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 by people like you. I must say I feel completely naked. I said I feel completely naked right now. Is that right? It's on. It's on, okay. How about there? Okay. Although this society has some trouble with people being naked, I think it's actually kind of good for you. kind of naked I'm talking about.

[01:01]

And one thing that makes that maybe even therapeutic, in a sense, is if you have a lot of confidence in your practice, in your practice of dharma. But I don't mean the kind of confidence that you sort of slather on, on top of something. Sometimes if someone suggests that we be confident, we think, okay, I'm going to be confident. And it's kind of a, well, not an act, but almost, pretty close. I'm not suggesting we have confidence in our practice exactly, but confidence in practice.

[02:14]

Which is to say, in being as you are. So, I don't know about you, but this is a little scary sometimes. Especially if you've grown up as I have and as most of us have, absorbing a kind of succession of postures, an elaborate repertoire to help us negotiate a world that's not us. A world that is there for our, hopefully, exploitation. but it is not us. And so then there's always a little vein of hostility in there. So naturally, we develop some postures, some ways of relating.

[03:25]

Now Buddha teaches that if you get right down in the middle of that, There isn't anything. I don't know. That's a little creepy, kind of. But it's also the wonder of liberation. And I'm afraid it means ultimately being naked. So after a certain amount of practice, there is a kind of confidence that comes up from the earth, so to speak, rather than that you paint on. It comes up from the earth, from mom, so to speak.

[04:30]

And as you all know, can't quite see. With my aged eyes, but I think it's that Shakyamuni doing the Bhumispa Samudra, touching the earth. Yes, so it's that. So even Shakyamuni Buddha said, excuse me, I have to call mom a second here. So he calls mom and mom says, remember whose child you are. You are a child of earth and sea and sky. And in fact, that's all you are. So relax, kid. And Chakyamuni said, did you hear that, Mara? And Mara said, shit, okay, I'm leaving. And...

[05:37]

This confidence I'm talking about is sort of nourished like plants and other growing things. And it's helpful to garden with others, as people who live here would know very well. And then sometimes if you do that, it's easier to see that this confidence isn't your... One of your tricks. You realize it is not personal property. I usually give talks to very small audiences. So...

[06:39]

This audience is quite a bit bigger. So when I came in, I thought, oh, here I go again. I'm sure I have totally the wrong talk for this group. Sometimes people say, your talks are too advanced. Or they say, one guy loves to tell me, I have the faintest idea what you're talking about. And so I thought, okay, I'll work on that. And then I realized, I can only talk the way I talk. If I don't do that, then it's, again, some other posture. Not that there isn't the urge to please people. It's a problem in Buddhism sometimes. What if you don't please people? the people who are feeding you.

[07:40]

That could be trouble. If you don't talk to us the way we like, you're getting no oatmeal, okay? There are all these loose strands floating around in my brain at the moment. I'm not sure which one I'm going to grab, but I grew up Catholic, and in the era when I was in school, the 50s, 50s and early 60s, martyrs were still a big thing, and the Christian martyrs were extolled as exemplars of the faith Recently I thought, you know, I think the way they told us about martyrs is it was a little off.

[08:51]

You know, all this blood spilling all over the place and how great that was. I think that was a little off. So I thought, well, what is, you know, if you go with the Psalms, okay, I realize I'm sliding into Christianity here, I'm sorry, but I'll tell you why in just a minute. If you go into the Psalms where it says, you know, precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his faithful. Well, I think that's something to do with this oatmeal business, actually. Namely, someone may come to you and say, here's your breakfast. Now, are you going to talk nice? And if you realize that you can't, And they say, I'm sorry, no oatmeal. You go, all right. You can't talk the way they want you to talk without, I don't know, disparaging the three treasures.

[10:00]

That is, without turning your back on the truth. And then if they say, okay, no oatmeal, you say, well, I guess I won't have any oatmeal. Now that is martyrdom. And not like, oh, I'm a martyr. Oh, you know, not like that. Just like, okay, so it's either oatmeal or integrity. I think I'm going to go with integrity. Now, we don't know what we do if we get hungry enough. The integrity might slip a little bit. There's quite a remarkable novel by Shusako Endo, which some of you may have read called Silence. Anybody read that? It's spectacular. It's really, really fine. And it's about Japan. It takes place in Japan in the probably 16th century. And you have some stealthy Jesuits, Europeans, crawling around converting the natives. And the bakufu, the junta, really, the military government was not happy about this.

[11:10]

So they would periodically try to catch them and make them do terrible things and torture them and so forth. And so there's these two, I guess, Portuguese or Spanish priests and they get caught. And one of them, I guess they're taking him somewhere on a boat and he jumps overboard and drowns. And this was thought to be spectacular. This was a great martyrdom Now, the other guy, they had this torture. Excuse me for going into this. So they truss you up like a chicken and hang you upside down in a pit of poo and then put these cuts under your ears so that the pressure doesn't build up and kill you. So you just get to hang there. And so...

[12:12]

And this other priest, they didn't do that to him. They did that to his flock. And they said, now as soon as you... Here's a picture of Jesus. And as soon as you step on that picture, we'll stop torturing these guys. So this is a pretty bad situation. And he goes through this terrible torment. I'm not going to step on Jesus. Except that he's not the martyr. Those other guys are being martyred. So, in the midst of this terrible, intense situation, he says, he kind of, so to speak, hears Jesus say, go ahead and step on the picture. What do you think I came here for? That's why I was here.

