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. Very good evening to everyone in the Buddha Hall, and good evening, good afternoon, or good morning to anyone listening online, depending on how close you are to San Francisco. My name is Shundo. I was a resident in this building and at Tassajara for about 15 years. And I've been gone from the building for about 10 years, but I've been around a little bit recently this week. A number of us were at Green Gulch on Monday and Tassajara yesterday and back here today as well. Thank you very much to Tim Tanto for inviting me to speak this evening. It's kind of... Fallow time at Zen Center. I think the practice period is over. The holidays are coming. People are coming up from Tassara tomorrow, I imagine.

[01:03]

And it's kind of the quiet time between practice periods when not so much is going on. And I know there's a board meeting happening tonight, so a number of senior folks said they were not able to make it tonight. So I'll start with the Zen story. I can't... guarantee that this story is true, but it's one of those stories that I heard a number of times over the years, principally, I think, told by Blanche Hartman, who was the abbess here when I first lived here 25 years ago. It involves Kadagiri Roshi, and for those who don't know that name, he came in the mid-1960s to help Suzuki Roshi get San Francisco's Entend off the ground and help him get Tassahara open. in the early years and then in later years, ran his own groups in Minnesota. And the story, as I remember it, is that Katagiri was invited to give a talk to a number of donors to the temple, you know, say something encouraging to get some money flowing in.

[02:05]

And he stood up in front of a room of people and said, you're all going to die. Now, what else happened in that room? I don't know. I haven't been told that story. But there's a kind of antecedent Zen story as well from a Japanese Zen master called Sengai. Sengai was a great calligrapher. He did a famous picture of a frog that Suzuki Roshi talked about a number of times. And again, a wealthy man came to him and asked for an auspicious calligraphy. And Sengai wrote, father dies, son dies, grandson dies. And I had my own version of that story as well when I was younger, just starting out at high school. My English teacher, Mr. Fox, and I don't know what we were talking about, but what I remember him saying is, well, that's why you have pets. First your pet dies, then your granny dies, then your parents die, and then you die. So why am I talking about this?

[03:07]

Actually, I mean, I do have a reason for talking about this. So my mum died a couple of months ago. She was 90. I had been to visit her for her 90th birthday with my brother and sister and her two grandchildren. We had a fabulous time. She'd been declining for quite some time, you know, getting slower and not able to see very much, but mentally still sharp. And then she was taken out quite quickly by a chest infection. So my sister texted me early on Saturday morning saying she was not well, and then she was gone a few hours later. And then at the same time, my mother-in-law, had had a diagnosis of cancer, which took her out very suddenly and died within two or three months of the diagnosis, two weeks after my mother died. So I've been thinking about death a bit. And one story that came up for me was, I think, my first encounter with death, or my first story around death. And again, the way I remember it, I was maybe five or six,

[04:12]

at my friend Matthew's house. We were playing on the floor in the middle of a room. And the door opened and his mother came in. So you can imagine when you're five or six, the mother is kind of quite tall. I remember looking up the doorway. And she said something like, Graham died. He was in a car crash. And I had that kind of, I don't think what the word is, not very respectful kind of childlike curiosity. maybe inappropriate child, like curiously. Well, he died in a car crash, but how did he die? I remember wanting to know what had actually caused him to die. And the answer I remember, because it was quite striking, and as I look back on it, it felt very skillful. She said, his insides got mixed up. And so she left the room, and I turned to my friend Matthew and said, who's Graham? And he kind of shrugged and said, oh, a friend. And so that sense of not really grasping what had happened, but knowing about it.

[05:17]

And in a similar sense of childhood indiscretion, one of my grandfathers was dying when I was about six. And I remember being taken to his house, and he was lying in bed, and it was his birthday. And my mum had brought a red tie for me to give him as his present. And I remember thinking, and I don't know if I said it out loud, but Why is he going to wear a tie if he's lying in bed all the time? So maybe reflect for a moment if you can think of your first memory of encountering death in that kind of way, in a childlike way or an innocent way or just your first awareness of death, if you have a story or a picture of that. And then to fast forward a couple of decades in my life, I was visiting New York for the first time, staying at a friend's house in Chelsea, an apartment in Chelsea, I should say.

