Good evening. I've been in a number of situations lately where good people disagree. People who are really trying their best to take care of things and take care of people still have a different idea of how to do that. Preparing for this lecture, this piece of paper fell out of my books,

[01:05]

And some of you have heard this before. This is a poem that was given to me by a good friend of mine. I mostly try to avoid conflict at all costs. No, that's something I practice with. That's my habit. And now I try to be more honest than that. But this friend, still that's my habit, avoid conflict. This friend, however, seems to bring out something different in me. Everything she says makes me disagree. And we've been friends for a very long time. And I think that she gave me this once when we were either having a disagreement or just reunited after a disagreement. So this is a Zen poem. I don't know where it's from. It says at the bottom, Genro. I guess that's the name of the person who wrote it. Anyway, it goes like this. True friendship is beyond intimacy and alienation.

[02:08]

Between meeting and not meeting, no difference. On the fully blossomed plum tree, South Branch owns the whole spring. North Branch owns the whole spring. When I read this tonight, I felt again how... hard that is. You know, how to really feel like there's some true friendship beyond intimacy and alienation. You know, that friendship doesn't rest on intimacy. And if we get alienated from our friends, that's it. I mean, we may make up with them. They may come to see the truth. Laughter Not always. Sometimes we actually... Between meeting and not meeting, no difference? That's ridiculous, right? We would really rather meet than... I assume not meeting means you're trying to meet, but you just can't.

[03:19]

Or you're not trying. Maybe you're beyond trying. And those two, there's a difference there. There's a real... difference in my preferences, you know, I definitely prefer harmony. And then the last part, on the fully blossomed plum tree, South Branch owns the whole spring, North Branch owns the whole spring, I think means, you know, in, we could say, in enlightenment, in wholeness, in completeness, Everybody, everything contains the whole truth. So in these disagreements, somehow, I think this Zen master, this poem is saying, somehow the truth is there in all sides. How do we actually get to a truth that feels to us alien?

[04:28]

How do we come to understand each other? How do we come to understand ourselves? So that's kind of what I want to talk about tonight, or one way of saying it. Another way is this phrase of Dogon's, which I really like, which is, I mean, it starts the... It's from the Gakudoyo Jinshu, which is the guidelines for studying the way, something that Dogen wrote, and it starts saying this dharma, and we might as well say this dharma, is such that it cannot be attained by groping or searching about, which is our normal way of trying to attain dharma or knowledge or understanding as we start... grasping at it with our mind and taking it apart and trying to figure out what it's saying.

[05:32]

So he starts right off by saying, that's not going to be the way to get to this truth. The next sentence is the one that I really like. By bowing formally and stepping inward, you stumble into the realm of great ease. That's what he said. By bowing formally and And stepping inward, you stumble into the realm of great ease. So this realm of great ease, I think, is the place where we can be with differing ideas, not by giving in, not by just pretending to agree or running away, but by actually giving being there by bowing formally and stepping inward. So what in heaven's name does that mean?

[06:33]

This morning in service, you know, we do a chanting and bowing, for those of you who maybe don't come to the service, we do a chanting and bowing service every morning. In the summer, it only lasts about 20 to 25 minutes. In the winter, it's more like 40 minutes, chanting and bowing. And I wondered, as I often have, why are we doing this? That thought comes into my mind. And actually, I like service quite a bit. In some ways, it's easier than zazen because you're doing something. Something, you know, you can actually move around and try. So, you know, you bow and then you chant and try to chant with everybody and... There are lots and lots of opinions about all of this. Like some people say, why do we chant in Japanese? I can't follow it. I can't remember it. I can't tell what it's saying. Other people say, why do we chant in English?

[07:37]

It's so much harder to chant. Some people say, why do we go so fast? I can't understand what it's saying. Other people say, why are we chanting these words that just confuse me with my meditation when I'm trying to be concentrated. So there are lots of questions about this service thing that we do and the Japanese teachers that I know and the teachers at Zen Center who were the closest to the Japanese teachers mostly say if you ask them why do we do this they say just do it. This is a wonderful answer and I'm sure it's the true one. In fact I'm quite sure it's a true one from my own experience. Something is happening, sort of like Zazen. What is going on there? I have, anyway, lots of thoughts about that, but really do I know? No. And the same is true with service. It's like something is happening.

