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. Good evening. This week I'm co-leading a Zen yoga workshop with Patricia Sullivan, yoga teacher. And we've been exploring and reflecting on and studying together impermanence, the teaching of impermanence, the fact of impermanence. And as we go deeper into this theme, it's beginning to turn from what we might have thought impermanence was or is, and opening to some new understanding.

[01:06]

So I think this lecture, I will bring up this theme as well, and knowing that it's a vast and deep discussion that, as I'm finding in my study, it feels bottomless, actually, how much one could study and reflect on this teaching. So we'll touch on it. However it unfolds tonight, we'll touch on it. I did want to say a few words about the passing, speaking of impermanence, the death of a Dharma sister of mine, and whom many of you may know, Ka Rin Sobun Catherine Thanis.

[02:10]

And Catherine Thanis was, in the last 15 or so years, 15, 20 years, she was the abbot of the Santa Cruz Zen Center. And I think she began that in her 60s, and she was at Zen Center when I first came. I think she started practicing in her early 40s, her late 30s, and I remember thinking she was a very old person. Since I was in my 20s, she was 20 years older than I was, and she was like, I actually thought she was kind of over the hill or something. That was my which is very funny now because I'm actually the age, far beyond the age she was, you know, when she first came. And I remember she had been here. She was Suzuki Roshi, the founder of Zen Center's attendant, carried incense for him and was extremely friendly, very friendly, very open, very... had a ready...

[03:22]

an infectious laugh. I remember at a particular meeting at Zen Center in the 70s, I think it was in 71, it was a kind of check-in. She said something like, I could never have come to practice in my 20s the way kind of all of us. There were just a few people of that age group, the old ones. She said, I could have never come in my 20s because I wanted to see the world and I traveled and I don't understand how you can do it or that you want to do it even. She had come to it in her old age. She had come to it later in life, but now it's just very funny. Those categories make no sense to me. Anyway, she and I... shared a job as Abbott's assistant for the second Abbott of Zen Center, Zen Tatsu Richard Baker.

[04:23]

We were co-Abbott's assistants and we had our difficulties and different ways of approaching things and different aesthetics, but working together over time, I think we were there about two years or maybe even longer, I really really appreciated her way and her willingness to come back over and over and over again to a difficult conversation or trying to understand where we went off. She had a kind of indomitable spirit in that way of trying to work on things with people as best she could. So she died surrounded by disciples and students just last Saturday after being in a, after a fall and being in a coma for a number of days. So it was very peaceful and I don't know if any of you were here when she was the guest, head of the guest, the guest manager here for many years and she made very,

[05:39]

good and close relationships with the guests. She's very related and they loved her and remembered her and asked about her still, I think. Just one other thing, she invented this way of booking the rooms, which you now probably do online or call up, but the phones, we didn't have the office in the city or anything and you'd have to call down here or send it in by mail and she made this It was ingenious. It was a great big poster board with all the cabins down one side and all the days. I think there were maybe two poster boards or one per month. And you could kind of see all of the booking like with one gestalt, you know. And she would look and with little tabbies, little stickies, she would move people around like, oh, if I move these people in this cabin, these people will be able to come. But she could see it all at once, very holistic. And what I heard about the booking online is you can't see it all at once in that same way.

[06:46]

And so something lost in that very kind of simple organizational strategy that really worked for all those years. She was also the preceptor for me in a very important ceremony, and I'll never forget her voice speaking to me. So, Catherine, we will miss you. So, impermanence. One might say that impermanence and... studying and practicing with impermanence might be the core teaching of Buddhism. It's in the life of the Buddha, the story of the Buddha, his encounter with old age sickness and death and how that turned him to let go of his life and set out on his spiritual quest, his journey, and also

[08:02]

If you look at the teachings of the Buddha from the Pali Canon, the oldest teachings, impermanence is just laced through everything. It's constantly looking at and asking the members of the Sangha, lay and ordained, to be reflecting on impermanence, the impermanence of our life. And there's... Many teachings where they say this teaching, wherever Buddhism is taught, this teaching is taught. It is never skipped. There's the teaching of the four horses that Shakyamuni Buddha taught, the Zen master, the main Zen master in this lineage from Japan in the 1200s taught, and our own founder taught. The four horses, the one that runs at the shadow of the whip, the one that runs right and left at the command of the rider when the whip hits their flesh, and the one where you have to really hit it, and the one where you hit the horse until the marrow.

