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. In case you don't know, my name is Roush and Paul Heller. Um... just thinking that crosses two traditions, you know, the given name in the Buddhist tradition and the given name in my family of origin. What I'm going to talk about this evening is I'm here teaching a workshop called The Path of Wholeness. And that's what I'm going to talk about. And I was just thinking the word path in Buddhism.

[01:05]

In particular, in early Buddhism, Marga, it has a dual characteristic to it. In one hand, it's following a heritage, following a tradition, like a disciple. A disciple follows a tradition. And then in another... The other part of it is you make it up. Because every set of circumstances is unique. Every person is unique. The challenge, especially in the heritage of Zen, the emphasis in Zen is the authentic expression of the essence of the teachings in the moment. In the situation you find yourself in. that you're part of.

[02:06]

So both of those in the path, the following and the creation of it in the moment. And I was thinking, well, my name carries that. My name carries both my heritage and my origin and this life I've chosen for myself, or maybe it chose me. I'm not sure. So path and then wholeness. I coined the word thinking of wholehearted. You know, the human capacity that we're all capable of. of being wholehearted about what we're doing. And then, of course, we're equally capable, or maybe more capable, of not being wholehearted, of being ambivalent, resistant, reluctant.

[03:26]

But it seems to me, in the path of authenticity, we're in search of wholehearted expression. And it's an interesting notion because, as Dogen Zenji said, the finder of this style of Zen in Japan, he said, no one can force it on you, and you can't even force it on yourself. You can't force yourself to be wholehearted. You can force yourself to comply with what you think you should do, or with what someone else thinks you should do. But that falls short of wholeheartedness. So the path of wholeness. And then, of course, wholeness has other connotations to it, too. There's a couple of words in Buddhist...

[04:32]

terminology that get translated as perfection, like paramita. Standard translation is perfections. In our style of Buddhism, we have six. Dana, giving, ethics, patience, energy, concentration and insight. And I would say anyone, short of a realized Buddha, who looks at themselves in the context of those, finds their own imperfections. But there's a very interesting consequence of engaging the perfections, to call them that, and discovering our imperfections, is that in the reconciliation of the two, we can find wholeness.

[05:49]

The human existence is... It's a mysterious event. Each one of us is capable of moments of stupidity. What was I thinking? Well, not very much in that moment. And each one of us is capable of profound, insightful wisdom. where something in us, maybe to our own surprise, expresses itself. That way in which we say in our tradition, in our ordination ceremony, we started by saying, trusting we're already Buddha, we enter Buddha's way. But when we take on the practice, when we start to follow the path, we discover that that trust...

[06:59]

for almost all of us, maybe everyone, isn't a simple, automatic thing. It's we earn our own trust through our own efforts. We strive with the perfections, discover the imperfections, and learn in the reconciliation how to trust the human being we are. and to trust both its imperfections and its Buddha nature, its innate wisdom. That living life has taught us about life. It's taught us about living. And then also, we were born into this world with the capacity to be human.

[08:11]

So we have an innate humanity. We know how to breathe. We know how to digest. Not to say these can be ailments that we can struggle with, but that's... part of being human. There's something in our humanness that comes with being born. There's something that's learned that often we don't know what we've learned until we engage it with mindfulness, until we engage it with awareness, And then we see what it is we know. And also, sometimes it's more than just awareness. It's being confronted with life's challenges.

[09:15]

And if you think about spiritual traditions, certainly all the contemplative traditions, They have a rigor. And certainly in Zen we have a rigor. Maybe not so evident in the summer. Maybe it is evident in the summer. I was thinking, you know, before we put in these wonderful fans, the Zen-do in the warm evenings like this could cook, you know. You'd come in here to sit Zazen and cook. in the heat, the humidity, being wrapped in your robes, you know. I often thought the awakening moment of those evenings was when you got to walk back outside into the cooler.

[10:23]

So there's a couple of words around which... I want to formulate my notion of the path of wholeness. And the first word is original, which has both origin, original, and originality. This origin. And in this origin, not so much... the particulars of the tradition, but what those particulars are getting at. When we engage in awareness, the word Zen comes from the Sanskrit word for absorption, to be absorbed in being in any moment.

