This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. Good to be here with you all. Thank you for making the time to come explore the Dharma together. I'm Dan Gudgel. I'm a resident and a priest here at Beginner's Mind Temple. Welcome. Whether this is your first time here or whether you are a Dharma Talk regular or a resident, I'm glad you're here. And San Francisco Zen Center is glad you are here. Thank you for coming. I do expect to leave a little bit of time at the end of this talk for questions.

[01:00]

And as well, if you have more general questions afterwards, feel free to find me out in the hall or stop anyone who has a robe or a raucousue on. Those folks are likely to at least be able to point you in the direction of an answer, even if they don't have the answer you're looking for. So first, this is not the of my talk tonight, but because this has been much on my mind today, I just wanted to bring it forward for a moment. Today we have had another instance of terrible and senseless political violence in this country. And from this position as a Buddhist, as an American... as an ordained minister in this tradition, I just want to say very clearly that violence cannot accomplish wholesome ends.

[02:16]

There is no place for violence in this country. Sadly, there is a great amount of violence in this country. And as... people of conscience, I think it's important for us to speak out against violence whenever and wherever it happens. So I just noticed this has really been with me today, with a feeling of sadness and a feeling of dread. I will now move on and talk about other things. But I think it is important for us to note when things like this are occurring in our collective experience as human beings.

[03:19]

So as part of tonight's talk, I'm going to pass this little statue around. As it comes to you, take a moment to notice it and be with it. If you wish, you of course are not obligated to interact with this statue. It is an offer. This statue was a gift to me from one of my brothers and sisters-in-law. Thank you, Andy and Kathy. Thank you. we'll pass it around this side and across as it passes by our AV operators. They'll hold it up to the camera. Perhaps you'll get a good view of it. We'll do our best. It'll come around to this side. Once it's come around to this side, we can send it back. You'll have a second opportunity to interact with this statue. I will talk about it eventually, but I'm not going to start there.

[04:35]

This will just be making its way around as I talk. And if you get distracted by the statue, that's okay. It is as good a teacher as I am. So I'll send this around. Feel free to take a moment with it if you wish. What I am going to talk about tonight are some experiences that I have had with altars and devotional practice. This has been really supportive for me of meditation practice and has energized me to continue practicing. I first encountered Zen Buddhist practice about 20 years ago when a friend invited me to a morning sitting with a small neighborhood sangha up in Marin County. Hello, Mountain Source.

[05:36]

I was open to meditation at that time, I think because I had read a little bit of Zen stuff in philosophical contexts, and it made some sense to me. So there was this sort of idea in my mind of what Zen might be and that it might be of interest to me. I came back... for more of that meditation because the actual experience of sitting down, being quiet, and meeting the present moment for me was really helpful and refreshing. I could feel in my body that this was a healthy and wholesome thing for me. And then once Zen Buddhist meditation had become a regular part of my life, I noticed this gratitude and joy for the practice beginning to well up in me.

[06:46]

And I wasn't really sure what to do with it exactly. So I set up a little altar in my apartment and I started directing some of my gratitude towards a Buddha statue that I put on that altar. And then I started adding in small devotional practices into my daily life, doing a short meal chant before I ate, for instance. And this connected my meditation practice with a larger experience throughout the course of my day. Gradually, those devotional practices like bowing and chanting, like having and maintaining an altar, became a really deep part of my life. And in the last 20 years, I think it's possible I may have gone a little overboard with altars.

[07:55]

I now have many altars that I interact with in my own In my own apartment, I have my main Buddhist altar, which has a Buddha statue and two of the Bodhisattvas, Samantabhadra and Manjushri. And so I interact with that altar on a very regular basis. I also have a sort of what I think of as a spirit or ancestor altar in my home, which includes some bones that i have found out in the wild and it's a place where i put memorial items for people who have passed recently in my life they sort of live on that altar for some period of time until either it feels appropriate to move those items elsewhere or until our annual new year's bonfire if it's a

[09:01]

a name card, for instance, for someone who has passed. I also have a small Catholic altar in my home with a crucifix from my grandparents, the rosary from my first communion, and a few other items that connect me to that religion that I was raised in. And I have a small altar next to the bathroom in my apartment. There was a really convenient old telephone nook right there next to the bathroom. So there's yet another Buddha statue and a small dried flower vase there. So I can reconnect with practice as I'm crossing that threshold in and out of the bathroom every day. There are two altars. around my office. There's one out in the hallway, part of the shared space of that Zen office building.

