This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Those of you who don't live here probably don't know me. My name is Timo, and I am living here since 10 years, but this is my first Sunday talk. So it's okay if you are nervous. I'm with you. originally when I was asked to give this talk Sunday talk I thought like what I what I will talk about is what I'm really interested in and that is reality or the nature of reality and I was part of a class here which was talking about

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the universe in early Buddhism, the picture of the universe, and the comparison to modern science. And there was a lot of interesting knowledge in there, and I thought like, well, I'll just pack that together and make that into a Sunday talk. But then when I was preparing the talk, I realized this is actually not really what... I want to talk about something which is close to close to my heart, which I really want to bring over. And there was some mist there. There was something off. And when I thought further about it, it's like what I feel like is really close to my heart is the questioning of reality rather than any sort of interesting knowledge about it.

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So that is what I want to talk about today, questioning. What, I mean, what comes to my mind is like, what is so close to me for questioning? And you might have read in books and especially in this tradition, like, you might often hear a teacher saying, oh, that was a really good question, rather than, oh, you gave a good answer. Nobody said that ever to me. So why is it that the teacher says, this is a good question? What's behind that? Maybe because he doesn't get an answer right away. but maybe there's something special in questions which is covered in answers.

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So I want to make a little exercise with you. Exercise? I don't know. I want to include you in analyzing what questions are. So what I will do is I'll give you a question and you ask yourself that question. And then don't answer it. Just stay there. And then when I tell you, you can answer yourself the question. Very simple. You don't have to say anything loud. You can just keep it in mind. So... ask yourself, where am I? And you hold.

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And now you can answer it if you want to. And it's a little bit of a big, too big group for me to ask you now what happened for you. I just tell you, like, what what comes up for me is like first, it's not so easy not to answer the questions immediately. And the second part is like, even if you manage to answer them, there is a little bit of a different space, like a different feeling, or maybe a bit more openness to the time when you have the question. compared to the time when you put the answer to it. So maybe just hearing that, I want you to try that once more. How about you ask yourself, who am I?

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Now you can give your name or whatever concept you have for it and see, how is that? I mean, what it reminds me for me is like, it's a little bit like, oh, I throw a ball in the air, I give a question, and then I'm waiting. And it's maybe a bit more an uncomfortable space. You're waiting and waiting. And when it comes down again, okay, I have it. and it's over. I gave it an answer and I closed it. I don't know if that resonates with your experience or not. I just leave it like there, but maybe I have another example.

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Maybe you have experienced like waking up in the middle of the night or in the morning, and you feel like you don't know where you are. It's like, and which direction the room is, What is lying next to you there? And then I have that urge to figure things out immediately. It's not so simple to stay in that space of not knowing. And so the mind just makes up, oh yeah, yeah, I'm in that room and this is my wife and they're my kids and this is the direction of the door. Maybe you can relate to that. And what I want to bring here together is like a very, very probably simple idea that like not knowing and questioning are two very related things.

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Like they sort of, for us humans, they come together. Like as soon as we stay in a space like we don't know, then there comes a question, and the question might support us actually to stay a little bit longer in that place. A question can be like a support, or a sky hope, or a friend, which keeps us in that place of not knowing and allows us a little bit longer to stay there. And I very much encourage you to try that out. Usually, like I said, our minds, why are they uncomfortable there?

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Because I say they like to make things in boxes. we don't know, understand where we are, who we are, where the borders is between me and the rest, the mind gets very busy and decides to, oh, I need to make a box around it. I need to close it. So I know who I am, where I am. And Asking a question is also already a little bit of a box, but it's more open. It's sort of an open box. And then we can keep the lid open, and when the answer comes, we often try to close it off. And there is maybe something, I just suggest there's something which gets lost when we close them off. There's something which we

[10:33]

because the boxes, they might be not the real thing. And so if we only look at the boxes, we might miss the reality around. And... I think at this point I want to read to you a very famous koan, and if you are a little bit in Zen, I'm sure you will have heard it. It's about Dijang's nearness. It's in the Book of Serenity, one of our classic Zen texts. By the way, am I talking loud enough? Some people. I try to talk a little bit louder, thank you.

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Dijang's nearness. Dijang asked, Fayan, where are you going? Fayan said, around on pilgrimage. Dijan said, what is the purpose of pilgrimage? Fayan said, I don't know. Dijan said, not knowing is nearest. That's the end of the case. It's actually a very good example how also sometimes answers can be very open. Mostly the questions are, in this case, like not knowing is nearest is a very open answer. So...

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It reminds me to a meeting I had recently at the preschool. My kids are going to kindergarten now, and we had a meeting with the preschool teachers where they expressed what their methods are and what their ideas are about teaching the children. And one thing one teacher said was like, And you know when your kids come home and when you ask them, what did you do today? And they say, I don't know. Then you can be sure it was a really good day. And yeah, I think kids maybe have an easier time to just be completely in that flow, in that flow of not knowing, maybe not so attached to the concepts and can be happy in there.

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And when we grow up as adults, we just lose something of that. And that's what I would encourage to find back. And to do that, we... need to train ourselves. When we think about it, I mean, it's easy for us, for me, like, to get a grip, an intellectual grip, like, oh, why could that not knowing be so interesting? You know, like, yeah, in that not knowing, you would have, like, um, you would have no separation because you don't know. There is no separation between me and you. There is no past or future, or there is everything just happening.

