This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Sojin and I have been doing a workshop for a few years, each summer, focusing on the teachings of Shinriya Suzuki Roshi. And it seems to get better and better. We have a very good group this year, actually. All the people who are coming are helping us. And so we're very fortunate. We're fortunate to be, to... I don't know if we're fortunate to have each other. I feel fortunate to have so... And... And so tonight we'll each talk a little bit.

[01:02]

So I should confess that I didn't ever meet Suzuki Roshi myself. I came to Zen Center just a few weeks after he died. I waited for him to die first. I was sitting... I didn't really know much about him, but I'd read actually one page of Send My Beginner's Mind in a bookstore in Cambridge. I thought, pretty interesting. So I remembered that. So I didn't know him, but I've been learning Suzuki Rashi's teaching since that time, 1972. I've been studying his words and studying people who... practice with him and being here at the place in Tatsahara where he established the practice so I'm actually continuing to learn from Tatsahara one of the stories that meant a lot to me when I was reading from David Chadwick you may know David put together a biography of Sudoku Roshi which is called Crooked Cucumber

[02:25]

It's really worth reading, if you haven't read it, to get to know something about Suzuki Roshi's life and the decisions he made, which is quite significant, how he actually came to America. But he met his person who later became his wife. I won't go into the whole story, but she was a kindergarten teacher and he He convinced her to come and help start the Buddhist kindergarten in the town of Yaizu, which is where his temple was, after World War II. And so, once she came, he said, you should come with me and attend these lectures, Buddhist lectures. And she said, well, I'm a Christian, I don't know that... He said, well, it's part of the job, you have to come. attended Buddhist lectures. So she attended a few of them. They were really difficult to understand.

[03:27]

And talking, there was Ian Kishizawa talking about Dogen's teaching. And finally she said, can you just tell me what Buddhism is in a few words? And he said, is to accept what is as it is and help it to be its best. So I thought in a way that for many people is a very helpful capsule of teaching to accept what is as it is and help it to be its best. And so I think Mitsu, the kindergarten teacher, applied that to her relations with maybe with the children and also with her fellow teachers and so forth and found it to be helpful. So today we are talking about accepting suffering, accepting what's difficult and so forth.

[04:33]

So, I just wanted to start off with that. and we'll see what happens. I'm here to say that I really appreciate Jürgen's effort to understand Suzuki Roshi's teaching, not having met him. And I think what he says, I think Suzuki Roshi's teaching is penetrating his heart, and his principle is not understanding about Suzuki Roshi. So thank you very much. Of course, I've said he was in Sigur Rishi for 70 years. And we had quite a wonderful relationship. All of us, and he supported him. And coming here in this hot July, in a few days, we must be here when I was here with Suturki Rishi.

[05:42]

And we were in 1970. And so in 1970, then we were building a stone wall. I mean, this is all of the kind of sound of the donkey thong. It wasn't there, it didn't kill you so much. But reinforcing the creek, these big stones, as easy as you could love, to move stones. We all love to move them. When we were in crack, we got some That's a hard 1960 film. And for 10 years, you're just moving stone totally quickly. Building walls and . You became stone-wise. And we had a Dodge pickup, really old pickup.

[06:44]

And on Balthusco, we had a towing bar on top of it. And we would go to the creek, or in various places, and beat 50-sheet bolters out of the creek. And then we had a car top that was cut off the top. And we carried it upside down, and it became a thread with a rock. We put the rock on the thread, and then we tried to but try to really, they're the places where we eat the rocks. And we just had wonderful times, you know. And specifically, well, she loved doing that. So, but I do remember that time in the 70s, 1970s, that summer, when we were moving those rocks and putting me in the creek. And sometimes it takes all day just to move one rock. If you ever, a rock this big, So, I ended up in a tripod, and you would rip the rock and keep moving over, and with bars, you know, and we'd get a rock in place after working out all day, and this is a great teacher, well, let's take it out.

[08:11]

No, no, no. He looked at us in one photograph the next day. And then his wife went to see him doing that, because he was not well. He died a week here. And so she would say, don't do that. Don't work too hard. He was moving on rocks. And he would say, OK. And then we'd go out there. He was a skinny little guy. He went to weight about 110 pounds or something. And then it comes his leg. He's like, oh. And it was really hot. I'm having five or something like that. And I would take the, I was a t-shirt, so I would take the washcloths, typically ice-cold water, put it on top of his head.

