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. Good morning. Good morning, Tova. Good morning, Valerie. My name is Tova Green and this is Valerie Beer. And we are... co-presenting this talk called The Practice of Aging and the Aging of Practice this morning. It's the launch of a program. We're not sure what form the program will take, but it's for people 55 and over. We might call it good old Zen. We're not sure. And in preparation for this talk, we sent out a survey And interestingly, 55 people responded.

[01:01]

So I'm wondering, if you're one of those 55 people, would you raise your hand? Thank you. Great, thank you so much. Gave us food for thought. So I want to first thank various people... at City Center, who encouraged us to launch this program and scheduled the talk, including our abbess, Christina Lanehair, our wonderful senior Dharma teacher, Blanche Hartman, who inspires us, and the tanto, Rosalie Curtis, and our teachers, many, well, all of our teachers including those of you who study with us and practice with us, whether you live inside the building or outside the building. I also want to welcome those who are here for the first time.

[02:04]

Is anyone here for the first time today? Great, thanks for coming. Welcome. So I'm going to speak about... the practice of aging, and Valerie is going to speak about the aging of practice, and you'll see the slight difference in emphasis. So I'll be going first. And I'd like to start by saying that we are all aging, no matter what your chronological age. And aging is something that happens in all of us unless we die at a young age, which... unfortunately does happen. And I realized how fortunate I am actually to have reached the age of 72 when I worked as a hospice social worker and many of my patients were younger than me. So I feel that aging is a gift and I don't take it for granted.

[03:11]

A doctor recently told me that we reach our physical peak at the age of 19, which may be surprising. Bummer. It's downhill from there. But after that, we begin to lose muscle mass and bone mass. But if you're young and you don't think of yourself as aging, you probably have older friends or aging parents or grandparents and so may be able to relate to some of these things. through your closeness to people in your lives who are aging. So I would like to explore today a few practices related to aging, and I'm going to talk about three practices. One is to approach aging with beginner's mind, and I'll talk a little about how beginner's mind is relevant as we age.

[04:12]

And then also... talking about some of the fundamental teachings of the Buddha, impermanence and not having a fixed self. So those two and that suffering exists are the three basic teachings of the Buddha. They all relate to aging. And then I also want to talk about how practice can support us as we age. And I want to start by talking about two older women who are role models for me, in addition to Blanche Hartman, our senior Dharma teacher, who lives in the building and is a constant inspiration to me about how to meet the challenges and rewards of aging. But these two women don't live here. One of them is called familiar Lily Okasan.

[05:14]

Her real name is Mitsu Suzuki, and she lives in Japan. And the second person is a fictional character, affectionately called Old Jiko, and she's a character in a novel that was recently published by Ruth Ozeki. The novel is called A Tale for the Time Being. And Ruth is a Zen student, a friend of many of us. She's a student of Norman Fisher and was ordained as a priest a couple of years ago. She's been a novelist most of her adult life, and this is her third novel. And I was fortunate to hear her read from it. And the character of old Jiko, incidentally, Jiko is the name of my teacher, Linda Ruth Cutts, and it means light of compassion. So the character of old Jiko, who's reputedly 104 years old and lives in a monastery on the side of a mountain in Japan, really caught my attention, maybe because I was thinking also of this talk.

[06:22]

But they're both very inspiring older women. And they both approach aging with beginner's mind and with total awareness of impermanence and change, but also the importance of passing on what they've learned to younger generations, which I think is one of the benefits of aging. And one of the things I love about aging at Zen Center, in a community that's multi-generational, our youngest resident is five years old. So... And we have all ages, not all ages, we don't have any teenagers living in the building right now, but people in their 20s all the way up. And that's one of the things that I enjoy the most about living here. So in terms of the practices, well, maybe I'll say a little bit more about these two women who inspire me because they illustrate the practices, and then I'll...

