Good morning. I feel very honored to have been asked to give the opening lecture for the Seven Days Hashim. Can you hear me okay? And I have lots of ideas about giving a talk that sends you off into seven days with resolve and confidence and earnestness, but who knows?

[01:05]

So I'll just speak about what's on my mind as I begin this first day of Sashim. I was very happy to hear the rain and sit in the rain this morning. This is our first really big rain that's lasted this long, and we get to feeling closed by the rain and the sounds, and it helps with one's longing to go gallivanting down the sunny fields. You might as well stay put out of the rain. And you might have noticed that the water out of the faucets and in various places is

[02:19]

running muddy a little bit. This happens every year around the first rain, there's mud and soil, a little bit gets into the springs and into the drinking water. Did you taste it this morning, a little bit? It didn't taste like the regular green gulch water. This is the rainy green gulch water, and this muddy water seemed to emphasize our practice of being lotuses in muddy water. May we exist in muddy water with purity like a lotus. The lotus doesn't grow in clear, fresh lakes and ponds, it needs this muddiness.

[03:24]

And then it comes up and it lifts up out of the water, but it's grounded, it's rooted in the mud. And also they say that dragons can't exist in pure water, they have to have muddy water too, and fish. So there's life in this muddy water, and that's what our life is like. We often try to get it all pure and just right and perfect, and get all the mud out of there, and then we're going to be okay, but actually it's in the mud where we'll find our truth. So this morning we commemorated the passing of Suzuki Roshi, and this was the 25th memorial

[04:40]

service and the 24th year following his death. And I just wanted to talk a little bit about that, and I feel I want to celebrate his life and teachings as we go into the Sashin. That morning, December 4th, 1971, I was living in the Page Street building, but I wasn't sitting in the Sashin. I was going to school at Berkeley, and I wasn't in the Zendo that morning. I think I had written a paper the night before, and stayed up really late, and decided to sleep in. Plus it was Sashin, and there wasn't very many seats, and I'd have to sit in the hall. Anyway, I had made some reason. And someone, my friend Debra Madison, knocked on my door and said, Suzuki Roshi had died.

[05:45]

And I remember what came out of my mouth was, oh no, that was what I said. And then I got dressed and joined the line of students that was stretching from the basement in Zendo all the way up to where he was lying. And he had died in his little bedroom right next to Oksan's kitchen in their apartment at Page Street, and then was moved into the Doksan room. And he was on the floor, I don't think there was a futon or anything, I think he was just on the floor covered in blankets. And this was the first dead body I'd ever seen that wasn't embalmed. I had been to some funerals where there was an open casket, but the body was not very

[06:54]

understandable as a body, it looked like a wax figure. But here was the first person I'd ever seen who had just died. And I remember the disciples, some of the disciples, Reb and I think Dan Welsh and David Chadwick, maybe were all sitting around, and I remember when I came in, we came in and offered incense, there was a kobaku, a chip incense set up, and then we did three bows to Suzuki Roshi, and the disciples were sitting zazen kind of around, and I remember thinking they looked so bewildered. Usually when you think of these men, you don't think of being bewildered, but they looked bewildered. And they were just, I think Reb was 28 and I was 24, and it was like young people, you know, facing something hard to understand, hard to settle with.

[08:06]

And that went on till the afternoon, the bowing, people coming from outside, and then according to the Japanese congregation tradition, he was taken, very different than we do it now, we usually sit with the body for maybe three days, depending on the circumstance, but about three days, but Suzuki Roshi was taken that afternoon to the funeral home, and he was embalmed as well, lightly embalmed, I guess they said, which was in going along with the Japanese community's wishes. And people sat with him at the funeral home, and then I think he came back in a couple days to Page Street, to the Buddha Hall, and was just in the Buddha Hall with a casket, very fancy casket open, and people came, there was a steady stream of visitors through the

