This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening, everyone. My name is Kyoshin Wendy Lewis, and I'm a priest and teacher at San Francisco Zen Center City Center. And I'm here at Tassajara co-leading a retreat with John Muir Laws, who goes by Jack. And it's called Nature's Notebook, Deepen Awareness Through Nature Journaling. So that's what we've been doing for the last couple of days. I want to thank Jack for his teaching and his generosity and his empathy. And I also want to thank Tassahara for very kindly taking care of us.

[01:05]

So thank you very much. So Jack has been teaching nature journaling from the perspective of both science and art for many years. He's written and illustrated guidebooks and also books on nature drawing and journaling. His perspective is joy and appreciation of the natural world. Jack has also received many honors and awards, including the Terwilliger, is that how it's pronounced? Environmental Award for Outstanding Service in Environmental Education. So he has brought all of that... to the workshop, the retreat, and a few students here also participated, so I'm happy that that was possible. But this is also a very rich context for being at Tassajara.

[02:13]

What a place this is for seeing the world that way. The Tassajara... Central area has birds and trees and things going on. And then you walk down the creek or, you know, up the road, anywhere. And there's so much happening. So this is, you know, a kind of matter for gratitude for those of us who've been able to live here for periods of time, as well as people who come here for a shorter period of time. And during their retreat, Jack has been talking about three things, attention, noticing, and curiosity. And those are all qualities that correlate very much with Zen practice. So one of the wonders of nature is that it can be deeply nourishing and nurturing and inspiring, and it also has a lot of discomforts.

[03:17]

There are ticks, there's flies, there's dirt, there's all kinds of things, rough terrain, and it's hot or it's cold. And there's many ways in which we kind of resent nature for not, you know, following our preferences for how we want the weather to be or, you know, our comfort levels. But what I found when I was living at Tassajar many years ago, I... came up with this word for it I think of nature as being indifferent to our preferences our likes and dislikes and that that's a very interesting context for looking at them looking at our preferences our likes our dislikes our fears our desires and all those things and also our expectations in terms of how we're going to express ourselves in art or in practice.

[04:18]

This backdrop of this world that's going on beyond that way we want it to be or not. So the founder of Soto Zen, Ehe Dogen, reflects on nature in many of his talks that we now read and study as fascicles in a collection called the Shobo Genzo. or Treasury of the True Dharma Eye. And two of these are often cited and commented on during the summer guest season. And so I thought I would, too, comment on them. One is Valley Sounds, Mountain Colors, and the other is the Mountains and Waters Sutra. So Dogen's perspective in these fascicles is from the a view of a bodhisattva. So this is a being or a person who's not only pointing away from themselves to see and hear the world, but is also pointing towards themselves to notice how they are interpreting the world and seeing it and hearing it from a particular perspective.

[05:40]

So it's this looking out and reflecting back. In the first of these fascicles, Dogen says, to hear with the ear is an everyday matter, but to hear with the eye is not always so. This eye. And you could also say this, to see with the eye is an everyday matter, but to see with the ear is not always so. And what I think he's talking about is that in less differentiated relationships of our ears and our eyes with the world, and we often see this in our relationship with nature, we can develop intimacy and understanding when we're not sort of poking out at it or expecting it to be a certain way. it can develop this deeper intimacy and understanding.

[06:43]

And then that becomes true hearing and seeing. Dogen says, the tongue of the Buddha does not take a break. The colors and sounds are beyond coming and going. Bodhisattvas who study the way, open your minds to mountains flowing and to water not flowing. I once was looking at the creek out here before study or something one day, and there was a moment when my eyes stopped seeing the creek flowing. They just saw something still. And I don't know what made that happen or anything, but it was as though I insisted that the water had to be doing a certain thing. And then I stepped back and it wasn't doing it anymore. And I can't explain it, but it just was a step back.

[07:48]

I've always remembered that. So the bodhisattva perspective is a kind of ideology and we can have a sort of conflicted relationship with it because bodhisattvas are often described from the perspective of the person who's describing what a bodhisattva is. what you'd want a bodhisattva to be, what you think you are in terms of your bodhisattva action and intention. And this isn't surprising. What other perspective, in a sense, do we have? And so Dogen is trying to undo this habit of projection by questioning our limited view so that a bodhisattva... realizes that they are not just affecting the world, but the world is affecting them, and this is going on continuously. And we're being affected, all of us, by the world in wider ways than we can even comprehend, which we kind of know and we kind of ignore.

