Good morning. I'm used to talking, but not with amplification. That's trippy. My talk is not about Memorial Day. Are there any tips about that? Is it like echoing? It's okay.

[01:00]

But I was thinking about Memorial Day yesterday. I just thought I'd share that to begin with. In my understanding, Memorial Day is a day to reflect on particularly people who have died in the armed services. And so I was just thinking about people who have died as soldiers in this country and in the history of the world. And I was so struck with... I'm sure there are a number of people who are, I don't know, crazed and violent. But I don't think they're the majority. I think most people who have died as soldiers in this human realm have been, you know, just really wanting to go home. People who are somebody's cherished child, somebody born of somebody's womb.

[02:06]

somebody who was nurtured enough to get to be big enough to be a soldier. And, yeah, I really was feeling that. Like, all these people, when we think of war, you know, like, oh, so bad. But it's always ever been just these individual people who had moms and brothers and lovers and dads and who just wanted to go home and not kill anybody and not die. How many people died in that state? So I want to take a moment to welcome that in this morning. That was loud. I'll get used to it, don't worry. So is there anyone here this morning that has never been to a talk on Buddhism or Zen? Whoa.

[03:07]

Northern California. That's awesome. That's great. Then I won't have to apologize. Usually if I know that people are new, newer... I'll stick with sort of a little bit of a lopsided view of practice, which amplifies and stays with one aspect of practice, which is the peaceful part, the part where there's ease and joy and quiet and refuge in that. Because in my experience, that's often what we come seeking if we're You know, if we weren't born into Zen practice and we're coming to seek it, we're usually in some kind of distress, either subtle or immense, and we're looking to relieve that pain.

[04:13]

And so it's really helpful to hear, oh, yeah, come on in. You know, we've got this. We've got peace and ease and joy. And we do in Zen, I think. But... This morning I want to also offer us all encouragement to... So that's here, let's say. I talk with my hands a lot. So if you're going to close your eyes, I'm whipping one hand around. But there's also this... There's also other stuff. And in that case, there's also what brings us, the suffering that brings us. And what I also want to offer encouragement is to also take refuge here. and attend to what's painful, to hold in our practice both things. And maybe more than that, actually, this is the last visual, although I'll keep talking with my hands, is what's in the middle of them. We have what we imagine to be the relief of suffering and suffering, but the dynamic and the vitality of our practice is here, dancing around in the way these things relate to each other.

[05:29]

That's really where the life of practice is, and that's where a true freedom from suffering is. The real cessation of suffering is in the middle of that dynamic exchange between what we imagine to be suffering way over here and not suffering way over here. So Buddhism, all schools of Buddhism, there's many, many schools of Buddhism. Many expressions of Buddhism that are very different than Zen. But I'm pretty sure fundamental to every school of Buddhism is this concept of the middle way. You probably have all heard about it since you've been. And originally this concept is like the balance between asceticism and indulgence. And I feel like colloquially we use it that way, even not in religious or Buddhist context.

[06:33]

You know, people are like, you know, someone's overdoing it. Someone else will be like, you know, oh, the middle way. I heard this just last week. So that's a root of Buddhist practice, the balance of the middle way. And Zen in particular is a bodhisattvic school of Buddhism. So that means that it's rooted in the middle way, and how it is expressed through the bodhisattva vow and the bodhisattva precepts. And just really briefly, the bodhisattva vow is the idea that we practice for the benefit of all beings, that any individual's practice is for the liberation of all beings, all kinds of beings. You know, human beings, but also other kinds of beings, water beings. beings. And so the middle way expressed with that vow is a very particular thing in Zen that I love.

[07:43]

I'll just confess to you all right now. I love this. I know I'm really hoarse. I've been sick all week and I sound sort of muffled to myself even. but I hope you can feel my enthusiasm underneath there. I think sometimes we hear that idea about the bodhisattva vow and it seems like really virtuous, you know, like, oh, that's so great to practice for everybody else first, you know. I don't think that we should hear it that way, or we could do that if it's helpful, but... Eventually, I think it's good to—it's not really altruistic. It's just an expression of reality. Because we are all connected, when we strive for freedom for ourselves, we are striving for freedom for all beings. It's just the situation. But we get to wake up to that situation.