[06:46]

And I had a very vivid dream. I was in a pine forest and someone came along with a curved sword and cut my head off. Clean cut. And I remember having read that, you know, if your head is cut off, there's a little oxygen left in the brain where you might still be conscious for a few seconds. And so in the dream, I was thinking, oh, I have about 20 seconds left. And I woke up kind of in a sweat. And what I remember thinking is, I'm 30, I'm halfway dead already. And I lay awake listening to the sounds of New York at three in the morning. And at about that time in my life, I think I had lost faith in an afterlife. I wasn't really expecting anything to be happening after I'd died. Which is a sense of a void. that was awaiting. But that visceral sense of death happening was very different to the first experience. And it may have indirectly brought me to Buddhism. I don't think I sought Buddhism out because of that experience, but when I came to Zen a few years later, I think it helped make sense of that.

[07:54]

So again, if you have any visceral memories like that, And by that stage, I'd had pets die and I'd had grannies dying. But this was a very different kind of feeling to either of those things. And this practice we do in this temple, we are constantly being encouraged to remember that we are going to die. So down on the Han, the wooden block that calls us to Zazen, is the verse that is on every Zen Han, I believe, in one form or another.

[08:58]

Great is the matter of birth and death. Life is fleeting, gone, gone. Awake, awake, each one, don't waste this life. So we don't do, as other schools of Buddhism do, channel ground meditation, sitting among the dead to remind us of our impermanence. But we are, I think, encouraged every moment, every period of zazen to examine impermanence, to examine the fleetingness of our own lives, which may not seem fleeting in the moment, but the older you get, the more fleeting it feels. And about 20 years ago, I was at Tassahara with Tenchin Roshi. And the topic of death came up. And one of the students was saying that he felt very afraid of death. And we had a discussion about this. And how can we diminish our fear of death? And Tenshin Roshi, I remember making a gesture with his fist.

[10:00]

He said, it's not that you go from this kind of clenched fear to this open hand acceptance. But maybe you go from this clenched to slightly less clenched. I've heard many times over the years that Zen practice is really practicing for death. Practicing to deal with our own death. And living at Tassajara in the monastic schedule, many, many hours of Zazen, personally for me, was pretty uncomfortable. I had a reminder of that sitting through these long ceremonies at Green Gulch and Tassajara on borrowed cushions. My legs were aching. I was tired. But my practice is, or was, This week as it was when I lived at Tassara, can I bear this? Can I deal with this? Can I face this discomfort?

[11:02]

Sometimes physical discomfort, sometimes emotional discomfort. And every moment of silence in Zazen, it's like, can I deal with this? What is arising now? Can I meet it? So I think if we get used to dealing with small discomforts like painful knees, aching backs, busy, unhappy brains, I think we have a better chance of doing well face to face with death. Now I'm reminded of one student who came to practice because her mother had died too young and had raged against her own death. And so the daughter sought out Zen practice as a way to try to find a better way to deal with this. Human brains are primed to find meaning.

[12:04]

And then somehow it seems so meaningless to lose everything. To lose our loved ones, to lose everything that we've done in our life. And especially without the promise of an afterlife. So the Han tells us, don't waste this life. What does it mean not to waste a life? also thinking about the first precept, the first of the ten grave precepts, which is a disciple of Buddha vows not to kill. And then in the version that adds the positive half to the prohibitory part, it's I vow not to kill but to cherish life. So what does it mean to cherish life? I was thinking about this.

