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. I've spent an awful lot of time in this room, although it was an awful long time ago. But this is the first time I've sat in this seat for this purpose. So it's rather nice. Thank you for coming. We're in a Zen and Yoga retreat, as you all probably know. And this afternoon, we had a most lovely, very, very long, relaxing, lying down, guided type of meditation, relaxation. And we were invited to think about things for which we felt particular gratitude and appreciation, and particularly having to do with supporting us to be here at Tassajara doing this practice.

[01:05]

And as I was lying there, three things came to me. One was gratitude to my teacher and to all the teachers who over centuries and millennia have passed on the teaching. And one was for all the people who had the vision to create Tassajara, and then all the people who've come through here over many years now taking care of it, and then also to everyone who is here now taking care of Tassajara. I know it's a lot. It's a lot to keep everything going, and you're doing it beautifully. So I was feeling the privilege and gratitude of being able to just... come and step back in and be held in that way. And then the third that came to me, gratitude of being here, was my mother. And in 1958, so when Suzuki Roshi had come from Japan to here, and had been here a couple of years, I think, in 1958, my mother got on a ship

[02:23]

and sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge from Fort Mason to Japan. So she ended up spending, this was quite a bit of time before I was born, and she ended up spending a couple of years in Tokyo and learning about Japan and teaching there, teaching army kids. And... also traveled around Asia, went to all sorts of places like India and Sri Lanka, a thing called Ceylon, Cambodia, Nepal. So she learned all these things. She even took classes on Zen Buddhism from a Catholic priest, a Jesuit priest. And then she came back. She came back and eventually... went back to the small town in Texas where she had grown up and ended up marrying someone that she had known all her life and lived about a mile and a half from her parents.

[03:29]

But she brought all this exoticism with her. So even though she was in this small Texas town with nothing remotely like any of this going on, she meditated and she had a yoga practice And she was into TM when it was there, Transcendental Meditation. And when I was growing up, when I was four, they expanded the house and she built this amazing room that was basically in a Japanese style. This beautiful living room with deep orange carpets and a wide open glass wall and with rice paper doors and a stone lantern outside and figures of... Kuan Yin, and actually a Buddha head, and a rubbing from a temple in Cambodia, and then a table that she had had made for her in Japan, beautiful walnut. And on it, all my growing up, there was this huge, thick, thick, really thick book that said, Japanese temple architecture.

[04:34]

And there were these incredible black and white photographs from all the major, and I think minor, temples in Japan. So this was all around me. growing up. And then just recently I was going through some of her things and I found also an old album of Alan Watts, you know, sitting there in his jubon and with the bells and everything. And I'm sure she was playing that when I was, you know, small and running around. So I think she is a large, a big factor in how I ended up here. You know, and... She actually passed away just this past January. And she used to really love to come. She lived in Los Angeles, and she loved California. And she came quite often to visit me wherever I happened to be. So she came here a number of times, and she went to Green Gulch, and she went to city center. And she really, really wanted to have one last trip back to California.

[05:38]

And it didn't happen. But she, you know, so she left home, in a sense. She left home, and she went on her own kind of adventure and pilgrimage. And then she came back home, and that was what she wanted to do. And she had studied Zen and had a pretty wide and deep spiritual exploration. She read a lot of different traditions, although she grew up Christian. She was very clear. She said, I don't like change. I don't like things to change. She really wanted them to be settled. And there was something about place and house and home. They were all very important. She had pictures, paintings done, charcoals, pastels done of our house. and also of my grandparents' house, which she eventually had to sell after my grandparents died.

[06:40]

And so they were up like portraits of people, kind of on the walls. And in fact, a key from my grandmother's house was framed and put next to our door. So there was something about place and being home that was really important to her. And going back, and she did not like to throw anything away. And so just even though we'd been trying to go through it over actually a number of years, just a few weeks ago, I was in Texas with my sister, and we spent five really intense days trying to go through everything. And at some point, I had this aha, like, oh, I'm actually not going to be coming back here before the house is sold. When I went to Texas, that hadn't quite occurred to me. And then it was like, oh, this really is it. This really is goodbye to this house that she's been in for 50 years, practically, and that has always been, like, the safe place for me. You know, there was always, all my growing up, either college, beyond, you know, whatever happened, there was a place that was always there for me, a safe anchor, and it was going to disappear.

