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 morning. My name is Reverend K. Julian Schutt. I want to thank David Z here. Atanto for the invitation to give the talk this morning. And to Avid Ed. As usual, in any event, you can plan and plan and plan and then something will go wrong. You'll forget something. When there's chanting, there's quiet. Right? I would say probably this weekend or this week, Thanksgiving week, it's probably a little bit fuller of that kind of thing.

[01:08]

Or maybe we just notice it more since it's a complicated holiday. And going home or going to these kind of gatherings bring their own complications to I know when my parents were alive, these are my adoptive parents, coming home for the holidays was a big deal. And we go home to those who we ideally know and love best. And in fact, the ad industry really loves this. And there's so many commercials, aren't they, about coming home Lately it seems like they're car commercials. I guess it makes sense, because how do you get home? There's doors opening, people laughing, lots of hugs and kisses.

[02:08]

And I have to say that some of them in the past, not so much this year, but have gotten a few tears out of me and I buy into it. That sense of going somewhere that people know you and care about you is big for most of us. And yet it's also complicated, right? Family gatherings bring a lot of stress for many of us also. Sometimes it's a time to bring home whoever you're dating, he, she, they, or any of those versions, or you're the one that's being introduced. So there are big feelings and big events happening. In-laws, engagements, weddings are announced at such time. And it's obviously pretty shared by many of us in the US, even North America. I heard Canada have their own version, which was a month ago. And it's big, because you see lots of movies about it.

[03:15]

And then the climax in these movies are always some kind of secret being revealed. Divorces, separations. And myself, one Thanksgiving, Way back in 1984, I came out to my parents during Thanksgiving. I transferred to college in Oregon and came back, they were living in North Dakota, which I'm still recovering from. And I lived there too before I went to Oregon. And I can remember the scene, the evening, before Thanksgiving. And what happened was I had started school in North Dakota and went into live in the dorms. And we had this whole posse of friends in the dorm, about eight of us, that we hung out with. And I had a best friend then.

[04:16]

And then I went off to Oregon. She was actually the impetus for going to Oregon. I ended up with a scholarship. She didn't, so I went and she stayed. And then But we would meet up, you know, during the holidays. And I decided, or I'd come to a point where I realized that how I cared about her was more than just pure friendship. And I thought, I'm a lesbian. So I wanted to tell my parents. And for me, it was, to be perfectly honest, it was just like, oh, I know. And so I wanted to tell them. Now, my adoptive parents were doctors, A doctor and a nurse. So mostly what I remember about it that night was that right away my father said, what about AIDS? This is 1984, right? The famous Newsweek cover with the two men had been out the year before. And my father, that was his first question, and I was like, as far as I understand it, lesbians are actually the lowest risk group.

[05:27]

And that's basically it. It was very, not quite sterile, but just like fact-finding. You know, not a lot of hearts. But they didn't reject me or anything. So, you know, just to switch gears a little bit, because I was asked to talk about the Sandokai, which is what the study is here, this practice period. I couldn't find of a better study. transition, I apologize. And I will connect them. So, the sandukai, which if you've come regularly, probably have some sense, and I'll just give the brief overview. The sandukai, usually translated, or definitely at Zen Center, the translation is The Harmony of Difference and Equality. It's a poem, written by Sekito Kisen. in the eighth century. And at the time, in China, there was a big brouhaha about Zen, between the northern and southern school.

[06:39]

And so, this poem was written to talk about dichotomies. And in particular, about the one and the many, light and darkness, sameness and differences. Sandakai, one way to talk about it was to show us how defending dichotomies, in the defending we miss the truth of life. And it goes like this. The mind of the great sage of India is intimately transmitted from west to east. While human faculty is sharp or dull, the way has no northern or southern ancestors. The spiritual source Shines clear in the light. The branching streams flow on in the dark. Grasping at things is surely delusion. According with sameness is still not enlightenment. All the objects of the senses interact and yet do not.

[07:41]

Interaction bring involvement. It goes on. I'm not reciting it because I want to show you I still remember the poem, right, or the chant. And mostly I'm resetting it because I will tell you that it's, you know, when I lived at Tassajara, of course we're all trying to memorize the chant, and we chant them in a very regular way, probably more regular than any of the other centers. And yet it was one of those that was easy for me to memorize, in part because it's very poetic, or at least to me, and it's beautiful, and it has a beautiful title, The Harmony of Difference and Equality. And I think it... was easy because on a certain level, it really made sense, right? Intuitively, I could resonate to it. Now, however, right, when we think about it a lot, sometimes we get confused, which you're probably going to get confused when I really get into it.

