Good morning. This morning I would like to base my talk on something that Suzuki Roshi said, a phrase that he used, a sentence. My whole talk will be one sentence long. It's a really good sentence. The sentence is, the phrase is, right there in imperfection is perfect reality.

[01:12]

Maybe I don't need to say too much about it. Maybe we can feel that that's true. Right there right here in our imperfect, incomplete life is complete reality. Nothing missing. A few months ago, I conducted a Bodhisattva initiation ceremony. That's called Jukai in Japanese. It means receiving the precepts. And some of you have Raksus.

[02:19]

And those of you who don't can see some people who have those little square things. That's part of the ceremony of receiving the precepts. And each person who receives the precepts spends many, many, many, many hours sewing that robe. It's considered a robe, even though it looks like a... People say, what is that bib you're wearing? So people really put their whole heart into it. And one of my jobs as the person who was conducting the ceremony is that on the back of the raksu, on the white silk backing, I write something. So it could be, you know, a phrase from a koan.

[03:25]

like every day is a good day. Just before the talk, I walked up by the woodshed and went over to that first reservoir, and I felt every day is a good day. That isn't what I wrote, though, on the back of their Raksus. Or it could be, you know, something from Dogen, like, here the way unfolds. That's a good one. Here the way unfolds. But I chose to write this. Right there in imperfection is perfect reality. Sometimes the person leading the ceremony will write something different on each raksu, but I wrote the same thing on every one.

[04:36]

Seven. Except one of them I made a mistake on and left a word out. That one was not exact. Right there, an imperfection. I told the person who I gave it to, see, this is... This is living proof of that teaching. The main reason I chose to use that phrase was because I find the phrase very encouraging. It's encouraging because right there in imperfection is perfect reality. So you have imperfection and perfection or perfect reality. And I have always felt and continue to feel that I don't know much about perfect reality.

[05:42]

But imperfection, I feel like I'm an expert. I'm a well-practiced, deeply experienced expert in imperfection and mistakes and doing things wrong. So it's very encouraging to know, oh, right there in imperfection, which I know so well, is this other thing called perfect reality. Wow, I never would have thought that. What a great enlightening statement that is. So that's how I came to use it. I also feel that right there in Imperfection is Perfect Reality is a pretty good summary of all Buddhist teaching and practice in ten words or less, seven words.

[06:55]

leaving out maybe a few details here and there. But basically, that's the basic gist of it, which I'll try to say a little bit more about to give you a sense of what I mean. While I feel that right there in imperfection is perfect reality contains, epitomizes, is the essence of our way, our teaching, Zen teaching, it also has a particular flavor of Suzuki Roshi. In recent years, I've come to feel that those of us who had an opportunity to practice with Suzuki Roshi, that each of us has our own Suzuki Roshi.

[08:16]

Each of us has our own emphasis on some aspect of his teaching. Each person, or maybe just one person at different times of their life, So someone may emphasize how he worked, particularly if you were with him at Tassahara doing stonework, how he worked, as a way that the teaching is conveyed. And someone else may emphasize his teaching about meditation. I've just been listening to Jiryu, a teacher here at Green Gulch, who's giving an online course on breath meditation and using a great deal of what Suzuki Roshi said about breath, about meditation, about zazen.

[09:20]

Counting our breath and following our breath and shikantaza. So someone may emphasize that, or I may emphasize that at some other time. But today, and something that is with me often is his kindness and encouragement. Encouragement and courage. We need courage to face what we fear. We need encouragement.

[10:23]

Encouragement is very helpful to us in facing what we fear in facing our pain, our suffering, our difficulty, in facing what we don't want to face, living with it, tolerating it. In etymology, encouragement and courage come from C-O-U-R. That's the core of... Core, I think, may come from the same thing, actually. That's the core of those words. And that, in French, that's C-O-U-E-R. Cours.

[11:24]

And that means heart. So when we are... When we have... Encourage, when we're encouraged, we're heartened. What does that mean exactly? I don't know. But I think we all know what it means to feel heartened, to feel, okay, I'm going to do this, or okay, this is the way things are. So heart is very important for us. And heart, to be heartened, please notice that to be heartened does not mean that the pain goes away.

[12:32]

that the difficulty is eradicated, that the problem is solved. Maybe we can solve the problem. Good. When we can solve the problem, that's good. Let's solve them. But we can't always solve them. Some difficulties are insoluble. Can't be dissolved. So, and when they can't be dissolved, when they're that way, nevertheless, we can face them, we can tolerate them, we can live with them with heart, wholeheartedly. The other connotation of heart,

[13:41]

is meaning the most important thing, the main thing, the central thing, the essential thing. Like we chant the Heart Sutra. So the Heart Sutra is not about the Heart Sutra. It means the heart of the matter or a sutra that describes the essence of the teaching. That's the Heart Sutra. So I think part of my talk today is, we could say, I could say, the heart is the heart. That this heartening, this ability, this encouragement to be with our life completely, to not imagine an escape, not attempt an escape, but to stay with it is the heart of the matter.

