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, everyone. Good to see you. Good to be here. This is a one-day sit that we're having here at City Center. so all of you that are online just wanted to welcome you here into our one day sit for this one piece that you'll be able to join us with and for all of you here in the one day sit i'm curious if there's anyone doing their first one day set one two three four five six a number of you So I'm seven. I think I saw another hand go up. So there's a number of you. This is your first one day sit. I want to welcome you. And we're really glad that you're here with us.

[01:03]

And after this talk, there will be an introduction to any Q&A that you might have after everyone leaves. We'll come back and you can ask some questions. So first, I want to start off with a small dog. I discovered that there was a metric on my watch called the heart rate variability. And this is something that measures in many ways my stress. And I didn't know that this metric even existed. But when you are under a lot of stress, your heart rate variability will be quite low. It'll be under 20. And when you are doing pretty well and not so stressed and have good sleep, it'll typically be above 50 or at least in the 40s. And I didn't even know this existed.

[02:04]

So back last fall, I was in the middle of several things that I got very busy with here in the temple. We had a big meeting coming up and I was stressed. I had a lot of things on my mind. I wasn't sleeping so well. And they made an announcement that they were going to be bringing over here in the courtyard next door, they were going to be bringing a rescue dog at lunch for people to pet. And I thought, okay, that's great, but I've got plenty of other things to do, and I'm not going to be petting the dog, of course. And I came over here really quickly to get a bowl of something for lunch, and I went back. And unfortunately, my office, you pretty much have to walk through that courtyard to get to the door of my office. And so I figured, well, no one will see me. I'll just scoot right by the dog, and it'll be fine. Well, of course, as soon as I got into the courtyard, a few people spotted me and said, Michael, come over. We want you to see the dog. I thought, oh, I'm going to have to be nice, and I've got things to do, but okay.

[03:13]

So I went over there, and there was this dog, and I said, okay, that's a cute dog. And then they said, why don't you hold it? I thought, oh, here's more time. More of my precious time. And I'm going to need to hold the dog. So I sat down and they put this dog on my lap. And they said, oh, and the dog's name is Noodle. And Noodle was 15 years old. So it was an older dog. And it was a little, small, furry dog that had these cute, deep, dark brown eyes. And because it was an older dog, it shook just a little bit. It just had a little bit of a shake to it. And then when it would lick you, it would just kind of lick you really slowly. And it would look up at you like it was the most peaceful animal on the planet. And I don't know what happened for me, but I felt like crying. I felt like deeply touched by this dog. And a thought even came into my mind.

[04:16]

Maybe I could adopt Noodle. Now, this really wouldn't work for my life, but in the moment, it really seemed like maybe the thing to do. And I held Noodle for about four or five minutes, and I felt like crying the whole time. I felt that I just cherished this being and this existence that was on my lap so much, and I felt connected to it. And I felt like I wanted to promote its life. I wanted to sustain its life. I wanted to feed it. I wanted to take care of it. I wanted it to be around, living a good dog life as long as it could. That's what I felt like. And then I gave the dog to someone else. And I walked upstairs for our meeting. And we had a meeting that day. And I just felt really relaxed. And then it was later on that evening that I actually, by chance, discovered the heart rate variability metric on my watch. And I thought, huh, I wonder what happened today.

[05:19]

And I went in there and I looked at my heart rate variability, and it was like 16, 18, 15, 19, all under 20. And then somewhere around 1 o'clock, it jumps up to 52. And it stayed at 52 for several hours until it jumped back down later in the afternoon. a physical manifestation on a graph of what I had felt in my heart that I wanted to cherish and love and promote this being. And I don't always feel that way toward other beings. How about you? And sometimes people cherish us and it's wonderful that to be in the presence of someone who treats you that way. I had someone, maybe probably each of you can think of someone in your life that looked at you in a way that said, I accept you and I want to be here for you and I think you're the best.

