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. Welcome to San Francisco Zen Center. Even though I'm actually not in city center, I'm across the street in my apartment, but... such is the nature of the digital world. We can be exactly where we are, and we can be representing something else. I'd like to start today by reading a piece of prose written by Joy Harjo, the poet laureate of the United States. Each human is a complex, contradictory story.

[01:02]

Some stories within us have been unfolding for years. Others are trembling with fresh life as they peek above the horizon. Each is a zigzag of emotional design and ancestral architecture. All the stories in the earth's mind are connected. Somehow that came to my mind. By the way, this is a quote from a book called Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, poems by Joy Harjo. It came to mind as I was waiting to enter the Buddha Hall,

[02:08]

City Center to be the doshi, the person who offers incense in the service that we were doing this morning. This morning's service was a commemoration of Bodhidharma's birth. I was reflecting as I was waiting on what a wonderful, peculiar proposition it is to have Bodhidharma as our finder. I think it's fair to say that there is lively debate and reason for doubt that Bodhidharma did or did not exist. There's reason to doubt his literal existence. So if you think about it, and that's the person that you're choosing to be, your finder, of all your collective aspirations and, I don't know, needs for symbol, authority, and finder, that's the person you choose.

[03:34]

And here you are, all these centuries later, doing a ceremony for what you're saying on the day you're saying is his birthday? How does someone who may not have existed, how do we know exactly when they were born? Yes, the mind is complex. And not only that, most of the... the images that have been painted of Bodhidharma represent him as a gruff character. You could even say they represent him as having a scowl on his face. But at least, I think it would be fair to say, gruff. And again, my mind was thinking,

[04:39]

You know, one of the benefits of the passing of time is that we can embellish who the person may have been with our own preferences. And so how is it that of all the possible attributes we could have given him, we could have given him magical powers, we could have given him sublime compassion. We could have given him a heritage of extraordinary generosity and kindness. Instead, seemingly, we've given him a kind of grumpy old guy. There's no depictions of him when he was a young, dedicated monk.

[05:42]

He's an older, scruffy, kind of grumpy person. And there he was this morning on the altar. And we bowed. We offered incense. We offered our ceremonial tea, rice, and sweet water. And then we read a version of Bodhidharma's wake-up ceremony. And in that version, it says, the mind is a fiction. And when I came across that, I thought, well, doesn't that just sum it up and how wonderful it is to have fiction, how wonderful it is to be able to conjure up a version of reality.

[06:56]

And something within our conjuring up a version of the reality seems to be, certainly in my case it is, often beyond our control. I think one of the things you discover when you continue to meditate is just what your mind can cook up. Sometimes it's just startling. You get a snippet of information and then you go to time. You conjure up a whole story. Fill in the blanks. I teach a chaplaincy course, and one of the things we do is we pass out each month. It's a year-long course. And each month, we give a story, and then the participants in the course write a reflection on the story.

[08:04]

How does this inform your engagement in chaplaincy? And one of the stories is about Ryo Kan, a beloved poet monk, in Japan, of a couple of centuries ago. And in this story, a father brings his son to Ryokan. And the father brings his son to Ryokan because something about their interactions, something about the son's behavior, has motivated the father to come to Ryokan and have him, I don't know what the father was expecting, berate the son, fix the son, get him to modify his behavior into an appropriate way of behaving.

[09:10]

And And the story goes something like this. Rilkan brings them in. The three of them drink tea. And they chat about polite, innocent things. The weather. I don't know how the clouds are moving. Just gentle behavior. And topics. And then they get up to leave. And then... As the sun is putting on his shoes, he notices a drop of water landing on his sandals. And he looks up, and he sees that real countess crying. And then he puts on his sandals, and he and his father leave. And about a week later, the father contacts, real kind, and he says, what you did, I don't know what you did or how you did it, but somehow my son has transformed.

