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. Good evening. So, I really like this whole setup. It's sort of, you know... dark and intimate and so on and so forth. It's pretty great, actually. So, you know, feel free to, you know, move forward and get as close as possible, even though we got the sound and everything. But the... Excellent. So I... Normally I wouldn't be sitting in a chair... but I had surgery on Monday, and I'm feeling a little, still feeling a little whacked out.

[01:07]

So first of all, if I just totally lose it in the middle of this, that's why. And the next thing is, I figured I'd talk about a con that I can, you know, I can completely relate to right now. So they say that... Yuen Menelens was speaking to the assembly, and he said, medicine and disease subdue each other. And then he said, the whole earth is medicine. What's your self? So medicine and disease subdue each other, and the whole earth is medicine. So often in a lot of different spiritual traditions, but certainly in the Zen tradition, there's a lot of use of the following thought experiment.

[02:14]

Imagine if you all of a sudden discovered that you were going to die really soon. People say that. And it shows up in a whole bunch of different contexts. There's a exercise that we do for EPP, the Stopishing the Path of Practice program, where we kind of kick off from a Mary Oliver poem and write down all the things that we discovered we were going to die. We might want to have people say about us after we were dead, right? And all the things that we wouldn't want them to say, right? So there's that. You know, so on and so forth. And it's a pretty good exercise. I mean, clearly the function of this exercise is to bring up the following. There's sort of a subtext, which is if I was forced somehow to pay attention to and really concentrate on the most important things that I needed to take care of in my life, what would they be?

[03:24]

And as that kind of exercise, it's pretty good. It also has this funny kind of not-so-great effect as well, right? So the funny thing about death is that it's so final, right? And if you're really thinking about it... and you're taking that proposition seriously, it starts to have your rumination about it kind of starts to have a kind of valedictory flavor. Like, well, I've got to go through my bucket list and check off all the items on my bucket list, and I also, you know, have to be nice to people and stuff like that, right? So it can kind of get... It can bring on your inner valedictorian and it can be speaking to you, standing presumably on your right shoulder while you're doing the exercise. So I wanted to propose a slightly different exercise, which is what if you went to the doctor, you're feeling really terrible, and you went to the doctor and

[04:42]

the doctor looked you over and said, well, you know, once you got it, it ain't gonna kill you, but you're gonna be with it for the entire rest of your life, or it's gonna be with you for the entire rest of your life, right? That happens, right? And it isn't just disease or injury that causes that. I mean, people... People injure themselves and end up with chronic pain. People get diseases. I'll talk about one a little bit later. It has been pretty inspirational that caused them quite horrendous pain and difficulty for the entire rest of their lives, even if they live until they're, you know, 92 or something like that. And then there's other sort of more complicated versions of it. What if you went to a doctor and they said, you know, here's the problem.

[05:48]

You're an alcoholic and the condition you've got is going to worsen and slowly ruin your life and it's essentially incurable. You can do stuff about it, but it's incurable. What a thing to live with, right? It completely takes away the valedictory aspect of the exercise. There isn't any, oh man, I just got to check things off my bucket list, right? You're really in the middle of it and you're in the middle of it for essentially the entire rest of your life, right? So I have an interest in this particular area of exploration for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that I'm starting up a clinical trial.

[06:54]

I'm going to be part of a clinical trial at the Tom Waddell Clinic in the Tenderloin starting in February. We're going to do... we're going to try out alternative and integrated pain management practice for their patients. I don't know how many of you are familiar with Tom Waddell, but it's a big sort of aggregation of San Francisco clinics that deal with a lot with the homeless population and the Tenderloin and Virens, and they put a lot of focus on housing, so they've housed it. bunch of people, and they also offer clinical services, right? And a lot of their patients are dealing with really severe difficulties. I've been teaching meditation there for the last five years, approximately, yeah, about five years.