[09:15]

next week or so. And it just, it doesn't seem very long ago that that happened. And written on the Han is a poem, which as we hit the Han, you know, it gets worn away and worn away, and you often can't read it, the poem is, listen well everyone, great is the matter of birth and death, no forever, gone, gone, awake, awake, each one, don't

[10:17]

waste your life, listen well everyone, great is the matter of birth and death, no forever, gone, gone, awake, awake, each one, don't waste your life. And Suzuki Roshi's translation of that last line is, don't goof off. So, I feel some seriousness about seshin, and I realize the danger of taking oneself

[11:17]

too seriously, and the danger of not taking oneself seriously enough. Serious comes from the word to hang on a scale, weight, there's some gravity there, some weight. So, we have seven days in front of us that may stretch out and feel like some endless time, and one may be thinking, how am I ever going to be able to manage? How am I ever going to be able to do it? And there's no way that you can do it. So, thinking like that, thinking like that is painful.

[12:18]

So, what is the attitude, what is a helpful attitude to have? We're so taken care of this week, we really don't have to think about hardly anything except the schedule, and listening to the sounds that let us know what's next, where we're supposed to be next, and what we can do, or our effort can be placed on 24 hours a day, whether walking, standing, reclining, or sitting, to carefully, meticulously, with minute attention to be looking, looking, looking at our life and exactly what we're doing,

[13:31]

to not waver from that, to stay with it step after step. You know, I often wondered when I was younger about, if I had lived in the time when pioneers were heading off west, and I was living in some beautiful green valley in the east, would I have set forth as a pioneer in the covered wagon heading out west to face the unknown and all these hardships? I've often wondered, would I do that? And are there any frontiers left, you know, now? But I feel there are. I feel like we're all pioneers. Pioneers are, comes from the word foot soldiers that were sent out in front to kind of clear

[14:37]

the way in medieval times. So we're all foot soldiers, you know, step after step after step, setting forth into the unknown. And we actually can be pioneers. See, I wanted to know whether, would I have it in me, you know, would I have what it takes to face the raging river, you know, and the mountains? How would I have been with the oxen and running out of food? But I actually feel like, Sasheen, there's some feeling of that, you know? We actually do have a chance to see what's there, you know?

[15:40]

Facing our own unknown, facing our mountain range, the rocky mountains and the raging rivers, we voluntarily have put ourselves in a situation where all of what we can draw upon of our strength and softness and everything we've got, we can draw upon here. We don't need a covered wagon. We're all, this is kind of like a big covered wagon. So this Sasheen commemorates the Buddha's enlightenment, Shakyamuni Buddha's enlightenment,

[16:45]

and on the altar, or behind me, we have the Bodhi tree, which is very healthy and beautiful. I'd only seen the leaves, the dried leaves of the Bodhi tree, they look like skeleton. They have a lot of lines and veins in them. But this one is strong and vibrant, just like us. I read recently, or a Zen master called people of the way, tree blood people, who sink their roots and cast their seeds and flower and bloom, as Wendy was talking yesterday. So when the Buddha sat and decided to sit under that Bodhi tree, as you know in the story,

[17:55]

during the different watches of the night, things, Mara, the evil one, sent various difficulties and problems for the Buddha to have to deal with. And this is what's happening for us too. We get sent our problems, and I don't know about sent. We have our problems there, and they might feel like they're being sent, but they're there, and they arise, and we are no different from the Buddha. We have a chance to sit in composure, like a mountain, and trust that what is coming for us is very intimately connected with our own enlightenment, or our own realization. These problems and afflictions and difficulties that arise are not something that is an obstacle that's in our way.

[18:58]

It's these very things that are intimately, intimately connected with what we need for our understanding. These are the teachers that are coming to help us. So there's no point in trying to get rid of these afflictions and problems. These are for us. This is the attitude of sitting under the Bodhi tree. I think our minds tend to work in the way that if only my knees didn't hurt and I could sit without this much pain, then something like that. Or if only my back wasn't so tight, if only my mind wasn't racing so much, if only I didn't have these worries, then.