[08:38]

So I'm going to expound on what I think might be happening, even though the true teachers said, just do it, so don't believe what I say. this morning I thought and I thought before in some ways it's like in my imagination there is this wonderful old Native American man in my imagination could be a woman just as easily now that I'm thinking about it he'll probably change to a woman who stands on a hilltop with every morning, and does some kind of gesture to the sun coming up, you know, some thank you, some gratitude to the world. And in my imagination, that's a beautiful thing. And it's a beautiful thing that it happens every single morning.

[09:41]

And somehow this service is like that. It's a different tradition, but it's a way of saying thank you. One of our abbots, Steve Stuckey, who died of cancer a few years ago when he knew that he was dying, he told us that he had this practice of every morning when he woke up, the first thing he did was... say thank you for something, to express gratitude for something. It was different every day. Something would come up and he would just say, I'm grateful for whatever came to his mind, which, you know, I think is a wonderful practice. I haven't been able to remember to do it. The wake-up bell happens and get up and go. But by service time, there's a reminder to say thank you.

[10:44]

And I guess what I've feel saying thank you to and service. It's not exactly, I mean, service, we do things like, you know, chant these traditional texts and also list, you know, like list the names of some of our ancestors and our lineage. And lately we've added a bunch of women Buddhist teachers who some scholars have discovered, you know, They are ancient women, some of them, or all of them are, but they had to be sort of uncovered in history, and we put them together in some kind of a, it's not really a lineage, because they're not passing down, but they are people, women, who have been teaching Buddhism, practicing Buddhism in India, China, and Japan.

[11:46]

And we felt like that was important to add these women teachers to the men that we've been chanting for all these years. So there's one way of seeing the gratitude of service is to this lineage, to these lineages of people who've been passing it down. And I think that's great. That's not how I usually think of it. I usually think of it as gratitude to, one way of saying it is Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. But the way that I think of that is, to Buddha, is gratitude that the way the world works is the way it is, as I understand it now. And by that I mean that everything is connected and nothing is stuck. Everything is happening. Everything is being made by everything else, and nothing is stuck the way it is.

[12:51]

It keeps changing. Therefore, my little part in it can make a difference, and it's immense. It's so connected. So gratitude for the way the universe is... Gratitude, I guess, for life. And then gratitude for Dharma. So that's kind of gratitude for Buddha, my definition of Buddha in this talk anyway. Gratitude for Dharma. Dharma is the teaching. So I think of it, or I am thinking of it tonight, as gratitude that some people actually spent the time and energy to... figure out ways of saying how the universe works and how we might practice in it, and of experiencing something like zazen and something like the life of a monastery, how people live together in a monastery, and took the trouble to discover those things and to put them down in some way that could be passed on to us.

[14:08]

So gratitude for dharma, gratitude for... passing on this understanding and practice that we could follow. And then gratitude for Sangha, in some ways, is the easiest for me. Sangha is the people that you practice with, which could be the people in this room or the whole world. So gratitude to be joined in... trying to live a life that causes less suffering instead of more suffering. So this bowing formally and stepping inward I think could be epitomized by service, like bowing and bowing and bowing and chanting and chanting and chanting formally.

[15:09]

Of course, Service happens at a certain time of day, and we would like to stumble into the realm of great ease all the time. Especially when we're not feeling it. When we're feeling like this is not the realm of great ease. When we're feeling like there are people who I care about who I'm disagreeing with. How then do we bow formally? Is this a... Is this a practice that we can use then of bowing formally and stepping inward? And does it result in stumbling into the realm of great ease? This is something that we can be looking at and trying and experimenting, so I certainly can't tell you for sure. But I think, you know, if you're... If you find yourself in an argument with somebody, they might think it was a little strange if you suddenly bowed formally.

[16:10]

And certainly if you did like full prostrations. That's probably a little too formal. But I think there's a kind of attitude of bowing formally, which is respect. You know, which is respect, just that. It's like, oh, here is... the world. Here is this situation. Here is this person. And remembering that attitude and having that intention or almost like internal experience of bowing formally, of trying to make some space in our in our worldview for here's another way of being that's different than what I had imagined or hoped for or want to be or any number of things.

[17:16]

And then the stepping inward, so this is respecting the situation, and then the stepping inward I think is acknowledging and taking our place It's like, I am part of this situation. Whoever this person is, I'm connected to making them who they are. Who I am, how I'm responding is intimately connected to who they are and how they respond. So it's kind of ownership. It's stepping inward into my place in this situation and being there, staying there as much as possible. How do I be... close to what's actually going on over here. If I'm feeling rage or fear or, you know, to stay close to that, to not run away from that either by actually running away or by lashing out or arguing or trying to be nice are many ways of taking care of situations.

