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 evening, everyone. I would like to thank the Abbots for inviting me to speak. and the Tanto, David Zimmerman, and Tova, who's standing in as Tanto right now. And I'd like to thank you all for coming tonight in this crazy world that we live in. Each and every one of you turned around your karmic conditions, And we've all ended up here together to do a Dharma talk together.

[01:08]

You guys didn't know that you were going to be doing one with me, did you? Well, you are. We make this talk together. We're in the middle of a sewing sashin here. Sashin is... a period of gathering of the mind where we have a structured schedule. And there's between eight and 11 of us down there sewing all day. We make our robes. We make our own robes and we make them in a very special way. So that's what it is that we're doing, and it's our first sewing sashim here in a very long time. There were a couple a really long time ago, but this is the first one that we've had in a couple of decades at least.

[02:14]

And I'm having a blast. I never thought that I would be able to have so much fun with a needle and thread. and I seem to have lost my glasses. How did that happen? Thank you, Emily. We all help each other. I have Blanche's. Blanche Hartman was our first abbess, and she was my sewing teacher, and she passed away two years ago. I have her jubon on right here, so between her and Emily here, I'll be able to do a Dharma talk, and you all. It's a really strange thing to do in a world that's as troubled as ours, to take some time off. I have an outside job. I live outside of Zen Center right now. To take some time off of that. Everyone who's in the Sashin has done that as well.

[03:24]

There's several people who've come from the East Coast. Anne is here from Milwaukee. It's a really strange thing to do. First of all, how many of you are... This is your first Dharma talk here, because I want to give a special welcome to you. Thank you very much for coming. And how many of you have not been in the Zendo downstairs in the morning at 6... You've all been down there? Okay. Oh, okay, there's one. All right. Well, we do a very strange thing at that time. After we have sat for two periods of meditation and done walking meditation in between, a bell rings, and those of us who have them put these packages on top of our heads, and we do what's called the Rogue Chant. And we don't quite know why it is.

[04:28]

that we put them on our heads. We just know that Dogen, our founder in Japan in the 13th century, had visited China and said, and they put their robes on their heads and they did the robe chant and I started crying. And so we've just been doing it because he started crying and that's one of the things that we do to start off our day. And if we don't do that, if you've been around here for a little while, if you don't do that, then something's just off for the rest of the day. So what we're doing is we're putting our robes on our heads, and we're using that moment to remind ourselves that we've taken vows and... we're going to do the best we can to live by those vows during the day. There's different kinds of robes that you see around.

[05:34]

I'll talk a little bit about that in a moment. Basically, 2,600 years ago, the Buddha, during the time of the Buddha, in the beginning, the Buddha didn't wear any special robes at all. They were mendicants. They... begged for their food. And one of the Buddha's followers wanted to be able to identify the people who were monks and learned followers of the Buddha so that you could engage in conversation with them. And so that's when it is that we started wearing these robes. And this follower of the Buddha went to the Buddha and said, can you wear something so that we know who to talk to? And the Buddha turned to his trusty assistant, Ananda, who he often turned to.

[06:40]

And that's when Ananda became the Buddha's clothing designer. And he came up with the idea for how it is that we would make and wear these robes. And they're designed on the pattern of a rice field. And the Buddha came up with a very special way with Ananda. And Ananda became our first sewing teacher. A very special way of making the robes and work... what they should look like, and how they should be worn. We try to do it as close to that as is practical for us today, but it's actually very, very close to what the robes look like in the time of the Buddha. We're all very lucky to be alive right now at a time...

[07:47]

the first time in Buddhist history when all of the still-inexistent types of Buddhism that are being practiced have come to a culture all at once. So Tibetan Buddhism, mostly through the Dalai Lama, and Theravadan Buddhism. Is this working okay? Yeah. Theravadan Buddhism... They all sort of came here within kind of 60 or 70 years, and of course Zen, which is what it is that we practice here. And they all came in different ways to the United States and to Europe, to the Western world. The Theravadan form mostly came from... Westerners who went to mostly Thailand, but also Burma and Sri Lanka, Westerners who studied with the monks there, and then when they decided to come back, these Western monks, they thought that the ropes and all the bowing and all the stuff, the bells and whistles, Americans, they're not going to go for that.