[08:46]

Maybe not. And then the harder part, of course, is how to apply it to our life. So, on a certain level, this is the way it should be. Because as you know, in Zen, we like to make the understandable as un-understandable as possible. I'm kidding, and yet I'm not really. So I want to propose to you that in some ways, you say the laws of nature We intuitively understand, I think most of us. We understand that holding on to fixed views will cause us suffering. We understand equality. We yearn for oneness. We have a good sense of this. And when we hear the words, we intuitively know it, we intuitively get it.

[09:48]

Yet thinking about it, over and over, trying harder and harder to grasp onto the meaning often brings about more suffering when we try to intellectually really know it. Suffering can happen. Still, as a Zen fool, I'm gonna try to say a few words about it today for you. So, here's from Suzuki Roshi. So there's a book, Branching Streams Flow on in the Darkness. This is lectures and commentaries on the Sandokai. I want to start with this section. The spiritual source shines clear in the light. The branching streams flow on in the dark. Grasping at things is surely delusion. According with sameness is still not enlightenment. This one's a Zizuki version. So the characters of the first line

[10:51]

Reigen mi-o-ni-ko-ketari refers to ri, the source of the teachings beyond words, the true source, ri, Japanese, Sino-Japanese. It's beyond our thinking. It is pure and stainless. When you describe it, you put a limitation on it. That is, you stain the truth or put a mark on it. The next line reads, Shi-ha-an-ni-ri-ru-chu-shu. The branching streams flow on in the dark. Shi-ha means branch stream. Regen, source. Regen is more noumenal, and Shi-ha is more phenomenal. To say noumenal or phenomenal is not exactly right. But tentatively, I have to say so. That is why it's good to remember the more technical terms, ri and ji here. Ri, which is used in the third line, grasping at things, things is surely delusion, refers to the nominal, excuse me, phenomenal, to something you can see, hear, smell, or taste, as well as the objects of thoughts or ideas.

[12:10]

Whatever can be introduced into our consciousness is chi. Something which is beyond our consciousness, the noumenal, is ri. He goes on to say, in the last of these four lines, Sekito says, according with sameness is still not enlightenment. So to recognize the truth is not enlightenment either. Often we feel that the truth is something we should be able to figure out. But in Buddhism, that is not the truth. The truth is something beyond our ability to describe, beyond our thinking. Truth can also mean the wonderful source, wonderful beyond our description. So just to be really clear, right, re is the understanding that's beyond word. I'd say you could think of it as intuitive knowing.

[13:11]

And g is the intellectual, rational understanding. Now, trying to get an intellectual understanding, g, of what you... already intuitively get, is fine. It's when we try too hard. Obsessively trying to make fit our ideas of how things are, which can bring suffering. Believing in, solidifying, conceptual experience instead of the actual lived experience. So what comes up for me these past few weeks as I try to figure out exactly what it is about the Sondakai that I want to share with you today, which is, as I say, foolish because it's trying to make G out of the re. Or, another way to put that, is to share some aspect of my sense of what my life is and how it could bring resonance into your life.

[14:15]

So, the next part of the talk goes like this. All the objects of the senses interact and yet do not. Interacting brings involvement, otherwise each keeps its place. Suzuki Roshi says, let me go ahead and read this part. We have to understand things in two ways. One way is is to understand things as interrelated. The other way is to understand ourselves as quite independent from everything. When we include everything as ourselves, we are completely independent because there's nothing with which to compare ourselves. If there's only one thing, how can you compare anything to it? Because there's nothing to compare yourself to. This is absolute independence. Not interrelated, absolutely independent.

[15:24]

Then it goes on a little bit further down here. So the various things that we see and hear are interrelated, but at the same time, each being is absolutely independent and has its own value. This value we call re. Re is that which makes something meaningful not just theoretical. Even though you don't attain enlightenment, we say you already have enlightenment. That enlightenment we call re. The fact that something exists here means that there's some reason for it. I don't know the reason. No one knows. Everything must have its own value. It is very strange that no two things are the same. There is nothing to compare yourself to, so you have your own value. That value is not a comparative value or an exchange value. It is more than that. When you are just sitting zazen on the cushion, you have your own value.

