Good morning, everyone. I don't know how many of you were here last week and know that we had a delightful visitor here with us all week, Shohaku Okamura Roshi, whom I always think of as a young monk because... When I met him, he was. He's the age of my eldest son, but he's now 51, so he's not so young anymore. And he was leading a study session where we were studying one of the essays in the collection of essays of Dogen Sanji called Shobo Genzo, which Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. This one was on spiritual powers. How many of you were here last week and heard them?

[01:05]

Good, there were quite a few. A lot who didn't, though. Anyhow, I very much enjoyed the week. And the one class I had to miss, it turned out he talked about Uchiyama Roshi's, his teacher, Uchiyama Roshi's teachings on birth and death, which is too bad because I really would have liked to have been here for that. When I first, Shohaku-san took me to meet Uchiyama Roshi in 1992 when I was in Japan. He and Suzuki Roshi were about contemporaries, although he lived another 20 or 30 years longer than Suzuki Roshi did. But when I went to see him, I was getting older, and he was older than I was, and he said, you know, when I go to homes for elderly people to give a talk, as I'm sometimes invited to do, they said, don't say anything about death, they don't want to hear anything about death.

[02:17]

He said, I don't know, at my age, I'm very interested in death. I said, I am too. So I'm sorry to miss this particular class, but luckily, Shohatha-san had some notes, which I'm going to use, and some poems of Shiyama Roshi's about the question of birth and death. But I think that, you know, on the Han, the instrument that calls us to the Zendo, that wooden block, most of you know what he is. There is a verse, which is often chanted just before bedtime at Zen monasteries in Japan. And it begins, great is the matter of birth and death. And a common way of speaking to someone when you're separating, someone's departing to go somewhere, is to say, odaiji ni.

[03:24]

Odaiji is the great matter, meaning the great matter of birth and death. So odaiji ni, please take care of the great matter. It's something that once we are settled in our understanding of life and death, I think it clarifies how we want to live. And so I am interested in talking about it, thinking about it, sitting with it, not in some morbid way, but in opening up to realize what is this great life we're all living. There's one story in... that I read in, I believe it was with John Roshi's book, Approach to Zen, which later was published with some editions as opening the hand of Zen, opening the hand of thought.

[04:28]

But there's a story of a monk who hears this squabbling going on out in the garden. He goes out there and these squashes are all squabbling with each other. And he says, hush, hush, stop that squabbling. Every one of you... your hand on top of your head. Do you feel something up there? Now follow that and see where it goes. And they follow the stem and they find they're all living on one vine. They're all living one life. And the squabbling stops. You know, there are various kinds of metaphors and teachers are always looking for metaphors that help you understand a subject better and that's one of the squashes and there's another one in these poems but there's also one that was the first one I was very distressed about the whole matter of birth and death when I first came to practice because that's what brought me to practice was coming up against

[05:41]

The sudden and unexpected death of a close friend who suddenly developed an inoperable brain tumor and was gone, which is in a coma within weeks and dead within months. And then I had a very serious infection and went to the hospital in septic shock. And the combination really, really rattled me. And in my searching around for how to live, knowing that I'm going to die, someone... I'm so lucky, someone told me about the Berkeley Zendo. And I went there, and I met Mel, and I met Suzuki Roshi, and I met Sozen. People should all be so fortunate. But one of the metaphors that I have found very supportive... and that's helped me a lot, appears in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind in the talk called Nirvana, the Waterfall.

[06:50]

Are any of you familiar with that? Well, he talks about... He talks about... Maybe I'll just... He says, I went to Yosemite National Park and I saw some huge waterfalls. The highest one there is 1,340 feet high. And from it, the water comes down like a curtain thrown from the top of a mountain. It does not seem to come down swiftly as you might expect. It seems to come down very slowly because of the great distance. And the water does not come down as one stream, but it is separated into many tiny streams. From a distance, it looks like a curtain. And I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes time, you know, a long time for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall.

[07:57]

And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time, I thought the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. It is as if the water does not have any feeling when it is one whole river. Only when separated into many drops can it begin to have or to express some feeling. When we see one whole river, we do not feel the living activity of the water. But when we dip a part of the water into a dipper, we experience some feeling of the water, and we also feel the value of the person who uses the water. Feeling ourselves and the water in this way, we cannot use it in just a material way. It is a living thing. Before we were born, we had no feeling. We were one with the universe.

