This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Everybody should have big sleeves like this so you can carry things around, pull them out and hide them like handkerchiefs on this warm day. Hello, everybody. Welcome. Welcome to San Francisco Zen Center. Welcome to the Saturday morning Dharma talk that we do just about every Saturday, very few exceptions. My name is Jordan, Jordan Thorne. And I hope my words today are useful to you and to myself and to all of us.

[01:06]

Normally I'm not. I wonder if this is turned up properly. I can talk more loudly. It's a simple thing. So speak up, anybody, if you need to speak up. Okay? So again, my name is Jordan Thorne. And I work for the Zen Center. I'm the treasurer. And, you know, I actually love my job. I love working for the Zen Center and helping to support the Zen Center. And I say that because I think it's important for people to have work that's useful for themselves, that they appreciate. I remember a tragic thing that happened some years ago.

[02:10]

Horrible thing. Grace Damon, who lived at Green Gulch Farm, was in a horrendous head-on collision on the Golden Gate Bridge. Jaws of Life, medevac helicopter from... The bridge, things happened, and comas, and touch and go circumstances. And she's very much recovered, but still affected. And anyway, the point of my mentioning what happened to Grace is when she first was able to start speaking, because for the longest time she was kind of quiet, and I was attending to a kind of a blog about her health. And, of course, I don't know what she really said, and I don't know when she said it, because all I know is when I read it.

[03:14]

But I was really surprised, kind of, what she said was, she said, what a miracle and pleasure it is to be alive, and I urge all of you out there who are in unhappy relationships to get divorced. And if you don't like your job, find a job you like. And I'm sure that's not exactly what she said. I'm sure it's even not exactly, it's kind of what I remember. But I thought, when something really enormous happens to us, we realize it's time to take care of ourselves. And if we're in a circumstance Like if we've got a job that doesn't work for us, if it's not supporting us, well, look for another one. So I urge all of you. This actually isn't my Dharma talk. This is just kind of exciting. I urge all of you to tend to yourself in such a good fashion.

[04:15]

I'm sorry, I couldn't hear what you said. Yeah, well, chronic pain such as grace experiences. I think that's another story, and we all have pains of our own sorts, and I'm not going to speak to that right now because actually I think I wasn't prepared. I hadn't thought about it. Various things come up, but actually I'm going to move on. But thank you for the question. And also, what I also say kind of... We have to be careful. Precipitous moves aren't often that wise. So as you look for a new job, maybe find another job before you quit the old one. Moving on. So here we are at the San Francisco Zen Center. Here we are at the Zen Center.

[05:28]

Saturday morning, and I am one person, okay, in this room. We are a room full of single people connected by our proximity temporarily until we get up and go elsewhere. But right now we have something in common, which very simply put is we're here together. But I think we have more than just geography, more than just physical proximity in common. I think we actually are here together. We're a self-selected group of people who have come here because, and I might be wrong, but I think we're here because we all have some question about how to live a good life, how to be helpful. how to take care of ourselves, take care of other people. I think we have, that's a kind of underneath reason that somebody might decide to come to the San Francisco Zen Center on Saturday for a Dharma talk.

[06:46]

So when you come to the San Francisco Zen Center to hear a Dharma talk, you hear about something called practice. Practice is a code word. It's a code word for something more than just like learning an instrument or some music. There's a music stand here. People might practice on using the stand like this. But practice is a... a word we'll use for the whole shebang of study at the San Francisco Zen Center, Dharma practice. And so, in some ways, what I'm talking about today, what I hope to talk about is how to practice together. And in that sentence, they just said the word together is maybe the important word.

[08:07]

How do we practice together? And one way we might understand practicing together is We want other people to better understand and appreciate us. But that's actually kind of putting, that's backwards way. The way for other people to better understand and appreciate us is for us to first understand ourself and why we are the way we are, what makes us tick. There's a French writer, Simone Weil, who passed away in the 40s.

[09:13]

She wrote some wonderful things, and I'm going to quote her right now, just a sentence. She said, so many of us desire to find pleasure in friendship which is not fully deserved because it's not fully honest. And the honesty that we need to have is actually, first of all, honesty about ourselves, seeing ourselves clearly. My teacher is someone named Norman Fisher. And I became close to him when I lived at Green Gulch Farm. I actually knew Norman years before we lived together at Green Gulch Farm, because I lived and practiced with Norman at Tasahar.

