This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everybody, or good afternoon or good evening, depending on where you are. And I'm so happy to see you. And I'm so happy to see people who I practice with every day And also people who I'm meeting for the first time. And I also see some people and people's names that I haven't seen in a long time. Or people I miss from practicing with 30 or 40 years ago or 20 years ago. And I just want to acknowledge that we're holding the practice in our hands.

[01:00]

with each other across time and across space. And I'm so happy to see my Dharma family and to be able to speak and practice with you. And thank you, Abbott David and Tonto Nancy for inviting me to speak. The San Francisco Zen Center leaders, the Abbott's, the officers and board are in an all day retreat today. trying to figure out how to take us all through the pandemic and keep the dharma in this place alive. And so it's just us. So I'm not saying we can do anything we want, but we can do some things that we want. And so today I want to speak about love and power, letting go of control, and about what makes that possible.

[02:02]

But first, a word from our sponsors. So Karyu had sent me a link some time ago. I asked her about why she had renamed herself a certain way. And she let me know that there was a map on which we could see the regions of the world and the first people who were stewards of those regions. So right now I'm going to rename myself. And K. Ryu, I don't know if you have the link. I think it's Native Lands CA. And it's not as good in Europe as it is in or in like Australia or Africa as it is in the in North and South America. Okay, so if you send that link to Kodo, or I'll try to post it as well.

[03:08]

If everyone wants to rename yourself, I'm going to do it with my Dharma name, my English first name, my pronouns, and my native tribe of, well, peoples, actually, because it's a collection of tribes and families that used to take care of this land and who formed the spiritual basis of this land. You see it, it's nativeland.ca. And I invite you, if you want to use your pronoun or your first people context to rename yourself in the box in which everybody sees you, please do. And I'll just be quiet for a moment to give you a chance to look at that and to be curious about that.

[04:10]

Okay, and if you don't know, the nations or lands, yes, is nations or lands. What lands? What nations? are stewards, traditional stewards of our land. And I got this idea from Australian public TV. So I have an Australian sister. And before every TV program, there's an acknowledgement of who is traditionally steward of the land and how. We happen all to be on this land. So what is letting go of control? And why is it important? I want to show you why I think it's important.

[05:20]

So this is a photo of my teacher, Sojin Mel Weitzman. And he passed away several months ago. And in this picture, he's making a staff. So I don't know if you can see in the picture why I love this picture so much. So do you see how he's holding the wood, which is a big branch that he got? And of this wood, he's creating a staff that he's going to use in a Dharma transmission. The staff is given as part of the transmission. See how he's looking at the staff and touching the staff and how the staff is telling him how it wants to become a staff. Do you see that?

[06:26]

Okay. So he did that with people, too. So this is a picture of Sojin and me at Tassajara in the mid-1990s. And we're getting together. I'm helping him with the ceremony. And we're having tea to discuss what we're going to do in the ceremony. And this was an important moment. in my learning how to be a Zen priest. So you see, he's not doing anything special. We're having tea. And that's all. And we're having tea together. Here is a photo about what that relationship became. So in the Genja Koan, Dogen Zenji says, by riding in a boat, you make it a boat.

[07:37]

By being in a relationship, we make it a relationship. And the kind of teaching that goes on in relationship is not just teaching about another person or about the world. but about ourselves. And we usually think of teaching as imparting a particular way. And so there is an element of control or mastery, but we should have a couple of different words because there's a kind of control that has to do with actual mastery or skill. And there's a kind of control that has to do with the absence of mastery or skill. So when I say letting go of control, I mean letting go of one kind of control to impart the treasure of the other kind of control or mastery.

[08:47]

And here's a photo of what I mean. This is a photo of my student, Michael Warner. being trained by his martial arts teacher. And both of the people in this photo are gone, but their understanding of control as mastery lives on in me. Because I learned something about mastery and how it's imparted also from my student, Michael. So what is control of the unskillful kind, and why is it important in a practice period in which we're trying to understand karma? Okay, so the word karma means action or activity.

[09:50]

It comes from the root syllable kri. Kri means doing. And the word kri is used in a variety of bigger words, compound words, that talk about different kinds of doing. And one of the important words is krama, or process. So karma means doing, and krama means the process of action by which something happens. Usually we think of karma in a very simplistic and retributive way that is our legacy from the 1960s and 1970s. Okay, don't, don't, that's karma, you know, he's getting karma, you know. So we use the word very loosely to talk about you'll get yours.

