yoga together and sitting together. And for the weekend, we're a Sangha.

[23:19]

So, it's kind of magic. In... Japanese Buddhism, in our tradition, we say namu kyei butsu, namu kyei ho, namu kyei so. I take refuge in Buddha, I take refuge in Dharma, I take refuge in Sangha. But the word kyei is very interesting. It relates to Sanskrit, saranam, which we say, you know, to go for refuge. And yet the characters in Japanese, Chinese, ki and ei, I asked Yuto-san about ki, and he said, like this, plunge in. You plunge in. You just throw yourself in unreservedly. And the other character, ei, ki ei, is something you can rely on.

[24:26]

something you trust. So to throw yourself unreservedly into something you trust, like a child jumping into his father's arms, says Dogen Zenji. Jump, and you know, it's cool. Daddy will catch you, like that. So it's just like throwing yourself into it unreservedly, but it's not a blind leap of faith. unreservedly into something you trust. So we sew. I was actually putting stitches in somebody's rakasu today. Namu, kye, butsu. We do that with every stitch. The needle goes in. Namu, kye, plunges in. Butsu. Sewing Buddha's robes. This is our practice. Taking refuge in Buddha over and over again. Dogenzenji says, Ehei Dogen, our founder in Japan.

[25:28]

One of the fascicles in his life work, Shogo Genzo, is called Taking Refuge in the Three Treasures, Kiei Sanbo. But it was written very close to the end of his life, kind of interesting. He wrote this, maybe even when he was dying, because it only exists as a rough draft. his disciple Ejo wrote this addendum at the end of it saying, alas, I'm sorry to say, this is only, no doubt the master would have made more, another draft and additions and elisions, but this is what I have and so I humbly offer it. So in this, Dogen goes on at some length about the Lotus Sutra. You knew I was going to get there eventually. He takes one verse from the chapter on the lifespan of the Tathagata, chapter 16.

[26:38]

This one kind of odd verse to me. Those living beings with their various offenses, through causes arising from their evil actions, spend asamkhya kalpas without hearing the name of the three treasures. And then, Dogen goes on and on about the Sutra of the Flower of the Dharma, the Lotus Sutra, and how important it is. And at one point, towards the end of this sort of long paragraph about the Lotus Sutra, he says, in this Sutra of the Flower of Dharma, there is the present preaching. Remember, the merits of the three treasures are supremely valuable and are supreme. Present preaching is anutara samyaksambodi. This is kind of the message of the Lotus Sutra. We all wake up together. So having confidence in that is taking refuge in the three treasures.

[27:44]

It is expressing our fundamentally enlightened nature. I wanted to sort of mention a couple of little possible misconceptions about or maybe wrong approaches. One is not too long ago I did a wedding. I really love marrying people. I love it when people get together and I love performing this ceremony. And part of the liturgy of the wedding I said, please take refuge in each other selflessly. Taking refuge in each other, we take refuge in all people and things. When I marry people, I always do at least some pastoral counseling. And one thing I'm on particular cautious of is people going into this commitment thinking...

[28:54]

this is going to fix me. This is going to complete me. Whatever was wrong with me before, now I've got this other person in my life, everything's going to be good. I'll be completed, I'll be fixed by doing this thing. So that's kind of a wrong view of taking refuge. In that same Dharma talk of Suzuki Roshi's, he says something similar. He says, precept observation is we should be very grateful to the precepts. It is the mercy of the Buddha. If you think the precepts will be a bandage for your life, or precept is the rules of your life, that is big misunderstanding. It means your effort is not, you're not sincere enough, actually, is what he said. You're not sincere enough. So, actually, you know, taking this commitment, taking refuge, is wholehearted.

[29:59]

Jump. Jump in. It's something you have confidence in. Confidence coming from with faith. I have confidence in this relationship. I have confidence in the Dharma. Another thing is there's a... liturgy in Zen Buddhism called Shushogi, which is sort of, you could translate as, I think, affirmation, faith and practice. And in this it says, do not take refuge in the spirits of mountains or ghosts of the dead and worship not the heretical shrines. Such refuge seeking lead us away from salvation. Let us instead quickly take refuge in the Buddha, the teaching, and the Buddhist community, seeking their not only release from pain, but complete enlightenment.

[31:01]

So, yeah, do be careful about what you're taking refuge in, please. I don't recommend taking refuge in drink. I don't recommend taking refuge in busyness or consumerism. These are all things that people do go to for refuge. So what is it in your life that you can have confidence in? This is a question we should all ask ourselves. I'm not saying, oh, you should take... I'm not like Bible thumper. Sometimes I act like a Bible thumper. But I'm not. I'm not actually saying, you, you should take refuge in the triple treasure. No. I'm saying... Whatever you take refuge in, have confidence in it. Let it be something that you can take refuge in with your whole heart. Well, I was going to go into talking about zazen because...

[32:17]

Anuttara Samyaksambodhi, complete enlightenment, taking refuge in the three treasures. Actually, all the precepts. My teacher, Sojan Roshi says, it's very hard to get in trouble when you're sitting zazen. You're actually upholding all the precepts. You're actually taking refuge completely. But I'm running out of time. So maybe I'll just say, especially to the students, what is it you're doing there on your black cushion? Maybe I'll just say that. I've actually had somebody tell me, I sit down and turn on the TV. What's going on? What's going on? Where is your effort? Where is your commitment when you sit down on your black cushion?

[33:18]

If you're just letting your thoughts run amok, that's not actually shikantaza. We say, you know, let the thoughts come and let them go. But actually, mirror mind. Not identifying with the mirror, not identifying with what passes in front of it, but just presence. It's hard to talk about. But there's effort there. Okay? It's not just hanging out. Finally, I wanted to say that, wow, there's a lot going on in Tassajara this summer. It's been a wonderful summer. Amazing so far. Amazingness yet to come. And I wanted to mention that come August 4th, we're going to have a big ceremony, Oban, which is a way of honoring the departed.

[34:24]

And if you have loved ones you want to remember, I think we all do, actually, you can go to the stone office and put the names down, and they'll show you how to fill out a paper slip, and we're going to hang up all the names all around the courtyard. on August 4th, and we're going to read all the names. So you don't have to be here on August 4th, but if you want your loved ones, your dear ones, the departed ones, to be remembered and to be actually brought into ceremonial space in a joyous way, please be our guest. Go ahead and give us those names. And I'm just almost exactly out of time I had to I can't just have this as a prof you know I have to read something maybe my favorite passage from Dogen and you know Dogen was a faith type make no mistake about it that my teacher Mel he always says this Dogen was a faith type he was a genius he was very erudite but he was from the heart so he just

[35:46]

This is from a fascicle called Birth and Death, Shoji, which is thought that maybe this was regarded as a sermon that was preached to Pure Land Buddhists. So it's got a very faith flavor. So my favorite Dogen quote. However, do not analyze or speak about it. Just set aside your body and mind. Forget about them. and throw them into the house of Buddha. Then all is done by Buddha. When you follow this, you are free from birth and death, and you become a Buddha without effort or calculation. Who then continues to think? Okay. Once again, I haven't left time for questions. It's not intentional, I swear. That's just the way it goes.

[36:47]

Thank you for coming, everybody. Thanks for being here. Good night. 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, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[37:13]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.57