[09:06]

They're not going to go for that at all. So we should drop all of that, and let's just take the teachings, the core teachings. That's what it is that Americans will need and will respond to. But the rest of it is just not going to make them comfortable, and they won't be open to the important part of Buddhism, the teachings. So they dropped all of that, and that's become what we know as the insight meditation process, Spirit Rock and the insight meditation community in Massachusetts. And I'm actually very grateful that they did that because that was my first practice. I first started to practice Vipassana and this focuses, Vipassana means insight. So it's really about concentrating on what your internal experience is. And that was very important to me when I first came to Buddhism.

[10:09]

But here at City Center, there was a meeting for people in recovery right here. And I needed to come to that because I was an alcoholic and a drug addict and just getting some recovery. So they had this meeting here where it was meditation and recovery, so I would come to that. But I would just come in the front door and then come into this room, which is where the meeting was. I didn't really like all the other stuff. It scared me. It scared me. So I'm really happy that Spirit Rock was around and I could become introduced to this technique of understanding and putting names to what my internal experience was. And I still use that. And my first Zen teacher, who I got about four years later, he said, well, actually, you know, Theravadan... and Tibetan, it's all kind of included in Zen.

[11:10]

And we never really had much of a discussion about that. But I tried to go forward with that idea that by practicing Zen, because I started to practice this after a couple of years, and coming here, you know, after just coming in here, going down to the Zen Do, and then going deeper and deeper into the building, And so I tried to proceed with that idea that Zen practice includes all other techniques that come under the Buddhist headline, and that has served me very, very well as a concentration practice, knowing what it is to the best of my ability, what's going on inside of me, and being able to name it. knowing that impermanence is my experience always with my internal feelings, my physical experiences in my body.

[12:17]

Nothing is permanent. In Zen, of course, we start out our meditation by counting your breath. That's also a concentration practice. To count your breath. This is our first instruction after we get our posture done. We count our breath, in-breath, out-breath one, in-breath, out-breath two. You can count however it is that you want. But to really focus on this incredible experience that is one of the marks of us being alive as animals is breathing. But very quickly you're asked to let go of that and... Once that sort of muscle of concentration has been practiced, we're asked to move our concentration and our awareness out to all phenomena, which is difficult to do. And when we describe our practice, our early training to other people,

[13:23]

schools like Theravadans and Tibetans, they say, oh, that's actually very advanced. We don't usually teach people this broad concentration method until they've been practicing for a very long time. And we call this shikantaza, which is just sitting, just sitting. And the idea is that you... spread your concentration out to all of the universe, all things. And it's also a scary thing to do. So back to the robes. We've got three main robes. There's the blue robes you'll see that people are wearing. Those are the lay robes. And those are usually the first ones that people wear. where, and if you've been practicing for a couple of years, maybe you get a teacher and you start working with that teacher.

[14:36]

Teacher-student relationship is encouraged strongly in our practice. And then at a certain point, the teacher will say to you, you know, I think you should start sewing. Go to sewing class. And sew your rakasu, your blue rakasu, and get ready to receive jukai, to take the 16 bodhisattva vows in a public ceremony. And then I've got a black robe on right here, and this means that I'm a novice priest. So this is the very first level of priest that there is. In Japanese Zen, there... There's over 20 levels of priests. To be abbot is like just sort of the sixth or seventh level. So this is a black robe right here.

[15:40]

And we get a little... which is called a rakasu, that has five panels, and then this big one has seven panels. And then when you get dharma transmission, which Tova has, and you get a brown robe, you get a brown rakasu, brown five-panel robe, you get a brown seven-panel robe like this, and you get to make another one, which is a nine-panel robe, which is for... giving dharma talks in and for ceremonies, very important for ceremonies. That's when you become an independent teacher. There's another level that we've recently invented here, which is sort of in between black and brown, and that's green. So you'll see some green ones sometimes. And this is dharma entrustment. So you've been entrusted by your teacher to be an independent teacher, but you can't ordain people. So those are all of the different kinds of robes that we have here.

[16:43]

And when I first got here and started to learn about that, I wasn't very happy about this state of affairs at all. Robes and ceremony and formality and forms, we call them forms, they are the enemy. to me. I come from a barbaric background. I grew up very working class in London and lots of violence and lots of drugs and alcohol around me and uniforms are what the Queen has. And the Queen was no friend of the poor people. Everything's changed now. The Queen's becoming a friend of poor people now, I'm told. or at least your grandchildren are. But anyway, that's how it was. And so when my teacher said to me, you need to go to sewing class and start sewing your uniform, I didn't like it at all.

