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, everyone. My name is Shundo, for those who don't know me. Welcome to everyone who's in this beautiful room. Welcome to everyone who's in the Zoom room. I usually like to start with a quote, but I think we should start with another chant, because I heard that it was Roger Dejico's birthday. He's 28, unless I've got the numbers mixed up. So, happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Roger. Happy birthday to you.

[01:01]

And many more, as Blanche would always add at the end. Those who remember Blanche, you have us. I was going to say we could listen to the crows for a few minutes, but they seem to have gone away right now. So let me continue with a quote from Suzuki Roshi, our founder. He says, if we try to be the most famous... and most useful and most powerful. Everyone will lose the true meaning of our existence. So we say, when you become yourself, Zen becomes Zen. When you become you, he loves. When bamboo is bamboo, that is Zen. When a tree is a tree, that is Zen. If so, we have to realize our inmost nature as a being or inmost request of ourselves. Inmost request works for every existence in the same way. But as each existence is different, bless you, from the other existence, even though the inmost request is universal, the way of expression should be different.

[02:13]

So thank you very much, Tim. Where's he going? Oh, there he is. Thank you for inviting me to give this talk. Thank you to my teacher, Zachary. Thanks to Abbot David. Senior Dharma teacher, Ryu Shin, my ordination teacher, who I know is on his way to Belfast soon, back to his home. We can still listen to the crows. Please give them your full attention. So last week I was down at Tassajara, our training monastery deep in the mountains, and I have the poison oak to prove it. And I was also invited to give a talk there, and people did say, oh, for giving the talk two Wednesdays running, are you going to give the same talk? And it's like, of course not. It's impossible to give the same talk twice. The room, the circumstances, the people, everything is completely different. It was an amazing week to be at Tassajara last week because people went down on Tuesday. There were three separate groups going down, including my small group of students.

[03:20]

And the first evening we had full moon ceremony. So people who were fresh to Tassajara got kind of thrown in at the deep end. It was a very powerful, quite intimate and physical ceremony. There's a lot of bowing in the full moon ceremony. And one of the things I talked about in my talk on Wednesday was just explaining the different parts of the full moon ceremony. Because I think if you come in and you have no idea what's going on, as much as you can be paying attention with beginner's mind and kind of trying to follow what's going on, trying to fathom out why people are doing what they're doing inside the zendo and outside the zendo, I think it takes time for the different elements of the full moon ceremony to kind of come to the fore. So just as a reminder, if you're not familiar or if you haven't thought about it for a while, the first part of the full moon ceremony is avowing and repenting our own karma.

[04:26]

And the notion of repenting definitely sticks in the craw for a lot of people. The idea of confessing and repenting is kind of built into maybe unpleasant experiences growing up. But the way I think about karma these days is to try to be honest with ourselves, to try to be honest with all the causes and conditions that made us who we are, brought us to where we are right now. And keep making an effort. We avow our karma. We admit that we've got it wrong. And, you know, I've got it wrong many times. But we keep trying to do better. And having done that, having kind of, you know, kind of owned up a little bit to our imperfection, we pay homage to the seven Buddhas before Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, Maitreya Buddha, Manjushri, Samantabhadra, Avalokhita Hishvara, the Bodhisattvas, the archetypes of

[05:30]

kinds of behavior and conduct and then the succession of ancestors so we pay homage to those who have come before us those who have set an example those who have brought the practice through millennia to us in this present day and then we do the full Bodhisattva vows so those of you who've sewn a robe or even those of you who have a practice a sincere ongoing practice, we take these vows. And when I was rehearsing the chant, because I got to be the chant leader, the kokyo for the ceremony, which is a very powerful and wonderful thing to do, it seemed to me that the first two chants were kind of very daunting. You know, Buddhas, sorry, beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. This is, you know, a hard task to contemplate.

[06:31]

And somehow the second two seemed much more optimistic. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. So Dharma gates are boundless means every moment, every opportunity, every circumstance of our life is an opportunity to meet the Dharma, to enter the Dharma, to actualize the Dharma. And we can make that effort. And even if we don't succeed in that effort, even if we don't succeed in becoming Buddha's Way, the vow, the desire, the intention to do this, guides us on our path. We had a long conversation during the week with our student group about the difference between a vow and a habit. And a habit, you know, you can have many habits of self-improvement. But I think a vow takes you beyond the small self. and into the bigger self.

[07:34]

And one of my students got married and I said, is your marriage a habit or is your marriage a vow? So that kind of brings home the difference between things that we might habitually do, which tend to perhaps create more ancient twisted karma for us and things that we vow to do. And then we also all chant the refugees, these This ocean of support that surrounds us. Refuge in Buddha, the teacher. Refuge in Dharma, the teaching. Refuge in Sangha, the community. This great support. And then Doshi, who was Mako, the priest leading the ceremony, reads, recites the precepts and we recite them with her. And these precepts are the guardrails of a life of community. And I was thinking about the lines from Dogonzehe Kosohotsu Ganmon where he says, Buddhas and ancestors of old were as we.

