We'll fix it. Okay. I have a big throat. Okay. So, good morning. Good morning. My name is, I always skip my name. My name is Mark Lancaster. I'm a priest here. And I was thinking, what's something you don't know about? I think they do these things. I was thinking, when I was eight in Ohio, once I was standing in front of a magnolia tree, and I got so excited I ate one of the blossoms.

[01:07]

I didn't notice. I just didn't. I got kind of panic. I got pretty, it wasn't so good. That didn't taste so hot. But it was really, yeah, I just, anyway, it was a moment. And Eric, our new front office staff person, asked me if I wanted my Dharma name put up. And I never use it, so I thought I would share it with you. It's Tokuden Shinki. And our dharma names are kind of, Christianity would be a confirmation name, a renaming. And I'm not sure. I never use it. And part of it could be that I'm from Ohio, so I still have some difficulty. But the after effects of the magnolia blossom. And the name means, and part of it is the name always seems so heavy. It's virtuous field. a true spirit, you know, so it's kind of a heavy name.

[02:09]

I haven't kind of gotten used to it, but I may try to use it a little bit now, because it is our heritage, our tradition, to use these names and to practice with them. And so you may see the next time I talk, Tokuden Shingi up there, and we'll try it out together. And just as an aside, I thought, geez, what a great forum. I wanted to apologize We have a residence, a monthly residence meeting at City Center for people that live in each of the properties that live in practice together. And the idea is we come together and we share our lives, not only our difficulties, but our ideas for how we can make this a better practice center. And I couldn't go today. I wanted to go and I thought, I think I could do that and then come and talk. But I realized I would be in the residence meeting and not really concentrating. And this is... Multitasking in Buddhism isn't usually recommended. It's never recommended.

[03:10]

So you should just do one thing the best you can. But I'll be at the next residence meeting and I'll talk a little then about the paths and gates, which is a new training system we have at Zen Center, a time of reflection. on what we do in our practice and how we're experiencing our practice and how it can be richer for us, both individually and as an institution and community. And each year we want to extend this circle, make it wider, so this year it's people in residential work practice and then next year hopefully people in residential practice and also lay practitioners who live outside in practice here, you know, that come to our events. We'd like to kind of keep offering this time of reflection, a yearly time of reflection together. So for residents, I'll be there next month. And if you have questions, please, about this Paths and Gates and what it means, please ask me. And then to everybody here today, you know, you may be, this is your first Dharma talk or taste of Buddhism.

[04:25]

So Welcome to this place which is called Beginner's Mind Temple. I was thinking, what a wonderful name for a temple in the middle of the most expensive city in the world, or one of the most expensive cities with careers, cars, great restaurants. And we have this little temple called Beginner's Mind, which we say is to have an open mind or a ready mind. a curious mind, waiting to see what this is about, what life is about, what I am in this moment. So you may come, never having heard a talk, and you may come with a complete beginner's mind, and you may come with a complete expert's mind. And I thought, it's all fine. It's all perfectly safe. And I had this image of this... sort of a motherly figure with little kids with chocolate on their fingers climbing all over her, you know.

[05:29]

It's the way we kind of operate. We desperately try to understand our lives, understand our Buddhist practice, and do the best we can, and we worry. And so this image of this matriarch, it's actually behind... here, the Prajnaparlita statue, or the perfection of the darvas, which can't be stained. So it's perfectly safe. Grab on any way you can. Do your best. We're all going to be okay. We're all going to be okay. Even if it doesn't always look that way. I had a talk on Wednesday. I had a really wonderful talk on Wednesday. The lecturer quoted Suzuki Roshi saying, you know, we just don't know how selfish we are, you know, how selfish we can be. And I was thinking another way of saying that is, you know, we just don't know how sad we make ourselves with our stubbornness, you know, our stubbornness to go in this odd direction with our lives, a direction that causes us such difficulty and anguish.

[06:46]

So it's kind of stubbornness. and you could call it selfishness, perhaps. But again, it's unstainable, the true nature of things. So it's more stubbornness or some confusion that causes us to veer off in a way that I want to talk about today. And I'd recommend this talk that Jordan Thorne gave on Wednesday. It'll soon be on our Audiodarma and in CD. It's a wonderful talk. And I'll give you the line that kind of stayed with me, and I hope I have it right, but I usually don't. But this is my line. The joy of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The beauty of the world. That's pretty good. It's amazing if I would have had it totally wrong and been totally moved by it.