[10:29]

And that's the story. So you can see what exactly was the son doing before and what's he doing now? what transpired, it's all hinted at. And then the participants in the chaplain course write their reflections on it. And over the years, actually we've been doing it for almost 20 years, this course, Gil Franz Doe, Jennifer Block, and myself, almost invariably, each person describes what was going on between the father and the son. Oh, the son was doing this, and the father felt this. Or the father was responding to the son like this, and that was impacting the son like this.

[11:38]

It doesn't say anything like that in the story. Each of us, we fill in the blanks. As it says in the wake-up sermon, the mind is a fiction. Sometimes I think if we said the mind is fiction, or maybe even if we dropped the mind and said mind is fiction, Joy Harjo says, each human being is a complex, contradictory story. So here's another story. So each practice period, we have what we call Shuso.

[12:44]

And that's someone who... is at a certain point in their practice and ready to become a teacher. Actually, whether they're ready or not, that's what the initiation they're going through. And Kim, who's the current Shusoh, she gave a talk on Wednesday night, and she talked about a famous story. I thought it was a Zen story, but maybe it's not. It's sort of Kim... sort of gave it a different origin. But here's the version I've heard of it. Someone is chased and they end up trying to scramble down a cliff. And they're clinging to a root rather than fall to the bottom of the cliff where there is a tiger, a hungry tiger. And on the top of the cliff where they've been running away,

[13:47]

There's another fierce animal who could destroy them. And as they hang there between both disastrous possibilities, they spot a strawberry. And they reach out and pluck the strawberry and eat it. And it's delicious. That's the story. Maybe for a moment you could just ask yourself, you could let your own mind create in its complexity and its immediacy and its historical roots. What does your mind make of that? And the point of the story is what? Eat more strawberries.

[14:51]

Stay away from tigers. Always look for a safe way out. What does your mind make of it? And I'll offer you my own notions in a few moments. So this notion of mind, Nagarjuna, a great Buddhist scholar and logician, he said, yes, the momentary realities are constructs, but the suffering is real. To my mind, this is a powerful statement that we should literally take to heart.

[16:08]

I think it offers us guidance in our disposition in how we approach the human condition. each of us can rightly be asked to take responsibility for our own fictions, our own constructs, our own version of reality. And yet, the suffering is real. And as we struggle, even though we can be obliged to take responsibility for how we've co-created our own struggle, it's a challenge for us. It's a difficulty for us.

[17:14]

About a month ago, I was reading an article. And in the article, the author had... collected a lot of information that seemed to point at, collectively, as a society in the United States, how we are responding to the imposition of the restrictions that COVID has caused in our lives. And in the article, he was, you know, noting different ways that restriction had impacted our society. The number of suicides had gone up. The number of cases of mental distress, anxiety in particular, and other behaviors that...

[18:27]

seem to indicate the struggle of isolation, of restriction. And so in the midst of that, Christina and I conjured up with our fertile imaginations, conjured up the theme of this practice period. Taking refuge. Taking refuge and creating refuge. Maybe we could say in a linear fashion that in the midst of our anxieties, The challenge is to discover and create an expression of being that we can take refuge in.

[19:38]

And part of the extraordinary heritage of Buddhism, and I would say personally, it's my own One of my many notions is that this theme of refuge runs through many spiritual traditions, maybe them all, one way or another. That in the midst of a human condition, there is an impulse within us. Maybe you could even say there's a need within us to take refuge. And to that, I would offer you this notion, too, that we consider, as Nagarjuna did, that this is not a simple event. This is often fraught with challenges, struggling, anxieties.

[20:52]

And yet, in the midst of it, to harken back to the story of the strawberry, in the midst of all this, through the senses, we can reach out and experience the moment and experience its uniqueness and its preciousness and cherish our experience of it. And in the teachings of Buddhism, this is what we might say in one article by Jack Kornfield, he calls this the inner taking refuge. That we touch and taste the moment.

[22:00]

That we savor it. And in her talk, last week, Christina was saying, and this taking refuge, we can find all over the place. The example she used, I have no idea why, just now that I think about it, It's very interesting. Maybe it's a deep revelation of her personality. But she mentioned the coffee maker. Now, why she didn't mention Japanese tea ceremony or something else, I have no idea. And I'm joking. The point is... all these things that happen in our life, that often we just take for granted, we barely even notice, that each of them has its own virtue.