[07:55]

And a couple of years before that, I was, a few years before that, I was chuseau here, and I would ride down Market Street at 3.30 in the morning on my bicycle on the way over here to get into my robes and wake up the monks and go have tea with the abbot and start my day and so on. It was pretty exciting. And there used to be a donut shop right at the sort of east end of, right across the street, right on the east end of the UN Plaza. And the neighborhood was so bad that the guy would only ever open the window high enough to admit a single small cup of coffee and a kind of low profile donut, right? That was about as much as you could get through the window, right? It was a little tiny narrow window and you'd get there and you'd go, you know, I'll have a small coffee and a glazed donut and

[09:01]

that you wouldn't hear anything else. And then a little while later, or you'd put your money, and a little while later, he would push the small coffee and the glaze down and out. And so I would sit there on Market Street at, you know, quarter four in the morning and eat my donut and drink my coffee. And there was a guy there, he was kind of a UN Plaza regular, and he didn't have any legs at all. or from below the knee, and he would kind of lever himself around, and at night he'd kind of jack himself up into a bus shelter and go to sleep, right? And I saw him a lot. I saw him, not every time, but many of the times that I would take this trip, and I took this trip every morning, well, every six days a week for months, right? So I saw a lot of him. And I always had this kind of feeling of disjunction, like, what can I possibly know about the world that that person is living in, and how can I even grapple with that, right?

[10:17]

So years later, after I had been so, and after various things had happened, I was contacted to start working at this clinic, right? And I was all excited about it and we got everything set up and figured out how it was going to work and all that sort of thing. And we were holding the sessions in a residential hotel. So I went in, I checked into the desk upstairs, found the room and set up a coffee pot because you've got to offer people coffee. And then the clinical director came over with all the patients that were going to be in the meditation program. And the first person to the door was this guy, same guy, right? And so over the course of the next few years, I got a chance to get to know him pretty well, actually. And all of a sudden, you know, his world in some ways kind of merged with mine. So I have a, you know, it was really an amazing experience, right?

[11:20]

Here's a guy who was, you know, strong and kind of... beautiful and fast and totally ran himself down until he's in some ways physically the most physically compromised person I've ever met in my life. And at the same time, he's a marvel. He's really smart and really funny and kind of quick in all these different ways. Really a marvelous person, right? But the thing that aches the most for him is something about, you know, I think we all do this, not everyone. There are some people for whom this isn't a luxury, or this would be a luxury, but for most of us, I think, we grow up and we imagine ourselves as well, right? We have a kind of normal state, and that normal state is kind of well, healthy.

[12:25]

And often that well is pretty good, right? I mean, the human body is a remarkable thing. It can do amazing things without anybody having to think about it. And it's this marvelous, self-sustaining, and quite beautiful entity, right? And We surround ourselves with this body and imagine ourselves in the midst of it and our state of wellness, and we think, yeah, this is the way it's supposed to be, right? This is how, and you know, I kind of deserve this, right? And so here was this guy, had that, he grew up that way, and then all of a sudden here he is in this state. He'll never be that way ever again.

[13:26]

amazing. And it's very hard, right? And even for people who aren't, who aren't, don't ever get as sick as he did, right? You just, let's say you only get a cold, right? Our way of dealing with getting ill normally is until something really bad happens, is we think of it as temporary, and we either struggle with it and find it really frustrating, or we try and ignore it, which can also be really frustrating, and we kind of zone out. And a lot of people that get the sort of run-of-the-mill illnesses basically zone out. So... sit on the couch and binge watch bad TV and eat anything that comes to mind until the thing sort of starts to settle down, right?

[14:27]

That doesn't work all that well. And it especially doesn't work if you've ever, if anyone who's ever sat a Zen retreat with a bad cold, right? You realize just how badly it doesn't work, right? So you're sitting there from, well, let's see, the one I was just at, from a little after four in the morning until nine at night. And if you over-breathe or under-breathe even just a little bit, you have an uncontrolled coughing fit. So your entire... you know, focus of attention is the space between your sinuses and the top of your throat or something like that, and you're kind of sitting there paying, not to get too graphic, but kind of intimate attention to the creep of mucus inside. It's so intense, right? And it just does not work to zone out

[15:35]

Or you could conceivably zone out, but it's very difficult to do during a long retreat. And when you do, you usually end up either getting sleepy or sitting in a position that hurts you or something like that. Or you can struggle, which is what a lot of people do. Or you can really just pay attention. And if you pay attention, something different happens, right? All of a sudden, it's not a problem. It's just... It's just the activity of zazen focused through the filter of, I have a cold right now. It's different. Something shifts about it. And that's a hint about what's possible. So... As I've been ramping up to go teach this integrated pain clinical trial, somebody suggested a book, right?