[19:58]

But that kind of thinking is not accepting fully these problems as our teachers and gifts, the gifts for us. But that's so much our usual way of thinking, I know. So if we can make this shift to meticulously and carefully, step by step, receive and accept these difficulties and problems and afflictions without struggling to have them go away, to just sit, staying close to our bodies, close to our body-mind, I wanted to read something from Suzuki Roshi about problems in Sashin.

[21:06]

This is in the Berkley Zen Center's newsletter, and it's a Sashin lecture in February of 1971, so this was, you know, 10 months or so before he died. And this is the last day of Sashin. And Suzuki Roshi says, Perhaps many of you came to Sashin because you felt that you had problems to solve, that by coming to Sashin your problems would be solved. But whatever problems you have can be solved anyway because Buddha will not give you anything more than what you can solve or what you need. Whatever the problem may be, it is just enough problem for you. So I think you should rely on Buddha just enough, not too much. And if it is not too much, Buddha is ready to give you some more problems.

[22:18]

Just enough to survive, just to appreciate the problems. Buddha is always giving you something, because if you have nothing to cope with, you may have a terrible life. So our yearning to be rid of all of it, to be sitting in the pure water, you know, get this mud out of here, let me taste this pure water, you may have a terrible life, Suzuki Roshi says, if you have nothing to cope with. So this mud, this is what makes our life worth living. These problems to cope with, the afflictions of the mind, the painful sensations that we have, these are to help us.

[23:25]

I am not being masochistic, and you should, of course, know when, or work around when something may be too much. But don't be too easy on yourself. You know, find out what that frontier is, what is that edge that you may not have explored yet, that is not damaging to yourself, but even though you are afraid, can you go a little bit further to find out what happens, what happens if you just sit still through a pain that perhaps you have never experienced before. So to meticulously, carefully, minutely take care of yourself,

[24:29]

it includes taking care of your posture, and I just wanted to talk a little bit about that. Each time you take your place in your zendo and you bow to your cushion, bow away, sit down, turn around, begin to settle yourself, please take as much time, or more time even, than you think you need. You know, really settle yourself on your cushion, really find your center. Your sitting bones should be like two little feet, pioneer feet, right on your cushion, very even, not one up like that. So it may take a little bit of kind of rearranging, finding that. And then don't skip this step of opening your hands on your thighs and swinging around, and exhale as you go down, and inhale up to center, exhale on the other side in this wide arc,

[25:32]

and slowly, slowly coming back to the center. Take that time, each time. And then it's recommended to take an inhale and exhale through your mouth as a kind of cleansing breath before beginning to breathe through your nose. So do that kind of a breath. It will help you settle, and exhale all the stale air out. You might do two of those through your mouth, and then begin breathing through your nose. So this is, all these things are all part of your zazen. They're not preparation for zazen. This is all your zazen mind. And also to skip to when you uncross your legs to, as the Fukanza Zengi says,

[26:38]

when you arise from sitting, move slowly and quietly, calmly and deliberately. So really take that time to uncross and do this swaying back and forth, slowly, slowly getting those arches bigger and bigger. And make sure your feet are not asleep. And get down. This is what I mean by minute attention. You don't want to sort of skip in to get to Kihon already. There's a lot of infinitesimal, actually, moments of breath and movement and shifting. And turning and standing to get from your zazen cross-legged position to standing for Kihon. So find out about all that territory, all that frontier. And when you're sitting in zazen,

[27:49]

when you exhale, Shikantaza, or just sitting, or if you're counting your breath or following your breath, pay particular attention to the exhale. Exhale all the air out and actually allow yourself to calmly stay at the end of that exhale. And then allow the inhale to come in of itself. And this inhale brings refreshment and renewal to your blood and brings from the air, the outside, supposed outside, brings everything you need in to your body and then refreshes you and then exhale all the way out. And that calmness at the end of that exhale, if you can pay attention to that end of the exhale

