Good morning. As always, it's a wonderful day to sit. The weather, the little cool fogginess is very supportive. I have something on my mind that I want to let you all know about, maybe some of you know about it already. And the lecture that I was working on, the Dharma talk I was working on, got set aside

[01:06]

somewhat when I heard some news on Thursday. And what I was told is that Lou Richmond, who maybe I know many of you know, some of you know very well, is in the hospital. Lou Richmond was the Tanto here, the head of practice for about eight years, leaving in the early 80s, and a disciple of Suzuki Roshi, ordained by Suzuki Roshi, and he is in the hospital with viral encephalitis, and he's in a coma. And it's unclear exactly what damage is happening and exactly what the outcome will be. So I'd like to dedicate this talk and the entire sitting today to the complete recovery

[02:16]

of Lou Richmond, and we'll be chanting the Enmei Juku Kanon Gyo for protecting life for noon service. So I just wanted to say a little bit about Lou, because it's been on my mind quite a bit. He's kind of at the culmination of a number of things in his life. Just this year, a new book came out, Work as Spiritual Practice. Maybe some of you have this, and he's been doing workshops on bringing spiritual practice into workplaces of all kinds. He's an entrepreneur in the computer department, and at the same time, he had a CD come out of his piano music. He's a composer and pianist. That came out this year. So just a number of wonderful things have happened for him.

[03:18]

And he did a class during the beginning of the year in February, he did a class on this work as a spiritual practice that took place out of Green Gulch. So Lou is exactly my age. He always seemed older to me, because he came to Zen Center first, he was senior to me in terms of practice life, and was ordained by Suzuki Roshi, and was the Tanto, and so forth. But he's 52, which seems really young to me right now. And his mind, he has an incredible, brilliant mind, really brilliant. And when he turned that attention to the Dharma and would teach classes, it was very clear

[04:34]

and very deep, wide, comprehensive understanding of Dharma. And so this, you know, the power of turning our attention towards someone who's not well and is struggling, or there's, I think there is power in that for people to direct their hearts and minds towards someone. And we're on some kind of list, Zen Center's Green Gulch is, on a list of some, I don't know what list this is, but we get letters from strangers who've never, don't even know what Green Gulch is, describing terrible things that are happening to their children and people they know, asking us to pray for their loved ones and remember them in our prayers.

[05:38]

And I think for the most part, we have the practice of bringing everyone in all ten directions into our prayers, you might say, within our services, because we, all the benefits of our chanting and sāsana and service and effort together, we dedicate to the merit of all beings in the ten directions. So we give it away, we don't keep it for ourselves, and that's a regular practice. So in some ways, all beings benefit from that giving away and not holding on. But specific people that we're in relationship with and know, or that someone knows, we chant

[06:39]

for in services very particularly, saying their name. So I just want to keep this in mind all day, and if I have any news, I'll let you know. So our life goes along and seems to be pretty regularly paced, difficulties, little ups and downs, bigger ups and downs, and yet we never know at what point some major change is going to happen. And the practice of zazen is the practice of being ready for anything.

[07:47]

Someone that I know pretty well recently, I've told a couple people this, but recently told me that she thought I was cowardly, cowardly, and it was hard to hear, partially because I don't like that, I don't like cowardliness, and I don't want to see that in myself. But what they were pointing out I think was pretty helpful, and I was able to, I'm still working on it, this isn't over yet, hear what they had to say, receive it, receive this comment, and study what they're talking about, what they see. So I looked up the word cowardly and I actually thought it came from the same word as cowed,

[08:58]

you know, to kind of someone who's cowed is kind of lowering the head and shrinking back, that kind of feeling. But actually the word cowardly comes from the Latin for tail, cauda. So a cowardly one, a cowardly person is one with their tail between their legs, you can kind of picture what that's like. So usually, like a dog anyway, you know, when they're meeting the world with joyous exuberance and devotion and trust, and their tails are up, right, and letting us know, up. But when there's fear or timidness or other, that may be anthropomorphic, but anyway, fear I think is, in Buddhist cosmology, the realm of, the animal realm and the six realms is

[10:01]

characterized by fear. So the animal realm, I think animals get startled and fearful and, so I'll say fear. So the tail goes between the legs and protecting and not wanting to be exposed and hiding out. So I remember very early one of the things that my father told his three girls around the dining room table, I think, was a coward dies a thousand deaths, a brave man, he said, brave person dies but once. And I recall thinking, I want to be the brave one. I don't want to die a thousand deaths at each difficult transition, at each new change,

[11:05]

at each dislike or pain or confrontation. I don't want to die at each one of those because it's never ending. It's all day long. I want to be the brave one and just at the end of my life, put my legs in full lotus and die. Well, I didn't think that when I was little, but that came later. So when this person said that, I was one with the tail between the legs. I had to look, what is it that I'm afraid of? In this particular instance that she was talking about, what am I afraid to meet? What am I trying to protect? What do I have to lose? What's going on here? Recently on NPR, there was an interview with James Farmer.