[10:05]

And then I have also set up an altar in my office where I have another Buddha, another Samantabhadra, who is the Bodhisattva of great activity, and so who I find very encouraging of my work life. And Since we don't burn incense indoors in Zen Center spaces, I have a small bowl of chip incense. And when I make an offering to my office altar, I just move a little chip incense from one bowl to another. When one bowl gets filled up, I dump it back and start that process over. So I have this wealth of alters in my life and it has become just such a frequent part of every day that I am interacting with one or another or many of these altars.

[11:05]

And this for me is a real opportunity to meet and express what I experience as the joy of being alive and being in a human body. Sometimes my gratitude for experiencing and having the opportunity to be in this present moment sort of overflows. And I may go around to one altar after another expressing my gratitude because it doesn't seem like one altar can contain it all. And sometimes I'm struggling or having a difficult time. And then I can go around from one altar to another and ask for some help, ask for some support, and just express the fact that I am having a difficult time and would feel supported by that connection with those altars.

[12:13]

But the altar that I interact with the most is an altar that's right by the front door of my apartment. This altar started many years ago in another space I was living in when I put a Guan Yin statue near the front door of my house. Guan Yin is the Chinese version of Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of compassion. The same Bodhisattva who is also known as Kannon Bodhisattva. So I put this Guan Yin statue by the front door of my house. I was living in a shared house with some other folks. And I had set an intention to bow to that statue as I was going out the door. Whenever I was leaving my home, going out into the world, I would reconnect with my intention to be awake and upright.

[13:24]

At first, I was a little bit embarrassed whenever one of my housemates would see me doing a little bow to this statue before I went out the door. Before long, I sort of let go of that embarrassment and just started doing it as part of my life. And a few months later, one of my housemates, Justin, if you're out there somewhere, thank you, Justin, asked me, just casually in conversation, he had noticed my bowing practice, asked me what it was about, and I explained, oh, I bow to this statue as I'm leaving the house every time to set my intention, to sort of maintain an upright, aware, experience and interaction with the world. And he said very naturally, oh, and then you bow to it again when you come home. And I had never even thought of doing such a thing.

[14:29]

It totally changed my experience of crossing that threshold to notice that I was considering the outside world as different than my home space. Somehow I was feeling like I should be on better behavior out there and I could be somehow messier in my interior life. So that Guan Yin statue that was just on a windowsill by the front door for a number of years has now expanded into a full altar right across from the front door of my apartment. That altar has that same Guan Yin statue, and it has this Buddha statue that has been passed around the room. There's a piece of art on that altar with the word help on it, which feels appropriate and in line with the Buddhist vows of being of service in the world.

[15:38]

And there's also an image of a wrathful demon and three beautiful goddesses, which is intended to captivate and then scare away any evil presences that might try to enter my home. So as I'm crossing the threshold of my apartment now, I do a bow or three bows or whatever... interaction feels appropriate with that altar. These days, my interaction with that particular altar has sort of expanded into a really quite general gratitude practice. For instance, if I am returning home, I may I may do a bow to that altar and say something like, all you gods and goddesses, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, the communion of saints, bringing in my Catholic background, great mother, tree spirits, water spirits, all you honored ones, thank you for this opportunity of one more day.

[17:01]

I will keep trying. And that's the fundamental sort of devotional interaction and devotional practice that I find animating and supporting my meditation practice these days. It is gratitude for this incredibly rare opportunity that we have to be alive. And it's a reconnection with a vow simply to keep trying. I don't really know what that is gonna look like on a day-to-day basis. I don't know how successful I'm going to be at trying on a day-to-day basis. But if I continue to remind myself and continue to check back in with that intention, I find it very helpful. So recently,

[18:03]

I took the statues off of that front door altar and took them to a retreat elsewhere, just a one-day retreat that I was involved in. And so when I came home, I walked in the door and I automatically started to bow to that altar and then noticed that it was completely empty. And I laughed. Oh, it was such a good laugh. And I just continued... to bow anyway. I bowed to emptiness and I expressed my gratitude to emptiness for its support. The Buddha and the Guan Yin statues were in the bag that was on my shoulder, hanging right there at my side. So they were invisible, but their presence was still being felt. So in the Buddhist understanding, emptiness is also completely full.

