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. A little while ago, I was speaking with someone who has been practicing for a number of years. And the person was telling me about, can you hear me okay? No. Oh. Can you do something about that?

[01:05]

the way that you were looking at me conveyed that you were not hearing what I was saying. That's okay. Give a try on something else. So this person was telling me about what it was like for her when she began practicing And she said, Zen practice was not what I expected it to be. And it was not what I would have wanted. I guess she wanted something better than what Zen practice had to provide. She wasn't complaining.

[02:20]

This was just an observation. It was not what I expected and not what I would have wanted. I would have wanted something else. And I was expecting something else. And the Zen ancestor, Dogen, says, in Yui Butsu, Yobutsu, Dogen says, Realization never occurs as previously conceived. Which is very striking. Realization never occurs as previously conceived. In other words, oh, he also says, what you think one way or another about realization has nothing whatever to do with realization. Realization comes forth by the power of realization itself, he says.

[03:26]

So the one thing we can be sure of is that what our idea of realization is, and maybe we could say what our idea of realization and maybe we could say what our idea of what our life is, the one thing for sure about that is that it isn't going to be that way, that it doesn't happen as we expect. And we might say, well, it also doesn't happen as we would want it to happen, as it should happen, as we'd like it to happen, as we expect. as we feel like it would be right for it to happen, that it doesn't happen in this way. So my response to this person was very positive.

[04:35]

That is, that her experience was different than what she expected meant that her engagement that she had an alive, engaged relationship with teaching, with practice. This is a very essential quality of practice way. It's not some bunch of ideas or some list of truths and then we... take those list of truths, and we import them into ourself. Our way is not that way. It has this quality of engagement, and our alive interaction with it is necessary. So I was thinking that maybe it would be good after this Dharma talk, if you care to, to let me know if

[05:44]

what I said was exactly what you expected I was going to say. And whether it's what you would have wanted me to say. Maybe it would be better if I said something else. So this specific that she was talking about was that didn't turn out the way she expected. had to do with the Four Noble Truths, this very fundamental teaching. In Sanskrit, it's dukkha, samudaya, nirodha, marga, which means, in English, usually translated as suffering or dissatisfactoriness, suffering, cause of suffering, cessation of suffering, And marga is path, the way to the cessation of suffering.

[06:50]

And what the person had said to me was that the problem arose in number three, cessation. She said, well, it didn't seem like she... Her experience was not, her alive, engaged experience was not that this cessation thing was happening, cessation of suffering. It seemed like, well, I'm still suffering, you know. It wasn't happening as she expected it to happen, or it didn't look like she thought it was going to look, this cessation. So that's what I want to speak about this morning is... suffering and cessation, dukkha and nirodha, the first and the third noble truth. And, you know, a really core inspiration for me, as many of you know, is the teaching of Suzuki Roshi.

[08:09]

And one quality of that teaching was that he would sometimes speak about dukkha, nirodha, in this technical way, but also in a very ordinary way. So I want to speak about suffering and cessation, but another way to say that same thing is how do we meet how do we live with the difficulties the problems in our life that's the dukkha part and the meeting part is the cessation part how do we live with that how do we meet not in the sense of confront but what do we do with that which is difficult and problematic in our life.

[09:15]

And I want to try to speak about it from a practice perspective. And what I mean by that is from the traditional teaching from Suzuki Roshi and Dogen and the... Zen ancestors and Nagarjuna and Shakyamuni Buddha, but also hopefully alive, hopefully engaged with that teaching, not just some dry doctrine. Zen is not a doctrine. You know, people sometimes say, what does Buddhism say about, what does Zen say about X, Y, Z? It doesn't say anything about anything. It's not that sort of a thing. It's not some set of this is what it is. So this issue of suffering and cessation, the difficulties and problems in our life and how we meet those, is...

[10:36]

One could say that's what practice has to do with. That's what Zen teaching, Zen understanding, Buddhist understanding has to do with. The understanding was designed in reference to this very issue of the difficulties and problems in our life. And we know that because it's right there in the mythic story of Shakyamuni Buddha, of the founder of this way. Yes, mythic story. Mythic story.

[11:37]

So maybe, we don't know, but probably there was some person, some Muni of the Shakya clan who lived about 2,500 years ago. And, you know, he probably said something. It was probably a he. And he probably said one thing or another. But what it is exactly... Historically, we don't know. And actually, it's less important than the mythic understanding of what he said. It's less important because the mythic, what I keep saying, mythic, mythic, mythic, the mythic understanding is about us. That's the way myth and stories function. It's actually about us. allegorically, his story is our story or the story of our inner development or the development of our own spiritual life.

