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. Even when we are deluded, we are still being time. There is only life. We are that life. And at the base is nothing. Just this vast, mysterious stillness. This silent, awake stillness that manifests as everything we see and everything we are.

[01:00]

There is nothing else. There is no outside. It is what we are, whether we know it or not. Today, the zenda was really still and quiet and settled. And I felt, whether we knew it or not, that we were manifesting this stillness, even if there was activity. seeming activity inside.

[02:07]

I thought it was palpable. And I think you now understand how important it is for each of you to support each other by just being there next to your partner. on time, fully committed, making whatever kind of wholehearted effort you're doing in that moment. We were talking this moment, the little retreat group much people were benefiting from keeping the silence in so many different ways and benefiting from the effort that their neighbor was making to be present, to be themselves in this moment.

[03:31]

And it's enough. Tomorrow, finally we can talk about it. Tomorrow is a transition day. It's really a fun day. Tomorrow is Saturday and some of you maybe are already a little bit transitioning, although I hope not too much. But certainly tomorrow, it's going to be very interesting because the past and the future, especially the future, is going to be sneaking in. And as much as you try to, if you're trying,

[04:42]

keep it away. It's going to be rolling toward you. I should do this. I'm going to do that. I should talk to this person. What about this? I really have to get this done. I'm going to read this. This is going to happen. And on and on and on it's going to go. And you're going to be watching, if you're paying attention, two things. You're going to be watching linear time come back into your life. So enjoy it. And watch how, right along with linear time, you're going to rebuild a sense of separation and your egoic structure. The patterns, the conditioned thoughts, the likes, the dislikes, the expectations, the assumptions are all going to be pouring in with time.

[05:51]

And the great thing about Transition Day is because you're really settled and open and more tender, I think, than you know, you're going to watch it really clearly. You can watch... how the small self is recreated in front of your eyes. Suffering. You've got to laugh. Because we're going to believe it. You're going to believe it. Unless you're really watching, you're going to just be swept away. So there it'll be, grasping at this, averting from that, confirming this thought, believing that assumption.

[06:54]

And before you know it, you're going to know exactly who you are again, in case the boundaries of that sense of me got a little bit porous during this last week or three weeks. It's going to come. roaring back. And you are going to be the one doing it. Every time you believe one of those... Every time you're believing one of those thoughts, every time you're buying into one of those judgments, every time you tell somebody else what you think about something, there you go. Just building it up brick by brick by brick. You're building the jail. Brick by brick by belief, thought by belief, thought by belief, thought. So enjoy it. There's nothing wrong with it. If you are aware that you're doing it.

[07:57]

If you're aware that you're doing it, no problem. Really, not a problem. Problem is, and what gives us problem, is what we don't allow to come up. things we avert from, the things we deny, you know, the grasping without any consciousness, unconsciousness. You know, reifying thought without noticing, you know, believing thought without knowing that that's what you're doing. You're making and remaking your own sense of separation in your own jail. And then you're going to decorate it. You're going to decorate it with this picture or that picture and this lamp and that bed and this thing and that thing, and you're going to make it pretty. It's going to be a pretty jail. I had a sister-in-law. I had a sister-in-law because my brother had just finished getting divorced, which actually, I think he's listening to these talks.

[09:04]

Can that possibly be? It is? Not yet. He just went through, I think I told you, this terrible divorce for like two years and he just got, just raked through the coals and it was the best thing that could have possibly happened to him. All right, why am I telling you this? No idea. Building, oh, because his wife, who's a friend of mine, right? I mean, he was married for 27 years and then separated for 10. So they had a relationship for 37 years. And I thought, maybe they'll be friends again. Anyway, I'm going to wait for a certain amount of time and then call her and see if we can be friends because we used to be friends. It was a tough divorce, though, very hard. But good for him. Really, it was really good for him. But anyway, she was born in a family that was very wealthy. And so she used to...

[10:06]

I hope she's not listening to this either. I think she wouldn't know. Of course, I love her. She's terrific. But like everybody, we have our own idiosyncrasies, emphasis on the idiot part. I'm including myself, so I can make that joke. So, anyway... So she used to tell me, you know, she had this and she had that and she got to drive this kind of car and she got to do this kind of shopping and that kind of thing and stuff like that. And what she told me, I forgot how she told it to me, but really it struck me. She said, it's what she chooses even though it's a gilded cage. I thought, oh my... She made a choice between being a little bit more herself, standing up for certain things with her parents and so on and so forth.