[16:44]

And the book is by the late Darlene Cohen. I don't know if anybody here knew of her, but she was a kind of early participant and monk at Tassajara in San Francisco Zen Center. And there's this kind of, you know, beautiful, vivacious woman. By the time this happened, she had a family with a young child. Really just kind of great, right? And really funny and kind of, I don't know, in your face or something. And then all of a sudden she got sick and went to the doctor. She was in excruciating pain, and the doctor said, you've got rheumatoid arthritis. Nobody knows what causes rheumatoid arthritis, actually, as far as I can tell from the little amount of research that I've done. But basically, what it does is it causes your immune system to attack your joints.

[17:50]

And it's painful and disfiguring, and it has a... it has a kind of peak in your life, but it never really goes away. And she suffered from that moment until the day she died. And you'd meet her, and here was this person who was joyful and funny and had this kind of wild mind and active and so on and so forth. And so, you know, the... the question that immediately comes to mind is, well, how did that happen, right? So I bought her book. And it's, you know, not surprisingly, since it's a Zen book, it's pretty short and it has a really simple prescription. And the prescription is basically this, right? Stop trying to make yourself well, right?

[18:51]

And live your life as... completely as you can, right? And she does a great example in it. She says, well, you know, if you're sitting there and you're thinking about the contact of your feet with the floor and the breath moving in and out of your nostrils, the feel at the back of your spine as you lift your head towards the ceiling, the kind of position of your left hand in your lap, the breath going in, the breath coming out. If you're thinking about that many things, compared to the amount of pain that you can experience when you're really not feeling good, it's not enough. You're not living enough with just that. Her prescription was really dig in and feel your entire life.

[19:53]

Don't stint on it. meet everything as though it was the morning of the world. And it worked for her. It was marvelous. She was never comfortable, but she managed to find creative solutions to her discomfort that are a joy to read about and lived a life with which she was completely happy in spite of the incredible difficulty that she went through every single day just to do things like walk to the kitchen and get herself a cup of coffee. That sort of thing, right? Remarkable. So... That's the prescription, right? And the funny thing is...

[20:55]

that there's nothing new about it. It's the same prescription as you hear whenever you sit and someone talks about how to sit Sazen, right? Give up on anything that you thought you had to do and live this moment while you're sitting here. Live your life completely. That's all there is. Does anybody have any questions up until this point? I'm just going to shift gears a little bit after this. Does anyone have any questions or comments or anything like that before we move on? Go ahead. Well, he's housed and kind of taken care of.

[22:00]

He came to sitting for a long time, but he has a lot to carry around. He kind of fell off after a while, and among other things, he has utterly uncontrolled diabetes. So he had a... where he was hospitalized and in a kind of, you know, painful delirium. And I went to see him then, and that was one of the last few times I saw him. He's still having trouble, but he's, you know, he's not sleeping in bus shelters, and he's not dead on the street. And still, you know, kind of marvelous person, right? And you get right down to it. Anyone else?

[23:02]

It does happen. Yeah, absolutely. You could go, I'm going to do all of the unspeakable things that I didn't have the guts to do when I was young and should have done them in the first place. Yeah, absolutely. Of course that could happen. I was... talking about the hopeful side of the exercise, but yes, absolutely, of course, that could happen. In some ways, that's a kind of inverse valedictorian, you know, like, you ever go to a college graduation? Probably, right? So I, at my college graduation, We had a valedictorian, and we also had a guy who was the heir to the Dixie Cup fortune who got up on stage dressed in cutoffs and not much else and improvised music.

