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. Good morning, everyone. Good morning to those of you in the Great Assembly who are not in the Zendo in Green Gulch Farm this morning. And to those of you who are, it's a beautiful, peaceful day here. You can hear the birds outside. The sun is out. The air is warming up after a couple of days of cold, frosty mornings. And I wanted to start by acknowledging what's going on in the world.

[01:11]

What is all over the headlines for those of you who dare to read the news. This war. This incredible violence. That, you know, right now we're calling Russia and Ukraine, but also we could call Myanmar, Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan. The list goes on and on, this sickness. Of human beings. That leads us to.

[02:13]

Such terrible violence. So. And I'll think about the reasons why we are sitting in this room or why we are sitting in our homes. Tuning into a Dharma talk. on a Sunday morning in the beautiful places we're probably living. And I imagine that some of the reasons are very close to home that have to do with this body and mind, the suffering over here, but maybe some inkling or maybe some deep realization of how the suffering over here is connected to the suffering over there. And the longing for all of us to be free, to not cause harm, you know, to support life, to understand how we're all connected.

[03:25]

You know, and I will just say those are just armed conflicts, right? I mean, that's not talking about the police state in this country. the war on black and brown bodies, the violence of poverty, the violence of injustice. So, you know, I think it's good not to lean too far into this pain, but to remember it and hold it tenderly to carry it with us in a, you know... We can make a small nest in our hearts for the suffering of the world to care for it, to show a great compassion and understand that the great compassion that we are all practicing to embody is great compassion for the whole world.

[04:35]

This morning, I wanted to talk a little bit about a talk Suzuki Roshi gave quite a long time ago that I found and find very helpful on this path to realizing non-separation and non-violence. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about it this morning. When I first started practicing Zazen, or really when I was so new to Buddhist practice that I didn't even know what Zazen was or what I was doing, I read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I was on my way to Green Gulch to become a farm apprentice and a Zen student.

[05:36]

But I hadn't yet arrived and I didn't really understand what I was getting into. Maybe that's happening to some of you right now. But I had a feeling of what I was moving towards. A feeling based on an initial visit I had made to Green Gulch. A feeling based on the way that the... people living here, the teachers spoke to me and sat with me, how I saw them walk around the temple, how I saw them sit in the zendo. And I had some feeling based on my own body sitting in the pre-dawn darkness in this zendo with the smell of incense and the dim light. you know, not really understanding, but having some, something, there was something.

[06:47]

And that was mostly my experience when I read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. I didn't really understand, but I knew somehow that there was something there for me. But there was one that I remember clearly making an impression because it named something so clearly that resonated so deeply that it was like a knife or a sword cutting through the haze of my confusion, my experience of life. And I felt like Suzuki Roshi was speaking directly to me And my suffering, the feeling of separation and fear that was at the core of my experience of being alive. And he was, amazingly, across space and time, because he had already been, he had died 30 years prior to my reading this talk.

[08:04]

but he was still conveying and transmitting what I now know is wisdom and compassion. Through the words on the page, I could feel the warmth of his embodied understanding. And somehow I could feel through his words that there was some experience of being alive that was beyond my suffering. And I would say that all my practice since then has been to slowly, slowly start to understand through my own body and mind and through my own daily life where that warmth came from and what Suzuki Roshi was pointing to. You know, something larger, a path that offers relief.

[09:07]

from the suffering I felt so acutely at that point in my life, and actually relief from the suffering that we all feel, the root of suffering. Nirvana, the waterfall, was the talk which Suzuki Roshi gave in August 1965 that made such an impression on me. And the talk gets its name from a story Suzuki Roshi tells about a visit to Yosemite. I imagine many of you know this story and many of you know this talk from the book. As you may recall, he says, I went to Yosemite National Park and I saw some huge waterfalls. The highest one there is 1,350 feet.

[10:08]

And from it, the water comes down like a curtain thrown from the top of the mountain. It does not seem to come down swiftly as you might expect. It seems to come down very slowly because of the distance. And the water does not come down as one stream, but is separated into many tiny streams. From a distance, it looks like a curtain. And I thought, it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. still strikes me that this is an incredibly kind and compassionate thing to say.

