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 morning, everyone. I hope you can hear me okay. Yeah, good. It's a beautiful... warm day here in Berkeley. I hope you're enjoying the weather in San Francisco. If my voice falters a bit, I notice that I'm having a reaction to the smoke in the air. We drove up to Petaluma yesterday and it was quite alarming how much smoke there was in the air along that, but So forgive me for this condition that perhaps we're all experiencing and many are suffering from.

[01:08]

So this morning, I want to share with you a teaching that I received from my teacher, Sojin Roshi. Hakuryu Sojun, Mel Weissman, his Dharma name is White Dragon, Essence of Purity. He died peacefully at home on January 7th of this year at the age of 91. Later that month, still at the height of the pandemic, I was given the position of Abbott of Berkeley Zen Center. So a couple of things have been unfolding in the months since then. One is that in various places I've been reflecting on teachings that I received from Sojin Roshi.

[02:20]

And This is really in line with what we experienced, and I'm sure many of you experienced as well, his own constant engagement with his teacher, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and Suzuki Roshi's teachings. Suzuki Roshi was alive to Sojin. He wasn't gone. He was... really alive with him. And Sojin Roshi is alive to me and to many of us here in Berkeley and I know many of you in San Francisco. One of the aspects of his life in my own immediate experience is that I have been having frequent dreams about him.

[03:28]

And to be honest with you, sometimes I am really comforted by these dreams, by this unexpected return and his presence. And sometimes... I'm a bit confused or confounded by it. One of the interesting things of these dreams, one of the interesting aspects is that sometimes in these dreams we'll be in the zendo and we'll be doing some form or some ceremony or eating orioki, or even just sitting zazen. And inexplicably, it seems that Sojin has changed this long-established form very suddenly.

[04:44]

And I am flummoxed. Why did he do this? And I recognize, well, why did he do this? And sometimes I think, wait a second, he's not even alive. How did he do this? Or, wait a second, I'm the Abbott Berkeley Sin Center now. But basically, I just have to deal with it. And really, this just seems to be the way all of our lives have been over the last two years. We've had radical changes. One of the things that I remember Sojin saying a few years ago during one of his Saturday talks, he just kind of,

[05:55]

reflected and said, you know, everything is going really well here. And it could just go like that in a minute. And I was, I was, I certainly was responsive to that teaching, but I don't think any of us imagined how quickly and how thoroughly things could change in our daily lives. And we're still sustaining our daily lives. So everything changes constantly. In Togen Zenji's fascicle, Gakudo Yojinshu, which is translated as Guidelines for Practicing the Way, he quotes the great ancestor Nagarjuna, sort of at the beginning of this fascicle.

[07:11]

Nagarjuna says, the mind that sees the impermanence of this world of constant appearance and disappearance is called Bodhi mind, or it's called the mind of enlightenment. So the mind of enlightenment is the mind that really sees the all-pervading nature of impermanence. So that's really my point of departure for today. And this was conveyed to me personally a very long time ago. I think maybe a year or so into my practice in the mid 80s. One morning in Dokusan, Sojin gave me a very sudden teaching.

[08:21]

He just said bluntly, You should let things fall apart. At that point, I was in my mid-30s. I was really unsettled. I had run out of... The way I put it is I had run out of script in my life. But I found a home... in Zen and a home, particularly in Berkeley Zen Center. And having a teacher was a completely new experience. Sojin was disarmingly warm and supportive to me. At the same time, I think about something that my Dharma sister, Daijaku Judas Kintz, the way that she described Sojin is like, a teddy bear with claws.

[09:36]

He had the claws. So, he was warm. And also, His style with his students, there's really a couple of different approaches to Zen teaching that I've seen. Some teachers work by keeping their students in a very small, tight field. They want them to stay close to the temple, close to them, close to home. and really dig in there without looking around. Sojin style, which worked for me, was to give me a very wide space to practice in and to be very encouraging and to watch me.

[10:50]

this is in accord with Suzuki Roshi's advice in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind in the wonderful chapter on control. He says, to give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control them. So it is with people. First, let them do what they want and watch them. This is the best policy. So, I had a wide field, but it's still field, right? There's still, even though there's plenty of room to roam, there still is a fence. And you have to find out what those boundaries are. But that was Sojin's way with me. He didn't, he waited to give me this teaching, let things fall apart. So when I came to Zen, I was really surprised to find that I love the Zen forms and that I had an affinity for them, in fact.

[12:01]

My earlier experience with Judaism as my birth religious tradition suggested otherwise. suggested that I really had a disdain or discomfort with ritual. But it turns out that I loved bowing. I loved oryoki meals. I loved kinyin walking meditation, the intricacies of ceremonies, and the ceremony of zazen itself. I watched my teachers. I watched. very carefully. And I saw that he was very natural. He moved very naturally in the world and was very much in his body. And I can't say that I was.