[09:16]

And these four horses, if you look at the commentary, The one that runs at the shadow of the whip is like someone who hears of a kind of distant village or someplace over there or a small town in Japan where there was a big disaster, a tsunami, and you hear that, hear about it, and it turns you around and you begin practicing with complete effort. That's running at the shadow of the whip And the whip kind of touching the skin or the, actually it says the mane or the kind of hair of the horse's mane, that's someone who hears about a village, their own village, and some disaster happened in their town or their village or New Orleans, someplace where you grew up.

[10:18]

And it turns your life around. And the third of striking the skin or the flesh is if your own parents, someone very close to you, dies and you feel this loss, this is like the whip where it touches your skin. And the last, where it goes to the marrow, it's when you realize and come to look at and not ignore anymore your own impermanence, your own transiency, your own, that you're ever changing and old age sickness and death. So this is a very old teaching and it's brought up in various ways and the whip in this case is impermanence, you know, this whew, and just to run at the shadow of it, just a hint of it, So many, many people have come to practice through an encounter, a deep encounter with impermanence and loss, or have returned to practice after some encounter with impermanence and loss.

[11:33]

The Buddha on his deathbed, also a very peaceful death, where he knew the life force was waning and he prepared and called the people that needed to be around him there. At the end, he said to the people there, to the monks and nuns, I now ask you, is there anything that you haven't asked me or that you're not clear about? Please ask me now. And there was silence, noble silence. And he said, you may be refraining from asking out of respect for the teacher. I understand this, but please, if there is anything that you need to clarify and ask, please ask now. And there was noble silence. And he asked a third time, and no one asked. So at the end, the teaching story is his final words were all composite things or all conditioned things, or you might say all phenomena.

[12:45]

is of the nature, it has come together, and it is of the nature to come apart or to vanish. Practice diligently. These are these final words, all, or not in English, but the translation, all composite things, all conditioned things, all phenomena. is of the nature to come apart. Practice diligently. Another translation is strive on with effort. Make effort. This is difficult. It is difficult to make effort in the face of this, but it's the only way, I think, that we can enter it and understand more deeply what is being what is being taught here.

[13:47]

So what isn't being taught, and I think this is some idea that we hold to, is that impermanence is this big problem that we need to surmount somehow or get around or make go away or somehow not deal or insulate ourselves from this truth. And then if we could just kind of get away from it, then we would be okay. This is some held view that you may not even have articulated ever, but some, and there might be some effort in this direction of not wanting to look at this. It's a bummer, right? It's depressing. Why is she bringing this up? I'm a Tassar on vacation, and why is she bringing up old age sickness and death? which reminds me of this story of Katigiri Roshi being asked to give a talk to a new group of people from the University of Minnesota, an artist from Minneapolis, to introduce them to Zen.

[14:56]

His sangha, we're hoping he would do something really Zen-y, you know, real koans or something that people would really like and come to the center. It was a very fancy affair. He got up in front of the group and he said, you're all going to die. And there was a kind of silence. And I think Patagiri Roshi was he was giving a real Dharma talk. He wasn't just doing a reasonable facsimile in order to get people to come to the center. Whatever it was that he saw, this is what this teaching is always taught, you know. What are we running away from? Don't run. This is something to look at, to engage with, to understand deeply this teaching of impermanence or everything changes. So we tend to think of it as this problem and you shouldn't bring it up and play company.

[16:03]

This is not to... And of course in our culture we kind of hide old age sickness and death, you know? So this teaching that everything changes or impermanence is what's called a Dharma seal. It's a truth that's imprinted in reality. It is the reality of our life. And to try and avoid it and get away from it, that is actually, or cling to things that that are not permanent, that is what creates conditions for suffering. We think, our tendency is to think, or I think, we think that it's impermanence's fault that we're suffering. If only impermanence would sort of not be as it is, then all would be well.

