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. Here we are. This is, tonight is three weeks from the start of the intensive. And we have three days to go. So does it feel long or short? Last night was our final class on the Xin Xin Ming. It's a little echoey, huh? And One of the themes that I brought up close to the end was about time.

[01:05]

And there's a beautiful line in the poem that says something like, a single moment is 10,000 years. And so we have this experience of time. that may be different from what I call tick-tock time. And in ancient Greek, there are two words, chronos with a C-H, like chronological, and kairos. And chronos is linear time. When you have the admonition to follow the schedule, Some of you are sitting along with me. This is Kronos time.

[02:06]

It's very useful to have that kind of time to create a kind of coordination and harmony within the community. And then there's this other kind of time, Kairos, K-A-I, Kairos time. And this is bottomless time. This is a single moment is a thousand years, 10,000 years. This is when the bottom drops out of now. Now, now, here. It's that kind of time. So I do want to say that I think I got my kinds of time a little bit mixed up last night.

[03:16]

And some of you may have noticed that I ended the class early based on chronological time. That was not intentional. I just made a mistake. So I apologize to those of you who were expecting the class to go a bit longer. And it did feel to me in this kind of universal time that I was complete. I had said what I wanted to say, but I wanted to acknowledge the... not following the schedule. Yeah. So time is one piece that we talked about last night. And the other that another kind of thread that I want to pull through in this kind of pre-retreat talk is I talked about the historical trajectory of

[04:26]

And I only do this because I get to say these words in sequence, and it's so much fun. This sequencing of anata, shunyata, ta-ta-ta. Over time, we have the teachings of non-self, non-separate, solid self, that are then expanded to be understood as these deep and beautiful teachings on emptiness. No separate, solid anything. And I described that, for those of you who chant the Heart Sutra every day, this is the no, no, no teaching. With the wise and kind intention of preventing us from getting stuck anywhere. And then we have this teaching of ta-ta-ta, of suchness, which...

[05:28]

really comes into full bloom much later in the history of this. But you can hear or smell or they're like intimations of this teaching in Sang Sang's poem, in the mind of great faith. And last night I was describing the experience of suchness as one of full and wholehearted engagement of fully giving oneself to now. And the willingness, the willingness to do that is the expression of the mind of great faith. So I was saying that the teaching, this teaching of suchness comes much later through our direct ancestor, Dong Shan.

[06:38]

And I was happy to remember this teaching from him, which is case 43 in the Blue Cliff Record, one of my favorite. I should stop saying that because I think everything I say, it's one of my favorite things. And it's true, but here it is, one of my favorite koan cases. So a student comes to Dengshan and says, when heat and cold come, arrive, visit, how can we avoid them? This is so central to the poem, right? To the mind of great faith, which is all about Liking and not liking, pleasant and unpleasant, grasping and not grasping. That's what he's speaking of here. Heat and cold. When something pleasant comes, when something unpleasant comes, when grasping comes, when aversion comes, how can I keep that from happening?

[07:47]

Or as many of you began, how can I have no preferences? And Dengshan, wisely, answers a question with another question. He says to the student, why don't you go to the place where there's no heat or cold? So imagine you come to a teacher with your wish to be free from your constantly grasping and pushing away mind. And the teacher says, well, why don't you go to the place where that is? If it were me, I'd be like, tell me. And that's what the student says. He says, where is that? He's ready to pack his bags, right? And go there. And Deng Shan has this wonderful answer, which is in this really spirit of this wholehearted engagement that we were speaking of.

[08:57]

He says, when it is hot, Be completely hot. Be totally hot. Die to the heat. When it's cold, be totally cold. Die to the cold. So our engagement with our life is the point. There's not some place to get. We all carry some version, I think, of an old colleague who used to call it the island where it all works out. And if it didn't work out in worldly life, then maybe if I wake up, maybe if I get enlightened, then I'll be free of grasping an aversion. Then I'll be free of liking and not liking.

