This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I'm very happy to be here this morning with everybody. And I'm happy that from right now, for the next 30 or 40 minutes, None of us has anything at all to do but sit here and contemplate Dharma together. It's a great privilege. Who knows what's true and what's real. Probably we're all a little bit lost and confused. But the main thing is we're alive. and we're together and we have the capacity to feel and think and perceive and to know that in this brief lifetime something must be true and real and we could try to understand so we

[01:28]

can make a choice to take a little break from all the stress and the confusion and the distraction and make that effort to try to feel through to what's really important and satisfying for human life. So this morning, I would like to share with you an article that I wrote for the Shambhala sun. I do that from time to time. Writing an article, I might as well use it for a Dharma talk, save myself the trouble, you know, thinking of another Dharma talk. That's the advantage of writing, you know. So the latest Shambhala Sun article is about impermanence, because they just did an issue on impermanence, and they asked me to write an article about that. That was pretty easy for me to do because I'm thinking about impermanence pretty much all the time.

[02:33]

For the last two weeks, actually 15 days I think, I've been practicing intense Zen rituals with some of the senior priests in our everyday Zen. Bay Area Sangha, 15 very intense days. And that was over yesterday. And here I am this morning. How is that possible? You know, where did those 15 days go? Where did yesterday go, for that matter? At the moment I can remember it, but did it really happen? Or was it just a dream? And how, anyway, do we get from yesterday to today?

[03:41]

And how is it that today becomes tomorrow? I find the whole thing very strange and somewhat unsettling. Anyway, here's my article. The title of the article is, Impermanence is Buddha Nature. The scene of the Buddha's passing, as told in the Pali Canon's Mahaparinibbana Sutta, is starkly beautiful. The Buddha having three months earlier, told his disciples that he was now renouncing the life force. And at that time, announced to them the day and the time of his passing. Now, he's about to pass on, he's surrounded by all of his disciples.

[04:43]

He asks them, do you have any last questions, any doubts? And they're all silent. And he realizes through his clairvoyance that this means that there are no doubts, there are no further questions. And he then says his final words to them, the final recorded words of the Buddha. And here are those words, he said. Now, monastics, I declare to you, all Conditioned things have the nature of vanishing. Keep on diligently with your practice. Those were his words. And then, as the text says, the Buddha journeyed on through the meditation states. He went from the shallowest state to the deepest state and then back again.

[05:51]

And then from the shallowest state to one of the middle states. And from that state, he passed into Parinibbana, leaving this life once and for all. The text then reports that those monastics, not yet fully awakened, tore their hair. I didn't think they had hair, but anyway. It says in the text, tore their hair, raised their arms, threw themselves down, twisting and turning, and cried out in their extreme grief, too soon, too soon. But the fully awakened monastics remained mindful, and they said, all compound things are impermanent. What's the use of crying? The Buddhist practitioners have always understood that impermanence is the cornerstone of the teachings and the basis of the practice.

[06:59]

Everything that exists is impermanent. Nothing whatsoever lasts. Therefore, you can't grasp anything, you can't hold on to anything. When we don't appreciate this simple but profound truth, we're going to suffer, just like the monks in the story. who descended into misery and despair at the Buddha's passing. But when we do appreciate this truth, we will have real peace and understanding, as did those monks who remain mindful and calm. As far as classical Buddhism is concerned, impermanence is the number one inescapable and essentially painful fact of life. It is the singular existential problem that the whole edifice of Buddhist thought and practice is meant to address.

[08:02]

To understand impermanence at the deepest possible level, because we all understand it perfectly well at a superficial level, but to understand it at the deepest possible level, and not only understand it, but to merge with it fully. That's the whole of the Buddhist path. And the Buddhist final words express this. Impermanence is inescapable. Everything vanishes. Therefore, there is nothing more important than continuing the path with diligence. All other options either short shrift the problem or just out and out deny it. So a little while ago I had a dream and probably I have a lot of dreams and I don't remember them but for some reason I remember this dream when I woke up. I'm in a hazy sort of underground grotto.

[09:09]

I later realized that it probably is a basement cafe in Paris where I gave a poetry reading a few years ago but it was like that place kind of dark and hazy and It's low ceilings. And in this place is me and my mother-in-law. I'm going in one direction toward her. She's coming in the other direction toward me. And then we come to a doorway between rooms, and we're both stuck in the doorway trying to pass to our respective sides. We're stuck with each other in the doorway because both of us are kind of... She's a pretty big woman. I'm not small. So we get stuck in the doorway. And finally we squeeze through and she gets to the other side and I get to the other side. So that's the dream. Now, it's not that surprising that I would have a dream about my mother-in-law because I'm thinking about my mother-in-law pretty much every day.