[09:17]

And so I just kept doing that. If you do that, it'll really cool you off. I would recommend it. So we managed to actually finish that. When you look at it, it's like, But doing that was not working. And he just loved that kind of work. And a number of people got to work on that. And that was maybe the last time that his students could really participate in doing something, some physical work like that. So any of us that worked with him there really appreciated that last episode. He used to say, you know, like, all I want to do, I want to do it with you, eat with you, work with you, and just be there together.

[10:24]

That's our practice. Nothing special, nothing good, no big deal. Just be there with each other, working together, and not trying to do it, but you have to practice work. And when the practice is a good thing, Yeah, I'm inspired from the fact that we feel really like, you could let me, you know, be saved. When we talk about this, it's actually new. Where is the Bodhisattva? Did the Bodhisattva help people before helping itself? That's probably stupid. Really, before final... The boys have to put them up in order to stay around and help people. But they can get attached to that. That's the new problem. Because they feel, well, I'm helping people.

[11:29]

I don't know. I didn't like it. So instead of You don't practice for your own self. You don't practice for your own benefit. And you don't practice the benefit of it. You go, oh. You get practice for the sake of practice. You get practice for the sake of practice. You get practice for the sake of practice. There's a lot of benefits. And it doesn't matter how you're doing things. You don't have any, like, extending it, you know, someone or another. Let's take care of the practice. Let's take care of the practice, and Moody will take care of everybody else. But then when Suzuki Roshi practiced, he would say, people say, well, how do I extend my practice? How do I practice when I've done it in my experience? He said, if you think about that, you will leave. That just couldn't work.

[12:31]

But in your activity, think about, I am doing that. maybe practice new women and go out in the world and just participate with people. And in fact, as mature, everybody, whatever you come into contact with will be help. I'm trying to help anybody. It's really difficult to know how to help people. Sometimes things we know that we help people in a supplemental way, but it's difficult to know. So this is why S.E.S.E.R.D. Energy is really adamant about just simply taking care of our practice. And people will become, will understand somebody not themselves just by seeing who you are, just by association with you.

[13:38]

So what that means, though, you have to put your effort into real practice. You know, without trying, people are rude. So we left our teacher, and our effort is to follow in the concepts of the teacher. And that way, not everybody will notice that. We all think we're following, that's interesting, following and also going beyond. It's interesting. This is the 50th anniversary of forming the founding of Zen Center as an institution.

[14:40]

Suzuki Roshi came to America in 1959. He came to be a priest for the Sakoji Temple in Japantown in San Francisco. They needed someone to come. They actually had to kind of make a deal with people coming up, but they kind of filled in the position. At some point, they surprised people by saying, okay, I'll go. I'll go to San Francisco. He had other responsibilities in Japan that he had to turned it over to other people and he'd read a couple of good years. It's said that he felt this is the time to turn it over to Hulip, time to emphasize, open the door for Zazen practice. So he showed up in San Francisco

[15:43]

people would come, and they'd kind of heard about it, whether it was Zen priest or Zen teacher or somebody, it was called Reverend Suzuki, Reverend Suzuki, at the Zen temple, and people would say, well, I said, so it's time for money, come and sit with me. Well, I can see it really took off at that time, people would come and sit with me, But only two years later, he had the desire that he would stay beyond just three-year term. And actually then he had, at that time, that same year, he had the ceremony of being installed as the habit. That's the Kodi Temple in Pantone. And at the same time, he was supporting the development of something else. It was kind of a group of Americans that were doing present. kind of like the Sakoji Temple was kind of like a desk, a kind of incubator, and it was a little American student sitting there.

[16:58]

And I think some of the Japanese, well, some of the Japanese congregation members didn't quite know what to make of it. What are these people doing here anyway? They really don't even know how to behave. But he felt their sincerity. To me, that was the fact that he stayed with his people really impressed me, because he told me that he had confidence that Americans, through their sincerity, could do the most essential practice and understand the essential away of the Buddha, through the way of the end. And so he then had to make a decision. So this morning, or sometime today, I was talking about it. It was a very difficult decision for him to at some point say, I think I will go with these Americans.

[18:06]

So after he'd been there another three years, That was the time that he was looking for a place to have a more complete training center. And then in 1966, Tassajara was discovered, or he came and visited. And it was pretty exciting, I can imagine. There was a story of him. Richard Baker brought him, his student Richard Baker brought him to visit Tassajara, went around there. At that time, it was a Hot Springs Resort for people. There was a lot of activity at the bar. He says, now there's Sunni in your room. But on the way out, driving down to Tassahara, he said, stop the car. Stop the car. It was just a Richard Baker and Suzuki Rishi.

