Thank you. That's right. With tick-offs today. Yeah. People like Mr. Nilsson. I didn't want to trade up with him. Thank you. Thank you.

[03:43]

Let's see. I guess . Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool.

[05:33]

Please share. Otherwise, you're welcome to grab the cushion. And if you have a cushion next to you that's available to you in your hand, on the far side of the cushion, And I stare at it with my face. If you have a push-up next to you, please raise your hand up.

[17:31]

So the far side of the room, chairs and curtains. There's more space. Flo in. Flo in and Heather. That is about to dismiss seats. Look at that. Are there curtains and chairs still, I believe, on the far side of the bedroom?

[19:01]

You can raise your hand if you've got an edible seat and have a few couldn't. We've got one cushion and three chairs over here.

[21:25]

Thank you. I'd like to hear them some cheers. Thank you.

[29:03]

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to you all. My name is Tenzin Nigga Zimmerman. I serve as the Central Abbey of San Francisco Zen Center, and I am delighted and honored to welcome our speaker today, Zontatsu Richard Baker Roshi. Welcome. Welcome back again. For those of you who may not know him, Baker Roshi is the founder and former Abbey of the international nonprofit organization Dharma Sangha. And it's two centers. So there's one in Germany, in southern Germany, in the Black Forest. That's the Zen Buddha Center. And then also another one in Crestone, Colorado, Crestone Mountain Zen Center.

[32:21]

They're both very beautiful sites. If you ever have a chance to visit, please do. And Richard Baker has been teaching the Buddha Dharma for almost 60 years. And he... He actually spent time also in Japan from 68 to 71. Suzuki Moshi sent him over there to Taiji, Eiji, and Daito Kuchi, and spent time there. He became a Dharma heir of Suzuki Roshi in 1969. And then, after Suzuki Roshi's passing, became the second abbot of San Francisco Zen Center. He was also very foundational in many of Zen Center's initial endeavors, including the acquisition of Greenbelt Farm at Marin, and the establishment of Green's Restaurant at Forest Mason, which is still growing strong, so if you have a chance, please visit those two beautiful places.

[33:31]

After he loved San Francisco Zen Center in 83, He ended up founding the Dharma Sangha. And so he spends his time between both Germany and Crestone, back and forth. And Fekiroshi and Tatsuru Roshi, who is now the abbot of the Dharma Sangha, and Crestone, they have been here for the last 10 days, and it's been quite a joy. to have them staying with us here at the temple, spending time with sangha, visiting and sharing their presence and their drama. So warm welcome again. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for such a... How do you know all those things? Internet. Internet. Excuse me for, oh, I'm not used to amplification.

[34:49]

Excuse me for not wearing traditional robes, but, you know, I seem to be getting old. And Japanese dress in general, but particular robes, are designed for a particular kind of posture. And I can't just do that posture anymore. When I sit down, I get all tangled up, and then I can't find my legs and so forth. So this is convenient. And I'm wearing a Raksu Sukhyoshi gave me. So I feel at home. And I even have a staff that Joe Cohen made from Manzanita at Tassajara. So I... I feel like I belong. First and most important, I want to apologize for all the pain and distress and suffering I caused 40 years ago for this sangha.

[36:02]

And for me too, pain and distress because I was also this sangha, and I still feel like I'm part of this sangha. You are. Thank you very much. Yeah. Just coming into the building when I first arrived, because the building itself was a big part of my practice for many years, and I understood something better about Merit. It's a word I always kind of expunged from our chants and things. Because it's kind of monetized the Dharma. And it actually is called a spiritual currency. And I don't know anything about Bitcoins, but...

[37:08]

But a Bitcoin is a distributed ledger. And merit is kind of like a distributed ledger. You could almost say it was a synonym for a Vilaya Vijnana, how practice is absorbed through the details. I mean, supposedly Dogen said that... Maybe the most important word in Zen Buddhism is hisshiryo, which I don't know how Kaz would translate it, but I tend to feel it means to notice without thinking about. And to notice without thinking about establishes another kind of, it establishes a memory not rooted in conceptuality, but in a certain kind of the way you experience things.