[17:49]

But I was willing, despite all the bad things that I associated with sewing. hierarchy and ranking and one is an independent teacher and the other is a priest and the other is not a priest and it just didn't sit well with me very much at all but I went to sewing class and I thought I would give it a go and that's where I met Blanche my first sewing teacher Blanche Hartman and found out that I was, what I would later call, when I became a sewing teacher, what I would later identify as a large section of the population, an adult survivor of childhood sewing trauma. My mother died when I was very young, and in England you have to wear uniforms to school, and so...

[18:58]

I had three sisters and there was no one to teach me how to repair the uniform for school and so I just kind of did it halfway myself and I didn't do a very good job at all and it was a big problem. I was teased and learned how to fight probably because of my poorly repaired uniform and people making fun of me. But I basically had set up my whole life so I didn't have to sew anymore after I left school. And I didn't have to sew until I came to Blanche's sewing class to sew my rakasu. And, of course, I brought all of my childhood sewing trauma with me. And there's a lot of you out there. You know who you are. You don't like sewing. You have an inappropriately strong aversion to sewing. And we don't start to get to be able to pull it apart until you get into your sewing cloths.

[20:05]

And we find out there was some kind of problem with your grandmother or some cultural thing or some kind of disciplining that happened to you when you were really young around sewing. And we get to work on that stuff. in sewing cloths as Christine Palmer. I'm leading this retreat with Christine Palmer, who's my fellow sewing teacher here at City Center, and Christina Lenhair, the former abbess. And it's a great treat to work with both of them. And Christine Palmer says that this is a way for us to meet ourselves by sewing. And it's really strange how that truly is the case. In your first class, you're taught how to do the stitch. It's a special stitch that we have to do so that it can't be pulled apart by a cheeky monk who's sitting behind you, which is in one of our koans where the whole robe was taken apart by a naughty monk.

[21:18]

Lots of naughty monks in Zen. That's one of the reasons why I love Zen. Filled with naughty monks. So we have to make a special stitch, special sort of a back stitch that gets locked. And then we have a chant or a mantra that we're given. It's an incantation. An incantation are words that have magical powers. This is another thing I wasn't very happy about, magical powers, magical stuff. If you couldn't see it, it didn't exist as far as I was concerned. You know, logic, rational thinking. So this chant is, in English, I take refuge in the Buddha. That's one stitch. Your next stitch is, I take refuge in Dharma. Your next stitch is, I take refuge in Sangha. But Blanche Hartman liked us to say it in Japanese because Japanese is more dramatic.

[22:22]

And in Japanese it's namu kiei butsu, I take refuge in Buddha. And she liked it because that kiei part, namu kiei, the kiei part is I plunge into refuge with the Buddha without any resistance, without any reservation. And so I ask my students now to, even if that's not what's actually happening, you're not actually plunging, you're at the beginning of your practice pretty much, you've only been practicing for a couple of years, even if you don't have that kind of faith in the Buddha, can you imagine what it would be like to have an object to where you would have no resistance, no reservations about entering into the arms of that object? And that's what it is that we're trying to make contact with. Namukie Butsu, to plunge into refuge with the Buddha.

[23:26]

Namukie Ha, to plunge into refuge with the Dharma. Namukie Sa, to plunge into refuge with the Sangha. Imagine what that would be like and then try to make contact with that with every stitch. So that over and over again, someone figured out that in one of the rakasus is 1,400 stitches. They figured it out. It's probably different for different people, but they're all pretty much the same size. And you have to make them little tiny stitches. So that means you're saying this over and over again. So the idea is to, once again, return to a concentration practice where you're concentrating all your being on... a place that is very positive. So it's a little bit like a meta practice. We have been, at the beginning of our class, I need to keep an eye on the time here.

[24:30]

How do I do that? Okay. Okay. We've been chanting a... These are purportedly the birds of the Buddha, the words of the Buddha. And it's the chant of the okesa. Okesa is the Japanese word for what we wear, this robe. It's called kashaya in Sanskrit. And... It's just a page long, but I'm just going to read a section of it. But we've been reading this each morning, and there's several sutras about the robe, the Buddha's robe, and this is the one that we use a lot here at different places at Zen Center.

