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. Greetings, everyone, from a gray and damp San Francisco. normally i would be looking around the buddha hall to see who's here during the den show i took the opportunity to scroll through the different screens of attendees and it was really gratifying to feel as we do in the buddha hall that we're among friends i know many familiar faces familiar names people at city center people i know through tassahara going back many many years it seems um I'm also delighted there are people in Europe, my Dharma sister Jean, special good evening to you, and even people in Turkey and maybe elsewhere in Europe as well on completely different time zones to us.

[01:02]

So I'd like to welcome you all to this room, this virtual room, this place we're in together. I also want to thank the C-Center Tanto, Head of Practice, Horen, Nancy Petrin. I know she's here. Thank you very much for inviting me to give this talk. and also express my gratitude to the teachers that I've had over my two decades of practice. Kon Jin, Galen Godwin, the abbess of Houston Zen Center, Rishin Paul Haller, the former abbot of Zen Center, and Anshi Zachary Smith, who is down in the basement with Mojo the Cat. Thank you all for all your guidance. I noticed that the blurb on the website says, Dharma talks by Zen teachers are a traditional method of transmitting the heart and understanding of Buddha's way. So I'll be doing my best to do that in the next little while. And first of all, a lesser-known exchange of Suzuki Roshi, the founder of this temple, to whom I also extend infinite gratitude. I imagine many of you have read his books, but the whole Suzuki Roshi archive, which is available in transcript form and often in audio as well, is an amazing resource.

[02:12]

I found this from a quite late talk he gave at Tassahara, not long before his death. A student said, I am so grateful to you and Tassahara and Zen Center that I'd like to study Zen. What should I do first? Suzuki Roshi responded, you should do something in the right time, in the right way. Try to keep up with our practice. Student says, I'm so grateful to you and Tassahara and Zen Center that I'd like to study Zen. What should I do first? Suzuki Roshi says, you should do something in the right time, in the right way. Try to keep up with our practice. So for those of you who are on the Western calendar, happy new year. I know other people don't have a new year until later, but if you're celebrating new year, happy new year. And congratulations that we made it to 2021. And since this is the first Dharma talk Zen center of the new calendar year, I think it might be an appropriate time to pause and remember those people who did not make it through the year.

[03:17]

So when I looked yesterday, the current count of American dead was about 350,000, coming up to 350,000, which equates to one in every thousand people who were alive in America at the beginning of the year, which is quite incredible. And of course, around the world, there has been an incalculable amount of death. So let's take a moment just to think of those people. Perhaps it is difficult to imagine 350,000 people, to picture them all.

[04:32]

And when I was a high school student, I read Albert Camus' The Plague. And at one stage, the narrator of the story gets a little bewildered by the number of people who have died. So he tries to imagine them all filling a sports stadium. So I've always found this a very helpful way of thinking about large numbers. So my... My benchmark for that is the old Wembley Stadium in London, which I went to several times when I was younger, which held 100,000 people. If you need a more local example, I understand that Candlestick Park used to hold up to 70,000 people. So if you know Candlestick Park, imagine that being filled five times over. As Kodo very kindly just said, I do take a lot of photographs, and one thing I tend to do at the turn of the calendar year is organize photographs from the last year and put them into folders and put them away on archive drives.

[05:55]

And this year there was a particular poignancy of looking through pictures and immediately identifying, oh, this was pre-lockdown and this was post-lockdown. That's a very different flavor of pictures, very particular memories, very distinct memories. and thinking about the progression of last year and i remember there was a particular time when the whole pandemic went from it's them to it's us and to me that was seeing the grand princess cruise ship come into the san francisco bay early in march suddenly it was right on our doorstep and it was not something that we could avoid and the last talk i gave for Zen Center was just over a year ago at the end of 2019 in December. And I've been saying this to various groups, like if I could travel back a year, like if I could give that talk again, knowing what we know now, I think everybody present would run away screaming.