[10:55]

But actually, the study of karma is the study of dharma. The word dharma comes from a Sanskrit root, D-H-R in English, which means holding. Okay, so somebody in this room has dharma as part of their name, part of their Buddhist name. And that particular person's name means the holder of a particular quality. And that word Dharma means we hold it. And the word Dharma has so many different meanings, but why it's important to study control is that we often think of holding someone or something and in a way that limits their ability to do anything else besides what we think they should do. But Dharma, the word Dharma in its small d sense, big D means the way, right?

[12:05]

But small d means what holds reality. What is an atom of experience that holds the reality of a particular kind of experience? And how did this... And so karma is what is the kind of ability of a dharma, capability of a dharma in our moral development. And karma means that kind of capability or process holding part of dharmas. What is their state? What is the state? And what is the state in relation to our entire moral being or development or relational being or development? Why am I getting so technical? Well, it's because there were more than a thousand or 1500 years of dialogue about karma and dharma in North India alone.

[13:16]

And not to mention South India, where the dialogue was going on simultaneously and in a slightly different direction. So karma and dharma, these concepts, tell us what reality is and what time is in ways that allow us to be liberated or free from suffering. And so I think it's really important to understand these concepts because they're a kind of technology of release or freedom. That if we understand them, not intellectually, but from a body point of view, from a feeling point of view, from a relational point of view, that the world will be a better place. There'll actually be less suffering in ourselves and all around us.

[14:20]

So that's why it's important to understand this because, you know, you see the robes. I gave up a perfectly good career in architecture and urban planning to do this because I think it's a better for me way to help. I got ordained 40 years ago because I wanted to help spread the Dharma to the West because it's so important to me. Just because we're on autopilot, much of the time we create suffering and allow injustice, which builds a world of suffering for ourselves and others. And if there's any tools that I can kind of pick up or help kind of spread in the world that help take care of that, I'm there for that.

[15:27]

I want to do that. And that motivation has informed my entire adult life since I made that decision to shave my head and wear the ropes. So that's why it's important because this is like the most developed technology that millions of people have been in dialogue about and relationship about, which runs counter to our habitual tendencies towards entropy and active creation of suffering. So I'm going to give you a little bit of a kind of a technological engineering oriented description of experience. And this comes to us from the Buddha and from Nalanda University, from the teachings of North India.

[16:28]

And I will write the name of the book of the Dharma Kosha. Sorry about the lack of diacritical marks. I've written the name of the book in the chat. And this is a teaching. Abhidharma was a set of teachings that got distilled from the sutras. And over the course of, you know, like a thousand years of conversation, focused on the how. how is what Buddha is saying, the teachings that Buddha gave, how do they actually work out in a sequential way or an experiential way, leading from karma to dharma? Okay? And from dharma to a better understanding of karma.

[17:33]

That's what I want to talk about. So... that in this Abhidharmakosha Bhashyam, it's a kind of an encyclopedia in which Vasubandhu, and there's various dialogues, like Homer, Vasubandhu might have been a committee or might have been a person. We do not know. Might have been a committee that lasted for hundreds of years, might have been a person, might have been a couple people. The legend is that there was this wonderful scholar named Vasubandhu, who had a great brother named Asanga. Vasubandhu collected all of the teachings of the Buddha and as many people as he had heard about into this compendium called the Abhidharmakoshabashyam, which is an explanation of the, you know, the practice teachings of the Buddha minus most of the stories. So Vasu Gandhi is trying to lay out the system and how the different schools of Buddhism have similarities and differences in their understanding of what the Buddha taught.

[18:48]

Then along came his brother Asanga, who developed a set of practices called Yogacara, which related the previous teachings back into a yogic framework that had to do with bodhisattva practice and compassion. And I'm like glossing over like thousands of years of dialogue. And what I'm saying is like, oh no, please don't hold me to it because it's an on the spot and not particularly good summary. Okay. Anyway, Vasubandhu, the story is that Vasubandhu, when he heard Asangas teaching went, wow, you're right. I'm wrong. And convert it. Okay, so that's the story. But in this Abhidharma teaching, one of the beauties of it is that the Abhidharma Koshabashyam is like nine volumes of thousands of pages.