[25:34]

All Buddhas praise the robe as an excellent field, so it's based on a rice paddy. An excellent field, most beneficial to sentient beings. That's us. The inconceivable miraculous power of the robe nurtures practice for enlightenment. So it nurtures. So it's based on a rice field, just like we go to a rice field and the rice field gives us rice and that gives us sustenance so that we can be healthy humans, so that we can then be introduced to the Dharma. It's also acting in the morning when we put it on our heads as a reminder, once again, of how it is that we would like to be during the day. However it is that we failed the day before, this is how it is that we'd like to be today. It nurtures practice for enlightenment. The sprout of practice, once again, this is a reminder of sprouts, a sprout of practice that is going to hopefully mature and grow.

[26:40]

The sprout of practice grows in the spring fields. The splendid fruit of enlightenment is like a harvest in autumn. The robe is true armor, impenetrable as a diamond. The deadly arrows of delusion cannot pierce it. I wish that was literally true. Unfortunately, I can tell you it's not, but it's an intention that we have. It's an intention that we have. by making the robe, putting it on our head, and then wearing it every time we put it on. That is an intention that we have. So I like this because it's so out of this world right here, and there's even more out of this world stuff I'll read in just a moment. So this is a sutra, and the word sutra comes from... It means threat, but it is also related to our, I think it's a French word, suture, which is what we use to sew up wounds with.

[27:57]

So this is very important because in Zen, we are so grateful to the people who brought us this practice, temple is called Beginner's Mind Temple because it was brought by Suzuki Roshi who wrote a book called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And for those of you who are just coming for the first time, the state of your mind as a beginner's mind, as a questioning mind, as a mind that is open to many possibilities, is the mind that those of us who have been practicing here for a really long time are trying to get back to. We value beginner's mind. as an open mind. This idea of a string helps us to be grateful, not just to Suzuki Roshi, but to Suzuki Roshi's teachers and to many, many, many other teachers, men and women, most of whom we don't even know who they are, who carried this teaching together

[29:06]

from warm hand to warm hand over the last 2,600 years from the Buddha. So this is also a very important element of us sewing our rakasu with a piece of thread. Because that thread, people will get halfway through their rakasus and they'll look at them and they'll say, you know... It's amazing how different each stitch is because it's a record of our lives, of how it is that we come to the sewing room. It's a record of our day. It's a record of that hour or hour and a half or ten minutes that we spent sewing. This is a mark of the passage of time and how it is and how we were. Christina Lenhair is a fantastic sewer. You know, she's Swiss and was trained as a young woman to sew.

[30:07]

And like I said, no one ever taught me how I'm an adult survivor of childhood sewing trauma. So my stitch is not a pretty stitch. And I was a little nervous about coming and doing this retreat with her. And so I made sure I said something beforehand and introduced my stitches. Well, it's not a pretty stitch, but it's a strong stitch. It's a strong stitch. And so she came up to me yesterday and she looked at my stitches. And there were some pretty bad ones in there. There were some bad ones. Because I was kind of rushing. We've got a great big robe that we're doing. Every time we get a new abbot or... We have incredible democracy here, so there's several abbots here. Sometimes one abbot will... become a different kind of abbot. And my teacher, Ed Satterson, he's the abbot of city center, and he's next year going to become the big abbot, the central abbot, and Artanto, David, is going to become the abbot of city center.

[31:11]

And so they get robes. They get robes, but they don't have to make them. We make them. And so we didn't really get the fabric choices because they can start to get a little... You know, well, it's just a lot of choices these days in the world, as we all know. And we didn't get the fabric choices until recently, so I was kind of going a little fast yesterday, which I do anyway because I'm neurotic and I want to get things done. And I'm also trained as a craftsman, and so you're supposed to complete stuff, but that's no excuse. She caught me yesterday, and she looked at my stitches. She said, they're not so ugly, she said. which I had never used the word ugly, but they're not so ugly, she said, but you might want to slow down a little bit. She was absolutely right, absolutely right. Those couple of really funky stitches were stitches that I knew I did, but I wasn't going to take them out because I was already halfway through the next stitch.

[32:12]

I was already taking refuge in the Dharma. So once again, I don't think I really developed this idea of suture, the sewing up of a wound, and how that has been the case for me, learning how to sew. And the Buddha was called, is oftentimes referred to as the great physician, the doctor of our spiritual selves. And what a... it can be for so many of us, how it is that we were raised or not raised. My mother died, like I said, when I was young, and my dad was just busy. He just was not around. And this is very, very common to be completely neglected as a small organism that's learning to be complex.

