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. Welcome to Green Dragon Temple. Typically wet. What a beautiful blessing, what a beautiful assembly of people. Can everyone hear me? Awakened by this Japanese bell, the sky-headed, sea-tailed, green gulched dragon stirs the fine mists and rains of right dharma. For east and west, farming and greeting guests, the pre-voice of this old bell

[01:00]

is not hindered by the wind. That's the text on the old bell that has a new home that we'll be celebrating with you today. You'll all be warmly invited right after this ceremony out to our new lodging for the Au Bancho bell. This was a poem by Abbott Richard Baker from 1975. So, Bienvenidos. Salaam Aleikum. Welcome, welcome, welcome. Peace be upon you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for being sangha. These are the themes of the talk today. This has been the theme of the spring. This might be the 2,500-year-old theme of Buddhism. Please feel welcome and relaxed in your bodies. If there weren't enough bells today, I thought I'd bring a little one.

[02:03]

And if you're willing to do some exercises with me, we'll use this as a mindfulness gate. So if you're willing, you can sit upright in zazen posture, even in chairs. This is spine erect, chin slightly tucked, feet on the floor. You can feel the points of your body settled and connected to the earth. Breathing gently through your nose. After a few breaths, become aware of your awareness. The sense of who you are right now. not the space around you so much, but the inner space, your energetic presence in your body.

[03:07]

This awareness will be with you the rest of your life. This is a luminous awareness, always present in your experience. And it's that part of you that the bell is calling forth. To this awareness, Everything that arises is perfect, all-pervading, instantaneously, rising and falling, appearance and disappearance. So as this spring and motherly rain of April falls outside, I want to acknowledge that we Buddhists are new to this landscape. The watery edges of the North Bay of the Golden Gate, are the ancestral homes for thousands of years of Coast Miwok language groups. The Waymen is supposed to be the tribe that actually occupied the territory that Green Gulch now lies in.

[04:17]

So I've been reading what I can find out about these people, these peaceful communities that maintain themselves largely without warfare, without ecological collapse for thousands of years, and I've been deeply impacted by their longevity. And I feel like their fundamental orientation toward harmony with one another and with the landscape and with the great elements is a lesson we can learn a lot from. I've also of course been devastated and quite saddened to consider the profanity of the violence that was done upon indigenous peoples. So I feel like it's important that we know these stories and we invoke them. So I've gone to more and more social justice gatherings of late, and this is a practice that people are doing. We want to acknowledge that we're on Coast Miwok territory so we don't forget.

[05:22]

And it's also critical that we know a historian who recently wrote a book called All the Real Indians Are Dead and 10 Other Myths That You Should Know About. So it's important that we remember the ongoingness of these traditions evidenced at Standing Rock and by the really dynamic young indigenous leaders of the San Francisco Bay Area. So I wish to offer gratitude for their inspiration. I want to ring the bell in honor of their dances, their sacred shell mounds, their plant gathering sites, their sweat lodges, their pathways, and their non-violence. So my name is Kayyum Johnson. I'm the head farmer here at Green Gulch, and I've had just the right amount of rain.

[06:24]

So if any of you are still doing rain dances, you can stop. because we're pretty full up here at Green College. We have a planting schedule for next week, and it would be wonderful if we could get into the fields. The mallards have been mocking us. They are treating the fields as ponds. I don't know if it's only when I'm around, but it seems that way. I'm honored to be here and to spend the morning with you. I wanted to say that yesterday we had a very different type of day. It was a bright and sunny day, one of the most beautiful imaginable. It was also the culmination of our annual fundraiser for San Francisco Zen Center. It was called the Zenathon. It was a rainbow flag of activities, families, and people biking in from San Francisco and hiking through the hills with Hall Newbegin, a former farm apprentice here who's a naturalist and Someone was making matcha tea and there were sweets and the bell kept getting rung at random times, beautiful new bell tower.

