This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. Thank you all for coming out tonight here and those of you who are online. Thanks for joining us today at Beginner's Mind Temple. My name is Tim Wicks, and I live here now. I'm a priest here at San Francisco City Center. And I would like to thank Anna Thorne, our tanto, who's not here right now. She's back home in Germany. She'll be back soon for inviting me to give this talk in the name of our abbot. Thank you very much, David Zimmerman. and uh tover standing in as tonto holding the fort down while anna's gone and uh i would like to thank from the bottom of my heart my teacher rinso ed sadison who guides me so let's see we've got a little bit of show and tell tonight

[01:27]

That'll be a little bit later. Let's get the old clock out, shall we, so we don't go over. So I'm a sewing teacher here, which will make more sense to you after my talk. And we're having a sewing sashim here. So sashim means gathering the heart-mind. And we do a lot of sashims here. at city center and throughout the zen buddhist world it's uh our concentrated practice of our our main pillar practice which is zazen and um in our tradition we sew our robes and uh that's what we're doing uh people have come from uh far and wide People have traveled great distances to get here. They've taken time off work and lost money and then spent money to get here.

[02:30]

And it's a very beautiful thing to be able to get to people who get to be with people who are showing that kind of devotion. It's very inspiring to me. So, in Zen Buddhist temples throughout the world, and for at least the last 800 years, our day begins with Zazen, as I mentioned, the pillar of our practice. Zazen means sitting. Zen means concentration or focus, depending on who you talk to. And that's how it is that we begin our day today, right here at City Center. So after sitting for an hour down in our beautiful meditation hall that we have downstairs, after sitting for an hour early in the morning, the great big taiko drum starts to be beaten.

[03:47]

And like a heartbeat, it brings us back to to our daily schedule, brings our attention to the daily schedule that we have in the temple. Then there are some other sounds from different instruments. We have what's called a han, which is usually made out of oak. It's a thick piece of wood, and it's hit with another piece of wood. And that's what calls the monks to meditation. And then we've got this really big, beautiful bell. It's called the dencho bell. And so these three instruments, the big drum, the han, and the dencho, begin to be played. You have to be trained to play them. And then there's this little bell. And at that little bell, we know that it's time for us to put our robes on our heads. And the robes are... They're in envelopes.

[04:50]

This is a little one for the smaller rakasu, which you see many people are wearing. It's a smaller robe. I'm going to talk a little bit about that. But we put them on our heads. And then we put our hands in kasho, just like this. And kasho is a mudra. And a mudra is a hand posture. And in yoga, probably some of you know this, mudras are used to activate networks of wisdom in the body. And in our Zen practice, we are very interested in networks of wisdom. We investigate how one thing is connected to another. We notice how it is that different things previously thought of as separate are united in some way, in a way that maybe we hadn't noticed before.

[06:04]

For instance, to give a kind of gross example, I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the sun. If there was no sun, I would not be able to be here. And there's a reverberation when we begin to go through this process of engaging in networks of wisdom. There's a reverberation that happens. There's kind of an energy that we're being trained in our Zen training to notice. Hobon Chino was a priest who was brought here to San Francisco. He was a Japanese priest. brought here to San Francisco by Suzuki Roshi, who founded Zen Mind or Beginner's Mind Temple. And he was brought here to help us out with forms. And the forms are what we just did, how we bow and placing robes on our head and ceremony.

[07:07]

And Kobinchino was an expert. He trained for a long time at Eheji. And he ended up setting up several practice periods. The most well-known, perhaps, is Jikoji, down near Los Gatos. And he passed away in, I believe, 2004. But he says about the Gashu Mudra, he called it an identity. This is an identity. That it's the appearance and the acknowledgement of who it is that we are. Bowing to something or someone, he says, and this is quoting him, the appearance of form, color, and shape, along with your recognition of what you're bowing to, together makes an identity.