[14:48]

And why that's so, why that's possible, is because right there in imperfection is perfect reality. So I thought of an example of this involving Suzuki Roshi. And this goes back to many years ago, the late 60s. I was at Zen Center practicing then, and also there was another fellow, many people, but another fellow who was there named Craig. And Craig and I were friends. And both Craig and I had a kind of chronically difficult time.

[15:53]

It was chronically difficult. The main difficulty was that each of us inside ourselves, we would talk about this, each of us inside of ourselves were very critical of our own way, our own path. In psychology, this is called a tyrannical superego. Dr. Freud, a superego, a tyrant. You did this wrong. You're so stupid. What a jerk. How come you're doing this? You shouldn't do what you're doing. You should do what you're not doing. How come you're doing it so dumb, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm giving you a very mild. This is the edited version of publication. It would sometimes be quite a bit more vitriolic than that. Nasty. Nasty.

[16:54]

Nasty. So both Craig and I had this difficulty, and he was going to go talk to Suzuki Roshi about it. Great. We're going to get the answer and find out what to do about this. So he went to talk to Suzuki Roshi and Doka-san in one-to-one meeting. And then when he, you know, next day or a couple days later, I said, you know, so what did he say? I was anxious to get the answer. And Craig said, he said, Suzuki Roshi said, this is a paraphrase. This is almost 50 years ago this happened. But I remember it. So that's... Sometimes we remember something from 50 years ago that's important to us.

[17:57]

Craig told me that Suzuki Roshi said, because of the difficulty you're having now, living with the difficulty you're having now, you'll be able to help other people. because of the trouble that you're going through and living through it and being with it, that will result in your being able to help others, which, you know, that makes a lot of sense. If we've been through something, had some experience, then we can help others through a similar kind of experience. So what Suzuki Roshi did not do was how to end the difficulty he was having. He did not tell Craig about some really superlative meditative technique that would take care of it so that Craig would no longer feel the suffering that he was feeling then.

[19:15]

He didn't tell him that. He didn't tell him about nirvana, the third noble truth, as extinction. He didn't tell him about how to extinct this suffering that he was suffering of tyrannical superego. So I think without thinking about it, without trying to, I'm sure Suzuki Roshi didn't think what I'm about to say. But what he did, what he did was he transformed it, which was very encouraging to Craig and to me. He transformed this thing that's not so good, that's of little value, that you don't like, is really...

[20:18]

At the heart of it, it's really something that's really good. And that's really of high value. In Jungian language, this would be called alchemy, right? That's what Jung was interested in. The medieval guys, we don't know. Maybe they actually thought they could turn lead into gold, literally. It was guys, I think. I don't think there were any medieval alchemist ladies. So maybe they were trying to literally turn literally lead into literal gold. But Jung understood it psychologically. How do we turn what psychologically is lead for us, what psychologically, what inside of us is low value? Lead is considered... Low value was considered low value.

[21:19]

It's probably quite valuable. But anyway, in this metaphor, it was considered low value. How do you change something that's low value into high value? That was the alchemist's quest. And that's what Suzuki Roshi did. This thing of little value is actually of great value. What Suzuki Roshi said to Craig was essentially right there in imperfection called tyrannical superego, called I hate myself, called etc., etc., etc., is perfect reality. Oh, you'll be able to help people. This will be a great benefit to others and therefore to yourself. So I think this is a very important aspect of right there in imperfection is perfect reality.

[22:27]

Namely, this is not primarily a philosophical statement. This is not primarily a truth claim. Some abstract philosophy, yes, that's true, no, that's not true, blah, blah, blah. No. Right there is In imperfection is perfect reality means the difficulty you have, among other things, it means the difficulty you're having now, you'll be able to help others later. It's very practical. It's very pragmatic. It's very useful. We use it. We should use it in our life. it's not a, so to speak, a matter of discussion, a matter of philosophy, a matter of abstract theory. So now I'll do some discussion and abstract theory.

