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. Good evening. My name is Carolyn Kavanaugh. I'm currently the director at Tassajara. And so I was kind of a short talk about... problems, and meeting situations. I met with all the crew heads last night, and they're all perfect just the way they are, leading each crew They're all really confident at this point in the summer, and I just wanted to extend another appreciation to the crew leaders for taking up that responsibility and doing so well, and how much I appreciate you making that summer happen.

[01:07]

I thought of this talk the other day when one of my colleagues, One of my assistants, they had spent the morning looking for a ride for somebody. It was a day off, so they spent the whole morning looking for a ride for this person. And I hadn't known that they were going to be doing that on their day off. But they were so relieved when they found, like, I don't know how many rides, but there was multiple rides. And they realized that they would just have arisen if she hadn't gone to... Search them out and look for them so diligently. And that's how I feel like problems, they come up and we just settle with them or I settle with them. I wait to see what the response will be. And sometimes I wait a little longer and the answer just... just arises either someone comes up and gives me exactly what I want or something becomes known and I can make the appropriate and give the appropriate response.

[02:19]

So this is about having confidence, just having confidence in making decisions about leading crews, about solving difficult problems. And I think everyone in this room, you know, has responsibility, jobs. Often the guests come here to relax, obviously, and enjoy this somewhat simple-looking life. Although we feel like we are doing a lot all day long, it's a relatively simple life during the summer. And I wanted to start with the topic of worry, which comes up when we don't have confidence. scientists think that the propensity to worry evolved in humans along with intelligence. So as they become more intelligent, they worry more. And I don't know if that's still true.

[03:21]

The more intelligent people, I don't know if they worry more than I do, for instance. Worry involves anticipating that something unfortunate could happen in the future. So this is really helpful in historic populations. Because they were big dangers. They're big animals. So of course they worried and they escaped. But now is worry, how is it helpful or not, or a hindrance to our lives? We're all familiar with the discomfort that worry brings up, the anxiety and uncertainty that arises. Worry is never about the present. It's about fear of something unpleasant in our future. It's about not having control of the situation. And the Chico tonight, he mentioned the first thing I said to him when he came into the monastery recently, like a month ago. He's like, apparently I said, I can't control people. To him, I don't remember this.

[04:22]

And it's true, we can't control people. We can't control situations. We might be able to control ourselves, but that's questionable too. So worry tends to erode our confidence and self-esteem. We fear that we'll lose something we value. It could be friends, family, status, wealth, or health. But how can we be still enough to let the appropriate response arise to a situation? To think, speak, or act out of wisdom instead of anxiety. This is where mindfulness comes in. It's helpful to acknowledge that you're worrying and that there's nothing you can do about it, the situation right now. But be kind to yourself. Don't judge yourself about that worry. Often we worry and then we worry about the worry or worry about various decisions we can make.

[05:29]

But if you focus on what's right in front of you, if you're washing the dishes, just wash the dishes, just be completely doing what is your job right at that moment. And you'll notice that the worry, it worries about the future again, so you're worrying about something that may or may not happen in the future. So can you just do the job completely, wholeheartedly at that moment, washing the dishes, cleaning the tables in the dining room, chopping the carrots? Give whatever is at hand all your attention and energy. And as you start to do this, as you start to give all your attention to what's right there in front of you, you will notice that you feel calmer and kinder to yourself, and perhaps the worry has dissipated a bit. And just keep with that. So this is about worry. problems, and time. There's various subjects in here.

[06:32]

At Tashahara, we have endless opportunities to work with problems, which we can think of as koans. Koans, historically, in Zen Buddhism, are teaching stories between two different, usually several monks, usually a teacher and a monk, or there could be... two monks in a different monastery or the same monastery. And something arises, and there's huge volumes of koans, the different collections of 100 koans, etc. And they're really challenging to figure out with your rational, conventional mind. You have to go way beyond what you think is... true to really find the answer for yourself.

[07:33]

And I feel like all the problems we have in the valley and through the summer and winter are our personal koans. Sometimes these koans totally happen inside our own heads. There's no one else involved. There's just one thought and then something else that doesn't really meet it. And we're all familiar with that, I think. We're quiet a lot in the wintertime. We don't talk much. Sometimes we do have stories about other people, but stories are still in our mind. They're not that person. People often think we're tucked away from society, that we're in this quiet valley. And that we don't have difficulties or problems that you have in the world outside. And we have different problems. The problems are very important to us.

