Thank you. [...] Yeah.

[01:27]

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Thank you.

[02:38]

So that's the very, very true. This is not better. That was a good week. That's a good week. Yeah. It's perfect. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

[04:36]

Yeah, I don't know. [...] Thank you very much. Good morning.

[20:09]

And welcome. San Francisco Zen Center, Beginner's Mind Temple. So Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh was asked, aren't you worried about the state of the world? Aren't you worried about... Can you hear me okay? No? Is that better? How is the sound? Okay. Yeah, thank you. So many things to worry about, right? Aren't you worried about the state of the world? And at this particular time, he takes a deep breath and he says, what is most important is not to allow the anxiety you feel about...

[21:15]

what happens in the world to fill your heart. What is most important is not to allow the anxiety you feel about what happens in the world to fill your heart. There is tremendous suffering in the world, but it need not paralyze us. If we don't know how to breathe, smile, and live every moment of our lives deeply, we will never help anyone. if we don't know how to breathe, smile, and live every moment of our lives deeply, we will never help anyone. So I took this as I've been kind of mulling on these words and seeing that perhaps either very intently or more secretively, I think he's... providing some instructions here, right? The instructions about what about how can we live in this world?

[22:22]

And he's suggesting, I think, these three practices, breathing, smiling, and living every moment of our lives. And again, in some way, this is, I think... a useful, practical way to talk about what to do about our world and what Zen practice is, what it looks like. I was reflecting on... I don't know, this was a few years ago. I was hired to do a mindfulness training for a group of... I think these were a sales team that worked for a big medical company in San Francisco. And I just had, I think, a half day to do a mindfulness training for this group of about 60 people.

[23:26]

And as I got there, there was a lot of excitement and talking about they had all gone to a magic show the night before in San Francisco. Very excited about it. And as I was about to come on to be with this group, I was thinking, how am I going to compete with a magic show? Like, I'm going to talk about mindfulness. And then just as I came on and stood in front of the room, I thought to myself and I said, I hear you all went to this magic show last night. I'm a magician too. And mindfulness is a kind of magic. And I then quoted Thich Nhat Hanh as saying, the real miracle is not to walk on water. The real miracle is to walk right here on earth. And I had each of them do a, I think from there, one of the ways that I like to talk about mindfulness practice is have people look at their hands.

[24:37]

You might try it right now. Maybe just look at your hand. But really, I mean, where did this come from? Where did this hand, this hand, we call it a hand, but that limits it, doesn't it so much? And it's amazing, right? It's amazing. Okay. You can look at it the rest of the day if you want, but for now, this is an example, I think, of the first practice of that Thich Nhat Hanh is suggesting is to breathe. And I think it's the practice of seeing, just being present for the magic of our existence, of the magic of our hand, of our life, the magic of our breath, of our breath. And Yeah, he talks about, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about three practices, which I think of as breath practices.

[25:44]

And he calls these practices the three doors of liberation. Emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness. And emptiness, so with each breath, which each breath realizing that we're not separate. that we're not separate. And empty of separateness is, again, one of many ways to describe this practice of breathing into emptiness, breathing into empty of separateness. And signlessness is a really interesting, I think, practice of not being caught by signs not being caught by as soon as we see someone right we we we label them as you know good bad or neutral or and we're doing this we do this all the time we almost can't help it and this practice of signlessness is to with again with each breath i think not being caught by our own our own ways that we limit ourselves like like

[27:05]

like not seeing our hand, not seeing other people. So it's a subtle but not so subtle shift in this practice, practice of breath, practice of breathe, smile, and live. And aimlessness, these three doors of liberation, emptiness, signlessness, and aimlessness. I'll use this example. My golf partner, Corinne, is here today. I grew up on golf courses, and then I started practicing Zen, and many, many years went by, and I stopped playing golf. But I've started recently. And when people hear that about, you know, oh, Zen guy playing golf must, you know, must have this spiritual attitude.

