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. This is a particularly rich and deep time of practice. This particular day, is the confluence of two rather significant anniversaries for me. One is that it's my 31st year of recovery today. And the second is that it's my fifth year anniversary since I received Dharma transmission from my teacher, Darlene Cohen. So it's kind of nice to have all three of these things converging here tonight. And... I'm mindful of that it's happening against the seasonal backdrop of the winter solstice approaching and that we're nearing the shortest day, the longest night of the year.

[01:07]

And for me, for many years, it was just a very, very dark time. And then to have some events like recovery anniversaries, abdominal transmission, interjected into this dark time, started me to personally experience the simultaneous inclusion of light and dark, just as dark informs light as well. And another anniversary that is up tonight that kind of fits into this... loose theme that's going on in my mind that I may or may not be able to communicate to you, is that tonight is the second week anniversary of the death of my mother. And it is a rather pivotal and prominent date and time in what has been a very long personal angle of being with my mother.

[02:15]

when she was actively dying. And it is not certainly the conclusion of this personal thought. During this period, particularly the last three or so months, maybe it started when my friend David and I were reading Dogen and Shoji in particular. But I started to really dive into Dogen's classical on birth and death. And I've also been swimming in the waters of the Lank of the Tara Sutra as well. And so those are kind of the framework in my head, loosely, for the things that I've been inquiring into and what have been framing my own personal practice. So... certainly not the only person who has experienced the up-close and personal, the death of somebody that we love.

[03:22]

And it was very, very deep practice, but it was also what was so persistently kept appearing, despite my good intentions, was the presence of fixed ideas and duality. And those ideas for the last six months in particular have had me kind of bouncing off of the hallway of practice, if you will, everything from, oh my God, I love this woman so dearly. I can't imagine life without this beloved companion and long-time friend. And many, many other dualistic ideas like Oh, my God, what will this do? This is so painful for her, and it's so painful for me. And, oh, my God, I have to listen to that story one more time. Even when you're on Dad's doorstep, you can be frustrated by your parents' repeated storytelling.

[04:30]

And some very, very deep physical practice for those of us that have been close to death and the body. it does what the body does when it's actively dying. So everything that's included in that territory as well. And I would notice this constant, you know, riding this constant wheel of all of these ideas of dualism and duality. And then, two weeks ago, when I sat by her bedside with my sister and my niece for about 12 hours. In fact, we'll be coming up here during this time. Our time together will actually mark to the minute, the two-week anniversary of her death. Being with her in that space and all of the... emotions that arise. And there's nothing wrong with this.

[05:33]

By the way, I'm not criticizing myself in any way, nor am I presenting that someone should act in any particular way in the face of death. But what I was struck by as I saw my heart, mind, and body cycle through idea after idea after idea several times, and as I stood there, and sat there at my mother's bedside as she was having her last breaths. Just how much, how difficult it is to get beyond duality. You know, and from a practice perspective, this is what we want to try and do. We want to get beyond the confines, the constraints, the experiment, the entrapment, of being stuck in fixed ideas. But what is the biggest fixed idea that we usually go toe-to-toe with?

[06:35]

I think it really does have to do with birth and death and with our own potential annihilation or continuation. It manifests in tons of other ways, constantly, throughout our days. You know, duality. I like you. I don't like you. You're good. You're bad. I like black. I ain't white. I like vanilla. I hate chakra, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We're just constantly doing this. We're taking our lives, which are a perfectly beautiful whole piece of cloth, and cutting it up into all of the dualistic ideas that we have. And there's very good reason why we do this. It's hard to be a human. Maybe it's just me. Hard to be a human. wonder often if this notion of, or this inclination, this propensity toward fixed ideas is, you know, kind of genetically embedded in our DNA, fight to flight, you know, from the very beginning.

[07:40]

Certainly our world at large today is very deeply vested in dualistic thinking, right, wrong, my way or the highway sort of thinking. And our immediate culture and society, especially, well, everywhere, but I notice it as a person who practices in the marketplace, you know, just automatically the way, the many ways in which duality is set up, pitting one employee against another, you know, one company against another, your performance appraisal is based upon whether you've done a good job or a bad job. It's very, very hard to get away from dualistic thinking, right? So it's a big, big effort for us to try and enter into that primary invitation of practice, which is to go beyond dualistic thinking, to let go of fixed ideas and notions. And so this is one of the reasons why having a regular seated meditation practice is so important.