[06:26]

That person when I was growing up in my teen years was associate pastor of my church named Phil Rice. And whenever Phil would show up to something, I would just get happy. I would just be like, you know, here's someone who cherishes me. Here's somebody who looks at me in a way like, I accept you. I'm glad you're here. We want you to be here. And I'm so happy that you are here. And when that happens, the ability to put on different hats... to try different things, to be curious, to even make mistakes, gets so much broader and easier because the fear of failure and the thought of self and what I'm doing and how I'm performing kind of melts away. It's a gift that a person can give to the universe to be a person that cherishes life, that learns to look at their fellow human beings in a way that

[07:32]

And this is what we find in this Buddhist practice called the bodhisattva vow. And in the bodhisattva vow, the bodhisattva being the one who isn't seeking their own liberation as their primary cause, but is actually honing how to be with other individuals so that their impact on the people around them can be a positive ripple effect as their primary goal. One of the statements I really love was that a measure of a person's worth is not what they accomplished in their life, but the impact on the people around them. The impact on the people around them, how they were while they were doing whatever it was they were doing. And so we come to the Bodhisattva vow, and the Bodhisattva vows are found... It's really a Sanskrit sutra that was then translated into Chinese in 406 CE.

[08:34]

And this sutra, called the Brahmajala Sutra, lists 10 different key ways to practice. And the very first one they start off with is one that is pretty easy to skip over. Because... most people don't think that they're going to kill somebody or that they're in danger of killing someone. And the very first of these precepts is, I vow not to kill, and I vow to sustain life. I vow not to kill. Now, it's interesting that when you look at vows, like the 10 vows that we have in the precepts that we say every full moon here it's our most ancient ceremony i love it it even predates the buddha but we adopted it in buddhism in the indo-gagenic plane about 2500 years ago and this is where you go through and you recite your vows together as a group in a community and you start off with i vow not to kill

[09:44]

And that can be skipped over because it seems like, well, I'm probably not in danger of killing anybody anytime soon in most of the settings that we live in, that we're lucky enough to live in. But usually, if you look at the different precepts, the antidote, the way to practice them, the way to hone them, isn't by focusing on what we say we're not going to do. It's by the exact opposite direction. of whatever it says in the precept. I vow not to kill, but the way you practice that, the antidote is to cherish life, to promote life, to be with others in a way that promotes and cherishes life. That's the antidote. It's the vow. In the AA, the Alcoholics Anonymous, 12 steps, they have the antidote for... alcoholism and for alcohol misuse.

[10:47]

And those 12 steps, they only start off with the very beginning, on the very half of the first step that says, admitted that we were powerless over alcohol. And then there's a whole other end of that step. And then there's another 11 steps, but they all have to do with actually the spiritual condition and how to be with being a human being on this planet and so that you are not as likely to drink. It doesn't focus on alcohol. And so likewise with these ten precepts, we don't focus on the don't do this thing. We focus on the antidote. What is the antidote? And when we say, I vow not to kill, that vow isn't about I won't do that last final act. But the vow has to do with living an intention. Living an intention that doesn't put me in a position where I will not be cherishing life, where I will be taking life, where I'll be taking away from other people's lives.

[11:52]

It's way before the final act of killing, but it is how am I living and is it in a way that is in the opposite direction of taking life? Is it in the direction of cherishing life? of cherishing the people around me, of wanting to have them feel as special as what I felt toward Noodle. I wish that I could treat everyone with that much cherishing, that much I want you to be here. That's my intention. And we asked at the very beginning, like we usually do, who was here for the first time, and why? The main thing that we want you to know is that you're welcomed here, you're wanted here, and we want you to come back and use this place as a resource for you to work with your mystery, who you are, what's coming up for you. We want you here.

