This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. It is a full moon day. last day of winter, cusp of vernal equinox. Tomorrow is, my calendar says, spring begins. I want to celebrate our practice in the face of much difficulty in the world. I was speaking with some student from Tassajara a couple of days ago, and this person felt that to say all the disasters that are happening just reminds us of impermanence.

[01:18]

This person thought that was a bit dismissive. That... it doesn't necessarily evoke the practice of compassion. So I want to today speak about practice on a number of different levels, which I think we need to practice both simultaneously and sequentially. Today we have We have already practiced zazen here, shikantaza, the practice of sitting as awakened beings. And we have had some meetings already as sangha, the practice of sangha, the practice of a community of human beings joining together

[02:29]

to investigate the way together. And now we are having a public assembly, which I hope is in service of cultivating a culture of wisdom and compassion, not just for ourselves, but for the whole world. I think every effort that we make contributes to something, and to contribute to an effort of creating a culture of wisdom and compassion. Wisdom being that seeing things are non-dual, seeing that everything is completely interconnected. In a sense, it's true to say that there are no beings. We point to that. that there actually are no separate beings. And yet the way our conceptual minds work and must see things as individual, independent, separate beings who then experience relational encounters, relational engagement.

[03:50]

But our relational engagement is based upon fundamentally being So this morning someone gave me some news. I believe it was that a particle, a xenon-133 particle, has showed up here in California, which is evidence that we have some connection. with the nuclear disaster happening in Fukushima in Japan. Of course, we already knew that we had a connection because of the tsunami wave that travels. It's very interesting to me. There's the earthquake, and then the tsunami travels. That energy wave travels through the water.

[04:54]

I heard it between 500 and 600 miles an hour across the 1,000 miles of the Pacific and shows up in Santa Cruz and shows up in Crescent City as waves. And, of course, we may be fortunate that it was low tide here. But it's hard to measure. And so then there are many images in the news of destruction Whole cities just washed away. I know a number of Buddhist temples washed away. So that's easy to see. But what about the aftershocks And by that I mean aftershocks that are happening internally in people's lives.

[06:03]

Lives including deaths. It's hard to see all the trauma. You can't see it. So there isn't so much for the news. What else can you photograph? You can photograph people in a state of shock. And you can ask kind of stupid questions, you know, how do you feel? It's really difficult to get some complete, accurate appraisal of what happened. We never will. We all have received some impact according to our own situation and our own predispositions. So I want to talk about how we can practice liberation, how we can support liberation.

[07:21]

Let me back up a little bit because it's a question. How can you support liberation if you don't know who you are? Many, many centuries ago in China, there was someone sitting Zazen Someone later became called Matsu, sitting zazen. And his teacher, Naniwe, came up and said, what's your intention in sitting meditation? And Matsu said, I intend to become a Buddha. Matsu was a very imposing... person, big, physically big body, big, strong, energetic person.

[08:35]

And his vow, I think, was very powerful. I intend to become a Buddha. And what did his teacher do? But he went over and he started... And Matsu looked over and said... He could see, oh, he was rubbing a piece of broken tile on a rock. He looked over and said, what are you doing? What's the intention of your practice of rubbing a piece of tile on a rock? And Nanue said, I intend to turn this piece of tile into a jewel. Matsui said, well, you can't do that.

[09:37]

No matter how much you rub it, you're not going to turn it into a jewel. And Nanyue said, no matter how much meditation you sit, it's not going to turn you into a Buddha. Matsu said, well, what is the correct practice? They had a little more conversation. Nanyuai said, your ordinary mind is already Buddha. So what are we doing? We say, and in this lineage of practice, we say, we're sitting, we do this sitting practice, expressing our true nature, expressing enlightened nature.

[10:45]

So that's already a completely pure practice. What happens in sitting can't be understood by the intellect. It cannot be understood by what you think about it. You can have all kinds of thoughts about it. People may ask, oh, how was your zazen? You can say, well, it wasn't good. It was terrible. Steve Weintraub tells the story of going to see Katagiri, Roshi, who asked him about his zazen, and Steve said, my zazen is terrible. Katagiri said, oh, terrible zazen. Pretty good. Zazen can't be quantified.