[11:09]

To care so much for the experience of each drop of water that he would notice and consider its difficulty in falling. Yeah, I still find this way of thinking and speaking very touching. And I imagine it's part of why I could really hear this talk, why it made such an impression on me. It must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It's not indulgent, not leaning into the difficulty, nor explaining it away or running from the difficulty. It's just stating it with a kind, And direct gaze. Hearing or reading someone name this truth.

[12:11]

The first noble truth. The truth of suffering. That the Buddha taught. In such a compassionate way. Was life changing for me. Little did I know it then. And then there was something else. There was another side. Which was subtle. And resonant with my. deepest longing, which was the truth of wholeness. After he held up the truth of suffering, he said, But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. When the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it.

[13:22]

It resumes its own nature and finds composure. How very glad the water must be to come back. I love that. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river. You know, I feel the sympathetic joy in these words, you know, reading this. I'm so glad for the water. You know, how wonderful. I feel glad for the water, and I felt Suzuki Roshi did too. You know, and I think back, it's kind of hard to reach all the way back there, but I do remember how I longed to feel glad. That's my deepest desire, you know, to feel connected, to come back to the original river.

[14:29]

I longed to know that I, too, might be like the water and realize connection and composure to be in whole and complete relationship with everything I felt so painfully separate from. So in this image of Suzuki Roshi's, the falling individual drops of water are the first noble truth, the fact of our suffering in our human lives. And this coming back to the original oneness, the original river, is the third noble truth, the cessation of suffering. He talks about this third noble truth in terms of nirvana, nirvana the waterfall, or returning to oneness after our individual self ceases to exist, conventionally known as death. So this is in the talk.

[15:32]

that he gave in 1965. This is what he is talking about, the cessation of suffering. And also in terms of mind only or essence of mind or big mind. He talks about those things as how we were before we were born. and where we go after we die as individual selves. That we will be one with the universe. But about realizing this third noble truth, returning to the original river, he says, when the water returns to its original oneness with the river, It no longer has any individual feeling to it.

[16:33]

It resumes its own nature and finds composure. And I think this is hard to understand, right? When the water drops from the waterfall, which is us, right? Each of us, human beings, sentient beings, return to our original oneness. We no longer have any individual feeling. It's hard to understand because as human beings, all we have, all we have direct access to are our individual feelings. We know the world through these body minds, right? We know the world through these sense organs, sight, smell. taste, touch, thoughts, through this sense apparatus. The teaching that in wholeness there is no individual consciousness to experience it, that in big mind there is nothing to grasp with our small mind, cannot be comprehended in the way we normally comprehend the world.

[17:51]

The oneness of the river is The oneness of the river is not something the drop of water can experience directly. This is a tricky point and one that it seems like Suzuki Roshi knew would be difficult as he was giving this talk. He says, we will have composure then. It may be too perfect for us just now because we are so much attached to our own feeling, our own individual existence. It's hard to understand or accept that non-duality, big mind, original oneness is not perfect.

[18:53]

an experience we can have through consciousness. And that is why I think he begins and ends his talk emphasizing the fourth noble truth, which is the path of practice. The path is the practice, the aspiration, the enactment, And eventually the embodiment of how the first and third noble truths are not separate. That suffering and liberation are in the same place. That truth, the truth that the individual drop and the original river have never been apart. The path of practice is not trading one for the other.

[19:53]

Although, you know, who hasn't wished that practice would take away my suffering and give me liberation instead? Let's get rid of this suffering and let's get some liberation, right? Who hasn't wished it would take away a small mind and give us a big magnanimous mind? The path of practice is finding composure through embodying the relationship between big mind and small mind, between Buddha nature and human nature, between nirvana and samsara. As Suzuki Roshi says, by your practice of zazen, you can cultivate this feeling of seeing the beauty of our human life. When you can sit with your whole body and mind and with the oneness of your mind and body under the control of the universal mind, you can easily attain this kind of right understanding.

[21:05]

When you can sit with your whole body and mind and with the oneness of your whole body and This piece about under the control of the universal mind, that language seems a little rough, maybe, to me. You know, I think what he's getting at is not separate from the universal mind, you know. Under the control is like giving up. The small mind running the show and opening to what is really happening. You know. What is really happening beyond our human thoughts. Beyond our human mind.

