This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So right now, since I haven't really started yet, officially, anything is possible. And I'm wondering if there are any requests out there.

[01:08]

Are there any... Of course, I prepared something to talk about, but we could... change the plan at any point, especially now, since I haven't started. Are there any burning issues? Please. Can I tell you? Yes, I can tell you my part in this community. I'll do that. Yes. Thank you. Suffering and how to be free from suffering. Motivate us and guide us all. I can try. Thank you. That's a good request. How do you see beyond uncertainty and loneliness? Mm-hmm.

[02:11]

Will I speak? Yes, I can do that. I can do that. I can give it a shot anyways. Yes. The plane crash. Can I say something about the... Yes, we can talk about the plane crash. and how it helps us understand the Dharma. You let me know after the talk. Well, maybe that's a start. So... I came to Zen Center first in 1993.

[03:31]

I walked through these doors. I first went to Tassajara, and then I got a ride back up from Tassajara, and I walked through these doors. I was 34 years old, confused, suffering. And And I've stayed here pretty much since then. And my role in the community, up until about a year and a half ago, was I was president of Zen Center for about seven and a half years. And before that, I had been director and many other positions in the temple. And my teacher is Norman Fisher. And within three months, let me see, by June of last year, I stopped at my position in March.

[04:39]

By June, I was diagnosed with cancer, testicular cancer. And the last time I talked to this group actually was about a little over a year ago, and I told... Some people might have even been here. I told the community in this setting that I had cancer. And by the end of the summer, I had had surgery. The cancer, testicular cancer, had metastasized in my lymph system. And I had surgery in, I think, August. And by September, I started chemo. And I did. So at that point, my status in the community changed dramatically. I did 26 sessions of about four hours of chemo, 26 sessions of four-hour-long chemo treatments.

[05:52]

That took me through the end of November, and on December 31st, I had more surgery, and now I'm recovering. And I have a little project that I'm working on for Zen Center that's envisioning how we can... It's something I thought would be a wonderful thing to do while I was president, but I couldn't make any progress on it. So I'm taking up this project now in the way that I can, with the abilities that I can. And the project is to understand and explore... how Zen Center can use the internet to support people's practice better. Long overdue, and also interesting and complicated project.

[07:04]

So at some point during this year or eight months of cancer, I went to see various doctors. But at one point, I went to see this doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. And he had been practicing since about 1975. Extremely interesting guy. and a number of people had told me that I had to go see him. So I just went to see him, not necessarily for treatment, because I already had an acupuncturist, I had an oncologist, I had my wife's an acupuncturist, I had a whole team in place, but they said, you know, you should go see this guy. He's good. So we went to his place, and we sat down, And we asked him, like a natural question. I was still fairly early on in my process there.

[08:11]

And we asked him, why do you think I got sick? I got cancer. Why do you think that happened? And he said, well... He said, we could... We could... Write down. We could come up with some ideas about why you got sick. And we could write them down. And we could start making a list of all the things. Maybe it's my diet. Maybe it's my work habits. Maybe it's my genetic makeup. Maybe it's my lack of sleep and any other reason. We could start creating this list. And eventually this list would have... Basically, your whole life on it. What would you not put on the list? Because it's very difficult to say.

[09:13]

He said, what would be more actually beneficial, more fruitful for you? He said, in his opinion, would be to start a new list. Create a new list. And have the new list be as unrecognizable to the old list as possible. That was his advice. It was about a two-hour-long conversation, but that was the gist of it. And so my wife and I walked back out to the car and... And this immediately, intuitively made sense to us. Yeah, I need a new list.

[10:24]

So instead of sitting down and saying, okay, and the new list has to be have this on it and this on it, more vacation, less vacation, this, less that, more that. The way that felt true and authentic to me was to make making the new list my practice. Bring it into my practice. Start constructing the new list with the activities of my life, as such as they were, and see what happened. See how this new list could start to form itself.

[11:28]

So this kind of became a running joke between my wife and I. Every time I'd put on a shirt or a pair of underwear I hadn't worn in like 10 years, I'd say, well, I'm being unrecognizable right now. And we would laugh. Actually, I did become unrecognizable. I went from like 186 pounds to 153 pounds. I became extremely weak. My mind didn't function very well. Sometimes I couldn't stand up. I would sit there and just kind of stare off into space. That was about as much as I could do for months. I was completely unrecognizable to myself, to my wife, to my friends. I would see people on the street, Sangha members, and they would start crying. when they saw me.