[11:17]

She traded, she knew it, she was doing it consciously. She traded in some ways, I won't say the truth of herself because that's too much, but she traded some authenticity for comfort. very comfortable comfort. It's really interesting. But she said it's a cage. It was a cage. She could only do so much. If she did something that her parents didn't like, her parents wouldn't give her money. So I think in this transitioning business, you can see the difference that if you let go of the past and you release the bound-up energy of your history, of the involvement with your own history, you get energy.

[12:22]

Energy is stored there. No, trapped there. It's stuck there. And that's the stuckness you feel and the tension in your body. And the same thing about the future. Projections, fantasies, and so on. you can put that energy into the present moment. The brightness, the illumination of the present moment, it's that energy. If you take it back from its involvement in the future or its involvement in the past. And so I think, like I've said before, Spiritual practice is the present moment. You can't really do spiritual practice if you're dwelling in the past or you're floating about in the future. It's only in the present moment.

[13:23]

I guess that's a radical thing to say, but I think it's true. Because it's only in the present moment that we get a glimpse, if we're lucky, we get a glimpse... of our true nature happens only in the present moment. So if you're not in the present moment, you have less chance. It makes perfect sense. And then, like I said yesterday, once you have a glimpse of our true nature, which is this awake, spaciousness, space, awake spaceness, glimpsed, then you pay attention to that. Like I was saying yesterday, that's what you clarify. That's what you stabilize. You stabilize it by paying attention to it.

[14:26]

But the continuation, the practice of slowly dismantling the structure of the sense of separation and egoic conditioning totally continues. You just don't have any doubt about your true nature, so you can relax this seeking thing that some spiritual people have, like I was describing about myself yesterday. So you can do this practice of dismantling, thankfully, for a whole lifetime. And there's no hurry, so you might as well be patient. There's no need to struggle. There's no need to certainly grasp because that's the very thing that continues the duality. So it's kind of, sort of, you can say, well, I don't want to say that.

[15:34]

I don't even want to go there. So for Dogen, practice realization is the same. We are the complete manifestation of being time. And we practice in realization of that truth. I was going to tell you a little story only because I really like it as an encouragement to not reify thought. words, a word like time. The Trungpa is kind of a famous story in circles, the Tibetan Kargyu lineage, which was the lineage of the master Trungpa Rinpoche. He, and I think it was the Karmapa, the 16th Karmapa, although it may be

[16:40]

I don't remember. Anyway, the two of them, either one of those, were very... I don't know what to say, what words to say. They were sitting together on a bench, and they were in a, like the meadow of a forest. And they were looking at a tree of maybe a few hundred years old, so a big presence, a very big tree being. And they were talking, and then they were overheard to say, as they were laughing, one of them said to the other one,

[17:41]

And they call that a tree. That's the story. And they call that Naomi. It is as magnificent. The name doesn't even reach it. Not even close. It's true for every single one of us. It's a mystery beyond understanding that we can know if we just let go of everything. Every belief we hold dear. I am smart.

[18:45]

I am stubborn. I said that yesterday. I am short. I am whatever it is. Every single bought into thought that makes a solid, separate me has to be released. And that releasing, in the beginning, I think it doesn't feel bad to release it because in the beginning, you're letting go of suffering. And so it feels better as you keep releasing these thoughts about big sufferings. Big sufferings. But as it gets more subtle... It feels like stripping as you get closer and closer to the core ideas of what you build your identity on.

[19:48]

Like I was saying yesterday, me in doubt, my fave, hindrance. I don't know enough. I shouldn't be teaching. This is true. I'm never going to know enough. It's neat. You have to begin to let go of the things that you, what can I say, of you. It dies. This is from Category. Stillness means eternal time, timeless.

[20:57]

When time does not have the characteristic of coming and going, time doesn't move. It's very quiet. All sentient beings are interconnected and there is no fixed individual being. This is called being or no time. On the other hand, dynamism means being time. When time does have... You know what I'm noticing? If I may. He's using these words just a little bit differently, if you notice. But what I'm noticing is, as I read things about Uji and stuff, these people who are these wonderful teachers, everybody interprets it just a teeny-weeny bit differently. So... This is your responsibility. Don't you start believing what people are blabbing about and telling you. Don't take this as truth. Words are just pointers, maybe. You are responsible for your own practice and you're responsible for confirming or not confirming the teaching.

[22:07]

We each are responsible for our own path, which is a good thing. On the other hand, dynamism means being time. When time does have the characteristic of coming and going, time moves, but there is no distance. There is no gap between stillness and dynamism. All sentient beings are interconnected in the huge universe and all at once the whole universe moves. Pop. The world of being time appears. And here again. Spiritual life is vast, and you cannot get a result immediately.

