This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Everyone, can you hear me? Is this thing working? Okay, I'm just going to have a look around to see this here. So thank you all for coming. It is my dear hope that you will hear something useful to you, and my equally dear hope that if you don't, you'll forgive me for wasting your time. We'll see. So I'd like to begin by telling you a few stories. And the first story is not a Zen story, really. It's a story about St. Francis of Assisi, and it comes from a novel. So we don't know whether it's grounded in historical fact.

[01:02]

It's from a novel by the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis, who some of you may know better, is the author of Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ. But anyhow, he also wrote a novel about St. Francis. So here's the story. So it was a dark and stormy night, as these stories usually begin, and St. Francis and his companion brother Leo were walking down the road. They'd been walking all day long. They hadn't had anything to eat since that morning, and they were hungry, tired, wet because it was raining, and very, very cold and exhausted. So as they walked on a little bit, they saw in front of them, up the road a little way, a monastery. And St. Francis turned to his companion and said, Brother Leo, would you like me to show you perfect happiness? Well, he was no fool, so Brother Leo said, of course.

[02:04]

And his idea of perfect happiness was, at the moment, probably like mine would have been. Getting dry, getting a warm meal, a nice place to sleep, and a little bit of relief. So they go to the door, and it's quite late. So they knock on the door and nothing happens. And they knock on the door harder and they knock on the door harder and they knock on the door harder because they're trying to wake somebody up, right? So ultimately they wake somebody up and some grumpy old doorkeeper of a monk opens the little gate in the door and says, what do you want? And they said, please, brother, we're hungry and tired and cold. Can we come in? He says, I'm tired of you bums. Don't you know I was asleep? Go away. Whap. So they kind of looked at each other and walked on. And as they're walking on, Francis put his hand on Brother Leo's shoulder and said, Brother Leo, this is perfect happiness. So that's the first story.

[03:10]

I'll come back to it. So here's another story. This one has at least some historical basis. It's about me. Which doesn't mean it's true, it just means it has some historical basis, right? So I haven't spoken for a very long time. Some years ago I decided to take a break and had my name removed from the speaker rota. And I recently decided that this was a good time to speak. And the reason I decided it was a good time to speak is because in June I had an anniversary of having spent 35 years. at Zen Center. Now, if you think about it, for most of human history, most of the history of the species, people didn't live a whole lot past 35 years. That was a full life. So, one could say that I have lived an entire life at Zen Center.

[04:12]

So, it seemed like a good time to give a talk. It's not a way-seeking mind talk as such, but I do want to say a few things about me, because there are many of you that I don't know or don't know well, and those of you who don't know me, and I'm not gonna do the whole thing, I just thought I'd offer a few pertinent bits, and really what might be seen as the last part of the part of the story that I'm living now, or something like that. So, it begins this part of the story some years ago, when my then teacher and I had begun to discuss Dharma transmission. I'd been ordained for a while and practiced here at Zen Center for many, many years. And so we were talking about this and seemed kind of like the time, kind of like a good idea. Unfortunately, there was a problem.

[05:14]

The problem being that I am unable to do sashins. or longer sittings. And over the years of trying to do sashines and actually doing many of them and many innumerable one-day sittings, what I discovered is that as somebody who suffers from lifelong clinical depression, those sittings simply exacerbated that condition until if I tried to do a sashine, I was almost immediately plunged into suicidal despair. the last session I tried to do, I had to leave before the end of the day. And over the years, I found that more and more, following the Zen Center schedule, the morning schedule, was very, very difficult for me and exacerbated my depression as well. Although, at this time, I did try to follow it.

[06:19]

At some point, I realized that thousands and thousands of hours of zazen, five years and 10 practice periods doing the monastic schedule at Tassahara, and speaking to pretty much every Zen center teacher that I could get hold of, wasn't helping. So I finally made a decision to not do what was harming me which did not have any obvious benefit to others. So maybe if I could see something that was harming me, but it was benefiting you, I might have bit the bullet, but I couldn't see that it was doing any good to anyone. So anyhow, my teacher and I talked about this, and so I suggested at one point that he come and see my psychiatrist, so that my psychiatrist could explain the dynamics of depression and how that worked to him. So we went there together, and my shrink, told him, first of all, he didn't think I should be sitting Zazen at all, period.

