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, everyone, and welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. Those of you in the room and those of you online as well. My name is Shundell, and it's nice to be here. It's nice to be offering a talk on a Saturday and to see so many people in the room again. Probably some people who were in the room when I first attended a Dharma talk about 25 years ago. As I remember, I was sitting over on the benches there and the sun was very warm on my neck. So it's traditional to thank people at the beginning of a talk.

[01:00]

So I want to thank the Tanto, my compatriots, Tim, for inviting me to speak, and to my teacher, Anshi, who is sitting over there. And, you know, really when it comes down to it, you know, I was thinking the other day, if I wanted to thank everybody who has helped get me onto this seat today, it would take the whole talk and probably more. And there's probably people who have no idea that they've helped me get here. But they have. And so if you've played a role in my practice at all over the last 25 years, thank you. And even if you don't know what role that is you've played. I know it's kind of an auspicious time. We just had the full moon. I saw it last night. It was very beautiful. thanks to the clear skies. It's summer in San Francisco, at least on this side of the hill. And also we just had 8-8, which I know is a very auspicious date in some cultures.

[02:01]

And I spent a lot of time with the Suzuki Roshi archive. Suzuki Roshi is the founder of this temple in Tassahara. And I wondered if there was a talk that he gave on this particular date, the 9th of August, It turned out that 55 years ago today was the ordination ceremony for attention to Reb Anderson and Paul Disko in this very room. So people we can be grateful to include Reb and Paul for the enormous contributions they have made physically, spiritually, and in all kinds of ways to keep the temples alive over the last 55 years and keep Suzuki Roshi's lineage alive. And on a more somber note, 9th of August is also the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, which is a reminder of the way that human beings can constantly be cruel to other human beings for whatever reasons, whatever causes and conditions.

[03:10]

And thinking about that, I was amazed to reflect that it was less than 15 years after that date. that Suzuki Roshi came from Japan to San Francisco. So one person I have to thank in particular today is Eli. I don't see him. Perhaps he's here. So I was at Tassahara, the training monastery, about a month ago, and Eli gave a talk about liberty and constraints, and he offered pairs of seeming opposites, things that seem to be opposites. And one of the... pairs he mentioned was story and silence and for whatever reason in that moment that pair just particularly struck me as being you know something to think about and so I'm going to talk about stories and it seems a little fatuous to say I'm going to talk about silence but I'll say something about silence anyway and so what are our stories what stories do we tell ourselves if you're new here and

[04:17]

Especially welcome if you're brand new in the building today. What is the story you're telling yourself right now? If you've been coming to talks for 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years, what are the stories you're telling yourself about sitting in this room? What stories do we tell ourselves about Zen? I know that if you're new, it seems kind of daunting. You may have the story. Oh, everyone else knows what they're doing. I'm going to be a little conspicuous. I'm going to make some mistake. Everyone's going to look at me. And when I was the meditation hall manager, the Eno that Kevin is now doing, I would always say to people, whatever mistake you think you're going to make, somebody else has made it more loudly, more obviously, you know, in a more, you know.

[05:24]

terrible way then you're going to do it so don't worry about it and I have a story about myself sitting on the Dharma seat we just said you know an unsurpassed penetrating imperfect Dharma is rarely met with and it's my job to deliver this morning and so I have a story that maybe what I wrote is not sufficient but I'm going to try it anyway I'm going to give it my best shot I have stories about my upbringing in England. Our family had a particular way of looking at the world, which wasn't a very helpful way of looking at the world. And I'm grateful that moving to San Francisco was a way to release a lot of those stories. So when we think about our stories, we can notice, you know, where do these stories come from? Are they the story from this present moment?

[06:26]

I feel like I don't know what I'm doing. Or, oh, I know how this is going to be. Or you have a story about who I am. I'm sure many of you do. So is that an immediate story? Is it a story that we've just carried on from the past? We've hauled it around in our lives because we're used to it. And what purpose do our stories serve? And what can we do about them? And for my own stories, I know that they're within me. There's a reason why they're there. But I want to use them as a reference point and not a boundary. I think often we find ourselves bound by our stories. And one story many of us tell is, I'm not good enough or I'm not dot, dot, dot enough.

[07:34]

And you can maybe think, how do I tell that story to myself? There are many ways we can feel that we are not enough. You can supply your own adjective. I remember sitting in this room maybe 20 years ago. I'm listening to Away Seeking Mind talk, which is, you know, when new students talk about the path that got them to practice. And one particular person talked about wanting to be special when he grew up. He had this feeling that he wanted to be a special person. And the disappointment, the kind of almost inevitable disappointment, when as a grown-up he didn't feel that special. We might have a story that we never get what we want. We might have a story that we can be happy if we do get all the things we want.