[09:02]

This is called mind only, or essence of mind, or big mind. After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and the rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river or one with the universe you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore and we have no actual difficulty in our life. When the water returns to its original oneness with the river It no longer has any individual feeling to it. It resumes its own nature and finds composure.

[10:07]

How very glad the water must be to come back to its original river. If this is so, what feeling will we have when we die? I think we're like the water. We will have composure then. Perfect composure. Anyhow, I... was extremely helpful to me at that time in my life, and that's why I like to share it. I share it from time to time here from this podium in case there are people who haven't had the opportunity to meet this metaphor because I think it's very helpful for us to understand that we are all living one life, that there is this universal life that we participate in. And that, well, let me, there's one other quotation here that I would like to share with you from a book called Shine One Corner of the World.

[11:16]

These are kind of memorable moments that students had with Suzuki Roshi that David Chadwick collected in a book called The Shine One Corner of the World. The student says, one night after a Dharma talk, I asked Suzuki Roshi a question about life and death. The answer he gave me made my fear of death for that moment pop like a bubble. He looked at me and said, you will always exist in the universe in some form. Which is like the water returning to the river. So Uchiyama Roshi prefaces his comments by saying, there's no one who physically or instinctually wishes to die. When death comes, it is natural to instinctively desire to escape.

[12:21]

Be that as it may, it's stupid to react as though one were running away from the bill collector while the interest just piles up making the situation even more unbearable. As human beings who cannot avoid physical life and death, all of us wish to see clearly exactly what life and death is and to settle on our attitude toward it. Even though there may be no way to avoid the physical pain, we would all at least like to face death without the mental torment. as though having fallen into hell. What is important here is how to live having settled on our attitude towards life and death. These poems are on life and death. The first one, the first of the poems is a prayer.

[13:24]

My prayer, a higher, more comfortable life everyone seeking only to inhale, exposing themselves to the crisis of suffocation. This 20th century, this 20th century, age of the masses, I pray for the day when the ultimate wisdom may work in human beings and that we may become aware that inhalation and exhalation are one breath. Life and death together form one life. that a completely new prototype of human being, vividly living out the true life force as it is, inclusive of life and death, flowing from the depth of life, I pray may be held up rightly for the people of the 21st century. Professor Hiroshi told a story once, and I think it's included in a talk in...

[14:31]

the book, Not Always So, of a friend of his who was having a heart attack and he was very frightened because he kept trying to inhale and he couldn't inhale. And Suzuki Roshi said, I think if he learned to exhale as we do, he wouldn't have been so frightened. In teaching us breathing in Zazen, Suzuki Roshi emphasized The exhale. Just follow the exhale. Let it go out. Let it go out. Let it go out. And just watch it. And at a certain point it will turn into an inhale all by itself. You don't have to reach for it. It just becomes an inhale. And you can say, oh, I'm still alive. Fortunately or unfortunately. But he did have us... In, for example, following breath or counting breath, put our attention on the exhale and just let it go until it's ready to become an inhale in and of itself.

[15:43]

We know how to breathe. We don't have to, you know, we've been breathing since we were born. We don't have to direct the breath. We don't have to control the breath. We just have to be aware of it. Or... In practicing and being aware of it, we can begin to bring our mind here to where we are and be awake and aware of what's happening in each moment. Here at Early Morning Zazen, I have the opportunity every day to see if my mind is actually staying right here with me. Because I usually come into the Zendo right at the beginning of the Han. So I'm usually the first one sitting on my Tan. And the Tan I sit on happens to be one in which all the Assets are assigned.

[16:44]

It's for the office, the president, the vice president, the treasurer, and the secretary, and the director. And I'm facing out. So I have the opportunity every morning sitting there of noticing one of my companions on this pond walking past behind the altar, coming around to sit at their seat. And I say, oh, they're so-and-so. Now, be aware that they're coming so that you can bow to them when they bow to their seat. It's really embarrassing how often I can't remember for the 10 seconds or 15 seconds it takes for them to walk around and adjust their cushions and bow, that my mind has taken me off to la-la land somewhere. Anyhow, not there, and I know they're already sitting. No, not there.