[19:50]

And there's a wonderful translation by De La Valle Poussin into French. And that was retranslated into English by Leo Pruden. And so that's in nine books. And the books have a kind of a plot that goes from what is the self and how can we understand what we usually think of as kind of a self? How can we understand it functionally to break up the links we have to suffering? Yeah. And so it's a technology that allows us to explore the habits of self and experiencing to analyze and study what it is that actually occurs. So if those habits of relating, if those habits of thinking of self and the world remain unconscious, then they lead to, they stay kind of,

[21:00]

enmeshed and patterned in ways that, because of entropy, because everything falls apart, lead to suffering. But if we wake up to the patterns and develop new ones that embody a sense of context, like acknowledging nations or lands, but also acknowledging the oneness from which every differentiated experience springs forth, And if the new habits embody skill, so not seeing the person in front of us as an object, something we own or something we can change, if they embody respect, you know, actually experiencing the world and others as our teacher. So if we can embody, if we can figure out and practice habits like that,

[22:01]

then that way of relating becomes a lifetime exploration with curiosity, playfulness, intimacy, and interconnection. So I could tell you the different ways that the Buddha characterized what we usually think of as the self. But I don't really want to spend... a huge amount of time doing that because everybody will be asleep by the time I do. But what I want to say is the Buddha taught a shortcut way called skandhas, a medium cut way called ayatanas, and then kind of a long cut way called gatus. Skandhas broke down the self into a five-part process of perception. Ayatanas broke down experiencing in terms of our senses and experiences of the world and our ability to sense or experience the world.

[23:15]

And Datus broke down experience in three ways. Our senses, our capacity to sense. kind of basic consciousness that holds those experiences. So Ayatanas, it has 12 pieces that we need to know about, eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind, and then our actual experience, color, sound, smell, taste, touch, and objects of mind. Okay, and Datu's adds, the consciousnesses of those senses and sense experience. Okay, but whether we use the shortcut, the medium cut, or the long cut way of describing the self, what it teaches us, what any of these ways can teach us is that

[24:30]

our experience of ourself and the world is constantly changing. It arises in a moment. It disappears in a moment. And so when we bring our attention to like the visibleness of sight, you know, the soundness of sound, and so on, we can't be on autopilot in relation to ourselves, in relation to what we see or hear in the same way. That's called mindfulness or smriti, of real experience as opposed to constructed experience, autopilot experience. So these breaking up, of what we usually think of as the self, give us a way to relate.

[25:38]

They give us time to understand that every act of relating we do is a choice. So coming back to karma, When we allow ourselves to break up our experience of the self and the world in this way, it kind of puts a stop on that autopilot experience and allows us a split second between receiving an impression and reacting to it. And the more we practice with this, the more choice we have about how we respond instead of react. So in the Fukunza Zengi talks about the experience of meditation.

[26:48]

Fukunza Zengi is a, it's a teaching of the Buddha on meditation. How do we meditate in a seated position? So it gives a number of cautions about what you have to do before you sit down and how to put your arms and legs for sitting down and what attitude you need for sitting down. And then the end of it is explanations of the benefits of sitting down and how to get up. Everyone who reads them goes, huh? You know, so those three sentences are think not thinking. How do you think not thinking? Non-thinking. Okay, think not thinking.

[27:51]

How do you think not thinking? Non-thinking. Okay, clear? But I was talking about this with Abbott Ed yesterday and talking about this lecture that I was about to give today on love and power, letting go of control. And was saying, well, you know, that's okay for understanding or relating to dharmas. Because dharmas are about how we experience or are conscious of the world. Whether we... Use the shortcut, the medium cut, or the long cut version of being mindful of them. Dharmas will tell us about the way we see the world. But what is it that informs us or gives kind of teaching about how we act in the world? Shouldn't it more be do not doing?

[28:54]

How do we do not doing? Non-doing? Or relate not attaching? How do we relate not attaching? Non-attachment. Okay, so act without power. How do we relate without power? Non-power. Control, not controlling. How do we control, not controlling? Non-controlling. Okay, so I want to talk about attaching, not attaching, and non-attaching. Okay, so this is the heart of what I wanted to say. The rest has been built up, okay? Talking about the...

[29:57]

Adhidharma and the Dharma and the ways to deconstruct the self and so on. It turns out that the ways to deconstruct the self is also how we deconstruct the world. Our experience of the world, not the world itself. Our experience of the world, which is so limited by our prejudices and habits. Okay, so I want to talk about, I'm going to use attachment, not attaching, and non-attachment. But, you know, please hear behind it, control, not control, non-control, and power, not power, and non-power. Okay, because control and power are words that have big, you know, they have big, we carry a lot of preconceptions about them. Like, they say, power, you know, people will have ideas about what I mean. Or use your power, something. Yeah, or. You know, will occur.

[30:59]

Right? So, attach. Let's talk about attach. Let's talk about attach. So, when we haven't studied ourselves, our past or past dharmas or past concept of self functions as a kind of a gatekeeper in our present experience. So, our habits and prejudices rule us. We can't be free of them. So let's think about our consciousness as kind of a castle. And our past experience are kind of the guards or gatekeepers for that castle. The castle that's loosely bounded by our skin. Actually, in fact, the energy of the universe and the oneness of the universe flows unhindered everywhere. But we have this habit of thinking of it as stopping at our skin or another person's skin.