[16:29]

Although that value is related to everything, that value is also absolute. Maybe it is better not to say too much. Interacting brings involvement. A bird comes from the south in spring and goes back in the fall, crossing various mountains, rivers, and oceans. In this way, things are interrelated endlessly everywhere. So I think the key here, or a key for me, is that when Suzuki Roshi talks about values. I think where we might have a hard time with our negotiation between relative and absolute is in this place. It isn't that we don't know that there's a difference or a sameness in our experiences. The problem comes because we've been taught to differentiate our experience into what should be of value and what should not

[17:40]

be of value. We've been taught, conditioned, to frame our understanding of value in a way that we intuitively know does not reflect reality, our known experience. We've been taught the truth that isn't what we know it to be in our lived experience. Or, we've been taught a G that doesn't jive with our experience of re. Take Thanksgiving again. It's not what we've been taught. So here it is. This is from the New York Times, written a few days ago, earlier in the week. It says, most everything you learn about Thanksgiving is wrong. This is from Maya Salam. High school textbooks are particularly bad about stating absolutes because these materials teach history by giving students facts to memorize even when the details may be unclear.

[18:53]

Says James W. Lowen, a sociologist and author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. He says, the mindset, excuse me, that mindset pervades everything they talk about, and certainly Thanksgiving. So one, the timeline about Thanksgiving is relative. The Mayflower did bring pilgrims to North America, to Plymouth, England, in 1620, and they did disembark at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, and they set up colony there. It is true that in 1621 they celebrated a successive harvest with a three-day gathering that was attended by members of the Wampanoag tribe. But it wasn't until 1830s, 200 years later, more then, that this event was first called Thanksgiving by New Englanders.

[19:59]

And then it wasn't until 1863 when President Abraham Lincoln declared as a declared as a kind of thank you for the Civil War victories in Vicksburg, Missouri and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Beyond that, claiming it was the first Thanksgiving isn't quite right, either as both Native American or European societies have been holding festivals to celebrate successful harvests for centuries. A prevalent opposing viewpoint is that the first Thanksgiving stemmed from the massacre of the Peacock people in 1637, a culmination of the Peacock War. And Plymouth, Mr. Lowen noted, was already a village with clear fields and a spring when the Plymouths found it. A lovely place to settle, he said.

[21:00]

Why was it available? because every single native person who had ever been living there was a corpse. Plagues had wiped them out. And it wasn't just about religious freedom that the Plymouth, or excuse me, the pilgrims came. They were seeking religious freedom, but that's not entirely true. They had religious freedom in Holland already, right? So when they first arrive in the early 17th century, like those who settle in Jamesburg, Virginia, the pilgrims came to North America to make money. It wasn't for religious freedom. The pilgrims never called themselves pilgrims. They were separatists. The term pilgrims didn't service until around 1880. There's no evidence that native people were invited.

[22:04]

Possibly the most common misconception. That the pilgrims extended an invitation after they reaped the harvest. The truth of how they all ended there, of feasting together, is unknown. Perhaps it was because the native people were, the Pocok Indians, were already farming across the brook. And maybe they came to the gathering as a, to make friends. Diplomatic, to be diplomatic. So, and the role of Quanto is complicated. Squanto, excuse me. Tisquantum, also known as Squanto, did play a large role in helping the pilgrims as American children have taught his people I apologize, I don't know how to pronounce these. A band of Wampanoag tribe had lived in the site where the pilgrims settled. When they arrived, he became a translator for them in diplomacy and trade with other native people and show them the most effective method for planting corn and the best locations to fish.

[23:17]

It's usually where the lesson ends, but that's just a fraction of the history. He was captured by the English in 1614 and later so into slavery in Spain. He spent several years in England where he learned English. He returned to New England in 1619 only to find his entire tribe dead from smallpox. He met the pilgrims in March 1621. And if that wasn't depressing enough, there's this. There was no turkey or pie. I say that to actually give us a little relief. And for some, it's not a relief, I should say. There's no mention of Turkey being at the 1621 bounty, and there was definitely no pie. Sellers lacked butter and wheat flour for crust, and they had no oven for baking.