[13:15]

I was reading various articles about rich men, it seems to be mostly men, who are working at longevity, trying to increase their lifespan, maybe even trying to make themselves immortal. Even as in one case, a family said, you don't seem to be enjoying yourself trying to extend your lifespan like this. Why are you doing it? And there's something about maybe the arrogance of a particular kind of person in this society that to think that they can cheat death. And money may cushion you from many things, but it will not cushion you from death. And this is what Kadagiri was reminding his donors and what Sengai was reminding the wealthy man. And I do not believe that our phones are cherishing life. They offer a wonderful simulacrum a wonderful vista into things, but it is not the reality that nourishes us.

[14:18]

The reality that nourishes us is all around us. The grass, the trees, the lands, the people, the interconnected web of existence that we learn to respond to, I think, paradoxically through our solitary, it seems, practice of Zazen. a solitary practice that does actually connect us to everything. And at Green Gulch and Tassahara, we were at the Shuso ceremonies. And Shuso, for those who don't know, is the head monk, head student. And it's a person's first time on this dharma seat. And the ceremony involves everybody. So everybody, imagine everybody in this room, plus a lot of former senior people. so like Tim and myself, asking them questions. And then a kind of sad echo. My own Chusot ceremony at Tassajara was 13 years ago in December.

[15:29]

And it was a week or two after the Sandy Hook shooting. And despite the many, many, many, many mass shootings there have been since then, I think probably most of you remember the name of Sandy Hook. because it involved elementary school children. And so because that had happened just a few days and the news had reached Tassajara, I was prepared for someone to ask me a question about it. And I thought in my very English way that I would be answering, I don't understand what Americans have to do with guns. It's completely ridiculous. So I had my answer ready. But then when the question came, it was a different question. Hi, Brian. The person said, what would you say to the parent of one of the children killed? And I think I said something like, I can't even begin to imagine the suffering you are feeling right now. Because that is the opposite of St.

[16:32]

Geist's calligraphy. That is not the natural order of things, to have your children die. And if the former shoe sewers, the senior people who come to a shoe sewers ceremony, don't think that the shoe sewer is giving heartfelt, authentic answers, they will tend to kind of push them a little harder. And nobody pushed me in my ceremony, and I think it might have been the fact that I was able to drop the angry, frustrated response that I had and actually offer a response in that moment. This is what the Shuso ceremony asks of the Shuso. This is what Zen practice asks of all of us, although we don't have to do it in public, to respond authentically to this moment, not to come up with your pre-formulated idea about what you want to say.

[17:33]

And after the ceremony yesterday at Tassajara, I made a note to myself. Living wholeheartedly gives other people permission to live wholeheartedly. Being vulnerable gives other people the courage to be vulnerable. Facing your fears shows people that it can be done. And this is what the shoe sewers in this particular crop did extremely well. They showed their wholeheartedness. They showed their vulnerability. And they talked about facing their fears. And there's something very powerful about that practice, even if we never get to sit on the shuso seat, to practice this, to encourage others to practice. So can we forget our planned responses, our kind of warmed-up indignation, and meet the moment, meet the question, meet the suffering?

[18:41]

letting the self-concern that blinkers are so often. I think of myself when I'm wrapped up in my own thoughts and troubles, like wearing blinkers and not seeing the outside world at all. And the difference when I'm able to drop that and be present for what is happening. Those of you who know me know I love to talk about Dogen, the Japanese founder of Soto Zen, this lineage that we practice in. And he has a fascicle, a chapter of his great work, Shobhagenza, called Birth and Death, Shoji. He says, just set aside your body and mind. Forget about them. Throw them into the house of the Buddha. Then all is done by the Buddha. When you follow this, you are free from birth and death and become a Buddha without effort or scheme. Who then remains in the mind? So he talks about setting aside your body and mind.

[19:53]

But to set aside your body and mind, you first have to engage it wholeheartedly, as we do in Zazen. Over and over again. And when we face our own suffering to the best of our ability in each moment, I think it is easier to face the sufferings of others. and to meet them more wholeheartedly, more vulnerably. So my mother lived in England and I would visit most years, every year, except lockdown years. And as she aged, you know, over the last couple of decades, her horizons became so limited. She didn't enjoy going out so much. She stopped walking. And I was frustrated on her behalf. I wished that she would keep being as active and as interested in things as she had been before. But instead I tried to listen.

