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. Good morning. Today is the fourth day of Sashin. From the beginning, it was very still in the meditation hall. But every day, that stillness kind of grew, became more full. And I would like to invite you to tune into that stillness

[01:06]

particularly if you start to feel very alone. And maybe a lot of us start feeling very alone or have started to feel the aloneness which is actually a part of human existence. Because nobody, nobody can live alone the smallest little bit of our life. No one can take a breath for another person. No one can live the life of another person. So we are utterly and completely alone. And we are also completely interconnected. So, on the first day, we spoke about embodiment.

[02:11]

Really pay attention to this body, to the posture, to find the most balanced, most relaxed posture of the moment, each time when you sit down for a period of Sase. So... I know one of you has just started this machine, so you're dropping in what has been prepared and use it to help you to drop in. Then we have spoken about mental posture, about letting things be the way they present themselves, to let go of immediately... saying this is this or giving a judgment to kind of let go of those and just see if you can actually have the experience of what you're aware of and the experience in your body to keep dropping into your body.

[03:25]

Then we heard about letting go of knowing. from the chuseau. And we heard about witnessing from Marsha, the co-leader. And so we've all kind of dropped into ourselves. And that's what Sashin is about. It's creating a safe container, safe structure for you to meet your own life, wholeheartedly, completely. And so I would like to read a poem by David White, who went on a trip, that is the Annapurna Trail in Nepal, and visited a monastery. It's called the Braga Monastery.

[04:28]

And he writes... In monastery darkness, by the light of one flashlight, the old shrine room waits in silence. While above the door, we see the terrible figure, fierce eyes demanding, will you step through? And the old monk leads us, bent back, nudging blackness, prayer beads in the hand that beckons. We light the butter lamps and bow. Eyes blinking in the pungent smoke look up without a word. See faces in meditation. A hundred faces carved above. Eyelines wrinkled in the handheld light. Such love in solid wood.

[05:30]

Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence, they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them. Engulfed by the past, they have been neglected. But through smoke and darkness, they are like the flowers that we have seen growing through the dust of eroded slopes, their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain. carved in devotion. Their eyes have softened through age, and their mouths curve through the light of the carver's hand. If only our own faces would allow the invisible carver's hand to bring the deep grain of love to the surface. If only we knew, as the carver knew, how the flaws in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core.

[06:37]

We would smile too and not need faces immobilized by fear and the weight of things undone. When we fight with our failing, we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. And as we fight, our eyes are hooded with grief and our mouths are dry with pain. If only we could give ourselves to the blows of the carver's hands, the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers, feeding the sea where voices meet, praising the features of the mountain and the cloud and the sky. Our faces would fall away until we, growing younger toward death every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration, to merge with them perfectly, impossibly, wedded to our essence, full of silence from the carver's hands.

[07:58]

So solitude, aloneness, is part of what we mostly, most of us, encounter in a sishin. And if we can let go of our judging, our opinions about ourselves or what's around us, and just meet it on its own terms that would help us deeply in being our partners in this aloneness. A Zen student who occasionally comes to visit me many years ago decided to marry herself because she realized that if she couldn't partner her experiences.

[09:14]

If she couldn't be a partner to what she experienced, she wouldn't be able to be a partner to another person. She had tried. It always failed. So she bought the ring and she did a little celebration and she married herself and promised herself she would be a faithful, open-hearted partner for life, to this being. And I could watch her go through an incredible transformation. She was married to herself for maybe five years, and that path led her to make courageous steps in directions she had never been able to do and her life is blooming and she is looking younger every day and she's full of life and one day she decided now she was ready to maybe be open to a relationship and she took off her ring and did a little celebration for herself

[10:38]

to acknowledge that now there could be maybe a partner she would meet outside. So, it's for me a wonderful image of in Sesshin, if we can be our own, if we can be witnessing, if we can be faithful partners to what arises, not knowing ahead of time what it is. to hold lightly what we think we know and just be curious about what it is, is absolutely crucial. And Rilke has a beautiful poem, and he also says, what is necessary, and Rilke is a German poet, which I think knew unconditional love and new reality in an incredibly profound way.

[11:42]

What is necessary after all is only this solitude, vast inner solitude to walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours. That is what you must be able to attain. That means to become completely intimate and at ease with this being. And then he has a poem that is called In Celebration of You, I do not have to walk in estrangement in foreign lands and do not have to be afraid. Nothing can happen to me since I understand how... Everything is loving me. I have unlearned the I and now know only we.

[12:48]

With the lover I became two. And from the two of us into the world and beyond all being grew the we. And because we are everything, We are alone. So David White talks about allowing that if we could understand that what we look at as flaws or failings are actually the guides to our own essence. So he uses the image of the carver that has to actually respond to the grain of that particular piece of wood to bring out

[13:47]

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