[33:19]

And so there's a lot of problems. And that's true for so many people who come. So it's really a magical thing to sit down there. I still don't understand it. It's not right that I'm trying to give a Dharma talk on something that I actually don't really understand. The more I learn about it, the more of a mystery it becomes to me. And how it is that... if I can just go to this strange thing that for much of my life I've been hostile towards, authority, ranking, hierarchy, uniforms, if I can just go to this thing with just a little bit of a beginner's mind, a little bit of an opening of possibility, and do it as it is that I was directed by this great woman who sacrificed so much in her life to be the first abbess of a Western temple where the tradition is complete patriarchal domination.

[34:25]

She made many, many sacrifices. And just do it the way it is that she showed me to do it. Something happened. And I can't really tell you what it is. You know, there's scientific studies now about how if you have a focused meta... or loving-kindness meditation where you're concentrating on something positive, it will somehow change the plasticity of your mind. Maybe that's it. I don't know. I don't pretend to understand that data that serves Buddhists well. I just know that something happens, and I'm not totally clear what it is, but it happens inside my body. And it happens in my mind and that place in between the two of them, the way they interact with each other. It's very mysterious, and I know that it's good, whatever the change is. I know that it's good.

[35:27]

Even though I'm still neurotic and making stitches quickly and trying to quickly get on to the next part of the chant, I'm still flawed. I'm not... All of my childhood sowing trauma hasn't gone away, but my relation to it is different. And I know that it's good because in the beginning, by my first coming here and first being open to these things that intellectually I had a problem with, my intention was good. Somehow, that leads to... Good things. And I'm not very articulate about it. And actually neither was really the Buddha because he finishes up the chant of the Okesa as I will finish this talk. Will we have time for a couple of questions? Be honest, Eno. Yes. One or two.

[36:29]

Okay. So this is the Buddha. For eons, more comments could be made. about the robe. But I'll just say this. A dragon who wears even a shred of the robe can't be devoured by a gold-winged garuda, which is a scary bird, a very scary big bird. A person who holds a robe while crossing the ocean will not fear dragons, fish, or harmful beings. Lightning and thunder, heaven's wrath will not frighten a monk who wears a robe. When a lay person carries a robe with respect, no evil spirits draw near. When one arouses the beginner's mind, leaves home and worldly affairs to practice in this way, demon palaces in the ten directions will tremble, and such a person,

[37:38]

will immediately recognize the fruit of practice. Thank you all very much for sitting with me tonight and helping me with this talk. We have time for a couple of questions. Yes? Well, as you know, Koro, who is also his own teacher, these are... bigger for bigger people like you, and shorter for shorter people like me. So mine has around 16,000 stitches in it. Yours has many more. Yeah. I think that's all right. It's been two years now since I've counted. I didn't count. I didn't count. I didn't count every one, but I'll get back to you on that in case I'm adding some zeros there.

[38:42]

It's a lot, baby. Michael's in the back right there. He has the most of all. I think he's six foot two, I believe. Yeah, he's just big. Yes, please, Michael. Thank you for your talk, Tim. My question is, what do you do when you feel like the world is too... or better yet you're not strong enough to wear well it's very important here when you in our tradition here when you're asked to sew the priest robe you're asked to go to Tassahara to our monastery and I didn't really want to go you know it's cold there And I had a life here. I didn't really want to go. But one of the main reasons you go with a big robe is to learn how to wear it.

[39:44]

You learn how to wear it. And you learn how to carry the weight of that responsibility. And most of all, you learn how to fail. You learn how to fail horribly. And make massive mistakes. publicly identified as someone who shouldn't be making mistakes. It's like a flag, you know? It is a flag. And I guess that's really the main thing, is to wear the robe, to work with a teacher, to study the basics of Buddhism, just basics, you don't have to become a scholar, and to make the decision to take the public vows, that you take in Jukai, the very first ceremony. And after that, it's all downhill. But I think that's really one of the greatest things about Buddhism for me.

[40:49]

It teaches me how ordinary failing is and how easy it is with lots of practice to pick yourself up. Buddhism is not about being perfect anymore. Some of these sutures give that impression. I feel that that's not how it is that we are practicing it right now. It's a practice of forgiveness, not discipline and rancor and weight and responsibility it is all of those things but it is in the end for me anyway a practice of forgiveness so good luck on that one it's not easy but you're my Dahmer brother so we go

[42:04]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:34]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_95.37