[07:33]

It's hard to resist. So I wanted to thank everyone very much for your contributions, all the benefactors, great and small, for allowing these temples to continue. It's a great privilege to live in them. I want to ring this small bell throughout the talk as a traditional form of mindfulness. You're probably all familiar with this. Each time it rings, I invite you to sort of do what we just did, settle into your body, take a few breaths, check your posture as you would during Zazen, and connect with that awareness that isn't a personality, and it isn't an idea, but it's kind of a radiant something that I think you're all familiar with. And I invite you to return to your perfect bodies. your bodies are perfect just as they are and to your connection to the earth. The bell will be the theme of this talk so forgive me there'll be lots of bells because we have a giant new bell so after the ceremony there won't be a Q&A session we'll just retire to the lawn and we'll see what we do with the rain and you're welcome to join us please join us for the ceremony and celebration

[08:48]

and then we'll do the tea and muffin thing as usual. So I'd like to share today kind of coming from the perspective of a very ordinary person who's been blessed by the triple treasure of Buddha Dharma Sangha and specifically the encouragement of this community and the themes of this talk are welcoming and by welcoming I think I mean radical empathy which I feel is the essential activity of those who are on the bodhisattva path. This is seeking to undermine the fundamental confusion about human life, which is that we are separate entities who need to acquire things to be happy. And the recipe that the Buddha hit upon was that by understanding this, delusive activity of trying to grab things and acquire them for ourselves, we can achieve liberation with all other beings.

[09:56]

So a radical empathy is one that I think the world more than ever needs today. We have refugee crises and we have increased warfare. The doomsday clock, you've probably heard, has been ticked closer to midnight. And of course, practicing without sangha, I think, is an immense challenge. So this is also one of the themes, is that the people in our lives, and that not includes those we choose to be around, but everyone that we encounter, like the people sitting behind you, in front of you today, beside you, that you may not know, these are our fellow beings. with whom we are aspiring to awaken so to repeat i want to propose that welcoming is the essential practice of the bodhisattva and i want to associate the sensory music and the poetry and the sort of ineffable quality of bells with with bodhicitta

[11:11]

And bodhicitta means awakened mind, and this is the essential, this is the heart of a Buddhist practice. So bodhicitta has two qualities. Bodhicitta is practical, it's a compassionate activity, it's kindness, it's engagement with the beings that are around us, it's skillful means, it's an appropriate response, it's coming forward, it's being the first to speak, it's making eye contact, It's celebrating things that ought to be celebrating. It's lifting up and cherishing that which may be denigrated commonly. And then it has an ultimate form. The ultimate bodhicitta is the non-dual realization that this is it. All things are connected. Everything is perfect. There's no self and there's no other. So when the bell rings from here on out, we might think, That's bodhicitta calling us home.

[12:11]

So, if you're up for an exercise in this practice of cultivating sangha, I would like to ring the bell, invite you to settle into your bodies, and then turn, in one direction that's easy, to someone who you didn't come with, that you don't know so well. And what I would like you to do is to look at them with the wish that they be utterly happy, utterly at ease, peaceful, joyful, healthy, everything. Everything that you can imagine would provide a being with solace in the world today. You're just going to hold their gaze and look at them. How does that sound? A little nerve-wracking, right? We came to sit zazen. Okay. Are you ready? I'm going to ring the bell.

[13:17]

We'll take some breaths, settle in, relax, hoist up your spine, tuck your chin, and then turn to someone that you don't know and just hold their gaze for a few moments with this wish sort of flowing through your eyes, coming down through the rainfall on the roof. Okay? Looking unguardedly, without artifice, without trying to get anything.

[14:24]

Curious, settled, totally relaxed. Allow whatever arises to arise without trying to adjust it. Respect, look again at this being. this sangha member, this fellow practitioner. Give them a small bow and a kind smile. So I feel that this welcoming, that bodhisattvas practice is our gift to the world. It's our gift to the world that includes ourself, to the world that isn't separate from us. So it's a gift to us, it's a gift to the apparent other that surrounds us.

[15:29]

By seeing and acknowledging other beings in this way, we dignify everything. We elevate the quality of everything. And I think this is an essential teaching of Soto Zen and of Suzuki Roshi and this community of practitioners. We treat things with great regard even though they're in the mundane aisle at the supermarket. It's like ordinary, extraordinary, average, elegant, simple royal. It also feels to me these days like the limitless meaning or the indefinable meaning, the sort of meaningless symbol of everything that appears to us in our consciousness

[16:45]

is brought forth by this sort of seeing and acknowledging, wholeheartedly engaging with the thing before us. And it feels like it's the only thing that's going to save our species at this time. As we know, there's nothing else to this life than this life right now. The commute here, the clothes you put on, the routines and rituals that you enact with your life. that's just going to continue, you know? So, as Norman Fisher wrote in his book, Training and Compassion, we have the option as practitioners, as sort of awakened beings, awakening beings, to make practice our entire life, to say, this is what I'm doing with everything, and to apply that same alchemical switcheroo, like, we are just putting on our sheet, we're just doing all the ordinary things we need to do, but they're imbued with this vast intention to wake up and to include everyone else in this waking up.