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But this concept might be, even though they might be very helpful, it's not the thing. It's just like somebody... telling somebody about how it feels to swim, but the person has never swum. And yes, you can make a lot of words, and that might be helpful for the person to understand, but finally, if he wants to know how it feels like when you swim, you need to go in the water. So I want to talk a little bit about going in the water and staying there. And of course, you could say, well, there's no way we could be out of that water. If the water is not knowing, if the water is the flow, we are always in there. But I think I can miss it very easily, or I miss it all the time, just by making

[16:06]

these boxes around things and having no view on the water, even though maybe the boxes are just water. So, how can we help ourselves to get comfortable to learn to be in that space, the space of nearest? One way I started at the beginning with is questioning. And especially in this tradition and in other spiritual traditions, teachers work with questions. And you might have realized, like, the best questions are maybe the ones where you don't get so easily a lid on top. Like...

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where the shape of the question is so strange that you would like to, but it doesn't work. You can't close it. So I'll give you a nice example, actually from the same case in the Book of Sonoranity. In the commentary, it says, a master is referenced saying, an ancient said in the eyes it is called seeing. In the ears, it is called hearing. But what is it called in the eyebrows? Yeah. Like that. Kids are often a good trainer, too.

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Like, you know, I mean, they often ask me, of course, questions. And the questions seem very simple. They are not as complex, mostly. And the method is, like, they ask you a simple question, and then, I confess, I just try to give them a very sophisticated answer. Close the lid, and... concept is perfect, so this is done. And then what comes then? But why, Papa? And this why, as you imagine, as you know, can just be as endless as our not knowing. Actually, my teacher had a time where I think he was asked a lot of why questions.

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And he made the statement a few times, like, I don't answer why questions. And at the time, I did not... I think I was not completely agreeing with them. But now I can... I appreciate that more. It's a shame to answer why questions. It's like, what is nice is just to join into a why question. Oh yeah, I have that question with you, rather than trying to close it off. want to go to a very similar and maybe a little bit different approach other than questions. It's like taking a break or making a pause.

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And I mentioned the example at the beginning, like waking up like waking up in the night not knowing where you are. I think if we are a tentative, we can find a lot of places during the day where you have this small gap of like, I don't know, and where we immediately grasp our concepts, put them on them, and we feel safe again and relaxed because we know what's happening. And I just want to encourage to leave that space a little bit open, like to exercise it a little bit, like expand the gap and see if I can feel comfortable in it, if I can breathe in not knowing what's coming next, not knowing

[21:31]

What's going on? I feel like one way of that being exercised in a group is like Tishnathan groups, for example. They often do like a sort of mindfulness bell. In the middle of the work, you don't know when. That's just my idea of it. A bell rings. And you stop at that point. You learn to just pause at wherever you are. And then maybe continue again. It's not so much. Some people might think, oh, that's a nice break. So now I was working, and now I'm in break. And then I'm working again. But it's like this, what do you say? This going from one to the other one.

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This, when it flips from one side to the other side, just staying there in the middle, like on a turning wheel. Don't fall into what was before or what will be afterwards. Just stay in the middle. Stay with unknown. And then... And then we can fall into known again. There's nothing wrong. There's nothing wrong with making concepts. That's just how we are. That's just how our mind works. But it's nice to get used into staying in the unknown because we can learn to relax. There's so many things in our world which make us afraid because we don't know and to stay in that place to get comfortable with and to make friends with that space just help us to relax

[23:43]

us to relax and also I think I feel like our fears are a lot driven by the fact that we don't know our fear our fear of death our fear of life and maybe the reality is like it cannot be known And if we can relax in that not knowing, we don't need to take our concepts so seriously. We don't need to take our worldview so seriously. We can be together with others who have different views. And we can be together with ourselves not knowing what comes next. Not knowing what life brings. That's why I feel it is encouraged, and I feel very encouraged by practicing staying there.

[25:09]

Maybe I want to tell another story. It's about our family driving to Point Reyes. You might have heard it. I think somebody else told it recently. It's like we were driving in the car. My three-year-old daughter, Luca, and my five-year-old son, Miro, was driving in the back, and I was driving with my wife. And so we were driving through the nice scenery. And at one point, Miro got excited and said, I see cows. And everybody in the car was like, oh, wow, cows. And then Luca, you felt like, was a little bit like, I want to have an exciting story too. So after a few minutes, she said, I see cows. And people looked around.

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Not much of a response, because maybe people didn't think they see cows. Then Mira said, do your cows have leaves? And Luca said, yes. And then Miro said, but then there are trees. But the nice thing about the story is he smiled and they were not getting into a fight over if the cows have leaves or not. And that is the wonderful thing about, like, we don't need to identify with our concepts.

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It is nice to have them and we play around with them and we enjoy them and that's how we connect with each other. But we don't need to assert ours. versus other ones. And to get this type of flexibility, I think we need to learn how to rest, how to relax, how to swim in the unknown, to stay nearest. I think I just want to finish with a verse which comes from another case in Books of Serenity, which says, The free body, resting on nothing, stands out, unique and alive.

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Thank you very much for listening. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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