[12:16]

I believe that's his name, James Farmer, the civil rights leader who orchestrated and led the Freedom Rides in the South. And he passed away this week in his 70s, I think. So there was an interview about these Freedom Rides and what it was like. And his father, who was terminally ill, right about the time when he was heading off, asked him what the itinerary was. And his father was worried about him going down into the deep south, into Alabama and Mississippi. He thought he would be killed. And so right about that point at which he crossed into the deep south, his father passed away. And his mother said, he asked, where is he today? And at that point, he died. And so he was brought back.

[13:18]

He came back home and took care of all those things one takes care of around the death of someone in the family. And he felt he had a lot of things to do. And they were about to go into, I think, Mississippi. And so he had decided he wasn't going to go. And he had all these reasons. My father just died. And, you know, if something happened to me, it would be really hard for the other members of the family, my mother especially. And I've got a lot of paperwork to do and a lot of things to take care of. So he had all these reasons. And the young people who were getting in the buses and getting ready, they were singing, they were getting on the buses. And then they said he wasn't getting on. And they said, aren't you coming with us? And he said, well, no, actually I'm not. My heart will be with you, but I have, you know, my father just died. He named all these things. And he realized as he was saying them that they didn't hold water.

[14:21]

They were excuses. And he was afraid. He was afraid to go. And at that point, he just saw it, saw where he was coming from with these reasons, very good reasons, but what they were actually based in was fear. And he dropped it all and got on the buses, got on the bus. So when we examine our lives, when we examine what is going on with us, what is in the way for us to thoroughly live in accord with our own deepest intentions, in accord with our own innermost desires, as Yukiroshi said,

[15:23]

to live in accord with what is the most important, what we admire the most, what we long to be, to live in accord with that and to examine what it is that seems to be in the way for that to happen. So, what do we have to lose? So in Zazen, Reb Tenshin Roshi talks about Zazen as the ceremony of Zazen because Zazen itself actually is a formless practice that cannot be actually put into a box, like, you know, certain time of day in this room, Zazen goes on. Zazen actually can't be boiled down to just that.

[16:28]

Zazen is wider than. But in order to enact that understanding, we have what he calls the ceremony of Zazen. Actually, it's a translation of a word in Japanese that means ceremony. So the fukan zazengi is the universal admonitions for the ceremony of Zazen. So we have a way, we have particular forms of entering the zendo and bowing, bowing to our cushions, taking care of our place, chanting, doing service together, taking care of our neighbors through our own deportment, meaning muffling coughs and sneezes, walking very quietly, not rustling around at our places. These kinds of things are all part of the ceremony of Zazen

[17:30]

that takes place, you know, in a formal way. But the actuality of Zazen, it is not just that. Zazen is the expression of something that's bigger than that. But we're given this particular practice so that we understand how wide Zazen actually is. So there's a wide range of people today sitting, those for whom this is their first one-day sitting and those for whom they can't remember how many sesshins and sittings that they've done. And for each person, each person has their own way, their own unique, particular way,

[18:35]

the uniqueness of what is arising for you in your body and mind and emotional life during the day. Each person is completely unique, and yet we share together something, all sentient beings share our dependently co-arisen selves, meaning the fact that we are all dependent on each other and affect each other and actually exist only in relationship to each other and the whole world. We don't exist as independent beings. But within that, each person has their own unique way that we can either appreciate or be irritated by. You know, depending on what's going on with you,

[19:37]

you can have a lot of irritation and impatience with yourself and those around you or great appreciation, you know, it really depends. But both of those are kind of equal really in terms of fields of practice. You can examine what's going on when you're irritated with someone and you can examine what's going on when you're completely inspired by someone. The practice mind is the same in both. We do, however, tend to want to get away from the irritation and the unpleasant, and we want to cling to and get more of what we're inspired by and what we're pleased by. So the practice of patience actually comes up mostly,