[08:45]

The week we were at Tassajara, there were a lot of children there. It was quite a rambunctious week, a little less quiet than usual at Tassajara. And one morning when we were serving ourselves breakfast. One of the boys, who was maybe six or seven, was offloading the duty of getting his breakfast to his father. And he said very loudly, loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear it, don't get me anything I don't like. Get me everything I like. And we know that doesn't really work in the outside world. It might work for breakfast. It doesn't really work much further than that. we still have these other stories you know maybe if I have enough money and enough things I'll be happy and when we think about these stories especially the you know the ones where we're down on ourselves can we have some compassion for our own stories

[09:55]

I was speaking with a group of students this week about the gratitude for everyone who had helped them on the path, as I just said just now. And one person came back to me and said, did you include yourself in the people you should be grateful for, for getting here? It was a great question, because it's much easier to think about being grateful to other people than being grateful to ourselves. another student was telling a story. And she's particularly upset with one aspect of family life at the moment. And she noted that it was a different experience for her to tell her story in a Zen group than it was telling her work colleagues. And I had to think about why maybe that is. And when we tell each other stories, it's very easy to affirm somebody else's story.

[11:02]

We all want to be affirmed in our stories. So we tell our stories and when we get this reflection back, yeah, yeah, I know exactly how you feel. It's a nice feeling. We all want that as human beings. We all want that affirmative connection. But since I often think these days in terms of hand gestures, I was thinking that her workers were kind of doing this. They were propping her up, propping her up in her story. Yes, yes, it's quite right that you're upset in this situation about your family. And then when she talked about it with the Zen group, there was still compassion and understanding, but I felt it was more a support. And it wasn't keeping her within that story. It was saying, yeah, I hear that story. I support you in that story. And this is taking refuge in Sangha. Sangha is a refuge here. When we tell our stories, even the embarrassing ones, even the difficult ones, that we will have this support from everybody else.

[12:06]

Not all the time, but enough that it makes it safer to tell these stories. And I think if we have this kind of experience with our stories, yeah, yeah, I hold you up in your story. But that's when the story becomes a boundary and not a reference point. But as human beings, you know, our brains are hard-wired to, you know, make coherent narratives out of the world. You know, we hear that sound. It's like, oh, that's a plane. We know what kind of plane that is. I remember, as a kid actually, just thinking of that, reading a science fiction story where somebody had been transported from the 1920s to the 1960s. And they heard this noise, which was a jet plane going overhead. And it totally freaked them out because, to their mind, a plane sounded like the plane that just flew overhead. It's a little propeller plane. One time, when Zachary and I were sitting outside on the Embarcadero, which we used to do every week, had a pelican flying low overhead.

[13:12]

Now, we're used to pelicans. We know that a pelican is not going to come and eat us. But nevertheless, there's that moment when this very strange-looking beast comes flying towards you. It's like, oh, it's a pelican. I don't have to be scared of a pelican. This is how human beings have evolved in the world. We make these snap decisions about whether something is safe or scary and act accordingly. So these stories keep us alive. And we have coherent narratives about things. The world looks less scary. And so we can't stop telling these stories, even if we try. And it's not that stories are wrong but they're never the whole picture and so often you know we we load up all these stories and then our brain is full of stories and we think that's it you know that's all we've got a whole bunch of stories and sometimes you can dredge them up I was speaking with somebody recently he was dredging up a story and this is a an older someone older than me so quite old and

[14:22]

He was dredging up a story from his childhood and how he'd responded in this one particular situation. The fact that this story was so tightly held to was very interesting. Why did they feel the need to tell me that story five or six decades later? Well, we don't have to get rid of our stories. We can't really get rid of our stories. I'm sure you can all think of a story from childhood that really sticks out in a particular way, has a particular flavor or meaning. But we can change our relationship to them. This is one thing that stories have is lack of nuance. They tend to be stuck in binaries. This or that. Good, bad, right, wrong. And, you know, again, as an evolutionary bias, you know, our stories tend towards negativity. You think, no, no, no, no, better not do that.

[15:24]

And again, the trouble with binaries is they don't tell the whole story. You know, I can say the world is in a terrible place right now. And we can think of many reasons, we can all think of many reasons why the world is really terrible right now. And if I say the world is wonderful and amazing, we can maybe think that too. I find it easier to think the world is wonderful and amazing on a sunny day. And sometimes it's harder to think of those things, but there's something we can practice. We can practice being grateful for things that you take for granted, the things that function every day without needing to worry about them. When I was doing this practice with my students the other day, the one that came up for me was Can we be grateful for just being able to turn on the tap and get clean drinking water?