[07:35]

come back to the practices. And I'm going to touch on all these things somewhat briefly because each of us is going to speak for about 20 minutes and then we'll have more time to go into some of these things in the question and answer period. But Mitsu Suzuki, who was the... second wife of Suzuki Roshi, came here to live with him at Zen Center in the 60s and became a tea teacher and was very beloved by many of the residents here. They called her Okusan, which is actually Japanese for wife, and that's what Suzuki Roshi called her. And a lot of Zen Center... Zen students who didn't know Japanese heard him calling her Okusan, so they started calling her Okusan.

[08:41]

And Okusan recently celebrated her 100th birthday, and because she was a tea teacher, we had a tea ceremony for her here, which was given by some people who had studied tea with her, who are still... students, it was very inspiring to come and hear some of the stories they told about her. And just briefly, my own teacher, Linda Ruth, has met, well, knew Oksan back then when she lived in the building. But recently she asked Oksan what has kept her alive and engaged all her life. And she said, basically, there are three practices. I want to get them right. walk every day, don't hate anyone, and have good conversations.

[09:43]

So that's, I think, really good advice for all of us, no matter what our age. Walk every day, don't hate anyone, and have good conversations. She also began writing haiku poetry later in her life. And there's a book of her poetry that came out maybe 10 years ago, called Temple Dusk. And if there's time, I'll share one of her haiku. So Jiko, old Jiko, the 104-year-old abbess of the temple in Japan, emerges in this novel as the great-grandmother of a teenage girl. whose name is Naoko, or for short, Nao, N-A-O. But it also sounds like now. And for those of you who are familiar with the... There's a fascicle called Uji, The Time Being, written by Ehe Dogen, who lived 800 years ago, but whose writings are very relevant and alive for many Zen students.

[11:03]

And this novel, A Tale for the Time Being, has references to Dogen woven through it. It's a very unusual novel. But one of the main characters now has been bullied in school, and her great-grandmother, Oljiko, teaches her, she spends a summer at the monastery, and teaches her how to realize her superpower. And you can imagine or guess her superpower is zazen. So old Jiko teaches her zazen, and it changes this young girl's ability to stand up to the students who have been tormenting her and to have a whole different feeling about her own life and her place in the world. So I found that the relationship is so moving, this very fierce and sharp 104-year-old woman who also, one of the things about her as she begins teaching, you wouldn't even know she's just building a relationship with her great-granddaughter who lives in Tokyo most of the time.

[12:24]

But she engages in this kind of thinking that I really appreciate. It's a both and thinking. So what Suzuki Roshi sometimes refers to as not always so. So this is true, and this is also true. And they're not necessarily contradictory, even though they might seem like that. But it opens your mind when you think things are a certain way. Can you also imagine that they're another way? Or that if you disagree with someone, both of you might be right. So how does this relate to beginner's mind? I think it very much does relate to beginner's mind, which we can cultivate at any age. But last summer I went to a teaching with Shohaku Okamura, who's 64 years old and is a Dogen scholar, and periodically he gives week-long teachings with a lot of sitting and then a lot of study of a particular essay of Dogen. And he talked about three times in one's life when we really practice beginner's mind.

[13:29]

One is when we're starting out in practice and everything is new, so it's maybe easier to have a beginner's mind because you have lots of questions. Why do we bow? Who are these figures on the altar? Just, you know, everything is unfamiliar and a little strange, and of course we have questions and we ask them, and it's really a kind of... wonderful time in practice. And he says another time we need to have the beginner's mind is when our practice is more mature and we might be going off on our own and thinking about what is it that we might want to embody or convey or teach through our practice. And then the third time he talks about having beginner's mind is when we're aging and everything is changing in our bodies and Maybe some of the ideas we had, like you have to sit in full lotus, can't do that anymore. And how do you meet that?