[17:46]

But I get this opportunity every morning to check myself out. And you can too, as you're sitting there, if you're sitting next to an empty cushion. Or then you can notice, are you aware when the person is bowing next to you? They adjust their cushion and then they bow. Are you there for them? It's a nice little wake-up call. So our practice is not to, as I say, control our breath, but just to be aware of it. To be aware of this living being here. breathing in and breathing out. This next poem has a very nice metaphor in it. I like it very much. It's called Life and Death.

[18:46]

It says, water isn't formed by being ladled into a bucket. Simply the water of the whole universe is has been ladled into a bucket. The water does not disappear because it's been scattered over the ground. It is only that the water of the whole universe has been emptied into the whole universe. Life is not born because a person is born. The life of the whole universe has been ladled into the hardened idea called I... Life does not disappear because a person dies. Simply the life of the whole universe has been poured out of the hardened idea of I back into the universe. The image that I see there is perhaps the ocean of universal life and some of that water being ladled into a bucket called meat.

[19:58]

And there are all kinds of buckets, you know. There are big ones and little ones and shiny ones and tin ones and brass ones and wooden ones and clay ones and whatever. But this universal life that we're all living takes the form that I call me for some period of time and that returns to the universe. And I think that when we can... That's the great value of the experience of realizing that we're always one with the whole universe. This idea that we get that each of us is separate and distinct from the whole of life. The self and other that we can...

[21:01]

this division in the self and other that we are capable of making with our mind creates a lot of anxiety and difficulty and sometimes we find sadness and sometimes we find many different emotions arise from this notion of us being separate from the universe. So as we begin to notice that this separation is something that we do with our mind, and that we're all breathing the same air and living the same life. Well, actually, you know, we're breathing the same air, but the trees out there are breathing in the carbon dioxide that I breathe out. And I'm breathing in the oxygen that they breathe out. That's a pretty neat trick, isn't it?

[22:04]

I love it. So I think this metaphor, actually, that Uchiha Maroshi has come up with, if they... The universal life as a great ocean being, portions being put into various containers and then being returned to the ocean. It's quite similar to the metaphor that Suzuki Roshi gave us in Nirvana the Waterfall. And I recommend to you that you consider this as a possibility. If you, you know, the more you consider this as a possibility, the more you feel your connection with all the other mights, if you will, knowing that the life that we live is the same life.

[23:12]

And very likely, the feelings that you and I have are quite similar as well. There's another poem here of the Chama Roshis. Discriminations, thoughts, feelings, all are secretions inside our heads. Returning to the present reality of life, prior to the distinction between life and death, This is kinyo, which is a Japanese word, meaning returning to suchness. Suchness is just this, as it is, right now. This word suchness is very much used in Zen. This reality of this moment as it is.

[24:23]

always bringing us back again and again to just this as it is. Because our mind wanders off into all kinds of mental constructions and painful stories and we can really make ourselves miserable by telling and retelling and retelling some painful story of how this life has not been the way I wanted it. And we can do that if we want to. But if you notice that you're doing that, you might ask yourself, hmm, Every time I tell myself this story, I feel really bad.

[25:25]

Maybe I don't want to tell myself this story anymore. Even it's true. Who knows? Maybe it is. But even so, every time I tell myself this story, I feel awful. Well, gosh. Maybe I have some control over what stories I tell myself. Let me see if I can not tell this story this time. And each time I pick it up, as soon as I notice I'm chewing on that same old bone again, I can say, oh yeah, there's no taste. I don't like the taste of this bone. And we can put it down again. It's actually quite possible. I mean, some of us have stories we've been telling ourselves for years. years. I mean, one day, when I was secretary of Zen Center, head of the front office, I was ordained as a priest, a Vinciso, you know, and somebody rang the doorbell.