[06:56]

If I said, this is what you're going to have to deal with in 2020, like it would be impossible to imagine. And yet somehow here we are. And I think amidst all the suffering and loss, there have been discoveries in the last year. The fact that we have all managed to get through to this is a tribute to our resilience. And maybe we don't think that we're resilient people, but we have all shown somehow, in some way or other, an amazing amount of resilience. You know, suffering has been physical and mental and financial. and I say this coming from a European social democratic tradition, without the kind of support from government that you might expect to help people who need help, as everybody has needed help. But in the midst of that, there has been, even as we gather on Zoom, a sense of togetherness.

[07:59]

Even though digital togetherness lacks that all-important in-person connection, that kind of energetic exchange that we need to thrive as social animals. So last year I did a lot of teaching on Zoom, and one of the wonderful opportunities was a chance to have a regular conversation with a Dharma group in England. Myself and Catherine Gammon, another Zen Center priest who's on the East Coast of the States, shared the speaking responsibility for months and connected with not just the local group in England, but everybody who was connected with that group, who was around the country and again further around Europe, which is an amazing gift and opportunity, just like we have this gift wherever you are in the world. to connect and be present together today. And some people, I remember during our check-ins in that group, did say, well, yes, there are a lot of terrible things, but actually there are parts of the lockdown that I'm kind of enjoying that work well for me. Like this slowing down, this taking care of ourselves is actually beneficial.

[09:03]

So even without diminishing the suffering, we can recognize there's a broader and more nuanced picture. And that's part of what helps us get through what seemed to be, if we paint it in black and white terms, incredibly difficult situations to live through. And say, if I spelled it all out a year ago, you would just run away. But now here we are, we've managed. And maybe in the midst of that, I think for most of us, we've asked questions like, what is the most important thing in life? Maybe that's what brought you to this talk today. For myself, every time I sit, and even just now when I was quiet for a moment thinking of the people who died, like the feeling of grief that arises when I slow down and come into silence, it's been palpable. Almost every period of meditation in the last year, I felt that. So allowing space for that to come in, you know, during our busy day-to-day lives, there may not be space to explore all those emotions.

[10:10]

But that's an important part of taking care of ourselves, especially taking care of ourselves in situations of stress. So now we're in 2021. And it's natural to want this to be a fresh beginning, a new year, a new president, a new vaccine. We're through the darkest time of the year. Maybe hope is around the corner. And yes, it is. And yes, it's not as simple as that. Are we there yet? No, we're right here. And how does being right here look for you? How does it feel for you? And what does a sense of a fresh beginning mean for you? Perhaps you think, oh, if I start a meditation practice or if I get more serious about my meditation, maybe I'll be a better person.

[11:14]

Or maybe like, well, when we get the new president, things will be better. Or maybe when we get the vaccine, we can take off our masks and go back to the way we're used to living. So we've been doing all this for a long time and we want it all to be done. But we're not there yet. They're just taking a moment to acknowledge and feel this, the poignancy of this moment, the poignancy of every moment we've experienced since the pandemic and how that is resonating into this present moment. And so back to the story. The student says, I am so grateful to you and Tassahara and Zen Center that I'd like to study Zen. What should I do first? Suzuki Roshi says, you should do something in the right time in the right way.

[12:18]

Try to keep up with our practice. So I like this story particularly because it echoes very closely, I think, a more familiar Zen story, a story that may be familiar to many of you from the golden age of Zen in China about 1,200 years ago. And the great teacher... Joshu in Japanese, or Jiaoju in Chinese. So a young monk comes up to him and said, well, I'm freshly arrived in the monastery. Please give me some teaching. Which is a little bit presumptuous, but, you know, that was his request. So Joshu said, well, have you had your breakfast? The monk said, yes, I have. Joshu said, well, you should wash your bowls. And what I take from these stories is that this is not some... special teaching that we're offering. And if you've come here expecting to be given something esoteric or something life-changingly magical, maybe you'll be disappointed. There isn't a linear progression from A to Z, or A to Z as I would say in my native tongue.