[17:51]

That's the essential teaching. That's the essential reminder for ourselves. So... I had a computer program write my Dharma talk last night, and I think they switched up some pages. They didn't realize you were a room full of bodhisattvas, so they just figured that a lot of repetition would be important. I think what the program thought I ought to talk about was, and not talk too much, but to talk a little bit about the way this applies in larger settings too.

[19:07]

I don't know if any of you were off kilter at all after the November event. I was a little bit. But I noticed in going to gatherings of like-minded people that we weren't talking to each other very much. We've been conditioned kind of like this setting, which is why I'm interested in having you look toward one another and really take refuge there. We would go to events and there would be a sort of central focus and we would all be oriented in that direction, but there wouldn't be a whole lot of horizontal communication going on. So again, I think that's where bodhisattvas can be agents of change in the big picture. I think we can bring that spirit of fearlessness that gives a gift of fearlessness to assemblies of people who are working for social good. How does that sound? Have you all been to protests or activisms and had that experience and maybe thought someone should stand up and

[20:14]

look around at other people. Or maybe we should say our names before the assembly goes off marching. Or maybe we should have a check-in at the end. Maybe we should just sit before, during, and after the event. So we have some new folks that I want to welcome. We have the Farm and Garden Apprentices for the 2017 season. Was it the 24th, would you say? announced it was the 24th Farm and Garden Apprenticeship at Green Gulch Farm. So we have nine new bodhisattvas who have been anticipated since last October. And we're immensely grateful that they came. And so we're engaged in the dual ritual of initiating them into the community and also welcoming them again and [...] making it clear that they are our new beloveds. So I do feel like this radical empathy is a radical act.

[21:19]

I think it is what allows communities like this to flourish and I think it is what will allow the changes that need to come to manifest. I wanted to share something that I was initiated into that maybe a lot of you already know about but these are the principles of Kingian non-violence. How many people have heard of these already? These are sort of spreading around. These are coming out of Martin Luther King Jr. 's work and they are being sort of spoken to by the convergence of movements that are calling for social justice across the world and this is fundamentally kind of informed by Gandhi and his Ahimsa principle of no harm. These principles also seem fully like modern updated expressions of the Bodhisattva vow.

[22:22]

Principle one, non-violence is a way of life for courageous people. Principle two, the beloved community is the framework for the future. Principle three, attack forces of evil, not persons doing evil. Principle four, accept suffering without retaliation for the sake of the cause to achieve a goal. Principle five, avoid internal violence of the spirit as well as external physical violence. And principle six, the universe is on the side of justice. So nonviolence, sangha, recognizing the difference between confused behavior and the essential goodness of every being, the acceptance of suffering,

[23:37]

as a part of any movement for change. And that it shouldn't be idiot suffering. You don't need to get clobbered without having a goal in mind. And principle five, avoid internal violence of the spirit as well as external physical violence. I think this speaks to the way that we are working with Buddhist teachings in a psychological way. vein in this country because we are so much in our heads that we really need to have some psychological tools in order to understand the way that we are oftentimes alienating ourselves with our own inner voices and principle six is the vision of universal enlightenment the universe being on the side of justice so may we transform the world. Welcoming is also central, of course, to Suzuki Roshi's teaching of beginner's mind.

[24:50]

And in rereading the book, and particularly maybe for my new farmers and gardeners, I just can't recommend enough, even just the first three chapters on posture and breathing. and what's titled in there, control, as well as the prologue, provide almost all you need to know to be able to get yourself well along in the path of awakening. As well, the other ingredient, of course, is sangha. I think we really need sangha. So we need to set up the circumstances for having ritual in our life, and we need friends to help us do that. Suzuki Roshi says that unless we're diligent, we're liable to lose the limitless, non-separated meaning of original mind. He writes, for Zen students, the most important thing is not to be dualistic. Our original mind includes everything within itself. It is always rich and sufficient within itself.