[23:18]

Each of us opens the door, the Dharma gate of being present. And in the heritage of Buddhism, this... passing through this Dharma gate, being present, is taking refuge. And... so... where do we start? How, given... not just the complexity of the human condition, but the deep tendency to create a version of reality that reflects both, as Joy Harjo says, our ancestral roots, but also the way that life has been shaped

[24:26]

in our own personal existence and in our collective existence. And so the challenge in the realm of Buddhist practice is, can these moments of awareness, whether it's your coffee maker, the attending to the exhale, as you sit zazen, reading a piece from a book that inspires you. Attending a morning ceremony in which you're venerating someone who may or may not have existed. And chanting a ceremony a sermon that he may or may not have written.

[25:36]

All these offer us this moment of presence. And this moment of presence illuminates the nature of being. I was what we call the doshi, the person who offers incense. And as I was doing this, I was marveling at its ephemeral nature. That there's no way we can congratulate ourselves that we know exactly who Bodhidharma was, and that we know for certain he existed, and that we know for certain that he wrote the wake-up sermon.

[26:39]

And as we were doing it, I was thinking, how lovely. May we hold everything that we construct in our life as a proposition. That it's not the whole story. And it not being the whole story, it's infused by something of me being the person I am. The workings of this one, And in the process of awakening in Zen Buddhism, we let the moment of awareness illuminate how the self is coming into being.

[27:46]

And not only do we let it illuminate it, we learn from it. Ah, we learn something about the moment. In Soto's then, we have particular ways to do things. I must confess. Maybe it's a confession, maybe it's just an observation. But as I was standing, looking at the altar, it occurred to me, that the altar cloth that was draped underneath the incenser, was draped over the table, was a little bit skewed. Not a whole lot. Maybe about an inch to the right. So do Zen does that to you.

[28:53]

You know, it's like... An inch to the right, oh no, you know, let's all go home. This is a mess. Or, what a marvelous sweet strawberry teaching me something about the workings of a mind in this moment. Just how things take shape. And we illuminate the self, and we illuminate the dharma. And as we chant it together, the wake-up sermon, you know, and many of the people who were standing there, several of them I know for decades,

[29:57]

several of them I know for many years. And here we were, expressing our dedication to a practice that graciously offers us nothing to cling to. It tells us up front, you know, Bodhidharma may or may not have existed. But that doesn't invalidate the efficacy of awareness. That doesn't invalidate the path of practice, the path of liberation, the path beyond anxieties and suffering. whether he did or did not exist, the path can be experienced directly by every one of us.

[31:11]

And as we engaged together, I felt, oh, What a blessing. What a blessing to collectively practice in a way that opens up mind. That rather than, here's what we believe, and we know we're right, and anybody who doesn't believe what we believe is wrong. Here's what our fertile imaginations have collectively conjured up. And we know we're right, because here we are doing it.

[32:19]

Almost like the opposite. Here we are. In the uniqueness of this moment, that someone could storm in and say, this is absurd, and we would nod and think, okay, that has validity in this occasion. But the tentative nature of it invites a turning inward. noticing the nature of mind individual and kind and collective noticing how it's not the dogmas or fertile minds singularly or collectively create it's the very process of waking up in what it illuminates and how it is to be collectively doing that

[33:28]

in addition to singularly doing it. Because the singularity is just another thing that our fertile mind has conjured up. And so in Buddhism, we say that that moment of awareness, that engagement, or in Zen we actually say, that immersion in awareness, where the immersion within it sort of recreates the perceived reality. When we see mind as a fertile imaginary activity, it illuminates What is?

[34:29]

In the Prajnaparamita, a term that is a designation of a school of Buddhism, it says, neither real, neither an absolute reality, nor nothing. What we create is a tentative proposition but it is in its own way a something. And as we take refuge in the awakening, and we take refuge in the teachings that reveals, and we take refuge in the interbeing that we are, And that inter-being holds our singularity, our perceived singularity, and our perceived interconnection.

