This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Today I'm going to talk about learning. Learning in the context of Zen practice. So how many people are here? Maybe you could raise a hand. Many people here see their being here today in some way in the context of learning, learning something. You want to learn something. So most people. But not everyone. Is anybody here or feel like they're practicing in some way that's not learning?

[01:14]

Different than learning? How so? Unlearning. Right. Right. Unlearn. Uh-huh. Anybody else? Uh-huh. Unlearning. Yeah. We've acquired so much in our lives. We have to, you know, actually let some of it go, maybe. Yeah. Michael. What? Reminding. Yes. That may be different than acquiring, like, some new knowledge, but actually... you already know, but you maybe forgot for some reason. Even though it's important to you. Accepting.

[02:19]

Yeah. So it's not like there's something wrong and you need to learn how to fix it. but maybe just accepting yourself or accepting whatever, right? Yeah. That could feel different than learning, yeah. It's seeing, it's being, yeah. Yeah, learning in the context of Zen is kind of a tricky thing. It's kind of problematic almost. At the same time, we may see somebody and we may think, well,

[03:27]

I'd like to be like that. Or maybe there's something for me to understand. Maybe I don't know it all. There's a very famous quote from Suzuki Roshi He said something like, we are perfect just the way we are, and we could use a little improvement. So that seems to imply some kind of a learning, you know? Maybe, maybe not. Dogen Zenji, the founder of Soto Zen, said very specifically, Zazen is not learning meditation.

[04:30]

We don't sit down to do our meditation to learn something. Something else. Maybe it's more in the territory of what was just offered. Yeah, unlearning, accepting, remembering. Sometimes it's hard to trust that, or it's hard to believe that it's just that simple. It's just that. Okay, if I unlearn all this stuff, then what's left? Just this? That may not be enough. So, it's a water Thursday today.

[05:41]

A few months ago, a couple months ago, very recently, I was asked to spearhead an effort on the part of Zen Center to increase our presence in and our ability to communicate and support people's practice via the internet. So I'm not a... person who's been trained in internet technology, and I follow a couple of blogs, but I wouldn't say that I'm particularly engaged with the online world, even though I am somewhat interested in it, and I think that's why I was happy to say yes.

[06:55]

So then I started... moving all around the internet and trying to understand, well, how would, why would, how would Zen Center kind of extend our practice to people via computers, cell phones, things like that. And I realized, and all of a sudden, I came across the whole world of learning, learning online. And I tell you, it's like exploding. And of course, some of this is maybe not so good. People are trying to make a lot of money. People are trying to take the content stuff that they've been developing and just get it out to more people and get people to just increase the numbers and their profits, certainly.

[07:58]

But another aspect of it is the, and you can just see it or feel it intuitively, is the tremendous opportunity to reach people who can't make it to the great educational institutions or metropolitan areas of the United States or anywhere in the West. You know, people in other countries, people who are not mobile, people who are trying to learn something while having two jobs and a family at the same time. So it's kind of interesting what's happening in the whole learning world. Our world that seems to have become learning. And maybe already was learning from the time we were born.

[09:03]

Who knows? So while I was doing this, I remembered something from when I was a new student at Tassahara. I was there maybe a year, this is like the mid-90s, and we were having what's called a Shosan ceremony. Mel Weitzman was the practice leader. I was there for a practice period. This is my third practice period, I think. And Mel, so how it works is the teacher is in a big chair, and the students are all kind of like you are today, and then one student after the next comes up and they stand in front of the teacher, and they ask them a question, and the teacher answers right away. So this is in some way some kind of public learning event that we don't have too often.

[10:07]

But they're very special when we do have them because we get to see our fellow students and we get to see the teacher. It's a really powerful way of learning, actually. So... one of my buddies who was there, and it was also his third practice period, a young guy who had just graduated from MIT and was there doing a practice period, and he was like super smart. His life was all about learning. He was just like a, you know, his appetite for learning and for ideas, and it was just incredible, and it still is. He now teaches Buddhism, at Berkeley. Brilliant guy. He was very young at the time, 22. So his question was, and he came right before me, his question was, okay, what are we learning?