[08:39]

It's not like we have less important problems. And we do. We tend to fixate on them a little bit until we can find a solution. But we have all a lot of patience for each other. or we want to have a lot of patience for each other. And gradually, we let go of our opinions and views, and answers to problems arise. A lot of our problems are based on fixed views of things, things we think are true, opinions about other people, what they've done or what they've said, thinking of self and other, so having the other... be outside of you versus just being a mirror of you. Our winter season brings a lot of other challenges. This year we had kind of an extreme weather, a lot of rain, 70 inches of rain. Our usual is 37.

[09:43]

And so there's some problems with the road. There's some very physical problems with the road. pretty consistent physical problems, which you might have noticed some of them on the way in. We learned lots of new terms of slip-outs, which is not a landslide, but it's when the road slips out underneath. And that's what all those bags of sand were on the road before China camp as you came in. And then we had the traditional landslide, which you may have noticed about 0.7 miles up the road. And that one is... It's just resting for the moment. It's going to reactivate as soon as we get more moisture. Thankfully, to our shop crew and our plant manager and work leader last winter, we were able to... Every day, it's like, well, what's going to happen today? Sometimes 24 hours would go by, and I thought... Wow, this is great. And then, you know, immediately something would occur or someone would report something.

[10:46]

So you see those big boulders at the 0.7 miles thing? Some of those boulders were even bigger. But Kogan, the plant manager, he has a way with rock and it's mostly sandstone. And he can reduce the rock through chipping away and finding the crack and finding the perfect slice and removing it. So then we don't have a bulldozer. The shop wants a bulldozer. Or what is it called? A loader. What is it? They want a tractor. What we have is a much smaller vehicle. And... A limited weight of rock that goes into it. And, of course, they want things for that smaller vehicle too, treads instead of wheels, you know, and things like that. So it's just interesting.

[11:47]

Anyway, so you've seen those big rocks on the side of the road. And we actually had to have a huge excavator. We're not going to buy an excavator. That came down the road. It took them a whole day to get down the road. They do have, what do they call treads? Tracks. They have tracks, and 14 miles, they go like two miles an hour or something. It's just ridiculous, and it's really big and heavy. And then part of that road, you probably noticed it was a little skinnier than it used to be, and there were some direct chutes that went off to the side. It went vertically. Those are new. But the excavator got in. It's exactly the width of the road in the 11 feet. And it came down and busted up the rest of the rocks that were 0.7 miles and moved it out of the way so you could drive in. So throughout the winter, we had one after another.

[12:51]

It's like people would start... start on the way up with chainsaws and shovels, et cetera, and see what they found. And usually they were gone the entire day, and they came back tired, exhausted, and there was snow up there, mud, landslides, trees down. So, yeah, just being up for whatever occurs is kind of our lifestyle down in the valley. Meanwhile, down here, we had lots of flooding. All that rain came down. Lots of trees went on the creek. There's a lot of debris that came down. It was quite dramatic and fast-moving. And it knocked out all the geothermal pumps. So the problem for the people down here was mostly warmth. And some of them were quite calm about it.

[13:52]

Others were not. regarding trying to keep the rooms and dining room warm. But how do we meet these difficult challenges of the monastery? We do everything. We're completely wholehearted trying to fix the entire infrastructure, trying to meet all the various needs of the students and sangha. And we just do our best. That's all we can do. And then we relax. It's like we've done our best. We've addressed the situation. Let's relax for a moment until the next thing arises. Worrying about a problem or... Yeah. Waiting until solutions arise has been my mantra this year. I found a talk by Suzuki Roshi... He didn't name it.

[14:53]

I'm sure the person who, you know, typed it out, named it. He says, why do we have so many problems? It's from March 1971. And he mentions that one of the purposes of religion is to help people respond to their difficulties and problems. And I never thought of religion in this way, but... I guess I feel like we're often uncomfortable with... I hadn't really thought this out completely, but I feel like a lot of people are really uncomfortable with how they are in the world, and they're looking for a way to meet that uncomfortableness or insight. I think they're looking for insight.