[20:46]

almost completely in terms of being irritated, annoyed and angry. The practice of patience arises or it meets that. It's the only thing really to settle those states of mind. And patience, we sometimes think of patience as kind of grinning and bearing it or, you know, in the dentist's chair, I'm patiently letting her do it while my knuckles are turning white, just holding on for dear life, gritting our teeth, grinning and bearing it and just sort of holding on. So we think of that as the practice of patience because it kind of gets us through difficult times or an annoying person. You just, you know, tighten up and hope that they're finished soon or some feeling like that. But the actual practice of patience is, it's actually a relaxing and widening ourselves,

[21:54]

widening our mind, widening our body-mind so that we can include that which is irritating us or making us angry, an actual breathing and relaxing into as opposed to tightening up around and gritting our teeth. So this flavor of the kind of relaxing and making space for the unpleasant, the irritating, has enormous effects on all beings and on our own practice. And it allows us to tolerate, to tolerate the unknown really because we don't know. We don't know what's next. So to have this wide feeling in your mind

[22:58]

to relax and open to something even though we don't like it includes the whole world. Pat mentioned in her lecture on Wednesday the practice of friendliness, that I had brought up the practice of friendliness and I wanted to say a little bit about the practice of friendliness which is called, they say that the practice of friendliness has power, there's enormous power in the practice of friendliness to change the whole universe, to affect the entire universe. And some of the practice, Maitri is what's translated as friendliness. There's four, what they call the unlimited or the Brahma-viharas,

[23:58]

the four abodes, heavenly abodes in Buddhism and these practices are meditations really. They call them heavenly abodes but they're practices and meditations and ways to live and those are Maitri which is translated as friendliness and sometimes love, although we use the word love in so many different ways. In English, we love ice cream and we love our mother. So love, it's hard to know what we're talking about when we say love. So friendliness, it's often translated as friendliness. So that's Maitri, then there's Karuna which is compassion, Upeksha, equanimity and Mudita which is sympathetic joy. So these practices are part of a bodhisattva's way of life really and the practice of friendliness for a bodhisattva

[25:01]

includes lots of small details really if you read, which I could not find today for the list. I couldn't find the list to talk exactly from the list but there's all sorts of things. For example, the bodhisattva speaks first as the practice of friendliness. So, you know, how do you carry this out in your life? You know, sitting down at the dining room table or at dinner tonight, if those of you are going to stay, what would it be like to be the first one to introduce yourself or how was the sitting? We call this, sometimes people say, well, that's small talk and I don't really like small talk. But as Martha DeBarros was saying about hospice work, small talk is really necessary. It kind of greases the wheels, you know, or it's the lubricant for anything else to happen. So in hospice work,

[26:01]

if you come to visit a terminally ill person in great pain who's struggling and you don't sort of right away say, how do you feel about death? You know, are you afraid? You can't sort of leap in like that with someone. You first say, as Martha said, would you like the window open a little bit? These flowers are awfully beautiful that people are sending you or whatever. You make small talk. It's called small talk but it's really universal talk. It's the practice of friendliness that has great effects. Through this kind of interaction, someone begins to feel trusting and to open up or you pick up on something. So the Bodhisattva is the first to speak. These are things that I've read and have had great effect on me in my practice,

[27:03]

so I've passed them on. Another thing that the Bodhisattva does is they indicate things with their right hand, extending their full arm and hand. Now I think this is probably out of India where you use the right hand, you always use the right hand, not the left, because of hygiene practices, but I think if you're left-handed you can extend the left hand, too. I think it's mostly, it's like don't point, like you were taught not to point as a kid. So the Bodhisattva indicates by extending the entire arm, which is a very, it has a generous, you're not holding back, you're just giving everything, indicating and you're right there rather than, or, you know. So these are, you know, you might say, well, that's just etiquette or something, or I was trained to do that in Boy Scouts or something, I don't know. But to see it as a practice,

[28:05]

as a practice of friendliness, the practice of friendliness is meant to be useful to other beings and to help them to carry out what they need to carry out. And there's all sorts of other things having to do with deportment and hygiene that can come under these practices of a Bodhisattva. So Maitri has great power. You know, there's this story, and I'm not sure if it's apocryphal, maybe we'll hear it tomorrow at the Suzuki Roshi disciple panel discussion. Maybe they'll be telling some stories, but there's a story that I heard about the practice of friendliness that Suzuki Roshi was in line in a grocery store standing behind someone who was checking out, or there was a long line, I think,

