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. I'll adjust a little. My name is Sarah. My Dharma name is Dojin. Does this feel loud to you? Is it seeming okay out there? Okay, that's better. Let's see. I want to begin with gratitude to Jizo Bodhisattva, who's behind me, and the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas also in the other directions. And thank you to all the beings that contribute to our lives, known and unknown and human and otherwise.

[01:12]

And to my teachers, who are many, but include my transmission teacher, Galen Godwin, who's the abbot of the Houston Zen Center, who lived here. And many teachers here who have guided me. And I used to live here for many years, many years ago. It's very moving to be here. I want to acknowledge. Can you hear me okay? Like, Nadia, oh, now it's dangling. Okay. I am, I also want to thank the many people who live here now. We are in a stream together of care for this beautiful place in Tassahara. And thank you for caring for a Dharma center, you know, for making places in the world where people come together with this intention of taking up the Dharma.

[02:23]

What I'd like to offer today, if... if you hear nothing else, is that I've come to have a deep belief and experience that the Dharma is a path of healing. But Zen practice is enormously supportive for healing all things, actually, but particularly healing the fundamental delusion of separation. We're imagining that we're separate from all things. And all the pain that flows from there. I'm here this week. So I lived at Green Gulch. I lived at Tassajara for many years. And then I lived in other places, including most recently, a large chunk of my life was in Sonoma County in Sebastopol. And I... was a teacher at the Stone Creek Zen Center there.

[03:31]

I live with my family. And last year we moved across the country to Brooklyn, New York. Different. Different environment. Equally beautiful in terms of quantity. And differently beautiful in terms of what's beautiful about it. And it's a lot, actually. Our eldest daughter was born at Tassajara. And for those who know Kaya, some of you do, she's 20. I'm having a memory right now, actually, of a... I think it was in honor of Suzuki Roshi's 100th birthday, there was a skit night. And Kaya was a baby at the time, and she got to play the role of the reincarnation of Suzuki Roshi. Right here, actually. like minutes ago, you know, but also 20 years ago.

[04:34]

And I'm here this week. I have a great gift and privilege to help co-lead a retreat for environmental activists with Tim Ream and Katie Dion. And we did this also last year. It's like the first annual was last year. And the whole idea is that Tim conjured along with other people, but he was instrumental. And what from Zen practice can we offer to people who are engaged with the frontline work of trying to protect the planet and all the living beings here? And it's so wonderful, like, the array of what people do who are in the retreat. And I think at one point in my life, That might have seemed like a specific set of people, you know, but now it's like, i.e. all of us, you know, protection of this planet and all the living things is all of our concern, you know.

[05:47]

It's not like a side gig. And so I spend a lot of time in preparation, but actually I think about this all the time in all settings. Maybe it's not what, because I feel... Again, I'm totally convinced that Zen practice is a path of healing and of supporting human beings in sustained engagement in the world of suffering. And this is true in... So we could maybe imagine that... Environmental activism is different than being a teacher for first graders, even though that's not true. But for everybody, how do we sustain committed, skillful, liberating engagement in the world of suffering without harming ourselves and without falling into despair or cynicism?

[06:51]

or distraction. But mainly despair lately is the one that with people I encounter, that's the one that is the weight that's hard to lift. And again, in my experience, I feel like for me, Zen practice is the support that lets me joyfully return every day to engage with this world. and care about and love all the beings in it and strive to reduce suffering and harm. I want to bring in the work of Dr. Paula Arai. Dr. Arai is a wondrous Buddhist scholar who currently teaches at the Institute of Buddhist Studies. She's done a lot of different work, but one thing to mention is a book that she wrote called Bringing Zen Home that looks at the practices, particularly of lay women in Japan who are Zen practitioners, who have long legacies and traditions of rituals at home.

[08:16]

So much of particularly scholarship in Zen, looks at rituals and ceremonies in monastic and temple settings. That's where most of the focus has been. And Paula has lifted up and given attention to the long legacies of the ways Zen rituals have functioned for people in the home. And through that, her study and her engagement, more importantly, with living human beings who do that. She wrote this book and the first chapter of that book is called The Way of Healing Yudho. And she talks about 10 principles of healing in Zen practice. The first thing she mentions is that the Four Noble Truths, so this is a foundational practice not only in Zen but in really every school of Buddhism.