[08:57]

So I believe that you can't really do or be a bodhisattva But you can, through attention, vows, and humility, kind of throw yourself into, with great confidence, this arising and passing away of yourself and everything else. And Jack has been saying, too, that attention is love. So this is what... The bodhisattva keeps giving this attention, attention, attention. It doesn't mean like everybody's going to notice, you know, but that attention and that feeling of love. So in Buddhist teaching, there's this concept called no-self. And this can be very puzzling to practitioners. practitioners and non-practitioners, but what it is addressing is the narcissistic self that projects our own needs and desires and hopes onto what is around us and then judges everything based on that, looking for what is pleasant, trying to avoid what is unpleasant, and ignoring or dismissing what is perceived as neutral.

[10:26]

So in another fascicle, very famous, Faskov Dogen, he recommends deeply examining the self and then he calls it forgetting it. And what he's describing is how practice of the Buddha way works. He's not saying, okay, do this. He's saying, this is how the Buddha way works. You study the self and you forget it. It just, that's the way it works. And in our interactions with the natural world, we can see this again and again. So there's a Zen teaching that Dogen refers to in the Mountains and Rivers Sutra. And it goes, When first I encountered Zen, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers. Then mountains were no longer mountains and rivers were no longer rivers.

[11:31]

Then mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers again. And I think my experience with the creek was in the middle there. Mountains were no longer mountains and rivers were no longer rivers. And so I think this undoing of kind of what we expect of mountains and rivers to seeing and hearing them as they are is also a method for interacting with with the natural world through drawing and painting and writing. So after I had lived at Tassajara for a few years, some friends of mine gave me watercolors and paper and brushes and I didn't know why. They just gave them to me, you know. This is where you should, I don't know. So I wasn't quite sure what to do, but I'd always wanted to do watercolor. So I thought, okay, I'm just going to try to figure it out.

[12:34]

And one of the things I did, a friend of mine who is a painter and I were in a bookstore and I was looking for a book, of course, that's me. How do you do this? To get me started. And we were looking and looking and I picked up this one book and she said, that's the one. And it was complicated. Jack was showing us different ways to mix color today. And I was remembering that book because it had pages and pages and pages of how to mix watercolors to get these colors. I was like, that didn't make that much sense to me. I mean, intellectually, yes, but I couldn't understand it. But then he said one thing, start small. So that's what I did. Everything else had an effect, but that was something I could do. So my first painting was a postcard size and it's divided in two and there's two miniature paintings on it. But on the left side one, I was struggling and struggling with the lines and the shapes and the colors and I was trying to understand it.

[13:44]

And then... When I finished it, something happened. And I started the second one. I said, oh, I get it. And it started to do itself. There was no longer this kind of intellectual trying to figure it out. And what impressed me about it was the relationship between my eyes seeing the object, my brain interpreting it somehow, and my hand taking this pencil and drawing something. And then that whole thing also working with the color. Suddenly I was like, oh yeah, this color and this color will make this. I wasn't, there were no words for that. It just was like, oh yeah, you know. And I can feel the difference when I look at that painting still. So the thing that I was looking at was telling me how to paint it in a certain way. Something was happening there. So I'm not a great painter or anything, but maybe, I don't know, I don't think that's the point.

[14:47]

But that experience made me want to paint more. So I did painting for quite a long time, and then life sort of gets busy and everything. I had a harder job, so I kind of dropped it. But I've been thinking about it lately, so this was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with that. I knew that John Deidolori, who is an American Zen teacher, he died a little while ago, but he has always included art as part of the Zen training. And he has what he calls the eight gates of Zen. And they are meditation or zazen, study with a teacher, Buddhist study, liturgy or celebration, right action or ethics, art practice, body practice as self-care, and work practice.