[12:54]

And we want you to ask questions and we want you to use this as a resource. And the whole reason we put this place here is that we want human beings to be able to have a place that they feel welcome to come to so that they can work on their human condition. And that is what we're talking about when we're looking at the antidote of not killing. This temple is promoting life and we want to cherish you. And so I think about this and I think about who I'm not willing to cherish. And this is where it gets a little bit sticky because we all have attractions and aversions. Noodle is low-hanging fruit for me. That is not a hard one. I just naturally, noodle shows up and I just cherish noodle. But we all know that there's other people, people that we don't feel connected to, people that we don't feel as happy that they showed up, either in our life or in society or in some sort of way.

[14:12]

There are people that we are not maybe spiritually inside willing yet to cherish, to hold space for. And so that's the far end of the spectrum. On one end, I have noodle, and on the other end of the spectrum, I have people that I am highly averse to. And so what are we doing here on a one-day sit when we could be using the 55 people that are engaged in this one-day sit and their 12 hours of practice... That's roughly 600 hours of people hours that could be maybe finishing building a house or cleaning up a neighborhood. There's all sorts of things that we could be doing with this time. But we are here, and we are in silence a lot and being with what's going on. And is this just highly indulgent navel-gazing?

[15:13]

Is that what's going on here? The reason that we have this place, just like you have a practice place, you have a practice place if you want to play the violin. If you want to play the violin, you have a practice place. It's set up with the right acoustics, it's set up with the right chair, the right music stand, and you have a practice place for your violin. It can be fairly hard to practice the Bodhisattva vowel right from scratch if you just start doing it on the middle of a noisy bus on Muni. Now, Not that you can't try to practice there, but we thought, why not set up a place that was a little bit easier of a place to start? So that we can practice for life. We can practice for cherishing life. We can practice for being with the next person that we come across. And where do we start? Well, we start with ourselves. and what it is that we don't accept, what it is that we don't cherish, what it is that we don't love, what it is that we think should be surgically removed from us and then we will be a better person.

[16:21]

And then we realize that this condition is inoperable and that it's on every atom of our body and it's called us. And so we learn to sit with what comes up all day long, looking at this mystery of ourselves our body sensations. We create this kind of false context, but it's intentional. It's a context of like, let's try to sit and not talk and not move. Let's put this context there. So we have something to see our spirit jump against. I mean, you can see this really easily with a three-year-old. Just say to a three-year-old, okay, on the count of three, don't think about elephants. Okay, one, two. By the time you get to three, the three-year-old's laughing. know because they're just thinking about elephants you know so we say okay we're going to sit in a room we're going to be quiet and we're not going to move okay we're going to hit a bell okay go now you can surf wikipedia for 90 minutes and not move but as soon as we hit a bell it's like oh wait a second i think i need to scratch my nose i want the person next to me to see i'm scratching my nose well they're adjusting themselves maybe i can adjust myself

[17:39]

And now I'm thinking. So you get this context in there and then you see what your mind does with it. It goes all over the place and it's great. So we put this context there so we can see ourselves jump against it. And then we have all these other things that come up. All these other things that happen in regard to thoughts about the past, things about the future, all the aversions that, oh, that thing that happened last week in that meeting. Oh, this thing that is really fun to think about. I want to hold onto that like a shiny object. All of these desires back and forth. And we sit right between playing whack-a-mole and holding on to shiny objects. Just what's happening now, being with the thing that's happening, and then holding it with acceptance. Like you're holding a small dog. Like you're holding a child. Not approval, like, yay, I'm petty. Yay, I'm angry. But acceptance.

[18:42]

Acceptance the way you would deal with something that needed holding, needed cherishing. We have this sutra called the Loving Kindness Sutra, the Metta Sutra. The Loving Kindness Sutra, the sutra literally means thread and the root of that is about binding like a collection of things, and the loving-kindness sutra is one of the ones we chant here, written down originally after the Buddha's time. A lot of it was oral for many years, but it's attributed to the Buddha, and it's a really interesting sutra. It talks really about wishing well to everybody and the whole planet over and over again in all these different angles. And that's pretty much what the loving kindness meditation is.