[10:21]

close to 90 years old now, and she has a lot of problems. She is in pain pretty much all the time from some sort of back ailment that no one can diagnose or give her any relief from. Because of that, she can barely walk, and then she fell down, and now she's in bed, can't get out of bed. She also, because of the pain, never sleeps through the night, never sleeps more than an hour or two at a time. She's also losing the use of her hands to some sort of strange neuropathy, so she can't use her hands either. She can no longer write her name, write anything down. She lives with her husband, over 60 years, my father-in-law, who has advanced Alzheimer's disease. He cannot speak a coherent sentence. He doesn't know who he is or where he is.

[11:25]

Now, despite all this, my mother-in-law affirms life 100%, as she always has. As far as I am aware, she has never entertained the idea of death. All she wants and all she hopes for is a good and pleasant life and since she definitely does not have this right now although she hasn't by any means given up hope for it she is pretty miserable as anyone would be in her situation I on the other hand seem to be fairly healthy I feel pretty good and I really don't have any serious expectation of dying anytime soon. And yet, unlike my mother-in-law, I'm constantly thinking about death. I've been thinking about death since I was a child.

[12:32]

Probably, my thinking about death has been the main motivating factor in my entire life. How else would I have ended up, you know, being a Buddhist person? like this since I was in my 20s. Why else would I be doing that if I didn't have this strange obsession with the idea of death? And when I think about all my talking and writing and thinking, in one way or another, it's all in reference to death, to absence, to disappearing, to nothingness. And I actually do. think about death pretty much every single day, more than once. So this is interesting to me in terms of the dream. Is my mother-in-law about to pass over from life to death though she's temporarily stuck in the doorway right now and can't get across?

[13:37]

Well, That makes sense, but if that's the logic of the dream, then it would appear that I am already dead, stuck in the same doorway trying to pass through into life where she is, which of course is absurd. But then again, having thought about life and death so much, it does seem absurd to me. The more I think about it and the more experience I have with it, the less sense it makes to me. Sometimes I wonder whether life and death isn't just a conceptual framework that we use to confuse ourselves. Now, to be sure, our experience tells us that people that were formerly appearing no longer are appearing. And, logically, this

[14:40]

having been the case with others, it seems reasonable to assume that this would be the case with oneself at some point. But what is it really about? How do you really understand this? And how do you account for the many, many anomalies that seem to appear with some frequency in all the cultures of the world? Things like ghosts coming, other sorts of visitations from the dead, evidence of reincarnation, all kinds of evidence that there's something else going on here. I find it very telling that many religions refer to death as eternal life. And it's also noteworthy that in the Mahaparinabhanasutta that I'm quoting from, the Buddha actually doesn't die. He enters... full extinction which is understood to be something other than death and anyway never mind about the Buddha in Buddhism generally death is not understood as death death is understood as a staging ground for future life so in other words there are many respectable and less than respectable reasons to wonder

[16:10]

about this question of death that we take so blithely for granted. Now, there are a lot of older people in the Bay Area everyday Zen Sangha where I mostly practice. Some of them are in their 70s and 80s even. There are several of us in the 60s like myself. Because there are so many people at that age range, The theme of death and impermanence is very frequently on our minds and somehow seems to come up again and again in all the teachings that we study. All conditioned things pass away. Nothing remains as it was. The body changes as it ages. Less strength, less resilience, more telltale creaks and you know, sore spots. In response to all this and to a lifetime of experiences, the mind is changing as well.

[17:19]

Even the way you think of, the way you view, the way you feel about life and the world is different as you're older. Even when you have the same thoughts, that you had when you were young. They feel different when you're older. The other day, a friend about my age who had in her youth a study with the great Koreans and teachers, Song Sanim, was recalling him saying all the time to his young disciples, soon dead, soon dead, soon dead. And she said to me, when he said that in those days, I understood what he was saying and I took it seriously. But it seemed at the time so zen and almost funny. Now, she said, it doesn't sound like that anymore.

[18:25]

It sounds a lot more personal and a lot more poignant. The Buddha says, all conditioned things have the nature of vanishing. And what is impermanence, really? When we're young, of course, we know about impermanence and we know that death is coming. But we think it's probably coming much later. So why worry about it now? We have other things to worry about. And even if we are nutty, like I was as a young person, and concerned with death when you should be thinking about something else, That concern is really more philosophical than anything else. When we get older, we think, oh, probably death is coming soon. And we're taking it more personally. We're even maybe writing our will and so on.