[24:43]

a song about how capitalism is a lie and all the promises are empty and played it really loud on the piano and then tried to get everybody into a chorus where they'd sing some chorus from the Beatles, like, or something. He tried to keep it going for like 15, 20 minutes, and all the people that were trying to run the graduation were running around going, Stop! So that's kind of inverse valedictorianism, right? People do that, too, when they come right down to it, right? But... Yeah. So that's a good segue into the next part of this, right? The koan itself, you know? Yin men is speaking metaphorically in some ways, but... He's saying, metaphorically speaking, everyone's ill in exactly this way.

[25:50]

We have this illness that you could call the human condition. And in the metaphorical language of Tang Dynasty Zen, it's often referred to as a disease and practice is referred to as medicine. And there's a lot of talk about dispensing medicine in accordance with the disease and so on. So that's what he's saying. He's saying everyone is afflicted with humanness, with their humanity. And let's be clear in case you think he's being negative. Being human is great, and nobody knew it better than Yen Man. Yen Man was a poet, Zen master, really kind of marvelous guy. He could say things that would meet... Someone would ask him a question and he'd meet them directly just in terms of what they were saying.

[27:03]

He would also simultaneously roll everything up and... and astonished the world, right? Remarkable guy. So he doesn't have a beef with humanity per se, but he's saying there's something problematic about the human condition that you could think of as kind of an affliction, right? It's funny, I was thinking about this when I was preparing for this talk. In some ways, it's not dissimilar to the whole notion of original sin in Christianity. The terms are different, but it's intended to be some kind of explanation of why people are so messed up, why we suffer so extravagantly, cause each other to suffer so extravagantly.

[28:06]

make messes of things, elect governments that can't govern, etc., etc., all this stuff, right? Why is that? It's because we're human, right? That's really why. There's no other reason. It's the human condition, right? And in the Buddhist tradition, the... the roots of the problems in the human condition are the kind of grasping an aversion that arises out of the construction, reification, and clinging to a separate self. That's what the Buddha said, more or less. And you can sort of see how that works, right? You... in order to be human, in order to do the things that humans do, use language, do long-range planning, et cetera, et cetera, you kind of have to do this thing of building yourself a self, right?

[29:12]

You have to cobble it together starting when you're, you know, one, and usually by the time you're in your... early double digits, it's pretty well established. And then it continues to plague you for the entire rest of your life. And also to be an invaluable asset. We couldn't live without it, right? So let's be gentle with the separate self. But nonetheless, there it is. It causes us all sorts of difficulty. It's the entity to which we attach ourselves our agendas and put them in motion by feeling strongly about them. And when those agendas collide with the agendas of other beings in the same space, it's the entity that engages in conflict, right? And what's worse, we've managed this trick of

[30:17]

of groups of people forming a cultural self, a kind of aggregate self, where all the entities in the cultural self have some loose agreement about what's important, what we ought to be doing, what we ought not to be doing, and so on. And then you get a bunch of those groups together and have them fight it out, and you've got some real trouble. So there it is, the human condition, the disease that we're talking about. So how to fix it, right? That's the whole question of Buddhism from the very beginning. In Buddha's first sermon, he says, life is suffering. It arises in this way. There's clearly a way out of it. And he said, the way out of it is the Eightfold Path, right? Yeah, that's good.

[31:18]

So you essentially wise up, learn about what's really going on, note the way in which you suffer, note the way in which other people suffer and the way the interactions cause suffering. And then there's a couple of elements of the Eightfold Path that have to do with adjusting your life so that it supports more kind of wising up. So you're not... your entire day is not one long moral conflict or you're not too tired to even think about the problem or et cetera, right? And then he says, you know, meditate. So that's good. But if we were to really boil it down and go back to, you know, Darlene's book and the question of sickness, what would her prescription be? I mean, the first thing would be stop thinking of yourself as curable, right?

[32:25]

You're not going to become not human, right? And you could conceivably make yourself not human, but it would be a terrible, terrible mistake, right? And would probably involve such, you know, doing such shocking violence to yourself that it's not worth even considering, right? So, and then the other part of the prescription is live your life completely. never think oh if only I didn't have a cold I would be able to sit this retreat you know perfectly right no that's not how it is right never think oh if only I had a different job I would be able to live you know I would be able to really live fully right Maybe you need another job, but it has nothing to do with living fully.