[10:17]

One time I went to see Norman for Dokusan. And he said to me, you know, when you go to see somebody for Dokusan, a teacher, In some ways, it's a territory called best foot forward. You kind of like, you don't want to make a fool of yourself. You present like, this is what I'm concerned about, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And Norman listened to me, and then he said, paraphrasing, because this was some years ago, but he said... You're pretty good about describing where you want to go. But I think you need to pay more attention about where you've been. It's only half of the picture if you aim a flashlight in front of you. You need to aim the flashlight behind you and see what you left back there.

[11:25]

In other words, see what your wake is, the disturbance that was created by your actions. And I thought that was pretty good advice, actually. I offer it to all of you, I offer it to myself again, that as we know ourselves, we need to not just know kind of like where we want to go, but also we need to be aware of where we've been and how we have perhaps hurt people in various ways, just by the normal agency of being human, being a friend even. how we've hurt people. Seeing things in a 360 degree way like that might be something like what's called practice. It's a little bit coarse.

[12:31]

But I'll say, I'll say, I've had the experience of, I must apologize to say, but of going to the bathroom and leaving it and someone else coming in behind and saying, oh, I got poop, wow. But when I was in there, I didn't think it stunk. Our own poop doesn't smell bad to us. It smells bad to other people. And there's a lesson there of some sort. Of some sort. And let's move on to other lessons. in this thing called practice and in this thing called knowing ourselves so that we can be with others.

[13:36]

We also need to not just accidentally but intentionally on purpose help others in their journey. And one way of helping others is to understand that everyone we meet on the path is the same as we are. And another way of helping others is to realize that they need our permission to change, just as we need permission so that we can change. In a very real way, we need the permission of our friends, family, sangha, and ourself so that we don't stay stuck in small versions of who we become. So starting off in practice,

[15:00]

Starting off to try to kind of like understand ourselves and maybe get along better with our friends, family, work, and maybe even feel that we're doing what we need to do. Starting off is actually pretty simple and easy. It's like the toughest thing is continuing. I mean, really, the toughest thing is to continue. Various things make it tough, and one thing that makes it tough is that, actually, it's not that easy to change. I don't even know, actually, if change is what we're aiming for, but a little bit more openness and a little bit less reflexive reactivity, that just would be some change that's useful. That's measured in the scale of things.

[16:02]

That actually could be an avalanche. It could set off other things that are really wonderful. Just a little bit of change. So starting off isn't so hard. Continuing is tougher. I mean, I started off practicing because... To be honest, I just didn't actually feel like I was so proud of what I was becoming or how I was living. I felt like I needed some advice. I needed some model. So I came to the Zen Center and at first it was a great model and then after a while I kind of wore through and actually stopped being useful because I stopped working on myself and I started thinking I understood what it was. And then I became disillusioned and then I had to leave because that's what you do when you're disillusioned.

[17:08]

And then I came back. But that process of starting, stopping, continuing, coming back is something repeated in a million ways in our life. If you have ever sat a period of zazen in 40 minutes, that's what happens. 40,000 times, you know, with every breath. You take a breath, you follow it, pretty soon, well, you know, who knows where you go, and then you come back and you bring ourselves back. So in this thing called practice in Buddhism, in the Dharma, the process of returning to our intention is just as important as awakening our intention. It's a very rare process who can wake up an intention to practice and then, you know, off to the races, there they go. Very most of us wake up that thought, wake up our heart, and then have things happen.

[18:13]

And then we forget, we forget. And then we remember, but we forget again. I know that it's not like that for everybody, but it's like that for a lot of folks. So, you know, it might be that like, when you look at your life, it could be that like, there's a past of stuff that happened, that brought us to the present moment. And then in the future, we've got this idea about where we're going to go and how we're going to, you know. But I want to say in Zen practice, and not just in, I think in authentic spiritual practice across all traditions, at least in my mind, what we focus on is the moment of now, of today. We don't worry about the past. We don't deny it. We don't worry about the future.