[08:14]

So when I put Buddha's robe on my head and my hands in ga sho, first thing in the morning in the zendo downstairs, I'm no longer just Tim Wicks. I'm expanding out that previous simple idea of Tim Wicks and becoming more. My identity is becoming more whole. It's including more of the universe somehow. So back in the zendo, first thing in the morning, with all the instruments having played and the beautiful rhythm, and we put the robe on our heads and hands in gasho. We say the first words of our day, and the first words of our day is the robe chan. Great robe of liberation, field far beyond form and emptiness, wearing the Tuttagata's teachings, saving all beings.

[09:24]

And that's a whole chant right there. We say it here at City Center twice in Japanese, which is once again extending beyond our experience, making connections of wisdom with the culture that brought this great practice to us. And then we say it once. in English to end. And then we put our robes on, finally. It's a great robe of liberation, the first line. First of all, our robes, they're given to us by our teacher. Even though we sew them, they're given to us by your teacher. What you do is you find a teacher and you start studying with a teacher. There's a whole list of potential teachers out there for you if you don't have one yet.

[10:26]

And you just kind of listen to Dharma talk, see who you resonate with and ask if you can become their student. And you study with them for a while. And then at a certain point, the teacher asks you begin sewing your robe and you get sent to me the sewing teacher and sewing classes on tuesday and thursday evenings downstairs in the sewing room and if you're like me you go down there terrified uh and wondering why it is that you know you're studying this really intense religion and now you got to go and uh go and do some sewing um and uh you begin to uh sew the robe and It takes different amounts of time. You can actually sew one of the small ones in one day if you have access to a sewing teacher. And according to Dogen, our 12th century founder in Japan, you should be able to sew one of these big ones right here in a week.

[11:28]

I think he actually said five days, which one day I'm going to try, but don't tell anyone because you should be racing to do these things. You should be doing them quickly. So when you finish the robe, you give it to your teacher, and your teacher writes on the back of your rakasu, if it's a rakasu, the small one like this, and they write your new Dharma name on the back right there, and they put a bunch of official stamps. In medieval Japan, this was your... Dharma driving license right here, driver's license. So this was an actual document. It still actually is a document in Zen. This is the stamp of my teacher right here. This authorizes me as his disciple, to be his disciple. And so you give it to your teacher. Your teacher writes the name on the back, and then your teacher gives it back to you.

[12:33]

So there's this back and forth giving and receiving that occurs, once again, another network. I forgot to say what the title of this talk is. The title of this talk is The Living Thread. And so this process of sowing and giving and receiving, this back and forth, is a type of thread that happens between your teacher and you, just like there's this thread that between our practice here in the United States and Japan, where it came from, and China and India before that. So in talking about the Rakasu, once I heard Sojin Mel Weitzman, our late beloved abbot of Berkeley Zen Center, and he was also abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, And he sat in this room once and told me, along with a bunch of other people, but I heard, what I heard him say was that this is not a little robe or a symbolic robe.

[13:41]

And most importantly, it's not your robe. This is Buddha's robe. What it is that you're making is Buddha's robe. And of course, I'm skeptical. and was even more so 15 years ago when I heard Mel say this, and I was in my head very quietly. Oh, come on, Mel. Don't be silly. This isn't Buddha's robe. How can you say that Buddha died a long time ago, and even if he had a robe like this and then gave it to his first disciple, Mahakashapa, that thing's rotten. How can this be Buddha's robe? But I began to think, I was already being trained as a sewing teacher at that time, and I began to be exposed to the devotion that people have and that I was building around sewing Buddha's robe. And so I knew at that time that there was no question about whether or not since the Buddha's time, there's always been at least one person sewing Buddha's robe.