[14:33]

And what is your practice at that moment in your life? And just being aware as things change that every moment is, you know, you might say every moment is a new beginning, but how do you meet freshly some of the... the changes and the challenges that come with aging. So that leads into the practice of impermanence. As we age, we notice changes in our memory. Often I find I can remember vividly things that happened when I was much younger more clearly than I can remember what happened yesterday, or I don't remember names as well as I used to, or facts and dates. It seems like the important things I remember, but some of the things that might not be so important, and maybe they are important, but I often have to ask somebody, could you remind me of your name? Many of you have been very gracious in reminding me of your names the second or third time I meet you.

[15:43]

So that's a change in memory, changes in our bodies, and learning how to meet them, to... I experience Zen meditation as a very physical practice, and noticing... So when we sit, we can notice much more keenly changes in the body, like a sore throat, or an aching knee, or... stiffness or whatever it is, it's much more apparent. And then how to practice with these changes. One thing I find, I don't get sick so often because I do notice right away when I have a sore throat and I can take something that will strengthen my immune system. But then I can't easily sit on a Zafu nowadays.

[16:45]

I'm sitting on a bench and My left leg just doesn't bend the way it used to. And even though I'm working with it, I don't know if I'll ever sit on a Zafu again. And just so, okay. It's not, doesn't, it just means I find another way to sit. So some of these changes, you know, we also, in terms of impermanence, as we grow older, we start losing some of our friends. family members, parents. One of my friends just lost a sister. And so being able, learning how to grieve, I think is very important. I think it's important at any age, but I think it's especially important as we grow older because these losses come more frequently. And then we also sometimes lose or change with

[17:48]

what we may have devoted a lot of our life to, which is work. It may change, or people retire from paid employment, and this can also bring about loss, as well as opportunity to do things we may have put on hold, or travel, and then sometimes new relationships, like becoming a grandparent, can replace some of the... never really replace anybody that you lose, but can bring new life into our worlds. So practicing with impermanence and meeting these changes fully, I think, is one of the gifts of aging, but it can also be challenging. And then in terms of the third practice, just fully being present and... I think the advice of Mitsu Suzuki is helpful here.

[18:56]

Just pay attention to your body. Walk every day. Don't hate anyone. Practice loving kindness and have good conversations. Engage with the people around you. I've... looked at a couple of books about aging, and one of them is called The Second Half of Life, Opening the Gates of Wisdom. It's by an anthropologist, Angelese Arian. And she looks at some of the ways in which we can value our experience as we age and And think of this as an age of active wisdom. There's another anthropologist, Mary Catherine Bateson, referring to the eight stages of man or woman, which were originally developed by Eric Erickson.

[20:08]

She added this additional stage because many of us are living longer than than people used to live. When I was young, my grandmother died at the age of 60. Both my parents lived to be 93, and it's not so unusual now for people to live into their 90s and even 100. So this additional stage of life, sometimes called the second stage of adulthood or the age of active wisdom, I think is a gift that we have. And with aging, I think, comes awareness, as I mentioned earlier, of the preciousness of time and of not wasting time. You know, the words on the Han, the instrument that calls us to the Zendo, awake, awake, each one, don't waste this life. And with an awareness, we don't know how much time is left. comes this sense of really doing what's most important and not putting off the things that we care most about, and then trying to fully engage in whatever activity we are practicing.

[21:22]

So I think that's the end of my time, and I'll just end with a very beautiful haiku by Okasan. A wish for old age. clear and modest, bright day after rain. I'll read it one more time. A wish for old age, clear and modest, bright day after rain. Over to you, Valerie. Good morning. So I need to start with a confession. I have never been able to sit in full lotus. So aging has nothing to do with it. I could never do that. I'm not going to be able to do that. So I'm just going to have to let that one go. So Tova talked about the practice of aging and what changes for us as we grow older and how we practice with that.