[19:10]

So Suzuki got out of the car. dancing up the road, dancing up the road, saying, it's great, it's just like China. Now that always struck me when I heard that story, it's just like China. And he hadn't even spent any time in China. But I think he wanted to be true to the origins of Zen, In China. It then really originated in China. So he had a feeling of something that was really authentic. And he saw that possibility of doing some authentic practice here in the mountains at Tassahara. So as time went on, then Zen Center also acquired a building in the city, somebody at all, 300 feet building. And then he had to make another big decision, which he

[20:13]

It was really kind of the point at which it was very clear that he was committing himself to this group of students and moving from his residence in Japan to live in the building at Page Street. And so I think that was pretty hard for a lot of people to understand, pretty hard for people who were in the community of Sukkoti to understand why would he do such a thing? So, when I reflect on his decisions to come to America in the first place, to stay longer, to actually emphasize the practice of Siddhartha and just being with people, that's what he's saying, just being with people and paying attention to relationships with people and then supporting the creation of a monastic training place, Pasahara, and also a city-centered place.

[21:20]

These were big decisions that he didn't necessarily do. It's like he didn't really do anything, but it happened around him because of him. Because he was there, because he was willing to be there. It all kind of just happened to him. So, when he said, okay, following in footsteps, my thought was to follow in Suzuki Roshi's footsteps you also have to go beyond Suzuki Roshi because he was creating new he was creating something new all the time supporting the development of something new and willing to step into an unknown situation and respond and be creative and encourage that in people too so I think following his footsteps is to go beyond the first step.

[22:21]

What else? It's not very long. It's this. It's difficult actually, there's the material. I think they come in the world. I did have a picture of China. It's very And I remember one time, I was talking to them, and I couldn't remember exactly the place everybody loved, but I was just flagging some place to somebody. But I hadn't been there. You heard about something, and then you talked about it to somebody. And you said, oh, have you been there? Oh, yeah, I haven't been there. So I think there's always wrong you to be authentic. to know your own experience, not to talk about your second-hand experience, your experience of somebody else's experience.

[23:26]

What is your own experience? That was very worth it to me. What is your own experience? So he was emphasizing where you are right now, what is your own experience? It doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be profound. It's what is your experience right now? What are we doing right now? So I thought that I would be making, not as serious, I'm serious in words. I'm just going to, this would become, um, not also, no book. I'm serious. What? I'm going to open it up, right now. There's brown rice. It's just right. How do you like that? I think it made me better to ask, how do you like brown rice? Now, I can tell you that back in the 70s is when we started eating brown rice.

[24:32]

In the 60s, actually, we started eating brown rice. And in Tassajara, we had various food fats going all at the same time. I'm at least all of an idiot. There were the macrobiotics. There were the people that didn't think we should make juice with rice. There was a name of it that people would hear. And there were people who came to do it. I had a whole wheat bread and no sugar. And it was like eating a rock. How do you like this dessert? And then you're actually eating brown rice. Not the Japanese creature eating brown rice.

[25:36]

There was white rice. And I was like, who eats that? you know, if you were willing to try and do whatever we wanted, which sometimes, I think, it's like the brown rice is what kind of did it, you know. It's not exactly you could. You know, if you did it. So, the other thing is too big a topic to talk about. Brown rice, right? Actually, there's not much difference between factors and brown rice. When you eat brown rice, you have to chew it. And unless you chew it, it is difficult to swallow. People say, you have to chew your brown rice one time a time. And somebody asked him, did you chew your rice a hundred times? He said, oh my God, if I did that, I wouldn't be able to chew my food.

[26:38]

So... When you chew it very well, your mouth becomes part of the kitchen. And actually, the brown rice becomes more and more tasty. You use this term, part of the kitchen. You know what, there's a saying that lunch now is like a nothing. In other words, it doesn't mean anything. It means you take everything in and digest it, whatever it is. Not food, but Whatever you need, you will take it in and digest it. And maybe you don't like it. At least you taste it. At least you need it. That's a practice to accept what it is. To accept, yeah. So when you eat white rice, we don't chew it so much.

[27:43]

But the ultimate chewing feels so good that naturally the rice cooked that easily. So when we digest food completely, what will become? It will be transformed, changing its chemical mixture, and will permeate our whole body. In the process, it guides in our bodies. To eat and digest food is natural to us. As we are always changing, this organic process is called emptiness. It means stability for everything to change. The reason we call it emptiness is that it has no special form. It has form, but that form is not permanent. While it is changing, it carries on like energies. So things are not changing. There is no energy being abused.