[11:25]

This is what zazen is. It's absorption in being in the moment. Whether it's seated, activity, or any other version of human endeavor. When literally, when we're absorbed in the moment, the very notion of self, the disposition of this, separate from that, is forgotten. And in that forgetting the self, the habits of the self, the deep concern of self-survival, in the many, many forms it can take, self-survival evokes most of our negative emotions.

[12:28]

Self-survival creates a sense of self and other, extended to a sense of us and them. But in the moment of awareness, in the moment of absorption in awareness, that falls away. And the more thoroughly it falls away, the more thoroughly absorption, the more a realization of the fundamental ground of being is brought into consciousness. And of course, it's no trivial matter. That degree of absorption is usually quite rare.

[13:42]

As a sustained experience, as a momentary flash, we're doing it all the time. When we come out of the womb, We were, in our not knowing, in this revelation of being, going through a human birth, we were absorbed in momentary being. The newborn infant has no sense of self and other. Actually, it takes quite a while for the newborn infant to to realize that it is separate from the mother. We come into this world with some deep sense of dropping the self because we didn't have it when we arrived.

[14:45]

We created it. And in the world of Zen, we call that our original nature. the origin, original mind, the mind, the consciousness of the origin. And so the very process of awareness is not to create something, it's to let what's innate be realized. And so in the workshop, I've been trying to entertain the participants by giving them different exercises about how this can be experienced. And I hope they were entertained.

[15:48]

And then the word original. when we drop the self and then we resume the self, there's an opportunity to see it anew. Most of the religious or spiritual traditions and religious traditions have this sense of rebirth. This going through a shift in consciousness where we arrive back where we started from, but we experience it in you. So we drop the self, and then we resume the self. But when we've let the moments of awareness register, what we've assumed,

[16:58]

The world according to the self that we've assumed as reality is now seen as a construct. Or more realistic. We have glimpses of that. We have some sense of that way of being. And we're still caught by the... adamant assertions of the world according to me. So I read all that into this poem by William Stafford. It's called Being a Person. Be a person here. Stand by the river. Invoke the owls. Invoke winter. then spring.

[18:00]

Let any season that wants to come here make its own call. After that, sound goes away. Wait. How you stand here is important. How you listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe. Wow. Awareness, the moment, is happening. Being aware of it, being it, requires, other than what it accidentally occurs, it requires a discovery. Recently I've been using the phrase experience,

[19:00]

the experience you're experiencing. Experience the experience you're experiencing. It's already happening. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't like it, maybe you have opinions about it, associated thoughts, emotions, but it's entering into the now, enters into original mind, enters into the origin of being. In the tradition of Zen practice, this is always close at hand. No? Someone was pointing out to me today, they were saying, well, you guys have altars all over the place. And, well... And I said, yeah, we do.

[20:01]

It's a way to try to remind ourselves, okay, this is a practice place. Go into the bathhouse, go into the toilet, go into the kitchen, go into the shop, go into the zenda. The association of original mind, the association of awareness is always close at hand. And then William Stafford goes on and he says, in a kind of wonderful poetic way, a slow bubble rises through the earth and begins to include the sky, stars, all space, even the outracing, expanding thought. Come back, hear the little sound again. Each moment, even though our human consciousness can think of the whole universe, each moment has a particularity.

[21:18]

The sign of the creek, the chirping of the crickets. Suddenly, this dream you're having matches everyone's dream. And the result is this world. If a different call came, there wouldn't be this world, or you, or the river, or the owl's calling. How you stand here is important. How you listen for the next things to happen, how you breathe. And from this place, here, we enter our life.

[22:25]

We enter the next moment. We enter this great interplay of existence. And in the Zen terms, we say, not knowing is most intimate. Just assuming you know it's going to happen. It's just assuming it's a repetition of what happened before. In coming back to now and letting that touch us deeply, letting the wisdom of that, the insight of that, inspire us. When we do that, there's a kind of vow or intentionality that comes up for us.

[23:31]

Maybe vow is not such a helpful word because it's so easy to associate with should. In the functioning of the Tao, the way, the path, we're attuning with the nature, the natural order of what is. The disciple follows, and the disciple has a discipline. With the discipline, of the Tao, it's evoked through the nature of what is. Physical health has a discipline. What you eat, how you exercise, how much you sleep, many things.