[13:23]

We're not checking off boxes along the way. We're not shifting from delusion to enlightenment. We're not along this road from delusion to enlightenment. There isn't even necessarily anything handed to you from your teacher. You have to wash your own bowls. You have to try to keep up with the practice. Recently I've been reading, or dipping into, I should say, I haven't actually finished a whole book since lockdown, I'm ashamed to say, but I've been dipping into some books. This is an old book, a relatively old book, called How the Swans Came to the Lake, which is a history of the arrival of... Buddhism in America, which stretches right back to the 19th century and the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, and traces the many different threads of Buddhist teachers who came from across Asia to help, and the people in America, particularly, as this story is about, who resonated and who wanted to explore further.

[14:25]

And in the chapter on Suzuki Roshi, there's a quote... from him, which I don't remember seeing elsewhere, so I don't know exactly where it's from. And he says, because there is no end to our practice, it's good. Don't you think so? Usually you expect our practice to be effective enough to put an end to our hard practice. Like we think, oh, I'll just really get into it and then that'll be it. If I say just practice hard for two years, then you'll be interested in our practice. If I say you have to practice your whole lifetime, then you'll be disappointed. you will say, oh, Zen is not for me. But if you understand that the reasons you are interested in this practice is because our practice is endless, that is true understanding. That is why I'm interested in Buddhism. There is no end. So this is why I'm interested in Buddhism. It wasn't why I was first interested in Buddhism, but certainly it's what has kept me engaged and involved and sitting for all these years.

[15:27]

And I remember that kind of transformation between arriving and expecting to be given something, expecting something to happen, or expecting to become enlightened and everything was going to be great, to realizing that actually it was a continual practice and a continual effort. And it was my effort. Nobody else was going to do it for me. I was the one who had to sit on the cushions. And... There's a wonderful venerable teacher in New York called Enkya Ohara who said, there's a fantasy in Buddhism that everything will be perfect and I'll be all one. And plus I'll be successful. But it's just a fantasy. And if it's not caught, it gets lodged in the psyche. So this is where a teacher will help us. This is where Joshi will say, well, I'm not going to give you some fancy teaching. I'm going to tell you to wash your bowls. And Suzuki Roshi says, well, just try to do the right thing. Putting it back onto ourselves. And how do we deal with that? There's a notion that's come up for me, which is recently of meeting the present moment with trust.

[16:37]

So we know when we meet a person, instinctively, we generally know whether we can trust that person or not. There's some kind of energetic vibration that lets us know whether this person is trustworthy or not. So how would it be to meet each present moment? with a sense of trust. And it's difficult for us because our minds are always focused on outcome. We're not focused on present moment. We're focused on being safe and being certain. That's one of the reasons that this year has been particularly hard because nothing has been safe and certain and the outcome still isn't particularly clear. But our minds are always grasping for that. And that grasping is one of the obstacles. So I want to introduce a quote by Pema Chodron, the fantastic Tibetan teacher, since we're not too sectarian here. The wisdom tradition is a wisdom tradition.

[17:40]

She says, as human beings, not only do we seek resolution, we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. Think about how you suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution. We deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity. And how successfully do you feel able to do that for yourself? She continues, to the degree that we've been avoiding uncertainty, we're naturally going to have withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawal from always thinking that there's a problem and that someone somewhere needs to fix it. The middle way is wide open, but it's tough going because it goes against the grain of an ancient neurotic pattern we all share.

[18:45]

When we feel lonely, when we feel hopeless, what we want to do is move to the right or to the left. We don't want to sit and feel what we feel. We don't want to go through the detox. Yet the middle way encourages us to do just that. It encourages us to awaken to the bravery that exists in everyone without exception, including you and me. And again, maybe we can acknowledge our own resilience in getting through this year, no matter how much we've wanted to move to the left or move to the right, no matter how much we've wanted to avoid it, we've had to go straight through it. And we haven't come out the other end yet. We're still sitting in it. So our practice is to sit and feel what we feel. I encourage you to do that right now. I always like to say that upright sitting is upright because we're not leaning forward.

