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, everyone. My name is Tim Wicks, and I'm a resident here at the City Center. Welcome to you all. Coming here to the In Us Mind Temple, welcome to everyone. online um i'd like to thank our former tanto from quite a while ago now uh anna thorne for inviting me to speak tonight and uh our central abbot david zimmerman and our abiding habit mako vocal both of whom are not here tonight because they're at a board meeting It feels like the parents are not here tonight.

[01:00]

And always my teacher, Rinso Ed Satterzen, who has endless patience and kindness for having me as a student. So for those of you who haven't noticed, things are kind of strange when you first come here. the San Francisco Zen Center. If you come to Zazen in the morning, our Zazen is sitting meditation, and down in our meditation hall, we sit for an hour in silence, and then there's a bunch of drums and bells, and then we do this strange thing. We put our robes, Buddha's rope, on our head, and we do the robe chan. And when I first came here over 20 years ago, um i was i was trying to be open and so uh i thought you know i'll chant and i'll go ahead and john i didn't have a robe to put on my head but i did the robe chant anyway um and slowly you begin to learn about the robes that we wear uh we wear robes that sort of follow the geographic movement of buddhism so

[02:27]

We wear a kimono, which is from Japan. And then on top of that is a Chinese robe called a koromo. And then this one on top right here is called an okesa. And you'll see the people who have the kind of bib-like robe on, that's also Buddha's robe. That's not a baby robe or an imitation robe or a symbolic robe. It's actually Buddha's robe, just like this big one is right here. and that's called a rakasu. And the rakasus, the Indian robes, the rakasus and the ocasas, we actually sew ourselves, the kimonos and the kuromas. We get those from kuroma and kimono makers. But the top ones, we actually sew ourselves. That's Buddha's robe right there. Now, our Zen practice is really a conglomeration of different... Buddhist disciplines. It's a collection of causes and conditions within Buddhism throughout the last 2,500 plus years.

[03:34]

And for instance, we don't really follow in Zen, we don't follow the Vinaya. And it's said that classical, traditional Buddhism has three main sections. The Abhidharma, which is sort of the commentary on... the doctrine, the teachings of the Buddha, and the Vinaya, which were the monastic rules, which were written down during the time of the Buddha. And we don't really follow those like Theravadan Buddhists do. Theravadan means the school of the elders and spirit rock. Many of the teachers of Spirit of Rock come from the Theravadan school, and they very strictly follow the Vinaya. We follow really the precepts, and we have our own sort of adaptation of the Vinaya, which is the Shingi, which are our own temple and monastic rules that we read out at the beginning of every practice period, but they can change.

[04:48]

and oftentimes do according to the causes and conditions that we find ourselves in. So right now we're having a sowing sashin. Today's the first day of sashin means a gathering of the heart-mind. And we have sashins as a focused way of practicing at different times in our Zen practice. And today we're having, it was the first day of a three-day sewing session. But just like our broader Zen practice is kind of a conglomeration of different Buddhist developments, so too is our sewing tradition. It's not purely Zen. And in fact, it was recovered by a Zen master named Koto Sawaki in the middle of the 20th century. But it was recovered from Shingon nuns and Shingon These nuns were disciples of a 17th century Shingon monk named Jian Onko.

[05:58]

And this connection between Shingon Buddhism and Zen Buddhism is very interesting to me. Shingon is basically a Vajrayana school. Vajrayana means diamond vehicle. And it's very similar to that which is practiced in Tibet. It is an esoteric school in that they study mantras and mandalas. Now, we don't really care for, in general, esoteric practices in our Protestant American culture. It's considered undemocratic. Esoteric, of course, means... that it's intended to be understood just by an initiated view. And that is not democratic. That's not horizontal. It's vertical in its hierarchy. And we fought a revolution here to free ourselves from that kind of power structure.

