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 evening. Really appreciate getting to be here. I see some old friends. Thank you to Tim for the invitation to speak tonight. I bring warm greetings from the Berkeley Zen Center, your sibling temple on the other side of the bay. I really appreciate this experience of getting to be together. And what that has come to mean for me more and more, appreciating means appreciating all the people that have made it possible for us to be here together.

[01:23]

So I notice that the chairs are set up. and they're set up because somebody set them up. The altar is cared for, and it's cared for because someone cared for it. I think more and more I've had a feeling of how much how much effort through generations and centuries there has been to bring us our practice. So all the poems and stories and texts of our tradition are here for us because they were maintained. They were taken care of, they were written down.

[02:30]

They were translated. They could have been lost. Many things are lost. But these weren't. And that means that we receive them. We get to benefit from them. We get to do this because other people have taken care of it in the past so that we could do this now. That's true of all the practices of our tradition. It's true about zazen. We're able to sit zazen. We're able to be still and upright and present because that practice was maintained. through generations for us.

[03:31]

So knowing that I would want to talk about this, I've never worn this okesa. This is the first day I've ever worn this okesa. This okesa is a gift that arrived a few weeks ago, and it belonged to a Dharma brother of mine, Yazan Dave Johnson. as a priest at the Houston Zen Center and a disciple of my teachers, who died a little over two years ago. And so this summer when I did receive Dharma transmission at the Houston Zen Center, some of the ceremonial items I received were Dave's. And then a few weeks ago in the mail from... from my teacher and from Dave's wife, Luann, this beautiful, pretty fancy, you've got to admit, Oquesa arrived. And Dave took care of it.

[04:36]

And because he took care of it, now I can wear it. And there's something about that. It clarifies or it inspires me in some way to take care of our practice now so that people later can have it. We received it from those who maintained it in the past. And when, for me at least, when I really feel that, when I see that, it makes me want to maintain it for people in the future. I don't know. It was fair or something, or like the least we could do. Maintain it or uphold it. Take care of it through time. And partly out of gratitude.

[05:40]

Partly out of gratitude for the many gifts that we've received from this practice. In general... I've thought before that one of the central questions in a human life, one of the questions for all of us, is that question of what we'll take care of. What will you take care of? I thought before, one measure of a good life, when we... someone's life and we admire or appreciate their life, often it's because we can see that they found a good answer to that question of what they were going to take care of. Like with their life, they took care of something, of something good. You find the dignity or the nobility in that answer.

[06:46]

I think times in our life that are there's a satisfaction or something very powerful about finding what it is that we want to take care of with our life. And there's a kind of pain in the chapters of our life where we maybe haven't clarified that, where we don't know what we want to take care of. And I think people can answer this question in a lot of ways. I think people who have children, sometimes that's the answer. That's what I'm taking care of. I'm taking care of these people. Sometimes for people, there's a particular livelihood or vocation or calling or a community or a place. And that's what they take care of.

[07:50]

That's what they take care of through time. what they give their lives to. And for some of us, if we're lucky enough to encounter a practice that we have an affinity for, that works for us, that harmonizes or resonates, that's a really elegant answer. It's like a really good answer. You take care of this practice. That's really good. What do we take care of? What will you take care of in your life, with your life? I think it's such an important question. There's another way to ask it, or another way to say, I think the same question. It's what are you serious about? What are you serious about? And I thought of that because I listened.

[08:51]

A friend of mine sent me a talk that Reverend Chimio Atkinson, gave recently. Some of you, I think, know her. And this was through the Soto Zen Buddhist Association, and she was speaking about her training, her monastic training, in Aichi Senmon Ni Soto in Japan, in Nagoya, Japan. So there's great talk about her monastic experiences in Japan, studying with Shundo Aoyama Roshi. probably the most famous, the most sort of well-known woman Soto Zen teacher in Japan. But so Reverend Atkinson is giving this talk, this wonderful talk, a lot of reflections in it about her time there. But at one point what she says about the nuns that she was practicing with, which she's really struck by, she says, and her voice got really intense, she says, they were terrible.