[08:52]

because it allows us the chance, puts ourselves in the way of the potential opportunity of actually starting to touch something and experience it in a way that our whole being can experience that is beyond dualism. You know, this is one of the very profound reasons why I love Dogen. I'm kind of assuming that everybody here is nose-joking. Yes, okay. You know, he spends so much time trying to show us what this space is all about, about going beyond dualism. And it is so difficult and so challenging to describe that which is fundamentally beyond description, that whole territory of the ineffable, where we actually get a moment of release and get out of that black and white, yes, no, off on sort of thinking.

[09:59]

And he's so generous and so persistent in trying to be that finger pointing at the moon to help us. You know, you've got to love a practice like Zen, which fundamentally is about something so simple as sitting and trying to get it beyond dualistic thinking and being quiet, and yet has libraries and libraries full of books trying to explain the experience. So... I noticed as I was... in addition to these ideas that I was having that were more, you know, kind of very typical. I know many of you can identify with the ideas that I was articulating about my practice with my mother. I had two things that were rather profound during her last maybe 15 minutes of life that also took me, again, deeply into this territory of how to get beyond duality.

[11:07]

The first was that I was sitting there, and as I started to know that her death was approaching very, very soon, I started chanting. And this is not a bad thing to do. This is a very good thing to do. I've been at many bedsides of Zen Buddhist practitioners where we've chanted. And it's very, very helpful to center I felt it helpful to center me. I felt it was very helpful in terms of kind of focusing and directing my intention, which was to hope that my mother had an easy transition. But at a certain moment during my chanting, I thought to myself, stop the chanting. The chant is happening. right in front of you.

[12:11]

Watch your mother's brain. That's the teaching. And so I let go of this idea of form, that this would be a good thing to do. And it was a good thing to do. But I sunk into my direct experience of watching this beautiful sutra of my mother in the last ten, eight, five, 3, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1. I was struck by that, and I bring it up because I think that's such a strong tendency we have when we are faced with something that seems so profoundly dualistic to move into some form of action as opposed to being with. What is actually happening?

[13:13]

The second thing that happened was, you know, after that last breath, it's like, what gives? What has just transpired here? Something incredibly, incredibly profound that I can, again, not articulate. My mother was alive. Now she's dead. But wait a second, she feels very much to me like she did when she was alive. I felt her death coming before she died. Not so easy to draw a straight, bold line in the sand of any of our experiences, especially life and death, and say, this is one thing, this is another thing. The koan where the student says to the teacher, knocking on the coffin, They're out making a call to somebody whose family member has just died. Knocks on the coffin. Dead or alive?

[14:13]

The student says, dead or alive? And the master says, don't know. Won't say. And I felt that when I'm looking at my mother. And even in the two weeks, the short two weeks since she has died, what was death? two weeks ago, and her death is a different her death in this very moment. So, Dogen invites us to go beyond this. And for those of you who I'm sure are familiar with this, I'm just going to read a couple of the paragraphs of this classical. But I think, you know, I certainly feel in this one, very, very deeply, both Uji, time being, as well as the Genja Koan. Because a Buddha is in birth and death, there is no birth and death.

[15:19]

It is also said because a Buddha is not in birth and death, a Buddha is not deluded by birth and death. Just understand that birth and death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided. There is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free from birth and death. It is a mistake to suppose that birth turns into death. Birth is a phase that is an entire period in itself, with its own past and future. For this reason, in Buddha Dharma, birth is understood as no good. Death is a phase that is an entire period of itself, with its own past and future. For this reason, death is understood as no death. In birth there is nothing but birth, and in death there is nothing but death.

[16:19]

Accordingly, when birth comes, face and actualize birth. And when death comes, face and actualize birth. Do not avoid or desire death. So this is where, for me, some of the teachings of the Lanka, the Tara Sutra come in, which is a sutra about mind only. People are familiar with the Lanka Sutra. And there are three things in particular that I thought related to this that struck me during this time of my own practice. And this is from Red Pine's book on the sutra. where the Buddha is answering Mahamati's questions. Moreover, in Mahamati, once Bodhisattvas had firmly established themselves in the attributes of wisdom, they should devote themselves to the cultivation of three aspects of the highest Buddha knowledge.