[38:11]

Yeah, so if I go way back into my practice years ago, as I've often spoken about, I noticed, you know, I decided to, I decided to practice Utsuzuki Roshi. and I decided to practice within my own experience within the experience I discovered myself in and and of course I read the sutras and everything written in English in those days couldn't do it now but still I decided to do it in English and to do it within my what I experienced and of course doing it in English I have no ability at languages, so that was convenient. Doing it in English means that my experience... I mean, zazen opens you to experiences that you... to your interiority.

[39:25]

It's a kind of doorway to your interiority before you project the world through the senses. And... So I had to stretch the words. If I find a word, I said, well, this seems like sort of describes what my experience is, but it's not quite. So I spent a lot of time changing words around to see if I can find ways to reach into with what I can communicate with English, reach into my own experience. others experience. So when I way back what I noticed was my evidential experience was different somehow different than my Dharma experience or my experience that arose from sitting zazen and the the first real

[40:37]

Noticing was, you know, English says that space separates. Well, that was my experience. But then after practicing, space connected more than it separated, or connected in addition to its separating. So I wondered, what the heck's going on? I mean, basically, I decided to... live a life rooted in practice as much as I can and rooted in Suzuki Roshi's practice because he was my example. So what do you do when your evidential practice isn't your dharma, your evidential experience isn't your dharma experience? Well, you really have to have trust in the practice and you have to have trust in the teaching and trust in your teacher and hope for the best.

[41:41]

And so I played around with, geez, this is a view. I don't know why I had such a clear intuition that space separated was the view I had. But I began to try out the view, because that was also my evidential experience, that space connected as well. I felt the way I practiced with Tsukiroshi and the way I practiced with other Kaas who I've known for many years. And Kaas and Linda were kind of mid-wifed me into this week. Really, I was My first time was to have dinner with them. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, all of you have kind of midway.

[42:47]

It's been such a nice experience to be here. Everyone has been so warm and supportive and friendly. It feels good. So I feel I've been kind of, maybe this building is a kind of womb for rebirthing an old guy. And you've all been midwifing me. You didn't probably think of yourself as midwives, but that was my experience. Yeah, so at some point I recognized that when I played with Well, it's a view. I began to notice that when I felt the view was clear enough that I repeated it, space connects, space connects.

[43:53]

I began to have the repetition, the successional repetition began to enter me into my experience in a different way. And surprisingly, first my experience used to tell me that space separates, but then my experience, I began to notice ways in which experience, I began to notice ways in which space connected. There had to be some kind of medium, like a Taoist sense of a medium. And so then I, I visualized it that I had a little, maybe is it because in those days they had slide projectors, you know. I saw that I kind of put a slide in the back of my head called Space Connects. Once I settled this slide in the back of my head or somewhere in my imaginal body, I began to notice space connecting and more and more it began to support

[45:03]

the articulation of Dharma practice for me. So when I came into the building, I mean, it's just amazing, this restoration, because it feels like the same building, just better. Refurbished, sort of articulated, clarified, but still feels like Julia Morgan's building. And she designed it for, hopefully, for these young women who were expected to live here and did live here in some number, to feel and develop a sense of community. So it's a building designed specifically to, as much as I know about Julia Morgan, this is the case, designed specifically to enhance a feeling, develop a feeling of community. And the rows of Sharon's in the entryway and up along the... You know, I hardly noticed those for a while, but then they're there.

[46:16]

And it turns out that the rows of Sharon, no one knows what quite flower that was. And it's a word for when you don't know the word for something. So it's like Seindaba. There's a word in our koans. In fact, it's used in the first koan of... to show you Roku, Saindava, is it a horse or a salt? So Saindava is a word for, when you don't know quite what the word should be or what's being referred to, so we can call these Rose of Sharon's Lotuses. So now, in my mind, they're Lotuses because no one knows what the Rose of Sharon was anyway. So why not, it's now in my mind, My mind. Excuse me. So signed. Of course, for me, almost all words are signed of us. She agrees.