[08:45]

That's our practice. So when we come, or maybe I can just speak for myself, when I kind of crawled my way into a Zen center a while ago, the 90s, I was in a lot of pain. And I was seeking this thing. I was seeking to end my pain. I was seeking to become somebody who was so extremely lived in equanimity that I wouldn't feel, actually. I mean, I didn't know that that was a bad idea at the time. It seemed like a good idea, because what I was feeling was painful. And that I would get there and I would stay there. That was another kind of cute idea. But the problem with...

[09:46]

The problem with trying for just one side of things is it's the mind that's seeking purity. I often think about that purity mind, you know? The mind that's right. That's the purity mind. The mind that is certain. The mind that is limited, actually. When we're right and we're certain, that certainty depends on chopping off a whole bunch of reality. So, and we need it sometimes. I don't mean to disparage that. We really need sometimes to lop off lumps of reality and take refuge over here for a little bit. We just don't want to get stuck there. Because when we get stuck there, there's a kind of deadness that's brittle. If you think about in your own life when you're trying to hold on to something you know, in this big, complex reality that we live in and we're trying to hold on at one, just control one tiny portion of it, it gets pretty stiff, you know.

[10:53]

We're no longer flexible. We're like... And at some point, even that peace that we're seeking can get kind of brittle and doesn't have room for people who are, like, upset in it and doesn't have room for, like, distressing thoughts and... So what Zen offers is this kind of radically inclusive refuge, and a refuge in a kind of freedom that doesn't depend on chopping off anything. Not the world, not our everyday lives, not petty thoughts, not overreacting. This stuff is, there's room for all of that in this kind of real and whole freedom. that we try to practice toward. Yeah, it's not opposed to the world. It's of the world, this practice. So we talk about the middle way.

[11:58]

And again, for me, there's this idea, it's like this dynamic. When we're just like standing in our You know, when you're standing still and you're... I mean, I feel like this happened probably to us more when we were children and people were like, stay still. This is impossible, right? Like, you're kind of... There's all these micro-movements involved in being balanced. I think that the middle way is like that. It's like the location of an electron. You know, how we know this now. You can't really, like... You can't say it's here. You can say mostly it's around here because it's alive and it's moving around where it is. And the reason it does that is because it's in relationship to other things like protons and neutrons. The middle way is like that. It's alive and moving around.

[12:59]

And so the effort of practice in Zen is to stay with that. Like where is it now? Where is it? We can swing way over to one direction, but then we kind of right ourselves. Okay, now I've got a little balance, and then whoop, and I'm over here. So that's how I understand the practice of the middle way. But I think that idea is a little bit hard to start with. It takes a while, and I would say maybe we should even encourage that for a while we just... that it's a skillful means to come to practice and say, just sit over here for a while, just be quiet. Things are okay. There's just a wall. It's not going to do anything to you. And then we turn toward the wall. So we start with taking refuge there. But then we get up. And we do stuff.

[14:01]

There's a Zen story of a... a student in China a long time ago going to a teacher named Zhao Zhou and saying, what is meditation? And Zhao Zhou says, it's not meditation. And he could have left it at that maybe. The student could have been like, oh yeah. But he was maybe smarter to be, or he was more genuine than that. And he's like, well, how is it not meditation? And Zhao Zhao says, it's alive! It's alive! He says it twice with an exclamation point in English. Or in its translation. So it's living. It's a living dynamic practice. I'm going to stay abstract for a little bit more and then I'll say something concrete. But the last abstract thing I wanted to talk about was so we talk about in Zen the two truths.

[15:07]

And if I'm being super reductive, the idea is, on the one side, the relative truth of reality. This is where our everyday lives mostly occur, mostly, where we have particularity. There's lots of things in relative reality, like we are different people. We can't read each other's minds. We have particular karmic streams. We do boring things. We do dumb things. This is all. And we do concrete things, material things. And then there's ultimate or absolute reality. Ultimate reality I like more, which is speaking to how sort of the opposite of this. The way we're connected. The way that all things are quiet. Often, if we are people who are inclined to the spiritual, so these things exist like this.

[16:14]

They're parallel. They're two and they're equal. If we're spiritual people, we tend to kind of go like, we want to do this, and put the ultimate one higher. It's transcendent. It's quiet. It's nice. Everybody's the same. There's not so many problems, we imagine. But Zen is like, uh-uh. They go like this. They live like this. We live in a dynamic exchange between them. Our particular stuff, the particulars of each of our lives is expressed over here in the ultimate truth. And the ultimate truth is expressed through the particulars of our lives. In fact, that's actually, as human beings, the only way we encounter it. So sometimes we lean over here At places like Green Gulch, we have something like Sashin, where we really kind of close down things as much as possible and sit, and it's really quiet, and we take refuge in... Well, I mean, you'd think you'd take refuge, but there's plenty of relative reality happening, you know, thoughts and food and...