[23:41]

Maybe, I don't know if that's what this is, but so... Right there in imperfection, this perfect reality is a lot of Buddhist teaching, condensed. So I want to talk about that ontologically, about the way things are, and then also about practice. Because we really, Zen students, love... Practice. We like to practice stuff, not just think about it. So to talk about it as the way things are, the way things are is that right there in imperfection is perfect reality, is, oh, first we have to understand perfect. So usually we think of perfect or often we think of perfect as meaning

[24:45]

Something like no blemishes, no flaws, no difficulties, like that. Like I'm on the dish crew here at Green Gulch every other week. And one of the things that I like to do, or if somebody is working with me, I give them a treat, which is that one of the sinks is stainless steel. And if you put bon ami on it, with a green pad, and you really go at it, you can get a perfect surface. Some people don't understand that. They kind of do it. And I tell them, it should look like a mirror. You should be able to see your face in that stainless steel. Oh, OK. I work at it. So that's often the way we think of perfect, means no blemish.

[25:48]

But etymologically, perfect actually has more to do with completeness, per facere. The per of that is completely, and facere means to do, completely to do. So that sense of perfect, you know, like in our grammar, you know, tense, there's the perfect tense. Like the future perfect is, I shall have done that. I think that that's it. It refers to something that's completely done, complete, complete. So if we translate that into Suzuki Roshi's phrase, then we'd say, Right there in incompleteness is completeness. Which sort of doesn't make any sense, but listen to how Dogen said it.

[26:52]

So Dogen said, Dogen is a 13th century Zen teacher who highly revered by the lineage that we are a part of here. He said... Enlightenment, more than one sentence. He was verbose, Dogen. Three sentences or four maybe. He said, enlightenment is like the moon reflected in water. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dew drops on the grass, even in one drop of water.

[27:57]

So there's a book called Moon in a Dew Drop. which is a collation of essays by Dogen, translated by Kaz Tanahashi with various San Francisco Zen Center teachers. And the title of that book is Moon and a Dew Drop. Moon and a Dew Drop, and that's where it comes from. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky, the entire universe, all things and all being are reflected in dew drops on the grass, even in one drop of water. Even in one drop of water means even in our small, limited, imperfect life.

[29:16]

Even there, the moon, the whole moon, and the entire sky, and it's true, right? The metaphor is fabulous because it's so accurate. I mean, if you could look inside a dewdrop, which is pretty hard to do, but there's no reason why it wouldn't be true. The entire universe is in the dewdrop. So even in this small thing called the dewdrop, called our life, called your life, called my life, is completeness, is fullness, is the whole universe. So our life is limited, very limited. Limited means particular, specific.

[30:22]

It's extremely specific, and the range or the spectrum is very, very, very narrow. A couple of weeks ago, I had a medical emergency. Some of you folks here at Green Gulch know about that, and the people in the practice period after I started to feel a little bit better wrote me a beautiful card saying, get well, and so on like that, which I really appreciate. Thank you very much. So I had a medical emergency, which may have been... Oh, and I had to... If you ever have a medical emergency, try not to do it so that you have to get in an ambulance and lie down at Green Gulch and get driven over Highway 1. Because whatever the emergency was, that's worse.

[31:28]

That was the worst part. Oh, my God. Everyone was very sincere. They were trying to help me. That was really one of the most miserable experiences I've ever had in my life, lying down. I was already not feeling so good, right? I was in an ambulance lying down on the road. Wow, that was really awful. Various things happened. I'll save you those, spare you those details. But anyway, why I had this medical emergency, which involved severe leg cramps and going into shock and hypothermia and all kinds of crazy stuff, was possibly, probably because of an electrolyte imbalance. Namely, my potassium wasn't in the right place. Now, how much potassium is involved here, right?

[32:29]

A tiny, tiny, tiny amount, right? Probably like I only had a half ounce of potassium instead of an ounce or whatever it is. I mean, potassium is not like a big part of your body, right? It's just a small thing. But it was off, and by it being off... It had very, very major consequences. I'm trying to illustrate how narrow, how specific, how particular, how limited our life is. That's the way causation works. It rains now. It rains now because of... An infinite number of very, very, very particular circumstances. And then it moves on.

[33:31]

That's the way things always are. This is causation or karma. Our individual karma, our family karma, our life karma, the world karma, being karma, earth karma, solar system karma. However, even though our life is very, very, very limited in all of these ways, and of course one of the real limitations that we really notice a lot is that we're going to die. This is a very significant limitation that we all run up against. And we're not so happy about this limitation. Who came up with this idea? Anyway, that we're going to die. So in the midst of that, we have to remember the moon and the entire sky.

[34:37]

We shouldn't forget. We shouldn't be caught, stuck in that limitation only. Because if we're stuck there, if we're caught there, that means we're forgetting that right there in imperfection is perfect reality. Right there in incompleteness is the complete total universe. If we do that, then we're like a frog at the bottom of a well. The frog at the bottom of a well looks up and sees a circle of blue. And the frog says, that's the sky. I know what the sky is. The sky is a circle of blue. It's about that big. That's a foolish frog.