[25:53]

You should not lose your self-sufficient mind. This does not mean a closed mind, but actually an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, It is always ready for anything. It is open to everything. So in these frightful times, as the great unraveling, as Joanna Macy puts it, happens all around us, we need to practice welcoming, which is another way of thinking of Dogen's teaching. To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. that myriad things come forth and experience themselves as awakening. So when we welcome whatever is before us, we are actually welcoming ourselves. In welcoming the stranger warmly, we allow myriad things to come forth and experience themselves, which is an insight into our own true interdependent nature. Oh, breathe, settle into your body, adjust your posture, relax into luminous present awareness, and turn to that person who you gazed at and tell them in just a few short sentences why you came here today.

[27:33]

What brought you to this old hay barn in Maroon? No, you know, you were going to come back. Oh, man, I only came because I was hoping you would come. What's that?

[29:18]

I can just let it go. I can just let it go. Yes! Sangha! Sangha! Victory!

[30:42]

Thank you. Maybe someday we can dance around each other. Maybe we can dance. Yeah, there's a harvest dance at the end of the year. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. So, obviously, I believe the way to wake up in life is to wake up. and to welcome the people and situations and objects and feelings and body situations and losses and on and on, whatever is before us, to welcome them radically. If they're beings, we can cultivate a radical empathy that recognizes they have a life as rich and complex and confused and karmically bound as we do. This can... do the trick that my favorite Allen Ginsberg line is, candor ends paranoia.

[31:48]

Candor ends paranoia. And I think, I'm sorry to say, Americans were really paranoid. I think that thing that happens in a group or on the freeway where you see someone and then you pretend you didn't see them, I think that's paranoia. And I think it's because we think we have something, I think, well, There's many. We could go down that road. We won't. There's reasons for our paranoia, but I think they're dispelled. The antidote is to be wholly forthcoming, to show up with our full moon face, even when it's raining, even when it's drizzling. Does that seem like in line with the teachings, as you understand them? So, I think another... element is settling into our bodies into our somatic experience I think this is the site of our awakening this body that we have this this thing that we have so many feelings about this skin bag as they like to say we need to settle into our bodies and breathe and breathe our awareness into our bodies and

[33:03]

And settle down. So this is the first gate. This is calm abiding. This is shamatha. This is the mindfulness of the body, the mindfulness of mind, the mindfulness of feelings, and the mindfulness that recollects dharma teachings that continue the wheel turning. Oh yeah, this is paranoia I'm feeling. I'm thinking that person is separate from myself. So, more to the point, how do we establish our own mindfulness? How do we do this? How do we get encouraged to do this? How do we remember to remember our intention to wake up and study ourselves and look into the origins of suffering? How do we remember to breathe into these enlightened bodies? How do we appreciate joy and beauty as they arise without being possessive of them? But not turning away from them either, really fully celebrating them and then letting that celebration go. How do we welcome the difficult, the repellent, the horrible, the tragic, the ongoingly difficult, the chronic?

[34:10]

And how do we feel compassion for our own confusion, our own suffering, our apparent brokenness? When you're depressed, your brokenness seems so inescapable. It seems like the only thing, right? So how do we have compassion for that and not get stuck? And that compassion is the gateway, the pivot for us having compassion for the lived profanity of other people's suffering. So bodhicitta is both the mind of compassion that welcomes beings and meets them face to face, just as they appear. And it's also the non-dual insight into the impermanent nature of reality, wherein there is no self or other. There's some wonderful poems I couldn't help but want to read to you.

[35:13]

One is by Rujing, Dogen, Zenji's teacher. And then the other is a slight retooling by Dogen himself. It's a poem they usually call Wind Bell. The whole body is like a mouth hanging in empty space. The whole body is like a mouth hanging in empty space, not questioning the winds of east, west, south, or north. Equally with all of them, speaking of prajna, ding dong ling dong ding. This is Dogen's version. The whole body is just a mouth defining empty space, ever arousing the winds from east, west, south, or north. Equally crystalline, speaking your own words. Ding-dong-ling-dong-ding. So when the bell rings, Bodhicitta is present, and there are limitless possibilities.

[36:15]

Let us practice together and alone with incredible gratitude for one another and for these teachings. Let us not miss the opportunities that occur every day. As you know, seeing impermanence can be beautiful. There have been some big spring transitions recently here at Green Gulch. Not only the bell, but the end of the two-month practice period that was led by Fusan and Mea-sensei, wherein they discussed host and guest. And Marcia Lieberman was our head student, our Shusel, An incredible person I hope you all get to meet. And then we were descended upon by the hordes of divine beings we call farm and gardener. All shining and open and passionate and curious. A new batch of beings, perfectly rendered in a uniqueness.