[09:19]

People heard of the Four Noble Truths. for those who haven't, or just for review for all of us. The first one is there is suffering. The second one is there is a cause. There's a reason why there's suffering. The third is we can interrupt it. We can actually choose liberation over suffering. And the fourth is the Eightfold Noble Path, which is like the how-to. And Soto Zen is roots in this. And Dr. Arai talks about it as a medical model. So the First Noble Truth is the diagnosis. And then the Eightfold Noble Path is the prescription to remedy suffering. And she talks about how

[10:22]

Really, and I think this is important, that there's different flavors of the suffering of a separated self depending on culture. Like for myself, so I am racialized as white. I've spent most of my life in the United States. And in the cultures I've grown up in and I've been conditioned in, there's a very particular flavor of self that coincides with like rugged individualism and an idea of separation that has very particular both roots and functions. And I would say it's pretty bad. It's pretty like jacked up levels of selfness and isolation and alienation. And there's a function to all of that that causes lots of harm. And it's also somewhat universal. that human beings, because we have sense perception, can mistake the situation for us being separate from things.

[11:30]

Dogen Zenji, who's the founder of Soto Zen, in the Genjo Kans, says, to carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. So this is that root delusion that I feel like is... The one we need to keep addressing. So when we are in the orientation of moving ourselves through the world, like I'm separate, and here's all the stuff out there, we are in delusion. Then he goes on to say, when myriad things come forth and experience themselves, that's awakening. That's freedom and liberation. And we can do that. We can orient that way. We can cultivate the capacity to learn about and move in the world, and actually even most importantly to train our body to move in the world where sometimes, and it never stays, I want to be clear, these moments of liberation, we can create the conditions where they are more likely to arise, and we can move that way, where we're one of the myriad things coming forward.

[12:50]

experiencing themselves. And those are moments of freedom. And they tend to be moments where we're less likely to perpetuate suffering. And it's more possible that we'll offer something healing or connecting than separating and harming. She says, we suffer because our actions are not synchronized with the way things actually ultimately are, which is impermanent and connected. So that Eightfold Noble Path, the first one is Samaditi, or right view. And right view is essentially over and over again reminding ourselves, oh, that's right, things are connected and impermanent. And I... Impermanent is super important and super helpful. It might sound like maybe if you're not into it, it might be like, I don't want to hear about things being impermanent.

[13:55]

Like I have despair about the world. Because I can't get much into it today, I want to offer the possibility to check out in your own life how attuning to impermanence actually counters despair ultimately. And also allows us to be whole and real and engage with reality as opposed to like a little bit checked out or a lot checked out. And then the other part of that is things are connected or interrelated. We use the term emptiness. That can be misleading though because it sounds like void. Emptiness is the fullness of how everything is in relationship to all things. Thich Nhat Hanh uses the term inter-being, how all things inter-are. All things. So this is really important in Zen. All things, including ourselves, are constantly in relationship to all things.

[14:59]

We are actually made out of all things. We are making each other. Every time we interact, we're impacting and co-creating each other. We are a flux. We're not a stable, fixed, permanent thing. And again, like attuning to that and cultivating that, not just with the mind, and I think this part's super important, because we could be like, that's a great idea. Oh, I like it. But to actually feel this in our bonds, and that takes effort because much of, I would say, Dominant culture, and I think it's true that many dominant cultures in cultures aren't emphasizing this. And so we have to kind of counter a lot of our conditioning to get to that place where one of the myriad things are rising and we feel it and we know it.

[16:04]

And it's guiding our thoughts and our actions and our words and our interactions with one another and the world. Sorry if this makes a sound. So Dr. I talks about 10 principles of healing, and I won't talk about all of them, but I want to name them just so you can hear them. The first is experiencing interrelatedness. So that's just what I was pointing to. So in our being, not just an idea, but the actual experience of interrelatedness. And in our retreat, we have community agreements, and one of them is like, please don't make assumptions about other people's experience. And I'm like, ooh, I do that constantly. But I don't make assumptions about other people's experience. What I often do is say, like, I imagine that other people have had this experience, but maybe that's an assumption.