[17:35]

jealousies and confusion. And these two things dancing this way in an equal balance with each other is, well, has a long history of evolution. But there was a guy also a long time ago in China named Jerry Yi, who, this idea of the two truths comes from way back, but it he was afraid it was getting a little bit brittle. He was afraid people were doing this thing too much and that they were making the transcendent higher. And he wanted to write it like this and talk about how neither one is a place to abide and that the middle way, so this is his definition of the middle way, the middle way Buddha nature, the middle way that exists at that node between them, is it's not a third truth either, because he thought, well, people, that could just get brittle, too.

[18:38]

It's round. It's not a polarity. It's a roundness, and it's whole, and it includes both. And the other attributes that he was like, this is really important that it's dynamic and alive and vital. He uses the words dynamic and imminent and vital. And the reason he... was espousing this was because he was like, because our practice is to help beings in the suffering world, in this world of suffering. It's to help relieve suffering. And if we're all lost in something that's transcending the world, that's not going to help. It's not going to have any function. And the middle way, as he understands it, has function. And I agree with him. So there's this... The whole truth is where the everydayness of our lives meets up with the complete reality of how everything is totally connected.

[19:43]

I didn't anticipate actually sitting here. I thought I was going to be sitting... When I pictured this situation, I thought I'd be sitting on one of these sides, but above me here is a figure named Jizo. I'm not supposed to turn around because I have a herniated disc, but I'm gonna look at him for just a second. I looked at him a lot, though. I really like this figure. And that's really fun to be sitting in his field of juju. And then over here, On the other side is Manjushri. I mean, there's also Buddha, but he's somewhat outsized by Manjushri. And these two large figures, and then there's Tara behind me too. But I'll talk about the bigger figures just because I was thinking about this zendo and I was thinking about this dynamic. So Manjushri always sits in a zendo and holds the archetype, he's the archetype of wisdom.

[20:56]

And he's sitting, and he looks pretty contemplative, you know, and still and quiet, at least from where I'm sitting. And Jizo Bodhisattva is the archetype of fearlessness and engagement, or that's how I'm seeing it a lot lately, engagement in the world. Jizo has a great capacity is to go into hell realms, so to walk into the fires of suffering. And she carries a jewel. of fearlessness, the wish-fulfilling jewel, but like the emblem of fearlessness to move with ease into places of suffering. Wendy, I live up in Sebastopol and teach at the Stone Creek Zen Center, and Wendy Johnson, who has lived a lot at Green Gulch and founded the garden here, gave a talk up there, and she was talking about these two figures in this zendo, and her thought about it was, we don't cross the middle, and She did this beautiful description of how, because there's this field between these two beings, you know.

[22:01]

And when we cross the middle, but when we cross the middle, we bow. We honor that we're crossing in the middle of this dynamic between stillness, quiet wisdom, contemplative repose, and activity, engagement, fearlessly walking into hell realms, that genoism. And I really like that. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, this is so cool. This is right here in the Zendo, right? The practice of people who sit every day is held between, I mean, not to the little Buddha who's there, or Tara who's here, and these other guys who are around. But still, the big ones are these big archetypes of sitting, quiet, not moving, standing, walking, engaging. And that when we sit zazen, we're in that field that they make of engagement and of repose. And that's pretty cool.

[23:06]

Or to me, that's Zen practice. So I can give you some examples of how this engagement dynamic works for me, just so I can be a little more concrete. ideas I'm espousing here. So one is that when I came to practice, I was in a lot of pain. As I mentioned, my whole world concept had unraveled quite a bit. And I was in my early 20s, and my mom had died when I was 22. She was 47, which I'm about to be 46. She's getting younger in my mind. And it was super painful. I was really close to my mom. And her death actually was this thing that happened that wasn't supposed to happen. It was so profoundly real for me.