[10:00]

And Deng Shan gives this somewhat... curious answer. Don't resist your life. And this is such strong medicine for guidance for how to sit or retreat. You give yourself to the schedule and some of it's pleasant and some of it will be unpleasant. What does it mean to be wholehearted when your knees hurt? What does it mean to be wholehearted when you'd rather be doing anything else? What does it mean to be wholehearted when you find these beautiful moments of ease, of contentment? So I do want to say for all of our benefit that there is a place in practice where

[11:04]

Wholehearted engagement can tip into overwhelm. So wholehearted engagement means we're fully present with what's here. And when our nervous system becomes overwhelmed, it means in a simple way, we can't be present anymore. That's not the time to push through. That is the time to step back to settle the nervous system, to be kind. Because once we are checked out, overwhelmed, then we have to adjust how we're engaging. And this is true in meditation practice as it is in life. this in not such an easy way maybe two decades ago after I was in a car accident I was in the passenger I was in the back seat of a car on the highway that was hit by another car spinning smashing into a wall and except for a few broken bones everyone was okay miraculously

[12:40]

But for many months afterwards, every time I was on the highway and a car would be merging, gone. I'd be gone. And this wasn't the time for me to try to be wholehearted. This was a time to be gentle. To call on any and all resources I could find to help me get back in my body. This is true for all of us. Wholehearted engagement isn't a rule that you follow rigidly. It is an encouragement. And there's another piece that I want to bring in that I didn't talk about so much yesterday, but it is also part of the flavor, the quality of this suchness. This being fully present with things as it is.

[13:44]

And that is this quality of simplicity. And not simplicity like the opposite of complexity. I mean this kind of pristine here-ness. Where we're not adding anything. our interpretation, our judgment, our preference, our story about, our meaning-making to. We're just with what's here. This is Ling Zhao, Lehman Pong's daughter, who said, it's very simple. When I'm hungry, I eat. When I'm tired, I sleep. This kind of simplicity is not so easy. but it has this flavor in it that is also part of the kind of encouragement and recommendation for entering into this period of kind of an intensification of the intensive these next few days.

[14:56]

What does it mean to just let... An unpleasant memory be an unpleasant memory or painful knees be painful knees without piling on. This is what this means. I have this pain in my knee because I was in this car accident all those years ago. And so I have this twist in my spine and that makes me sit this way. And if I keep sitting this way for a long time, then. Probably by the next period of Zazen or the next year of my life, I'm going to be crippled and I'm not going to be able to walk and I'm going to. This is. Allowing the moment. To be stretched in a way kind of distorted by past and future. We're stepping out of this moment in which there's pain in my knee and creating a whole past and future storyline about it.

[16:05]

This is no longer simple. So the encouragement is to be wholehearted, but also to just let things be. You don't have to add on. You don't have to make sense of. You don't have to. In the class yesterday, I talked about in this dependent co-arising, these steps of how suffering comes into being, that after we have pleasant and unpleasant liking and not liking, grasping and pushing away, then there is the becoming and this taking birth as. When you have an experience, you don't need to go all the way into taking birth as a person with a pain in her knee. You can just keep it simple and be aware of the pain.

[17:06]

So for those people who are sitting this three days of sashim, There is external simplicity. All you have to do is follow the schedule. You will discover quickly how difficult this is. There's that phrase of the schedule is like putting a snake in a bamboo pole. The snake is curvy. That's us. And the bamboo pole is straight. This is not punishment. You may feel like it sometimes. But it is, how would I say, it's self-discovery. When you place yourself in some restriction, when you give yourself to a schedule that somebody else gave you instead of doing whatever you want, you discover things about yourself that you might not have been able to learn in any other way.