[19:45]

Now, the loving kindness meditation is something that the Buddha gave in a really interesting context. The context of the story goes that there were a whole bunch of monks and they wanted to sit meditation in a forest. So they go to a forest and and they start sitting meditation and in this forest there are these guardian spirits and these guardian spirits are disturbed by the fact that these monks have come into their space so they scare them and they chase them out and they come back to the buddha and they're just like well we wanted to sit zazen but like we were chased out of the forest um what should we do you know And the Buddha recites this loving kindness meditation to them that is basically wishing well to the whole world and wishing well to the people around us and to the people we like and people we don't like. And he gives them this whole loving kindness meditation. And he says, why don't you take this loving kindness meditation and

[20:48]

and go back to the forest and just chant that and see what happens so here we have a situation where we have um you know disturbance we have fear we have what seems like others um and the antidote that the buddha gives them is the loving kindness meditation he says go ahead and see what happens when you put your minds in this space so as you would expect they go back to the forest And they start chanting the loving kindness meditation. And for whatever reason, the spirits that are there totally relax. And they're like, okay, you can sit meditation here. That's all right. But this was the anecdote that was given toward a situation where there was fear, there was aversion, there was disturbance. And then here is the anecdote, cherishing life. putting your mind in a place that's cherishing life.

[21:49]

Because we could put our minds in the place of not killing, but then what we're doing is we're actually spotlighting killing. And we're actually creating a duality of, oh, I don't want to do that. Hmm, I don't want to do that. Yeah, that thing. Okay, I'm going to try to stay away from thinking about that. But then let's think about not thinking about that. That isn't the anecdote or the process. The process is what is the opposite of that. The opposite of that is cherishing and promoting life. And so what is it to put our minds in a place that cherishes and promotes life? And so we start with something that is really simple, which is ourselves. And the things that come up that we consider to be our shadow side in Zazen, or the ways that we criticize ourselves for not sitting Zazen, the way we think we should sit Zazen, all of those things we learn to cherish and to hold. We learn to hold them like we would cherish something that we're trying to promote the life for. Something like how we would whatever it is that you instantly cherish. For me, I just go back and think about noodle.

[22:51]

I'm like, yes, I want noodle to be here. Noodle is awesome. Can I hold myself with the same spaciousness that I would hold that animal? I was given an exercise one time, an exercise that I didn't like that was highly effective, but it was painful. And I will tell you about this exercise. So oftentimes in Buddhism, we have ritual that we don't understand. And ritual is something that usually comes up because someone realizes how if we do a certain focused series of things, it helps us be mindful and bring ourselves to that place, to that thing. Like if you're going to... There's a way that you set everything up, and there's a whole ritual around it. There's a ritual that I often talk about as a surface-level ritual that is like a made-up ritual, but it's hyperbole.

[24:00]

And it's like if you wanted to read your book, and you wanted to be at your book, and you know that when you come home, you want to read your book. So you've had a really busy day. You come home, you sit down on the couch, you grab your book, you start reading, you're three pages in, and you don't know what you've read because your mind isn't at your book. And you think, well, you tell this to a friend, a friend says, why don't we have a mindfulness-like exercise? Why don't we create a ritual around our book? So you come home, you close your door, your book is in the corner, it's on top of that piece of felt underneath that glass case your grandmother gave you. You give thanks to the fact that you have a roof over your head. You go over to the book. You bow to the book, you give thanks to the person who taught you how to read. You take both hands and you lift that glass case and you think about your grandmother. You feel the cover of the book and you think about the font and the design and how someone probably spent at least a few months of their life just designing this for me. And then you pick up the book and you carry it over to your...