[07:51]

You would think, at 46, this would be okay. But still, somehow, to know that There's this stability that's always been there and then isn't going to be there. And she had thousands and thousands of slides because she had traveled everywhere and took lots and lots of slides. And so I went through all of this. Actually, I found her old projector, which miraculously still worked. And so I could actually put, you know, the slide, the tray, the kachinka-chinka, and there we go. And... So I threw away, I don't know how many slides, two-thirds of them at least, and still 1,000 slides I sent away to be digitalized. And then she had kept a lot of things from my grandmother's house and actually gotten a storage room, a metal storage room to put out back so that there would be room for all that. And that had just been sitting out there. And as we were starting to go through all of that... realizing there were all these old things from my grandmother's life that we had never gone through.

[08:57]

And I found a four-year scrapbook from her college days. And it was beautifully done, except it was falling apart, literally. It had been riddled by insects and hot and humid and just scraps of paper. And it was almost beautiful in its decay. I actually took a picture of it. My grandmother was born in 1901, exactly 100 years before my daughter was born. And you could see the script. So this beautiful script of these young college ladies and their birth dates, you know, 1900, 1901. And so I picked it up, and there was no saving it. No saving it. And then as I dug deeper in this, and I had gloves on, mask, you know, the dust and everything. As I dug deeper, I realized that... The boxes that had been pushed off to the side, water had gotten in through the roof along the side, so they had gotten damp on top of heat and humidity. Think Louisiana.

[09:58]

I mean, this is really hot and humid. And as I was going forward, you know, it just got kind of gooier and gooier in a way, or more amorphous. And finally, it was sort of dark in there. And finally, I just put my hands in it, and I lifted it up, and I turned to my sister, who was standing right outside, and I said, it's dirt. It literally was dirt. All of her memorabilia, all of her life, all of these records had composted. And as I turned, this rich, beautiful dirt made out of old photographs, and I turned and I realized it was teeming with ants. And I went, and a little bit too close to my sister. She didn't like that. She dumped away. But it was amazing. It was amazing, actually. You know what I mean? There's dust to dust. Literally. all these carefully preserved things. You could grow things in it. It was ready to go, to turn into something else, no problem. So in letting go of that home, so in a way I left home, you know, but it was always like, but you know, it's really still there.

[11:11]

I can really still go back to it. So what is, this question of like, what is home? Later, I, a couple of years after college, I found, some of you may know this story, but I found myself in Berkeley, and a relationship had ended very painfully, and I felt like I was responsible, and I could not fix it. You know, I wanted to fix it, and I could not fix it. And my parents even came out, and they could not fix it. Nobody could fix it. And I had this thought very clearly, you know, I need a church. And I didn't really want to go back to the Methodist church I had grown up in, even though that had been very important to me. So I went church shopping. And I went around different places, Quakers, etc. But someone had told me about the Berkeley Zen Center. So I found my way there on Russell Street. And I think a lot of it was aesthetics, to be honest. You know, it looked like the room that my mother had created that I had grown up with.

[12:14]

So it felt very comfortable in a way. But someone showed me how to sit on this afu facing the wall and said, okay, it's a 40-minute period. Just sit there. And I remember thinking, the only way I'm going to get through this is if I die right here. Somehow we got through it. And then there was a service. Like if you were here this morning, something very similar to that. It was the afternoon. So there was someone in robes, doing bows, and then going up and offering incense and bells. And I thought, this is very strange. You know, this all seemed very foreign to me. But then when we did these full prostrations, which I'd never done or thought about doing in my life, when my head touched the floor, there was some really profound, deep sense of homecoming. And I thought, I don't know what this is, but I want to find out.

[13:16]

So it's interesting. What's home? How is that home? The word that came out of my mouth was home. Homecoming. In this strange place that I'd never been before. how is that home different from the home I had left? You know, and pre-sordination is called shukkei tokudo, so leaving home and attaining the way. There's some sense of stepping outside of our normal expectations, routines, social roles, busyness, and... I think it's an interesting question. What brings us here right now? How did we all get here? What inner question, inner thought brought us here and how conscious was it?

[14:25]

Whether we're new students or have been here a few years or many years or guests coming just for the weekend, why here? Why now? Why brave that wild road to get here? What's the inner question? And then we get here, and then if we're here for a while, it can become kind of just life. In My Beginner's Mind, Suzuki Roshi talks about that. He says, when you're in the monastery for a while, it seems like nothing special. It's just life. But then also people come from the outside and like, oh, there's something going on here. What's going on here? And the more I live at Green Gulch, but I do work outside of Green Gulch, and the more I do outside of Green Gulch, the more I can write different angles.

[15:36]

I have different angles of view. of a practice place and the more precious, in a sense, it seems. To have a place that's really set up to help us remember, to ask these questions, to say, what's going on here? What? I asked my teacher once, I said, what's a good Zen student? And he said, yes. What is a good Zen student? How is a good Zen student? Who is a good Zen student? you know, these questions, to how to hold this question, what? What? You know, so if I go into, say, a company, a corporation or something, and they're teaching these sort of basic practices of sitting down and being still, etc., it's much harder for people to actually continue with the practices, because they're kind of on their own. You know, they don't really have a group to go to sit with every morning.