[07:21]

But he did say that sitting in a state of sleep deprivation in a dark basement facing the wall was not the ticket. For those of you who are familiar with the Vasudhi Maga, Buddha Gosha agrees as well. At any rate, so my teacher thereafter, as we were leaving, or perhaps a day or two later, said, well... maybe if we turned up the lights a little bit and you sat facing out. But I can't give you Dharma transmission if you can, Sestashin. So I thought about that and I said, you know, thank you. But I can't do that. And so that kind of put the kibosh on any plans I had of becoming a hot shot Zen teacher without Dharma transmission. So now... I practice in the secret and esteemed lineage of Lou Hartman, who lived here for many, many years and never took Dharma transmission.

[08:24]

And I think it's a pretty nifty lineage to be in. So, this may sound like a sad story, and maybe so and maybe not. You know, it is a story in some sense about failure. My failure to fully perform as a priest, as Zen Center understands that, and perhaps also my teacher's failure to understand that one size does not fit all. However, over time, I have found the positive sides of this experience as well. I practice now knowing that I have no ambition. I'm never going to be Abbot, which I would rather eat broken glass and drink bleach than do anyway. But, you know, I'm never going to be a hot shot Zen teacher. And I have freedom to practice in a way where I'm not trying to satisfy someone else or make them think well of me.

[09:35]

And finally, I have a freedom to practice in a way that works for me. So what that means for me now is that I sit at home, I wake up in the morning when I'm well rested, I read some dharma, and then I sit in a bright open space. And that is how I can practice. However, because I am not able to function fully as a priest at Zen Center, as you see, I've stopped wearing the ropes. So the obvious question would be, well, why don't you just give them up and revert to lay life? And yet, the reason I got ordained initially was because I thought it would be a way for me to be of service in the world. And there are ways that I can be of service in the world without being a priest that I can't without being a priest, if that makes sense. So there it is.

[10:39]

So here's a third story. Those are two stories. This is the third. This one I think you will have heard before, many of you. It goes like this. Emperor Wu of Liang asked the great master Bodhidharma, what is the highest meaning of the holy truths? Bodhidharma replied, empty without holiness. The emperor said, who is facing me? Bodhidharma replied, I don't know. The emperor did not understand. After this, Bodhidharma crossed the Yangtze River and came to the kingdom of Wei. And in the commentary on this story, there's another little story. When Bodhidharma first met Emperor Wu, the emperor asked, I have built temples and ordained monks. What merit is there in this? Bodhidharma said, there is no merit. He immediately doused the emperor with dirty water. That didn't sound very nice.

[11:42]

You know, I've always felt that Emperor Wu got a bad deal with this. He was just doing his best. Unfortunately, he was not an enlightened sage. So all three of these stories that I've just told you, the story about St. Francis, the story about St. Jeffrey, and the story about St. Bodhidharma. Thank you. are all in a sense about emptiness. The last story is just naming it more specifically. So St. Francis, you know, when he was turned away, cold, hungry, tired, wet, he faced the dark night, both literally and what Christians call the dark night of the soul. And what he found, at least if we're to believe, You know, the story is perfect happiness.

[12:46]

And he found perfect happiness, I believe, because he found that there was nothing for him to rely on. He was completely in the hands of his God, completely abandoned himself to the absolute. And that's why he was a saint. You know, I faced my ideas had them facing me of how I should be, who I should be, how I should practice, and what that should look like, and found them all empty of meaning. Emperor Wu is told by the village idiot that his meritorious deeds don't mean anything. So, you know, these are all in some way about emptiness. And you know, the teaching of emptiness is multivalent and nuanced, subtle, It's both an ontological proposition and an experience. And although there is nothing to be lost in the first place, when we begin to understand a little bit about what emptiness really means, it may seem like something or indeed everything is being taken away from us.

[14:00]

There is no there there. The movie is projected onto empty space and experience is simply a Mobius strip comprising only surface. The music is without an instrument. So even our thoughts, our feelings, our sense of self have no basis in reality. There is neither ignorance nor extinction of ignorance, neither old age and death, nor extinction of old age and death, no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path, no knowledge and no attainment. That kind of takes everything away. So when you take everything away, including the Eightfold Noble Path, as we just heard in the Heart Sutra, and the possibility of attainment, how can we possibly practice? How can we practice when there's no place to stand? When, in the view of emptiness, you know, we can't grasp into anything.