[11:12]

What are we learning? I just thought, oh, that's so great. I hadn't even, I hadn't... I was just kind of doing my practice. I wasn't even thinking I was there learning something. I was basically just trying to recover for the last 10 years of my life. Trying to get a little foothold of stability in this sea of chaos that was my life. I wasn't thinking about what I was learning. I thought, oh, that's great. Yeah, right. What are we learning? And Mel didn't miss a beat. Mel's like, I don't know. He could have been 70 years old at that point. He says, as if it was just so obvious. He said, we're learning to be a human being.

[12:22]

And I know everybody in the room was just like, oh. We're learning to be a human being. We're learning what it is to be a human being. So that's been, in some ways, a koan for me. And for people who don't know that word koan, it's kind of an enduring, deeply meaningful question. Or something to, in some ways,

[13:33]

Explore, investigate, figure out. So I have some ideas, mostly because I'm reflecting on my own practice and would like to share a little bit about what I've learned in maybe a little over 19 years of practice with you. But first, before I do that, I'd like to say just something about how we learn at Zen Center because it's kind of connected to what we learn and what we are learning that will help us know what it is to be a human being. In some ways, how we learn is connected to that. So how we learn at Zen Center is that we study or not Zen Zen, I'd say Zen practice, is we study ourself.

[14:38]

This self, these thoughts, these challenges, these emotions, this fear, this anxiety, this joy, that I'm having right now is what I study, is what we study. We also learn by doing. We don't learn by sitting around talking about it so much, even though that's kind of what we're doing today. We learn by doing. It's a very kind of active engagement with understanding our life. We learn by making things, cooking, cleaning, doing basic things, helping people walk across the street.

[15:54]

And in the learning by doing, An important part of that is making mistakes. We learn by failing. By trying to do something. And failing. Failing to meet our own expectations. In this way we also, how we learn is we learn with others. We don't learn by ourself, but we learn together with others. Always. We learn by being in relationship with others. By watching others. By watching how somebody does something. Watching how they maybe don't do something.

[17:00]

We learn by putting ourselves in situations where we get feedback, get a response to our doing something. We stick around and kind of like try to see how did that work out. And lastly, we learn continuously We don't just learn on weekdays, 9 to 5, or when we want to. Now I'm available for learning. It's not like that. It's kind of like every moment of every day becomes our place of learning, when we really commit ourselves to practice waking up, sleeping, washing ourselves, talking on the phone, being at the computer.

[18:20]

All of these become our place of learning. This is how we learn continuously, moment after moment after moment after moment. So what is it to learn how to be a human being? That became my question. And here's what I think I've learned. Or am learning. I say I am learning. That's a big difference there. And in some ways, it's very much like sometimes it feels like taking something on. Like trying on new clothes. Obviously, I'm still learning. I didn't even kind of understand the forms here today. But sometimes it feels like letting go, accepting, remembering what I already know.

[19:31]

But there's two important ways that I feel like I'm learning. One, is that I'm learning how to offer myself to each moment. I'm learning how to give myself to this moment without trying to control it without expecting that it's going to be any particular way, without expecting any kind of return on my offer, or anything back in exchange for my gift, but just to offer myself.

[20:40]

It sounds so simple, huh? Just offer myself. I'm still learning how to do that. And actually, zazen helps a lot. Zazen Would I just sit down without needing anything to be different, without expecting anything back, but just sitting down with myself, watching myself, giving myself to myself? I am learning.

[21:50]

This is very different than offering myself so that I can get something in exchange, or needing something before I'm going to offer myself. This is actually offering myself and receiving myself at the same time. This is participating in the cycle of giving and receiving. This is different than the usual way we offer ourselves. But this is what we learn in practice. In Zen we call this Jijuyu Zanmai, self-fulfilling samadhi. Giving myself to myself, giving myself to this moment, giving myself to the experience of being a human being right now, is receiving myself as a human being right now.

[23:17]

is receiving life. Giving myself to this moment is receiving this moment completely. Giving myself to others is receiving others completely. This is kind of a simple thing, but it's a difficult thing to learn. The other thing that I've learned, besides picking up a little bit about how to cook and how to clean and how to read a spreadsheet and how to, sometimes, how to offer incense, how to bow, I learned to see myself as I truly am.