[09:56]

Dead serious. It really impacted me. Actually, I backed it up a couple times just to hear her say it. They're dead serious. Because I thought that was a wonderful question. What am I dead serious about? What are you dead serious about? Really powerful question. What are you dead serious about? What will you take care of? And what will you take care of over time? So part of why I've been thinking about this, part of why I've been thinking in this way about taking care of things and taking care of things through time. See, I read this book by this Icelandic writer that I wasn't familiar with. I'd never heard of, but his name is Andri Snire Magnusson.

[11:01]

I'm sure I'm not saying that right, but Magnuson. The book is called On Time and Water. And it's a powerful book. It's wonderful. It's about climate change and glaciers and about his grandparents. And it is about the Dalai Lama. It's got a long section about the Dalai Lama. It's about cows. He's really into cows, all these riffs about cows. It's sort of a wild book, but there's a little observation in it. There's a little insight in it that I think in some ways was the seed of this whole series of reflections about taking care of things. It's a moment where he is with his daughter, who I think is around 10, and with his grandmother, who is about 90.

[12:05]

And he's thinking about time. And he has this insight that one of the things about climate change, one of the reasons it's kind of hard to take too much action on climate change is that time seems kind of far away. So it's like, you know, sea levels will rise by 2060. And it's like, oh, that's terrible, 2060. It seems really far away. All these things seem sort of far in time. And we get caught up in the more daily things. It's hard to imagine. 2050 feels really far away. 2080 feels really far away. But he has this insight. And it has to do with the span of his relationships. So his grandmother, who's 90, was born 90 years before. And his daughter, who's 10... if she lives to be 90, that in some ways the relationships in his life last for sort of centuries, right?

[13:08]

Going back to when his grandmother was born, all the way to when his daughter maybe dies, right? And it's a really fun, or it's a fun, fun's not the word, it's a really, well it is fun, I had fun with it. It was a valuable sort of reflection. who's the oldest person that you were in relationship with when you were young? So I thought about this, and I actually, I met my great-grandfather in 1979. He was 97. I had to look this up. So he was born in 1882. And then... 1979, I met him in Kansas. So one branch of the family had been in Latin America. So it's when we moved from Argentina to the States.

[14:09]

And so I met my great-grandfather, who I'm named for. So, you know, I imagine that was an important moment for him. Here's this great-grandson from far away, you know. I remember he had one of those, you know those straws that Bend. He had one of those. I was pretty impressed. I made a big impression on me. I knew about straws, but I didn't know they could bend. I looked it up. He was born on January 15, 1882. He was born in 1882. I have an actual relationship to 1882. There's a way in which I can touch that with my hand. I... had a real relationship with a person who was a baby in 1882. And so that's in that direction, you know? And in the other direction, if I live to be 80, that's in about 30 years.

[15:13]

And so if one of you come and visit me, and you should come and visit me when I'm old, bring a kid. Bring a kid. child or grandchild, bring a neighbor, bring a baby of some kind to see me. That baby lives to be 80. That kid is going to live to 2132. I can touch 1882 and I can touch 2132. Not in my lifespan. You could say in my relationship span. That's 250 years. That was really helpful for me. That helped me think about what the responsibility is of taking care of things through generations, of kind of how big the scope of our impact is in a way. I think the scope of our, again, actual embodied relationships can be.

[16:17]

It's a great book. I recommend it. It inspired me to think kind of along these lines. But I also think it's possible for us to go a little farther than he does. He's a great writer, and I appreciated the book a lot. He's not a disciple of Dogen Zenji. He is not a Soto Zen practitioner, which is great. It's fine. He's doing this other wonderful thing. But we are. And so it's possible for us to take his reflection and see that even though he's made time bigger and longer, he's still thinking of a dimension of time that's sort of linear, where it's sort of moment after moment.