[37:18]

Appearing every April, each more perfect than the last. And then disbanding in October, never to be together in that way again. So all summer long, we'll be welcoming the next new moment, respecting our original nature that's beyond easy definition, reminding ourselves and one another about the blessing of Sangha that allows us to see and be seen. I think that is a blessing of a community of practitioners, not only that we are cultivating our capacity to see, but that we have no place to hide, that people are seeing us all the time, that we're responsible for our uprightness. And not in a harsh way. We're not getting the stick anymore. But we're getting the encouragement of like, oh, I see that you're depressed. I just saw that that was a little weird, that behavior there.

[38:20]

Every morning on the farm, we begin the day with a mindfulness verse inspired by Case 21 from the Book of Sobernity. It goes, our verse, which is, I think, mostly a homegrown verse, goes, now as we enter our day of activity, fully engaged in helping others, let us remember the one who is not busy and be free from self-cleaning. So who is the one who's not busy in our busy, busy world? Let us call them home. I wanted to read something. My sweetheart knows this by heart and shared it with me.

[39:25]

It's a Gaian prayer. Great Spirit, who is heaven, earth, rock, wind, insect, tree, fox, human of every size, shape, color, holy are your infinite names, chanted, sung, whispered, shouted in every language, tongue. We will midwife the rebirth of Gaia as best we can, restoring the great law of peace. Guide our hands to soil and seed, honoring the alchemy of food. Let us remember your abundance and share the bread of life with any who hunger. We are forgiving and giving and giving. We trust the giveaway. We give and receive. Let us be humble before the darkness and the light, walking in harmony amidst them.

[40:26]

Give us the courage to know them intimately, both within and without. For you have breathed it all, the behind, the above, the below, the beyond. Your awesome power courses in our veins and animates our hearts. You are the great bell. We thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. So after our final bows and cleaning up the zendo a little bit, we'll go out to the front lawn and have a dedication ceremony for our new bell tower, the new home of our Obancho Bell. This is in honor of Daigon Luke, Steve Stuckey, Michael Sawyer, and every other beloved who has passed. Please invoke them and perhaps consider something outlandish like that every time this bell is rung, whether you hear it or not, they hear it, that whatever love and feeling you have for people who have passed from your life or who may be ill now will receive the balm of hearing the bell of Bodhicitta rung in this green valley.

[41:56]

near the sea, hopefully for many, many years to come. All three of these people, personally speaking, Dagon and Abbott Steve Stuckey and Michael Sawyer, were the first people who shared their death with me. They all died close to Dagon, and Michael died at Green Gulch, and Steve Stuckey died at his home just north of here in Root Park. And I was able to sit with their bodies, which was an incredibly powerful experience, my first experience of that in this life. So for that I'm immeasurably grateful. May the sound of this great pancho bell arouse bodhicitta and dispel confusion in the minds of all who hear it. in memory of all the benefactors of these temples, all guests, practitioners, workers, strangers, to the four elements, the entire diversity of life, known and unknown, and out endlessly into the expanding frontier of the cosmos forever.

[43:01]

So as you go about the rest of your life, please consider that you are a blessing in the world, that your life matters, that you can make everything a ritual of generosity. you can give gifts of kindness and presence in even the most mundane situations, and that in so doing you are transforming the world. I think this is the great faith that Zen tradition sometimes speaks of. And also please remember that the beloved community that Martin Luther King envisioned, that all bodhisattvas, that all wisdom traditions call for, requires courage and action. We sit, And we have dynamic stillness. And then from that place of great peace, I feel that we are then capable of skillful means and showing up in society. We all need to show up to practice radical empathy and to welcome difference and refugees of all kinds. So one final bell ringing so that you can bid your new beloved adieu.

[44:07]

Please settle into your bodies. Adjust your posture, connect with your luminous awareness, and then turn to the person you now know so well and give them a blessing of some kind, spoken, unspoken, gestural, respectful, no touching, unless they want to. So may this blessing express the world you want to live in, that you want to pass on to the next generation.

[45:36]

I think of a verse that we say prior to the personal day during our retreats. The Eno comes in and cleanses the space by saying, Buddha's sun shines in everything. The wheel of Dharma turns and turns. Throughout Green Dragon Temple, the Dharma peacefully resides. Everyone in ten directions knows an increase in joy and growth in wisdom. Thank you all very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast. offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support.

[46:44]

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

[46:55]

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