[25:03]

sofa chair and you take a deep breath you think about all the pathway of this object to get to me from that tree in the forest to the rain in the forest to cutting down the tree to all the way to that delivery driver that left it on my front porch and we have this whole process and i have this object i take another deep breath i open the front page and then i look at the first sentence and i read it And I have a much greater chance of being at that first page and at that first sentence than if I just flopped down on the couch. And I see the reason for it, and it's personal. Because now I realize how it personally helps me. It's a ritual, and it works. And so I do that ritual my whole life, and my kids know it, and then my grandkids know it. And then one day, you know, my grandkids, 16 years old, looking at me, and he says to his friend, man, my grandpa is so obsessive. That's just a bizarre thing. Can't we just get the book and sit down and read it? Because it hasn't been personal yet to that person.

[26:03]

It's just something you saw at a distance. And so these rituals that we have in the temple have to do with bringing us back to this moment, to what's going on. And it's a club that has been going on for hundreds and hundreds of years of people asking that question of how do we cherish life? How do we be here with what's going on? How do we be here with that one mystery? How do we hone this? Well, how about we set up a practice place? How about we welcome in people? How about we come up with things that seem to be time-tested and well-worn? And we share that with other individuals about how it really works for us to be a person in the world that is promoting life and cherishing life. And that's what we get to come and engage in. And the ritual that I was going to tell you about that I was given was a ritual that I did not want to do and I didn't see the meaning for until I actually did it for a period of time.

[27:04]

And sometimes you have to suspend disbelief and realize that if I would have already had the realization of all the things that I need, that my rational mind would have already solved all my problems. So obviously the answers that I need in many cases are going to be things that I think are not the answers. And so I have to be open to suspending disbelief and trying on some hats that might seem a little bit weird. I was in a practice discussion in Dokusan with one of our senior Dharma teachers, Reb Anderson, years ago. And I was having a difficult time, a very difficult time with someone in my family. And... Yeah, I was trying to figure out how to approach them and what to say, but there was a lot of inside about things that they had done and things that they hadn't done, and I wanted to talk to them about it, but... there was this tightness inside. And I was like, man, if we have a conversation or even address this, I don't know if all of the tension I'm feeling inside is not going to be able to be kept inside.

[28:08]

It's going to spill out. And as soon as I say the first sentence, I'm going to be able to see in their face all of the tension that I'm trying not to convey to them, which they are going to instantly recognize and absorb. And then our conversation is going to be going downhill and it's not going to be a positive conversation. This conversation is not going to be worth having. Well, Why should I even deal with it? How do you even deal with situations like this? Do I have to wait until all that tension leaves me? And I remember Reb said to me, he said, so do you have an altar in your cabin in my space there at Tazahara? And I said, no, I've never really been much of an altar person. Don't really get into the whole altar thing. I'm not much into iconography, not much into incense. That's really not my thing. And he said, why don't you put together an altar? And I was like, all right.

[29:08]

He said, and on that altar, I want you to put the name of that person in your family. And then twice a day, I want you to go and do a few bows in front of that altar. And then I want you to sit in the zazen position, facing the altar, and I want you to chant the loving-kindness meditation with them in mind. I'm like, that's a whole bunch of well-wishing. I don't know if they deserve that. Now, cognitively, I think they deserve it. Emotionally, that's really painful. I really more want them to learn their lessons about all the stuff that they've done that aren't good. That's what I emotionally want to do, and I want to set up an altar that helps that happen in the universe. But no, that wasn't the lesson. The lesson was for me to actually connect to cherishing life, cherishing their life, promoting their life, their well-being, being with that.

[30:12]

So I got to sit a couple times a day... And do some bows, you know, humility. We do the bows. We put our head on the ground, symbol of humility. I'm not the one that's running everything. I'm not the one that's important. I'm not the center of things. It's just, you know, I will put my head on the ground and I will raise my hands a little bit to elevate the teachings of Buddha. And then I will sit down and I will chant the loving kindness meditation with that person in mind like they are noodle. like they are something that I hope has a great day, are taken care of, are not worried, are not anxious, and are well-fed. I hope that that is what that person gets. And a real softening started to happen. A real softening started to happen. And I actually started to appreciate the possible use of altars.