[19:22]

We realize that paying attention to this present moment is the way to work on our future moment. You know, Buddhism is, one of the metaphors for Buddhism is the middle way. This is, you know, this is the middle way. Not the past and not the future, but right now. the place in the middle between the past and the future. That's where we put our focus. So, at Zen Center, there's various helpful traditions. One thing we do to understand the way to live with other people is we learn about the precepts.

[20:30]

We learn how living ethically is important. I just forget about important. It's foundational. We learn stories about teachers who have come in the past. We live in a community so that we can have our hearts broken by folks that don't seem to live up to what we think they should and also have our hearts expanded by the beautiful individuals who come around the corner and meet us and help us. And also, at the Zen Center, we taught about meditation, which is called, here at the Zen Center, it's called Zazen. And, Zazen is radically simple. We sit down. We express an intention to not move.

[21:37]

And of course, the first thing we notice is we're moving. Even sitting, all of you together, many of you being still, I see, but just the act of breathing is motion. Thank God for it. Zazen begins with sitting down, maybe on a cushion, maybe in a chair, maybe on the uni bus seat as we go down the road. And at the Zen Center we say we face the wall. Now that's because in our meditation hall we actually turn and face the wall, we sit. If you don't have a wall in front of you, it doesn't matter, you can still face the wall. There's a wall always in front of us that we can face. And that's found when that wall is found when we just simply stop and realize how tough it is to stop.

[22:41]

We think we have a lot of time to figure things out. Very few of us have to blessings that Grace Dammond did of a head-on collision on the Golden Gate Bridge to bring forth the priority of life. And I say that, of course, you know, I really, it's a horrible thing that happened and I wish it hadn't. But anyway. So, I think one of the things we need to understand is a sort of sense of urgency. Now, let's not be frantically urgent. Let's take time for smelling the roses. But also, none of us really know how long we've got. And it would be a regret if we didn't make the effort

[23:47]

just to understand ourselves, to understand how to be with people in a healthier, more honest way. And even if you don't realize it yourself that that would be regrettable, well, I just want to say it would be a regret not to make the effort. One of the things that's so healthy about practice, is that we can't do it on our own. We start on our own, but actually, you don't make much progress by yourself. You make progress in relationship to other people. You make progress in relationship to a community. In Buddhism, we say there's the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And one of them is... more important altogether, equal Buddha, the awakened one, the teaching, the dharma, but the sangha, without the sangha.

[24:54]

Well, first of all, we're each of us, whether we know it or not, we're bodhisattvas who are living our life in order to help others wake up. And not to help ourselves wake up, it's a kind of a pyrrhic victory. You know, to have a heroic enlightenment experience on your own and then to sort of like treasure it and keep it. It only works if you share it, have it challenged, have it lost because of working with other people. That's a truly tested awakening. When you risk it by stepping into the hurly-burly of this room and the other rooms. You know, we

[26:14]

We talk at the Zen Center sometimes. If you hang around enough, you'll hear this. We talk about the lineage of Buddhas. From Shakyamuni Buddha to the seven Buddhas before him, from Shakyamuni Buddha to his disciple Mahakashapa through the, I don't know, somebody, some better student of the Dharma than Mika. How many generations? are we now at with, say, Suzuki Reji? Maybe 90 generations, give or take, 2000. And we treasure this lineage not so much because we think that all of those people We treasure this lineage, I think.

[27:17]

Not so much because we're so foolish as to think that all of the historical anecdotes are necessarily accurate and correct, but we treasure that because it points to the fact that we're part of a long story. Friendships are things that don't have ends. This lineage of Buddhism, of the Dharma, of the Zen ancestors is a delicate line. It's a bloodline that joins the past with the future and we can find ourselves on that line with knowledge that it's continuing and will continue. And that's helpful, at least I find it helpful.

[28:19]

One day, Suzuki Roshi, who's founded this temple, this particular San Francisco Zen Center school, Suzuki Roshi said to everybody, wherever he was, maybe in the Zendo, he says, it doesn't get better later. It doesn't get better later. When I was ordained as a priest by Richard Baker, as part of that ordination ceremony, I received a mala. Do you know what a mala is? It's a string of rosary seeds, or various things, stones.