[24:24]

Not as I think I am. Not this idea of myself that doesn't know how to do something, but as I truly am. I'm learning that in some fundamental way, I am not separate from anything. This is what I'm learning when I practice. And again, zazen helps a lot with that. When I sit down right in the middle of my life every day and see for myself directly, see fundamental ground of my being. And see that in that fundamental ground I am not

[25:30]

separate from anything. But I am interconnected with everything. Awakening to the truth of my life. That I am not operating independent of anything, but actually interdependently with everything. I appreciate this word of remembering. In some ways, when we sit down in zazen, that's what we're doing. We're remembering that. Because we forget it. how does this work in real life?

[26:47]

Recently, a few months ago, I was invited to lead a practice period in New Mexico. And I had never done that before. I didn't know if I could do that. And as I'm flying out to New Mexico, I was... I was starting to think, well, I don't know how to do this. Even though I participated in maybe, I don't know, 15, 20 practice periods in my life, I had never led a practice period. Been the teacher, been the sole teacher, been the person who everybody was looking to, to help them learn. So I'm on the plane, and it's kind of like this Gary Larson cartoon came into my mind, and... There's a picture of a tightrope and there's some kind of like a dog is out in the middle of the tightrope.

[27:53]

And the dog is on a unicycle on the tightrope and has a pull. And then there's a little thought bubble coming up from the dog's head. And the dog says to himself, I'm an old dog and this is a new trick. And I was thinking, I'm on the plane thinking, that's me. I'm an old dog and this is the brand new trick and I don't know if I know it. I don't know if I've learned enough. So I show up. And amazingly, I knew what to do. I knew exactly what to do.

[28:58]

Which is basically, I knew to just offer myself. Just show up. Just say, okay, here I am. Completely. What are we going to do I'm here. And I saw that it was not about me. It was not about me. It was about me participating in something larger than myself. It was about me harmonizing with the many other forces at play, including the mountains and the clouds and the streams and the snow.

[30:05]

And I knew it wasn't about me because I'd been practicing. I knew it was about us working together, being together, and figuring it out, figuring out what it was to be a human being, to be human beings together. Somehow I knew how to do that. I didn't know that I knew how to do that. I forgot for a minute. Because I was worried. For a minute I was worried, what are they going to think of me? Are they going to like me? Am I going to be good enough? I didn't have to. I didn't really have to. They were worried about that themselves. They were worried about if they were going to be good enough.

[31:13]

The other thing, the other way this kind of works in real life, and granted, I'm still kind of figuring this one out, but in the last couple of weeks, I received a diagnosis that I have testicular cancer, which is, if you're going to get any cancer, this is the cancer to get. It's very treatable. 95% of people who get it or more survive and go on to live perfectly happy lives, healthy lives. But still, still, just like all of you facing the challenges of your lives, the uncertainty of your lives, the complexity of your lives, the stress, the ambiguity of everything.

[32:37]

This is just what it is to be a human being, right? So as we are a human being, we are learning to be a human being. And when we can find some stability in our lives, some way to Notice what's happening for ourselves. Notice our response. Notice our feeling. Notice our fear. Notice our anxiety. Then we give ourselves to actually be the full human being that we are.

[33:54]

Not just the reactive human being. But we give ourselves the chance to experience the full capacity of what it is for each one of us to be a human being in the midst of life and death. there's a fascicle by the founder of Soto Zen, Ehe Dogen Zenji, where he talks about all the things that the bodhisattva is supposed to learn. The practices of the bodhisattva.

[35:02]

And at the very end of this, he kind of sums it all up. by saying that essentially what we need to learn, what we need to understand, what we need to see is how to meet each other, how to meet those around us with a gentle face. That's what he says. How to meet others with a gentle face. So simple. But isn't it true?

[36:11]

Isn't it wonderful when somebody meets us with a gentle face? We have to unlearn a lot to meet people with a gentle face. We have to accept a lot to meet each other with a gentle face. And we have to remember our deepest intention as a human being to meet each other with a gentle face. It's not so easy, but I wish you all good luck. And thank you for your gentle faces. I really felt it and appreciated it so much.

[37:12]

For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:39]

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