[17:24]

And to which three aspects of Buddha knowledge should they devote themselves? They are, the three aspects are, freedom from projection, the power of the vows made by all Buddhas, and the personal realization of the ultimate knowledge of Buddhas. So this freedom from projection is just this insistent, and sometimes insidious, inclination that our entire beings have to kind of project something onto our experience. This is good, this is bad. I should chant here, I should stop chanting here. I like vanilla, I hate chakra. This is going on constantly, constantly, constantly. This tremendous propensity of ours to take something which is perfectly whole and cut it up into ways that somehow make us feel better. So to be aware and to try and get freedom from projection.

[18:25]

The second is the power of the vow made by all Buddhists. And I'll come back to that in a second. And the third is the personal realization of the ultimate knowledge, which is basically having our own direct experience, somehow being free of our own myriad, constant delusions and tendencies that rob us of the opportunity to directly not only connect with, but to directly be our life. I think that to live this way requires quite a lot. I'm looking forward to being able to live this way. To be this supple, this fluid, this engaged and aware of all the moments of our lives, our own karmic tendencies, is quite a challenge. In dualism, there is undoubtedly

[19:29]

a tremendous comfort zone that it offers us. You meet somebody that you have a funny feeling about, you immediately can say, I don't like that. Or I like them, they're great. They're better than I am. They're worse than I am. We constantly look to find ways to take them to give ourselves some ground amid an existence that is fundamentally groundless. So, of course, we go to do all this. And the basic backdrop, in fact, that's not even correct to say the backdrop, the very context, the container of our life and of our experience is not only the simultaneous inclusion of the phenomenal and the absolute, but it is happening in an extraordinarily dynamic way. What we experience in our lives is multifaceted in every moment, multidimensional, multitemporal.

[20:40]

Just think about a single moment of sitting zaza and how much goes on with just yourself and the cushion, right? And fortunately then we have the stability of our cushion and we have the support of a sangha. But this is happening to us wherever we place our foot as we live our lives. It is very, very dynamic. And I think that dualism is one of the ways that we first reach for, one of the things we first reach for, to help us alleviate some of this discomfort of how dynamic and impermanent this world is. this type of dualism and getting beyond dualism, I think is the second of these three things that Buddha says that we should devote ourselves to in terms of highest Buddhist knowledge.

[21:43]

And that is the power of Tao made by all Buddhas. When my teacher was dying a number of years ago, Her last practice period was about the precepts. And one of the metaphors that she gave all of her students, which stays very much alive in me and which I borrow heavily, is that she said that Val is our staff. It's a staff that we can hold on to under all circumstances and all conditions. So as we go reeling about our lives in this incredible stew of emptiness and the simultaneous inclusion of the phenomenal and the absolute, of the incredible pace at which impermanence happens, rather than clutching for our ideas that are alive, we just hold on to that staff.

[22:52]

And that staff, whether we place it in bucolic, you know, bubbling brook type of waters and raging oceans, flooding rivers. That stat is something we can always hold on to. The Buddha goes on with it, Brother Dogen goes on with this Thassa ultima and actually talks about this in the last paragraph. And he says, there is a simple way to become a Buddha, to go beyond dualism. There's a simple way to become a Buddha when you refrain from unwholesome actions and are not attached to birth and death and are compassionate toward all sentient beings, respectful to seniors, I especially like that one these days, and kind to juniors, which I try to do, not excluding or desiring anything, with no designing thoughts or worries,

[23:54]

you will be called the Buddha. Do not seek anything else. So this is fundamentally a description of vow. Refraining from unwholesome action, you know, there are two mechanisms in terms of kind of the technology, if you will, of vow. One is the restraint of unwholesomeness, and the other one is the active cultivation of wholesomeness. So refrain from unwholesome actions, be compassionate toward the sentient beings, respectful to seniors, kind to juniors, etc. Restraining and cultivating. This is how he ends his last pen on birth and death. That, that's death, we can all rely on. He goes on to, he says earlier, which I love. This is probably one of my favorite paragraphs of Dogen.

[24:58]

And he says, However, do not analyze or speak about it. He's talking about going beyond notions of birth and death. Do not analyze or speak about it. Just set aside your body and mind and forget them and throw them into the house of Buddha. Then all is done by Buddha. When you follow this, you are free from birth and death and become a Buddha without effort or calculation. Who then continues? However, do not analyze or speak about it. Just set aside your body and mind, forget about them, and throw them into the house of Buddha. Then all is done by Buddha. So when we make this vow, and it is, you know, vow is a very complicated thing, but perhaps it can be broken down into two compound parts, which are we make a vow to pay attention, to wake up, see what's going on in life, things just as they are.

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Coupled with our intention to refrain, For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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