[18:17]

So all of that is preamble to the main thing that I want to say this evening, which is that for me, it feels really important, as it has throughout this intensive, to cast a wide net to really, in the spirit of radical inclusivity, to invite everyone to participate in this three-day sashin. Now, obviously, not everyone will be sitting downstairs in the zendo. Not everyone will have someone ringing a wake-up bell or cooking them meals, right? The main thing about intensive retreat, a sashin, is that it is a simplified environment. It's a great gift. even if it doesn't always feel that way. But in fact, regardless of your circumstances, if you are sitting here in person, if you are sitting with Sashin online, if you are fully engaged in your day-to-day life, taking care of yourself,

[19:49]

your work, your family, changing diapers, doing dishes, sitting in traffic, whatever it is, all of these principles apply. And I would invite everyone to take these three days as an experiment. How is it to give yourself wholeheartedly to whatever it is that's in front of you with this spirit of simplicity, not making stories about what's happening, If you're doing the dishes and you break a dish, it's just a broken dish. It doesn't mean whatever it is that you make up that it means about you. I wasn't planning to say this, but I'm having this memory of this dream I had a long time ago. And in the dream, I was in my room in a house somewhere, and I was cowering in a corner because, sorry about this saying this, but all over the room, there were just bugs.

[21:05]

There were crawly bugs and slimy bugs and flying bugs. And I was in the corner of the room, you know, going like this. And then all of a sudden the door opened, whoo, And some kind of amalgam combination of my teachers walked into the room. And they looked at me, cowering in the corner, and they said, it's just bugs. And in the dream, I was like, oh, right, it's just bugs. And I got up and I was able to walk out. This is simplicity. It doesn't mean you'll have 100% pleasant experience, but we don't have to do backflips. We don't have to create complexity around it. Good.

[22:08]

So I want to, in the spirit of this wide invitation for all of us, those of us who are here in the temple practicing together, those who are practicing online and those who are practicing in life to offer a story, a kind of revised version of a story that I hope will feel inspiring in this way. Because here's the secret. It's all practice. This is the point of the Xin Xin Ming. It's all practice. There's not better practice and worse practice. It's you practice with what you've got. Some of which you will like and some of which you will not.

[23:12]

So many of you know the story of the Buddha. Great spiritual teacher who was. by the way, also a social revolutionary who cast a very wide net and invited all castes of people into his Sangha. It's hard, perhaps, for us to kind of grok how radical that was at that time. So he didn't only teach He also engaged. He created whole new possibilities through his activity, through his action. There's so many good things. We sit in this long stream of goodness that began with Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha.

[24:18]

So for me, one of the very hardest parts of his story and sort of the mythic story of the Buddha is the part where he leaves his wife and young son to go out on his spiritual pursuit. I've spent a lot of time, all kinds of ways trying to make peace with that. And in my own kind of study of the person who became the Buddha, I've come to feel him as this very sensitive kind of, he was like a poet mystic who was being shoehorned into being the next leader. You know, he was being shoehorned into politics and it was a really bad fit.

[25:26]

And he was not happy. He also had this history of his mother's death at his birth, which we don't know if he even exactly knew about because he was raised by her sister. But somewhere in him, there was discontent. And all of that caused him to leave, to depart. So his wife, who is the one who is left, Yasodhara. In the early teachings, you almost never even hear her name. In the Pali canon, she's often referred to not as Yasodhara, but simply as the mother of Rahula. That was our value. And when... Her husband left to go on his spiritual pursuit.

[26:29]

It left her in a bit of a pickle. It was not a good position for women to be in to be left, to become widowed, which was essentially her fate. I don't think she was thrilled about it. There are stories that talk about when he comes back, And everyone comes out to greet the great holy man, and she refuses. She stays in her room. She won't come to greet him. So there's an alternate version of this story that comes much later, not in the Pali Canon. It's from the Sarvastavada teachings. And in this alternate version, it's described that the Buddha, is said to be he who goes forth.

