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. My name is Sarah. I am a priest in the Soto Zen lineage, and I lived here for many years, many years ago. And I'm just back visiting for a little while. And I have a tremendous appreciation for this place. And thank you to all of you who are helping take good care of it. And thank you to Hakusho for inviting Charlie and I to come down and help support. the life and practice here. It's a kind of nourishment for us actually to reconnect and be a part of what's happening here and listen like to the creek and the crickets and the chirping squirrels and the human beings.

[01:26]

So we have all ended up here right now. Some of you maybe just were dragged down here by somebody else. Is that true of anybody? And it kind of doesn't matter how we got here. We're here right now. And we're in this place where for the past like 51, 52 years, it has been a Sotizen Buddhist monastery. And I'd like to talk about what that means and what that is and why it's here. But before that it was, it belonged to a family, one of whose members is here tonight. And so that's like, there's some history right there. And before that it, probably belonged to other people.

[02:30]

And before that, Native Americans came here with some frequency, is my understanding, not to settle, but as a place of healing because of the hot springs waters. Do you know more about this? Was it just the Esalen tribe or other tribes as well? It's the Esalen. So mainly the Esalen tribe. And that's here. So currently, in this current situation we all find ourselves in, this is a place where Zen Buddhist practice. And the fundamental effort of Zen has been put in different ways. The way it comes to me lately, when I get to try to express it, is the effort of Buddhism is to reclaim humanity. The effort is to reclaim humanity. us from our fundamental delusions.

[03:34]

And the primary, maybe, fundamental delusion is one that says that we are separate from one another. And we're cut off from one another. We're apart. And I think, you know, if you haven't heard about this before, it's like, well, we are different than one another. We are. We are distinct, particular human beings. But really, if you want to test this out, you want to try the theory that we're not connected. Are we or are we not connected? Breathe in. And then this idea of self being apart from other things is very easily popped. Like, oh, I literally depend on the environment around me, just like everything else. I wanna offer a teaching that, so I was here for eight days doing a zen and yoga workshop, or a series of them, and this story kept coming up, and I realized, you know, in yoga, there's a lot of work with the alignment of the body, and not only, but the body gets evoked a lot.

[04:53]

And so it was bringing forth for me, because I was teaching the zen part of it, the alignment of the heart-mind. And this story, which is a very traditional, this comes from, like, ancient Buddhist cosmology. It probably predates Buddhism, actually. Is given... I don't think the immoral to the chair did that, but it seemed like it. Anyone know what just happened? It was over there. Yeah, whatever. So... This is like a foundational teaching of Buddhism and thusly of Zen. Here is what it means to be human. And here's the image that's offered. There's a vast ocean. And in that vast ocean, like massive ocean, there's a regular sized turtle. And the turtle doesn't have sight usually or is blind in one eye.

[05:59]

And also in that ocean, there's a ring that's about big enough to accommodate a turtle's head. And the turtle swims around in the ocean, and the frequency with which this turtle would, without the use of sight, happen to put its head up through the ring for air, given that the ring could move anywhere, is how, unlikely it is and how precious and rare it is to attain a human form. I think this is super important. Do you hear that humming? Is it humming out there or is it just... So this is a fundamental teaching about humanity. And I think it's a really good one to call to mind. To begin with, when we think about ourselves.

[07:03]

I think a lot of the disconnection in the world, and there's reasons for this, it's not like any of us were asking for this, but a lot of the disconnection that we feel is because we have a, at this hour in the night, I can't think of a better expression than like messed up relationship with what we are. We have a skewed and diluted perception of what we are in ourselves to begin with. Somebody's trying to come in there. Come on in. And it's really important. And I don't mean this in a new age way, and I don't mean this in a way that's like... going to amplify the self any more than it's already amplified but it's really important for us to understand this is like a miraculous situation and so is this [...] and so is like everyone that's ever been in this form and that's foundational to the teaching it's also really good to remember our lives are fleeting every single one of us was born to a human woman

[08:17]

Every single one of us certainly will die. It's rare, it's precious, and it's fleeting. This is really important to remember. Because then that informs, first of all, our perception of ourself and our engagement with ourself, and from there, how we engage with other people. And if this one, if the turtle in the ocean doesn't work for you, just go scientific. Think about the vastness of the material in the universe. What are the chances that the stuff that came together to make each one of us? I feel like I've mentioned this before in a talk, and I was like, just biologically, simply the number of sperm that are there, that happen to be, not that the sperm's the only determining factor, it certainly isn't, but I'm just saying, it's miraculous that the particulars that we came into are here.