[29:07]

he was behind them. And by the time they got to the checkout, they felt so warm towards this person, just the way that they were in line and treating them. Who knows what it was, you know, just the right amount of space between you and the next person, not feeling like you're being crowded, and some wonderful spacious feeling, this person began to sit after that. I love that story. I don't know if it's true or not, but I believe it actually. I have faith in that story. Also thinking about Isan Dorsey. Isan Dorsey, there's a book out about him called Street Zen. He was the Tenzo, one of the earliest Tenzos for me when I first came in. He was extremely friendly to people, and whenever you met him, you felt like he really was glad to see you. How are you doing? And it didn't matter. There was no distinction made between,

[30:08]

you know, you're a new student he barely knew or somebody he'd practiced at Tassajar with. He just emanated this friendly feeling and love, I think, too, this maitri, this combination of friendliness and love. Lou Richmond tells a story in this book, Work as Spiritual Practice, about this. He's friends with an actor, a Hollywood actor, who he calls, it's a pseudonym he calls Curtis, and Curtis was saying how on the set in these movies, people are, it's really kind of cutthroat. People are very short and terse with each other, a little bit nasty almost, and the director will say to him things like, oh, what are these wrinkles on your neck here? Have you been working out? You better get to the gym. It really looks bad. Don't you have a scarf, something you can cover that up with? You know, things like that. Just kind of the general drift of interactions have that side to it.

[31:11]

That's what this actor was saying. So he decided he was going to treat everybody with friendliness in the same way, the director, the cameraman, the makeup people, the people cleaning up the set. He was just going to be friendly and treat them all in an equal way. So he started doing that, and it had enormous effect on the set. People thought, now what's going on with this guy? What's he up to? What kind of a, you know, they heard he practiced Zen, so is this some kind of spiritual practice or why don't you knock it off? Everybody noticed that he had this way about him, and he just persisted in having this equal equanimity, I think also, maybe he was practicing the 4 Brahma Viharas, equanimity and friendliness and compassion probably arose, and sympathetic joy. Sympathetic joy is being happy for the good things that happen to other people.

[32:11]

Oh, you got the part? Great, that was a beautiful shot of you on that last scene. You did a wonderful job. Sympathetic joy rather than ooh, they did that so well, maybe they're going to outdo me in a competitive way. But having sympathetic joy, rejoicing in the joys of others. So anyway, after a while, it was really noticed, and he felt that later on he got a kind of reputation for being nice to have on the set, easy to work with, easy going, and he thought it maybe made a difference in some acting jobs that he got later on. He can't say for sure, but anyway, this kind of way in the world has enormous effect and unseen effect. We can't really track it. So when I said that I have faith

[33:15]

in this, you know, my feeling is that Suzuki Roshi was the way he was in the checkout line because he understood, he had faith that he was Buddha, that he was no different than the Buddha, or that he understood that he was Buddha nature, or sometimes we say half Buddha nature. And this faith, in faith that we are Buddha, is the underlying basis of zazen, this wide zazen that I was talking about that isn't confined to just 5 o'clock to 5.50, 5.40, 5.50 to 6.30, that is the zazen that's formless. So we talk about, sometimes ceremonies start out

[34:17]

with in faith that we are Buddha, let us recite Buddha's names or something like that. And I know that the longer that Buddhism is in this country and the longer that the English translations and these set phrases like in faith that we are Buddha or that pretty soon at a certain point, not quite yet, but it's getting there, they'll begin to have the kind of drone, the kind of saw, you know, of perhaps the sermons and so forth that we heard when we were kids or were exposed to that. I know for me it often, it wasn't alive in a certain way, but when I came to practice, all of it was fresh. The words came in in a fresh, new, uncharted territory kind of way. So let's hope that they don't become, that these words don't lose

[35:22]

their vitality and their aliveness. I think that is, the loss of aliveness or the aliveness, I think, comes, arrives with the energy of those people who are speaking the words. And so I don't think, in and of itself, the words have to lose vitality, but sometimes with repetition and they become buzzwords. But in faith that we are Buddha or that we all are Buddha or have Buddha nature, this faith sitting with this, rather than the construction of in faith that I can become Buddha. Now, those two are sometimes called sudden and gradual. The sudden enlightenment is I already am Buddha. I am in faith that I am Buddha