[27:31]

That's the language. Beautiful. He goes forth on the path. He leaves home. And Yasodhara is understood as she who stays. And in this version of the story, it's described that on the night before Siddhartha leaves, that they make love and she gets pregnant. And for the eight, nine years that he's out wandering, she's pregnant. This is a mythic story, right? And at the moment of the Buddha's enlightenment, she gives birth. So this is not a true story. It's an archetypal story, but it's pointing us as archetypes and myths due to something really important, which is very much in the spirit of this radical inclusivity of the Buddha's Sangha.

[28:43]

So I am offering to all of us regardless of which path we are walking. If we are walking the path of wearing robes and sitting quietly in silence in the zendo, or we are wearing street clothes, as it were, and going to work and taking care of kids and so on. That these can be understood as parallel paths. And my view, I have some passion about this, is that this second path is just not very well developed yet. It's ours to discover. And so I say all of that, I'm looking at the camera because the folks who are... not here primarily, who are going to be practicing at home, this is an opportunity for you with the support of knowing that you are wholeheartedly engaging in a simplified way, as simplified as you can.

[29:58]

You may not be able to stop activities, but you can simplify internally that we can all practice together. We are all still learning how to do this. And there is deep and vast wisdom for us to lean into. And there is so much to be discovered. Dogen Zenji has a short, it's not exactly, I guess a poem you could say, that for me brings these two themes of wholehearted engagement and simplicity together.

[31:09]

He says, realization, realization is the making real for yourself of all of what I'm talking about all of what we've been studying, what it means to have a mind, a heart of great faith. We make that real for ourselves. Realization. Realization, he says, neither general nor specific. Not quite sure what that means. Realization, neither general nor specific, is effort without desire. This is wholehearted engagement effort without grasping for a goal, for a result, for it. I'm only going to do it if it turns out the way I want. No, we make the effort because we're alive.

[32:13]

We make the effort because this is what it means to be a human being. Realization, neither general nor specific, is effort without desire. Clear water all the way to the bottom. A fish swims like a fish. This is simplicity. This is that kind of shimmering pure nothing extra added is it a big fish or a small fish is it a red fish or a blue fish a fish is just itself that's it clear water all the way to the bottom a fish swims like a fish vast sky transparent throughout a bird flies like a bird

[33:21]

When you read stories about the monks and nuns who were part of the Buddhist Sangha, and you read stories about the lay men and women who were part of the wider Sangha, these are characters. And each of them comes forth with some unique expression that they contribute to the whole. Teaching is inviting us to be ourselves. We're not being asked to become something else, to become some better version. We're invited to stop adding, stop trying to get someplace else. And part of the way that we can do this is these twin themes that Dogen lays out. This wholehearted engagement.

[34:26]

Effort without desire. And then this beautiful imagery. This simplicity. Whatever it is. If you're walking up the stairs. Or you're paying your taxes. Or you're taking a breath. It's enough. You can just let it be what it is. And. as we practice this way, to do this, is the mind of great faith, is the heart of great faith. Realization, neither general nor specific, is effort without desire.

[35:33]

Clear water all the way to the bottom. A fish swims like a fish. Vast sky transparent throughout. A bird flies like a bird. So in whatever capacity you find yourself, whatever set of circumstances you are immersed, engaged in over these next three days, I invite you to join, to join all of us together practicing in this way. Of meeting our life as our practice. Whatever it is that's here, that's what we have. And then in this way, you get to be you and I get to be me.

[36:47]

And neither of us has to grab. or reject. We can together be in this simple, beautiful quality of being alive. So these three weeks have been quite difficult. So much heartache, heartbreak. And what I'm pointing to here is not, it's not escape. It's asking us to be ourselves this fully in a way that we are able to respond. We can respond.

[37:49]

to our internal cries and the external cries by this willingness and this training to be wholehearted, to be not adding on to be ourselves. Because if we can let ourselves be ourselves, we can let other people be who they are. I look forward to practicing together with you in this way. And may all of our wholehearted effort and simplicity and care support the healing of the

[38:53]

and pain in our world. Thank you very 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. May we fully enjoy the Dorma.

[39:25]

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