[19:47]

We're not leaning left or right. We're not leaning back. We're sitting upright right in the middle of all of this. We're not dependent on outcomes when we do this. We're just continuing. And when we're sitting like this, we don't need to know what things will look like. We just do our best to meet each moment and perhaps meet the moment with trust. So this is the miraculous meditation practice that we undertake here at Zen Center and elsewhere. So we have to sit down and make a habit of sitting down. And it doesn't matter whether a period of meditation is wonderful or not. And certainly there were many, many times when I was doing monastic practice at Tassajara that I left this end of thinking, I'm never going back in there. I'm done. I'm so done with this. And yet I always went back. And there may be a part of you that's still thinking, but wait a minute, isn't there a point to all of this?

[20:56]

Aren't we supposed to be heading towards something? What about this enlightenment that we hear about so much? So I'd like to bring in another classic Zen story from the collection of Blue Cliff Record. It's Case 25. The master of Lotus Peak Hermitage held out his staff, his authority for teaching. and said to his disciples, when in olden times a person reached the state of enlightenment, why did they not remain there? When in olden times a person reached the state of enlightenment, why did they not remain there? No one could answer, and he replied for them, because it is of no use in the course of life. And again he asked, after all, what will you do with it? Once again, he said in their stead, take no notice of others.

[21:57]

Throw your staff over your shoulder. Go straight ahead and journey deep into the recesses of the hundred thousand mountains. So it's not a question of like, oh, if I sit long enough, I'll get enlightened and then everything will be perfect. I won't have any problems. We keep sitting. If you get stuck in a moment of enlightenment or a belief in enlightenment or a delusion that you're enlightened, then what are you doing? You need to keep going. It's of no use in the course of life. What would you do with it? Or another translation says, after all, what is it? So when we're stuck in those kind of ideas like, oh, I'm not enlightened, I should be enlightened, or oh, I am enlightened, everything's perfect, we're not free to keep moving and meeting the moment. moment by moment. We're not free to do the right thing at the right time. So this is an endless practice, as Suzuki Roshi says.

[22:59]

And because we're in a Bodhisattva tradition, a Mahayana tradition, with our endless vows, and if you don't know the Bodhisattva vows, you can hear them at the end when we do the chant. We're here to help. We're not just here to continue by ourselves. We're here to help everyone, even if we're not in the same room as them. We have these endless vows for everybody, reaching out way across the whole known universe, all living beings. And we help imperfectly. Maybe we have great intentions, but our impact is awful. That happens to me quite often. And what does helping look like? Well, we don't know. Maybe we don't need to know. We don't have to have everything figured out. We can be with the uncertainty. We can be in the moment and ready to help without knowing what it looks like ahead of time. That's trying to do the right thing at the right time. And just in case this is sounding a little too formless, there are many tools in the Buddhist toolbox and they're trustworthy suggestions on how to do things the right way.

[24:16]

the qualities and behaviors that we can cultivate. Because the bottom line for helping someone is, is this enabling well-being? Is this enabling people to feel protected, safe, and awakened? Or is there risk and harm and suffering? And even if we don't get it right, we keep trying. We can keep cultivating these practices. And I know there's been a lot of talk of them at Zen Center. I've been teaching on them quite extensively in the last year. So there's the six parameters, the six perfections. Generosity. Ethical conduct. Patience. Diligence. Meditation and wisdom. The four Brahma Vaharas, the heart qualities, divine abodes. Compassion. Loving kindness. Sympathetic joy. And equanimity. As I believe Nancy was talking about just recently, the Bodhisattva's four methods of guidance. Also generosity.

[25:18]

and kind speech, beneficial action, identity action, putting yourself in the shoes of another person. So I think these things go deeper than just a New Year's resolution or an intention or reposting handy aphorisms on social media. These things can point the way, but we have to do this work ourselves. We have to wash our own bowls. We have to get on the cushion. We have to sit on the chair to meditate. So I suggest that we do this in a way that nourishes your own particular life force. I can't tell you what your particular life force is. I encourage you to practice in a way that helps you to find out. And in the midst of that, take care. Take care of yourself and use that self-care to expand outwards. So with that said, I'm going to try a slightly different angle. On Suzuki Roshi's answer, and this one may be familiar to you if you've been around for a while.