[47:19]

Yeah. So I came into the building and began to feel completely at home with me. each of you and with the building. And when I was in the room, which it says and told me used to be his room years ago, I can hear the sound of this amazing, really amazing, Keisoo Bell and the Densho and the Han It just comes up through the building. And then it also comes up through the courtyard, where she also has the sound of water happening. And I could sort of feel the sound coming up along the walls and then into the room I was in. And that, again, was part of my feeling of having a kind of new sense of what merit could mean.

[48:33]

kind of song of the small details which connect everything. Song Dava. Yeah. Now I often suggest that... we again it took me a very long time I mean I'm a slow learner and it took me decades to learn to notice something and then to incorporate it into my practice but to recognize that we don't really live in a reality We live in a relationality. And the relationality is, you know, and my experience with these things is mantras are where we have a conversation with the Dharma and a conversation with ourself.

[49:53]

And you have to kind of have a mantric relationship to wados, to turning words to phrases, or to your own exploration of a word like relationality. So I've made it a kind of rule. I simply never use the word reality unless it's very clear. I'm using it in a very specific way because I only notice relationality, which is also a word for interdependence, but it's also a word for, excuse me for getting into my thing again, words, but it's also a word for intra-dependence. Because, I mean, we're talking about mudras and the details which connect things.

[50:55]

And as I said the other day, the left hand is actually quite different from the right hand. And the dominant hand, my right hand is the dominant hand. So if I bring attention, and here I'm speaking about a way to enter into relationality, is through discovering reference points. So if I make the reference point for attentionality, and again, I would say that Zen practice is very particularly, and within Buddhism, particularly a practice of attentionality. And it assumes a whole culture of attentionality, which is not the same as a culture rooted in conceptuality. These differences are real differences, in my experience, in this experience. So the left hand is the dreamer, Nancy Wilson Ross would say.

[52:00]

She wrote a book called The Left Hand is the Dreamer. So the left hand functions differently. And if I decide to, as Kitagawa Roshi, I think it was, suggested to just put your attention every day, all day in the left hand. Now you can do that. I mean, you can just try, try that, you know. And it's maybe the more tantric side of Soto Zen, but anyway, it's pretty commonplace. You just decide this will be your reference point, not self, not comparison to others, not what you want to do next or the future or the past, just your attention. You begin to develop an attentional skill that can simply rest in your left hand. This is actually a big accomplishment. So after a while, your left hand, whoa, your left hand thinks it's a quite interesting world.

[53:04]

Nice to be here, you know. And then you can shift your attention to your right hand, which is the hand that does things, or your dominant hand. Takes this off and puts it down. It feels more comfortable than if I do it with my left hand. So then you explore, actually, the right hand offers this is a kind of at the level of what I meant by merit the right hand begins to act in the world differently and you begin to also the body does its own thinking and you can begin to start trusting your body of what to do, what to wear today, etc. But you have to develop the trust in the body and let the body show you what's next. And that's more the right hand. So maybe if I still talk with the hands, maybe this is something like interpenetration.

[54:17]

And this is more intra-penetration. And there could be mudras like this. There's mudras like this. The mudras are, you can look up the words and what they're supposed to mean, but do you feel them? I mean, the posture in which you sleep is a mudra. And you can begin to find mudra... mudric elements in where you put your hand or something because neurologically you're functioning during night so you can begin to let the body talk to you with the sense that mudras are how we talk with gravity we're having a conversation with gravity with mudras I mean, gravity's invisible, you know. There you are. Proudfoot, I love your name.