[16:37]

There's nothing in the environment. We take it all for granted, but all the sounds, you know, the Han, the bell, all the Buddha statues around, people with wake-up bells, everything in the environment, there's so many little things saying, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up. The whole place is actually incredibly brilliantly designed over centuries to support practice. And all the way we move together, the way we cook together, the way we work together, all of these things have layers upon layers of layers of affecting us. And we're not stable entities. It's not like whoever you were before you came here, that you're the same being that you were then. Everything we do shapes us, changes us, shifts our brain. changes our perspective. So to put oneself... It's an important question.

[17:39]

Where do I put myself? Because wherever I put myself will shape who I become. And I can't control that in some way. I can't put myself in a certain place and say, okay, I'm not going to change. You're going to be influenced by your environment. So to put yourself into this environment, then you become shaped in the way that this place shapes people. put yourself in a different environment, you will become shaped in the way that place shapes people. When I was going through my mother's things, I never really thought of her as keeping a journal, but going through some of the papers, I actually found a very thin spiral notebook, and she had kept a journal. for a short period of time, starting in 1968 when I was two and my sister was just a baby. And I spent some hours, and it was actually kind of a wonderful practice, typing up her journal and hearing a voice of her as a young woman with very young children that I never knew.

[18:56]

That was not the voice that she shared with me or she even had by the time I was old enough. That was another part of her. So I saw a different person than I had known in some ways. And one passage really struck me, which I'm going to read to you. She says, so this is 1969. And now it's late July. The mimosa blossoms have fallen and decayed. The drought has been broken. The Jacksons have parted company. And the moon has been unveiled and is still. Things go on just as they have. People spin on their wheels like white mice, occasionally getting off to inquire, why? Finding no immediate answer, the little white mice climb on again and begin to run. It is, after all, a much more comfortable existence, even terrifying to some to stay off too long.

[19:56]

And then she says... That is written in the third person, but first person would have been more appropriate. It's lonely out there, off the treadmill, all alone. I think for centuries, people who've had a kind of inclination to ask, why? What? there's a kind of loneliness or even something deeply unsettling about asking these questions. And it's often not reflected in the society around us. And for thousands of years, people have been seeking each other out to actually come together to a place to have support where these questions cannot not only be tolerated, but actually brought to the front. and explored together.

[21:01]

And then whole traditions rise up to give that form and structure, to allow that to happen. And in a way, it's kind of funny, because when you come, like if you receive a Rokkasu, a Bodhisattva precepts, then you, in a way, are entering a new family. And then if you do priest ordination, you are you're receiving a new name also with Bodhisattva precepts. You're receiving a new name, and it says, now this is your true family. These are your true clothing. This is your true clothing. You're entering a whole lineage. You're entering a whole family, like a whole new home, in a sense. But it's like, but wait a minute, didn't I just leave? Didn't I just leave home? You know, is this home different from that home? is this a home that supports me to remember I'm not actually who I think I am? Although if we start to hold on to that, that lineage, that identity, then you're kind of recreating the same kind of home that you just left.

[22:09]

But to have a place that helps us ask, Again, sort of what's going on here. There are different traditional formulations of this, but I've been reading a kind of interesting book you might know called Buddhist Brain. Anyone know that book, Buddhist Brain? So it's written by Rick Hansen, who I don't know, but I think he's a talented teacher who... It's Buddhist, but also a neuroscientist. And he laid something out which I thought was very, very in line with Buddhist teaching, but something about it, that angle felt very clear to me. He was talking about how, just in terms of evolution, human species, things, how we evolved to help us survive. And he mentioned three things in particular that were very smart in terms of survival. And one of them was to create boundaries. So the idea that I'm over here, you're over there, where also my in-group is here and the out-group is over there.

[23:24]

And there are certain ways that we actually are predisposed to feel very suspicious of people who look different from us. So a sense of, okay, boundaries, here, there. To maintain stability. keep things pretty subtle and smoothing a lot smoother along so that we can raise families and do things like that, right temperature, et cetera, stability. And then also that we approach rewards, so things that feel good we move towards, and get away from threats. So things that seem dangerous or feel bad, we try to get away from them. That makes total sense, right, evolutionarily. The problem with this, it helps us to survive, but it doesn't take into account how we feel. So we're trying really hard to do this, these different things, create boundaries, maintain stability, go towards things that feel good, get away from things that feel bad. But the problem is that actually reality isn't set up like that.