[31:59]

So let's think about how past experience functions as a gatekeeper to what's included in this, as the Zen teachers say, skin bag. So let's just say that this gate at the door of our consciousness is strongly impacted. By the history of feeling we have in relation to similar experiences or experiences we project to be similar. So, for instance, let's say that, you know, someone with a big nose always gave us ice cream when we were kids. You know? What are we going to think when we meet someone with the big notes? Right. And that's going to be like completely unconscious. That the person looks like, you know, Aunt Mary.

[33:02]

Is going to be completely unconscious unless we actually take the time to understand. Oh, yeah. Aunt Mary. Big nose. Ice cream. Yes. I understand. Okay. So. So in our experience of what we call the world and our preconception that the self is only what's inside of the skin bag, what comes to the gate of our senses we will experience as enemy at the gate, red flag, red flag, or friend at the gate, green flag, green flag. Or unknown person at the gate, yellow flag, yellow flag. Okay? So this sounds really simple, and it is simple. But in fact, it's what we do. And besides the history of the feeling, which we can kind of bring to consciousness if we want, there's...

[34:15]

Part of our experience that's harder to bring to consciousness because it's unconscious. We carry it unconsciously stored in our bodies. And so that would be our unconscious greed, hate, and delusion, which is it occurs at a deeper level than, you know, Aunt Mary's big nose and ice cream. Okay, so... Let's just say that if we think of our past experience as the gate to our present awareness, that greed, hate, and delusion, greed is kind of like bribery or corruption at the gate. Hate is kind of an enemy list of unwanted people at the gate, people or events at the gate. And delusion is kind of like fake news at the gate. Does that make sense to you? I hope.

[35:16]

So it's a form of premature knowing of that person or experience that actually gets in the way of our having an experience of them and creates fear of a possible negative outcome. getting to know that person or experience. So what, what do we do? Okay. Enemy at the gate, send cards, right? Or friend at the gate, send team, you know, or unknown at the gate, send scientists or interrogators or whatever. Okay. So we, We have this unconscious process at our gates of experience that's guided not just by our past, but by our unconscious motivations of greed, hate, and delusion.

[36:24]

Greed, I want. Hate, I don't want. And delusion, I don't know. Okay, and those... unconscious motivations have force. So perhaps the most important moment of practice is the moment when we decide to wake up and be beneficial. And in our practice, that's called bodhicitta, or the heart and mind that leads to awakening. And so what that is, is kind of like a UN. observer at our gate. That's how it functions. A friendly person at our gate saying, hey, wait a minute. We want to actually wake up to who this person is, what this experience is. Wait a minute. Could you tell us a little more about yourself?

[37:27]

That motivation of waking up actually does. So that's the experience of attaching, and that's what gives us defenses instead of boundaries, possessiveness as opposed to enjoyment, jealousy as opposed to protection, demanding as opposed to requesting, competing aggressively versus being able to play. That's what gives us that in relation to other people according to practice. So not attaching would be a form of withdrawal, which we can do with the body. We can say, oh, I'm going to go be a hermit so I can study this. So I'll limit the number of interactions I have so I can study each one. Not a time of mental withdrawal. Okay, so I'll detach.

[38:29]

from everything so that I can kind of control the number of interactions I have so that I can be more present with each one. Or a kind of withdrawal from the roots of suffering, like, for instance, putting a giant hand picture on the refrigerator. So it's kind of like that. That's not attaching. So we establish a diet. for our experiences so that we can lose the weight of our attachment. Okay. What happens with diets, right? So diets don't last. Diets don't last. And so these withdrawal is a temporary condition because when we withdraw from our habits, they tend to reassert themselves in difficult ways. So I know, for instance, of people who try very hard to abstain from eating sugar.

[39:38]

And then every so often, they binge. I know of people who try to, you know, they took a lot of anger management courses and tried to not be angry. And what happened? When they got outside of their window of tolerance, they blurted, or it was as if nothing happened. had ever, no studies had ever been done, right? So, but diets have their place and withdrawing has its place, you know, because it allows us to understand in a general way what happens in our desire to be good or do good. It allows us to a wholesome history instead of an unwholesome history. But it's still a form of control. And there's a Buddhist name for not attaching.

[40:40]

It's called Viveka. It's also a yoga name. But I think it's more important to understand vairagya right now for the purpose of letting go of control. Vairagya means the absence of the absence of hatred, the absence of ignorance. So it means when we resolve our discomfort and suffering from liking some things and hating other things and with confusion, when we resolve it instead of take a diet in relation to it, that suffering actually ends. instead of just being temporarily put aside. And so liberation is when the suffering actually ends. Although we can practice not doing the thing that we're attached to, and we can practice doing different things than our habits, what we're aiming for is that those habits would actually end as powerful forces in our life.