[28:45]

So we know that we are empty, and also that this earth is empty. The forms are not permanent. You may wonder, what is this universe? But this universe has no limit. Emptiness is not something you can understand through a space trip, in other words. It's not the sky. Emptiness does not need the sky. But the sky is sometimes a miracle for emptiness. Emptiness can be understood when you are perfectly involved in chewing rice. The most profound teaching you will ever have is to make ground rice. This is actual idea. The most important point is to establish yourself in a true sense without establishing yourself in delusion.

[29:51]

And yet, we cannot live or practice it without delusion. Delusion is necessary. But delusion is not something on which you can establish yourself. It's like a step ladder. Without it, you can't find luck. But you don't stay on the step. Without it, with this confidence, you can continue to study our way. That is why I say, don't run away, stick to me. But I don't mean you to stick to me. I just, that's the way, you know, he said, you could say that sometimes the teacher will chase the student out. Get out of here, go away. And if the student is stupid, he'll leave. But it doesn't mean you should go away. It's just expressing something to help us to attend.

[30:56]

Don't speak to me. I mean, speak with yourself, not with delusion. Speak with yourself. Sometimes I may be a delusion. You may overextend. Be as a good teacher. It's already kind of ugly. I am your friend. I'm just practicing with me with your friend who has many efforts. You shouldn't be disappointed with a bad teacher or with a bad student. You know, if a bad student and a bad teacher strive for the truth, something new will be established. That is our dhazhyan. We must continue to practice dhazhyan. We continue to chew brown rice. Eventually, we will accomplish something. That's all. So, particularly Rishi, because, by the most profound, I'm teaching, I don't understand it, but it's the most common place and way.

[32:11]

And that was, I think, It's basically the magic of teaching. You have to go very far to suppress reality. It's always right there, right where you are, right with community. And he talked about Zen practice, Misoto Zen Yudu. He said, Misoto Zen Yudu, Endless. So you just keep going. And you don't worry about getting someplace. The strength really puts out other energy to no short distance. But the long distance running has a pace. It doesn't go too fast.

[33:13]

and just keep going and going and going. And it becomes the turtle that gives the right. But, you know, it's an ignorance of that. When you're practicing this practice forever, you said, well, when will I finally be able to stop this? I don't want to get there. The fact that you don't get there is that you're already there. And the more you can do, to get somewhere, the further you go away from itself. So, it's a goal, knowing the mind, in practice is to go here. So here, we always think it's someplace else. One is to go, I've been practicing for 10 years, and I still haven't got to do it. But with many nights, what do we need to do? what's in the middle left.

[34:20]

In Japan, when monks or some other fantasies celebrate something, they eat noodles. And the way they eat noodles is they don't chew them. We're not used to doing that. Me, secretly, too, and we'll spooch. The physicality is a funeral. That one's important. Because he knows that that means... So that's why we don't have so many extraordinary things in our practice life. We grew up through shingings and so, but I practice a daily practice, you know. It's like every day to practice because I practice every day.

[35:24]

We're just practicing a lot, days by day. I hadn't heard that . I heard the . I think there's a part that doesn't really like that. It may be hard to accept. Now, another statement that I'm working with, so, is... He would give these talks, he didn't write these to the book, but he would give these talks, and then people would listen to the tape and transcribe it.

[36:33]

So one phrase that he would say, you should, you should, you should work, work, work on your difficulty. You should work on your difficulty. Work, but it was hard to say, and people, some people translate down to transfigure, and you should work on your difficulty. But then people listened more carefully, and it was clear that he was saying, you should welcome, You should welcome your difficulty. It was harder for people to hear that. Harder to hear it. Or it makes sense that you should work on your difficulty. You should work on your problem. That kind of made sense, but welcome it? That doesn't make sense to our usual way of thinking.

[37:36]

We should actually welcome what's the difficulty. I said, welcome, what's a problem? But that was this teaching of completely, of not being separate. Everything in your life, whatever is in your life, difficult, it's actually very good, very helpful. What does it take to have a true feeling of appreciating what's difficult? your feeling of welcoming what's difficult. If you can welcome what's difficult in yourself, say, then maybe you have lots of friends, because you can welcome anybody. I think from what many people I hear, there's this feeling around Savikiroshi that it didn't matter who you were, if you had any kind of social status or not,

[38:38]

if your behavior was, you know, whatever it was, you know, friendly, unfriendly, confused, if you were an angry person, if you were an unhappy person, whatever that was, whatever you presented, it would be okay. And I think this practice of welcoming everything is a way not having some separation from anything in your life, which means that you are completely living a seamless, unified life. So one way to take that up is to think, how can I welcome what I would rather not have? Some feeling I would rather not have. I would rather not have to think that The railroad track is endless.