[36:25]

is the sudden enlightenment. And the gradual is I can become Buddha. After practicing for many years and practicing the virtues and the parmitas and the four Brahma-viharas and the ten bhumis and all the different lists of things to practice, that then, eventually, I will become the awakened one myself. And the other way is I already am. So these two things are kind of in juxtaposition all the time because we hear that the Buddha said, marvelous, marvelous, all beings, without exception, have Buddha nature except because of their confusion they don't realize it. So we hear this and it sounds like the good news, you know, capital G, capital N. And to hear those words that you already are and yet you feel, one feels,

[37:28]

but I get so angry and I'm so afraid and I'm cowardly and how does that, how do those two come together? How can those two possibly be interconnected? So it's said that in order to practice the gradual way you have to first have the sudden. Usually we think gradual, gradual, gradual, then sudden understanding. But the teaching is actually that there is this sudden, actually, faith that you are Buddha first which allows you, which gives you the ability to tolerate the pain of our life, the manifestation of impermanence, the loss, the abandonment, all the difficulties of our life.

[38:30]

So this faith is necessary. The faith comes first that I am Buddha or Buddha's and sentient beings are not two. My body, Buddha's body, not two. I was recently interviewed by someone who was writing a book about faith in the Christian religion and also looking at Buddhism and he was asking me about faith and I don't think we talk about faith all that much. Shraddha is faith in Sanskrit. But it has this quality of being steadfast and firmly upright, being firmly abiding,

[39:33]

firmly abiding in non-duality is faith. Being able to firmly abide in the truth of non-duality is this faith. And this sudden enlightenment or this faith, in faith that we are Buddha, the practice, the practice enlightenment, the practice is no different from the celebration of that understanding. So practice enlightenment come together. To have that understanding and not practice actually means you probably don't have that understanding. So practice enlightenment comes up together. To practice fully, manifest this faith even if not fully realized

[40:34]

because of our habits of mind and our ancient twisted karma. So when we practice today, to actually think of practice enlightenment, Dogen talks about practice enlightenment as like one word, practice-enlightenment. Our practice enlightenment is manifest this firmly abiding in non-duality. And zazen is the perfect expression of it. To sit completely present. And zazen shikantaza or just sitting zazen doesn't have any particular object that's necessary to focus on. We may want to do a concentration practice of breath, posture, which are very wholesome practices and very sustaining

[41:37]

and helps us actually to see and to experience non-abiding and firmly sitting. But zazen in the big sense of formless does not necessarily have to have any particular object. So the object can be changing. Just firmly abiding. So I remember once Lu when he was having a very difficult time over some kind of crisis at Zen Center, he told me that he wasn't able to sit zazen, cross-legged zazen. And I remember thinking,

[42:37]

what does this mean? He can't sit in this difficult time. He's not able to sit. The tantra can't sit. But he actually took up the practice of walking meditation. He actually found that the movement, he was so disturbed and upset by something that the walking, doing walking meditation, not like he needed a little faster and breath counting and breathing, unifying body, breath and mind, that seemed to meet him where he was at. And that's been very helpful for me. It's not like zazen means you have to sit cross-legged upright. His zazen was being walking in the fields up and down, staying with his breath and working with the pain, that emotional, mental pain

[43:40]

that was going on for him. And it kind of broke through a kind of narrow view that I had that you had to be able to sit cross-legged under every and all circumstances. That's how you meet your life. Well, maybe not sometimes. Maybe you do zazen out under the sky in the fields. So this wide feeling of zazen, zazen is not just this. And yet we have been given this practice in order for us to understand that, in order to free us to know that the whole world is practice enlightenment. But it's pretty hard to understand that unless we have some bodily experience of sitting quietly, fully present, examining over and over what's coming up for us, what's going on, and devoting ourselves to something.

[44:44]

So I hope you will join me in holding Lu in our minds and at noon service we'll chant the Enmei Juku Kanongyo, which is calling upon Kanzeon or Kanon, the one who hears the cries of the world, called Kuan Yin in Chinese iconography, Kuan Yin, and the one who responds to the cries of the world with compassion. So this sutra will chant, and one of the lines is, Cho Neng Kanzeon, Bon Neng Kanzeon, that's evening, morning, morning my thoughts are Kanzeon, evening my thoughts are Kanzeon, meaning in the morning I turn my mind, I myself turn towards compassion or towards the suffering of the world, listening to the cries of the world, morning I do this, evening I do this,

[45:49]

24 hours a day, this is my practice too. So we participate in this, this isn't just some kind of being outside ourselves, this is our own energy of compassion that's activated in this way. Thank you very much.

[46:17]

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