[23:16]

But you can practice it continually with full devotion in every aspect of your life. When you practice in the zendo, you can concentrate your body and mind on the form of zazen or gasho. When you are walking on the street or sitting in your office, there is no particular form for you to concentrate on, but you can concentrate on breathing. Breathing is very close to you, and also it's alive. To breathe is to live. That's why we concentrate on breathing. By your full devotion, the phenomenal world and unknown time and space come together and work together in your life, right here, right now. that time you are calmly, stably walking on Buddha's path and you live freely in peace and harmony. The beauty of existence appears in your life as the functioning of wisdom and your action is right because it is manifesting the truth.

[24:27]

The human form is called Buddha or Bodhisattva arises as time and space and that form really helps people. So let's walk together and with hope and make our life mature. Then, by compassionate action based on wisdom, we can help all sentient beings move one step toward the future. That's pretty good for us. So now I thought, if we have time, we have a little time, We'll go over Section 9 and 10 kind of quickly. I was asked, though, to say something about trust, which I will. Two things. Two things.

[25:33]

One is... We get into trouble a little bit when we think that trust is absolute when it comes to people. And I think you might consider thinking about trust this way, that if you want to trust a person or if you're having trouble trusting somebody, don't think that you need to trust them absolutely as if to say that person is trustworthy, period, end of story, and then they do something that you think is hurtful and then completely you don't trust them. You can do that, but there's another way. You can just say that that person or I am is trustable for this particular thing. They will always pick me up on time. I can be trusted to so-and-so and such-and-such, but I'm not really very trustworthy when it comes to so-and-so and such-and-such.

[26:34]

So if you think about your relationship with people with trust, having a little bit of flexibility, a lot of times you won't get hurt in a way that you might get hurt if you put this person in this trust, this absolute trust package. It's just a thought. You can try it. It might work. Then the other thing I wanted to say about trust was... about time and trust, that the great thing about the past and the future being now, as Dogen says, is that this moment can be fully trusted. Because we don't have to fix the past and we don't have to be better in the future. We actually can take care of whatever is arising in this moment. Especially if you... Do rain. Very good.

[27:40]

So we can rest here in the present moment and trust things to be the way they actually are. The way they've come to be. Which is a relief. Because then you don't have to fight with reality all the time. You can just open to things the way they are. come to be. So this is number nine. Although the views of an ordinary person and the causes and conditions of those views are what the ordinary person sees, they are not necessarily the ordinary person's truth. So he's saying here that although we have our views, our ideas, and we're, you know, stuck to those ideas, we're They're not really what we are. They don't include the truth of that we're being time, that we are life itself, that our activity is time and that this activity is a manifestation of life.

[28:53]

And that life manifests just right now as an ordinary person. It goes both ways. Kind of neat. So then he does say that. He says, the truth merely manifests itself for the time being as an ordinary person. It's just that we don't think we are Buddha nature. So I wanted to stop a moment before I keep reading and talk about a little bit... Have you ever seen this movie, Ballroom Dancing?

[30:01]

Anybody? No? It's one of my favorite movies, Ballroom Dancing. Ballroom Dancing? It's a great movie. Anyway, I don't want to tell you a little story about it, but this one guy is a terrific dancer and He wants to do... He's in a competition, and in the competition you're supposed to dance certain steps, and he wants to dance his own steps. But in order to win the competition, you're supposed to dance the assigned steps. But he's kind of bursting out in his own creativity and his own way of wanting to dance, and he thinks that his mother and father who were in the same contest. Now I'm going to make it too complicated. But basically, as the end of the story is, at the very end of the story, there's a moment when he is confronted by his father as he's going right out into the dance floor to dance the assigned steps.

[31:19]

instead of his own steps. And his father stops him and says, no, listen to me, I've been trying to tell you this for half of the movie. And then he almost shouts this. He said, I didn't dance with your mother. She wouldn't let me do my own steps. And then he says, and we lived our life in fear. And it echoes. The word echoes. in the big hall. And he's stunned by that. He doesn't want to live his life in fear. But we do. We do. We live our life afraid of being who we are. We live our life in many ways in inauthentic life. because we're afraid to be who we are.

[32:22]

And so we settle for less, for many reasons, because it's safe, because we were told to, because, like my sister-in-law, because she wants to be comfortable, for many reasons we're afraid to live life. This is a quote from Marianne Williamson, and it's assigned sometimes to Nelson Mandela, but actually it's her quote. I looked it up, but I think you'll recognize this. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?

[33:31]

Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the truth that is within us, each of us. It is not just in some of us. It is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. This is what Dogen is saying. We are a 16-foot golden Buddha.