[17:10]

Anyway, I'm going to guess that most of us, maybe all human beings, have moments. of interrelatedness. When people tell their stories about their practice life, often they'll name a memory from childhood where it was like, I knew I was a part of everything. And then stuff happened to me and I forgot. These can be tiny moments, but they're big and important and they're a necessary part of our cultivation. of understanding and knowing and experiencing interrelatedness. So all of the ten that she mentions, you can see how they're all woven. The next one is living body-mind. So again, in an embodied way, we know this. The third is engaging in rituals.

[18:12]

And again, so they grow out of and then keep informing one another. So when we engage in rituals, that's a training in interconnectedness. Zen practice is full of ceremony and rituals and forms. And my experience is they are all there to help us cultivate a lived experience of how we're related to all things. And the reason for that is so like we, you know, steep in this so that when then when we move in the world, again, we're more the possibilities there to cause less harm. The fourth is nurturing the self. And I feel like this one is really. Again, in my experience and in working and talking with and living with and. supporting lots of different people, this is very hard.

[19:17]

Particularly if you are a person raised in the United States and probably other places too. But what's really cool is we can start to, if we work with those first two ideas, right? So we're really cultivating interrelatedness as a feeling. We're really cultivating this through the body, not just through ideas. We're we're engaging in rituals, we're trying that out, then when we get to nurturing the self, we can do that non-dualistically. That's a very different orientation than like a spa day, a self-care spa day. So the idea, it's not selfish. It's not self-oriented. It's not self-indulgent to care for this one, for each of us have this one. that we have been charged with caring for in this lifetime? And can we care for ourselves and nurture and nourish ourselves as caring for all beings?

[20:25]

Can we see the relationship between that and what we can offer in the world? And again, I find it challenging with my conditioning. Because again, the conditioning I receive is hyper-dualistic. And I was raised with messages of to be a loving, caring person of the world, you forget yourself, forget yourself. Put yourself aside, put your needs aside. So for me, it's a very engaging act of reclamation and of like wholeness. Can I care for myself so that I can well care for the many people that depend on me and that I get to be involved with? So then, again, if we can do that, if we can feel the support to do that, then caring for ourselves becomes another way that we are cultivating interrelatedness. We heal that idea that we're separate by just lovingly tending our own body and hearts and minds.

[21:39]

Okay, the next one is enjoying life. It goes right along with that. Enjoying life. The next is cultivating beauty. I'm sorry, creating beauty. That's the sixth one. So nurturing the self, enjoying life, creating beauty, allowing the nurturance and the interconnectedness of creating beauty in the world, noticing it and creating it. Cultivating gratitude is the seventh one. And then the eighth, ninth, and tenth are accepting reality as it is, expanding our perceptions, and embodying compassion. And again, all of these things, building on one another and informing one another. For those last three things,

[22:49]

accepting reality as it is, expanding perception, and embodying compassion. I want to offer an image from the Buddhist tradition, a story. So Avlokiteshvara Bodhisattva, this is Jizo, behind the smaller being on the altar is Shakyamuni Buddha, and behind the bigger being is Manjushri Bodhisattva. And on the backside of the altar when you walked in is a version, is one rendering of Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, who's the archetype or the embodiment of compassion. And in that rendering, she has a pretty humanoid form that we recognize. There's a... There are visual images of Avalokiteshvara that maybe some of you have seen.

[23:50]

Often there are Tibetan tankas that depict this, but there are statues of this as well, where the body of Avalokiteshvara, so again the embodiment of compassion, is a being that has a number of heads and what looks like a halo around them that's actually a thousand hands and And each, just so you know, if you want to look closer, if you haven't looked at this before, each palm has an eye in it. And she has many tools. And that's a teaching to render her that way about how does compassion work in the world. And I want to tell you this story about her 11 heads. I love this story so much. I didn't mention one of my other roles, or one of my concurrent roles in the world, alongside being a mother and a priest, is as a grief counselor.