[09:20]

I feel like I made that point. And so thusly, treasure ourselves. And treasure the beings that show up in front of you. ground ourselves in the value and preciousness of this human life, the fleetingness of it, the value of it, and then move into our activity in the world. It really matters, actually, how we treat each other. And when I was thinking about this, so in terms of reclaiming humanity, and by the way, like Buddhism, Buddhism... We talk about it being passed, warm hand to warm hand. We are it. We're not the far reaches of it, but we are a part of what Zen Buddhism is in the world.

[10:21]

Even the people who are just here for the food. Or your friend said, come on, come on, you'll like this. We're here right now. We are participating in this manifestation of this project. So when we think about the effort to reclaim humanity from delusion, The phrase that kept coming to my mind was, think globally, act locally. I think it was from the 70s about how we could take care of the planet. Also really applicable there. But this is how we can engage with humanity. Is with who is right in front of us. So, and I've been, it's really, it's, I should qualify with saying, when I first lived at Tassajara, this is a confession, I was probably as tight as any Zen student has ever been. I was really, I think it's a, I honest, and I think other people have described this, it's probably a phase of practice, that if you come and you like practice and you like the forms, and then I came in the winter, so I came in practice period where there's lots and lots of forms and everything's really strict.

[11:35]

I was pretty uptight about it. I have outgrown that. The forms are not, the tightness is not the point. They're just there to wake us up, to like, oh, what's right in front of me? Wake up. So I give that qualifier to say, you know, an example is like, so maybe somebody's in the courtyard right now having a really loud conversation. That happens, you know? People are just like, People don't know. They don't know that there's like, I don't know, 60 or 70 people sitting here listening to them. They would probably form themselves differently if they did. Probably an upright thing to do for somebody is to go and say, oh, do you mind being quiet? But the how we do that is really important. If my recommendation would be, for any human interaction, ground ourselves in the reality of like the turtle in the ocean in the ring.

[12:42]

And then ground ourselves in our own reality. Meaning, you know, we say that to study the Buddha way is to study the self. Have a good and constant and ongoing look at what we carry within us. I'm trying to see if I can locate. I don't think I could locate spontaneously like what my uptightness was about. But it probably had something to do with, I came to Zen practice in a lot of pain, and I felt a lot of refuge in this really strict container. The grief I was carrying, I felt, for me, it's a very unusual way to express grief, you know, sit there still. But that worked for me, so I was really protective of it. If I was a little more mature, I could probably see like, oh, you know what, actually that container is not threatened by somebody coming in the wrong door or something. Not at all. Yeah. So when we are caretaking this place, and if we're guests here tonight, we are caretaking this place.

[13:49]

Your generosity and commitment, making it over that hill, that's caretaking this place. So collectively, we are caretaking this place, and please let us do it with a great awareness. of this primary teaching that we are here to dissolve the delusion that we are apart from each other. A new form in the work circle, so when the students, for those who are guests and not coming to the morning work circle, the students all gather that are working that day in a work circle. And there's a new, new this year, is that right? Would you say? form of we say our name and then we say our preferred gender pronouns. And I was really encouraged that this change has happened. I teach at a place called Stone Creek Zen Center, the predominant demographic of people at that lovely Zen Center, which has been around for a long time as a lay practice center, so not like a residential place like this.

[14:58]

Mostly people are in their 60s and 70s. Mostly people are white, identified. And when I bring up gender pronouns, people are like, I don't understand why you're doing that. I was like, great, I'll tell you. And please chime in if there's another layer to this that I'm missing. But my understanding and my experience of it is we, you know, When people look at us, they don't know our names, so we say our names. That's a way that we can communicate with each other. And then we offer our gender pronouns. She, her, he, him, they, them. And I have heard of others, actually. I had a friend who was, they wanted to make the pronoun ze. Or, you know, pioneer them. And we do that collectively. for a couple reasons. One of them is to dispel delusion that there is such a thing as a binary of any kind, a dualism of any kind.

[16:05]

And another is to make an environment that's more inclusive. So if someone comes and they don't fit in the binary, there's room for that to be acknowledged and expressed. If everyone all summer expresses gender pronouns in the binary, it's still important to work with that delusion. That's one of the things that's rising, that consciousness is rising up in our culture. It is totally our responsibility and practice to reckon with that rising, that consciousness rising. And for many people, it's been there a long time. And in many cultures it's been there a long time. There's a lot of opportunity at Tassajara to work with the self. This was coming up in the class that I was offering the other day.