[41:51]

So instead of... dieting our attachments, we would come to a skillful and respectful and playful understanding of relationship that ended the suffering of being with the self and others, that resolved it completely, that ended it. Okay? So, To end it, we have to realize, actually have a deep realization of impermanence. We have to drop our confusion or end our confusion about what's good and what's bad. And we have to drop our attachment. To what we presume is the self and what we presume is another human being.

[42:54]

And so in awakened experience, the gatekeeping process of our past experience becomes workable. Becomes workable because gatekeeping as a kind of controlling activity ends. So. instead of our past experiences driving us from behind to defend ourselves, we learn that past experiences are part of our history that has to be supported and understood and nourished. And their impacts need to be put into context by continual Continually relating to oneness or integration of our experience.

[43:58]

So we call in Zen, we call this glimpse of oneness, we call it Kensho or glimpsing reality. And in Kensho, it's often an experience of oneness of ourselves and all beings. which doesn't drop the difference between ourselves and everyone else, but it puts it into a context of respect for feelings and history of other people and skill with that respect. And so I want to just maybe you know, culminate this conversation, which is kind of theoretical, I appreciate your patience, by discussing some spiritual vitamins that we can nourish our respect with.

[45:01]

And these spiritual vitamins are taught in the Abhidharma as part of the 37 Wings to Enlightenment. And these spiritual vitamins are taught both... interiorly and exteriorly. So they are faith, energy, remembrance, one-pointedness, and the wisdom of direct experience. So their Sanskrit names are Shraddha, which is faith. It's not faith in anything outside. It's just faith.

[46:01]

Virdhya, or energy. Smriti, or remembrance. Samadhi, the development of one pointedness, single ability to focus on the experience. And prajna, wisdom, the ability to open to experience. So the antidote to control, the functional antidote to control, the functional antidote to karma as imprisonment is to surrender and accept what is. with faith, with energy, with remembrance. And in time we develop a kind of one-pointedness that leads to a change in who we are and how we express ourselves.

[47:08]

It's a kind of a moral growth. So there's so many ways that I could close this lecture out, but I actually just want to give you a very simple quote, very simple series of quotes from Zen Mind Beginner's Mind by Shinri Suzuki Roshi. And this was not about, you know, I could have... use the chapter about control, but I didn't want to. So the chapter about control says the way to control your cow is to give them a big meadow, right? But I didn't want to use the chapter in control. Instead, I want to use the chapter called God-giving. God-giving. One of the reasons I like this God-giving is Willard Dixon's picture that's right in the

[48:16]

middle of this chapter. You see this fly? So Mike Dixon, Willard Dixon, is a student, because he still is a student, of Suzuki Roshis. He's an artist. So why did he put up a picture of fly in the middle of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind? And I think it's because what do we usually do with flies, right? We control them. You know, we control them by killing them, actually. Or by screening them out. Or we ignore them. But Mike had this idea, like, that came from his awakenings. He didn't make a big statement about it.

[49:20]

He drew this artwork of a fly and put it right in the middle of Sissabue Hershey's book. Trudy Dixon actually was the editor of the book. So Mike had an in there, I think. Although I wasn't actually part of this. It happened like the year I was coming to practice. I wasn't even here in San Francisco yet. So Suzuki Roshi says, to give is non-attachment. That is, just not to attach to anything is to give. Ilza means anyone. And what he says is, it talks about karma and dharma. Suzuki Roshi's teachings are like this, where they sound, when you read them for the first time, they sound really simple. But then when you've studied a lot, you go, oh my gosh.

[50:21]

He's including this incredibly abstruse teaching, but in really simple words. So he opens this chapter by saying, Every existence in nature, every existence in the human world, Every cultural work that we create, and a relationship is a cultural work that we create, is something which was given or is being given to us, relatively speaking. But as everything is originally one, we are in actuality giving out everything. Moment after moment, we are creating something that This is the joy of our life. But this I which is creating and always giving out something is not the small I. It is the big I. Even though you do not realize the oneness of this big I with everything, when you give something, you feel good because at that time you feel at one with what you are giving.

[51:34]

I actually just want to end with Suzuki Roshi because Suzuki Roshi. So I'll end the talk and we can have a more interactive conversation about how non-attachment with faith and remembrance leads to experience of insight. for friendliness, for our compassion, for our joy, and for our peace. Okay? Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[52:39]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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