[14:49]

There's no doubt in my mind about that. Even in times of suppression, and there's been quite a few of these times in India, in China, and in Japan, where if you were practicing as a Buddhist, you could be killed. Even in those times, I know that people were sewing Buddhist robe. In fact, some scholars have said that maybe that's the reason why this is... This robe became small like that. It used to be a skirt that was worn. This is called the five-jo, five-panel robe. And this one is a seven-panel robe. Maybe it became small so that people could wear Buddha's robe and hide it when they needed to. But we don't know for sure if that was the case. So Mel Weitzman, who is my teacher's teacher. So he's my great teacher.

[15:51]

grandfather, Buddha grandfather. What he was doing was he was challenging me to ask myself, is this possible? Is it possible that this is actually Buddha's rope? And I sat with that for a really long time and sewed many, many stitches and started to help people with their ropes. And I started to see that maybe it really is possible and now at this stage uh i don't have any question about it this really is buddha's rope right here that i'm wearing so that process right there with me and mel and students and my teacher and my sewing teacher was teaching me how i'll speak about in a minute how to be a sewing teacher That process was applying the imagination beyond objects, robe, fabric, objects and form and extending it back in time and place.

[17:06]

So. When you're given your robe by your teacher, so you finish your robe, you give it to your teacher, write your name on the back of the rakasu, wrap up the okesa, and they give it back to you. They also give you, and this is extremely naughty, and I'm publicly showing you this, but I will take the consequences of that. They also give you what's called the kechimiyaku, which means bloodline. And what it is, is a document of all of the ancestors, all the way back to Shakyamuni Buddha, who's up here. And then these are all the Indian ancestors, kind of, maybe some are missing, maybe some... sort of died before the person after them, but this is for us a document of ancestors.

[18:22]

And it goes all the way through Japan, China and Japan, and all the way comes down here. And there's my name written in magic marker right there. This magic marker was kind of running out right there, but that's okay. And so this is the line... that is connecting me through all of my ancestors all the way back to the Buddha right here. And so this illustrates this process of the imagination from here through the past and over time. And I began to be able to realize that it might be possible that I could be free of the restrictions That I lived in right now. Or my suffering. That it might be possible. That. I could be free. Great robe of liberation.

[19:32]

Next line is field far beyond form and emptiness. So. These five. rows right here one two three four five and on this one there's seven uh on the rakasu it has two uh two patches right there and one of them is small and one of them is large small large small small large and the okesa has two large ones and the small patches right there Those are ignorance or delusion patches. And the big ones are the sexy wisdom that we all come to Buddhism for. We want to have some wisdom. We want to get rid of all the delusion and just be wise. But we actually sew them together. We sew together these delusion and ignorance patches because

[20:41]

Our Zen understanding of awakening doesn't exclude delusion. We're not trying to get rid of it. We're not trying to purify ourselves. We understand that we have to include our delusion and the delusion of the world in how it is that we proceed towards awakening. We're looking at the whole identity of who it is that I am, all of me. past, present, and future. And so for me, as a straight white male, my whole identity means that I need to investigate how it is that I benefited to this day from slavery, which ended a long time ago. I need to investigate how it is that I benefited from the genocide. of indigenous people i have to investigate how it is as a straight male i have somehow played a role in homophobia and the impression of lesbians and gays and uh very importantly i have to as a male investigate how it is

[22:07]

that I played a role in patriarchy and the oppression of women. So all of this has to enter into the process of sewing and wearing Buddha's robe. This process of discovering the whole of my identity can be overwhelming at times. And this is where it is that our practice of kindness has to come in. We have trainings called the perfections or the paramitas, and one of them is kashanti, which is forbearance or tolerance. And that teaches me that I need to be able to look deeply at what can be overwhelming realities about who it is that I actually am. But I learned to do it without becoming mired in shame. I experience shame just like I experience anger, but I have to investigate shame just like I have to investigate anger.