[17:07]

There's just lots of ways to like, so you have a certain identity and then your identity shifts because your job shifts or your status. There's lots of hierarchy here. which is, you know, it's functional. And we should always work with that too. We should know the baggage we carry when we engage with the hierarchy. Baggage and like just training and other stuff. So there's lots of ways to tenderize the self. I keep picturing it like... Like get your solid concept of self and... let you know, like me tenderizing. Just to allow it to, and it's not just to break down a self so that we bliss out and we're like, oh, I'm just connected to all things and I have no responsibility to the world. It's to, so in this practice, in Zen practice, we drop the self, we also pick it up again.

[18:09]

We tenderize it and we pick it up again. And now it's a little more porous. And then someone comes up and says, you know, The way you do things here is causing me pain. We have some pliancy to say, oh please tell me how that is. What's that like? And I won't actually hear. It's really different than a response of like, I know who I am, I've got myself together, the thing I'm doing is fine, we've always done it this way. you know we've always done work circle just names it's been fine i don't know you know it's like no no no maybe that worked then it probably didn't work for a bunch of people truthfully but they didn't have the support to stand up and say something different yet but now we do this is like a celebration for us in zen to be for the world to come forward and us be you know

[19:17]

from the point of view of a self, but now like a softer, more pliant self to be like, I meet you, I see you. I have a 16-year-old daughter. She was born here, actually. Not so long ago, she said to me, Mom, how is it not cultural appropriation that you're like a Zen Buddhist priest? And I was like, that's my curse. I really felt proud. And I was like, oh, gosh, you're right, honey. Actually, I said to her, I think about this all the time. I think about it a lot. It may actually mean that someday I have to take off these robes. No one's asked me to do that yet. And I don't know what I would do if they did. it's a living question.

[20:20]

I identify as white. I come from Northern European descended folks. I come from a line of people that, I come from a hair, like what little I know, and it's not a lot, is like, I often feel like this, like I grew up in Massachusetts and now I live in California. I come from a long line of people who have done that. They didn't, generations of people that didn't really live long where they grew up. They moved and they acquired. And recently somebody said to me, so how'd you end up in Zen? And I told them the story I usually tell, or some version of it, I can't, I don't know. And I don't want to discredit the pieces in my normal story, and some of those are like the pain I was in. I think there's karma in there, honestly. The teachings sang to me. The pain I was in had to do with a very devastating death of my mother.

[21:28]

And I was 22, so I was reckoning with mortality at a time when that's not what's going on for a lot of a 22-year-old. And then I went to this place, and it was like, life and death is the great matter. And I was like, oh, thank gosh. So yes, thinking about this. So those things are important, and I don't want to minimize them. But I've also recently realized, and I didn't, and I neglected to say this to this person when I was telling my story recently. I came into the Zen Center. All I knew was that... That guy, Suzuki Roshi, who wrote this book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, was a teacher there. I didn't really know what was going to be in there, but when I went in there, there was a lot of white people that looked like me. And that mattered to me, actually. I mean, I didn't know that at the time. I didn't, yeah, I feel embarrassed to say I didn't know that at the time. I just was like, oh, I'm just in another place.

[22:29]

Because a lot of the places I moved were pretty predominantly white. It wasn't exclusively white, but it was predominantly white, and there were women who looked like me 20 years from now wearing stuff like this. It was like I could imagine myself into that. And the cultural references were things that made sense to me, even though it was California, and that's quite different than Massachusetts. And actually, in talking about, and I think actually it was with the same person, we were talking about the founding of San Francisco Zen Center. Suzuki Roshi, who was the founding teacher, and he was a Japanese man, came to the United States. I think this came up in the class. He came to the United States and he wanted, he was actually interested in teaching American students. But he came to take care of a temple that was for Japanese American Sangha community. And then, I don't know what the conditions were, that American students started coming there, white American students, and some people of color who were American, but were not Japanese American.

[23:31]

And it got uncomfortable. for the community there. And I will look into this more, so the next time I tell the story I have more details. But essentially, there was this branching off, and Suzuki Roshi went with the predominantly white students to found a center that was culturally relevant for Americans, white Americans particularly. And again, there were some Americans of color in that group that founded it. Yeah. That's a relevant part of this history. And it's always been there. And people have pointed it out over the years. 20 years ago when I was here, people were pointing that out, actually. And I imagine that people were pointing that out along the way. The predominance of whiteness continues in part, I think, because that history hasn't been fully brought.