[15:05]

And we have to ask ourselves, once this teaching comes towards us, Does anything really matter? You know, if everything is empty, so what? Now, I can only give my views and my conclusions based on my own experience, of course. So what gives me a basis for practice is the vow, specifically the bodhisattva vow. And my favorite version of the Bodhisattva vow is, I vow to live and to be lived for the benefit of all beings. I vow to live and to be lived for the benefit of all beings. Even if I don't know what that means or how to do it. Yeah. So when St. Francis found perfect happiness, he was facing the emptiness of everything he could see, touch, even imagine.

[16:08]

Everything but his God, or perhaps in our version, his vow, was taken away from him. And you know, the vow is circular, I believe. We create the vow by taking the vow, which then takes us and recreates us as itself. It's the same with the bodhisattva vow, that we give ourselves to it, as Saint Francis gave himself to his God, And to the extent that we can abandon ourselves to it, it transforms us in ways we can neither predict nor control. It also involves the acceptance, I believe, of the limits of our possible transformation and of a life lived without hope for the end of our own suffering. It's a lot to ask. Somebody once quoted to me Stephen Gaskin, who some of you may have heard of, a spiritual teacher. as saying his version of the Bodhisattva vow was, I vow to shovel shit against the rising tide forever.

[17:16]

I like ours a little better. He lived on a farm, though, so it probably meant something to him. So in some schools of Buddhism, there is talk of a being called an Enchantika. So an Enchantika, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, is someone who... has no possibility of ever retaining Buddhahood, completely incapable of final Buddhahood. And in the Lankavatara Sutta, it's said that there are two kinds of Ichantakas. One, and I quote, those who are Ichantakas because they have abandoned all wholesome roots. In other words, you know, I think that's fairly... fairly straightforward, understandable, who have done so much evil, who have no desire for goodness at all. Personally, I find it hard to believe that there are such people in reality. But the second Ichantaka is, quote, an Ichantaka because they have cherished certain vows.

[18:32]

for all beings since beginningless time. And so when we take this vow, we take the vow to be in the midst of suffering with all beings for, well, from beginningless time and to endless time. And emptiness, an understanding of emptiness is how we manage that, I believe. So I think that it's very important to take these vows. And we have a ceremony here, Jukai, called Receiving the Precepts. And when you take Jukai, you know, you sow and receive a rakasu like this. Your teacher gives you a Dharma name. And I think those are very important things because they are sort of the manifestations of our inward intention. But... I don't believe that they're either the beginning or the end of the matter.

[19:33]

I believe that when we come to the point of receiving the vows in a formal sort of way, what we are looking at is the culmination of a long, long process that goes back much further than any of us can even remember. I'm kind of iffy about the past lives thing, but certainly if we search in ourselves perhaps we can't actually remember where the desire to be of service, where the desire to be connected, where the desire to live, to be awakened came from. So this helps us and it encourages us, but it's only the outward manifestation of what's always been there. At least this is what I'm betting the farm on and this is what I'm betting my life on. And this is really all I have to say tonight. I was told that if we didn't run too late, it's only a little, not quite ten after eight, there is time for discussion.

[20:36]

So if anybody would like to discuss anything, we can do that. Or ask questions or what have you. Please. I'm going to ask that when people speak, if you could just say your name so we can all get to know each other. Sure. My name is Elisa. So I was interested if you could speak a little bit about your process. I was interested sort of, you know, not that it doesn't, just to hear you speak about, like, what kind of kept you going even though the Zazen and the Sashims and everything It was so difficult, and yet you stuck with it, you said, for five or 10 years before you said, no, I can't. And I was just interested in... The desire to practice must have been so strong.

[21:45]

There you go. I just was wondering, and yet in a way it seems like that resulted in your... being able to be here, because maybe by the time you said, no, I can't do it, you were already part of the community. So I was just interested in... Yeah, you know, it wasn't teasing when I said shame. Yeah. You know, question for us to consider. Yeah. Well, the other thing I want to say is that, once again, you know, this is only my opinion. It doesn't reflect the... How did they say it on TV? I really believe, I have this deep belief that real practice only begins after following total disillusionment. When we come here, when I came here certainly, I was kind of bright-eyed and it was funny, when I came here I was quite young and I had a little young man's mustache and I went down to Tassajara for the summer and I shaved the mustache off.