[28:10]

No, I want to really play good. I really want to be good. I want to score well. I want to swing well. And I want to do it. I aspire to do it with aimlessness, with a sense of stress-free, complete enjoyment, not... I'm not really there yet on either way. I'm not that good and I'm not that aimless. But I think it's a really, really useful, important practice in whatever you're doing, whether you as a parent, as a teacher, as a doctor, whatever your work is, this aspiration is to excel, and at the same time, this aspiration to let it go and to not be attached by outcomes. And again, I think this is partly, again, this first practice of aren't we worried about the state of the world?

[29:22]

Breathe. Breathing into seeing our our connection, letting go of being, of letting go of our judgments that we're, and comparisons that we're making, and this practice of aimlessness, of, and along with, we all want this aspiration to solve problems, this aspiration that we have deeply. to make the world a better place, a safer place, a fairer place. And at the same time, it's, I think, a practice of seeing what actually is, seeing what is. And I think Thich Nhat Hanh here is not suggesting, ignoring, right? He says, you know, there is tremendous suffering in the world. There is tremendous suffering in the world. So it's not And there's tremendous suffering in our own individual worlds.

[30:30]

We all experience birth, life, and death. We all experience uncertainty. We all know that we will all die. We will lose everything and everyone. How do we... allow ourselves to feel that, not suppress it, not push it away. There's tremendous suffering in the world, but it need not paralyze us. We must know how to breathe, smile, and live in every moment of our lives. So the practice, the second practice of smiling, the second practice of the practice of smiling, I think of that as reframing, reframing, seeing, reframing or shift, seeing from different perspectives, perspective taking, right?

[31:43]

The perspective, seeing the world through a smile as opposed to seeing the world through a frown. And that we almost always have some choice about how we're seeing the world. And here he's suggesting smiling. Can we smile even at the difficulty, the craziness of our world? Can we find a way to smile at it without ignoring the pain, without ignoring the suffering of it? So perspective, you know, perspective taking, perspective taking. I thought of a story about smiles and perspective taking is many years ago, I used to run a, I started a greeting card and calendar company.

[32:47]

Actually, it was beautiful walking around this building this morning, looking at all of the Mayumi Oda paintings. If you haven't really looked at them, there's a couple in the dining room. Mayumi Oda used to practice here at Zen Center at Green Gulch. And many, many years ago, I had this kind of crazy idea of starting a company to make things out of recycled paper. And I just mentioned it to Mayumi one day. And within a couple of days, she was sitting at my kitchen table with paintings that she had made to be turned into wrapping paper made from recycled paper. And that was the launch of a company that I started called Brush Dance. And we ended up making many greeting cards and calendars.

[33:47]

And I was... kind of writing about that I have made and produced in my lifetime millions of greeting cards, but in truth, I've sent very few. I've never been much of a greeting card sender. But this story about breathing and smiling and seeing the world differently, I think I was driving, and this was at a time when my son, Jason, was... He was probably 16 or 17 years old. And he said to me, Dad, how's that calendar doing, that one you produced called Golf in the Kingdom? I licensed from Michael Murphy, who wrote a famous book called Golf in the Kingdom. And he said, how's that calendar doing? And I said, it's actually not doing that well. And my son, my 16-year-old son, looks at me and says, I could have told you that.

[34:48]

He says, I could come up with a better idea for a calendar than any idea you've ever come up with in five minutes. And so he was, my son was always, of course, that made me smile, you know. And I said, well, I said, you know, it's really easy to criticize, but it's hard to come up with really good ideas for things. And I said, okay, you've got five minutes to come up with a better idea. And I looked at my watch and I said, go. And I could see him sitting there scrunching his face. And within a couple of minutes, he looks at me and he says, I've got it. All right, what's your great idea for a calendar? And he said, why don't you produce a calendar of children's smiles? I said, that's a great idea.

[35:52]

It's true, that's better than any idea I've ever, you know. And shortly after that, I was approached by a photographer who was traveling around the world photographing children's smiles. And we did produce such a calendar, and it did quite well in the world. So there's something about smiles, right? And seeing it as a practice. And also, you know, just like this practice of seeing our hand, looking, noticing how much smiling there actually is out in the world when we are aware of it. So I think it goes this practice of smiling. And again, I think here he's suggesting generally... the ability to see from a variety of perspectives.