[15:53]

And we have a lot of problems in our life due to desires. This is, Tsukiroshi mentioned this, and it's specifically about gain or loss around desires. So we have desires all day long. We all want breakfast, and then we want lunch. And then sometimes one of those doesn't happen. And then can we have no gain or loss about what's for lunch or if lunch happens or not? In the winter, we eat. Eat in the zendo. We have three bowls. There's a larger one and two smaller ones. And priest bowls are really small. The vegetable, my favorite bowl, is tiny. And that's what I eat the most of. And so for me, you'd be amazed how much I can put in that small bowl of vegetables. But I do. I notice what I have gained or lost about the lack of room in my vegetable bowl. And I totally fess up to it.

[16:59]

But the meals are... Oreoki means just enough. So there's just enough to satisfy your needs. Hopefully. The other thing beyond desires are, you know, people have desires about Dharma positions or status or lots of things. And desires are completely normal. Again, it's how we relate to the desire. Do we have gain or loss about the desire? Do we want more or less of what is it? Or can we be happy with what is offered? That's also true of opinions and views. In the Abhidharmakosa, there's chapter four about karma, and it talks about holding on to opinions and views. It's fine to have opinions, but it's when we hold on to them that you might notice they cause problems.

[18:04]

You can look in our political climate. Yeah. Yeah, so again, it's the gain or loss about an opinion, and can we accept what's offered? Can we accept what comes up? Can we relax with what we're given or what we're offered? And then Zen's story, which many of you probably have heard, which is an important teaching story for my teacher, Red Banderson, as he came to practice, and he still uses it often as a... a kind of person he wants to be in the world. And maybe he's that way now. He came to visit recently, and I thought, yeah, he's kind of that way. And it's about Hakuen. Hakuen is a Japanese Zen priest in the Rinzai tradition. And he lived from the late 1600s to the mid-1700s.

[19:08]

And he was an interesting guy. He's a colorful past, if you'd like to Google him sometime. But this particular teaching story is lovely in its simplicity. And it's about a village where he lived. And in that village, he had a group of monks he was practicing with. And there was families and... you know, a town around that. And a Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store near where Hakuen lived and practiced came one day. Her parents discovered she was pregnant and it made them angry, obviously. She was a young girl. And she couldn't confess who the father was, so she just decided that this... well thought a priest would be a good person to take responsibility.

[20:14]

And so the parents came and angrily said, you have to, you know, you need to take this child, you're responsible. And Hakuen said, is that so? Which is kind of like saying, this is my life, how do I need it? And... He's meaning it by just taking in the child. The child hadn't been quite born then, but after the child was born, it was brought to Hakuin. And at this point, he had completely lost his reputation and status in the community, which didn't trouble him. And he took good care of the child. And he obtained milk from neighbors and did everything the child needed. Then a year later... The child's parents came and apologized and realized that the real father, she had fessed up, the girl had fessed up, was a young man who worked in the fish market.

[21:17]

So the parents apologized to Hakuin, and again, his statement was, is that so? So he's not trying to, he's just taking it in. He's just accepting this moment. And then the last part of this talk is about time, which connects to worry and problems. In a conventional sense, here's the definition. The indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present and future, regarded as a whole. So you can think of that as a big picture. In Dogon's idea of time, in a fascicle called Uji, from the Shobogenza, one of his longer work, group of fascicles, together called the True Dharma Eye, Treasurer of the Dharma Eye.

[22:24]

And so there's two senses of time. There's our conventional sense of time. And I was in a seminar with Mel Wiseman long ago, And he explained this in a way that was really helpful to me. So if we can think of the conventional sense of time as a clock on the wall. So it goes around one way and it's vertical. There's a past and present really clearly there. And we're all familiar with that. And then if you tip that clock to the horizontal, you can see that there's all... All of time, all of that past, future, and present right there. All the Buddhas and ancestors are in that horizontal clock, in that plane that we're in. All that karma from the world, from its beginning, is in that horizontal plane.

[23:26]

And we can think of that as the ultimate or the... Yeah, the ultimate understanding of time. We can think of that as all of the karma of the world, all of the actions, karma is actions and volitions of the world, all of the wisdom of the world is in that horizontal clock, is always here, available, and affects this moment. Which is a lot of responsibility to... all taken together. And that's kind of what I wanted to say today. It was just about looking about how we meet each moment in this valley and hopefully take it home in your life. Is there any questions? Great.

[24:33]

I get really hot up here. This is my sheen. I have a poem for you. It's called Lost. It's by David Wagner. Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes behind you are not lost. Wherever you are is called here. And you must treat it as a powerful stranger. Must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers. I have made this place around you. If you leave it, you may come back again. Staying here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches. Thank you very much.

[25:37]

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.

[26:16]

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