[22:25]

I'm going to turn that around a little bit and talk about the aging of practice because practice comes along with us and also changes as we change. And this can get very interesting. and actually can help us out in our practice. So I'd like to describe three ways that I have noticed in my 22 years of practice and my little over 10 years of residential practice about how my practice has changed. Now, at some point, you'll say practice... Aging, aging, practice, same thing, huh? Yeah. So this is sort of a yin and a yang that goes in and out. But what I've noticed is three things. The first is that as practice ages, there is increased surrender to what is. Sort of this breath of, okay, sometimes it's okay, but sometimes it's, you know, okay, this is the way it is. And many philosophers in many spiritual traditions will say that before you can change anything, you must completely accept it the way it is.

[23:33]

So this is helpful, especially as our bodies are changing and things are changing around us as we age, to surrender to what is. That doesn't mean we have to like it, it doesn't mean we have to accept it, but... or to agree with it or approve it, but simply to say, this is what is right now, a surrender to what is, which requires, which also comes with practice, a softening of judgment, of course, because the root of wanting something different is a judgment that it's not right, and it's not okay, and it's not perfect, or it's not the way I would do it. Yeah, so... This is helpful and kind of nice, actually, that as our practice gets older with us and comes along with it, there is a willingness to soften judgment, which is very nice. This might be interpreted as lowering our standards, but I would like to suggest that it is more to do with letting go of the arrogance of the one right way.

[24:42]

And as we are able to soften that judgment, we're able to watch someone do something and say, oh, are they not doing it right, or are they just not doing it the way I would? So I think this is helpful as we go along. Excuse me, I feel like I'm losing my earpiece here. There we go. Okay. So... This is a helpful piece of the aging of practice is this increased willingness to surrender to what is and just to accept and keep breathing with what is going on just as it is and to investigate really what is going on. The second aging of practice that I have noticed is a... shall we say it, a willingness. It's not quite surrender, but it's a willingness to stay with things even though they are difficult.

[25:44]

So the willingness to stick with something and investigate it thoroughly, to stay with the highs and lows. And as practice goes along, we sort of switch from oscillating between the highs and the lows to more of a perspective of through. of just staying with it and staying through, and the highs and the lows are going to go on around that, but the motion begins to be more through, and things become more interesting. This doesn't mean that the problems get easier necessarily, but they become interesting to stay with and to investigate and to just be with, to ask the question, what is it? that thus comes. And to stay with that question. One of our sutras says, inquiry and response come up together. And when we can investigate things thoroughly, we have this meeting.

[26:48]

Tova's teacher, Linda Ruth, likes to talk about a meeting, a true meeting and investigation like this, rather than what we sometimes get is that or that. or that, or some other type of not staying with something. So as practice ages, there is this increased willingness to stay with things, to stay with things as they are, and investigate and see what comes up. Kind of nice, this patience with perseverance of staying with what's coming up. And the third thing that I have noticed in the aging of practice, I need to tell a brief personal story to get into this one. My father died suddenly last mid-November. And what came up for me and what has come up for me in the several months since then is I'm next.

[27:53]

Now, this actually is not frightening for me. What it feels like is stepping up, stepping up, taking my place as the next, the next generation, the next generation to go, honestly, to go where? We're not sure. But to step up to this. And what's been really interesting in this stepping up to be the next to die is to put it bluntly, is a real interest in what Buddhism calls the chain of causation, of how we get from ignorance, from karmic consciousness, around to sensing and grasping and averting and birth and death. And to realize, as Annie Tencent Palma says in her wonderful book, Reflections on a Mountain Lake,

[28:58]

The wheel of life is not something that drives us. We grip it with both hands. So one of the things that becomes really more interesting as we age is the minute investigation of this... wheel of causation in which we get to birth and death and birth and death and birth and death. Because one of the things I've discovered about my own thinking about my dad's death is I'm next and how many times am I going to go through this again? You know, how many times am I going to step on to the wheel of birth and death again? And the Buddha was very clear about this, that if you break one link in that 12-fold chain, the whole... The structure of birth and death falls apart. I have found in my own investigation, prompted by my father's sudden passing, that this investigation of this 12-fold chain becomes really concrete and not so much theory in some Buddhist text out there with the yama, the god of death, standing in the middle with these 12 things around it.