[13:07]

So, even though I was at home here, I still... had the suffering that was characteristic of my life. I had anxiety. And I think out of a desire for control and to manage that anxiety, I was perfectionistic. I could be judgmental. I could be impatient. And as I learned the various service positions and forms, I could be critical of how other people were doing their jobs. It's actually kind of painful to remember, but that was true.

[14:16]

And I think that on a psychological level... I had this fear that if I didn't fix the situation at hand, if I didn't do it right, I would be somehow spun off into the void. And as I was reflecting earlier on recurring dreams... From childhood, I had a recurring dream that I was clinging to a speeding car or a train or a boat. And as it rounded a curve, I was flung off into space. And usually I woke up. I woke up as I was flung off and I never did land.

[15:25]

But it's that fear of the fear of the void, if you will. So meanwhile, Sojin let me wander about and ruminate and screw up. take responsibility for my own errors. And he just watched patiently. You know, you could, I like this metaphor of Suzuki Roshi's of the cow in a pasture, but I will say that in many ways I felt like a bull in a china shop. Not exactly the same thing, but that's the way it felt. And Sojin sat unmoving. He sat like frog that he talked about often in his teachings, sitting on its pad, watching, not reacting, until a fly comes by and it goes boop.

[16:48]

And it swallows the fly so this is what he did to me he watched and he watched and one day he pounced and he swallowed me whole with this bottomless teaching let things fall apart so This is the nature of reality. Buddha's last words were, Behold, now, bhikkhus, I exhort you, all compounded things are subject to vanish. Practice earnestly. And the contemporary teacher said, many of us have read, Pema Chodron writes, to be fully alive, fully human and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.

[17:57]

To live fully is to be always in no man's land. To experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. And of course, this is a fear that we have. And I think on my part, my fear of letting things fall apart, the urgency of trying to hold things together, was my fear of dying. My fear of not so much the physical inevitability of death, but of somehow disappearing right here and right now.

[19:04]

So to let things fall apart, is, in a sense, to be able to live with hopelessness. Hopelessness, not in some state of desperation, but to live not so much with hope, but with curiosity. To be curious about, even if I'm uncomfortable in this moment, to be curious about what the next moment is. To live in not knowing or openness. And to recognize that the great space of zazen accepts everything.

[20:11]

This again was one of Sojin's key teachings to include everything in your zazen, which of course is one of Suzuki Roshi's teachings. Including everything means including brokenness and wholeness. It means including things that are falling apart. and things that are being born, emerging, and coming together. One aspect of the Buddhist teachings that we're probably familiar with is, succinctly put, he said, I teach about

[21:13]

and the cessation of suffering that is not all that he taught but that is one of the principal points I think about the three marks of existence which you're probably familiar with also fundamental teaching of Buddhism Existence is marked by impermanence, non-self, and suffering. That's the early Buddhist perspective on the three marks of existence. In later Mahayana versions of the three marks,

[22:20]

it sort of turned on its head, at least in some of the texts, not universally, but in some of the texts it says the three markers of existence are impermanence, non-self, and nirvana. So what comes clear to me in this teaching, impermanence, is really letting things fall apart, is recognizing that they are going to fall apart. Their nature is that, and there have no fixed nature that we can point to. And the question of the third mark, whether it's... or suffering or nirvana, to me that's a matter of perspective.

[23:26]

If you think that impermanence and non-self are a bad idea, then you're going to suffer. If you think that impermanence and non-self are... the way things are, and if we, I, can find a way to accept it, then I can be free. And that's nirvana. This is what Sojin was trying to tell me. That as long as I try to hold these things together with this incredible energy, I was going to suffer. And if I could allow things to fall apart, which they were going to do anyway, then I could be free.

[24:35]

So a few of us are in the process of editing a book of Sojin's lectures for publication. It's lectures and it has a kind of vignettes, autobiographical or memoir vignettes of key points in his life. I think it would be particularly interesting to many of you because a lot of it is really focusing on his early experience of San Francisco Zen Center with Suzuki Roshi and practicing there. before he came to Berkeley, but also after because he was cohabited at Zen Center for nine years. At any rate, one of the things that we're seeing as we review the lectures is how often he spoke about engaging with the adversity of life.

[25:43]

And we found this little collection of adages that someone had put together and given him from his lectures. I'll read you a few of them. Very short. Your difficulties aren't obstacles to practice. Your difficulties are your practice. The more adversity you meet, the brighter you glow if you stay with it. Another one. To know that this is hell and I've created it, this is enlightenment. Third one.