[22:08]

Yeah. So this is where I think the image of the waterfall really comes alive. And really reveals itself to be an amazing teaching about non-duality. I feel like it's the clearest image I've ever received about the relationship between form and emptiness. And between suffering and freedom and our human nature and our Buddha nature that I have come across. Because it's not that there was a before when the river was whole and then an after when the river was not whole. No one looks at a waterfall and thinks it is anything other than the river falling. Our mind is able to look at a waterfall and understand that it is something we call waterfall and experience as waterfall.

[23:15]

while understanding at the exact same time that it's the river. You know, we can use language to talk about the river above or before the waterfall, and the river during the waterfall, and the river after the waterfall. But we understand all of these things to be the river. The same water moving in different ways. And when you see a really high waterfall, it's hard not to be kind of impressed. You know, to feel some kind of awe or amazement at what the river is doing. You know, we're able to kind of pause and notice and think, look, isn't that amazing? Some years ago, I went to Iguazu, which actually turns out it's the world's largest waterfall system.

[24:27]

It's on the border of Brazil and Argentina. And on the Argentina side, you can walk around on all these viewing platforms and see the waterfall. It's like a semicircular waterfall with all these little waterfalls all over, and it has multiple layers. And you can go... See it from above on the Argentinian side. And then you can cross the border and go to the Brazil side and see it from below. And it is like totally amazing. If you ever see like a nature documentary with footage of a waterfall, it's probably that waterfall. Yeah, it's massive. And you feel it, especially from below, you feel it with your whole body. You know, it's like the vibration of all that water. falling at once you know and millions of people visit this waterfall every year to to be amazed right to actually like let me stop and take some time out of my life and be amazed really notice how amazing life is what this water is doing so yeah it's it's hard to miss the beauty

[25:44]

And we intuitively understand without any special effort that the waterfall is just the river. Right? Yet somehow we do not intuitively understand that our own life too. Everything we hear and see and touch and taste and think. is in exactly the same way. Just nirvana. Just big mind. Just the whole universe. Just the river falling. In our usual daily lives, it is hard for us to see that life is one thing, expressing and experiencing itself in many forms.

[26:49]

Freedom from the delusion of separation that underlies, the separation that underlies all of the greed, hate, and delusion that leads to wars, that leads to thinking some people are more important than other people, trying to protect this one and hurting that one. Freedom from the delusion of separation arises when we understand that all the drops of the waterfall, no matter how different they are, no matter which way they fall or how they are blown or who they are next to or what size they are, all have the same river nature.

[27:56]

When we know that while we can perceive them as separate drops, they are nothing but, nothing in addition to the whole river, we experience freedom to be with them in a different way and to enjoy them as our life. In the talk, Suzuki Roshi says, we say everything comes out of emptiness. One whole river or one whole mind is emptiness. When we reach this understanding, we find the true meaning of our life. When we reach this understanding, we can see the beauty of human life. The point of his talk and of this talk is that the drops have this emptiness, this big mind, this original oneness.

[29:10]

before the river falls, over the cliff when it looks like a curtain, before so-called birth, and during what we call life, and even after they reach the bottom and become one river again, what we call death. The drops have this emptiness. It is wonderful for us to realize this and to understand and appreciate that oneness. And yet, our Zen practice is broader than that. Practice does not depend on our understandingness. Practice this... liberating zen way of meeting our life and enjoying our life and enjoying others however it appears however others appear to us is available to us before during and after some time when we may have this understanding and although Suzuki Roshi emphasizes and appreciates this feeling of practice

[30:32]

You know, it's inspirational, right, when we have this feeling. The truth is that practice does not even depend on any particular feeling. It took me years of not having any particular feeling to appreciate this, you know. So... If you recall, if you've read this talk, you know that it doesn't begin with the story of the waterfall. The talk begins with Suzuki Roshi telling us how Dogen Zenji practiced and how he, Suzuki Roshi, practiced at a Heiji monastery when he was a monk. He says, if you go to Japan and visit a Heiji monastery, just before you enter, you will see a small bridge called Hansha Kukyo, which means half-dipper bridge.