[25:02]

This is somewhat of a grief story. So the bodhisattvas become bodhisattvas by cyclical lifetimes of effort. And Shakyamuni as well. Buddhas become Buddhas by like trying and trying and trying. And our tradition is full of the stories of their past lives. Like Jizo has a great story about how they became the bodhisattva of fearlessness. And the story of Avalokiteshvara is that she was working and working over many lifetimes to, because, you know, She was cultivating and so she could feel connected with all beings. And so people's suffering really landed with her. She was like, okay, I'm going to help everybody. I'm going to get everybody out of the hell rounds. And she worked really hard. And one day she did it. She got them out.

[26:05]

And she was watching the last person leave the hell round. And it's like, yes. I did it. I'm done. And then she looked in this direction and people were flowing in because humanity, what we do, our realm is known for a number of things. One of them is this is the realm where people can wake up. Another is this is the realm where there's suffering. And we can wake up here because there's... suffering and there's awareness and there's and there's a possibility of cultivating the interruption of it and we can only do that in the human realm you need a certain amount of suffering and um or avlo kiteshvara lost it like just couldn't deal and her head exploded there's one version of the story so it's like mind blown physically no

[27:08]

The grief was just too much. I'd done all this work, it's been lifetimes, and then like, what? And Amitabha Buddha was compassionately standing by watching all this. This is really... I'm riffing now. I've never heard anyone tell the story. But I have this image of Amitabha being like, yeah, yeah, and now your head's going to explode. And then Amitabha Buddha helped put... this being's head back together in a form that could allow her to continue to be who she was, which is the bodhisattva of compassion. And instead of just kind of putting it all back into one head, because that wasn't actually working, having one head couldn't deal with the enormity of the situation. He gave her 11. Actually, he's on the top. So she had her original eyes and face and then... a couple others, and then three, and then three. And then Amitabh was on the top, accompanying her always.

[28:11]

And recently, as I was telling this story to someone, I was like, oh, the teaching of her 11 heads just really landed for me of like, right, we have to have a very wide perspective in order to engage in And embody compassion in the world. Yeah. We have to look all around. And that's both physically and metaphorically. So in any given moment, we need to account for the past and the future and what's on the sides, what's up and what's down. the wholeness of all the myriad conditions that are present. And just in case this is a little abstract, I can share a story from my life recently.

[29:19]

So we have an elder daughter who's 20. We had a middle child who would be 16 who didn't live very long, but I still... She's very much included in my life of parenting, Sati. And then we have a younger child, Loka, who's 11. And throughout my life as a person in a living situation with other beloved people, I've noticed an impulse where I had this feeling, and I'm pretty sure some of this is inherited, irritation sometimes people know this with your loved one and if I try to pull up where it comes from is really it's from my conditioning of being separate and it says something like I'm the only one who cares about keeping this house clean nobody else cares

[30:24]

And this house would look different, you know. And sometimes I even go so far to be like, what would it look like if it was just me, you know. And then I'm like, what am I wishing for? So the other day I was having one of those little fits. And again, I feel my grandmothers in those moments. I feel my mom seems to be a female inherited thing. And I realized, wait a second, like I'm living the dream. Like, I want to be in this family. I don't want to be in a house without them. Someday I will. Or I'll die first. In any case, someday we'll be without each other, and that will be sad. That will be devastating. It's coming. Right now we're all here, and I'm, like, squandering my time with these beloved people by being like, well, you just picked that goddamn thing. And maybe it was because I was working on talks about healing and interconnectedness that this happened on a moment of freedom where I was like, maybe I'll just put that inheritance down.

[31:32]

So I just offered, that seems like a small example, but really I had a physical sensation of unburdening myself, of something that was pretty old. And actually, If I looked into... That was another thing. I was kind of like, there's this little irritability. And when I looked into it, it was like, actually... Yeah, it's the tip of an iceberg. And the iceberg that's under the water is this massive thing that says, I am alone. I'm separate. I'm not a part of this. So it seemed little. It seems like it's about the mess on the floor. But actually... It's about that conditioning that says I'm separate. And if I didn't have a good look at it, it would perpetuate it. Maybe the last couple of things I want to offer are...