[11:57]

can't actually be categorized. So we do it to express something that is bigger than what we can grasp and to put us in touch with our true being. Of course, we're already our true being. And yet we experience some interference. We experience interference And how do we experience it? We discover it usually in our relations with each other. So someone recently just told me, was talking about someone else and said, he really makes me mad. That's kind of interesting, isn't it? How can someone make me mad? How can someone make me angry?

[13:04]

So this is a place to study how our wisdom practice and our compassion practice come together. A number of questions. One question would be then how to, can I dismantle the habitual pattern that comes up in me when someone else says something and I get mad? Can I investigate what happens there if I say, He makes me mad that, in a way, that I'm a victim of him, right? I'm at the mercy of someone else's statement.

[14:08]

Of course, something happens. Someone makes a statement and then I feel something. Does that mean that he makes me mad? So at the level of interpersonal and we have an opportunity to investigate, and our practice supports, this practice of sitting supports the investigation to see what's happening in that kind of experience of meeting someone who seems separate from me. Is it the statement that person makes? Did I actually hear it correctly? Did I actually hear what the person said? Was I responding to the tone of voice? Of course, emails, you know, a lot of people are getting angry at each other over emails these days.

[15:10]

I think emails are a terrible way to have a conversation because you can't hear the tone of voice. It's so easy. I've had so many people actually come to me and tell me about their email arguments. Maybe someone else has a solution for this, but my solution is to not try to have an emotional conversation with email. Email's good for sending documents and setting up meetings and things like that. but so much is lost. So this is a practice of transforming one's self in response to an interaction with someone else. Sometimes we call it developing character.

[16:12]

How does one actually develop a character of compassion? How can one feel compassion in the face of someone saying something that makes me angry. I think it makes me angry. How can I feel what the other person's feeling? So some of this brings awareness to one's own personal limits. That is, limits in the sense of one's own personal karma, habits, ideas, beliefs that someone else may have treated, it seems, maybe with some disrespect in what they said. Some of that's personal and some of it's, say, cultural.

[17:19]

Some of it's from one's whole history and how one learned to cope with things as a child. And some of it comes culturally, from the culture that one grew up in and adopted, how to cope with the culture. So a lot of this then becomes an unconscious assumption So to take one example for myself, when I was about 20, I began to be aware that there was something called feminism. And that there was a whole kind of assumption of gender roles and gender perceptions that I was completely oblivious to because I had just adopted it.

[18:35]

It had just been part of the culture I grew up in. I grew up in Kansas, the middle of the country. Not so uncommon to have gender bias. and to have it unseen. Now I was living in Chicago, and a group of young men that I was with, we decided that we should have a men's meeting to respond to the feminist inquiry. I was about to say feminist assault. But feminist, kind of feminist inquiry into the assumptions, you know, that we were making. So we formed a men's group. And we met every week for a weekly meeting.

[19:39]

And also we had some other retreats and other events. At the very first meeting, I remember... expressing myself about how I had already understood how smart I was. Actually, the convener of the group then just blasted me. What an ass I was. What a jerk. I didn't like that. But I kept coming back. I was actually committed to the inquiry. So I kept coming back, and so we met every week. And then at the Chicago Free University at the time, and I started leading another group, a drop-in group for men to come and talk. So we began to notice things, ways in which we were blind. Sometimes one does not notice how one is blind.

[20:42]

until someone else says, the way you're blind is hurting me. The way you're blind is painful to me. The way you're blind is disrespecting me. So we have a vow in this practice of ours called the Bodhisattva vow. This morning we did a full moon ceremony of reminding and renewing our bodhisattva vow. And essentially the bodhisattva vow is to wake up with all beings. To not leave any being out. To be willing to wake up. So it means that whenever someone, any being shows that they're suffering in some way, Naturally, the bodhisattva extends some sense of being willing to be open to feeling with that person, that being.