[55:21]

So she's sitting there, I'm sitting here, but we're both relating to gravity. It's invisible. I know we're both relating to gravity, but slightly differently. And the posture is... And we saw the butoh dancer last night. who was definitely dancing in relationship to gravity and to war and to other things. And it made me notice when I thought about it afterwards that the kind of mandala that Suzuki Roshi, societal mandala that Suzuki Roshi was living when he came to America was the work of the world is to end war. The work of the world is to stop war. And he participated in the Japanese part of the Second World War as a chaplain, partly, because he wanted, what he told me, he wanted to be with the young men who were his generation, but he didn't want to,

[56:40]

to be a soldier exactly, for sure. But then he came to America and he was immediately engaged in the anti-Vietnam War. So he was immediately engaged with, if practice is anything, it ought to be moving the world toward stopping war. And I saw that dancer last night. She was, I think, pretty clearly dancing about war and dancing too within the gravity that let her find her locations. So again, when I first came into the building, I felt the building as a big mudra. I mean, in a way, if I had to use these words that I've tried to enter into over the years is A mudra is a way of, maybe we could say, the discovery of a gestural space, a realisational space, in a kind of dance with gravity.

[57:58]

And a conversation with gravity. And the mandala, I understand the mandala, is a kind of conversation with others. In that sense, this building is a mandala. It's a conversation with the potentialities of community. Yeah. And I think Suzuki Roshi's mandala in which he practiced was and feeling having supposedly been at war with the United States. Terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible war. But he also, before the war, he was quite aware of how America and the West and Immanuel Kant and so forth was influencing the thinking of Japan. He was quite informed about Western philosophy. But still, the mandala was America, Japan, we've got to somehow...

[59:05]

Stop. What leads us to war? And then mantra is speaking, having a conversation with the Dharma. And what we're doing right now is having a conversation with the Dharma. And discovering, I think, a process of how attentionality... shifting from conceptuality, noticeably shifting from conceptuality to attentionality, begins to actually feel like a conversation with Dharma, with interiority. I mean, zazen is a doorway, a doorway, a gateway to interiority. I mean, I'm looking at you all... But actually, I'm looking at myself looking at you. Because you're, my experience, you know, my senses are projecting it as if you're out there, and I guess you are out there.

[60:18]

But your versions, your out there-ness is being created right now by me. and you are creating your outsideness. And Zazen practice and Zen practice, one of the big shifts into non-duality is when you begin to feel interiority creating the exteriority. How do you suddenly feel at home? Geez, you feel at home, this is the world I live in. I can feel, there's no out there-ness, it's just now happening. Uji Dogen talks about the present moment and the existent moment. The present moment being our experience right now. And the existent moment being we're part of vastness, an incomprehensible vastness.

[61:28]

It's kind of a substitute for God in Buddhism. Vastness. For the dynamic of... which is everywhere and beyond understanding. Yeah. So, sometimes I feel, you know, I used to like to play chess. I'm not very good at any games, but I used to like to play chess, and I inherited a chess set from my father. But then I discovered Go in Japan. Again, I'm not much of a player, but suddenly I recognized Go is 16 squares, eight and eight and 16, eight and eight sides and 16, but they create 32 places.

[62:32]

But Go, It's just intersections. You have 19 by 19 intersections, which makes 361 intersections altogether. And they hardly exist. They're not there until you put a piece on them. And it's a game, really, to have a feeling of depth, a depth kind of connection with another person. It's not so much about winning and losing. But sometimes, I mean, the chess players each have an identity. It's a king or a knight or a rook or a queen and so forth. And they're in a place. But the pieces in a gold board have no identity. One's black and one's white, but they begin to have some kind of temporary identity when they're placed somewhere on the board.

[63:38]

And the game has no end. It just ends when the two players decide, geez, we've played long enough. So we can play chess and we can play go, which means we can decide to live on a more yogic board, locate our practice in a more yogic board than a chess board type, conceptual, And that's part of noticing without thinking about. So sometimes, I mean, if you get this image, you can feel yourself. It's... You can wonder, am I trying to play chess on a go board? I mean, if the yoga... world is much more like the go board.