[18:27]

There's another Dogen phrase that I really like and think it also describes the same attitude. It's in a different verse. It's in Only a Buddha and a Buddha. A different... Yobutsu? Not sure. Something like that. Only a Buddha and a Buddha. And... Here it is. So the first sentence just kind of sets the tone. Unsurpassed wisdom is to be unstained by the confusion between what is and what I wish for. So unsurpassed wisdom is to be unstained by the confusion between what's actually happening and what I want it to be. Being unstained is like meeting a person and not considering what they look like.

[19:38]

Also, it is like not wishing for more color or brightness when viewing flowers or the moon. So, being unstained. Unsurpassed wisdom is being unstained. Being unstained is like... You know, looking at flowers or the moon and not wishing it was different. That sounds really simple, doesn't it? That's like bowing formally, like here's a flower and stepping inward and being in your place. Here's a person who's saying something I don't agree with and stepping inward and being in my place, which doesn't mean... never saying anything. It means interacting truthfully from there. It means sometimes it might mean really running as fast as you can in the other direction. You know, if you actually respect what's in front of you.

[20:47]

But a lot of the time in our life, that isn't what it means. It means letting it really... It's difficult, you know? It's like... Having intimacy and alienation both still be the container for friendship. Being on a plum tree that's fully blossoming where the other branch has a whole different kind of flower and you thought plum blossoms look like this and that side of the tree they look like that. Not caring what the person looks like. We've all had that experience. There are plenty of people that we do care what they look like. Especially we look in the mirror, we care what that person looks like, but there are people that we've met that we don't really care what they look like. They're fine. They're just who they are. It's like that. It's like just the simple acceptance. Dogen goes on to say, Spring has the tone of spring, and autumn the scene of autumn.

[21:58]

When you want spring or autumn to be different from what it is, notice that it can only be as it is. Again, pretty straightforward. When you want, you know, when you want, maybe it's easier with spring and autumn than summer and winter. When you want summer to not be so hot, still, it's pretty clear, it's possible to notice all your wishing. All you're arguing with it is actually not having the desired effect. It's keeping you far from the realm of great ease. Or when you want to keep spring or autumn as it is, reflect that it has no unchanging nature. There's no way to stop spring from turning into usually summer. Once in a while, a little return of winter. So this bowing formally and stepping inward and staying then close to what's happening here so that we can express fully and accurately this part of the mandala of all creation.

[23:20]

So that we can express... this part of the friendship, this part of the universe. What am I feeling over here? And be able to do it not as if it's a stuck thing. This is how I feel now. Not always in words. We don't always express it in words. We might express it some other way to express ourselves, but as something that accurately, really, like the spring and the autumn, is changing. And we don't have to protect it and make sure that it can stay just the way it is, that our ideas, our feelings never change. They change. And if we're stepping inward and staying there, we can feel that it's okay that they change. We can feel that they are changing. Checking to see the time somewhere in here is the time.

[24:37]

Oh, it's right there, too. Except it's in that funny kind of time. This is, yes. I want to stop and see if you have anything that you would like to say or ask. Yes, Brian. Well, I was sort of thinking about this. I was sweeping leaves off the path. you know, the leaves will come back. Yes. So what is the purpose of doing actions like that? Yeah. Well, some of them, like, you know, dishes, we do them so that we can make them dirty again and then make them clean again. The path is kind of like that, you know. If we just let the leaves build up, eventually it would be hard to find the path. So that's one reason that we do it. We have some idea of how to maintain our life, and we do those things just to take care of our life.

[25:45]

Also, I think we do it to, here anyway, we do it to have something to do. Some harmless, mostly harmless, work, to keep us busy. We're trouble. Human beings are, you know, the old saying, idle hands are the devil's playground or something like that. There's some truth in that, that it helps us to have things to do. I mean, of course, in your life it's wonderful to have free time and all that, but that's not probably what you came to Tassar for. I mean, some of the guests did. That's great. Enjoy yourself. Vacations are wonderful, but that's not what you came to Tassar. If it was, you made a big mistake. Is there anything else?