[07:47]

It's just like this, you know. That's happened before I've said something, and someone will say that was so wise. And I have no idea what they're even sometimes talking. I say, did I say that? So whatever you hear that's useful, please use it. It's now yours. So the beauty of the world is a mouth of a labyrinth. And so the image of that stuck with me. What is this labyrinth? What is this labyrinth? What is this open place or this place of some unease that was talked about in the lecture? And what's our fear? What holds us back from making a deep inquiry about our lives, which I believe this is evocative or a way of expressing. That's what I felt, a way of expressing. How can we give over to this inquiry?

[08:50]

And how does Buddhism work with that? What does Buddhism offer? What is this thing good for, this Buddhist practice? So I propose the way I've led my life for many years and the difficulties I got in, I'll share with you. This may sound familiar. I kind of, instead of making this entry into something that's a little unknown, a lot unknown, perhaps surprising and frightening, I decided I would figure it all out. I would make a plan, you know, and I would sort of figure out my life and strategize, picking up random clues and hints and make sure that I was safe, you know, that I was safe and that I could be happy. And I think often that's our operating procedure, that we do our best.

[09:53]

We have powerful, this mind is such a powerful apparatus, and it's incredibly useful in many ways, but it can cause problems for us. And so we proceed in a kind of fashion of trying to wind our way through life, figuring it out. and building walls or making four ways outside to acquire something that will make us feel better. And, you know, I think as Americans, we add this deep, to make it even more confusing, I think we have a kind of deep self-criticism. I always feel that in our country, a deep sense of criticism, maybe even anger directed, like, well, I'm good enough. We have to try harder. It's good to try harder to make a big effort, but not to get stuck in the effort. The back of my rock is here.

[10:54]

There's a poem from A. A. Dogen, and it says, desire without effort, clear water all the way to the bottom. This is the heart of our practice, this open-hearted stretching. What did I say? It's going to be a very tough day up here. Thank you, thank you. Effort without desire. This couldn't be what happened to me.

[12:05]

Effort without desire, an open-handed effort is what the speaker meant. So this is kind of a perplexing problem we run into. On the one hand, we use this powerful forebrain to try to win their way safely through things. And then we have this deep self-criticism that springs up, and then a kind of recklessness that we bring to situations, maybe even impatience, that makes this even more difficult, our situation even more difficult than trying. It can be deeply alienating as we proceed down this road of being alone, being critical,

[13:14]

being slightly reckless and practicing with a kind of impatience. And I think we move further from the source of things, which is our true heart. Not necessarily the heart we can understand in so many words, but our true heart, which is unknown even to us with this big forebrain. This is entering into the labyrinth is making this deeper. search with this deeper progress or inquiry into our life. Unfortunately for me, and I think for many people, the problem is we don't give up easy. I went on for many years, and I think we all do, saying, I've really got to figure this out. I can get it right. They're not going to leave me behind.

[14:16]

I'm going to get all I can. I'm going to be safe. And we kind of persist in this way, in this kind of foolish way, moving further and further away from the source of our true heart, of our true openness, of our true possibilities. And, you know, In this way, we kind of back ourselves into a corner. We back ourselves into a corner. And it seems like at times there's no way out in this corner. Now, luckily and perplexingly, things are changing all the time. Things alter themselves rapidly all around us in life. So... In the midst of this struggle to hang on even more tightly and to protect ourselves, our lives change with a kind of dizzying speed.

[15:19]

I was reading Yasutani Roshi recently, and he was saying, I go from one room to the other, and it seems like it's the same person that leaves one room and enters the second room. And yet during the course of the day, there's six billion transformations that occur at a frightening rate. In that way, we say this mark really isn't this mark. It's not the same person. This room is transforming by our interconnection, our relationship. So this change is ceaselessly happening. When this change in this intimacy or this inner penetration or this activity bumps into our deep need for sameness and separation or holding on or making things solid so we can get a handle on it, we feel a sense of anguish or deep pain can start to happen.

[16:26]

And we feel a deep sense of unease, something's not right. Some people, sometimes we ask each other here, why did you ever come to Zen Center? And people ask me that. And my answer is, and it's still the same one, just one day I decided I wasn't going to be able to guarantee my happiness anymore. It's just, I couldn't do it. And I immediately thought, I'll call Zen Center. It's the craziest thing. And so I did, and I just came over and started sitting. Lin Zinke gave me Zazen instruction, and I just kept sitting. And we seem to have to get stuck in this way. Most often it happens this way, that this ceaseless change from our vantage point is frightening, is chaotic, is uncontrollable, and is very threatening.

[17:30]

And this change with our deep desire, which we call greed and hate, or I want it, or get it out of the room, bump together. And it's very abrading and causes great anxiety and difficulties. But the anguish is actually kind of like a notched tree in the woods or breadcrumbs left. You know, it's a way out. It's a way out of this situation of deep discomfort or anguish. It's actually a signpost. Now, at that point, that's when we, perhaps, we ask for help for the first time. We say, help me. And we ask, in a way, outside of what we consider ourselves. In this lineage, we have sangha. And teachers of old and new, and everybody becomes a teacher. Sometimes we invert a line and somebody helps us immediately.