[19:27]

But half the time we forget about it anyway. And even when we're not forgetting about it, do we have any idea? what we're talking about. So death may be the ultimate loss, the ultimate in impermanence, but on a lesser everyday scale, impermanence in all the loss that it entails more or less simply comes down to one word, later. Something's here now in a particular way, and we know later it won't be. I am a particular way, and later I'll be different. I have something now, later on I might not have it. Today is today, we're all here together. Tomorrow will be different. Later, we know that. But when you think about it, later is the safest of all possible time frames. Because by definition, you know, you can ignore it.

[20:37]

Because it's later, not now. And later never comes. It's always later. And even if later did come, well, why worry about it now? Worry about it later. In other words, when you really think about it, for most of us, most of the time, Impermanence is completely irrelevant. But the truth is, impermanence is not later. Impermanence is now. All conditioned things have the nature of vanishing. They're vanishing right now. Right now. As things appear before us, they have that nature.

[21:40]

This is the Heart Sutra saying, form is emptiness, emptiness is no other than form. This is the Diamond Sutra saying, everything is like a bubble, a flash of lightning, a dew drop, a mirage. So the point is not that something is vanishing later. Right now, everything is in some way. Excuse me. In some way, though we don't understand exactly what way. Right now, vanishing before our eyes. Squeezing uncomfortably through the narrow doorway of now. We actually don't know whether we're coming or going. Impermanence may be a deeper thought than we first imagined. And impermanence isn't just a loss.

[22:43]

It's also change itself. And as we all know, change can be beautiful. It can be refreshing. Renewing. There are points in our lives where we look forward to change. We're delighted with change. But the truth is, change is always both good and bad because even when it's... refreshing change, a change we were looking forward to, even working hard to bring about, that change always involves loss, because nothing new can appear unless something old passes away. You know, people my age think, oh, how wonderful it was when we were young, even though when we were young we were desperately trying to make a change from what it was to something else. So everything that's new depends on something old going away.

[23:47]

Just like they say on New Year's Eve, you know, out with the old, in with the new. And that New Year's Eve party is happy and sad at the same time, right? That's the nature of a New Year's Eve party. And it's like that also in the scene in the Mahapati Nibbana Sutta, where you have despair and equanimity. at the same time. Impermanence is both of these things. In one of his most important essays, Dogen writes, impermanence is Buddha nature. Impermanence is Buddha nature. This seems quite different from the classical Buddhist notion of impermanence, which emphasizes the loss side of the loss-change-renewal equation. For Dogen, impermanence is not a problem to be overcome with diligent effort on the path.

[24:53]

Dogen is saying impermanence is the path. Practice is not a way to cope with or overcome impermanence. It's the way to fully live it and appreciate it. Dogen writes, if you want to understand Buddha nature, you should intimately observe cause and effect over time. If you want to understand Buddha nature, you should intimately observe cause and effect over time. When time is ripe, he says, Buddha nature manifests. So Dogen comments on this saying of his, in his usual delightful inside-out, upside-down kind of way. He says that practice is not so much a matter of changing or improving

[26:03]

the conditions of your outer or inner life, as much as it is a way of fully embracing and appreciating those conditions, especially the condition of impermanence and loss. And when you practice, he says, time becomes ripe. And even though this phrase normally means later, Time will become ripe. It's not ripe now. It'll become ripe later. Dogen says, no, it doesn't mean that. He says, when you practice, time is ripeness. Time is always ripe. Every moment of time is ripe. And Buddha nature always manifests every moment of that ripened time because time is always impermanence and impermanence is Buddha nature. Well, of course that's true. Time itself is impermanence.

[27:08]

Time itself is change and development and loss. Present time is ungraspable. As soon as it's now, it's already later. As soon as I'm here, I'm already gone. If that were not the case, how could the me of this moment ever give way to the me of the following moment? Unless the first me disappears, clearing the way, how can the second me ever arise? This means that my being here this morning, talking to you, is thanks to my not being here. If I were not Not here. I couldn't be here at all. In words, this becomes, you know, very quickly paradoxical and weird.

[28:17]

But in actual living, it really is the case. When you think about it, you realize it has to be so. And once in a while, once in a while and here's where we can really appreciate our meditation practice because sometimes this brings it about particularly if we sit a long retreat we call session for five or seven days or do a monastic training period sometimes you actually viscerally feel this You can actually feel the lightness and the ease and the radical ephemerality of your own and all being. And it appears to you somehow joyful.