[17:07]

But in actuality, impermanence is The entire nature of reality is ever-changing, flowing, ungraspable, inconceivably wondrous. Everything changes. Each moment, moment after moment, what is being brought forth is not substantial things that have permanence, but the arising and vanishing of each thing, each person, each moment. You might say, well, I'm not arising and vanishing. I've just been sitting here. But you have already changed from the moment you came into the room until now. You have changed many, many times as you've been listening and settling and whatever thoughts are coming up, commentary that you're making to yourself about what I'm saying.

[18:08]

You're changing all the time. This is all flowing. So the problem is not that everything changes. That is our nature, not only the nature of, you know, kind of old age sickness and death, kind of that, just those things that we're maybe frightened of or grieve over, but all things. Pleasant and unpleasant are ever-changing, arising and vanishing, which is how anything comes to be. It's how we all grew up. This is how the weather changes. This is how gardens grow. This is how bread bakes. This ever-changing reality is our life together. This is our shared reality. And not only some reality out there, but our very nature is impermanence. The Buddha taught that all sentient beings are, all sentient beings are Buddha nature, and Buddha nature is impermanence, these two teachings.

[19:23]

All beings, whole being, not just sentient, but sentient and insentient alike are Buddha nature. And Buddha nature is impermanent. Impermanence, not impermanent. Impermanence itself. So this seal of everything changes, our impermanence, when we try and cling to that which is impermanent, we suffer because, as we know so well, we can all attest to it, it's ungraspable. We can't have it. We can't keep it whether it's a person. You know, we don't actually cling to a person. Well, I guess sometimes we do, actually. I told a story about clinging once to somebody, literally. They had to kind of, you know, pull off my fingers, you know. But we usually don't really cling to somebody and hold on to them as they're trying to live their life.

[20:28]

But we do mentally. We do emotionally cling and attach. We're talking about the mind here. Not necessarily that we grasp something and don't let it go physically, although sometimes we might, but it's the mind of attaching. And that may be even harder to understand because we're so used to it. It's our way. And yet we will suffer. We will find endless suffering there by our clinging and grasping to that which cannot be grasped. So one might say, well then, how do we? Well then, what do we do? Is there no, you know, key? Is there no solution? And I think this one key, you might say, is to, you know, the more we turn this teaching and this

[21:30]

seal of the truth of everything changes, and not set it aside, but bring it to mind, and it is right before our very eyes. It's not hidden. There's nothing hidden. We can reflect on this all day long, each moment, because each moment is, it's already gone, right? It's already changed. So it's right there for us, and The key might, if you want to say key, is the more we familiarize ourselves with it and enter fully, unreservedly, this flowing life of which we not are part of, but of that which, it's hard to even say, that we are. all sentient beings, all being, is Buddha nature. Buddha nature is impermanence.

[22:33]

So it's entering this flowing wondrousness that includes sorrow and sadness. It's not excluding. And the more we can find our equanimity and our composure and our calm in the midst of the reality of our life, the more the truth that there's nothing to cling to comes home. And the more it comes home, the more we relax. We relax our grip, our mental grip, and can let be what is. So when the Buddha on his deathbed said, all things, all phenomena, they come together and they come apart. This is the nature of our life. and the nature of all things, practice diligently. So one might say the key to this is bringing our practice as a path to this reality of our life that we all share.

[23:47]

No one's immune, no one's outside of this. So that impermanence becomes our path rather than this that we're trying to avoid and distract ourselves from and keep at bay. That is a recipe for suffering and I would say anxiety and also an inability to accept people and things and our own bodies and the weather even. And this is effort. Our practice is, we make our efforts over and over and over again to, when I say practice, there's myriad practices, but one is sitting, our sitting practice, which puts us in immediate contact with everything changes.

[24:49]

The sensations of the body, the thoughts that are coming and going, the sounds of the, you know, whatever our circumstances are, whatever those sounds are. And there's nothing to hold on to. They're flowing, they're walking. There's a sutra called the Mountains and Waters Sutra and one of the kind of main teachings is blue mountains are constantly walking. The blue mountains are constantly walking. The blue mountains are this complete whole being of our existence is ever-changing. And as a whole being is just as it is in a kind of, I'm going to say, permanent way, meaning eternal, everlasting, ever-present quality. And walking.