[26:22]

And if it's new for you, I hope you can make some space for it. It's from Dogen's Genjo Koan. Dogen is the Japanese founder of Soto Zen, the lineage we practice in. From his early work to Genjo Koan, actualizing the fundamental point. It was written 800 years ago, but it's full of human wisdom. And sometimes just the first couple of lines are quoted, but for me, they form a kind of a five-part harmony. I say who it is. To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind, as well as the bodies and minds of others, drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly. Let's do this one by one. To study the Buddha way is to study the self.

[27:30]

This is a pretty famous line. So when we sit, when we sit in zazen, when we sit in silence, we can come to see ourselves more clearly. All the delusions, all the foie goals, all the things we'd rather not tell anybody else about. And hopefully through that we gain some illumination. And maybe, hopefully, some self-compassion. And I think, again, like self-care, that self-compassion starts extending outwards. Once we understand that everyone is going through these same repertoires of emotions, of experiences and sufferings that we are. So we can fool ourselves sometimes. God knows we all do that. But I think the longer we sit, the more that we study the self. then becomes less appealing. And there's more room for our own understanding or our own sense of the reality of our own particular life force. So the second line to study the self is to forget the self.

[28:36]

So really we're always more than our ideas about ourselves. We know this. And yet we still cling to those ideas. So my current phrase for this is breaking the trance of the mind. This is the mind that wants a resolution. The mind that loves dishing out judgment and opinion. The mind that loves reveling in self-justification. So one trick that worked for me in this was monitoring my self-talk. As you start listening to how you talk to yourself, really... Notice whether you expect yourself to behave in a particular way, and you judge yourself for behaving in a particular way, and how that creates and limits who you are. So make a practice of listening to your own mind with the way that I. In silence, when you sit, you really get a chance to listen to this mind a lot. If you've ever done an extended retreat, you've probably been

[29:44]

all around the houses with what your mind came up with. And there is always a lot more to your lived experience than what it's trying to tell you. So to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. So when we let go of this conception or fancy about who we are or who another person is or what is actually happening in any particular moment, there's a liberation. That's the kind of liberation we're talking about. Liberation of allowing everything to be as it is. Suzuki Roshi famously kept saying, things as it is. The many things and the one state of being as it is. The Japanese phrase is nyōho, often translated as thusness. So we can't grasp thusness with our minds. Our minds would love to grasp this. because then we think we'll have it all figured out.

[30:46]

If we can just grasp thusness with our minds, we'll be happy, we'll be liberated, we'll be enlightened, end of story, we can go home. It's not like that, unfortunately. But fortunately, because we keep practicing to be present with the moment. So I put up in bold here, we cannot overstate how valuable this practice is. Letting go of the conceptions of who you are, who the other person is, what the situation is. Let go of those preconceptions. We arrive with preconceptions. So don't let those derail the present moment. Allow yourself to be in the present moment. The present moment might be messy. It might be uncomfortable. You might want to dodge it. Nevertheless, allow yourself to be there. And this is the kind of equanimity that we're talking about that I think we can get to cultivate during Zazen. So when you meet the present moment with trust and not preconceptions, it is letting go of a huge burden because your preconceptions don't help you in the present moment.

[31:55]

Even a preconception that I'm enlightened, as the master of Lotus Peak Hermitage says, it's of no use in the course of life. It's doing something in the right time at the right way or washing your bowls because it's the time to wash your bowls. That's the thing to do. Regardless of whether you think washing bowls is cool or insignificant or a waste of your time, it's time to wash the bowls. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. So this is meeting the moment and not being caught by ideas of ourselves and others. And Dogen's not talking about out-of-body experiences. It's easy to think about body and mind dropping away as being some kind of psychedelic trip. That's not what he's talking about. He's just saying, don't get stuck in your habitual ruts. Or as he says elsewhere, be no longer concerned with conceptual distinctions.

[33:02]

So it's not that we're not thinking. It's not that we run out of thoughts or stop our thoughts. It's that we don't get hindered by those thoughts. when we meet the moment, when we meet ourselves and when we meet other people. We're liberated from carrying those burdens around moment by moment. No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly. So this is not some special teaching. This is not some esoteric thing that we're going to give you. It's not a linear progression from A to Z. We're not checking off boxes along the way. No delusions of enlightenment. Not getting hung up. enlightenment. So no trace of realization remains. If you think there's enlightenment over there, I need to get it, or enlightenment over here, or I have enlightenment in here, then there's a trace of realization. Let that go. Let all that go. There's moment by moment accord, be in accord with the way things are, the thusness of each moment.