[35:40]

We shouldn't be like a foolish frog. In some way, there's no way for us to see anything other than a circle of blue. We can't see the entire universe. We're not that way. That's not human life. Human life is, you know, the spectrum of vision, right? The spectrum of hearing. It's all, it starts here and it ends there and that's it. We don't get all of the other stuff that's going on around it. So in some way, there is no sky for the frog. There is no sky for us other than that circle of blue. But if we're stuck there, if we think that truly is the sky, then we get into big, big trouble. There's a world of difference between understanding that our view is limited Understanding that our view is limited is entering unlimitedness.

[36:48]

That's how you enter it. That's why we're so interested in not knowing. Everybody's interested in knowing. We should know this and know that and know this and know that. But in Zen, we practice not knowing. It sounds crazy. But actually it has to do with this kind of open thing. The entire sky, the full moon is not knowing. A work of Suzuki Roshi, a talk of Suzuki Roshi's that we were studying recently is called ordinary mind, Buddha mind. And in that talk, Suzuki Roshi says, if you say ordinary mind, I'll say, OK, I'm ordinary mind.

[37:55]

If you say Buddha mind, I'll say, OK, I'm Buddha mind. That's the same thing. Ordinary mind is limited. karmic, specific, imperfect. Buddha mind is unlimited, perfect, complete, everything. So again and again, this is the teaching. And for those of you who are familiar with it, This is the sandokai. The sandokai is perfection and imperfection shake hands. Limited and unlimited are friends. Limited and unlimited merge. The merging of difference and unity.

[38:59]

The merging of difference and sameness. These are all ways of expressing this same feeling. As I said, as Zen students, we always like to practice. So this understanding that I'm talking about is a guideline for our practice. Actually, it's even more than that. This understanding is in the service of the practice that we practice. From this perspective, the practice that we practice is don't go anywhere. Stay home.

[40:04]

Dogen says, here is the place. Here the way unfolds. Dogen said that probably in 1246. 1246 or so? About How far is Japan from here? 6,000 miles away? 8,000 miles? Long way off. So 6,000, 8,000 miles away, 1246, I didn't calculate it, but it's a long time ago. How long ago is that? 800 years? 750 years ago? He said, here is the place, here is the way. Here the way unfolds. So I don't know what here he had in mind. Fortunately, it's here.

[41:15]

It's always here. Here is the place. Here the way unfolds. Here in this imperfect life that we have. That's always where we'll find the whole moon and the entire sky. That's the only place it exists. can't express itself in any way other than in this muddy puddle of our life. Here. So this is a really, wow, this is really something for him to say that. Here. It's like you can use that teaching wherever you go, whenever you think of it. Because you're there. You're here. We're always here until we're not here anymore.

[42:18]

And then we don't know what it'll be like. But anyway, while we're here, we've always got here to practice with. Why leave the seat that exists in your own home and go off to the dusty realms of other lands? he says. We don't leave the seat that exists in our own home called here. That is the seat. So that's one major implication of this teaching of right there, here, in imperfection is perfect reality, is that our practice is based on here. Not some imagination that we're supposed to go someplace else where we won't be here.

[43:20]

We'll be there and there will be a lot better than here. That's what we usually think. How do I get there? But our teaching is stay here. Live here. Breathe here. This is wonderful, wonderful bomb, B-A-L-M, of our teaching. And just my final point about another kind of implication for coming from this right there in imperfection is perfect reality. Is that the work of practice, the practice of practice is to open what is closed.

[44:40]

Suzuki Roshi called this, don't get caught, don't get stuck in some idea, in your own idea, in some brilliant idea from some brilliant Zen teacher, in some brilliant thing from something you read, don't get stuck. Don't get caught. Don't be a fundamentalist. Suzuki Roshi called it that. Uchiyama Roshi called it open the hand of thought. To open the hand of thought is to realize that right there in imperfection is perfect reality. It's a gesture toward that realization.

[45:56]

Opening the hand of thought. So in our practice, in our Zen practice, in our Zazen, we count our breathing. We count our exhalations from one to 10. And then we start again at one. Isn't that something? This is beginner's practice. For the first two or three hundred years, we should count our breathing. Then after that, we'll move on to advanced beginner. There's no such thing as beginner's practice. So we just count our breathing. Counting our breathing allows us to experience something bigger.

[47:11]

Our mind has a natural tendency to close, to be limited. It's an evolutionary bent. But it's not all that's happening. Then if we can take that in, then we can be encouraging and generous and patient. The foundations of those. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast. offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support.

[48:17]

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

[48:28]

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