[36:55]

So often we get caught in our own perspective of how we see the world, how we see ourselves, how we see other people. I think this, in some way, this is the work. The work is of noticing our own perspective, noticing the lens that we see the world through and realizing it's one lens, realizing that everyone sees the world through a different lens. So this is a practice of perspective taking, is what I think he's getting at here as what he's calling smiling. And the third practice is to live, right? So he's saying, there's tremendous suffering in the world, but it need not paralyze us.

[38:06]

If we don't know how to breathe, smile, and live every moment of our lives, we will never help anyone. So this third practice, again, he's using the word live. I think it's a practice of how do we integrate breathing, smiling or perspective taking? How do we actually live it? How do we live it? And I'm often coming back to one of my... It's funny, I've... I brought with me this copy of Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, which is kind of an amazing book. This is a pretty well-used copy. And there's one particular talk that I find myself coming back to again and again called Nirvana, the Waterfall, in which Suzuki Roshi is seeing Yosemite Falls for the first time.

[39:10]

And he's looking at the droplets, the droplets of water falling off the falls. And he says, right, before we were born, we had no feeling. We were one with the universe. After we're separated by birth from this oneness, we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the universe, you have fear. Our life and death are the same thing. When you realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore and no actual difficulty in this life. You will find the true meaning in life. You will discover

[40:11]

So I kind of took his words from this chapter and put them in an order that I felt was... something that I could study and live by. And again, here I think he's combining breathing, smiling, and living, right? Breathing, again, he's talking about no separation. Here he's talking about noticing our, I love his, you will discover how meaningless your old interpretation of life was. So again, he's talking about noticing what lens we're looking through the world through.

[41:13]

What lens are we looking through the world through? Can we look at the world through the lens of wonder? Being a sense of wonder, not only when we look at our own hands, but can we live that way? And at the end of this particular talk, he says... It's one thing to have kind of an intellectual understanding of no separation, of living with a sense of wonder, but can we live it? Can we actually live it in our day-to-day lives? I want to share a poem by William Stafford called Why I Am Happy. Now has come an easy time.

[42:14]

I let it roll. There is a lake somewhere so blue and far nobody owns it. A wind comes by and a willow listens gracefully. I hear all this every summer. I laugh and cry and for every turn of the world. It's terribly cold, innocent spin. That lake stays blue and free. It goes on and on, and I know where it is. Now has come an easy time. I let it roll. There is a lake somewhere so blue and far nobody owns it. A wind comes by and a willow listens gracefully. I hear all this every summer. I laugh and cry for every turn of the world. It's terribly cold, innocent spin.

[43:19]

That lake stays blue and free and it goes on and on and I know where it is. So do you know where that lake is? Do you think about this question, how to be of service in the world? Aren't you a little worried about the state of the world? What is most important is to not allow... the anxiety you feel about what happens in the world to fill your heart. There's tremendous suffering in the world, but it need not paralyze us. If we don't know how to breathe, smile, and live every moment of our lives deeply, we will never help anyone.

[44:25]

I think come join me in the dining room if you'd like to talk about these things. I hear that's the current form. But maybe just take a moment to feel your own breath. And maybe take a moment just to look around this room and see who's here. I sometimes, I really, I'm fond of the word a conspiracy, right? That we, I like to think of us as a conspiracy, right? Conspire, to breathe together, to breathe together. I think with the, you know, with the mutual intention to, to breathe, to smile and to,

[45:45]

bring our real heartfelt sincerity into this world that needs us. And I really appreciate William Stafford's words in this poem. I laugh and cry for every turn of the world. It's terribly cold and innocent spin. That lake stays blue and free. It goes on and on. And I know, I know where it is. I know where it is. So do you know where your, where is your lake? Where is your lake? Where is your place that you can come back to, to find your own place? ability to breathe and smile and live more deeply.

[46:48]

Thank you very much. He is the sound of the number of lists. [...] The sound of the number of lists. But in the heart of God, this is the way you need yourself. Absolutely. I love you. I love you. I love you. Good morning, everyone.