[16:30]

Not many humans have had that ability in history. And I remember right before the pandemic, about a month before the pandemic, I was riding down Market Street in the morning and there was a huge crowd of people waiting at one of the bus stops. And my story was, oh, you know, the streetcar underground has stopped working and everyone's had to come up, try and get a bus to work. And they're all going to be really annoyed because they're going to be late to work and the Muni's not working. And I remember thinking at the time, well, all those mornings when the Muni does work, you know, we don't remember to be grateful for that. But on that morning, as on many mornings, I was riding my bike. And riding a bike, it's very easy to have a lot of negative stories about people in cars. Because if you spend any time on a bike anyway, you know that there are lots of scary situations you end up in.

[17:31]

Drivers are distracted. They do things that are careless or dangerous. I know there was a study that came out a few years ago that cyclists exhibit a kind of a paranoia. You know, actual symptoms of paranoia when they're on a bike. But thankfully it goes away as soon as you get off the bike, actually. But one way I practiced with that story is to notice all the times when drivers did kind and courteous things. Waved me through, stopped, gave me lots of room. And that helps shift the balance of your story. So I still tell the story that drivers are terrible and distracted and do dangerous things. But I can also balance that and give it some nuance and lots of other people do nice things. And in my first training period at Tassajara, which was more than 20 years ago now, at Tassajara you're sitting in the Zendo next to the same person for three months

[18:41]

you know, up to 12 hours a day between the same people. And you know, every now and again, they're a little irritating. But towards the end of the training period one evening, when I probably should have just been sitting zazen, I was thinking about my next door neighbor. Like, well, you know, yeah, I kind of appreciate how, I kind of remember what it was that I appreciated, but I thought, oh, oh, look at that. I'm not just being irritated by this person. And then I thought about the person on the other side. Oh, I appreciate this about you. And then I went round and tried to picture everybody in the Zendo to try to think of one positive thing I could think about everybody. To counteract my inbuilt English bias towards negativity and judgment. And it worked. It was amazing. A whole different way of looking at the world. And that's something we can all practice. And for me, the important thing of that is placing yourself in connection, not in isolation.

[19:48]

You know, we have a narrative maybe that we're a separate being. Nobody gets us, nobody understands us. But actually, we can connect ourselves with other people through this kind of practice. And of course, there are societal and cultural stories as well. when I was biking around London back in the 90s there was a building I would pass every day which was maybe from the 1930s quite a pretty building and it was a local health centre and above the door was written the health of the people is the highest law I remember thinking this is a very noble sentiment the health of the people is the highest law If you look that up, it comes from Cicero, the Roman writer, historian. So there have obviously been times in history when that story was felt to be important.

[20:52]

I can't speak to how important it was when Cicero wrote it. But in the 1930s in England and after the war, there was a story that that was the case. England fought in the war and a lot of people suffered. And so there was consensus then that everyone needed looking after. And we built a state that allowed for that. And then, you know, since about 1980, I think, that dominant narrative has flipped. We live in a different time when... I don't think anyone is going to be quoting that anytime soon around here. We live in days of fragmented stories, a loss of faith in... collective truth. Politics, frankly, is rancidly cynical, was the word I came up with the other day when I was thinking about this. We have stories that somebody is one of us and somebody else is other.

[21:56]

That somebody is the oppressed. Maybe even that oppressed person may be the oppressor right now. The story that they started it. The story that indiscriminate killing and forced hunger is self-defense. These are stories lacking in nuance. And again, it's not that the stories are wrong, but they're not the whole picture. They lack bigger picture. They lack the whole, whole truth. So coherent narratives that we tell ourselves may make the world look less scary, but they leave out so much possibility of seeing things differently. And so even though we may not be able to do away with our stories, can we change our relationship to them?

[22:58]

And this is where the silence comes in. Our practice offers a lot of silence. Perhaps you've already spent part of today in silence and we could all sit in silence for a few minutes now but i don't think that would do the trick maybe 30 or 40 minutes or half a day or a whole day or a week or most of three months over and over again In that silence, you meet yourself over and over and over again. And you learn how to deal with that. And this silence offers us the freedom from our stories about the past and future. And we can't expect to get close to silence unless we're able to drop our attachment to story.

[24:16]

And there's a famous clip of Suzuki Roshi. There's a video clip that somebody managed to synchronize the sound to from Tassahara in June in 1970. in his series of talks on the Sandokai, which are in the book, Branching Streams, Flow in the Darkness. But you can find the clip on YouTube, I'm sure. He says, if you think when you're reading something, if you think the bird is there, you know, blue jay is over my roof. Blue jay is singing, but their voice is not so good, you know. And there was a lot of laughter in the Zendo because anyone who knows blue jays knows they're not very tuneful. When you think in that way, that's noise. When you are not disturbed by the blue jay, the blue jay will come right into your heart and there will be a blue jay and the blue jay will be reading something. Then the blue jay won't disturb your reading. So when we sit in zazen, when we sit in silence even just sitting reading, we find a story very quickly.