[30:08]

It's not a picture anymore. It's my life. And this is really interesting to investigate, especially where I make contact and then where's the feeling and then right away the grasping and the averting and the clinging and then what gets born out of that that then needs to die. So this is really interesting where theoretical Buddhism suddenly becomes right there, right in front of your face. So I would say all of this study about that theory over these last 20 years has become very alive for me in the study of the 12-fold chain of causation. So this is another way that as our practice ages, all that theoretical stuff we've learned throughout our study of Buddhism becomes more concrete. and more relevant. And all of a sudden, it makes a lot of sense to investigate the wheel of birth and death, to investigate surrender, to investigate staying with something.

[31:22]

And as we do that, some of the highs and lows begin to even out a little bit. Dogen called this the full investigation of the homeward course. I like that. The full investigation of the homeward course. Any of you who have been in Zazen instruction that I give have heard me say many times that the purpose of our practice is not to make any progress or get anything done. The purpose of our practice is to come home. So this full investigation of the homeward course and as our practice ages, those theoretical tenets of Buddhism help us to come home. Come home to our inmost request, to come home what our heart most wants. I was reading a... sort of light Dharma book the other day that someone gave me. It's actually a set of cartoons about Dharma, which is very sweet.

[32:28]

And one of the cartoons says, if you don't love what you're doing, stop doing what you're doing. I think that's pretty good advice. So this investigation as practice ages, these tools that Buddhism give us grow up with us and age with us. so that we can use them right here, right now, not to pass some test in Buddhism 101, but perhaps to pass the test of being able to step off the wheel of suffering. That seems like a pretty good thing to devote. any years of our lives to, but especially the elder years, is how can we mitigate suffering? The primary teaching of the Buddha to mitigate suffering. So how can we do that? So the increasing staying with the practice offers some tools and suggestions for how to do that. As our practice ages,

[33:35]

One of the benefits is that some of our practices become a little more available and a little more automatic. The ability to return to the breath, those of you who are in EPP know that we spent the whole first trimester coming home to the breath. So being able to do that, even in frightening situations, to remember to inhale all the way down if we can. As our practice ages, we are able to disengage from the need to label and judge and to just be with what is. This is that surrender that I was talking about earlier. And as our practice ages, we are able to use the suggestions of Buddhism to let strong things come up, just like an ocean wave, and to let them go without a judgment and without maybe so much of a story.

[34:37]

There's some competing views in Buddhism that one of the goals of Buddhism is to get rid of your story. I don't buy it. I haven't been able to do that yet. Maybe some of you have, but it hasn't worked for me. But as Norman Fisher says, if we can't get rid of our story, we made this story, which may be a story of suffering, we can make another story that is less suffering. So as our practice ages, the willingness to change the story and to come up with one that is helpful to mitigate suffering for ourselves and others. So as our practice ages, it becomes less necessary to prove and argue and convince and fix, and it becomes more worthwhile and gentler and less suffering to listen with curiosity. So that's what I have noticed in the aging of my practice as I have aged, is this willingness to see things through, this willingness to stay with things, this willingness to surrender to what is, and this very alive investigation of the 12-fold chain, all of which requires a lot of listening and not so much arguing and proving.

[36:01]

And I'd like to end with... my portion with a poem from Rumi where he talks about, interestingly enough, what part of us gets buried when we die and what part of us lives on. This present thirst is your real intelligence, not the back and forth mercurial brightness. Discursiveness dies and gets put in the grave. This contemplative joy does not. Scholarly knowledge is a vertigo, an exhausted famousness. Listening is better. 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.

[37:05]

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

[37:15]

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