[18:35]

And we get to share our heart a different way. And so you ask for help. I think the Christian tradition, you would say, well, what you sincerely or deeply ask for will be answered. If you can make this request, if you can open your heart in this way. And when we're aware in this way, we say also dharma, or the true situation now, the true reality of life fills our bodies, fills our bodies and minds for the first time. And our teacher Dogen says, and then we know we need all the help we can get when we begin to see this truth. We need all the help we can get. So I'll share a couple of, and some of the help comes in the form of each other, paying deep attention to how this pain arises, what conclusions we've drawn from what we see and what we're experiencing, a directness of vision for the first time, and talk a little about practicing in this way.

[19:57]

I thought I'd read a koan. I've been liking koans. These are koans, or public cases. And they're kind of the treasure books of sages and teachers, like treasure maps left behind, to help us enter the mouth of this labyrinth, to enter our life. So I thought I'd read this one to you and talk a little bit about it. It's come up for me several times in a couple of different ways, and maybe it's my life now I'm reading, so. And Lucy, where's Lucy? So I think it's Shang-Yen. Shang-Yen. Thank you. She helped me with her pronunciation. Shang-Yen, up a tree. The priest Shang-Yen said, it is as though you were up a tree, hanging from a branch with your teeth. Your hands and feet Can't touch any branch. Someone appears beneath the tree and asks, what is the meaning of bodhidharmas coming from the West?

[21:04]

That guy. If you do not answer, you evade your responsibility. If you do answer, you lose your life. What do you do? So this is the koan. I'll read a little bit of Wumann's comment, and then we'll maybe do a guided koan exercise I want to try. So Wumann, he's the compiler of this koan collection, says, Even if your eloquence flows like a river, it's all in vain. Even if you can expound cogently upon the whole body of Buddhist literature, it's useless. If you can respond to this dilemma properly, You give life to those who have been dead and kill those who have been alive. If you can't respond, you must wait and ask Maitreya about it. So Maitreya is coming a long time away, millions of couples, a long time.

[22:13]

The suggestion here is try to answer this. So I'll read it again. And be comfortable. If you're a little comfortable, you can move if you want. So I'll read the koan again. So just breathe easily and let the koan settle. It sort of like melts in your body, not in your mind. So let the koan fill your chest and your belly. And if you find yourself going back to your mind, for an answer. Just note it. But come back over and over to the openness of the koan in your body here. Okay. The priest Xing Yen said, it is though you were up in a tree hanging from a branch with your teeth. Your hands and feet can't touch any branch.

[23:17]

Somewhere beneath the tree Someone beneath a tree asks, What is the meaning of bodhidharmas coming from the West? If you do not answer, you evade your responsibility. If you do, you lose your life. What do you do? Feel maybe the... like the labyrinth, the openness of the question in your body, the unease or lightness even, the lightness of being that could arise around a question like this. Sometimes even a smile might come up. So hang out for a second with that feeling. So we say we take koans deeply into our body, not food for mind.

[24:37]

It doesn't mean that mind isn't important, but this is a different way of understanding, a different way of practicing. I'll read just a little section. When Shen Yen was a young monk, this is this priest who died in 895, He studied under Pai Cheng, and it was only when Pai Cheng died that he became a disciple of Kui Shan, who was a very famous Zen teacher in the Tang period. Now, Sheng Yan was known for being a very smart, very smart cookie, and like many intellectuals, had a hard time with the practice at first. One day Kui Shan said, you know, I'm told you've been under my late master Pai Cheng, and that you have remarkable intelligence. But the understanding of Zen through this medium necessarily ends in intellectual and analytical comprehension, which really is of not much use. So, again, this is important.

[25:39]

He's not saying intellect isn't of much use. In the study of Zen, he's pointing out, this doesn't help. It's not going to help you in the way you think. Yet, you may have some insight into Zen. Let me have your view as to your own being before your parents were born. So he puts him on the spot again, this young Xing Yen puts him on the spot. Xing Yen immediately goes to his room and ransacks all of his notebooks looking for clues. It'll really identify with this. So this is the first thing we do. I need a clue. Don't I have a note? Can I construct something? I've done this. I've gone to lectures here and taken classes and I thought if I can just string together enough comments, I can figure this out. And that's waiting and asking Maitreya about it. You'll have to wait a long time if you proceed down that route. So this guy, Sheng Yen, comes back and says, you know, I failed to find a response to your question.