[28:51]

and then let the inhale come in of itself. When you're working with pain, and just so you all know, I'm sure you all do, but everyone has pain in zazen, even if this is your millionth seshin, there's always pain that people are working with to some degree or another. So if you allow the pain, if you get very intimate with the pain, and this has been helpful for me, I don't want to make this sound too much like going somewhere else, but if you go towards the pain, if you go towards it as if going towards a loved one, where you will not tense up and try to go away,

[30:04]

but melting towards that kind of feeling, relaxing into, breathing through your body and relaxing towards. The more we tense up, the more we cause ourselves more pain, and mental and emotional pain on top of a physical pain. So in dealing with your physical pain, if you stay very, very still, very still, not try to pull away and tense up and fight it, if you stay very still and breathe and soften into it, then that playing, actually, on that frontier will be new, I think,

[31:06]

and the pain will not be the pain you thought it was that you have in your mind, the idea of pain. Something else may happen in there that's new. That's a frontier. And our tendency is to want to move away from and avert from, avoid, but because we're voluntarily here, here is a chance. See, many other pains that we're going to be having in our life, physical and mental and emotional, we don't necessarily voluntarily choose those. They will be coming. They're coming right around the corner. But here's a situation in our covered wagon where we voluntarily said west bird hole, you know, wagon's hole, and we voluntarily are stepping into this.

[32:08]

So to find your composure there is different, a little different than when something comes totally unexpected. This is your choice to be here and to work in this way, to find a new way to be, to find your composure in a situation that you may feel is dire or extreme. Can you find your composure there? And Suzuki Roshi says, you know, we sit with our back towards Buddha except for the leaders of the Sashin who sit facing forward. Everyone else sits with their backs, you know, and it takes a lot of trust. You need to be able to trust. I know certain people in restaurants, they cannot sit with their back towards the door. Maybe that's how you are too.

[33:09]

Or in an office they have to orient so they face the door. But here we sit with our backs out, and this takes, we have to trust. It takes a trusting to be able to do that. So I'm talking about practice now, my words are about our practice, and yet each one of you get to completely, even right now, you don't have to wait for Zazen, right now get to practice with this yourself and taste it yourself. Taste the muddy water. So, I didn't bring my watch. How are we doing for time?

[34:19]

10.45, okay. I wanted to tell you a story, and some of you have heard this story, it's an Italian folk tale, but it's a perfect story for Sashin. It's about, it's in a collection by Italo Calvino, Italian folk tales, and it's about a young girl whose name is Olive, and her father, her mother died when she was born, and her father gave her to a foster family and said, if I'm not back by the time she turns 10, just consider that I won't be coming back, something's happened to me. And please just adopt her as your own child. And she loved this family very much, and they loved her, and at her 10th birthday, her father didn't come back, and they thought, well, she's really our daughter now, we don't have to worry, and they raised her. And it was a religious family. But at her 18th birthday, this man came down,

[35:27]

looked like a stranger, and he came to the cottage, and it was this long-lost father, and he came to claim her. And the family was heartbroken, and Olive was heartbroken too, and didn't want to go, but he brought it to court, and the judge at the court said, you're the real father, the biological father, and this young girl has to go away with you. So she did. And her foster mother, her stepmother, gave her this book of religious poems that she loved, and as a gift, she tucked it in her, not in her robe, she wasn't wearing a robe, she tucked it in her basket, and went away. And her father, this biological father, was very mean to her, and he didn't want her to read this religious book that would remind her of her other family. So he said, if I catch you reading that, I'm going to do something terrible to you.