[32:44]

I've practiced Zen for decades, and so I felt supported in that moment to open to this other way of being. And that can be uncomfortable, actually. It's not familiar to live in the world in interconnectedness, necessarily. And at the same time, I want to offer this possibility to all of us to try out, which is... that it is our nature. I mean, actually, this isn't just me offering. There's this whole Buddhist tradition that says, like, Buddha nature is in all of us. But I want to offer it in this form of, like, that we don't have to oversimplify things and cut them up. That actually, we can live in complexity. Not only is that, like, better and we're likely to cause less harm, it's what we're made for. is my recent inquiry and belief as I check it out.

[33:51]

Actually, Paula Ardurai says, Buddhism is an experiential religion. The whole idea is like, don't just listen to these ideas and say yes, try it on. So I've been trying on this idea that we're made for holding complexity. And I feel pretty excited about it. And I want to offer it to you as something to try on. And in the Fukanza Zengi, so that's another writing by Dogen Zenji, the founder of Soto Zen, there's some other images. He offers an image. He says, like, when the heart of Zazen, when the heart of our practice is grasped, we are like... the dragon gaining the water. We are like the tiger taking to the mountains. And these are based on, both of these are based on old Chinese stories.

[34:55]

And Dogen lived in Japan, but he studied in China. But essentially those ideas are, so a dragon gaining the water in that story, a dragon is a water being, actually a dragon is a water magic being. a water power being. So dragons can walk around on the land and they can fly and stuff, but when they get in the water, they're like, they're in their element, they're in the fullness of their power. And same with the tiger. When the tiger gets into the forest, that's a description of like a being entering their element and in that, entering the fullness of their power. And so I've been using those images to imagine human beings, our complexity magic beings, that's our magic.

[35:57]

That's our power. And the complexity, the mess of things, the paradoxical kind of nightmare of everything, is our element. It's what we're made for. We can, not individually, but together we can handle this mess. And again, not individually. So if we try to come at the problems of our world individually, or if we even try to come at it with others, but we're holding, we're coming from that, an embodied place of separation, we will suffer. We will cause suffering. We will burn out. And we will not be in the fullness of our power. But we can possibly, as particular beings, join with the fullness of reality on one another. Like we lend ourselves to be part of the body of Avokiteshvara Bodhisattva.

[37:05]

How does she show up in the world? It's not just a thousand hands. It's a billion, billions and billions. It's our hands. We lend our particular selves to be a part of that body to respond to the world. So just practically, and I'll stop in just a second. I can see the kitchen folks going. So practically, we can use that image in any given moment. How many heads am I using to look at this? How many eyes? Is it one head and kind of like this? And we can feel it, I think, or I experience. We can feel in any given moment, are we contracted? Are we getting smaller? Are we feeling separate? Or are we looking with 11 heads and 22 eyes that go all around?

[38:10]

And we can notice and then start to cultivate, what are the things that support me? I have 11 heads and come from that view. And then there's a koan in the Blue Cliff Record that says, medicine and sickness cure each other and the entire earth is medicine. And then that makes sense. The last thing I want to leave you with is, before we can talk to each other more, is a quote from a teacher, a philosopher, poet, and trickster being, Bayou Akumalafe, that I think that, I read this recently, and I was like, yeah, this. Your life's work is an intergenerational project.

[39:16]

That is because we are produced by the manifold, by the collective, so that to squeeze the significance of one's life into the container of its biological duration is to lose sight of the ways death is generative, prolific, and even useful for continuity. It is to center the human in the very middle of a cosmic saga. all the while forgetting that the human is already ecstatically mediated by and dependent upon and threaded through with the non-human. To think of our lives as ours is to relinquish our accountability to our ancestors who often need healing and continue to produce effects. Our bodies are long bodies, wide bodies, spread out, queering space and time. Your failure, your confusion, might very well be the nourished soil that coaxes out new possibilities from the earth.

[40:25]

Our work is long, unusual, and always yet to be fully disclosed. The anorexic confines of traditional activisms cannot understand this or appreciate why many now feel invited to lean, on the fences of conventional, intelligible action, even if it means being branded mad. Your life's work is an intergenerational project, an ancestral conspiracy, a continuous meeting of bodies, a queering of temporality. Your life is not yours to resolve, yours to complete, or yours to contain. It is necessarily the life of the many. Be thankful for the threadbare places of your life where it gives the many who are yet to come something to stitch theirs with. Thank you.

[41:29]

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.

[41:54]

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