[24:38]

It has a discipline, but it's not independent. of the physicality of being. It's evoked through being in harmony with the physicality of being. And we could say the same with mental health. It has its own request in terms of creating that harmony. And we could say social health. We just see across our planet the ways in which we create us and them. And then we, by strange coincidence, think what us think and what us want is what should happen. And what they think and what they want is inferior. But when we just say it like that, we just know that's...

[25:46]

close to absurd, you know. We share this planet, you know. Us and them is just a temporary construct arising from a misperception of our shared origin. So, social health, you know, the coming into harmony and accord with our interbeing. And then we can even say environmental health, you know, coming into harmony and accord with our interbeing, with the planet, with all the life forms on the planet. So the heritage of the discipline in Zen has this flavor to it. And in Zen monasteries you'll find

[26:47]

like when we wash our bowls after reading, we pour the water back on the plants. And we pour it a certain way in Psalms and traditions. Even how you take water out of the stream. You take the water out and then you give some of it back. You're not... You're not trying to take everything. You're trying to take just what's needed. This is harmony. And in some ways, if you think about it, it's quite different from a rigid set of right, of shoulds that's based on a fixed notion of good and bad.

[27:49]

And so even though we might say in the expression of originality, like the finder of this school of Zen, he coined the phrase beginner's mind. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. this originality, this making it up as we go along. And in the process of making it up and discovering these harmonies, we earn our own trust. And we realize... our own intrinsic nature, you know, that as we do this, something within us blossoms.

[28:57]

Something within our shared being blossoms. Something within our societies blossoms. Something within our interbeing with the whole planet and probably beyond blossoms. And another word I wanted to mention was integrity, which has also integration. That as we live in harmony, this integrity is being expressed. We're expressing the oneness of being. When we meet others with compassion, with the realization that their welfare and our welfare is intertwined, this integrity is being manifest.

[30:11]

As we function in this way, even internally, even within ourselves, There are conflicting ideas. There are aspects of our self that we're not so aware of and not so readily accepting of. And that's what brings us back to experience the experience you're experiencing. Because what happens when you do that? You integrate... the very expression of your being, moment by moment. So psychologically, we experience the aspects of ourself that maybe we'd rather avoid, we'd rather suppress or deny, but there they are. We experience the emotions.

[31:16]

And as we experience them, they become just themselves. They become the thought of the moment. They become the feeling of the moment. They don't impute a reality. And this is how the originality and the origin harmonize. that when we don't impute division, when we don't impute a separate world, when each moment's experience, the interbeing of life is expressed. But on a human term, I want to...

[32:20]

read a part of a poem by Amelia Earhart. For those of you who don't know, Amelia Earhart was this quite extraordinary woman aviator. She was an aviator when there weren't many aviators. And she was a woman when I think there were almost no women aviators. And she wrote a poem called Courage. Courage is the price that life extracts for granting peace. Is that or is that not an amazing sentence? Courage is the price that life extracts for granting peace. No release from little things. Knows not the vivid loneliness of fear.

[33:24]

Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear. The courage to meet the challenges of your life. How can life grant us boon of living? Unless we dare, each time we make a choice, we pay with courage to behold the resistless day and count it fair. So this is what I was getting at when I was talking about intentionality or vow. Some way... that this opportunity to be fully alive, it asks of us a wholeheartedness.

[34:32]

It gives us this exquisite opportunity. In the workshop today, we're working off a poem by Mary Oliver. We worked in the writing exercises with these two phrases. And when I die, I want to say. And in the negation of it, and when I die, I don't want to say. We are alive. That part's happened. whether we like it or not. We're alive. What we do with it, that part is still unfolding. This originality, this dipping into the origin of each moment, existence,

[35:46]

this coming forth wholeheartedly. How do we do that? What is the path of wholeness? And of course, these are just what I've just said in the last 40 minutes. These are just my ideas, right? For each of us to search around and find the expression of the request of life, and I would say, in a way that's truly inspiring. And I would say to you, don't settle for should. Should has its place, but it's a limited place. Inspiring

[36:48]

infuses us with something. So I'd encourage you, poke around, explore what's inspiring. Courage is the price that life extracts for granting peace. all this time the creek and the crickets and the fans whirring in the heavy warm evening air and inside the heart beating the diaphragm moving

[37:54]

the lungs expanding and contracting, the mind hearing and thinking, and some mysterious thing called being alive asserting itself. How curious. Thank you. For more information, visit SSCC.org and click Giving.

[38:46]

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