[23:14]

I have to look closely at the basis for how it is that human beings practice dehumanizing other human beings. And usually for me, that has meant that I need to look closely at fear. And all of this is included in Buddha's robe. Oh my God, I can't believe that. It's 8.15 and I'm only on page 7. Well, we'll have to do some editing here. So all of these are the teachings of the Tathagata, the Thus Gone One. wearing the Tathagata's teaching, the one who is crossed over to the other side. And this is the teaching of emptiness. And this is an unfortunate translation of the word sunyata.

[24:25]

Sometimes I think it should be translated as, instead of emptiness, fullness. What we're referring to is we're just referring to empty of a permanent... Empty of permanence and a connectedness with all phenomena throughout space and time. So we cloak ourselves in this field of emptiness first thing in the morning. And so... This Zen practice in my experience is really, and I just moved into the building three months ago or so, and it's just as astonishing how almost the whole building itself is really a practice of centering constantly. We bow before we go into the restroom. There's a little altar outside, and then we bow when we come out of the restroom.

[25:30]

We can actually bow. There's gathas or chants that we can do for almost everything, even the stuff that we do in the bathroom. There are chants for that. And these are all centering practices. They're asking me to align myself with this moment in this time and connect it with all moments throughout space and time. It's asking me to engage in this living thread that passes through me in this moment, into the past and into the future. It's a reminder, an invitation to investigate the possibility of my connection with everything that there is. It's asking me, is it possible? Is it possible that you could be connected with everything that there is? So this living connection with the past, the connection also to those who brought this practice to us, begins with the most recent of our ancestors.

[26:44]

And I've already mentioned Mel Weitzman, and one of his students was Zenke Blanche Hartman, and she was the first abbess of San Francisco Zen Center. And she was also the person who recruited me as this trainee sewing teacher and then taught me. I suspect somewhat reluctantly at times. I don't think I was her first choice, but she taught me for over a decade. And when she first came to San Francisco Zen Center, it was because there was a woman Roshi. Roshi means great teacher, approximately. And there was a woman teacher... from Japan, a woman, Roshi, who was going to come here to San Francisco Zen Center. Blanche had been coming here a little bit, and Blanche was a feminist. She was trained as a scientist and as a mechanic, and she kind of shunned the sort of stereotypical activities that she associated with women's oppression, such as sewing.

[27:46]

And she was very excited. She moved into the building for a week. She got time off work, and she came here to listen to Yoshida Roshi, who ended up teaching about sewing. And that was very ironic for Blanche, but she was intrigued by Yoshida Roshi. And Yoshida Roshi was teaching the first classes here of how to sew Buddha's robe. She was not able to continue coming, but someone who was her Dharma sister named Joshin Sensei was able to come regularly. And she ended up teaching Blanche Hartman how to sew Buddha's rope. And what Blanche saw in her was an incredible devotion to Buddha's rope. And that's what really sort of made Blanche plunge into this thing that was sort of... this activity that was sort of symbolic of women's oppression. And she took up that devotion.

[28:50]

Joshin-san transmitted it to her, and Blanche has transmitted it to many of us here, including me. And that's our responsibility to transmit that now to people who are here for the sowing session. And Blanche was showing me once, she was taking me through how to clean a rakasu. They get really dirty. And she was showing me how to clean it. And there's a ceremony that you do to clean the rakasu safely. And then you incense it. And she incensed it three times. And she said, this is just to stay to the robe that you're sorry for any harm it is that you've done. And in this way, she was illustrating the livingness of Buddha's robe. How it is that to her, Buddha's robe was actually a living thing. Let's see.

[29:53]

Should we go into Therabhaddon? Our hot ideal? I don't think so. It's a good part, though. So there's different kinds of Buddhism. And my first practice was from a Theravadan teacher. I practiced Vipassana. I was kind of sneaking into Zen Center on Monday nights for the meditation and recovery meeting. It still happens on Mondays for people who are in recovery, 12-step recovery. And... Charavadan means the way of the elders, and it has the Arhat ideal, which we're sort of familiar with in a romanticized way, many of us. It's the ideal of the lone monk who works towards enlightenment, and that's a horrible simplification of it right there.