[21:55]

It may be a human being. It may be another species. It may be the environment itself. Suffering. So whenever there is some sense of something suffering and someone suffering, the bodhisattva vow is to be willing to wake up to that experience, that suffering. So sometimes our men's group met also with gay liberation group. So we can also appear of how it was to be queer and how it was to be rejected by the prevailing culture. And I discovered, amazingly enough, I discovered a friend from my Kansas high school who I'd known in high school who is now in Chicago and who had come out as

[23:07]

a gay man. And it was really kind of eye-opening to me, and I realized that he couldn't have come out in the way that he did in Chicago in small-town Kansas without receiving a tremendous amount of antipathy. In a small-town Kansas, you could be a confirmed bachelor. You could be a confirmed bachelor. There's a way of people saying, well, okay, so we never expect this person to get married. He's a confirmed bachelor. Kind of a way of putting that person aside, but never opening up to the experience of that person. So we have this challenge of, I'd say, Sangha practice of actually making it a matrix of enlightenment.

[24:10]

That the Sangha can be a matrix of enlightenment if and as much as day by day we are willing to wake up to each other. And it doesn't mean we necessarily know what to do. In fact, it means not knowing what to do. which I think Shundo said the other day, that was a terrible thing, and where's Shundo? So that was in the family he grew up in, that was the worst thing. You could not know. You could not be permitted to not know. You were supposed to know what to do, and you were supposed to have an answer for everything. So it's pretty hard to... place yourself in the situation of not knowing so that you can listen, so that you can hear, so that you can feel the feelings of those among us who are having some difficulty actually feeling disrespected, feeling somehow

[25:35]

disregarded, somehow disparaged. So it's hard to even be willing to say, okay, I don't know what to do. I don't actually know what you're talking about. Please. Or maybe you're not even willing to talk about it. It's too painful. Can I even be here? Can we even name that there's something to talk about that we don't know how to talk about? Talking about it is maybe just one kind of aspect. But we do have language, and language blinds us, and language also... You need anything? I need a drink of water.

[26:39]

You need a drink of water? So I just noticed I asked twice if he needed anything. And so sometimes if I ask someone if they don't need, do you need something? And they say no. Well, maybe they just don't feel comfortable saying. So it is hard sometimes to know what is what really is the communication. It takes careful, careful listening.

[27:45]

And none of us can be careful enough. None of us can listen clearly enough. So that's why we have the vow, we say, we say, delusions are endless. I vow to end them. So this is taking on an endless practice. The bodhisattva vow is an endless practice. And the bodhisattva vow is based upon Nanyue saying, ordinary mind is Buddha. Matsu does not need to become a Buddha. Matsu, Suzuki Roshi said, when you become you, Zen becomes Zen. When you become you, Buddha is Buddha. So what we may notice internally is that there are many ways in which we are not completely ourselves.

[28:51]

So the internal practice is to notice, oh, I actually even need to have compassion for the parts of myself I don't like. I may not even like it that I get mad when so-and-so says something. And I don't like the feeling I'm having. So to have the compassion for oneself, to actually be willing to be fully present and wake up with the feeling one has, it's essential. Then to extend that into interpersonal, being willing to wake up to the feeling the other person has as my feelings. And then to be willing to wake up to the way in which as an institution we have blindness. The way Zen Center as an institution has blindness. As a Sangha, we have some things that we maybe don't want to look at.

[29:55]

How do we actually welcome everyone? How do we actually welcome every part of everyone. And then to extend that into society or into culture more broadly, how do we bring the question, bring the practice of not knowing to a kind of a project of dismantling structures that are oppressive. So to have a practice of meeting together with other people with that intention, even if you don't know what to do, I think this is a big role of, say, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, formally saying, okay, we don't necessarily know what to do, but we are going to regularly investigate how to work.

[31:14]

how to express this fundamental Buddha nature extended into a whole world that has so many difficulties. Many difficulties that we create actually for ourselves out of our own blindness. Out of our own karmic habits. So this is So in the course of a day, you may find you need to work internally, you may need to work relationally, you may need to work within the Sangha, the groups that you are participating in, and you may also participate in a wider conversation. Sometimes it's a conversation that people don't want to have. It's uncomfortable. compassion is uncomfortable.

[32:17]

Being willing to be uncomfortable. And being willing to be uncomfortable and bring as much presence and calmness and clarity that you can to that. There was a poet who grew up in Kansas not far from where I did. And he was actually working on this same matter. all his life, I'd say, William Stafford. And every once in a while I read this as a kind of nourishment or a kind of a reminder, a poem he calls a ritual to read to each other. So it goes like this. If you don't know the kind of person I am, and I don't know the kind of person you are, a pattern that others made may prevail in the world, and following the wrong God home, we may miss our star.