[24:20]

What is known is that the pilgrims harvest crops and that the Wampanoag brought five deer. If fowl graced the table, it was probably duck or goose. It's unlikely that Turkey was in the 1621 bounty. And there were no sweet potatoes either in North America at that time. And perhaps while they were not invited, they did come. It turned out that by some account, there were 90 native people in attendance, which doubled the number of what we're still calling pilgrims. And then just as a fact, this is from the National Turkey Federation website. In the US, an estimated 44 million turkeys are slaughtered and killed just for Thanksgiving Day alone. All to feed a lie. That's my take.

[25:24]

For many of us, Our pains and suffering, our experience, how to deal with difficult, complex, big feelings. How to be with pain and suffering in the world around us is learned from our family, from school and from our surrounding in our early years. Often we're taught or conditioned about what kinds of suffering we should pay attention to. Indigenous people, peoples or nations in North America used to be thought of as savages, and did not deserve to exist, hence the genocides of hundreds of nations. Saying multi or non-binary gender love is framed as deviant, and therefore does not need to be recognized, still are not recognized in a certain area, even go so far as to say, perhaps to deserve their fate

[26:31]

especially during the early years of the AIDS crisis. We've been also taught or conditioned unwisely how to pay attention to suffering, not just what to pay attention to, but how. And mostly we're taught to turn away from or to deny it, often with substances. In my own adoptive family, it was alcohol and drugs, tobacco, and lots of overwork. What was it in your family? And really, in essence, we're taught how not to be with pain and suffering. Then we come to practice. In Zen, often we say that one's practice really starts when you realize how all your ways of dealing with suffering, your coping mechanism of turning away, of running from, of denying suffering, doesn't work anymore.

[27:37]

It doesn't serve you well, if it ever did. Or, perhaps you see it and you're just not willing to do it anymore. Today I like to say that practice really starts when you're ready to see and be in and with the world as a wondrous place. Let me say that again. When you're ready to see and be in the world as a wondrous place. Or actually, more correctly, I should say, the world is a wondrous place. And are you ready to let it in and be a part of it? And to let it in comes about not because we will see less suffering in the world. It doesn't come about because meditation or practice will get you to some place where you're removed from suffering, where it doesn't matter to you anymore, you know, that false detachment thing, where you think it's about Buddhism.

[28:46]

It comes about because you're willing to let in the suffering of the world. It comes about when you relearn how to be but the suffering of the world. Suzuki Roshi again. Let's just go back to the San no Kai. San means three. He says it means things here. Do means sameness, oneness, one's whole being, or a great big mind. He says, so our understanding is that there is one whole being that includes everything, and that the many things are found in one whole being, many parts of the one whole being that includes everything. Many and one are different ways of describing one whole being. Kai means shaking hands. To completely understand the relationship between one great whole being and the many facets of that one whole being is Kai.

[29:53]

He says, high as you have a feeling of friendship. You feel that the two of you are one, more than good friends because they are originally one. He asks, what is many? What is one? And what is the oneness of one and many? So, I say let's look at it again. So, san means three. And I want to play with, right? close to you, that the three are me, or what we think of as inside, and you, what we think of as outside, and the third is in the shaking hands is the we, or the one that happens. So we've been conditioned to frame the world in a dichotomously way. Me, what's inside, and what's outside. We've been taught

[30:54]

to see that these are separate, within and without. And the how we've been taught with these is that these are seen in the power differential. When there's a me and a you, there's always power. Because there's separation, and the way to relate we're originally taught to the separation is to, one, keep it at bay, keep it outside of us, put up a wall and not let it in, or to ignore it, to get rid of it, to overpower it, to annihilate it, to consume it. Or if you can't do that, then to understand it, to take care of it, and to make it, though, like ourselves. It can't be different. It has to be like me. Ironically, when my My adoptive parents were Caucasian.

[31:55]

I'm from Vietnam, and they were living in Thailand, and soon after we adopted, they purposely, they worked for the State Department, they purposely took us back to the US to Americanize us, to make us like them. This is how children are seen, as part of you, and how, in a way, to make children into your own image, right? And your parents are always very disappointed when you're not the idea that they thought you should be, which is somehow related, you know? Family business. My father was a doctor. One of my siblings became a doctor. So many of us, you know. This is typical. Try to live up to a parent's image of how they think we should be. Ironically, though, To be able to be fully in the world, we have to relearn how to be with it. Interacting brings involvement.