[06:59]

We like direct communication with all information. We don't like to have an initiated view. We prefer exoteric, which means that it's... The information is understood by all. We sometimes like to think of our Soto Zen practice as that we're kind of the farmers of the Zen school with our feet planted firmly in the soil with awakening that's available to everyone just by sitting on a cushion. The esoteric is for the Rinzai school. the Rinzai practitioners with their koan-focused studies and their sudden enlightenment. But we practice esoteric Buddhism every day here. We use duranis, which are some of the chants that we use on a daily basis.

[08:03]

And these are incantations. They're used in the service of awakening. And they're basically root syllables that don't make much conventional sense when translated. They're oftentimes from pre-Vedic, shamanic, earth-based practices from before Buddhism. And they're said to have a mysterious effect when used ritually. And after practicing with them for over 20 years, I have faith in that statement right there, that there is something mysterious that happens. when you use them. And this is the case also with sewing Buddha's robe. We sew ritually, and something mysterious happens when we do sew. It's a training that is essential to our tradition, and I'm very interested in this in the...

[09:05]

this connection between this tradition that we have and Jian Onko's Shingon Buddhist practices, esoteric practices. I'd like to go on a pilgrimage to the temple in Japan where these nuns offered these teachings about the robes that we now make at some point. That's my deepest wish. So our lineage of Zen, it didn't always have this rogue practice, this tradition that we're practicing today in the Sashin that we're having. Suzuki Roshi didn't come from this tradition. He didn't make his own rogue. He was convinced by Katagiri Roshi to start this practice. And Katagiri Roshi was a student of Hashimoto Roshi, who was sort of a partner with...

[10:05]

in recovering this tradition in the first part of the 20th century, this practice that was fine-tuned by Gion Onko, who in the 17th century researched the vinya and other statues of robes and came up with what it is that we practice right now that was brought by by Katagiri Roshi to the United States. So what happens when you sew Buddha's rope? When you come to practice regularly at San Francisco Zen Center, it's suggested that you get a teacher. And after working with a teacher for a while, they might suggest, or you might have to ask, depending on who the teacher is, that you begin sewing your rope, begin sewing a rakasu for jukai, which is lay initiation.

[11:15]

And those are the blue ones right there. So you can see there's sort of different colored ones. There's a blue one that Paola has on, and some people you'll see sometimes, mostly it's blue ones tonight. You can see brown ones and black ones. The black ones wearing a black robe like this. This means that I am a novice priest. So I'm a priest, but I'm still under the supervision of my teacher. And people are wearing brown ocasas, like Heather's wearing a brown ocasas. She also has a brown rakasu. There's also green. as well, which I don't think anyone with a green one here tonight is, which is one of our own inventions at San Francisco Zen Center, and that is lay entrustment or lay transmission. And so that's sort of, well, I'm not going to rank it. It's important.

[12:18]

And so when that happens, you're invited to go to the sewing room. And to come to sewing class, because you have to take a class. You can't just sew it on your own. It has to be taught to you by a sewing teacher. And I'm the head sewing teacher here at City Center. And when I first did this, I was really nervous. And I wasn't sure quite why. I'm a professional craftsman and a fully trained fine artist. And so what was going on? I mean, I shouldn't be nervous about using my hands. First of all, Blanche Hartman was the sewing teacher. And Blanche Hartman was the first abbess of San Francisco Zen Center. And for 40 years, she was the sewing teacher. And she was a very powerful human being and could be a little bit intimidating at first. But there was something else going on because she was also warm in her own way. There was something else that was going on that I didn't fully understand.

[13:22]

I need to give you a little background so that you can understand now that I do understand a little bit more. My mother died when I was very young, and my father and my three sisters had to learn how to sort of look after ourselves, and that meant learning how to sew. My older sister was a childhood parent for a couple of years, and then she very wisely split, and that left me as a childhood parent. My father was not really around very much. And no one showed me how to sew. We lived in England. I have the remnants of an English accent, you might hear. And in England, you have school uniforms. And school uniforms need to be repaired. And I had to learn how to do that, even though no one had taught me. I knew you needed a needle and you needed some thread. And if there was a tear, you try to close the tear. Button comes off. You try to put another button on.