[29:23]

And traditionally, a larger mala has 108 seeds on it. And I had it for a couple of months. I had no idea what to do with it. It was kind of attractive. Where were it on my wrist? But at some point I said, I was one-on-one with Richard Baker, and I took it off my wrist, and I handed it to him. I said, I didn't know what to do with this. And he said, Actually, I had it on my wrist. I said, I don't know what to do with this. He said, here, hand it to me. So I took it off and I handed it to him. And he held it in front of me and he said, this very mind is Buddha. And then he moved to seed. This very mind is Buddha. This very mind is Buddha. And he went around the circle of it. And then he handed it back and he said, that's how you practice with this. And I didn't... So I did.

[30:31]

That's what I did. But I had a hard time believing it, that this very mind is Buddha. Because actually I know myself well enough to think, this very mind is Buddha? I mean, I kind of wanted Buddha's mind to be a little bit more generous. But still, I think... That's how we start and find ourselves and continue and lose ourselves and then come back to this very mind is Buddha. That's how we take a breath in the zendo. After the mind has wandered off and we don't know even where we got, when we come back, yes, we're sitting here and we're going to be quiet. This very mind is Buddha. There's a... a teacher named Kobin Chino, who I knew just a little bit.

[31:36]

When I came to Zen Center, he was around San Francisco Zen Center, and then he left to have started a temple on the peninsula, Jikoji, and a number of other places. Kobin came from Japan to be an assistant to Suzuki Roshi. He was a very cultured person. He taught Japanese arts. He taught... Tea ceremony taught the way of archery. He got connected kind of to Trungpa Rinpoche in the Shambhala tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Trungpa would have him come to his monasteries and teach traditional Asian arts. Some years ago, tragically, he drowned in a swimming accident. But before that, he was at Esalen Institute and he was leading a workshop on archery, Japanese traditional archery, which is very sort of stylized, almost like kabuki or something like that.

[32:40]

I mean, they've got their own versions of robes like this. And they had set up on the great lawn there at Esalen a target, it's a kind of a hay bale about this big around that you aim at from a certain distance. And so Coben, in the dramatic way in which you go through a kind of ritual process of drawing the bow and sighting it, he did all of that stuff and he lined himself up on the target And then he slowly turned 180 degrees and released the arrow back behind him over the cliff into the ocean. And he watched very carefully. And at the moment it hit the ocean, he said, bullseye. He was a unique person.

[34:01]

I've shared some stories about him in the past because he somehow impressed me. One way he impressed me was he's the only person I ever met who, while they're giving a Dharma talk in this room, fell asleep as he was giving the Dharma talk. He was so relaxed. talking just sort of like, most important thing is to... And then there was this long pause. And I looked up, and he was just nodding off. Now, whether that's a good thing, I'm not sure. But anyway, I remember it very well. So anyway, I'm talking a little bit about Zazen. And that arrow that turned and landed in the ocean and it was a bullseye, well, that's also the way zazen is because there's no such thing as bad zazen.

[35:03]

It's always a bullseye. Even when you think about your shopping list, well, if you notice that, even if you don't, it's all a part of the process. It's all a part of it. Just don't stop the process. Okay? Just don't stop the process. Cobincino was the teacher of somebody named Les K. at the Los Altos Zen Center. And this is just about the last thing I'm going to say. A little anecdote about it. But Cobin and Les K., this was back, well, must have been in the 70s. And they were at a... public service, a radio station, kind of a version of KPFA, but down there on the peninsula, being interviewed about Buddhism and Zen. And Coben, pretty quiet person, he let Les do most of the talking, which meant he let Les do all of the talking, mostly.

[36:14]

And the teacher... Les Kaye was asked by the radio interviewer, well, what technique do you use to encourage people to practice meditation? And Coben, I mean, not Coben, but Les Kaye said, well, we don't really use any special technique. We don't have special visualizations or mantras. We don't really have any system at all. It's just we... ask people to throw themselves wholeheartedly into sitting, into paying attention to their breath. And Kolben kind of went on the mic and kind of asked for it to be moved in front of him. And he said, in Zen, we have a technique. We use the most important technique

[37:20]

technique there is. In Zen, we use people's sincerity. And I think that's what brought us all together here. I hope that's what brought us all together here. Our sincere hope, desire to live in harmony with the world, with each other, with ourselves. Thank you 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, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[38:24]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:27]

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