[12:39]

I was looking as close to death as I could possibly imagine and still stay alive at some points for about three weeks there. So during this process, the only thing I could do And my main form of exercise was to take walks. So I started taking walks first around the neighborhood. I would just like go a block down and go back and then sit down. That was as much as I could do. And then I would start taking walks. over the hill, past Alamo Square Park, and then this direction and that direction. And I had some walks, and I would just take them by myself, and I developed my favorite kind of paths, and I would just be in my own kind of space as I put one foot in front of the next. And I thought about, well, how is this...

[13:42]

sense of a new list of new possibility my practice. And I started to think about this and I started to see that in some ways I had been practicing for this moment. Buddhism has a lot to say about old lists and new lists. A lot to say about letting go of the old lists, of the old habit, of the old attachment, and understanding what's happening now. In fact, you could say that in some way the teachings of the Buddha are all about creating possibility, creating new possibilities in each moment.

[14:57]

The Buddha taught that we could see this sense of new possibility from two different perspectives or in two different ways. One has to do with the fact that we are in relationship with each other and with everything in the world. That this is our nature. Our nature is that we are not living, abiding separately from anything else. The air, the water, the space, the earth, the trees, the mountains, the cars, computers, everything around us is making us and is our field of possibility because those are the conditions of our life. And that is this fact that we are empty

[16:16]

of any separate, permanent kind of existence is possibility. We are empty of any separateness. We are alive, interconnected, interdependent, dependent on everything around us. That makes for the possible variation that we see in our faces, in plants, in diseases, in responses. The other way that Buddha taught that we are In some ways, possibility, our self, is in the sense of time.

[17:19]

He taught that nothing stays the same, ever. Anything. Everything is always changing, moving, going. This is a possibility. Suzuki Roshi talked about a word that's in a chant, a teaching called the Sandokai that we chant every week. This word is ki, and it's the Japanese word for the Chinese word chi. And this ki means potentiality or possibility. And so Suzuki Roshi gave this teaching, and as he was giving this teaching, he said that this possibility seen from the perspective of our nature, of the interdependent nature of all things, the interconnected nature of all things, requires us in our practice

[18:44]

to be patient, to be patient with ourselves and patient with each other. Because even though we may not be manifesting it right now, at this moment, we all have the possibility of being Buddha. So we need to be kind, compassionate, and patient. from the perspective of time, he said, we need to sometimes be not patient. We need to actually not put off things till tomorrow. We need to be a little more impatient to realize that we are this possibility, that we are Buddha. About that, we shouldn't be so patient.

[19:46]

And in fact, as I started to think about this more, I could see that Zen and Mahayana Buddhism had developed a very elaborate and quite detailed picture of possibility. Even going back 2,500 years in the Lotus Sutra, there's a picture or a diagram of practice that has three aspects, three bodies, three minds. The one body is Dharmakaya, Buddha. The other body is is called the Sambhogakaya Buddha, and the other body is called the Nirmanakaya Buddha. These are three different Buddha bodies in one person, in each of us.

[20:55]

These are three different aspects of possibility for us in our practice. The Dharmakaya Buddha, Dharmakaya is the truth body. This is the possibility that I was just talking about just a minute ago. This is the possibility of the way things are. This is the possibility of our life. This is the possibility of ourselves as everything. This is the fact that we are not separate from anything and that we're always changing. This is oftentimes represented by the notion of space.

[21:58]

So that's the Dharmakaya Buddha. The other Buddha of possibility, the other way of... of seeing possibility is called the Sambhogakaya Buddha. And this possibility realizes the first possibility, the Dharmakaya. This is the innate possibility that all of us have to realize, to recognize, to see that we are like this. that we are connected to everything around us, and that we are impermanent. And then the Mnemonicaya Buddha is the physical human body manifestation

[23:02]

of the Dharmakaya and the Sambhogakaya. It is the possibility of Shakyamuni Buddha appearing in the world. It is the possibility of you and me appearing in the world to help other beings, to benefit, to live life for the benefit of all beings. How does that actually work in the sense of our practice? as practitioners, as people who want to understand how to be authentic, how to be creative, how to respond to something like a plane getting shot out of the sky.

[24:22]

A body that one day seems to be happy and healthy and ready to live for another 30 years has cancer. How do we practice with this? I need to take a drink of water before I talk about the next possibility. as practitioners, we practice in relationship to our vow, the bodhisattva vow.

[25:26]

The vow that aspires to avoid harmful activities, do positive helpful things, and save all beings. You know, I just remembered something I didn't say at the very beginning. I wanted to tell everybody that since a couple months now, I'm cancer-free, and as far as they can tell, from whatever tests they can do, which I don't know how much they can tell, but as far as they can tell, I have no more cancer, and it's in complete remission. So it looks like I'll live for a while longer. I was talking to somebody the other day, and they said, you have to tell people that, Robert.

