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. Thank you, all of you, for being here. This microphone, good. Saturday Sangha. Whether you're at home or you're here, All of the little things that you did to open the temple today on a sleepy holiday weekend are very much appreciated. Thank you. Thank you to my family who are joining each other from a distance. Thank you to Ana de Tanto for inviting me. And thank you, Paul, for always seeing me through. Thank you.

[01:01]

especially today on this Thanksgiving weekend, I celebrate and honor the Ohlone people who've done so much to revive their culture and strengthen their community and on whose sacred land Beginner's Mind Temple stands. It's said that thank you is the only prayer that's ever needed, but I think it's also important to deeply understand that sometimes thank you isn't enough. When I began to practice regularly at a Zen center, I was taught that when we all chant the rogue verse in the morning, each one of us is putting on the rogue, whether we actually have one or not. This chant is practiced at home as much as it is in the zendo. In some zendos it's chanted before zazen, and in some zendos it's chanted after.

[02:23]

The main thing to understand here is that zazen is the true robe, and that we're all wearing it in a fulfillment, a vow. Know that even if all Buddhas of the Ten Directions, as innumerable as the sands of the Ganges, could measure the merit of one person's zazen, they will not be able to fully comprehend it. When I was ordained, this same vow was presented to me in a very different way. On the back of the rocks who I was given is the poem by Ryokan. Oh, that my monk's robe were wide enough to gather up all the suffering people in this floating world. I'd like to repeat these verses with a pause between them so that you can taste the feeling of each of them.

[03:30]

Great robe of liberation, field far beyond form and emptiness. Wearing the Tathagata's teaching, we save all beings. Oh, that my monk's robe were wide enough to gather up all the suffering people. in this floating world. For me, there's a difference in feeling. The first is confident and encouraging. Yes. The second has a very different quality.

[04:43]

However, as much as it describes for me a limitation, it expresses a compassion that goes far beyond that limitation. And while it is a lament, a mourning, it's also more than that. It's more than just a feeling. It's an expression of vow. I felt that feeling a lot this week in preparation for a talk on Thanksgiving weekend. It's been a difficult week. I've been reading the book There, There by Tommy Orange, a Cheyenne who lives in Oakland. It was recommended to me by a Sangha friend.

[05:43]

It's a book that is fiction blurring into non-fiction as a story of intergenerational trauma and a mass shooting. The first talk that I ever gave here at Zen Center was also on the heels of mass shootings in this country. And it was very painful to give that talk at that time. Having just come from Tassajara, it loomed large as a feeling for me. So I would like to explore with you gratitude. And this is how it has arisen for me this week.

[06:48]

We're taught since childhood to be grateful and how to be grateful. And I believe there's a reason for this. But it's hard to understand. At some point in this human life, there's a deep existential question that arises and each one of us experiences these questions in a profound way. But I don't think that this one, this question is unfamiliar. What is authentic gratitude or even how can gratitude even exist in the midst of the world's great suffering? What does that gratitude feel like? Where does it come from and what does it mean? The question that I'm asking, what is gratitude in the midst of the world's great suffering, has also arisen for me in the consideration of the koan, National Teacher Chung's Seamless Monument.

[08:00]

Here's how the koan begins. Emperor Su Song asked National Teacher Wee Chung, After you die, what will you need? The National Teacher said, Build a seamless monument for me. The Emperor said, Please tell me, Master, what the monument would look like. The National Teacher was silent for a long time, and then he asked, Do you understand? The emperor said, I don't understand. Both the rogue verse and Rio Khan's poem represent for me a seamless monument. Exploring the nature and qualities of gratitude on a national Thanksgiving weekend has helped me to explore what seams and seamlessness are.

[09:03]

It's not my experience that studying one's own gratitude is an easy or simple thing, and that it can even be confusing and painful. This is what is at the root of the existential question that I raise, and so I hope that this inquiry into this seamless monument will be helpful and encouraging. As a spiritual task, it might be difficult. I've been to Plymouth Rock, and like most people, I was disappointed at the sight of it. I was a child at the time on a summer camp field trip, and while it was true that it just wasn't very spectacular, it was also true that I could feel the deceit of it, that all of these tourist props around it were the staging of a non-event. And yet I understood that I'd been brought there to be edified,

[10:06]

Too young to know anything, I could feel the weight of ideology upon this stone. In what are now to me the words of Tommy Orange, the Cherokee novelist that I mentioned earlier, there was just no there there. I had to wait many years before I could learn that the only reason Squanto could speak to the pilgrims and share his knowledge of food was because he had been a prisoner of war long before that. Thanksgivings were really in honor of stolen land and massacres, and that African slaves had already arrived before the pilgrims ever did. Still, since Lincoln's time, the presidential proclamations have rolled out every year— an annual and ritualized performance of national gratitude. And to top it off, sociologists have observed that a significant amount of the middle class, quote, lose sight of the effort and struggle which has been required for past mobility.