[14:23]

But anyway, seams came undone. Buttons fell off. And there were a couple of situations that were very embarrassing to me as a clothes-conscious teenager. Needless to say, as soon as I could, I made it so that I never had to sew again. I found out that if you take your clothes to the dry cleaners and ask them nicely and give them some money, they'll fix it for you, which was wonderful. So I didn't have to start sewing until I was in my early 40s and had come to the sewing room at San Francisco City Center. And once I started going to the sewing room, I noticed that I had anxiety, but I noticed there were some other people in there, quite a few in fact, more than half, who had some anxiety as well when it came to sewing. So after some investigation of my own fears and looking at my childhood trauma around sewing and seeing that there was a group of us there, I started to slightly lightheartedly, but I've since come to see that it can be kind of serious sometimes.

[15:38]

I started to... I coined the title for... the name of our group as Adult Survivors of Childhood Sewing Trauma. And here we all were in the sewing room learning how to sew Buddhist road. Warm water, thank you very much, Kate. In our Zen training, we're asked to investigate things all the way. People can take years to finish their robes. We have someone in our sewing session who's taken 28 years to make his robe, which is very inspiring to me.

[16:43]

Sometimes the investigation is dropped. Sometimes it's just a matter of taking time to be very thorough about the investigation. We say awakening is seeing something all the way to the end. And the beauty of sewing Buddha's robe is that you finish. At some point, you finish. It comes to an end. There's completion involved. While you're working, you chant Namu Kiei Butsu with one stitch, Namu Kiei Ho with the next, and Namu Kiei So with the third. And this is I take refuge in Buddha. I take refuge in Dharma. I take refuge in Sangha. And I ask people to take deep refuge. Blanche Hartman liked us to use the Japanese because the word Kiei means to plunge without any resistance.

[17:46]

into refuge with the Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. And you do this hundreds of times. And this is the training of sewing Buddha's robe, to repeat this positive mantra over and over again until the robe is finished. When those of us who choose to go on and become priests, you're already acquainted with the transformative nature of this practice and what it is that happens. Now, if you choose priesthood, you have to sew many hundreds of times more. These big robes are a lot bigger than the rakasus are. And what happened before in making your lay robe happens again because you're repeating it in an even deeper way. And many people who come to sewing with anxiety end up loving it.

[18:48]

And they love it in part because it's a tactile, tangible thing that we do in this sometimes beyond words practice, this mysterious practice that we do, where we use incantations that we can't quite put your finger on how it is that it changes you, but it does, it changes you. In a world where the sheer magnitude of suffering that we're increasingly aware of in a broad sense, thanks to the internet, can seem unbearable and beyond words. This practice of sewing provides a tangible touch and a comfort and a sense of grounding. It's the nirmanakaya, which means the body, this body, this earthly, tangible body of the Buddha. It's the gateway to the sambhogakaya, which is the heavenly, enjoyment body. So we get pleasure from it.

[19:52]

It makes us happy. Which in turn provides entry to the dharmonikai, the essence body that is the experience beyond words. Last week, central abbot David Zimmerman spoke about personal suffering and he gave to examples, both from our canon and from a friend of his, a personal story of just terrible suffering of great magnitude. Our practice, he said, teaches us to withstand all suffering throughout space of time by giving ourselves fully over to it and allowing it to break us. in some ways. And we bring this to our sowing practice. We bring our personal karmic conditioning of dysfunctional families.

[20:57]

We bring the consequences of injustice that touches all of us. And you can see it in individual stitches and in the distress that people pass through as they take up this practice. We bring to the practice the suffering of this place right here, where it is that we are and the original people, the Ramatoshi Ohlone. We bring to it the suffering of slavery that created the excess capital that allows me to have the privilege of living in this beautiful building and to sit today. And so actually I didn't sit, I stood. practice says that you can handle it. You can handle the suffering. You can be fully aware of all aspects of what it means to be alive. The beauty and the horror. With full awareness we sow upright in the midst of it all.

[22:05]

Thank you all very much. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[22:35]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.77