[29:26]

And nothing ever appears unless it appears in time. whatever appears in time vanishes at once, just like the Buddha said on his deathbed. Time is existence, impermanence, change, loss, growth, development. Time itself is the best and the worst news, both in the same breath. And Dogen calls this immense uncanny process Buddha nature any rights Buddha nature is no other than all are because all are is Buddha nature such a beautiful saying this

[30:38]

Two-word phrase in English. All are. Are. Existence, being, time, impermanence, change. All are. Existence, being, time, impermanence, change. Is never lonely. Never isolated. is always all-inclusive. The nature of time is that we're all in it together. Nobody is apart. The other day I was talking to another friend who's a long time Zen student. I appear to have many friends who are long time Zen students. 10, 20, 30, 40 years. Lots of friends like that.

[31:40]

And she was telling me that she was starting to notice that the persistent, nagging feeling of dissatisfaction that she had had all of her life in relation to others, in relation to the world, and in relation to her own inner life and her outer circumstances. She was beginning to notice that this persistent dissatisfaction was probably not about others, probably not about the world, probably not about her own inner or outer circumstances. But she was beginning to get it that this persistent, nagging feeling of dissatisfaction was her deepest, inmost self itself. In other words, dissatisfaction was not a problem to be overcome.

[32:43]

It was herself. Before she was realizing this, she said, she always thought that dissatisfaction was... At first she thought, well, it was somebody else's fault. She got over that. And she thought, well, it's my fault. It's a personal failing, deeply ingrained, which is why she... took up Zen practice in the first place. She was hoping that it would correct this flaw in her. But now she realized that the problem was far worse than she ever imagined. You know, even a basic character flaw can potentially be changed, corrected. But if it's like built in to what you are, then it's entirely hopeless. And this seems pretty much what the Buddha meant when he spoke about the basic shakiness of our sense of subjectivity in the famous and famously misunderstood doctrine of anatta or non-self.

[34:02]

though we all need healthy egos in order to operate normally in the world, it may be the case that the essential grounding of ego is the false notion of permanence, a notion that we all unthinkingly subscribe to, even though we all know better. In our hearts, we understand that this is impossible. Because we all think, you know, of all the things that are true and untrue, the one thing true is I am me. I have been me in the past. I will be me in the future. I can change. I have changed. I want to change more. But I'm always here. I've always been me. And I have never known any other experience. But this ignores the reality that all conditioned things have the nature of vanishing and are vanishing constantly as a condition of their existing in time whose nature is vanishing.

[35:16]

Well, if that's all true, it's no wonder that we would feel, as my friend felt, a constant nagging sense of dissatisfaction and disjunction that we might well interpret. as coming from some personal failing in us. But on the other hand, all are is Buddha nature. This means that the self is not, as we imagine, an improvable, permanent, isolated entity. that we are responsible for. Instead, the real grounding of our self is impermanence, which is never alone, never isolated, constantly flowing and immense.

[36:28]

Our real self, the foundation of it, is Buddha nature itself. in Dogen's terms. Impermanence is Buddha nature. And then he says, permanence is the mind that discriminates the wholesomeness and unwholesomeness of all things. Wait a minute, permanence? Isn't permanence forbidden in Buddhist discourse? There's no such thing as permanence. Everything is impermanent, right? No exceptions. How come all of a sudden Dogen says permanence? How did that manage to sneak its way into his talking? So now I come back again to my dream, being stuck in the doorway between life and death with my mother-in-law.

[37:32]

Which side is which? And who is going where? Impermanence and permanence may simply be balancing concepts, words, feelings, thoughts that support one another in helping us to grope toward an understanding and the misunderstanding of our lives. For Dogen, permanence is practice. Impermanence is having the wisdom and the strength to know the difference between what we as human beings must commit ourselves to pursuing in this brief lifetime and what we must commit ourselves to letting go of. The good news in impermanence's Buddha nature is that we can finally let ourselves off the hook.

[38:40]

Love that sound. How come it only did it twice, though? Usually it goes a lot longer. What's that? Turn it off, huh? Yeah, we can let ourselves off the hook. we can forget about the great endless, truly endless chore of self-improvement. This job we all think we have of turning ourselves into stellar accomplished individuals. sophisticated to think we will do that externally we now believe we can do it internally what a relief not to have to do that anymore and this is a big deal because we are all subject to a kind of brutal and I think it's really brutal inner pressure

[40:20]

To be more and do more today than we have been and done yesterday. And to be more and do more than someone else has been and done today and tomorrow. So that's the good news. The bad news is that what are you going to do with impermanence is Buddha nature? How do you practice that? What do you do? Just like say it over and over again? Do you become converted to it, believe in it? And if we're not striving with this endless chore of improving ourselves all the way up to great awakening and ultimate enlightenment, what do we do? And why would we do it? And to me, this is the great beauty of Dogen's If impermanence is the worm eating at the heart of the apple of the self that makes suffering so endemic to being human, then

[41:51]

is the petal emerging from the sepal of the flower of impermanence. It makes happiness, even joy, possible. Because the secret is impermanence is permanent. The ongoing process of of living and dying and time is ceaseless. And permanence is nirvana, bliss, cessation, relief, the never-ending, ever-changing and growing field of practice itself. This is the heart. of the religious life.