[39:39]

I would rather not think this noodle is endless. I would like to just finish it with it. Or I would rather that this person, who is annoying me, would just go away. Or wouldn't shape up. So, Ed Brown tells a story about, as he was a cook here, he tells the story about, and Ed actually was, when I edited it, it's not always a book, but I heard him tell the story about himself a number of times, but it's about Suzuki Roshi's teaching. And he, as the head of the kitchen head, the Tenzo would go, He would ask Suzuki Roshi for guidance on how to practice in the kitchen. And Suzuki Roshi said, willing to stir the soup, stir the soup.

[40:44]

Cut the carrots, cut the carrots. So, Ed would go back and practice concentrating on just stirring the soup, when he's stirring the soup, cutting carrots, cutting carrots. But then, he was a head cook, so he would ask other people to cut the carrots. and other people to street pursuit. And then he noticed that they wouldn't always do what he told them. In fact, sometimes they would show up late. Sometimes they would have their own idea about how they should cut the carrots. They wouldn't follow the instructions. So he went back to Sri Likiroshi and he went on his whole rant. Some of you know Ed Brown, you know, he can really go out of the ranch. These people that are working with me in the kitchen are hopeless, you know. They don't show up on time. They don't pay attention. You said they should cut the carrots and they should stir the soup and they don't watch the soup. They get distracted. They cut the carrots all wrong.

[41:48]

And it's just a mess, you know. How can I work with these people? How can I get them to shave up? And... Saluki Rashid... Ed said, well, I thought that he would say something like, yeah, I know how hard it is. It's hard to find good help these days. But instead, Suzuki Roshi was quiet for a little while and then he said, it takes a calm mind to see virtue in others. And Ed felt, wait a minute. That's not what I want. I want some sympathy. But he took that with him and digested that and ended up working with that. And the truth of that, how is it that you can see virtue in others that actually come from your own acceptance, your own composure, the calmness of your own mind or the capacity of having Zazen mind, the mind of Zazen.

[42:58]

is to be completely willing to see the true nature, the Buddha, in everyone. But that's the way I should put it. It takes a calm mind to see virtue in others. So at that point, Ed did not want to hear that and confessed that that was pretty difficult. So for him to then welcome that difficulty, this is the teaching that was a difficult thing to accept. And then on top of that, Sandviki Roshi is saying, welcome to the public. So he's a pretty tough teacher. A very quiet, kind of gentle, and also a very, very tough, in a way, very strict teacher. So I try to work with that myself, realizing that, you know, the world we live in is pretty strict. It's just the way it is. So this practice can help you if you'd appreciate that, you know, appreciate the difficulty as something that helps you to understand that things are the way they are.

[44:16]

And if you're going to live in a way that's helpful to yourself without it, this is tough. Realizing that one tends to disagree with reality. Oh, I had my own idea. I'd rather not accept reality. I'd rather have my own idea. But when we do that, then we really encounter a lot of difficulty. So then this practice of welcoming difficulty is self-increduing. Oh, how things actually are. Sometimes it's brown rice. He talked about difficulty quite a bit. And he said, without difficulty, without a problem, you can't practice. If you feel you don't have a problem, then you need to be a problem.

[45:18]

Because you're not looking at what you need to do now. So everybody has a problem sometimes. And he would say also, the person who has the most difficulty is usually the best semester. Because through your own difficulty, you can empathize or understand the difficulty of others. Without your own self learning, you can't think clearly You can, but you can see more quickly the suffering of living. So it's important to go through suffering, actually, and difficulty and painfulness in order to refine your life and practice, actually.

[46:23]

And so it really, I never would say The problem you have now, is the problem you always have. You look back and said, wait a minute. It's really like that. I can never let go of this problem. The problem I have now, is you'll be talking to me. It's easy to resolve. So he was always encouraging us, always encouraging us, to look to just be with our problem, be with whatever our problem. When they talk about problem, I'm not talking about funding of the problem. That we are, really funding of the problem. Now just why am I not rich? Like what were they funding of the problem? What were they funding of the problem? Oh my God.

[47:23]

In a stone, Tony. Why do I have to eat this brown rice? Sorry? It's about time to wrap up. Just when we're trying to figure out what to say. So he didn't mean, actually, that he would not, he could not solve the problem. But he got that he spent trying to solve the problem. You use your thumb. It's like a oyster with a pearl. A oyster with a grain of sand. You let the grain of sand turn into a pearl. Not trying to get rid of it, but letting it teach you something. You could just be trying to get chagrata. We'll never leave anything.

[48:25]

But if we allow the problem to be there, then it helps us. So there's a saying that when you fall to the ground, you need the ground to help you stand up. 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, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

[48:58]

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