[12:42]

Is that clear? So this is not about something that happened to somebody 2,500 years ago. This is about what always happens to us all the time, currently, in the present, past and future. And as we know, dukkha, suffering, it is what turned Shakyamuni Buddha in the mythic story, it is what turned him toward the path. You know, he saw a sick person, he escaped the pleasure palace, right? And he saw a sick person, an old person, and a sick person, and a funeral procession. Old age, sickness, and death. These universal symbols and universal facts of

[13:59]

of dukkha, of how things don't work out the way we would like them to work out. That's the essential quality of suffering, of dukkha. He saw that, you know, in the story. One night after another, she saw that. And the fourth time, he saw a monk, and then that was it. He left home and started to So, again, in the mythic story, very specific, old age, sickness, and death. But, like a good story, it represents something much wider. Old age, sickness, and death represents all of that which does not go as we would like it to go. all of that which doesn't work out as we would hope it would work out.

[15:04]

And this is the Buddhist teaching and Zen teaching is about the way things are, but there's a kind of specialty. It's kind of like a doctor who has a specialty. a specialty in suffering. That's a specialization of Zen practice and Buddhist understanding. But this is not like people sometimes say, oh, Buddhism is so pessimistic and so morbid. Why are you always talking about suffering, you know? Can't you talk about something more pleasant than that? So it's not that way. It's just that things don't always work out the way we would like them to. When they do, terrific. Go for it. When they don't, then we need some help, some assistance.

[16:14]

And how do we meet that? What do we do in the face of that? Can there be cessation of suffering? When I was thinking about this, I was thinking that my own cultural heritage, the family I was born into and raised in, was the culture of Eastern European history. Judaism, Eastern European Jews. My mother was born in Warsaw, and my father, neither of them are alive any longer, my father was born in Western Russia.

[17:17]

We could never figure out exactly where, some little tiny village in Western Russia, but that area of Europe was It was considered Eastern Europe, and there was a very large Jewish population there until the Second World War. They both came to the United States before that. They came in the 20s when they were children. But anyway, in this culture with which I am very concerned, Having been brought up in New York City surrounded by millions of other Eastern European Jewish people. So there's a kind of joke, kind of a dark joke, which is, the joke is,

[18:28]

When things are bad, they're really bad. And when things are good, they're really bad. And the reason they're really bad when things are good is because when things are good, that's because the Cossacks are around the corner sharpening their swords. So you get the implication there? So things are good for a while, but soon they're going to be even worse than they were when they were bad. So is this pessimism or is this reality? When things are good, how long will they be good? How long? We should enjoy them when they're good, but we don't know when things will turn. And just like Shakyamuni Buddha seeing old age, sickness and death, we are confronted by this fact of life, sometimes dramatically and sometimes not so dramatically.

[19:49]

Like for many of us who have been here for some time, a few months ago, our dear friend Steve Stuckey, And that was very dramatic and sudden. He received a diagnosis of cancer on September 30th, and three months later, December 31st, he died. Sometimes it's very dramatic. Sometimes it's less dramatic. It's just some sense of dis-ease. some sense of things are not quite right. So this is what happens to us. And this is what happened to Shakyamuni Buddha.

[20:58]

And then what happens next, there's different understanding of what happens next in the story of Shakyamuni Buddha or in the story of our own inner life. So in one version, he goes through various practices. Shocking when a Buddha does. And then, at a certain point, he comes to cessation of suffering. Suffering, cause, cessation, path. By virtue of the path, he gets to this thing called cessation of suffering, the end of suffering. So that's one understanding, is that we can somehow get to a place where we're no longer suffering, where things are no longer... where it doesn't happen that things don't work out the way we'd like them to.

[22:25]

Suzuki Roshi... referred to this kind of understanding as step Zen or step ladder Zen. In other words, practice is the way to get to that cessation in this understanding. So you climb up the ladder, the step ladder of practice, of doing Zen practice. of various, I guess, each rung in the ladder is an attainment. You attain and attain and attain, and then you get to the top. And then you're in heaven at the top, where there's no problems, no difficulties, where suffering has ceased. He called this a stepladder zen. And in my own lexicon, I call it... parking space zen. And that's because many years ago I was going to lunch with someone and they knew I was a zen practitioner and they thought that because I was a zen practitioner that parking spaces near the restaurant would open up so that we could park close because, you know, I was zen and therefore I was...