[33:27]

For there is a many small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break, sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood, storming out to play through the broken dyke, and as elephants parade, holding each elephant's tail. But if one wanders, the circus won't find the park. I call it cruel, and maybe the root of all cruelty, to know what occurs, but not recognize the fact And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote, important region in all who talk. Though we could fool each other, we should consider lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

[34:35]

For it is important that awake people be awake, Or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep. The signals we give, yes or no or maybe, should be clear. The darkness around us is deep. So what I've been talking about here today is this. What he says is, what he calls cruel, maybe the root of all cruelty, to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. So it does happen when people are sitting that painful recognition sometimes come up. We sit with a vow to be willing to be present with whatever arises.

[35:37]

And we have great confidence in the true nature that is in the realm of inconceivable, that our true nature is actually supporting us to be able to do the work of awareness, the work of being willing to be present with whatever arises. And that doesn't mean that we do anything we actually set aside doing so that we can just be present. So Matsu doesn't need to do anything to become Buddha. Matsu just needs to set aside some idea of getting someplace else. Matsu just needs to be willing to be present with everything in his vast, ordinary mind, boundless mind, The things that arise in our consciousness often come from places that are hidden to us.

[36:46]

But tell us something about ourselves. Tell us something about ourselves in the wide sense where we're not actually separate from each other, not separate from the different parts of ourselves internally, not separate from the different parts of ourselves in our family, our friends. Not separate from the parts of ourselves and our community. Not separate from the emergency that's signaled by the sirens right now. All this arises. It's awesome. It's a tremendous commitment to make. To vow to wake up with everything. And I invite you all to do that because that's actually who you are already. Just as Matsu is already, not Matsu. Matsu already is of the nature of awakening.

[37:49]

And you, each one here, is already of the nature of awakening. So please investigate for your own say, your own deep sanity, to be willing to wake up to who you are, which is probably pretty scary sometimes. It means that whatever arises is also welcome, even if it's really difficult. So when someone told me that xenon 133 has arrived, I said, welcome, xenon 133. It doesn't mean I'm particularly pleased about it. It doesn't mean that I ignore that there may be some things that now need to be taken care of that yesterday I didn't think about. But now there's maybe something that needs to be taken care of.

[38:54]

Every moment produces something to be taken care of. And the first practice is simply to be aware of, okay, now what needs attention? always coming back to being present right here in one's own body, the body of flesh, bones, and breath. This body is supporting the practice, the mind of awareness. So since it's the cusp of spring, I thought it would be kind of fun to sing Red Red Robin. Old song, 1920. But you know, it has in it, it has wake up in it.

[39:58]

It has cheer up. I was watching Robins, you know, that they're migrating now and arriving and enjoying the rain. And they say, cheer up, cheer up. So maybe if we sing it twice, some people may know it. Probably many people know it. And then I'll see if I know it. When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbing along, along, there'll be no more sobbing when he starts throbbing his old sweet song. Wake up, wake up, you sleepyhead. Get up, get up, get out of bed. Cheer up, cheer up, the sun is red.

[41:02]

Live Love, laugh and be happy. What if I've been blue? Now I'm walking through fields of flowers. Raindrops glisten and still I listen for hours and hours. I'm just a kid again doing what I did again. Singing this song. When the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobbing along. One more time. Everyone kind of faded out there. That middle part, you know, what if I've been blue? What if I've been blue? Now I'm walking through fields of flowers. Raindrops glisten. Still I listen for hours and hours. That's actually good Bodhisattva practice. Listening and listening.

[42:03]

Okay. When the red, red Robin comes Bob, Bob, Bob and along, along. There'll be no more sobbing when he starts throbbing his old sweet song. Wake up. wake up you sleepy head get up get up get out of bed cheer up cheer up the sun is red live love laugh and be happy what if i've been blue now i'm walking through fields of flowers raindrops glisten but still i listen for hours And ours, I'm just a kid again, doing what I did again, singing this song. When the red, red robin comes, bob, bob, bobbing along.

[43:11]

Yes, when the red, red robin comes, bob, bob, bobbing along. So thank you for singing, thank you for listening, and thank you for your practice. 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 and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:54]

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