[26:50]

Oh, it sounds like yours did, right? Like you were sweeping and you're like, oh, well, this is really... If I think I'm going to be able to sweep this clean and keep it that way, I am going to be greatly disappointed. So I think that would help, right? Yeah. Thank you. Anybody else? I'll give you another minute. And then if you don't have anything, I will read the poem again. Yes, Lucy. So how do you work with your tendency to agree and how do you work with conflict? Yeah. Well, it was really helpful for me to see that my tendency to agree was based on fear. You know, that I... When I'm agreeing, either...

[27:59]

compulsively or habitually or when I'm agreeing when I don't really agree. Which, you know, in some ways is pretty easy for me because I... Anyway, when I noticed that, when I saw that's what I was doing and I stepped inward further, I saw at the bottom of that for me, or at least as bottom as I've seen so far, was a feeling of fear and And it's really, you know, like, what am I afraid of? Just the fact that I might be disagreeing with somebody. In my blessed life, disagreeing has really been actually dangerous, rarely been. Maybe I don't even know if ever has been actually dangerous. That's not true for everybody. But often, even for people who has been dangerous to disagree, It isn't always dangerous to disagree, but we have that feeling like it was dangerous once, or it was dangerous a lot, or in my case, it just seemed like it might be dangerous.

[29:15]

So to actually see and experience the fear at the bottom, let's just distinguish between those. Without much thinking, it actually is just clear, like, oh, this is fear and right now this fear is not accurate. Or right now this fear is accurate. And as I said, sometimes like run in the other direction. But so to get... I think it really helps to get closer to what is happening over here just in order to be able to have an accurate response. And then it's true, even if we do that, sometimes we have very strong habits that still... continue to you know habits they happen because we've been doing them a lot they tend to continue happening and the main way to break habits there's the insight into this is actually not what I want to be doing but then the way to break a habit is actually to do something different that's what you know I used to bite my fingernails the way to stop biting your fingernails is to stop biting your fingernails it's like that's it and

[30:30]

It can feel really frustrating if you just notice that you've just bitten your fingernails again. But the thing is, when you notice, stop. Habits tend to go on without our noticing. Fine, there's not much you can do about that. It doesn't really do much good to beat yourself up about it. It's just when you notice, I mean, I suppose that's why they have you put something bad tasting on there so you'll notice it faster, right? So in something like... agreeing when you don't really agree, if in the middle of doing it you suddenly notice, oh, I'm doing it again, do something different. If you can't bring yourself to say, I disagree. In spite of what I'm saying, I disagree. If you can't do that, at least say, wait, I need more time. Or if you're standing up, and you're near a chair, sit down.

[31:33]

Or do something just to break the habit. Okay. Thank you. One more chance. Yes? Say that again. Oh, reading that phrase again? From the Gakudoyo Jinshu? The main phrase I read was... There's a whole long thing which I didn't read, but by bowing formally and stepping inward, you stumble into the realm of great ease. Then goes on to say, however... In mind and body, there is no abiding, no attaching, no standing still, and no stagnating. There is entirely nothing to hold on to. Please try releasing your hold. So that realm of great ease... It can be kind of scary, too.

[32:34]

Thank you. Yes? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're... Say that last part again. It's so difficult. That you think you are. I think that's really the crux of so much of our suffering is our idea of who we are gets threatened. And, you know, our idea of who we are is it's really not a thing. You know, we have a lot of ideas of who we are, and we just pull them out or pull them in when they arise. Yes, somehow it appears in contrast to someone.

[33:39]

But to notice that that's what's happening, to have had that experience of seeing it, oh, this is an idea of who I am. That's a huge first step. And then this stepping inward and being with who you actually are, who is not an idea and not even a thing. You know, it's who you are right now, which is a constantly changing thing and is not really going to be damaged by someone's idea of who they are, right? Now, if they start throwing punches or something, you know, you might be damaged slightly. But then back up a little bit, yes. Yes. But mostly that's not what's really happening. You know, it's that, just like you said, my idea of who I am is being threatened. And that leads us to either disagree or agree or really sort of whatever's worked for us in the past but is not necessarily accurate to the moment.

[34:44]

So that is usually the fear that's at the bottom of our suffering-causing actions and thoughts. Thank you. Okay. I'll read this poem one more time and we will end for tonight. True friendship is beyond intimacy and alienation. Between meeting and not meeting, no difference. On the fully blossomed plum tree, South Branch owns the whole spring, North Branch owns the whole spring. Thank you very much. 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, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[35:48]

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