To taste the truth of the Tathāgata's words. Good morning. Can you hear me? I confess that I don't feel like talking much. In the last 11 days, we've heard words piled up upon words, words, image piled up upon image. It wouldn't be surprising if we're all just a little, getting just a little tired of it. So I'm going to try to be brief. But it does seem incumbent upon me to say something.

[01:08]

A time of mourning is not a time to talk away our pain or our fear or our grief. It is a time, I think, to press for a cooler look at the scrambled workings of our delusions, both personal and collective. A Sangha member asks that I announce that this sitting be dedicated to world peace. But I must say, of course, all our practice is dedicated to peace and the welfare of all beings. Always. And that's what we're here for. Whatever peace and harmony are found when sitting on our cushions,

[02:21]

it's what we take forward into our daily lives. Today is no different. It's just we're more responsive to that requirement. The karmic consequences of human intentions and actions are, as we have painfully witnessed, visited again upon the world. You and I know only too well that greed, hate and delusion are found within our own hearts. For me, the phrase we use, saving all beings, begins with sitting with that being in me called hate, that being in me called lust, that being in me called fear, that being in me called rage.

[03:32]

But we must beware. The little daily vexations and irritations we all experience come at first to us as guests, until slowly they take over and grow huge and become the host and the demons. Crowding out everything else. It is noteworthy, I think, that today is the Anamekwanaks, the time when the sun enters the sign of Libra, the sign of peace, the sign that stands for the unity of self and other. The merging of difference and unity, of fair play and equal sharing.

[04:36]

A time when dark and light balance each other for a moment only, like two hands touching in perfect harmony. And then the scales tip, the night force gradually begins to close in. The seasons change, sometimes gently, sometimes not. The buds of spring, the green leaves of summer, the yellow leaves of autumn, the bare tree limbs of winter. The rhythms and cycles of endless change. Such is the look and feel, the more common look and feel of our impermanence. I think catastrophe only gives it an edge, dramatizes our passing event. I would wish to remind us that the story of Shakyamuni Buddha

[05:50]

is the story of each one of us. The story of being shocked into sudden awareness by the sights of misery. That indeed, we come to realize how we live in a world of manifest change and mortality. We remember that realization, that the realization of this suffering is, is, the motivation for our moving toward the light. When we watched on our TV screens the pictures of those two iconic towers crumbling like sand castles, I couldn't help hearing the words we chant in the Fukan Zazengi.

[06:58]

Form and substance like dew on the grass, like a dart of lightning, emptied in an instant, vanished in a flash. Or the jingle I remember from my child which ends with the words, ashes, ashes, all fall down. At that moment, I think, we all knew with a sinking feeling that our world or whatever world we had hung on to was changed forever. Whether for better or worse, no one can say for sure. Or whether in the big picture, those terms even apply. It wasn't for me an unfamiliar feeling, this ground dropping away underfoot. I'm old enough to remember well December 7th, 1941, when the world suddenly changed.

[08:06]

We all knew with the same feeling we had this week that it would never be the same. Again on August 6th and shortly thereafter, when the newspapers began to come out with pictures of those mushroom clouds billowing up over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we knew again that nothing would ever be the same, or could be. And I think some of the same kind of experience we felt and witnessed in 1963 when President Kennedy was killed, and later that same decade when his brother Robert fell to an assassin's bullet along with Martin Luther King. And then we watched our inner cities being torched by people enraged and frustrated by injustice. For me, I must say that it still seems astonishing.

[09:19]

Astonishing how naive and innocent we seem to be, even after what might well prove to be the bloodiest century in our human history. And in fact, the whole history of the world is sometimes viewed as nothing more than page after page soaked in blood, and buried in the rubble again and again. Flames, smoking debris, the salvage operations, the bringing out, the burying of the dead. If I need any reminder of why I practice, I need only summon those images. And finally, I must say that sitting as we do here today is, and must be, a kind of dying.

[10:39]

Dying to the past, dying to all our plans, hopes, and expectations. It is as if to sit among our ruins, our pain, and to let go of everything. All our reference points. I was told that once, during a seishin, Suzuki Roshi suddenly shouted out, Just die! Even enlightenment won't save you now. So today, let us, breath after breath, let go of our usual strategies. Let go of hatching plans, and let go of even trying to brace our hearts against the raw and terrifying edge of existence.

[11:42]

We come here to unclench our minds and fists, to unclench them, to gather and to sit in silence and go even beyond the need for comfort or consolation. Maybe it's just my time in life, but I want to simplify. To consign the rest of my days to whatever fate awaits me, instead of scolding or preaching or complaining or blaming. I feel like an old grandmother who just wants to cradle some her child in her hands, rock it gently and murmur, they're there. I'd like to end with a poem. Maybe two poems, actually.

[12:54]

Let us remember that on Vulture Peak the Buddha held up a flower, and Mahakasyapa smiled. A single flower, one smile, and the whole universe bloomed. A single flower, and the universe blooms. It's called Shobogenzo, the true treasury of the Dharmai. And that true treasury has come all the way down through the centuries to us here today. What good fortune, what good fortune. The last poem. I used to want buyers for my words. Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.

[13:57]

I've made a lot of charmingly profound images with this saint or that father, famous for their icons. I'm so tired of what I've been doing. Then one image came without form and I quit. Look for someone else to tend the shop. I'm out of the image making business. Finally I know the freedom of madness. A random image arrives, I scream, get out! It disintegrates. Only love. Only the holder the flag fits into. And wind. No flag. Rumi, born 1207 in Afghanistan. Thank you. Now, I would prefer that we don't engage in questions and answers today.

[15:09]

But, if there's something in your heart, some poem, some particular line or phrase or feeling that you would like to bring forward and it fits the time and place. Let's take a minute and see if anybody has something like that they would like to say. Afterwards we'll go back to sitting. Silence is the best mantra of all.

[16:14]

Thank you. Thank you.

[16:31]

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