[15:53]

In The Zen of Creativity, he writes, the creative process, like a spiritual journey, is intuitive, nonlinear, and experiential. And I think that this intuitive journey non-linear and experiential process requires methods, tools, and training. And those deepen the intuitive capacity beyond the egotistical level. So I think we need methods and tools and training to move beyond our egotistical way of seeing things. So in this book, The Zen of Creativity, Daito Laurie describes a calligraphy class that a friend of his told him about that he had been teaching. And in the class, he asked everyone to take their brush and draw a straight line across the paper.

[17:00]

This is really important in calligraphy. No one did a straight line. There were waves. There were spirals even, you know, all kinds of different shapes and everything. So what I think they were doing is they were seeing mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers, and they're going to do what I want them to do. This is what a mountain is. This is what a line is. This is what a river is. And my guess is that at some point, they painted that straight line and understood. how to paint mountains and how to paint rivers as calligraphy. So, you know, this process we go through, somebody tells us to do something, and sometimes we do it, but we often do it with something added. Like, well, that's not a very good instruction, or I want to do it this way, or something like that.

[18:01]

And part of that is just our anxiety. It's not like we're trying to do things our way necessarily, but eventually as things become more familiar, you can do them. So this way of using our capacity and going through that process of mountains being mountains and rivers being rivers and then not and then again being is actually a path of freedom because you're making an effort to get out of your own way and to use the tools that show us how to do that and for the most part

[19:03]

we won't be successful in the way we expect. And for every moment of our, you know, sort of these creative moments in practice or art, there is what Dadalori calls the ebb. So there's the inspiration, there's the sort of insight and then there's a kind of a dwindling or quieting. And this is actually just as important as the insight or the inspiration. So understanding the ebb and flow of our experience and our expression in art is really important to see how they're related to each other, that they don't negate each other, that they're actually informing each other is important.

[20:12]

So many years ago, a friend and I were leading a painting workshop together. And we were down by the creek. And something happened. I don't know exactly what it was, but I got sort of confused and really angry. I just wanted to throw all my stuff in the creek and be finished with it. It was just too frustrating. But that isn't a way I usually respond, you know. So I was a little confused by it. So I stopped. And I decided to just put everything away and leave. So I went over to my friend and I said, you know, I'm leaving. And she said, oh, sit down and tell me what happened. And so I explained it to her. And she said, oh, yeah, I know what you mean. That happens to me. She said, but I just keep going. And I thought, oh, hmm. So I think the Zen path and the creative path have a lot in common in that way.

[21:31]

You know, you just keep going. And so I think that that means that they require time and patience. And, you know, if we experience a moment of freedom, there's this way that we wish it for others. Because if it's really freedom, that's what we wish for others as well. And that brings us back to this thought of the bodhisattva. So... So Daito Laurie describes the development of the relationship of art and Zen.

[22:39]

And I'm going to end with the four qualities that he considers have become synonymous with the Zen aesthetic. And I'm just going to let you take them away for yourself. I'm not going to explain them or anything. Wabi is a sense of loneliness or solitude. Sabi is the suchness of ordinary objects, the basic, unmistakable uniqueness of a thing in and of itself. Aware is a feeling of nostalgia, a longing for the past. Yugen is mystery, the hidden, ineffable dimensions of reality. So thank you very much. And I don't know if we have time for questions. Do you think? Okay.

[23:40]

If anyone has a question or a comment. Yes. I was interested in your comment about sort of a perspective or a relationship with nature as indifferent. And I wondered... that's the same perspective or relationship you have with the human world, and if not, what would be the difference for you between the human world and the natural world that would lead you to that distinction? I don't think of the human world as indifferent. The human world is... We're all very self-involved, but part of our self-involvement means engaging others in some way, either pushing them away or trying to draw them to us or sort of thinking of it as just a mass of things.