[64:43]

Maybe you need to discover how to, well you could try it out, put some chess pieces on a go board and the chess pieces wouldn't know where to go. So I'm just trying to speak in a way or create some sort of image that we can feel of relationality in contrast to reality. And this would be like constellated gatherings, which, as I said to someone the other day, gatherings which are like galaxies maybe. This is like interpenetration, and this is more intrapenetration. And I'm just using these words to give you a sense, to try to create a feel for the field of potentiality because if the world is being created it's being created right now as our experience it it becomes your experience and it becomes

[66:08]

Jeez, I don't know quite how to say it right now. But let me say that... It's supposed to end soon, I think, right? Eleven-ish. Eleven-ish. Okay. Well, it's two minutes to eleven-ish. So... You know, there's a Japanese word... watching flower cherry blossoms? Hanami. Hanami is really a synonym for memorimento, to watch Japanese people love cherry blossoms, not just because they're beautiful, but because they also are a practice of impermanence.

[67:11]

Sometimes the road can be filled with cherry blossoms, but that's part of the impermanence. It's not like, geez, we've got to sweep up those cherry blossoms. No. Memento mori, an awareness of dying, which It does happen more when you're 89 than, you know, it used to. But you can shift to, you can practice bringing attention to the breath. And practicing bringing attention to the breath again becomes a reference point, which makes it a lot easier not to keep referencing, self-referencing, self-referencing your self-referential identity. So you learn to sort of be in charge of your attention. Pretty soon, your lived body is lived through the physical experience of the exhale and the physical experience of the inhale.

[68:24]

Not just the idea of an inhale, but the physical experience of the exhale and the physical experience of the inhale. Okay, so that bringing attention to the breath like that begins to locate you in aliveness. And I hope we all have made, somehow, our parents help us make a decision. In childhood, I vow to be alive. If you don't really have that decision built into you, it's like, oh, I vow to be alive if I'm successful. Or I vow to be alive, et cetera. But there's no ifs. I mean, you're just gonna. And particularly in the world today, we need to just, we'll be alive and do the work of the world, which is to end war. Now, but say that you shift, and what's amazing to me

[69:28]

is it makes a difference. Say you shift to not just bringing attention to breath as aliveness, but you shift to, I know, making attention to breath as impermanence. So with every inhale you're practicing impermanence. With every exhale you're practicing impermanence. With every inhale you're practicing impermanence. Your heartbeat is practicing impermanence. The metabolic living of your aliveness is practicing impermanence. Well what happens is if you keep practicing impermanence you end up practicing disappearance too. Because oh Things not only are impermanent, they also kind of disappearance.

[70:29]

And that is also one of the roots of getting a feel for emptiness as absence or emptiness as vastness. So I suggest I'm supposed to stop, should stop. That you can actually try this out, shift from attention to... First of all, just see if you can have the yoga capacity to have attention just always in the aliveness of the body, the mudra of the body, the experience of the physicality of the exhales and inhales and the up and down. And then make the shift to... I'm practicing impermanence. I mean, it's not an idea.

[71:31]

You're practicing the actual impermanence of your life, of this situation, etc. And it also makes things newly and wonderfully alive. Thank you very much. Amen. I should be placed and to turn free in Adam's place, with the true marriage of God's grace. He is on your own religious, I was the same. To be with us, we shall be with God's love, and to [...] be with God's love.

[72:48]

We're going to leave. I actually managed to do this okay, I think. Thank you. We're going to leave this afternoon and go to Greengalch where she's going to give the Sunday morning talk tomorrow. I'm kind of sad to leave. More than kind of sad to leave. I really feel actually profoundly at home here. Thank you very much. Yes, I'd also like to, or not like to, but I feel I have to say goodbye. As you said, we've been here for 10 days, which has felt timeless to me. And just once again, thank you so much. You talked about the merit of the building. And then, of course, there is the measurable merit that I feel is arising with all this incredible warmth and strengthens of the sun.