[26:31]

They're going to leave them in suspense. But so, thank you. So as bodhisattvas, though, we vow to do this seemingly impossible thing of saving all beings. And then a plane gets shot out of the sky. Or... all of the other forms of suffering, economic, social, environmental, due to greed, violence, hatred, ignorance, bigotry, discrimination, happen.

[27:36]

So the way to understand this vow in our practice is not so much that it is possible for, in fact, not at all, it is not possible for us to actually save all beings. And it's not to focus our practice on saving all beings. but it's to focus on the possibility of making an effort, a continuous, boundless, open, full of possibility, complete possibility, effort to save all beings.

[28:42]

Do you get that? There's a difference there. It's not to focus on whether or not I can save all those beings. It's to focus on myself getting ready to save all beings. That's our practice. And that's why we sit zazen. we sit down and we've practiced enough so that we can sit settled enough comfortably enough and watch our mind watch the activity of our mind and we do that, we can start to recognize, we can start to see who we are and what we are.

[29:59]

And we can see ourselves as this possibility. This is moving from Dharmakaya to Sambhogakaya. The Sambhogakaya Buddha is the Buddha that sees that actually I am Buddha. From the beginning, I just didn't realize it. I just didn't see it. I was too busy worrying about all the other stuff that was going on. I was too busy worrying about what I don't like and what I do like and getting more of what I want do like and less of what I don't like, so much that I didn't see that I was Buddha.

[31:04]

I am Buddha. We are all Buddha. We are all like this from the beginning. In that same talk, I think it was in that same talk, Suzuki Roshi said that this sense of possibility in our practice is like having a bow and arrow. He says the arrow can shoot across the sky with the help of the bow, and that we can shoot the arrow... but if we don't pick it up and use the bow, the arrow will not shoot in the sky. It's kind of a simple metaphor, but it's like, he said, this was the same as our practice.

[32:12]

If we don't practice zazen, we don't see that we are Buddha. And then he said, we are all ready to be Buddha. Right now, we're ready. There's nothing in the way. We're ready to be Buddha. So he says, that's why we sit dozens. Now, the key thing to understand there in terms of our practice is that when we sit down, when we sit down in the middle of our life, and we see and we can watch our mind, and we can see the thoughts of our mind arising, and we can also see that there is awareness...

[33:21]

that there is a, you know, the second, the Dharmakaya, I mean, the second Buddha body, Sambhogakaya, is oftentimes represented by an image of the sun. So the Dharmakaya is space, and the Sambhogakaya, that capacity to, be aware, to be awake, to notice, to see is like the sun. So when we sit down and we watch ourselves and we notice, we see that we are this, the key point there, the key thing to do at that point is nothing. It's absolutely nothing. By doing nothing, we allow ourselves to be possibility.

[34:35]

We allow ourselves and everything around us in that moment to be possibility. And we watch and we receive ourselves as possibility. We receive our life as possibility. We receive our life as Buddha nature. When we do nothing, when we just sit. So I was very fortunate to have this practice as I went through what I just went through. I'll close by telling you two short stories.

[35:46]

One was a story that happened when I was brand new students. One was at City Center. I came to meet a person for a practice discussion, Doka-san, who would later become my teacher. And he asked me, what is Buddha? And for some reason, I started crying immediately. I just, I just, I couldn't answer. I just started crying. I don't know exactly why I started crying, but there was something, something there. Something there I knew, I knew, I could see, I knew, I knew about myself, but I didn't know.

[36:49]

I didn't know. And this not moving that I just talked about a minute ago, this not moving, this doing nothing is our training. And sometimes it takes a long time because surprisingly, doing nothing is really hard. It's really hard to sit with our lives in the context of our lives and not do anything, at least in that moment. So the second story is that I was having a great amount of difficulty doing this. I was a new student, and I went to another teacher, and she said, if you stick with this, someday you will be really happy you did. And she was right.

[37:57]

She was right. I am. So I want to thank you all for being here today and helping me. You know, this is creating my list. I'm creating my list right now. My new list. Because even if it looks like the old list, it can be done with a feeling or an awareness or a quality that's not like the old one. Even if it looks the same from the outside. Thank you. And good luck with your ownless creation, too.

[39:10]

I encourage you to be true and authentic to something deep inside And to be creative with it, too. To open to possibility. To allow for possibility. And know that as we do that, you know, the Buddha was just somebody who lived in India 2,500 years ago. And here we are still talking about that person, that person's disciples and impact on the world. So we never know how we are going to be able to help.

[40:17]

We just start with this person right here, this list we're creating right here. this practice we have right here. And trust that maybe as we practice that there is some way that people, that this can extend itself and that people can be helped. Thank you very much. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[41:24]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[41:27]

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