[24:43]

But what I mean instead by the natural world is that it will not respond to us when we want it. to be a certain way. So it reflects our desires and aversions in a certain way. So we can't have it be sunny if it's not going to be sunny. And we can't have it be night when it's day. So that's more what I meant, the qualities of the natural world around us. It's not so much our specific relationship with it. Is that answering your question at all? yes that's true I don't know I see them differently so I'm not sure you know maybe that's something I should look at some more but I the natural world just and maybe that distinction is too direct but for most of my life I haven't lived it

[26:00]

so much in nature except for Golden Gate Park, which was great. But when I came here, it felt different. It felt disorganized in a way that I liked. It sort of confused me and helped me to feel that indifference. So maybe it's just more intense indifference here than I would notice. And maybe that's true of the human world, too. I just don't notice the indifference as much as I do. Because it's not emotional. That's one of the problems with using that word indifference. It's not emotional. It's not judgmental or anything like that. It's more like quality. Something. I don't think I've answered your question.

[27:02]

I'm curious about where you would put self-acceptance and self-love in the process of observing self and then letting self go, because you're judging yourself in that case and accepting yourself, but yet... Yeah, I'm just wondering, does that fit into the philosophy in any way? Yeah. So let me see if I understand. You're saying... In the forgetting the self, does that mean? Does that mean accepting yourself, loving yourself, and then forgetting yourself as part of that as you're observing your constant judgment of yourself? Well, I actually think it's more about self-understanding. It's not about, you know, sort of creating a lovable self because then that's a lot of work. it's hard to sort of change your view of yourself into something that you're imagining like we're all lovable in a certain way and so if you say that only these qualities are lovable then that's not self understanding because you're complicated and I think that that's what forgetting the self understanding the self and forgetting the self are about is forgetting you know

[28:29]

Yet you're putting all these qualities out there as being what should be happening, and instead this self-understanding that you're caught in this whole thing just like everyone else, and how are you going to negotiate that? How can you be generous to others if you're not generous to yourself? Yes? Wendy, you talked about those eight practices, listen to the list, it seemed like everything else had kind of a schedule attached to it. Literary being scheduled, self-care being scheduled. Where does art fit into the timeline? If you say, oh, now it's time to practice art, or I have to practice art every day, or... He and...

[29:31]

intentionally makes it part of the schedule I don't know but it sounds like it was every day it was part of what they did every day and I've heard people describe that his practice place that way it was part of the schedule and that's you know how you learn these tools because it may always be at this time and then you say well But today at this time, I feel this way. Tomorrow, I'll feel a different way. So you're changing your relationship even though it's in the schedule. Yes. I was happy to see that art was one of those things. But I still don't really understand. I think it's important, but I'm wondering in the context of developing yourself in Zen, what do you see as the significance of developing art in that?

[30:49]

I can see understanding that yes, meditation, studying Buddha, the literature, art's an effort, yes. Well, Well, at dinner we were talking about the tea ceremony, and that's an art. So, and the intention is, you know, that concentration, but you're not really doing anything. And I think that's the context for the piece of art, that is art, yeah. Dido Laurie was a photographer. He probably had hundreds and hundreds of photographs. And actually, you'd be interested in this. He had a certain group of people that he would have look at his photographs and tell them what they thought of them. And it was a really varied group of people. Some of them had no interest in photography whatsoever, but they would look at his photos and tell them what they thought.

[31:49]

And he would throw away lots of photos and just keep a few. Yes? said, but I guess I don't have to look it up. Tell me again what you heard. That's how you heard it?

[32:54]

Okay. Let's see. Yes. Well, that reminds me of some of the meditation instructions that I was doing for our retreat where you start with the breath. And that's, you know, shamatha practice, the breath and the posture. And that's the foundation is this calm, ability to be calm. But then you extend that out to hearing sounds and returning to the breath or counting the breath and listening to sounds. So you're including the world in your meditation.

[33:59]

And that deepens your meditation. And, you know, this is all, people figured this out a long time ago. So the instructions actually work. And they take effort and they can be frustrating. But those moments when there's that sense of calm can be very nourishing. And sometimes they're a little scary because we're not used to being calm. So here at Tassajara, it's a little easier. Because it's pretty quiet. So if you become calm, you can, you know, not be so worried about what's going to happen when you walk out the door. Because, you know, it's not a calm world. But so remembering that, you know, that we're not actually comfortable being calm very much. So inside and outside and inside and outside.

[35:02]

Yeah. Is that... sort of answer. Okay. Thank you very much. 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, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[35:35]

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