[22:53]

And Isan Dorsey was there. He was like the sort of head monk. Some of you will know and some of you have heard of him. And he looked at me one day and said, oh, you shaved your mustache off. How come? I said, well, I've already been here six weeks and I'm still not enlightened, so I figured I should do something different. And he said, did you really think it would only take that long? I said, oh, no, no, no, no. But of course I did. So, you know, we come with our enthusiasm and our... And that brightness and enthusiasm is tempered. But I don't think that it becomes, hopefully, if we find a way to continue, it becomes something that's capable of continuing for a long time as opposed to something that flares very brightly. I don't know if that responded to you at all. almost like a different question, but thank you.

[23:58]

The gentleman's right there with the glass of this first. My name is Miguel. My question, sir, is how do you face your depression? How do you face that part of you? Well, I'm in the good, I have the good fortune now that through medication and some techniques I've learned, it seems to be mostly in abeyance. I still don't feel that I could show up in the zendo, sit in the dark, and face the wall, but as long as I take care of myself and have professional help, that helps. Tony. My name is Tony, and I just wanted to say thank you, because, you know, one of the treasures, the sauna, and the teachings, and seeing ourselves.

[25:13]

Lots of people don't realize how dark it can get, and both emotionally and physically, and you touched them both for others, and gave me support. They've helped me, and I thank you. I'm glad you've been. It's great to see anybody on this side. Lynn. My name's Lynn. Thank you for your honesty, and I appreciate that you brought up shame, because I think many people are with that, myself included. So I wonder whether you would be willing to share how we set down the shame so that you could take care of yourself. I don't sit down with shame. I simply accept that it's there. Can you share one more how you work with it? Because I think it's a big piece for a lot of people. At some point, I realized that I always have shame in my life. And I probably always will have shame in my life. And as I said, one of the things I think this practice is about, for me at least, is realizing the limits of possible transformation.

[26:18]

So I don't believe that I'm ever going to get rid of my shame. I don't believe that I'm ever going to entirely get rid of my temper. I don't believe that these things are erasable. I know, but I'm getting there. So sometimes what I do is just say to myself, you're feeling shame, but that's no reason not to do what you're doing. You're feeling shame. For a while, every time I walked into the building, I felt shame. because I felt that I was not adequate or that I was sort of... Somebody once asked me how I, you know, I was talking to a friend who was chuseau, and for those of you who don't know, I'm sorry, I don't have the time to explain it, but she said, how did you feel when you were chuseau? And I said, like a fake. And, no, I said like a fraud. That's what I said. And she said, a frog? I said, no, dear, but close.

[27:21]

So sometimes, for a while, a practice I was using is whenever I was walking into the building feeling like I couldn't do this and therefore I was a fraud, I would say to myself, may I be free of shame as I walk into this building. May I be free of shame as I go through my day. May I be free of shame as, you know, I see other people doing things that I can't do. And in a way, I think that those things that we were ashamed of that are very painful for us can be great gifts. I am not by nature a humble person. So this is a little bit of enforced humility. So... You know, it's like everything else. It has a good side and it's a bad side. If it's so crippling that I can't work or do anything, then it's really a problem.

[28:24]

If it's just something that I have to deal with on a day-to-day, you know, then that's just what it is. Yeah. Yeah. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw my friend Sam. Hi. Hi. Sam. I'm probably tagging on Ian's question. It was about shame, about acceptance. But I was curious, how are you able to come to a place of acceptance about what did not be? Quick question. Well, first of all, acceptance does not mean approval. You know, the first noble truth is about that all of our experience is bound up with suffering. And before we accept that, we can't do anything about it. It doesn't mean we like it. It doesn't mean that we wish things were different, weren't different, as it were. It just means that we have to, it means looking at things as they are.

[29:30]

And, you know, I don't know. It may be a gradual wearing down process. You know, if you live with it day after day, and you're willing to face it somehow day after day, a little bit by a little bit, it becomes manageable. I think perhaps it's like the great grief we feel at a loss. It never goes away, but little by little it becomes something we can bear. If I hadn't had great losses in my life, there's no way I would be able to relate to somebody else who had and try to give help to them. Yeah. Chris. The question is that color is your view of pretty much everything. So how do you know when you're seeing things the way they are? Yeah, I don't.