[32:55]

Otherwise, each keeps its place. This letting in and letting out is the difficult part, right? Because our hurts and our pains, we don't know how to be with it. So acknowledging hurts and pain and being able to process it is key to practice. The practice instruction for the first noble truth, right, that life, there is suffering in life, is to investigate. Which means, so how is it that you can be with it? How to pause, that's what meditation is, right? You literally stay still, right? Sitting down, standing, walking, lying down, right? But you pause, you stay still, and you investigate. Our practice is reflecting and then verifying it through the teachings, discussing with spiritual friends and teachers, and then our sense of things become more subtle.

[34:01]

Letting in suffering and allowing for each being's pain and suffering to reveal themselves to us. For some of us, right, it starts with acknowledging our own suffering. And then we learn about other people, and for some of us, it's about other people suffering first that might turn us towards our own, right? So, when I left North Dakota for college and went to Oregon, so this friend of mine, we were still friends, just friends at the time, had revealed to me that she had been molested by a family member repeatedly during her teens. So I, in an effort to support her, joined the Rape Crisis Network in Eugene, Oregon. It was a great time because they had a 40-hour training and that's when I actually really started to understand about how all the isms are interrelated, the intersectionality of oppressions.

[35:13]

And It was my first open, clear interaction with queer people, with lesbians. I remember, you know, I was clueless about my sexuality. There were lesbians who were running the place, and I just remember, when I realized there were lesbians, my first thought was, oh, lesbians are so nice. Every time they meet each other, they just hug each other, little kisses on the cheek, you know. Just lesbians are so nice, right? So, and then also, of course, the training. I remember this one time when we were practicing. Of course, you know, we were told how to, the big thing, of course, about rape is that a lot of people, mostly women, but many people are raped, and the majority of them are women, is that the sense of guilt. What did you do? What did I do wrong? And so the biggest thing is to say, it's not your fault, right?

[36:20]

And we would do role playing, remember, still? You know, you sit back to back and you answer the phone and people say something. And I had already taken, you know, feminism. I was a TA even for, you know, feminism 101 class. And so I just thought this is all piece of cake, right? I was a know-it-all at 19. And I came to a point where really I needed to say, it's not your fault. And I was stuck. I remember the person role-playing just kept saying over, and then someone had to say to me from the crowd, you know, from the watching, it's not your fault. Say it. And I had to say it. So it's whatever idea about ourselves and about how we might meet things. is really difficult, right? Until in the doing, even in the role-playing, this is partly why in Zen we just ask you to do it, you know? You might think you know how easy it is to come up here and do these bows and, you know, offer the petals like this and hold your hand like this or like this.

[37:30]

You've seen it a million times and you think, oh, it's so easy. Wait until you get up here and do it. It might still be easy. I don't know. So, it's also interesting that in this training, and it did take a, I was with them for a long time. It took a while for me to realize my own experience. Because when I grew up in Vietnam, we were incredibly poor, and I remember, childhood memory, I was adopted when I was eight, so in childhood you have a certain kind of memory. And my memory was, oh, I had a great time in the streets, playing in the streets of Saigon. And I was always on the street. That's most of my memory, really, is on playing on the street, running around, doing this, doing that on the street. And then, from this experience, I realized, because we were poor, we moved a lot.

[38:34]

And my mother had a chronic illness, right? So she was in and out of the hospital a lot. And it was her death from breast cancer that I got adopted. So when she could work, we would live in our own apartment, because we wouldn't own places in Vietnam. And then when she was sick, or usually after her hospitalization, we'd go live with my aunt and uncle in a room in their house. So one of these places that we lived, my memory is above a heroin den. And it's a poor part of Saigon. And I realized that the reason, the reason I was always on the street was because it was safer than being in the apartment. That negotiation between the street and the stairwell and into the apartment was not very safe. So, in trying to learn how to be with another's pain and suffering, I learned to hear my own.

[39:42]

So much of rape crisis network work was about listening, really deeply listening. So when we acknowledge our suffering, we are valuing ourselves. This is self-respect. When we let other people suffering in, acknowledging their suffering as they tell us, as they reveal it to us in their own way, this is valuing. Others. This is other respecting. In the shaking hands, which is to be with our own and being with another's pain and suffering over and over, we learn how to become more flexible in the negotiation of how to let it in and out. So I'm grateful for the teachings on suffering. getting closer and closer to it.