[08:41]

We in the future shall be Buddhas and ancestors. And it's very hard for us, I think, to think in those terms. Very hard for us to think of us in this ongoing lineage of practice. From the seven Buddhas before Buddha through Shakyamuni, through all the succession of ancestors, known and unknown, male and female, that have brought the practice to this place and this moment. And I reminded people at Tassajara that they were creating the Buddha field that is Tassajara themselves for that week. Tassajara is an incredible and powerful place, but it... remains powerful through the wholehearted, dedicated practice of those who were there at that moment, even if they've only been there for 24 hours. And at the end of the talk, somebody asked me about emptiness, and I kind of waffled a bit about, you know, how I understood emptiness as boundlessness, and it helped me understand it.

[09:49]

But I realized once I'd left the Zendo, what I should have said is that Tassahara is empty. There is no single unchanging impermeable thing that is Tassajara. Tassajara is what we make it. Day after day, week after week, guest season after guest season, practice period after practice period. Zen center is empty. I mean right now it really is empty because I just looked through the window and there's fluorescent jackets, workers' jackets in the director's office. But right now, Zen center is everybody here. everybody on Zoom, all of its constituents, old and new, from Julie Morgan onwards, 102 years of this building. And Tassahara has been there 57 years. And I noted that the day I went down last week, August 20th, just happened to be the day that the very first session at Tassahara started in 1967.

[10:53]

So Suzuki Roshi was giving his first sesshin talks to his Tassahara monks, encouraging them in their practice. And those of you who know Tassahara can imagine that sitting a sesshin, all day sitting for a number of days, in August in Tassahara is a hard thing to do. It's challenging with the heat. As it happened, Tassahara was pretty cool last week. The temperature went way down from the 90s to the 70s. Very unusual. And we finish the week on Saturday night with the Oban ceremony, which is a very powerful ancestor invocation that takes place in the courtyard of Tassajara. The light strung up, and also the names of those who have died strung up around the courtyard. I heard names I knew, names of people I did not know had died. call out spirits to help them on their way.

[11:58]

And again, reflecting on our ancestors, those Buddhas and ancestors of old who were as we. And we, in the future, shall be Buddhas and ancestors. Our names will be on strings in the courtyard at Tassajara, if people choose to put them there. So since I'd found an auspicious anniversary date for last week, I decided to look for an auspicious anniversary date for today. And it turns out that August 28th, 1965, there was a one-day sitting at Sokoji, where Zen Center used to be in Japantown. And it was one of the very first sittings to be recorded on tape. So I could go into great detail about how that came to be, but maybe you can ask me about it afterwards if you're interested.

[13:00]

But here we have the words of Suzuki spoken and transcribed. And that quote comes from that day. 1965, so that's 59 years ago if my math is correct. If we try to be the most famous and most useful and most powerful, everyone will lose the true meaning of our existence. So what do we want to do with our life? How is it that we spend our time here? So we say, when you become yourself, Zen becomes Zen. And this is one of those kind of formulations that I think in my early days of practice, I really didn't understand. I think there's a similar one in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind that had me scratching my head for many years. When you become yourself, Zen becomes Zen. When you become you.

[14:02]

What does it take to become ourselves? Why is it that we are not immediately ourselves? What is it that gets in the way of being immediately ourselves? bamboo is bamboo, that is Zen. When a tree is tree, that is Zen. The bamboo and the tree do not worry about their manifesting, their life force. If so, we have to realize our inmost nature as a being. How is it we realize our inmost nature as a being? Which Dharma gates take us there? do we enter those Dharma gates? Inmost request works for every existence in the same way, but as each existence is different from other existence.

[15:14]

Even though the inmost request is universal, the way of expression should be different. So as he so often does, Suzuki Roshi is pointing to the dual nature of all this. Beyond each of our own individual karma, beyond collective karma, national karma, racial karma, all kinds of karma, there is one universal inmost request. The way of expression should be different. So I remember when I was the Tenzo in this building in charge of the kitchen, about 15 years ago I was different to the Tenzo who came before me and the Tenzo who came after me was different again and those of you who have been Tenzo will have done it in your own way and yet each fills the role of Tenzo Tassahara is empty and yet each week it fills with people practicing

[16:30]

I was also thinking about the first line of the song of the Jewomera Samadhi, which we chanted on the last morning I was at Tassahara. We don't often chant it in Japanese, but the Japanese goes, The translation we use is, the teaching of thusness has been intimately transmitted by Buddhas and ancestors. Now you have it, so keep it well. And this is somewhat of an echo of the harmony of difference and equality, which was written a few generations before that. But again, both of them way back in the golden age of Zen in China. And the same word mitsu, intimate, comes up. The mind of the great sage of India is intimately transmitted. think about the connection between that intimate transmission and our exploration of our inmost nature as we get closer to manifesting what it is that our inmost nature is requesting.