[25:34]

and have a story about these dogs. I certainly have plenty of stories to tell about that. I think we all do. Thank you, whoever you are, for coming in right on cue. I mean, I have a very San Francisco story based around this, so most of you living in San Francisco know what parrots sound like. But when I have people from out of town, I have them say, that's a parrot over there. And so sitting in Zazen, you know, often I hear the parrots. And so there's the hearing. That's the first part. Where's my sleeve completely upside down? The hearing is the first. There's the sound. And then the way our brains work, we think, oh, parrot. Yeah, okay. We have parrots in San Francisco. That's a parrot. I know what that is. And then there's a formation that goes with that.

[26:37]

Oh, I often hear parrots in the morning and the afternoon. I think the parrots are commuting somewhere. So that's the story I can make up in that moment. So whatever is happening, we can make up a story about it. Or we can let them go. So you can see when the stories come up. And when you sit in silence long enough, Some stories totally melt away. Like you might have a story about something about yourself, but you sit there and you sit there and you sit there. And you think, oh, I don't have that story anymore. Or I'm not so bound by that story anymore. And then some stories might get a bit louder in the silence. Oh, I keep thinking about this one thing. Maybe I need to pay some attention to that. Not necessarily during Sazen, but during your life, generally.

[27:39]

So there's always an invitation to behold, to notice. Oh, maybe I need to pay attention to this story. And there may be other stories that are too quiet to be heard in the everyday life that we lead. Maybe in silence there's space for new words, new feelings to come. Sensations that may be just too deeply buried. So our job is to welcome them. Bring them to light. Pay attention to them. And if they're uncomfortable and difficult, let's bear as much attention as we can, given our resources in any one moment. Some days we might say, oh yeah, I can... I have the stomach to deal with this thing that's coming up. And other days we might not. But our practice is continued curiosity, kindness and generosity towards these stories, these thoughts, these feelings that arise.

[28:53]

And this is a practice that goes on endlessly because we have endless numbers of stories coming up. So can we meet each of them? with kindness, curiosity and generosity. And I never get through a whole talk without mentioning Dogen, the founder of Japanese Soto Zen. So he has this famous formulation, there's five parts to it, but I'm only going to do three parts today. So to study the Buddha way is to study the self. So this is examining our own stories. Examining who we think we are. To study the self, he goes on, is to forget the self. So we can not be bound by these stories. Again, it's not that they go away. It's not that we can do without them.

[29:57]

But we let go of them a little bit. We change our relationship to them. We make them reference points rather than boundaries. And then when you forget the self, you are actualized by myriad things. So this is the invitation. This is the magical transformation. This is, I think, this is my story about Zen. This is what's possible. So when we get out of our own way, we have the opportunity to appreciate. So right now I'm appreciating the sunlight on the leaves out of the window. I'm appreciating everyone's expression. I'm appreciating the feeling of warmth. So if I had a story that me being here I'm giving an insufficient Dharma talk.

[31:00]

I'd be kind of bound up in anxiety and not be able to pay attention to what's going on fully. The more I can let go of that, the more I can appreciate just being here and all of you just being here. So being actualized by myriad things means that You know, the world that is constantly unfolding around us, before we make a story about it, is a pretty amazing place, even with all the difficulties. And when we get out of the way and we forget the self, you can find a lot more joy. There's joy available in every moment when you look for it. And then when you meet a person, you might have a story about, oh, this is a difficult person.

[32:14]

If you put that story down and meet the person in that moment, they become less difficult. They may not be completely easy, but your story about them being difficult doesn't hinder the meeting in the moment. And this non-hindrance is a key part of that being actualized by myriad things. And this actualization, you know, this is a word that Dogen likes a lot, this is a bodily feeling, it's a bodily sensation. It's like full spectrum living. And we don't get that when we're stuck in stories. So when you put the stories down, you have more room to meet the present moment and more room to have that full spectrum joy. And something about that allows our full, authentic self to shine through. And that full, authentic self is expressing itself moment by moment anyway.

[33:22]

But maybe we have a story that we're not actually, you know, showing ourselves. Blanche, a former abbess, who many of you will remember, used to say at Tassajara, everyone can see how you are. You might as well see it for yourself. And that is like letting go of our own stories about ourselves. Participating fully in the world around us. And not just reliving our narratives about it. Even if we think they've kept us safe up until now. And actually to really experience the world is to let go of those stories. And just be here. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[34:31]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:33]

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