[26:36]

I went to open the door, and I had this thought, I bet this person thinks I'm on the inside. I mean, how inside can you be? I mean, what... But I still had that old feeling that I was on the outside looking in that there was something happening, you know, that was really the in-group that I wasn't a part of. That probably went back to when I was born and I had a mother and father and a sister and I thought there was something going on over there that I wasn't a part of. I told my sister this, she says, there wasn't anything going on over there. I carried that story. I was... I have to have been in my 50s when that moment happened. I mean, it's right here in this hall. And I can realize, I'm just making that up. And I don't have to. It was very refreshing and very liberating. So if you have any old stories like that, that are painful every time you bring them up, consider whether it might be more useful just to

[27:43]

Put them in a drawer and let them stay there. If you need them, they'll be there, but you don't have to take them out and look at them until they make you mad. You can save yourself in trouble. I know that sounds very easy, and I'm being very lighthearted about it. It's actually pretty difficult to give up our old stories. We identify ourselves by those stories. That's who we think we are. And I'm suggesting that we might take a fresh look and see things with fresh eyes. You know, Suzuki Roshi used to talk a lot about beginner's mind, the mind that doesn't know, the mind that's open to everything because we don't already have a fixed idea about how everything is. Let's open our eyes and see what's here now. So this fresh look is a very important notion in Zen.

[28:49]

This beginner's mind, this fresh mind that hasn't already been made up. But it's just looking, just returning to this moment, this reality as it is right now. Completely open to seeing whatever's there without any fixed ideas or any... prejudices, prejudgments, without any preferences, but just, what is it? What is this, I wonder? Giving a fresh look to everything, even if we think we know it all. Just give yourself the opportunity to see things with fresh eyes. Again, this poem, Returning to Light. Discriminations, thoughts, feelings, all are secretions inside our heads.

[29:54]

Returning to the present reality of life, prior to the distinction between life and death. This is Kinyo. Returning to life now. Revering life now. Whole heaven and earth, just revering. poem just live just die the reality prior to the division into two thinking it to be so or not thinking it to be so believing it to be so or not believing it to be so existence non-existence life death truth falsehood delusion enlightenment self others happiness unhappiness

[30:57]

We live and die within the profundity of reality. Whatever we encounter is Buddha life. This present reality is Buddha life. Just living. Just dying. Within no life or death. And his concluding poem Samadhi of the Treasury of the Radiant Light. Though poor, never poor. Though sick, never sick. Though aging, never aging. Though dying, never dying. Reality prior to the vision here lies unlimited depth.

[31:59]

the separating of the world into this and that that we do all the time. And, you know, sometimes we need to do it. You know, if I want to get to a particular location, I have to look at a map and find out how to get there. But then, you know, once I get there, I don't have to hold on to some idea of here and there. I'm here. Wherever I am, I'm here, right? So how can we not get stuck in these labels that we paste on ourselves and on others? How can we hold them more lightly? This is what Chiyama Roshi means by opening the hand of thought. We get some idea and we cling to it and we hold it tight in our fists.

[33:09]

This opening the hand of thought is just looking with fresh eyes again and again, seeing what's here now without this notion that I already know all about it so I don't need to look. I know what's in that box. You may be surprised sometimes. You may not know what's in that box. You may not know what's in the next moment. So there is this verse on the Han, again. Great is a matter of birth and death. All is impermanent, quickly passing. Be awake each moment. Don't waste this life. This is what our practice is. It's being awake in each moment of our life. Appreciating the gift of life.

[34:11]

And recognizing that it's a gift. And being ready when it's time to return to this universal life that we all share. And take another poem. The poet... What's any of my favorite poet? Come on. Marie Oliver. Yes, thank you. It's nice to have friends who have a memory for you when yours begins to go. The poet Mary Oliver wrote a poem called When Death Comes. And she says, when death comes, I want to be full of curiosity. I love that line. I hope that I can meet death in that way. Full of curiosity. What is it?

[35:15]

Can I be there for it? I hope so. And I wish each of you that joy of being present for each moment of your life, including the moment when this life returns to universal life. This is another one I wanted to share with you. A student asked Suzuki Roshi if he kept an eye on his students to see if they were following the precepts, Buddhist guidelines of conduct. I don't pay any attention to whether you're following the precepts or not, he answered. I just noticed how you are with one another.

[36:21]

I guess I would head to that, how we are with one another and how we are with ourself. Please notice, are you being kind to yourself? Are you being kind to those with whom you share this world?

[36:57]

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