[23:54]

in communication with the subtle forces of the universe, and parking spaces would materialize when needed near restaurants that one wants to go to. As it turned out, we had to park very far away, and it was raining, but so much for that. So anyway, so this kind of literal understanding of cessation of suffering, I don't know about that. I don't know. This is not part of my experience, not part of my alive interaction with practice, not part of my own experience, not part of even, as far as I can tell, not part of the experience of anyone I know, that suffering ends, ceases in that more literal way.

[25:05]

However, I think there is another understanding of cessation that is possible and manifest. And as sometimes is the case, etymology is helpful. So that word, that Sanskrit word, nirodha, the one etymology of it means end or cessation. But there's another etymology which is based on, so the ni part, the ni part, means out or out of or without. And the rodha part means constriction or like prison or wall or obstacle or impediment. So in that understanding of the third noble truth of nirodha, nirodha means without impediment, without constriction, without

[26:20]

So this is a very interesting understanding of what cessation means. To not be imprisoned by our suffering. To not be constricted by and restricted by and limited by our suffering. is a kind of cessation of suffering. It just ain't the same suffering that it was when one was constricted and bound by it. So do you know what I mean about being constricted? It's like I've felt that and I've spoken with many people who feel that way of the suffering is what it holds them or they are held in it, seemingly inescapably held in it, stuck there, quite restricted and imprisoned by it.

[27:39]

So to not be imprisoned by it doesn't mean it's eradicated. It doesn't mean it goes away completely. It's not that sort of cessation. It's just that its power over us, its dominating power over us, is changed. We have a different relationship to it. So this is very good, I think, because it means that this karmic that you have right now, this karmic life that I have right now, this life that right up until this point, and this karmic consciousness, we don't have to go somewhere else in order to free ourselves of it.

[28:48]

This notion of cessation is within this karmic consciousness of right now, within this karmic life of right now, we can, I don't know what to call it, achieve cessation? That's not exactly what I mean, but we can have, we can manifest freedom. This is what it means when you hear in Zen teaching, don't seek elsewhere.

[29:54]

It's not necessary for us to go somewhere else where there's some eradication of suffering. Suzuki Roshi would say, so one time he said in a Dharma talk, he said, pulling the weeds, we give nourishment to the plant. The weeds, our difficulties, our problem, is what nourishes our practice and our life. And another time he said, quoting Dogen, he said, we stand up by where we fall down. This is very important. We stand up by where we fall down. In other words, in order to stand up, you have to have falling down in order to stand up. There ain't no standing up without the falling down. The material of standing up is falling down.

[31:05]

The basis, the foundation of standing up, of whatever that means. What does that mean, standing up? the cessation of suffering or enlightenment or realization or whatever, the material of that, the essence of that is the falling down. It is that by which we stand up, which is so beautiful in the metaphor because it's so true, right? Because when you fall down, you don't get up over there. If you fall down over there, you've got to get up where you fall down. Exactly where you fall down. Not any other place. Even though it might be nice to get up by some other place. This is the place. This is where I fell down. This is where standing up is possible based on falling down. So in that way, this...

[32:13]

karmic life, this karmic consciousness is the material of our awakening and realization. It's not someplace else that we need to go to. And Zen is not some way of getting to that other place outside of our own life, outside of our own suffering, whatever that may be. So I wanted to quote something from a talk of Suzuki Roshi's where he addresses this. It's a few lines of this talk. And this is a talk that was edited and published and titled and is in the book Not Always So.

[33:19]

Many of you are familiar with Not Always So, which is a group of Suzuki Roshi's talks edited by Ed Brown and also Mel Weitzman helped him. And this talk is entitled Resuming Big Mind. And what I'm going to quote doesn't actually use those words, but that's in another part of the talk, Resuming Big Mind. This is a talk that Suzuki Rishi gave on. Here's a little date-ography. He gave this talk February 5th, 1971. And it was the beginning of a, I think it was the first day of a five-day or maybe a seven-day sishin. must have been at the city center.

[34:21]

I was around at that time, but I don't remember the talk from my memory. Oh, so February 5th, 1971. Now, of course, we know that Suzuki Rishi died December 4th, 1971. So this was a talk that he gave almost to the day, 10 months before he died. And he was born on, Suzuki Roshi was born on May 18th, 1904. And in case you didn't notice it today, is May 18th, 2014. So today is Suzuki Roshi's 110th birthday.