[49:18]

My name is Kevin. I'm Eno here at City Center, the head of the Zenda. I have a few announcements. First of all, thank you very much for coming today. We love having you join us for all that we do here, Dharma Talks, evening and morning Zazen, classes, special events. You're more than welcome to join us for all that we do, and we're honored to have your presence here. Please also consider supporting Zen Center with your donations as well as your presence. Memberships and support are the lifeblood of Zen Center and help us to create and sustain all that we do here at City Center, at Tassajara, at Green Gulch, and on our online Zendo. There is a donation box in the lobby that has a QR code you can scan to make donating very, very simple. Thank you for that. Ellen, are you doing Zendo forms? All right, so Zendo forms. Are you curious about the Zendo and what the Zendo means and what things are in the Zendo?

[50:23]

Ellen will be your guide for that. So how to bow, where to bow, what the sounds mean. Everything you need to know about the Zendo will be in Zendo forms. And you can meet Ellen in the lobby right after we're done here. And she'll be your guide to all things Zendo. This coming Wednesday, there will be no Dharma talk. However, we will have a full moon ceremony, which is something we do once a month. It's an opportunity for all of us to renew our bodhisattva vows, and you can come and join us for that. So at 7.30 p.m. on Wednesday, we'll meet here in the Buddha Hall, and we'll break up into small groups and talk about one of the precepts. Each person can talk about one of the precepts that they're working with or is meaningful to them at the moment. And then at 8 o'clock, we'll have the full moon ceremony here in the Buddha Hall as well. So please join us for that. If you've never been to it, it's quite an experience. If you've been to it before, you know that it's a really great opportunity for all of us to join together.

[51:25]

And it's actually the oldest Buddhist ceremony that still exists in the world. Today is also a garden volunteer day. You can meet David France. David, you want to raise your hand? If you're interested in working in the gardens here, there's a volunteer day today as well as later in the month. And David can show you what to do, give you all the tools you need. I think you're focusing on the courtyard. So you're focusing all over. That pins it down. Wherever there's a plant in need, we'll be there to help it. Okay, so 1130. So 1130 on the side courtyard at the garden shed. You can meet David and work in the gardens here.

[52:26]

Are you new to Zazen? Are you interested in doing more Zazen? You don't feel you're quite ready for a full-day sit, but maybe a half-day sit? There's a beginner's half-day sitting a week from tomorrow, Sunday, July 13th, 9 to 1, and you can register for that online. We also have a book event two weeks from today, which will be hosted by the Abbot of Green Gulch, GDU, and will be on the book Becoming Yourself, a brand new book of talks by Suzuki Roshi that GDU and... the late abbot of Berkeley Zen Center, Sojin Mel Weissman worked on for a number of years. We're very excited about this book. It'll be new teachings from Suzuki Roshi. There's a postcard just like this at the front desk there. You can actually scan this. Little QR code right on the front. Scan to order your copy. I never saw that before, but it's the thing these days, I guess. You can scan and order your copy.

[53:26]

So New Talks by Suzuki Roshi. And that book will be available July 15th and GDU's talk will be July 19th, a few days after. It will be a book event. So GDU will talk about the book and there will be a discussion after the Dharma talk about the book. Urban Gate Sangha helps us every Saturday morning with the 925 Zazen and the Dharma talk if the Urban Gate folks want to raise their hand. So all these folks here raising their hand, help us. And if you're interested in helping Us and Urban Gate, you're more than welcome to. The more the merrier. We just barely had enough people today to make it work. So any of the people who raised their hands or Tim or myself, you can ask about Urban Gate. It's a great way to become more intimately involved with the practice here. After the Dharma talk, there's a get-together. There's a light lunch and a Dharma discussion with Tim. So if you're interested, please talk to one of us.

[54:27]

As Mark said, he'll be in the dining hall doing Q&A along the way. Feel free to pick up tea and cookies, which will be in the lobby. And thank you so much for coming today. If you could help, if you have a chair and you're able to, bring a chair back to the dining hall. If you have a Zafu, please bring the Zafus back to the shelves there. So thank you so much. Have a beautiful weekend. Thank you. Thank you.

[55:07]

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