[31:36]

Whenever Dogen Zenji dipped water from the river, he used only half a dipper full, returning the rest to the river again without throwing it away. That is why we call the bridge half-dipper bridge. At a Heiji, when we wash our face, We fill the basin to just 70% of its capacity. After we wash, we empty the water towards rather than away from our body. This expresses respect for the water. We do this here at Green Gulch during Orioki. There's a water offering. We offer the water we use to wash our bowls, and we pour it towards our own body. just the way Suzuki Roshi did, and the way that Dogen did. This expresses respect for the water. This kind of practice is not based on any idea of being economical.

[32:42]

It may be difficult to understand why Dogen returned half of the water he dipped to the river. This kind of practice is beyond our thinking. What he's telling us, I think, is that how we act in our everyday life, in body, speech, and mind, is the essence of the way. If we practice sincerely with everything, even washing our face in the morning, we will return to our true nature. Or maybe when we practice sincerely with way-seeking mind, the mind of awakening, we have returned to our true nature. When we feel the beauty of the river, when we are one with the water, we intuitively do it.

[33:51]

In Dogen's way, it is our true nature to do so. But if your true nature is covered by ideas of economy or efficiency, Dogen's way makes no sense. I will say that I have found, painfully, through years of personal experience, that although we often wish to leap from suffering to liberation, you know, to the cessation of suffering, to the third noble truth, you know, this longing for enlightenment that's going to feel totally different than our everyday life. What our practice life is about is the second and fourth noble truths, studying the cause of suffering and the path of practice. Suzuki Roshi mentions the second noble truth almost in passing, you know, just briefly, halfway in.

[34:57]

He says, you have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. Right? So this is pointing to the study of how suffering arises of the 12-fold chain of causation. which is really worth studying and contemplating deeply, not just as words on a page, but how it operates in our own daily life, kind of moment after moment. It's really amazing how we ourselves create a self, moment after moment, and then practicing intimately with this self, with each of these selves, meaning practicing compassionately and practicing patiently and practicing diligently with the arising of the self and studying how it is that we ourselves can take responsibility

[36:18]

for the arising of suffering that accompanies the arising of the self. Moment after moment, then maybe we can understand Suzuki Roshi's teaching. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, We have no fear of death anymore. And we have no actual difficulty in our life. The thing is, you have to go through the difficulty. You have to study the difficulty. You cannot leap over the difficulty. I'm sorry. We could also say, when we realize this fact, we have no fear of failure anymore. And we have no difficulty in our life. Or when we realize this fact, we have no fear of separation anymore.

[37:21]

And we have no difficulty in our life. When we have no fear anymore, there is no need for violence. To talk about it in this way is quite easy, Suzuki Roshi said. But to have the actual feeling is not so easy. But by your practice of Zazen, you can cultivate this feeling. When you have this feeling, you naturally act like Dogen did. You care for the water. But even before you have this feeling, if you have sincere practice, it is the same. You can care for the water. When we care for the water, when we care for our life, when we care for everything, long enough we may realize what the feeling he was talking about is and that it has been here all along.

[38:29]

The gift of practice, this path that I stumbled on, when I came to Green Gulch to become a farm apprentice and a Zen student, of sitting upright in the Zen Do and in everyday life, has helped me understand what Suzuki Roshi meant when he said, you will find the true meaning of your life. And even though you have difficulty falling upright, From the top of the waterfall to the bottom of the mountain. You will enjoy your life. Even though you have difficulty falling upright from the top of the waterfall to the bottom of the mountain. This life together that we have. You will enjoy your life.

[39:35]

And you will support others to do the same. was right. And my sincere wish is that all beings may realize this teaching together. So, deep gratitude for all the Buddhas and ancestors, for Suzuki Roshi's teaching reaching us. Over the space and time to all of the wonderful teachers at Green Gulch who have supported and continue to support so many people on this path. Who have embodied the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha and transmitted it to us through space and time. May we repay this kindness through our sincere practice.

[40:38]

Our everyday practice. which we dedicate to the liberation of all beings. Thank you very much. May we fully enjoy the Dorma.

[41:14]

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