[20:57]

She loved to tell stories, and they tended to be the same stories every year. But she loved to tell them, and she said to me, you're the only one in the family who ever listens to me. And I didn't have an especially good relationship with my father, but I went to see him as well, and he had a... a slow decline with an unpleasant illness. And the last few times I went, I thought, this might be the last time. Let's make the most of it. And so I was there just to help. And the wonderful thing about my father as he declined was he was willing to be helped, which was very different earlier in his life. And so those last two visits of just helping and just being helped and even expressing appreciation being helped, which was unheard of. That was enough. Even if I didn't get to be with them as they died, I do not feel that anything was left out.

[22:05]

So when we had this conversation at Tassajara 20 years ago about releasing that grip, that fear ever so slightly, I remember thinking, maybe during the conversation or maybe a little afterwards, well, the me that is thinking about death now is not the me that is actually going to be facing death. And there might be these different stages, like the child understanding of death, the conceptual understanding, the visceral understanding, the personally dealing with. But as Dogen also says in the same fascicle, echoing what he wrote elsewhere, in birth there is nothing but birth, and in death there is nothing but death. Accordingly, when birth comes, face and actualize birth. And when death comes, face and actualize death. Do not avoid them or desire them. So in 30 years since my dream of having my head cut off,

[23:10]

And 20 years since that conversation at Tassahara, I've worked with just facing birth, facing life, fully facing life. Because right now, death is not coming. I do not have to face an actualized death. Not right now. But we all come to that time when we'll be standing at the threshold of death for however long. And my mother-in-law, we went to see her in a care facility not far from here, the day before she died. And she couldn't speak. She'd had a stroke and was very limited in mobility. But when she saw me, she smiled. And when I approached the bread, she squeezed my hand. And that's exactly what my mother had done, even though she was months away from dying, when she didn't have the energy to get out of bed or even speak very much. She would smile and she would squeeze my hand. So what else is that?

[24:16]

Being with and attending to this moment. The love, the connection in this moment. Being with and attending to the beautiful and the challenging. Being with it all. I was talking with a student recently who discussing their meditation practice, said, I have nanoseconds of clarity where it seems that things start to become a little more infinite. And we're thinking, that's pretty good. Actually, nanoseconds of clarity, I'll take that. And then it occurred to me that maybe right at the moment of death we have that nanosecond of clarity where everything becomes infinite. Who knows? Who knows? So practice, I think, encourages us to cherish life by meeting life fully and not turning away from and not grasping, not trying to find ways to live forever, but to be fully present with what it is that we are doing and everyone is doing around us and what the world is doing around us, even if we don't like it.

[25:50]

still be fully present with it. Just because we lose everything, it does not mean it is meaningless. And when you read these stories about how to find meaning in life, it always seems to be that the things that work are finding purpose in life. And doing things that don't just benefit you, but benefit others. And this is what the Bodhisattva is vowing. The Bodhisattva that we take these vows for in this life of awakening to help others awaken as well. Meaning and purpose and something bigger than ourselves. Our effort that is destined to fail to save all beings and all delusions. But because it's meaningless, we do it completely wholeheartedly in the moment without expecting anything else.

[26:56]

And in the 25 years I've been doing that, trying to do that, I don't know of a better way to live. You know, this dharma that the Buddha expressed is the dharma of the human realm, the dharma of making sense of what it means to be human. And that includes birth and death. And in Zen tradition, there are a lot of, or it's a tradition of death poems. Teachers and masters will compose a poem shortly before dying. And I found one that I quite liked. A teacher I had not heard of was Dairin Soto. He said, My whole life long I've sharpened my sword. Now, face to face with death, I unsheathe it. And lo, the blade is broken, alas. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[28:08]

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.

[28:31]

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