[17:28]

You know, things kind of line up year after year, day after day. And that, you know, one of the real gifts of our tradition is the insight that that is not the only dimension of time, or that's not the only facet of time, or That's not the only true way to talk about time. In our tradition, sometimes we talk about small mind and big mind. And I've thought that we can talk about small now and big now. And that small now are the moments that line up one after another. Maybe it's 250 years, but that's still small now. That's moment after [...] moment. It's a row. But in big now, all the moments are contained in the openness.

[18:37]

They're contained in the vastness and the non-boundedness. The big now is a now with nothing left out. It includes the past and the future. And I think it's possible to study this. You can study this in zazen or just in walking around. You can explore big now. And we do that by trying to find the edge. You try to find where the moment ends. You try to find the limit or the boundary. And you can't, because there isn't one. Oh, here's where now ends.

[19:39]

It doesn't end. It's a beginningless, endless present. So there's a way in which, as inspiring as it is to think about taking care of our practice out of gratitude for the past, and in a way as an offering to the future, that is a way of thinking about our practice that's still in little now. And it's very moving. It's a wonderful way to think. But I think it's also possible to practice in a way that just fully contains the past and the future, that isn't about having received something from before or taking care of something for later.

[20:49]

It's practicing in the reality of the timeless, all-inclusive now. And I say, I think a lot of the stories in our tradition are inviting us into that big now. So, I'll just tell one of them, a familiar story to a lot of you. You know, a monk asked Zhao Zhou, famous Chinese Zen teacher... what is the meaning of bodhidharmas coming from the West? What's the most important part of our practice? You know, what is our practice? What is the Dharma?

[21:50]

And Zhao Zhou said, the cypress tree in the courtyard. He points to this tree, the cypress tree in the courtyard. And you know, sometimes an exchange like that can feel kind of cryptic or like... a little hard to untangle, you know? But Wu Men's comment about, so another famous teacher's comment about that story, what is the meaning of Bodhidharma's coming from the West, the cypress tree in the courtyard? Wu Men says, if you can see intimately into the essence of Zhao Zhou's response, there is no Shakyamuni in the past, and no Maitreya in the future. If you can see the tree, if you can see what he's pointing to with the tree, there's no Shakyamuni and there's no Maitreya. Because the tree is in the big now.

[22:53]

Its roots are in the present, its bark is in the present, its leaves are in the present, its branches are in the present. It's alive in... the vastness of now. Dogen Sanji, the great founder of our school in Japan, has a whole fascicle about this story, about the Cypress Tree story, a whole chapter he wrote about this cryptic little exchange And Dogen writes, the time when the cypress tree becomes Buddha is provisionally within the 12 hours, and yet it is beyond the 12 hours. The time when the cypress tree wakes up is beyond the 12 hours. It's in the big now. So I love this book, this Magnuson book.

[24:08]

I was inspired by it. I appreciated it. I really liked this feeling of taking care of things through time, and I especially like this game of feeling my way into relationships that are larger than just my life. And that... felt really profoundly connected for me to practice, to maintaining a tradition through time. But there is this other way that the big now is it's the reality of our practice. It's also the reality of our life. This boundless place is the reality of our life. And sometimes we can touch it. Sometimes we We're aware of it, little glimmers of it. And that vastness, we often talk about it as an experience of freedom.

[25:15]

And I think that's just great. I think that's really right. It's so open, you know. But I think the other thing I want to say about that, about the reality of our life, is that it's also an experience of safety. because when we're in the little now, when we're in the sort of bounded place, necessarily, just always as a part of that, there's some danger. Because, you know, it's going to end, it's going to go badly, it's going to... There's always, always, always, when there's that separation, there's danger. And so part of what's available in the big spacious present is an experience of safety.

[26:22]

The cloud is rightly aware that it's going to get blown around, but the sky doesn't get blown around. not something the sky has to worry about. Well, there's another Zhauzhou story I can maybe talk about, but maybe that's a good place to stop. 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.

[27:25]

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