[24:34]

in front of us to encounter the whole of it. Pieces of it seem to have been brought to our attention, but not the whole of it. And it really strikes me more and more, the more I keep that somewhere in my field of consciousness, the way that these forms, and they're quite Japanese, we bow to each other, which is this beautiful thing, but it is culturally Japanese. The way that these forms and the quietness and the silence of Zen dovetails with dominant white culture and repression. That's just, we need to get that stuff out in front of us collectively. Carolyn was talking about the mountains being our karmic consciousness and that there is collective karmic consciousness. There is collective karma. of this place. And these are just some of the pieces.

[25:38]

I have heard, truthfully, I actually heard a white, older, white male teacher recently talk about like, I'm not gonna quote it, it's just too uncomfortable. It was essentially saying something like, it's just so hard to be careful all the time. I think actually what he said was like, it's just really hard to be woke. It's new, maybe, for somebody in his position. And he was bringing humor, and I think he was actually trying to bring some humility, and there can be a feeling when something is new. Like, well... That's not the way I used to do it. We used to just guess everybody's gender. And that was fine, say the cisgender people. It was never fine, actually.

[26:45]

The comments that white men maybe in particular, people on the highest peak of privilege in this culture have not had to look out about their behavior so much before and if that's shifting yeah and I can say as a white woman not far below that peak of things there's yeah there's discomfort in it and there's not a lot of tolerance in the dominant culture for discomfort I think in white culture, I would say comfort. So for me, for the particular white culture I come from, comfort is literally elevated, sometimes above relationship, definitely above truth.

[27:49]

Has anyone else had this experience? Like comfort, as if we're gonna die if we're uncomfortable. We're not gonna die if we're uncomfortable. And I would say, in truth, all along, even when it seemed like nobody had to be careful, everyone's been uncomfortable. There's a price to pay even for being at the pinnacle of privilege in any hierarchy. There's a discomfort because of the turtle and the wing because of the truth of how precious each human life is because hierarchy does not actually ring true. in the depths of us, in the truest of us. But we've been taught a whole bunch of devaluing the self, where it makes this thing of like scrabbling for privilege or, you know, for dominance seem appealing. If we find ourselves in a moment of discomfort around something new, someone's bringing something new, like please use your gender pronouns, and then you forget, and then someone says,

[28:58]

may I remind you, please use your gender pronouns. And then you feel like, and if we're white, we're more likely to feel like shame, like, oh, I'm so bad. We can just practice with that as a moment of the tiniest bit of teaching of compassion for how careful people who are not in dominant positions have to be all the time. So we can even it out. We can't actually, in our lifetime, the privilege is way too out of bounds. But we can move in that direction of embracing discomfort. Of embracing careful, careful attention. This is a Zen center. It's literally made for people to train in and cultivate careful attention. So if we can't do it here, where can we do it?

[29:59]

And I know, I know what the summer's like. I worked in the dining room. It's so busy, it is so hard. Thank you for your eyes being open, those of you who are working here. If you would like to bob now, please feel free. But it really is what it's for. And Zen practice places. are made as training grounds for encountering one another and awakening and calling into question the delusion that comes there. Zen practice, Zazen practice itself, this fundamental practice of Zen, literally trains us in support of sitting with discomfort. More and more I feel like we need to open up the gates of Zen, metaphorically.

[31:09]

It needs to continue to evolve and change so that more people come in that have maybe not been able to get here before and that the people here want to stay because there is so much in this practice that helps us Stay in discomfort. And in discomfort is where we can change. There was this great quote I heard. I'm not sure if it's going to resonate for everybody, but I want to share it and see if it resonates for you now or later. There was a Zen teacher, I think like a medieval Japanese Zen teacher that said, the translation is, My superpower is that when the wind blows, I fall down. And people could hear that and be like, what? I thought your superpower would be like, nothing can move me from my cushion.

[32:15]

But to me, this is a really strong teaching about I arise with what's around me. I arise with what's in front of me. I arise with it. I am made by that. There's a strong wind. I fall over. If people come and say, this thing that you've been doing for like decades, it causes me pain and my pain is this like legacy that it's like a lot. We can be like, oh, maybe that should change. And just like that, when I was in young and new Zen student, and I was just like, oh, no, nobody can violate the forms. We'll all fall apart. The integrity of this practice will only benefit, actually. The integrity of this practice is like reclaiming human beings from delusion. So that's so clear. We can change the forms of it.

[33:21]

We can change how it manifests. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[33:49]

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