[13:14]

So he does. And they let the other people go. And he spends the rest of his days in kind of house arrest. So I think that's martyrdom. This is a martyrdom of integrity and of truth. You know, I know I said I was going to tell you why I was talking about that, and now I can't remember. It has something to do with the fact that I'm going on retreat early next month. I'm going to spend a month with the Catholic monks down south of Big Sur at New Comandale. And so I was thinking about retreat recently and thinking that that's one of the ways to nourish, to nurture this confidence. spend some time on retreat. And then I also thought that, well, while that's very popular in American Buddhism, largely because of the kind of frantic pace of our lives, such that coming to Zazen every day is pretty tough.

[14:25]

Maybe you can sit at your house. But if you have to go somewhere and sit with other people, it's like you can't do it. If you've got jobs and kids and relationships, you can't do that. So a lot of Americans opt for retreat. So they'll try to carve out a piece of time, and then they'll go on retreat for that time. This is extremely helpful. But also, I realize that retreat is in us, that is in this body, in this body-mind. So yeah, we go someplace. But the retreat always happens here. And it happens any time that you take the so-called backward step. Dogen's infamous backward step. He says, take the backward step that turns your light and shines it back. Then what does he say?

[15:27]

He says... What does he say? Somebody knows body and mind... Come on, kids. Body and mind of themselves fall away. And your original face is manifest. This is just as much retreat as going off to some spot and eating bad food for a month. So, you know, we can all have that happen now as we sit here together in our Sangha Hall. It's a little tricky because though in the English it says, you know, Dogen says, take the backward step. It sounds like another thing that you do.

[16:33]

Another thing. Sort of like bend over and touch your toes. It's not quite like that. It's more like, just quit, would you? Just leave off. Just give over. And then the light turns. So again, the backward step isn't a little... pirouette of ours. It's what happens, what is happening as you give over. We have this elaborate yoga to support that, to support the appreciation of that, cross-legged and funny clothes and stuff, but none of that's really necessary.

[17:36]

So we're all on retreat. And retreat can happen anytime, anywhere. And the more we live in retreat, so to speak, the more confidence springs up. This is the kind of sweetness, the sweet taste of the scary practice of there's nobody in there. There's nobody in there. It's not quite right to say there's nothing there because there's the material, the sensate, the cognitive, the affective, and awareness.

[18:58]

There's that stuff. But there isn't, besides, a little jewel called me. So that's why someone like Dogen's great-grand-uncle, I think that's right, Tian Tong Hongzhi, could say stuff like, the Dharma bodies, the truth bodies of all the Buddhas, enter my nature. And my nature joins and is the same as all the Buddhas.

[20:07]

Because the problem with this little jewel notion, the little me notion is, it separates everything. that the Buddha's ancestors noticed that that's not how things actually are. And the price we pay for hanging on to that jewel is alienation, also known as suffering. By the way, I fled to the toilet before the talk here, and... sitting there in contemplation, I saw someone had written a Zen graffito on the inside of the door. He said, I love Dogen. Actually, I heart Dogen. Only at a Zen center would you see stuff like that. This is our retreat space.

[21:27]

This is our retreat space. And to also do the elaborate ceremony of entering a designated retreat space for a certain period of time is quite helpful. Sometimes we... In Zen places, we have these monstrous retreats that last for a week. And they're really uncomfortable. That's one way, but it's not the only one. The idea is to set things up so it's easier for us to cease and desist. A little easier. So you get rid of some stuff. No 42-inch TV. None of that. He also says, ordinary people and sages together share one house.

[22:41]

We see our lives as a Buddha field of tranquil radiance. Then, he says... Then we empty our minds, he says. We empty our minds in the hall for creating Buddhas, where some naturally open the flower of awakening. Here in our monastic garden by the sea. So he says, we empty our minds. Just like Dogen's saying, take the backward step. It's not a clever esoteric maneuver.

[23:48]

To empty the mind means quit stuffing things in it. That's all. The mind is empty. And... Its fluctuations subside if you allow them. Hongjir also says stuff like, he's talking about retreat space. He says, He says, by committing ourselves to not budging for 90 days, we see the place where we were before we ever took a step.

[24:56]

So 90 days, that's arbitrary. This is a reference to the supposed practice of the Varshavasa in Sanskrit, the rains dwelling, when it was just too messy to travel around India in Buddhist time during the rainy season, which is, obviously, it's not exactly 90 days. So even though that's what we've inherited, probably somebody... At one point we'll go outside and say, oh, it looks like the rain stopped, and that was the end of the retreat. But we sort of picked 90 days. So in the place of retreat, the place of nourishing confidence, You can see where you were before you ever took a step.

[26:06]

This will really... You'll feel good. You'll feel confident. Because it won't look like anywhere. And then, as the Zenis of old used to say, you will know it is. And then you have this mysterious, full feeling. Good feeling, not like you ate too much pizza. A full, empty feeling. I love being able to be on retreat with you all.

[27:37]

I think I'm not supposed to ask for questions now, so... What the heck? Do you have any questions? You're coming back to do that. Oh, I am? Okay. Hold those thoughts. No, don't. Thank you very much. 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 sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[28:42]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_89.62