[25:52]

So this impermanence, to shift our understanding as this isn't a problem to surmount, but this is a path of practice that's as deep, it is as deep a path as any of the myriad paths. It's a royal path. It's because of these truths, the seal, this Dharma seal of everything changes, the concomitant, Because, you might say, or therefore, there is no abiding self. Those two go together like two sides of a coin or something. Everything changes. And since everything changes, everything, everything, there's nothing that's abiding as a solid, permanent thing. So there's no abiding self, and everything changes, come together as one teaching, really. That's the second Dharma seal, no abiding self, nothing permanent and solid substantialness.

[27:07]

Even though we long for that, we want something to hold on to. And it's frightening sometimes to think there's nothing to hold on to. However, when we try to hold on to that which is impossible to hold on to, then there's suffering. And that's the third Dharma seal, is this suffering That comes from clinging and attachment to things, to fooling ourselves. We all know this about everything changes, but we have a great ability to fool ourselves and distract ourselves and blame. Oh, that's a good one. Blame other people for the fact that things change. So we have lots of ways to try and get away. That will be the suffering, because we're not in alignment with everything changes and there's no abiding self, there's nothing to hold. So when we're in alignment with those teachings, the first two dharma seals, everything changes, no abiding self.

[28:16]

Then the fourth dharma seal comes into play, which is peace or nirvana. this quality of true relaxation, not because we've surmounted and gotten away from anything, but that we have fully accepted it, deeply accepted these truths and are coursing with the way things are rather than fighting and distracting ourselves and numbing ourselves in various ways. So we might feel like very, this is hard, this is like bitter medicine, like this is hard. And there's this image that when I say hard, it's like we might feel we're alone at this, even though we know everybody shares this, but we are by ourselves alone

[29:30]

struggling all by ourselves, trying to live our life. It's a very kind of limited view. And the image that I have is the image of a frog at the bottom of a well who's, you know, just unable to get out of this terribly limited, narrow spot, you know, looks up and just sees this small circle, you know, with some... Every once in a while, some lights in the night go by when the sun is sort of there, but very kind of lonely and dank. And so that might be an image of this is hard, this is a struggle, this is lonely. And the image that kind of breaks that one open is that the frog is actually not sitting in a well. That's one of the ways we kind of fool ourselves or it's a kind of delusion that we're in this well all by ourselves.

[30:41]

We actually, and this is this image that when I first read it in a commentary, tears just welled up in me. And it was the image of a frog sitting at the bottom of the ocean. not the bottom of a well, the bottom of a vast ocean that's inconceivably big, sitting right in the middle of a vast ocean, eating breakfast, eating oatmeal, happily living its life eating oatmeal. And then the jeweled rabbit in the heavens washes his bowl, her bowl. Asian culture. There's a rabbit in the moon, and this jeweled rabbit in the heavens washes the bowl. So we're sitting there eating our breakfast, but in the vast ocean of being, ocean of reality that's ever-changing.

[31:47]

And we're not alone. You know, the rabbit, the jeweled rabbit in the moon, the moon is like... kind of a stand-in for Buddha nature, you know, washes the bowl. So, according to my clock, this is the bewitching hour of the end of the lecture, is that true? It is. There wasn't time for questions tonight, but I invite you to inquire within around some of the things I brought up and inquire without if you'd like to as well. One other thing that I wanted to say is tomorrow evening, for some of you who might be here, I'm not sure who will be here, we'll be having a ceremony.

[33:06]

And the ceremony is a ceremony, a bodhisattva initiation ceremony. This is a ceremony where a person who has asked to receive bodhisattva precepts, bodhisattva means, bodhi means awakened or awakened. awaken or realization or enlightenment, and sattva is being. So a bodhisattva is a being who has awakened to wanting to live for the benefit of others as a central, innermost request of their life. And to acknowledge that and make that public, there is a ceremony. And in this ceremony, this new baby bodhisattva, who's right here, sitting here, Dan Belsky, will receive the precepts in the zendo tomorrow evening.

[34:08]

So it's an open ceremony. Anybody who would like to attend is welcome to attend. And so we won't be having zazen. That's two nights in a row without zazen. you know, for lecture and for ceremonies, it's just another, it's zazen in action, you know, with words and ceremonial activity. So it'll be a different form of zazen. 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, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[35:02]

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