[30:33]

Because one of the things that I found is that when I'm in that state, I don't know what's real. Are my perceptions real? Is this really happening? Am I just making this up? It's crazy making. And sometimes what I can do is I can talk to somebody I trust and run my perceptions by and say, is this really happening or is it just me? And that is one of, of course, the benefits of Sangha. Whether it's your teacher or whether it's your good friend or whether it's just somebody you trust, is this really happening? And just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you sometimes. Yeah, but I know what you mean. This is actually a pretty good place to be in a way because it's like the uncertainty that comes with our first understanding, our first glimpse of emptiness. If nothing can be grasped, nothing is ultimately real,

[31:36]

Everything is constantly subject to change. It's a very good model for understanding emptiness and negotiating our way through that, I think. And it's painful as hell. You, sir, had your hand up. A lot of things were resonating in there. It reminded me when I got my master's degree. I remember thinking, I'm a fraud. I'm not a master of this subject. And I felt like I was the only one that felt that way, and everyone didn't feel that way. So my question is, I'm not a Buddhist either, but I've been studying it, and in a sense, practicing it for years, several years. Is there any reason to become one? If it feels kind of natural where I'm at. If it walks like a dog, and looks like a dog, and backs like a dog, it's a dog. What do you think becoming a Buddhist means? It sounds like you're already doing it. vows, and then referring to yourself as one?

[32:37]

I've never done the vows. I've never referred to myself. Well, if that doesn't feel comfortable for you, there's no reason to. You're very, very welcome here. But as I said, you know, I find that taking the vow is transformative. It gives us, let me put it this way, at its best, it gives us something much larger than our egos. much larger than our whims, much larger than our preferences. So actually, it's a misnomer to say that we take the vow. It is more accurate, in my view, to say that we give ourselves to the vow. So it's like giving oneself in marriage, for example, or giving oneself to an art. So that ultimately, we are transformed by that, and what comes through what comes through us is the vow, is the art, is the love.

[33:41]

So, you know, you can live together with somebody for a very long time and it's okay. I don't know if there's a value to taking a marriage vow or not. Some people don't find it so. Some people feel like their relationship is incomplete unless they do. Please. Hi, how are you? My name is Anastasia. Yes, Anastasia. Welcome. And I really appreciate it. And two days ago, I decided to take a 30 days break from something that I deeply wanted all my life, from wanting something I deeply wanted. So, and it's very interesting that you're speaking about because in my second day experience, which is just today, I was feeling two things.

[34:53]

First, that is, I wrote in my journal and said, this thing that I truly want to find is what else would mean. And that I... But I scratched the way for some reason. I wrote down friends and I scratched my way because I felt very, like, I felt like if I can't have this thing that you may want, then I can't find the wrong thing because I don't remove it. But there's a lot of things we've made, even if it's just me without humans. And I found that they should be scratched principally. But what I felt also that I didn't expect is a tremendous relief from feeling that I'm constantly failing. And I found a lot of freedom of that.

[35:54]

So thank you for your help. Zindi Roshi-Selmer says, Zen teacher's life is mistake after mistake after mistake. Maybe time for one more. Yeah, hi. Hi. I just wanted to, I guess, sort of note something I heard in what you were saying. Thank you very much for it. It's, yeah, as someone said earlier, it's acceptance, I guess. But it's also gentleness, gentleness of yourself. And I think that's really important. For me, I have a really hard time being gentle with myself for seeing my own limitation, seeing that I don't have to be perfect at all. I just wanted to really say that I really appreciated the way you've been very gentle with yourself.

[37:04]

And that's a good model, I think, for the way that we want to be gentle with everybody else. But if we treat ourselves a certain way, how can we really be training ourselves to treat other people a different way? Anyway, so I just wanted to thank you for that. You know, I thought about calling this talk Naked Zen and, you know, dressing appropriately. And if I had, you would have seen the whip marks barely healed. So it takes a long time. Okay, unless there's something that somebody really needs to say, I think we can say goodnight and thank you. Can we do that? Goodnight and thank you. 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.

[38:09]

For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:17]

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