[31:15]

And the ritual started to become personal. And up until then, that was probably, I don't know, four or five years into practice, I started to then actually, altars kind of became personal. And the loving kindness meditation became personal. It became an anecdote. It became a way of working and being with my internal lack of cherishing the people that I find an aversion to. And so today we get to start with ourselves and the fetters and the things that we have that we don't like so much. And we get to not worry about being here and whether or not we're showing up and we're doing it right. If you're trying and trying to bring your attention back to now, then you're doing it right. I said trying.

[32:17]

going to fall off the horse a whole bunch of times today in regard to being right here right now it's just coming back when you realize it and having that as your intention today to being with what's going on and if you're sitting zazen with what comes up not adding anything to it and not pushing anything away but accepting it like a host like we do in the sajiki ceremony where we invite in all of the shadow side of the world and ourselves and play host and are generous and promote the life and cherish it and offer it fruit we have a ceremony here on the 31st if you want to come to called sajiki that we will do this and we'll put up pictures of all of the ugly ghosts around the wall And we will be kind to them, just like all of the things that we have inside ourselves that we're not so inclined to be kind to. And we'll walk around realizing that we don't have to accomplish anything today in order to be the beloved prince or the beloved princess.

[33:27]

You're just wanted here. You're just accepted here. And we need to learn to accept ourselves here. just because we showed up, just because we're being ourselves. We don't need to accomplish something, and then we will be worthy of being a member of the Sangha. Then we'll be worthy of being whatever. Being able to hold ourselves with that amount of graciousness and that amount of cherishing is where we start. And then after... periods of time, we start to look outward at ways that we can cherish people that we're maybe neutral to and working our way up to those people that we are highly averse to. And it's not to say that we don't have to set boundaries, we don't have to work with safety, but I'm just saying that as we all know, there's lots of little tiny opportunities every day, every week,

[34:39]

with people that we just are not that open to, and we're just a little stingy with, and I just don't want to cherish their life. I can tolerate them, I can ignore them, I can whatever, but is my heart actually hoping the best for them and wishing them well? Is that the place that I'm at? welcoming in the hungry ghosts from the untamed wilderness and being the host and giving them the sustenance that they need. Cultivating compassion starts with cherishing life. And we practice on this continuum, starting with the place that's easiest to start ourselves. And we start in a setting that's designed for us to be able to have a good chance at seeing what's coming up for us, a place like this.

[35:40]

And if any of the rituals and any of the practices and any of the things that you come across today seem a little strange, like your grandfather doing a ritual around his book, and you just don't get why that's so necessary, ask one of us. Or write us a note. or ask for someone's email and say, I want to email you afterward about this. People here want to talk to you about this because that's what we're here for, is to try to find ways to promote this temple so that people can use it as a community resource to come in here and to work with the mystery of their life. Honing the Bodhisattva gift, essentially, is what we're doing. And honing the Bodhisattva gift... The bodhisattva being the one that is practicing so that their impact on the world around them makes it easier for other people to essentially reach enlightenment, to have their suffering lessened, if you will.

[36:45]

Being that person that the impact on that pond when that rock is dropped in and that ripple effect that goes out. Those ripples are things that are dropping and packing positive things back into the river of life because of the way that an individual has honed their gift. And that's what this temple is set up for, honing the Bodhisattva gift to the world. And that's what we will do here. And it's a very valuable thing for those 600 hours that we will be spending of people hours being quiet, walking in shashu, bowing to each other, sitting zazen, doing walking meditation, is honing the Bodhisattva gift so that we have this to give to the world so that we can show up for our friends and for our family. and for the next person that we meet, wherever that is. And so that maybe even further down that path one day, we can show up that way for people that we have an aversion to. It's lovely that you all are here today and dedicating your time to this.

[37:57]

And I thank you very much for being here and practicing with us at City Center. I hope that you have a great sit, and if you're not sitting with us today for the rest of the day, I hope that you go out into the world and cherish life starting with your own. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:41]

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