[34:36]

We just convince ourselves that we're not. And then he goes on. However, your attempts to escape from being a 16-foot golden body Buddha are nothing but bits and pieces of being time. So even our attempts to bury ourselves with these ideas of what we are not, That, too, is being time. Then he says, very great encouragement, he says, those who have not yet confirmed this, that you're also a 16-foot Buddha body, you should look into it deeply. He says, those who have not yet confirmed this should look into it deeply. And then he says, the rat is time, the tiger is time, sentient beings are time, Buddhas are time.

[35:43]

Being yourself, being authentic, is the time being itself. That is section 9. I like that we're ending with section 9 and 10. It's so encouraging. This is section 10. At this time, you enlighten the entire world with three heads and eight arms. We enlighten the world even with our delusion. If we're awake in the midst of our delusion, that is still useful to people. Enlighten the entire world with a 16-foot golden body. So sometimes, like I was saying the other day, sometimes we do Buddha activity and sometimes we're totally deluded. To fully actualize the entire world with the entire world is called thorough practice. To fully actualize the golden body, to arouse the way-seeking mind, practice, attain enlightenment, and enter nirvana is nothing but being, is nothing but time.

[37:00]

He's encouraging us to practice. like we did the other day. The precepts, the full moon ceremony, offering incense, doing gaso, eating oryoki, typing on a computer, parking the car, saying hello to your son. It's all being time and it's all the manifestation of ultimate reality if we're there for it. If we practice noticing that we're noticing. I was going to read to you Shakespeare, who I'm re-falling in love with as I see

[38:06]

seem to come up in my mind this last week. But I don't think, have I read anything from him? I haven't. Oh, what joy. So I'm going to get to do that. So I'm going to read two short, I guess, poems, but they're kind of soliloquies. And then we're going to stop because it's Sukiroshi Memorial. And then tomorrow I'll read another one. Because it's just so fun. I'm listening to Downton Abbey. I like Downton Abbey. You know Downton Abbey? I'm humiliatingly addicted to it. And partly is because I love the language. the way they speak. I'm just floored by the way they speak.

[39:11]

And I'm not an English literature person. My favorite fine art was music, I think you know that. But I'm finding that kind of rhythm in their speech. Oh, let me say one other thing. A young friend of mine, someone who was a high school student when I was teaching in high school, is an actress. She's an actress. And she was trying to help me understand why acting is such a wonderful thing. I had no entrance. I didn't know how to understand it. I just thought acting was kind of the silliest thing. Because mostly you don't see very good actors. I'm sorry. So... She explained to me that the responsibility of the actor is to make you care about the character. I thought, wow, what a terrific thing that is. And so she was saying that one of the reasons why English actors are so incredibly good is because, as opposed to American actors who do emotional acting, they evidently think about

[40:31]

things that have happened into their life and they bring up emotions and then they do the emotion on the screen. Does anybody know about this? Is that the right? Is that right? Stanislavski? Method? That's how Americans do it and it's more or less terrific, however it is. But the way the English do it, English actors, and again, I don't know anything about acting, so I can say this in total ignorance, are terrific from my point of view. But what they do is, the way they teach them acting in England is they learn acting from how Shakespeare writes the language on the page. Do you understand what this means? I didn't understand what it meant. But evidently, the way Shakespeare writes the language on the page, he's helping you know how to express that character's emotional depth.

[41:34]

Well, have I lost you now? Anyway, okay, forget about that. I thought it was really exciting. Anyway, okay, you'll recognize both of these things. I have five minutes. So this is from Macbeth. It's about time. That's why I'm reading this. So it says, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. So Shakespeare is bringing the future into the present. He's so Dogen. Dogen is everywhere. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays past have lighted fools the way to dusty death out out brief candle life's but a walking shadow a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more it is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing

[43:00]

Should I read one more? Do I have time? Yeah, one more. This is from The Tempest. I have to tell you this. I looked it up. It says at one point I'm going to say the word rack. It means a wisp of smoke. Our revels now are ended. This is from The Tempest. Did I say that? Our revels now are ended. These are actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, yes, with all which it inherit, shall dissolve. And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind.

[44:13]

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. So to me, he's encouraging us to notice impermanence. You know, that this is our shot. As somebody very famously said, this is not a rehearsal. You know, we get one shot. And that's... Or actually, maybe some Buddhists think maybe we have more than one shot. Who knows? I think we have one shot. I have no idea. So, you know, let's at least be here for it. You know, that's our practice. Just... Get yourself here and stay here. And then see the wonder of it.

[45:14]

You know, the total ineffableness. Ineffable means not speech. The totally, un-possibly wordedness of it. Beyond the words, you know, flower. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[45:58]

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