[35:38]

And of course, there's a historical version of this. And again, how much of all that is literally true? from a Zen perspective, that's not primary. Maybe we could say that to the degree to which it helps us to have a formulation, to have a statue, to have a way of creating what we might call the sacred. and to venerate it, maybe that whole process is valuable in terms of relating to the human condition. And Zen, to my understanding, it holds that lightly.

[36:51]

It sort of says, maybe... that's valuable for you, but don't assume that's valuable for everyone. Maybe for some people, the absence of the statue, the absence of the collective veneration is what's valuable. And as we allow for that to... Almost paradoxically, it brings about an extraordinary quality within us. In Sanskrit, the word is shraddha. And in English...

[37:55]

it's often translated as with three words. Trust, confidence, faith. The trust being that our experiencing of the moment, our experiencing of the activity of mind, of noticing how mind construct. It can construct whole versions of reality. It can construct a momentary detail. It can look at the altar cloth and think, that's a little bit skewed. And when we perceive

[38:57]

and we see how that's the nature of consciousness, there's something deeply trustworthy in that. We don't have to assert, well, I know everything, or what I think is always right. And that trust offers us, in a deep way, a place of refuge. Because we don't have to assert or uphold any version of reality. We don't even have to assert or uphold any version of the self. that, when we experience it, has a deep... a deep way of letting us relate to the human condition.

[40:20]

Our anxieties, our distress, it's when we somehow... we're relating to our version of reality and trying to find within it something we know for certain. Trying to find within it a foundation of being that we can totally rely upon. This trust, this shraddha, it also, as we engage it and we discover how to be immersed in it, it's like we're learning to swim and we can swim in the waters of impermanence.

[41:30]

We can flow with the currents of those waters. You don't have to control them or negate them or escape them. The confidence comes from being part of the flow. And the faith, usually when we think of faith, we think of have faith in something that's beyond our capacity to experience. But it's more that we, as we taste the fruits of awareness, we taste and can savor and can rest in

[42:35]

and can arise from this refuge in just being. And this gives us a willingness to engage. Liberation is possible. Whatever the circumstance that arises, it can be engaged with awareness. And the human condition will be part of that. This is our... challenge refuge in buddha refuge in awareness refuge in dharma what's being illuminated by that awareness and refuge in sangha as it expresses itself in all the different ways that we interbe

[44:02]

So I've run out of time. But even so, I'm going to read Joy Harjo's comments again. Each human being is a complex, contradictory story. Some stories within us have been unfolding for years. Others are trembling with fresh life as they peek above the horizon. Each is a zigzag of emotional design and ancestral architecture. All the stories in the earth's mind are connected. So we could say, and I will say,

[45:13]

Zazen is to sit with this big mind. Zazen is to sit with this compassionate relationship to what it is to be human, singularly and collectively. Zazen is to sit and savor what arises. our precious gift in this moment. And it's always in a flux of change. And who knows what's next. And this delicate process is taking refuge in Buddha, taking refuge in Dharma,

[46:15]

taking refuge in Sangha. And throughout the Buddhist world, not exactly in the ways I've articulated now, but throughout the Buddhist world, this taking refuge is revered. Generally thought to be the touchstone, the primary reference, the point of initiation, And so, when Christina and I were thinking, oh, and what shall we offer as suggested practice as a consequence of the first class? What will we offer people to practice with? Find your way of touching the moment, of being the moment, of immersing in the moment.

[47:17]

Do what you're doing. Find a way and remind yourself to practice with it a moment of pause. To be body. To be breath. To be whatever the senses are creating in that moment. Not as an imposition. Not that before that moment you were doing something wrong. Not that when you do this, then you will have authority over the whole world. No, none of that. No, it's just a point of access that gives us a taste of awakening. Thank you very much. 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.

[48:27]

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.

[48:42]

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