[30:56]

But I want to talk about our ideal in our kind of Buddhism, which is the ideal of the Bodhisattva. The bodhisattva is one who works towards liberation, just like the arhat does, the lone monk. But the bodhisattva, instead of entering nirvana, agrees to stay in the world of suffering until all beings can awaken together. And San Francisco Zen Center, in some ways, is a bodhisattva training facility, where bodhisattva is in training right there. Now, hardly anyone comes to Buddhism for this reason, disabled beings. Some of us might say that we do, but I know for me, the reason why I came here was because I was suffering. I was an alcoholic and a drug addict in recovery, just fresh in recovery. And though I liked the idea of compassion, I came here to be a better person.

[32:03]

came here to address my own suffering. And along the way, as you begin doing that, you realize how difficult that is to address your own suffering. We see the depth of our conditioning. And for me, sometimes it has seemed like I'm ruined for good, that my conditioning goes so deep that it's not possible for me to fully treat it in a very deep way. But because of this bodhisattva ideal of staying with all beings, we really focus on practicing together. In my Vipassana training, it didn't matter whether you sat in groups or not. The main thing was to sit, was to meditate. That's what the main thing was. But for us, it's critical for us to sit in community. And that's what we do first thing in the morning. And as we sit and practice with others and investigate our conditioning, something begins to happen.

[33:14]

I'm not going to tell you what it is because I don't really know what it is yet. Sometimes it's referred to as the Bodhisattva Paradox. So there's this idea that you're being trained to save all beings, but actually you come here because you need saving. And that is, on the surface, a self-centered endeavor right there. But it's okay. Because this is where it is that we have to begin. In the laboratory that is ourself. Our senior Dharma teacher, Ryushin Paul Haller, former abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, he refers to our practice as the yoga of investigation. The yoga of investigation. Dogen, our 12th century or 13th century founder in Japan, when you read his writing, he's just constantly saying, investigate, investigate, investigate.

[34:21]

And that's what it is that we do. And we need to do that. In my experience, in community, it's too much for me to investigate how it is that I've been conditioned on my own. I can't do it. It's overwhelming. and um i i had to do it in the company and with the wisdom of others so this uh process i'll just finish by saying um the bodhisattva paradox of wanting to save all beings but coming here to save myself, which was my experience, is the way it is that I begin to understand others.

[35:25]

So by investigating my own fear, investigating anger, investigating how it is that I've caused suffering for myself, especially as a drug addict and an alcoholic, but also for other people, what happens is you begin to see how it is that others are doing the same thing. By understanding my own fear, I can begin to see how it is that fear is behind so much of the hatred that there is in the world. And by being kind, first of all, in investigating my own fear, It helps me begin to be kind towards other as I see the fear that leads to anger in them. And so in this process, my separate self begins to melt away slowly and not all day long every day, but it does begin to melt away.

[36:29]

And I'm going to have to end it right there. So no questions. My email's out there, though. On that list of teachers out there, that's the list of practice leaders. And so all of the people who are available as practice leaders here, if you don't have a practice leader, get some information right there, some contact information and contact people. And if you have any questions, I love questions. And I love the discussion period. And I thought I was going to do a lot better job in leaving time for questions tonight, but I didn't. So please get my contact information and send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you. And just before we stop right now, I just want to take this moment to... This is a trigger warning for you, Paola. This is going to be very irritating. I just want to publicly thank Paola Pietranera.

[37:35]

She's my assistant and my leading, most advanced... apprentice in the sewing room. And she, like almost everyone here at San Francisco Zen Center, could very easily be out in the world doing other things that certainly are a lot more lucrative. But she chooses to be here. And I just really want to publicly thank you for all of the incredible help and devotion that you've shown. And I've relied on you so much. She gets to go home to Argentina after staying here for many years. And I just would like to take that moment to thank you. Okay. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org.

[38:40]

and click giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:44]

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