[19:06]

It is interconnection and interbeing. It's an expression, the word emptiness is an expression of the way that we cannot really single out any one thing, that everything that we experience as a separate part of the world is still deeply linked and interconnected with everything else. And sometimes engaging with emptiness from a sort of methodical intellectual approach is very helpful. Reading Buddhist philosophy and engaging with emptiness in that way. Systematically breaking down the fixed ideas we have to sort of recognize something more fundamental about reality. Once the brain and the mind have been involved in sort of softening up the concepts of reality, I find that this sort of indiscriminate devotional practice seems to help me stay turned towards emptiness and this experience of interconnection and interbeing in the world.

[20:37]

So I'm going to drop a short poem into the talk here. Like the Buddha statue, I'm not going to talk about it right now. I'll just sort of put it out there and let it have its moment. This is The Angel Handed Me a Book by Paul Valery. Placing a book in my hands, the angel said, It holds all you would wish to know. And he vanished. So I opened the book, which wasn't thick. It was written in an unknown alphabet. Scholars translated it, but produced very different versions. They disagreed even about their own readings, agreeing neither upon the tops or bottoms of them, nor the beginnings, nor the ends. Toward the close of this vision, it seemed to me that the book melted until it could no longer be told apart from the world that surrounds us.

[21:55]

So in addition to my personal altars, which I have listed at length already. You may notice there are also a wealth of altars scattered around this temple, around all of the San Francisco Zen Center temples and many altars in similar sorts of temples. There are what I think of as sort of major altars, like this beautiful Buddha-focused altar here behind me. And generally, each work crew and area within the temple has their own altar, which they orient towards at the start of the day, perhaps return to at the end of their day. Even each bathroom within the temple has its own altar. So there are these repeated opportunities to notice the presence of an altar and to have an experience in the present moment with that altar.

[23:25]

And I think of these daily experiences with altars as an opportunity to notice my own experience in that moment. It's an opportunity to notice how I change, if I feel very different or I'm having a very different experience of an altar than I had the day before, most likely, most of that difference is in this one and not so much in the altar itself. The altars do change, but they tend to have a slower pace of change than I do as a human being. There's also this aspect of having something to direct and orient practice towards, to give some area of focus temporarily within practice.

[24:27]

And altars like this, I think, also give us examples of awakened and awakening beings. To see the form of the Buddha again and again is its own sort of inspiration. And I think it's also helpful that altars give us something we have to take care of. They require a certain amount of work and mindfulness. They have to be cleaned and maintained. We distinguish them from counters or tables. We try not to casually set anything on altars. We try not to let them get too dusty or too dirty. we refresh the flowers whenever the flowers need to be refreshed. And this was sort of highlighted or awoken in me a number of years ago, before I had moved into San Francisco Zen Center, when I was visiting the Tassajara Monastery, which is Zen Center's

[25:41]

more secluded temple down in the Ventana wilderness. And I was there as a guest student for a few days, doing half a day of work each day. And one of those days I was on the Benji crew, which in the summertime is in charge of trash and recycling dishes and compost. And so I was assigned to this crew, and the first thing that we did was go down into the trash and recycling area, open up a beautiful altar, light a candle on that altar, and do a brief service outdoors next to the trash cans. That particular service happened to be led by a former resident, Ilya. And it left quite an impression on me. It was the first time I had ever done any religious ceremony outside, let alone one that included the trash cans, that included the smell of the trash along with the smell of the incense.

[26:59]

That altar being there in what would otherwise be a space we would consider dirty or less than in some way. Interacting with an altar in that space to me really broadened the scope of practice in a wonderful way. It showed me that Zen Buddhist practice can include everything in a really deep way. And I think that experience of that short Benji ceremony before we put on our rubber boots and drove down to the compost shed. I think that was a big factor in my continuing practice, deepening practice, and eventually moving into San Francisco Zen Center. So I think this experience of interacting with alters

[28:09]

this sort of devotional gratitude practice. Obviously, I have thought about it a bit. It has been a major component of my personal practice experience. But I think it can also be a wordless embodied experience. I think this can be of great value and support to our practice. whether we particularly care to think this much about it or whether we just want to do it. I certainly have times where I am interacting with an altar and no words are coming up. I just embody the bow and try to feel the gratitude and the devotion of being alive. I'm sure that that three, four, five of us who were involved in that ceremony down in the trash and recycling area probably had very different experiences of that moment.