[18:05]

What is it that is intimately transmitted? And the thusness which is talked about, this is You become you and Zen becomes Zen. That is thusness. What is in the way of our manifestation of thusness? So the teaching of thusness has been intimately transmitted by Buddhas and ancestors. So Dong Shan wrote that I don't know, at least a thousand years ago. It was true in his time and it is true now. No less true now. The people that Dong Shan thought of as Buddhas and ancestors are even further back and now he is a Buddha and ancestor to us. We in the future shall be Buddhas and ancestors.

[19:13]

So this intimately practicing. At the very end of the chant he says, working within, practice secretly like a fool, like an idiot. And that practice secretly is the same character, the same mitsu, intimate, close. Can we stay close to you being you and Zen being Zen? constant uncovering of the self that happens in zazen. The constant honest appraisal of our own karma. That maybe we can try to set it aside and fail, but still keep trying. Make our vows to keep trying. And then when we can meet ourselves, we have the chance to meet everyone else as well. because we appreciate there is not so much separation.

[20:34]

And this open-hearted meeting is something that makes Tassahara a very special place, but is also what makes Zen Center a very special community. And even in the few days I was at Tassahara when we had the work circle in the morning and people were leaving, There was one student who'd been there maybe a few weeks and expressed how deeply touched he had been to have been seen, accepted, and welcomed into the community. And those who were just there for the week that I was there expressed their own gratitude, being held in this container of the Sangha that they themselves were deeply contributing to. gratitude of being met, of being seen, of being included, of being given a space to explore themselves.

[21:42]

These days I find I have a lot of dreams about community, being in community, things happening together. I had a very striking dream quite recently where I started off the dream with some inner power that I could feel glowing inside me, that kind of loving, beneficent power. And people from Zen Center were kind of gathering around to try to figure out, you know, what this was all about. And then Christina Lane here, the former abbess, who some of you knew, appeared. And perhaps she would be today's bodhisattva of that inner loving power. And it's her foremost quality. It was interesting that she appeared in the dream. But we all have this loving inner power that we can manifest and express, especially when we get out of our own way. And practice of doing that is something that happens, I think, very well at Tassajara and can happen very well at Zen Center here as well.

[22:56]

around the room I see people I've practiced with for 20 years or more. People I've never met before. And this is the wonderful power of Zen Center. And when I think about this room, this very beautiful Victorian room, I have two very distinct memories. So one is some kind of high-level administrative meetings where we're all in chairs in a circle discussing some deeper point of you know, continuing Zen center. And when the talk got very long, I would find myself staring at the carpet and the rug in the middle of the room and tracing patterns across the diagonals. But the other memory I have is when we started Young Urban Zen in 2011. Again, I can tell stories about how that came about, but... We met here because we thought it'd be less formal than meeting in the main building.

[24:06]

We thought maybe six people would turn up and we had 25 people at the first meeting. And then more people and more people and more people until we had to move to the main building after all. And I was reflecting on that as how in the meetings we were continuing the current business of Zen Center. And with Young Urban Zen we were hoping to Intimately transmit the teachings onwards. And one of my students spent the week at Tassajara rebuilding a little altar. Not a large altar or a major altar, but you know, kind of about this tall with a sloped roof. If you've been to Tassajara, you've probably seen something like that. It might have been in the pit, I'm not sure. But he and another person were working on this without any, I think, particular expertise. But they appreciated how the altar had a certain age and had been beautifully constructed originally, and then over the years had been kind of patched and glued and nailed.

[25:14]

And they were taking it apart and rebuilding it for the future, so that it would stay at Tassajara and have its place, place of holiness, place of sacredness, place of mindfulness. And it's not like a good metaphor for how we're manifesting the practice right now, doing our best, our wholehearted practice right now, in order to allow the teachings to continue. This teaching has been entrusted to us, intimately transmitted by Buddhas and ancestors. We are the custodians and repairers of the Dharma and the Sangha. And the Sangha is perhaps not the same as it was before the pandemic. So much has changed because of that. Nevertheless, we owe it to the world to continue this practice so that we can sustain the teachings for the future.

[26:17]

And it's our own effort that we make. Although really, is it an effort to become yourself? But even though we're making our own effort, we're always supported by others in the Sangha. But not just the current Sangha, the Sangha throughout space and time supports us in our practice. So when you become you, Zen becomes Zen. So let us actualize that together, moment by moment, day by day. week by week, sashim by sashim, practice period by practice period. Let us continue this practice onwards because the world needs it. 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.

[27:22]

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.

[27:38]

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