[26:51]

Please teach me. This is the critical point. This is the point of, I need help. Please teach me. So if you open completely in this way, this is making this foray into the labyrinth, into doubt and faith, into openness in your life. Not evading responsibility, but going directly into a sense of intimacy with your own life. Ah. As you might guess, it turns out well. This young monk, Guishan, says to him, you know, I don't have anything to teach you, and if I tried, later you would only revile me. Sounds odd, but later you would only be very upset if I just told you what I think the truth is.

[27:53]

Besides, Whatever understanding I have is my own. This is saying, you have to eat your own food. And you're strong enough to do it. You don't have baby teeth. You can do this. You can eat this food. And it will never be yours. So don't go down that route. You can't get it that way. It has to be very personal, very private. So... Xing Yen goes to a temple, I think it's the Six Ancestors Temple, and cleans. He sweeps leaves, and one day while sweeping, a stone flies out and hits a piece of bamboo, makes a funny noise, clock, and he has a big insight. So, could be metaphorical, could be true, but he gave up this

[28:55]

external search out here for his notes and his books and his answers, you know, the crib sheet that will get us through this situation and enters more deeply into this inquiry. And then, in a sense, you know, The perplexing thing of this koan is, no right answer. Big problems anyway. Don't evade your responsibility. Act. What's the taste of wood between your teeth? What's the taste and the sound of a big fall? Everything has responsibilities. Everything is connected, quite untrammeled and free. What's beyond right and wrong in this situation, good and bad, or up and down?

[29:59]

This is the outline of the face you had before you were born. So in the talk on Wednesday, we say, enter deeply and just let go. Fearlessly go on once you've begun, and you'll arrive at your true home, which you never left. You'll be seated. in the correct position for the first time. Strangely, you know, and I've tried this for many years, when we run away from fear, it looms larger. And when we turn around, it looms not only larger, but we identify with it. Or anger, or any of these situations. When we turn around for the first time, it's manageable. It's doable. It's a part of life. Not always pleasant, but we can work with it. It opens itself up. We can do something for the first time.

[31:03]

We can get some traction. This kind of identification, Buddha says, we see ourself in all things and all things in ourself is this false connection or this ignorance that we have to work with. We have to let go of. by practicing with ethics, being upright, ceasing to do evil and doing good, and openness. One of the big things I think we can give each other is maybe we know everything about each other, but maybe not so. To have some openness with each other, maybe just a little. Maybe the person we're mad at did something terrible. But maybe we don't know what was in that person's heart. So on this ground that of some openness and ethical behavior, we begin to pay attention now to this intimacy, this authenticity we can find in our lives.

[32:14]

And we find we can look deeply. into what brought us to the dance. You know, we call that karma, the conditions. You know, we see before you Mark Lancaster, but you don't see the food he ate in Ohio, including that magnolia blossom, and the people that yelled at him, and the people that loved him, and all of these connections playing out before you. You know, we see a story of Mark Lancaster in some ways, too. And with karma, which is a big question. We don't necessarily cut it off or evade it. We melt it by our closeness, by our intimacy with the situations of our life. I think I have time for one more co-op. I brought this because I like it so much and I quote it wrong each time. I thought I'd actually read it.

[33:17]

This is from Michael Winger's Book 33 Fingers, which is modern American Zen koans. So he collected lots of koans. Yogi Berra is in here. Baseball gurus and sages. This is the one, Isan Dorsey. This is koan 32. Everybody gets what they deserve. Isan Dorsey said, everybody gets what they deserve, whether they deserve it or not. First you observe it, then you name it, perhaps karma. If you then see how it measures up to the name, you become lost in despair, pride, or confusion. But what is acceptance beyond acceptance? What is it that thus comes? Do you deserve it? Do you not deserve it? How is it different if you deserve it or not?

[34:20]

Perhaps the law of karma is bigger than your evaluation. The merging of difference and unity is a statement like Isan's. Healthy or ill, Isan met each moment. Perhaps you deserve more than these meager words. Alas. That's meant to be kind. Alas. That's like Kweishan saying, chew your own food. Take this in. And Michael adds a verse. Old Basho's splash rings in our ears. Whether you like the poem or not, the frog got wet. So, do good. Cease to do evil. Don't be stubborn. Don't be stubborn. Be willing to question even your firmest assumptions.

[35:27]

And doubt and faith, openness, go together. They inform each other. Put it away in my watch band, bro. And I had one tiny, tiny ending piece. This is from Kweishan. I found a little statement from Kweishan to you. This was written maybe 1,250 years ago, but he was thinking of you. Let each and every one of you turn the light inwards and not try to memorize my words. The one thing essential now is to recollect your mind to attain the fundamental, the very root of your being. Having arrived at the route, you need have no worry about the accidentals. Thank you.

[36:42]

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