[42:53]

In the scene of the Buddha's passing, as told in the sutta, there's a big contrast between the monastics who tear their hair, raise their arms, and throw themselves down in their extreme grief, and those monastics who receive the Buddha's passing with equanimity. The sutta seems to be implying disapproval of the former and approval of the latter. But when you go back and read it, you wonder whether that approval and disapproval is not more in the mind of the reader than it is in the words of the sutta. Because if impermanence is permanence, and permanence and impermanence is Buddha nature, then loss itself is also happiness. And both sets of monastics are to be approved.

[44:00]

Impermanence is not only something to be overcome and conquered, it is something to be lived and appreciated because it reflects the all our side of our human nature. the weeping and wailing monastics were expressing, perhaps, their attachment and lack of understanding. But maybe they were also expressing their full immersion in this human life and their love for someone who they revered. And I've experienced this more than once at times of great loss. I don't usually throw my arms and tear my hair and fall on the ground weeping. But I do experience sometimes extreme sadness and loss.

[45:11]

Feeling the whole world dark and weeping itself. with the fresh absence of someone that I have loved. And in that same moment of feeling that way, at the same time, I have felt a deep appreciation and equanimity because loss, searing as it sometimes can be, is also beautiful. Sad and beautiful at the same time. And my tears, my sadness, are beautiful to me because I know that they wouldn't be there without love. And the grieving that I'm feeling is making me love more and love the world more.

[46:18]

every loss I have ever experienced, every personal and emotional teaching of impermanence that life has been kind enough to afford me has deepened my ability to love. This is the kind of happiness that spiritual practice promises, not the kind of bliss and joy every minute, transcendence, the absence of difficulty. I personally have never sought that, and I don't understand how someone could want such a thing in a world in which there is so much injustice, so much tragedy, so much unhappiness, so much illness, so much death. Who would want to feel Joy all the time and kind of forgetting about all difficulties in a world like that seems wrong to me.

[47:24]

To be able to feel the scourge of impermanence and loss and to appreciate it at the same time profoundly as the beautiful essence of what it means to be at all. This is the deep truth that I hear reverberating in the Buddha's last words. This is what he said at the culmination of almost 50 years of spiritual practice. This was the essence of what he had learned. Everything vanishes. Keep on. practicing so I want to conclude with a few lines of poetry I think it has something to do with all this but who knows but I never worry about this because I go on the theory that everything is connected to everything anyway I have a new brand new poetry book just came out

[48:46]

called Conflict. Not a very cheerful book. Which is why I'm only mentioning it at the end and I don't want to make you unhappy. Not that death and all that is so cheery. Sorry. Anyway, this book is about conflict. It's a serial poem of 83 or so poems on that subject. Because I read the newspaper, right? I can't help it. So I'll read you a couple of the poems and then I'll stop. And I think that it's true that I'm feeling that at its root... Why there's so much conflict has to do with impermanence. Our inability to appreciate what impermanence is creates hardened positions which lead to conflict.

[49:59]

Always. You don't even need another person to have a conflict. You can have a conflict all by yourself. So anyway, the structure of this poem is kind of a collage poem. with many voices appearing from time to time which are identified in the text by italics but I'll try to see if I can indicate the voices anyway a few short poems and I'll be done write it and rewrite it and rewrite it again that which we witnessed old man in purple pants reading ads in the paper which side of the street north south east west bush and goth once they start they are sure

[51:15]

to end. Revelation reveals the unknowable, which, having been revealed, makes itself known. And herein lies a tale misunderstood. Speaking of which, as commanded the silent letter H the syllable ah my I is yours your you is mine taken for the giving in the going.

[52:22]

It's always a treat for me to come over to Green Gulch and see all of you. Some of you I know since the dark ages. It's always nice to see you. Please take care of yourselves. The faces change. The decades change. go on people appear and disappear practice does continue always thank you thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center our programs are made possible by the donations we receive please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving, by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving.

[53:30]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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