[35:30]

He'd be 110 years old if he were alive. One last date-ography. So from May 18th, 1904, to May 18th, December 4th, 1971, is 67 years. 67 years and a few months. About half a year. So he died when he was 67 and a half. Roughly. And I was born in 1947, which is... 67 years ago and a few months. That occurred to me. So when we were, when I and some others of us were much younger and around when Suzuki Rishi was alive, he seemed like a really, well, he seemed like a very wise,

[36:45]

and he also seemed like a very old, he was an old man, he was an old guy. So, being 67 in a few months, such as I am now, It's not what I expected it to be. And we could discuss whether it's what I would have hoped it to be, what I would have liked it to a bit. But it's definitely not what I expected. You may notice a similar kind of thing when you're 67 or 27 or 7. So here are a few lines from Resuming Big Mind.

[37:53]

Suzuki Roshi says, so in our practice, we rely on something great and sit in that great space. The pain you have in your legs. This was a sesshin, so imagine that. The pain you have in your legs or some other difficulty is happening in that great space. Interruption. So Suzuki Roshi, in this, he's talking about suffering and cessation, even though he doesn't use those words. So listen for that. The pain you have in your legs or some other difficulty is happening in in that great space. As long as you do not lose the feeling that you are in the realm of Buddha nature, you can sit even though you have some difficulty.

[39:02]

When you want to escape from your difficulty, you create another problem for yourself. But just to exist there, then you can accept yourself completely without changing anything. That is our practice. So, maybe I'll say it again. Because there's a lot there to absorb. So in our practice, we rely on something great and sit in that great space. The pain you have in your legs or some other difficulty is happening in that great space.

[40:10]

As long as you do not lose the feeling that you are in the realm of Buddha nature, you can sit, even though you have some difficulty. When you want to escape from your difficulty, you create another problem for yourself. Just to exist there, then you can accept yourself completely without changing anything. That is our practice. So when he says, when you want to escape your difficulty, you create another problem for yourself. He's talking about this thing of when you want to escape, when you think there's someplace else to go and you're trying to figure out how to get there. you create another problem for yourself.

[41:14]

But I have a little difference of opinion with Suzuki. He says, when you want to escape from your difficulty, and the difference I have is that there's an implication that somehow you're not supposed to want to escape from your difficulty. But of course we want to escape from our difficulties. Of course we do. Of course we want to escape from our problems. Of course we want that more literal idea of cessation. And if it's possible, well, good. We should do that if we can. So the problem is not so much that we want to. It seems like wanting to escape from our difficulties is the most natural thing in the world. The issue is just that certain things are not amenable to that sort of response.

[42:16]

How many? Four. Fifteen. Two hundred million. Some number of things is not amenable to escape. And one could make the case that some of the main, some really important things are not amenable to escape. like old age sickness and death, like loss. Loss is a big one. That is not amenable sometimes. Tragically, in many different levels of intensity. Losing a job that we want, losing a person that we love, many, many different things. Losing our faculties, you know. So far I've managed to give this talk and have not yet once said. Now the word that I'm trying to think of is, it starts with an A and it means like this, which is a very common experience for me these days.

[43:25]

That was not so common some years ago. Certain losses are not amenable to escape. But all losses, all problems, all difficulties, this is a striking thing to say, all difficulties are amenable to not being imprisoned by them. Not being imprisoned by them is as long as you do not lose the feeling that you are in the realm of Buddha nature. That's a way of saying not being imprisoned by them. The pain you have in your legs or some other difficulty, many things fit into that category of some other difficulty.

[44:30]

The pain you have in your legs or some other difficulty is happening in that great space, that's non-imprisonment. That's anti-constriction. That's some context for understanding and meeting our life and our difficulties. So last thing I would say is that also this has to do with meaningfulness. Sometimes we say, what is the meaning of my life? What is its meaning? As though the meaning was, again, something out there, something I needed to get to.

[45:37]

But this way of understanding is that we make meaning of our life, of the life we actually have, not some better life, not some enlightened life. We don't wait. We don't wait to get enlightened or do something fancy to have meaning in our life. Now is the opportunity with the life that you have, whatever it is, with the life that I have, whatever it is. Now is the opportunity for that to be meaningful, for that to be full and complete. I think that's what Suzuki Rishi meant when he said, we rely on something great and sit in that great space, practice in that great space.

[46:44]

imbued with that great space. We know it. We allow it. We manifest it. Okay. Thank you. 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. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[47:39]

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