[74:06]

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. I will show you a three dots now. I feel something like reborn. Thanks. Now I can get up right. everybody.

[76:48]

My name's Kevin. I'm the dean of the city center, the head of the meditation hall. I have a few announcements. I just want to say I'm always amazed that it's always the exact perfect number of communities for these events. I mean, we probably squeeze one or two more here, but almost every Saturday, it's just the exact right amount. So congratulations on pulling that off. And on that note, as always, you're invited to come and practice here with us for everything that we do. Morning Zazen, Tuesday through Saturday. Evening Zazen, Monday through Friday, 540 in the morning, 540 in the evening. Dharma Talks on Wednesday evening at 730. And Saturday mornings, obviously, at 10. We have an intensive coming up. We have classes, special events. So you're always welcome to come for all that we do. And we love having you here. Also, please consider supporting San Francisco Zen Center. with your donations as well as your presence.

[77:49]

It really helps us out a lot. Your donations and your memberships help to support us here at City Center, at Green Gulch, Tassajara, the online sangha, and are really important for us. There's a donation box in the lobby. It has a QR code to Venmo. You can also use cash, if you remember what that is. You can put that into the box. And we are grateful for every donation that we get. The next Dharma talk will be this Wednesday with Pamela Weiss, 7.30 here in the Buddha Hall. Tomorrow we have a special event, a benefit for Gaza, Writers Witness for Peace. That'll be tomorrow 4 to 6 in the, is it in the dining hall, Paul? Dining hall. Zen Center welcomes a gathering of 10 local writers of diverse faiths and backgrounds who will hold a reading in support of ceasefire and and ongoing peace in Gaza and Israel. This event is hosted by poet Naomi Shihab Nye and Zen Center senior Dharma teacher Paul Haller.

[78:52]

It's free admission. Donations will be collected and distributed through the Middle East Children's Alliance of Berkeley. So please join us if you can. We also have an intensive starting this week. Finding True Refuge goes from May 19th to June 14th, and that will be led by Pamela Weiss. Where do we go to find refuge in a world on fire? How does Buddhist practice support us in living together well? You're free to sign up in person for the intensive, do it online or a mixture thereof. Saturday, one week from today, we'll have a one-day sit to start off, kick off the intensive. You're welcome to sign up for that. How many people have done a one-day sit here before? Great. So a good number. Habit Davis done one too. So, yeah, feel free to sign up for that. There will also be a three-day session in June to end the intensive. Since Baker Roshi mentioned, we have a Butoh performance tonight, the Butoh dancer that Baker Roshi saw last night.

[79:59]

We did a film showing in the conference center next door. Dancer Gipizzi Aldelay has arrived from Mexico, and she'll be performing tonight along with Eric Larson. who lived at Zen Center in the early 70s. And they'll be doing two separate solo performances and also a performance together at 7.30 in the conference center right next door. You can go online to buy tickets or you can just come tonight and buy tickets too. There's still tickets available. Finally, Urban Gate Sangha helps support us every Saturday morning with the 925 Zazen as well as the Dharma Talk if the Urban Gate folks want to raise their hand. So all the people with their hands raised help support every Saturday. If you would like to be one of those people, talk to one of the Urban Gate folks, or you can talk to me, or you can talk to Tim, the tanto here, and we can tell you more about Urban Gate, what it does, how they help us. It's not an every week commitment. It's whenever you can come.

[80:59]

There's also a light lunch and a Dharma discussion with Tim after the Dharma talk. So finally... Baker Roshi will be in the dining hall for Q&A. You're welcome to go there. There's tea and cookies along the way, on the way to the dining hall. You're free to stop there as well. And if you can help put the Buddha Hall back together, if you're on a chair, if you're able to, bring the chair back to the dining hall. And if you're on a Zafu, please bring the Zafus back to the shelves there. So have a beautiful weekend. Thank you so much. Thank you.

[82:08]

Thank you. I feel like that. I'm glad of all these things. I'm glad my script is there.

[82:39]

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