[11:18]

They engage in a type of euphoric wallowing in present comforts. They organize their perspective around a sense of gratitude to the social order for making their present pleasures possible. End quote. How easily the expression of gratitude becomes a conformity to an unquestioned ideal. Once again, in what are now to me the words of Tommy Orange, there is just no there there. Growing up, gratitude was something that had to be taught as a performative act of speech, saying thank you, praying on my knees at bedtime, writing thank you letters to my grandmother, and Thanksgiving holiday. Emotionally, I cannot say what gratitude actually was for me as a child because in my memory I associate it with a demand for a compliant speech more than a natural feeling.

[12:25]

None of us growing up at that time that I know of were taught to appreciate gratitude as a natural and authentic feeling, something that we ourselves could name. As an adult, of course, there are times when gratitude looms large, such as when falling in love or having a child. I dare to say that each one of us also knows that there are times when gratitude is kept at bay and life has a bitter taste. We simply call it the ups and downs of life. I didn't truly understand how large and deep gratitude could be in my own daily life until I sat Zazen. There is a very clear and simple gratitude that flows from that. It's as though just to be present is to be grateful.

[13:29]

It's a kind of well-being, gentle and full. The gratitude that I do feel on any day is this kind of gratitude. It's like the gratitude I have for drinking water. I'm always surprised by how good my body feels to drink a sip of water. Drinking water, I'm completely exposed in my gratitude. That is awesome. And I believe that this small sip of water is what Shinryu Suzuki describes when he speaks of a small stone. In response to this koan of the Seamless Monument, Shinryu Suzuki wrote, Any stone will be good enough. Even a small stone can be good enough for me. If you know what a small stone is, you know that it is you yourself and that it will cover everything.

[14:31]

But if you think that you need to see the entire universe in order to see yourself, you will be lost. When you exist right here, the whole universe makes sense to you before you even think about it. That feeling of being completely exposed in gratitude is the whole universe making sense to you before you even think of it. This is a seamless monument. We simply are this and it can be realized. No small part of gratitude is that it can spill out from the direction we have taken. With this knowledge, for many people, gratitude has become a practice. Ryokan's poem, Oh That My Robe Were Wide Enough to Gather Up All the Suffering People in This Floating World, is also a seamless monument in its expression of compassion.

[15:39]

At a very personal level, in a great despair, I've found the very bottom of my heart rendered open. A tenderness of care emerges from meeting myself completely, and a feeling of gratitude spills out from that. I'm confident that many of you here know this feeling of gratitude as well, a gratitude that is born of a deep sorrow and has found its way through it. There's... a recently discovered monument that emblematizes for me how profoundly pathos and gratitude can be expressed in their unity. In the cultural genocide of the Japanese internment camps here in America, where their own written language was forbidden, a community of Japanese Buddhists in the Heart Mountain internment camp of Wyoming,

[16:46]

wrote the characters of the Lotus Sutra on small stones and placed them in an oil drum. This was then buried in the ground. The oil drum was discovered by a farmer. Long after the internment camp had disappeared, I can't say what the experience of doing this was for each of the practitioners who painted the sutra on a stone and placed it in a barrel. But the feeling for me in it is that there is both a great sorrow and a hopefulness. much like the parable in the Lotus Sutra in which a pearl is sewn into the robe of a drunkard so that when he is sober, he might discover that the very feeling of gratitude is the treasure of his own life returned to him.

[17:48]

In the Sutra, the life of suffering is described as striving and worrying to keep oneself alive. and the spiritual treasure of gratitude is its healing. This oil drum of stones buried in the earth is a seamless monument to the simple gesture of quietly persisting in the face of sorrow, a persistence of faith, of hope, and of gratitude. This is what I see in the great compassion, of Ryokan's expression of vow. To close, I would like to share with you the verse of gratitude, which is understood as a pairing with the verse of purification, which we chant here so often. It goes like this.

[18:54]

For all beneficent karma ever manifested through me, I am grateful. May this gratitude be expressed through my body, speech, and mind. With infinite kindness to the past, infinite service to the present, and infinite responsibility to the future. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org. and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dorma.

[19:59]

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