[36:29]

So he did catch her reading it, and he hit her and beat her, and then he said, if I catch you reading that one more time, I'm going to cut off your hands. Terrible. And she was so unhappy there, she had her maid kind of watch out for when the father would come, and read it surreptitiously, even though she knew it was pretty dangerous to do so. But one day her father came into her room and caught her reading it, and he did what he had promised, and he told her to hold out her hands, and he cut off her hands, and then pushed her out of the house into the woods and said, never come back. So there she was in this dire situation, very, in a lot of pain and wandering and no hands, just these stumps, and she came to this forest and there was a tree, it was a pear tree, and the tree felt so sorry for her,

[37:34]

they bent down the branches and allowed her to eat. She couldn't take the pears off, but she just sort of ate around the fruit and left these little cores hanging on the tree. And this tree happened to be the favorite tree of the prince who lived nearby, and he thought that the pears were ripe, and they went out to gather them, and his servant came back and said, oh, I'm sorry, Your Majesty, but an animal must have come in the night and eaten all these ripe pears, they're all eaten up, left the cores. And he said, well, I'm going to find out what kind of animal that is and shoot it. So he stayed up in the night and watched, and in the night came Olive towards the tree, and the tree bent down for her, and she was able to eat. And the prince saw this and was greatly moved by her situation, and he brought her to the palace and fell in love with her

[38:38]

and wanted to marry her and did marry her. Now, his mother didn't like this young girl and didn't trust her, this kind of foundling that her son had fallen in love with, and when he had to go to war, she was very mean to Olive, and Olive was pregnant at that time, and when she gave birth, the stepmother sent word to her son, she gave birth to twins, she sent word to her son that his wife was a sorceress of some kind because she had given birth to a dog and a cat, and the son was horrified at this and said, please, you know, kill her

[39:39]

and kill the children, and oh, this is a terrible thing. And the stepmother didn't do that, but she sent her off into the woods and made believe that these beings had been killed and the townspeople thought they had. So there Olive was again in this dire situation again with two newborn babies that she had tucked under her arms, walking, and she walked and she was crying and she came in the middle of the forest to a kind of pond, and at this pond there was an old woman who was washing clothes in the pond, muddy clothes, washing, washing, not too muddy clothes, but there she was, and Olive said, oh, please help me, please help me and help my babies and please give me a drink.

[40:40]

And the old woman said, get a drink yourself. And she said, but don't you see, look at my stumps, and I have these babies, and oh, and she said, drink yourself from the water. So Olive went forward and bent over and at that moment the babies dropped out of her arms into the water and she said, oh, my babies, my babies, help me, help me, get them. And the old woman said, get them yourself, plunge in your stumps. And she said, but I can't, I have no hands to get them. She said, plunge in your stumps. So she plunged in her stumps and at that moment her hand, all her fingers grew and her hands grew again and she was able to grab these babies and take them out. And the story ends happily with her husband coming into the forest, finding out that she was still alive

[41:41]

and finding her. So that old woman by the water washing was pretty serious and she took Olive pretty seriously and she knew she was not going to baby her, she was not going to ask anything less than what she could actually do. The problems that Olive had were exactly her problems and she had to, with those problems, with that body and mind, not wishing it were anything else, you plunge in, she plunged in her stumps to the living waters of her life and they grew. And this is to me what Sashin is, we plunge in with whatever we have. It doesn't matter if we have stumps or if we're this way or that way

[42:43]

or all of our problems, it doesn't matter, a hoot, we plunge in with just that and out of that we grow our hands, we grow through that activity, we grow new hands, we grow our Bodhisattva hands, gift-bestowing hands. If we say we can't do it, we can't do it because we just have these stumps, I hope that I have the strength enough to say, bullshit, plunge in your stumps. So these problems are very close to our own self-realization. We have to be intimate with that and not kid around, don't waste time,

[43:46]

gone, no forever, gone, gone, the Sashin will be over before you know it. So I want to end with a wonderful poem by Mary Oliver, who seems to be the poet of the week. You see this? This is this grizzly bear. This is when you're a pioneer and you come to the West, you come across these grizzly bears. One of our students did get attacked by a grizzly bear once. Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring. I think of her,

[44:48]

her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue like a red fire traveling the grass, the cold water. There is only one question, how to love the world. I think of her rising like a black and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees. Whatever else my life is, whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting. All day I think of her,

[45:53]

her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love. Thank you very much.

[46:13]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