[26:50]

says each one of us has a problem that will never go away. The main thing is compassion. Response from a deep place. And the last one is, we are the end product of the entire human race. I'm sorry to say. So this is some sense of his spirit. I really think that what Sojin was telling me was that if I can find a way to let go, to let things fall apart, I may catch a glimpse of what

[27:53]

happening or what's coming next and this is what I can say is it actually worked that I took these words to heart and some degree of anxiety dropped away from me. And I think there's another side as well to what Sojin was saying, and this is really important. In urging me to let things fall apart, he was indirectly

[28:54]

saying, don't blame others for what's going on in your experience. Pay attention to your own practice. And don't look at the faults of the world as external. This is a really difficult It's not to say there isn't an external. But until we really wrestle with this reaction we have of blaming, we will not be at peace. I'm talking about us as individuals. I'm talking about us as communities, nations, and so forth.

[29:57]

There's an ancestor in the Tibetan tradition, Atisha, who created his mind training verses that you might know of. And the twelfth of those mind training verses says, drive all blames into one. This doesn't mean... not seeing what's going on around us. But the challenge is that instead of trying to fix all the externals, or instead of placing the blame on others, driving all blames into one means to take full responsibility for what is happening, work diligently on ourselves and recognize that that will have an effect on the world around us.

[31:14]

It also, if we're doing this work, we develop our capacity for engaging with the world around us. So as I said earlier, We recognize that the mind that sees into the nature of impermanence is the mind of enlightenment. This is Buddha's way. This is fundamental Buddhism. This is Suzuki Roji's way. It's Sojin's way. Because we work on our own character and our actions that that influences the world. Blaming others just brings blame and separation into the world. Embracing impermanence influences the world for good.

[32:21]

Sojan wrote, sometimes we feel we have no effect on the world. But really, it's impossible not to have an effect. Suzuki Roshi also gives us another way of looking at this entire process. This is also in Zen My Beginner's Mind. He says, everything exists in the realm of Buddha nature, losing its balance against the background of perfect harmony. So if you see things without realizing the background of Buddha nature, everything appears to be in the form of suffering. So that's really in line with what I was saying about your attitude towards, one's attitude towards impermanence and non-self is

[33:26]

is the determinant of whether one is suffering or one is free. If you see things without realizing the background of Buddha nature, everything appears to be in the form of suffering. But if you understand the background of existence, you realize that suffering, this is again, you realize that suffering itself is how we live and how we extend our life. So in Zen, sometimes we emphasize the imbalance or disorder of life. So I would say still, the conundrum in this teaching, this Sojin's teaching to me of letting things fall apart is not an absolute teaching. There are no absolute teachings. It was looking at things from one angle in order to say something that was helpful to me.

[34:33]

And it was. But it didn't remove the question of when do I let things fall apart? And when might I work as hard as I'm capable? to ensure the well-being and survival of myself and others? When do I work that way in order to create a space for something new to arise? The danger of holding as a principle this idea of letting things fall apart is that it can really easily lean towards resignation and laziness.

[35:36]

And that's really not what Sojan had in mind. Trying to hold on to the present moment is impossible. And there's no instruction book, no cosmic directions for, you know, what's the dynamic between letting go and holding on? The teaching that Sojourn gave me to let things fall apart was medicine. All of the Dharma is medicine. It's designed to reestablish a balance, a balance in oneself, a balance in the universe.

[36:44]

And it's true that Sochin might very well say the opposite thing. to another person in a different circumstance. I think about a line, a very famous line of poetry that I'm sure I imagine many of you have heard. It's from a poem called The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats. that was written right after the end of World War I and really in the middle of the last vast pandemic that swept our planet. So the line is relevant to the talk.

[37:48]

It says, things fall apart. The center cannot hold. So in our practice, we always have choices. In our zazen, we have the choice to return to our breath and posture or do I want to think about lunch a little further or what's going to happen or what was hurtful to me last night. We always have these choices. Yeats' verse, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, is... It's a line of despair in the context of a whole poem of despair. But I think that our practice can turn it in another direction.

[38:56]

The center cannot hold... Because there is no center. There's no permanence. There's only causes and conditions and elements that come together and they fall apart and they recombine and so on. Our lives and the reality that we live... are in many ways like a stalk of bamboo. You peel away the fibers, you strip away, and then you find at the center, it's empty. And that's fine. Because in that structure, you have a plant of incredible strength and flexibility. So I think of, to close, I think looking at the responsibility we have to ourselves and to the world.

[40:16]

I think of another line from Suzuki Roshi. He says, the most important thing is to accept yourself and stand on your own two feet. I would say it's also really important to recognize that we don't stand on our own two feet solely by our own strength. Everything that has been given to us in our existence is part of what allows us to stand on our own two feet. And so when we stand on our own two feet, we are grateful. We suffer gratitude. And this is where I try to live. Simply to let go and be myself.

[41:25]

See what's being given to me moment by moment. To allow myself to fall apart and come together and come together and fall apart. 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.

[42:12]

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