[24:11]

Like, that couldn't happen. And my parents were like, oh, no, that can't happen, unfortunately. Because when it did happen, it was hard. And, yeah, like I said, I crawled my way eventually into San Francisco City Center. And I was going to sit and sit and sit. I got my way eventually down to Tassajara, and I would sit all the time. And then they would finish for the day, and I'd keep sitting. And I was like, I'm just going to blow up this situation of pain. Or melt it away or something. I don't know what I was going to do, but it was not going to bother me anymore that mortal people who I loved could die. That was the goal. So I worked with that for a while, it turns out. I've given up. Excuse me. Happily, other, not happily, not happily at all, other circumstances and other people's deaths have had me.

[25:12]

I have to stay engaged with that, with grief and loss and learning about the human condition of response to loss. And it just turns out it's painful. I'm like, I'm done with resisting that. So what I thought I was gonna do was get to a place where I wouldn't feel that pain anymore. But where I feel like I'm at right now, and I'm perfectly happy to stay here, is I'm no longer bothered with the fact that it really bothers me. So my sense of equanimity is not that people I love dying doesn't bother me. It's that That it bothers me doesn't bother me. And I don't resist it anymore. Yeah, I know it's going to happen. If somebody's going to die or I hear somebody who I love dies, I'm like, okay, here it comes. And I also know now that that's healing, actually. I don't think pain itself is suffering, actually.

[26:18]

For me, anyway, it's the resistance to pain that's suffering. So with that dynamic, like if I could put that in my visual model, here's a place where I have no feeling. Not such a cool place to live as a human being. But that, you know, one place where I'm not bothered by anything. Over here where I'm in anguish about people dying. And for me, the middle way is that this is all right. That this actually has a place. My pain and anguish has a place. And it doesn't eliminate my equanimity and my repose and my balance. We can swing way over here and be in excruciating amounts of pain. And there's still aspects of our balance that are there. And we find our way back. So that's one that sort of developed for me. But another example that kept coming up for me as I was thinking about this talk, and interestingly,

[27:22]

I didn't know that the theme for this summer at Green Gulch Farm is the intersection of race and Buddhism. But this is another example for me of practicing with this dynamic of the middle way. If I think about how I feel about Zen practice or the Buddha Dharma, I love it. Like I love this practice and it's endlessly complex and interesting to me and I just love it. And it gave me life. I was in a place of deep despair. I wasn't ever suicidal when I came to practice, but I was living in a world that was pretty gray and colorless. And I remember living at Tassajara and kind of noticing that things were starting to flicker back into color. And I couldn't help myself. I started to love people. So frustrating. I was like, oh, God, they're mortal.

[28:27]

Such a bummer. But I just couldn't help it. The practice actually supported me, my heart to heal and love that I'm actually wired to do to happen again. Yeah. Now I have all this liability around me. So there's a place over here where there's a truth for me of the Buddha Dharma is transcendently available to all beings. Buddha nature is everybody's nature. It's a birthright for all beings to encounter the Dharma and to practice it. So this is sort of in the ultimate realm of thinking. And it's not untrue. It's a truth. And the Buddhadharma is, in this sense, is not culturally bound. But then there's also Zen practice, which has pretty intense cultural and particular cultural heritage.

[29:40]

And as we practice it here and as the founding teachers here, we're from Japan. So there's this side where I could just kind of rest there, you know, be like, I love this practice. But then sometimes I look down or even like experience myself and I can feel, you know, I feel my, I can feel my human body. And it's kind of, it's a little tired. I feel it right now. A little bit getting over being sick. And then there's my pinkish brownish skin, which is a evidence of my European heritage on both of my biological parents' sides. That's in this picture with freckles, which is about my Irish heritage. And then I have on, like, Western underwear.

[30:42]

And then I have on this white layer and gray layer, a jubon and a kimono, and an obi wrapped around my waist. That's a Japanese... These are Japanese-style clothing. And then there's this black robe, which is, as I understand it, it's a Japanese version of a Chinese scholar's robe. And then on top of that is this brown robe that's in the pattern of a rice field, which is, the pattern is attributed to the historical Buddha himself. But I sewed it with my hands, and the fabric's from the United States. And sometimes when I look down at this situation that is happening, I wonder about cultural appropriation and my place in it and what this is for people.