[40:44]

It's paradoxical that with intimacy, the chance of suffering arises. Unaware interactions brings up the chance for suffering to happen. The more unaware you are and how you interact, the chance of suffering arises. And we will hurt each other because we're not able to stay connected, right? This is what a lot of practices, or what the teaching, really all the teaching are is to say, can you stay connected to your experience, which then is the experience of other people? Can you stay connected when your foot hurts as you're sitting cross-legged or your back? What is it? What is it that keeps you from staying connected to exactly what's going on, not your idea about what's going on.

[41:50]

So again, teachings and practice is learning how to sustain connection with our experience in order to be with others with the mirrored things. So acknowledging each side's responsibility in the connection improves the chance for suffering to lessen In the Me Too movement, this is about acknowledging women's suffering. As each woman tells her individual story and it is validated, it grows, the movement. It becomes acknowledged as the experience of many and of the one in the sense of how it is to be a woman in the world. In a world where women are objects A woman's pain and suffering is acknowledged, and through connection, that comes to be a broad experience.

[42:56]

Of course, this whole Me Too movement has been big, right? And it's great, I think. The other day this week, earlier this week, on a morning show, sadly, it was a morning show in which one of the hosts is being accused, I started watching that morning show because of that host, right? And they had had this panel lined up for many weeks, right? So the morning show was actually all these women who were quite powerful. So it's just another facet where even with power or positions of power, that interaction, There's complexity to power, right? And one of the women was talking about how perhaps what would be useful as a next step is for men to step up and say, I too don't know that what I did hurt women.

[44:04]

So we need to learn to share the responsibility of causing suffering Because when we cause suffering, it hurts us too. When we focus on the how we are all suffering, not necessarily just the individual what of suffering, the sense of shared experience arises naturally, and we connect. And when we connect, we can see the mutual responsibility we have to end suffering, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of all beings. That's not just respecting self, as in the small s, but the self as the bs. Here's Suzuki Roshi again. He says, this is from the first lecture.

[45:07]

He says, when I was preparing this lecture, someone asked me, What is self-respect? And how can we obtain it? Self-respect is not something that you can feel you have. When you feel, I have self-respect, that is not self-respect anymore. When you are just you, without thinking or trying to say something special, just saying what is on your mind and how you feel, then there is naturally self-respect. When I am closely related to all of you and to everything, then I am a part of one big whole being. When I feel something, I'm almost a part of it, but not quite. When you do something without any feeling of having done something, then that is you, yourself. You're completely with everyone and you don't feel self-conscious. That is self-respect.

[46:10]

goes on to say, let your ears hear without trying to hear. Let the mind think without trying to think and without trying to stop it. This is practice. More and more, you will have this rhythm or strength as a power of practice. If you practice hard, you will be like a child. While we were talking about self-respect, a bird was singing outside. Peep, peep, peep. That's self-respect. Peep, peep, peep. It doesn't mean anything. Maybe he was just singing. Maybe, without trying to think he was singing, peep, peep, peep. When we hear it, we couldn't stop smiling. We cannot say that it's just a bird. It controls the whole mountain, the whole world. That is self-respect.

[47:13]

The next day after I came out to my parents, the next morning, I can remember it was in the kitchen. My mother was stuffing the turkey. Making the Thanksgiving dinner. She said to me, You know, I have had a lot of good women friends. But I don't understand this thing, you know, about loving women. I understand really good friendship. I understand about loving women. This is not a note on my talk here. My mother's been dead 22 years.

[48:22]

She said, what's important is that you love someone and someone loves you. Being queer is not really to find out some part of me that wasn't already there. It did take seeing it. It did take connecting with the lived experience of other lesbians. It did take identifying it as a way that I could be in the world, right, the possibility. And it did take a way to be simply me, open, full, and flexible.

[49:34]

When I was going through my notes to give this talk, I found this post-it note I had in here, one of many. And I have it as from a teacher at another center. And it's this Arabic proverb. And I want to look on the internet, because to me Arabic's like saying Africa, right? Which Middle Eastern country did this come from? And this is just another example of complexity. Is that this was... I guess the big thing, though, that it was attributed to Maya Angelou, right? And then it turned out, then it also was, this is from, quote, investigator, right? Then it was a Chinese proverb. And then finally, it was attributed to a woman named Joan Wash Anglun, a child book author, right?

[50:48]

A bird sings, excuse me, bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song. A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[51:40]

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