[33:26]

It's the act of living your life completely and waking up in this moment has nothing to do with standing, walking, sitting, lying down, working, playing, dancing on a knoll above San Francisco, any of that stuff. It's just... a single request all the live long day. You meet the current moment. You open to it and take it in as completely as possible. You acknowledge what's happening and then act, take one step out of the kind of wisdom and mutual information that arises from that encounter and then you move on. That's how it works. Just that request only, just to live that request over and over again and be in the midst of your life, whatever it is, whatever version of the human condition you have, and there are a lot of different versions.

[34:46]

Every individual has a different version, right? But they have this common flavor of and the request of meeting all of them is the same. Dogen, the founder of Japanese Soto Zen said, there is in many minds as there are persons, but they all negotiate the way, they all wake up doing the same thing, right? He said in Zazen, and this is essentially the activity that sitting zazen embodies and that the request of practice is to bring that activity into your life all the live long day from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. So given that,

[35:49]

Yunman says, well, medicine and disease subdue each other, right? So what's the medicine and what's the disease in this picture, right? So if you say that the disease is circumstantial, you're already lost, right? If you say that it's this condition that we're talking about where our self-construct causes complications in our engagement of the world, then what he's saying is the antidote is just to meet the world. What Dogen says is on the... when the 10,000 things come forward and confirm themselves, that's how we wake up, right?

[36:54]

And when that happens, then awakening goes on forever, right, basically. And then he says, what's yourself, right? So any, let's see, what time is it? Cool. Any... theories about what yourself is in that context? Go ahead. That's completely right.

[38:09]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. In the case of the disease of the human condition, that's exactly correct. So if we give up on trying to become, trying to relieve ourselves of the burden of being human, then amazingly, Amazingly, we become ourselves, right? And we have the opportunity to live a life that's awake and alive, right? Which is great. Anyone else? Exactly.

[39:19]

No, that's right. So we were talking a little bit about the whole notion of original sin earlier and so on. When you cast human characteristics as these kind of... Well, to just recognize them is fine. To cast them as must-not-dos, right? immediately sets up a conflict that's unresolvable because, again, like we're saying, you're not going to become not human. It's not going to happen. And so the trick of living to living comfortably and skillfully with the human condition has to be something else other than that. And as you say, with all of the things that, you know, avarice... lust, etc., etc., all those things.

[40:20]

The methodology for living comfortably and skillfully with those is to treat them like they are. You are... you are a manifestation of the world and of the life force in the world rising up out of the ground in this moment, right? And you're the way you are because that's the way you were made, right? And to meet that in exactly this way, to acknowledge it, both the inner circumstances and the outer circumstances to the extent there is inner and outer, and act skillfully is, you know, that's practice. That's Zaza, right? So anyway. Well, it was really, really great.

[41:21]

You guys could come. I'm happy to be here. Go ahead. Yeah. at least to think. Right, right. Well, here's what I'd say about that.

[42:46]

So there's quieting the mind until it's not thinking anymore, which requires a really thoroughgoing and constant and subtle effort. And there's just kind of letting it rip and not making any effort at all. And when I... talk about zoning out. I'm talking about the latter, not the former. To calm your mind is great. It's very hard to do, and actually, really, we can't calm our own mind by effort. It has to, in some ways, calm itself down. You just have to kind of work with it and wait it out, and eventually it settles down. But that's wonderful, and it's possible to get to a place where the linguistic categories, dead and alive and so on, are substantially less significant.

[43:49]

And at that point, the emotional attachment to those categories kind of loosens up a little bit, and it's okay, right? It's a relief to be in that state, right? The literature unceasingly says it's a relief to be in that state, but that's not what it's all about, right? What it's all about is you get up in the world and you walk around and you practice in the world. Relief is okay. There's nothing wrong with relief. It's really all right. That was one of the other things in Darlene's book. She says, figure out what relieves you and then just do it every day. She has a bunch of dirty little secrets about what she does to make herself comfortable during the course of her day in order to be happy. If it's something as as intense as imagining you're going to die and using that as a way to settle down your mind, then go for it. That's what I'd say.

[44:49]

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 sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[45:14]

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