[31:45]

I wonder it all the time. I think some other white, I often get asked the question, what do you do? And when I move around in the world outside of Zen centers, I wear Western American-ish clothes for the most part. And I don't shave my head usually. Sometimes I do. I have a 14-year-old daughter. It's kind of hard on her if I shave my head. So I acquiesce. I go middle way on that sometimes. But I do wonder about this situation that includes, you know, So there's this way, like, this is so intimate to practice Zen. It's so intimate to me. It's so integrated to my body. And I can lean over here and be like, oh, maybe, I don't know, maybe it's like lifetimes of resonance. You know, who cares about this cultural? It's so much more comfortable over here, actually, for me. But there are these questions over here, you know? Why is my Dharma name in Japanese? I don't speak Japanese.

[32:48]

I know some words in it, but I've never been to Japan. What is it? mean you know there's this edward saeed has this term orientalism the kind of reification and i and idealization of things asian but it's also like it totally depends on a colonial mind you know which totally depends on on a white supremacist mind i participate in that there's no doubt am i entitled to wear these robes I mean, how does it look for her? My next-door neighbor was in a Japanese internment camp, a Japanese-American internment camp. As far as I know, she's never seen me in my robes. How would it be for her? People in this country, Japanese-American families who had to wipe out all traces of their relationship to Buddhism because it was a liability. How is my occupying this situation for them?

[33:48]

So this, for me, is an engagement of the middle way. And this is, you know, over here is a little uncomfortable. I could lean further and, like, take my robes off and not be like, okay, well, I have no right. I have no right. And that might be a legitimate way to go, actually. There's so much of my life is tied into Zen. If I did that, though, it would depend on chopping off this part of me. that loves and cherishes this practice and is given life by it. And because of that, I feel like it's probably not the way to go if I have to lop off something. But, you know, when someone comes up to me and says, what are you doing in those clothes? I don't have to, like, just hide over here and be like, oh, you know, Buddhism has always moved through different cultures and different appropriations happening, which is true. But... But cultural appropriation, when I occupy a place of privilege, is a different kind of problem.

[34:56]

It's a different thing to bring into my awareness. And it's painful for me. But it also feels alive and true and whole to not try to lop off that being open to questioning that. and also being open to other people saying, can you help me understand this? Because I find it offensive that you're wearing those robes. No one's ever said that directly to me, but I can imagine that situation. And again, I think it's a legitimate thing to put into this dynamic. We're almost out of time, but I wanted to tell you a story that when I was in 10th grade, as an example of this, I went to an all-girls Catholic high school, but I feel like I have to qualify and say, like, it was pretty extraordinary education.

[36:00]

And in 10th grade, we were studying world history, and my teacher was doing a block on world religions, and this guy was going to come in and talk about Buddhism, and I was really excited. I don't know why. I wish I could go back, and I have no idea what impression I had about Buddhism in my life. My world that was like half Catholic and half Jewish. But I had some idea that I would like it, I think. And I was really looking forward to it. And when I walked into the classroom that day, there was my teacher and there was this white guy in jeans and a sweater. And I was really disappointed. I was like, I mean, at first I was just disappointed. And I was like, you know, I was 15, right? So I was like, what a poser. And he talked about something. I lived in Massachusetts, so my guess is that he was part of Insight Meditation Society. And I think maybe he had trained in Asia, but then I don't really remember because I was too stuck in my mind being like, ugh.

[37:09]

And then I got mad. Later on, I was mad. I thought like, what right? I actually thought that. What right does he have to call himself a Buddhist? It did not fit my image of it. And maybe there was a little nascent consciousness, you know, that cultural appropriation was part of his story. And now, like, I'm that guy. Sometimes high schoolers call up and say, like, can I come and talk to you about this? And I tell them this story because I'm like, I just want you to know. I'm aware of the fact I am that guy, you know. But I'm open to talking about how I'm that guy. And I think it's important. And for me, it's a living dynamic to talk about how I'm that guy. What is this? And can I look? Can I be in relationship to the parts that are painful? The things that feel like entitlement and confusion and really things like privilege of education and

[38:16]

Wealth and all this stuff, all this stuff. And I wish that was more developed so I could tell you that I got somewhere useful, like jury, you know, like that there's a functional thing. But for me, anyway, the functional thing there is that I'm not close to talking about it and seeing it and looking for myself at the pain of it. In the perfection of wisdom of 8,000 lines, it says, Bodhisattvas are not impeccable. So Zen practice is like, this is not a path of purity, but it's a path of wholeness. It's a path of vital engagement of everything that we hold. It's a path of fearlessness in the sense that our engagement with freedom doesn't depend on closing our eyes to anything.

[39:19]

It's a whole round truth and it's alive. That's it. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:06]

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