[34:07]

And as Suzuki Roshi said, in another talk towards the end of his life. If you understand one practice, one activity, if you can do one activity with good spirit, then you can do everything in the same way. So, and this was a gift of Suzuki Roshi because he channeled Dogen to a whole lot of people who had no idea about what he was, or context of what he was talking about. And I know that Zen Center's mission is to keep making the teachings of Suzuki Roshi accessible. And what does that look like? Maybe we don't know what that looks like. Maybe it looks like monastic practice. I'm a huge advocate of the transformative power of monastic practice, and I know that's not a possibility for everybody. It's a constant question I have about how to bring these teachings forward, how to reach people with these teachings. I was thinking the other day how in the traditional morning service we do, when we make a dedication, we highlight the people who brought

[35:10]

Buddhism to new places. Bodhidharma, who took Buddhism from India to China, so it became Zen. Dogen, who took Zen from China to Japan so that it could flourish for 700 years. And Suzuki Yoroshi for bringing this part of Zen to America. So we highlight those particular figures, those particular founders, these really important teachers. And at the same time, we can remember that a few generations after Bodhidharma, Zen split into five different houses. Five different schools, or the five petals of Zen, as it's often called. And that a couple of generations after Dogen, his disciples split into two, pretty much, to decide how the best way to take things forward was. I read a very interesting article with Peter Coyote, who's a longtime student and friend of Zen Center in Lion's Roar magazine recently, where he's opening his own questions about how is Zen going to be embodied in America? And I really appreciated the way he looked at that. It might not mean monastic training. I hope that it means a lot of Zazen, and I hope that it means a lot of Dogen, because I think Dogen is fantastic and amazingly helpful.

[36:16]

So a lot of my teaching these days is outside of Zen contexts. And so I try to think, is this a benefit? How can I bring teachings to as many people as possible? I was reading an illuminating article in The New Yorker recently about people who are brought up in strictly Orthodox Jewish traditions and the struggles they face when they leave those traditions. And one particular family who recreated values and rituals that were meaningful to them. They weren't exactly the same as the ones they were brought up in, but the things that felt meaningful for them. So Zen Center has a lot of rituals and maybe those are meaningful for you, or maybe you would like to create your own things that respond to your own kind of life force. So even though we can decide at the beginning of the year to renew our vows, renew our intentions, to make a special effort, really this practice is all about continuous practice, continuous effort.

[37:31]

Deep self-inquiry, continual self-inquiry. Not thinking, oh, I'll do it for a couple of years and then everything will be okay, but really going deep into the continuing deep questions of our own human lives. And this year her think has brought new ways of meeting particular challenges. And can we take those lessons and move into the future with them? So even though I haven't finished a book since lockdown, one of the other books I've been reading, or I've been reading a lot, especially with my students, is The Six Perfections by Dale Wright, where he talks about the six parameters that I outlined earlier. And there are many, many wonderful notions and ideas in that book. So I'd like to leave you with one quote, which I think is particularly apt. He says, cultivating trust, we acknowledge and address our lack of control.

[38:36]

all the ways in which our agency is limited and at times completely overshadowed by the magnitude of the reality surrounding us. Trust of this kind enables us to accept that truth. It places us in a position to move confidently in that space of inevitable uncertainty towards goals that we ourselves have chosen. I'll read that again. Cultivating trust We acknowledge and address our lack of control. All the ways in which our agency is limited and at times completely overshadowed by the magnitude of the reality surrounding us. Trust of this kind enables us to accept that truth. It places us in a position to move confidently in that space of inevitable uncertainty towards goals that we ourselves have chosen. Dale is right. So I think we have all felt our lack of control in the face of the magnitude of the reality surrounding us this past year.

[39:42]

And yet we can keep moving, moment by moment, continuing forward. So I hope your year ahead of practice can be guided in this way. 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.

[40:23]

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