[24:25]

So we try to create boundaries, but in fact, we're all deeply interconnected. Everything ties to everything else. Thich Nhat Hanh very famously talked about a piece of paper, seeing the clouds and the trees and the soil and the water and all of that. But it keeps going. Who planted the tree? What did they have for breakfast? Who cooked it? What were they wearing? Where did that come from? Who decided this would be yellow? Where did that dye come from? It just goes on and on and on and on. So everything is actually fluid and connected. but we try to keep it separate. And everything keeps changing. So we try to keep things stable, but everything keeps changing. And then, even though we try our really best to try to go towards opportunities or things that are good, often we'll get what we want and get kind of bored with it, or it's not really what we thought it was going to be.

[25:27]

And then things we try to get away from them. Sometimes we can get away from them, but sometimes we can't, like old age, sickness, and death. So how do we... how do we work with this situation? Ajahn Chah, who is a famous master in the Thai forest tradition, you've heard of a glass being half empty or half full. But he said, when he looks at a glass, he sees it as already broken. So, any guess is how long this glass will... keep this form, you know? A year? Five days? Ten years? Thirty? A hundred? Thousand? Probably not. You know, so you look at it, this is already, you know, there's no hope. There's no hope for this glass.

[26:30]

Like, we can try to be really careful with our things, right? But it's a done deal. It's broken. So if I get really attached to this glass, I'm going to be in trouble. And of course the deal is that everything is like this. So we're also broken. We're all doomed. And this is the kind of... I almost want to cackle somehow. There's something kind of radical in Buddhism that says, well, just look at it. Look at it. You know, quit trying to deny things. Actually look at them. This is what's happening. It's right in front of your eyes, right? And if you can bring that to consciousness, how does that affect our choices? How does that affect how we live? And then it's not only you look at something and you say, okay, well, some, including me, you, some town down the road, that's going to disintegrate, right?

[27:36]

It's also looking at something and saying, even right now, this is not as solid as it seems. Not only will it change shape later, but it's not really... It looks so solid. It really does. But the nature of it is not solid. The nature of it is already independent, already changing, already not what I think it is. And it seems that this is actually a kind of liberation promise. that if you can actually sense, be with this wide openness of everything, then you still pick up the cup and you still take a drink. But you're not fooled by it. And this is why we sit, I think. It's one thing to talk about it, to have that intellectual, okay, that kind of maybe makes sense. But what if we sit down? What if we open? What's going on here?

[28:37]

How do I know? So taking, so bowing in the mat, this sense of homecoming. You know, what was that? Somehow I think that is related to that. You know, the feeling that things are not what I think they are, and I'm surrendering to that. I didn't know what I was surrendering to, but I was surrendering to something. So for me, this is a worthy lifetime exploration. It's never going to be tied up in a box, but you can live it. You can live it in a way that's very lively and potentially touches our deepest heart. getting close to time. I don't know if there are any questions, but if there are questions, you may ask them.

[29:45]

We have a few minutes. I had had encounters with practice previously, but then there was at some point in speaking with someone, a teacher, and suddenly there was a sense of possibility. And what it felt like was a door opening or something almost forgotten from childhood, kind of the invitation to...

[30:47]

allow that to come into consciousness or to follow that somehow. So I think we each have some deep question or deep yearning or deep love opening. And sometimes it's hard to hear. And sometimes it takes sitting down and remembering to even ask the question and going through the different layers. And the possibility of, can I invite that to be my primary way of going through the world with that heart? Yeah. The teacher that you quoted, Ajahn Chah, said, this glass is already broken. That is why I love it so. Would you comment on that, please? I didn't know the second part, no, slowly. know, I don't want to say what he meant, but I did laugh.

[31:57]

There was something in my heart that actually went, ha! There is a freedom, I think. Again, it means I don't have to worry in some sense. I can love this just as it is, and I don't have to worry that it's going to change. I can love you just as you are, and I don't have to worry that you're going to change, or that people I'm close to will die or change or, you know, there's some way to love freely when you know you can't hold it, when you know you can't hold it, even if you're trying really hard. Yes? This is a little bit of a continuation where you have felt with the believing, the realization. I've heard of one thing I found helpful is different ways to study or different layers of studying.

[33:17]

So one is to to read text or to hear talks, so to take it in with your mind to do that. And then work with it yourself, you know, well, what does this really mean? And think about it on that level. And then after doing that, really kind of hearing it, kind of thinking about it yourself, working with it, and then sitting. And sit, just bringing it into your meditation. And doing that in many layers over time. that there are different ways of entering, and they influence each other. And I think all of these words of knowledge, wisdom, knowing, direct experience, they're all approximations, I think, pointing to different ways of experiencing. But the main thing is to try it yourself. very much 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

[34:47]

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