[29:16]

And that I think is totally fine. We are all constantly having slightly different experiences. We're all having our own sort of individual experience of the world. But reorienting these devotional and gratitude practices I think can help us stay connected within the context of our individual and different experiences. So the mind and this intellectual understanding of practice, I think can bring us towards awakening and towards a reduction of suffering. I think these devotional practices, faith, love, leading with the heart, whatever we might want to call it, I think these can help us stay oriented towards the truth

[30:30]

towards awakening and towards the reduction of suffering. I think of it sort of as a constant conversation between different elements of practice. My mind gets a little intellectual understanding. that intellectual understanding may be helpful in some way. And then the embodied meditation process deepens the intellectual understanding, grounds it in my personal experience. And then these devotional gratitude practices as I experience them can help provide the energy to continue on this path, to continue trying, to just keep trying.

[31:42]

So this statue that has been passed around leaves a lot of space for interpretation. That's one of the things that I really, really love and am inspired by when I interact with that statue on my home altar. It might be a Buddha. It might be a mother goddess. It might be an earth spirit. In my mind, I call it the mirror Buddha because it has that sort of flat, nearly reflective front to it. And in its mirror-like quality, it encourages me to reinterpret it each time I bow to it, to keep my experience of it fresh from moment to moment. What is it today? Which of us is asking that question?

[32:58]

Which of us is answering that question? To just stay open, to have the will and the energy to not close off our questions, to allow the questions that arise in our direct embodied experience to support and guide that experience. The angel handed me a book. Placing a book in my hands, the angel said, it holds all you would wish to know. And he vanished. So I opened the book, which wasn't thick. It was written in an unknown alphabet.

[33:59]

Scholars translated it, but produced very different versions. They disagreed even about their own readings, agreeing neither upon the tops or bottoms of them, nor the beginnings, nor the ends. Toward the close of this vision, it seemed to me that the book melted, until it could no longer be told apart. from the world that surrounds us. So you've held that statue twice. You've heard that poem twice. Like you have done many, many things multiple times in your life. Was the second experience different than the first? Will the third and the fourth be different than those two? How much of that is you changing, and how much of that is the world changing?

[35:07]

These questions can just stay open, and we can express our gratitude to the objects of the world, to the experiences of the world, that allow us to refresh our questions day after day and time after time. So I encourage us all to just look for opportunities to express gratitude, to express devotion and reverence for the world. Here in the Bay Area, there are numerous Buddha and Bodhisattva statues all over the place. Just walking around I encounter them. Sometimes I find myself spontaneously bowing to a statue I see through someone's window. Walk into a decor or design shop in the Bay Area with this mindset and you may find yourself bowing again and again at all of the holy statues for sale.

[36:20]

To just... reconnect with our deepest intentions, our love for the world, and our gratitude for the opportunity of one more chance, one more opportunity to keep trying. That is my fundamental suggestion for tonight. We don't have to know exactly what it is we're doing if we orient towards the spirit of it. And if we are just willing to continue to try, continue to keep asking and return to the questions again and again. And speaking of questions, I have left time. for perhaps one or two questions.

[37:23]

So if anyone has anything that you would like to bring forward, please feel free. You can raise your hand and I'll bring the mic to you. Thanks, Dan. So you're obviously an expert on alters. That's a harsh word. Well, for those people who might want to build an altar in their house, what are the minimum number of things that they would need? Well, I think I would say in your own experience, in your own home, an altar that is aimed at whatever your intention is I can't really prescribe too much about that. Several of the altars in my house do not meet any sort of Zen Buddhist standards.

[38:31]

However, from the Zen Buddhist context, there probably are some very specific rules that I might not be wholly familiar with, but from my experience, the fundamental pieces would be Set a space aside that's not used for something else. You don't want your altar to also be a coffee table, for instance. Though it might, you may take a coffee table and turn it into an altar. But don't bring the two together. Flowers, flowers or something similar is a nice piece. Sometimes it's hard for me to get fresh flowers on my altar, so I also use feathers in place of flowers on one of my altars. A statue of some kind just to guide the intention is helpful, whether that's Buddha, a bodhisattva, or something like this little statue that has been going around that can be sort of interpreted in multiple ways.

[39:42]

I guess classically it would be the statue to orient towards flowers, light, and incense. I also substitute clean water sometimes for the incense, a little dish of water that I change out on a regular basis. I also think it's quite nice to raise the Buddha up a little bit above the level of the rest of the altar just to help it take its place. Those are my current thoughts. They may not They may not be Soto Shu official, but you'd do pretty good, I think, if you did it that way. I think that's all the time we have tonight. I think that is. If anyone has any further questions, please feel free to corner me out in the hall or get in touch later in whatever way you may wish. Thank you all for being here. Again, thank you for just making some time in your lives to connect.

[40:47]

with the Dharma and to investigate it in this shared Sangha space. Thanks for being here. 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 sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:22]

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