Good morning. Good morning. So today is... Is it on? Can you hear me? Yes, in the back? Today is the last day, the real last day of the millennium. And tonight is New Year's Eve. Is it on? Do I have to do this? This is on. Okay, well... So tonight is New Year's Eve, and I don't know what your plans are.

[01:16]

I know a number of you will be coming out to Green Gulch for a quiet, simple sitting that lasts from, we start at 8 o'clock and goes through midnight, and different activities including noodle slurping. I guess noodle slurping is a traditional Japanese practice for me. It's long life and long noodles on New Year's Eve. So we'll be doing that, and we'll also be launching lotus boats on the pond, and there'll be a big bonfire and a hot drink after midnight where you can offer into the fire things, thoughts, and actual physical things too that you want to burn up and let go of.

[02:19]

So this is a traditional New Year's event. And then I don't think there's room anymore to take more, but some people are staying the night, which is very nice. They won't have to drive home. People can stay put in the zendo. And tomorrow morning we'll greet the new year by visiting all the different altars and offering incense and making a toast for the new year. So that's our New Year's celebration. Very simple, and it doesn't take much. It doesn't take other than our own bodies and a place to sit and a little fire here and there, and that's about it. So this is the end of the holiday season,

[03:21]

and perhaps many of you are very happy that it has come to an end. There's been a lot of partying, perhaps, and gift-giving and receiving and traveling, and just about finished. It was 30 years ago tomorrow, January 1st, that I came to San Francisco Zen Center, 300 Page Street, to, I didn't know at the time, but to stay for a long time. And the day before I came, or in the couple days before I left from St. Paul to come to San Francisco, I had what I called a bedroom sale, which is I put all my possessions out in my bedroom, out on the bed in the dresser, and then had my sisters, my true sisters, come and choose anything they wanted to take.

[04:27]

That was my bedroom sale, sort of like a garage sale, and they chose various items, promising me that they would give them back any time I would ask for them, and were very nervous about it. What am I doing? And my mother was very nervous also. Why is she giving away her watch and her earrings and all these different adornments? But I was coming to the San Francisco Zen Center to practice Zazen, and that's all I needed. I didn't need any of these extras. So on the one hand, I was very idealistic about my practice and how it was going to take care of everything, and all my unhappiness and all my depression and everything. And so I was looking forward to this with great high hopes,

[05:33]

and on the other hand, there was a lot of fear from the family members. What has she gotten into? What is this place? A cult or a strange group of people? What are they doing? It was pretty new at that time, wasn't so mainstream as it is now. And one of the things I really appreciated about Zen Center is that there was no proselytizing. I've just learned how to pronounce that word. For years I've been saying pros-to-let-izing with a T in there, but it's proselytizing, and it comes from the word proselyte, and a proselyte is a stranger. A proselyte is a stranger or one who comes to a place, comes from the root, one who comes to a place or a stranger, and also a religious convert is a proselyte.

[06:35]

So I did feel like a stranger coming to practice, and maybe many of you also feel like strangers or that this is a kind of strange place in many ways. Someone recently was mentioning how we don't take Visa cards and that that's unusual in this day and age, and that culturally speaking, that's a little odd. So what kind of place doesn't take Visa nowadays? So the root of that word proselyte means to go, one who comes to a place, a stranger. So being a stranger and then coming to a place and not feeling like anyone was proselytizing, trying to convert me, trying to change me, convert is to turn around or to change. There was just a practice that was offered, zazen, meal practices,

[07:39]

ceremonies, and work practice and all these different practices, but nobody was exerting any pressure on me, which was very freeing and very, allowed me to find my own way, what was important to me, what were my own cues that I could follow, follow my own nose. So maybe you feel that way too, that coming to Green Gulch or San Francisco Zazen and no one's proselytizing, but we are having a conversation together. So this conversation, the word conversation and convert, turns out, are also very connected. Conversation is to engage with speech,

[08:41]

our thoughts and feelings is conversation, and to converse. And part of that, the root of that is to turn. So if we're really engaged with each other about what matters to us and our thoughts and feelings, there may be a conversion, there may be a turning, but in a subtle way, without proselytizing, without anyone trying to turn anyone one way or the other, but just through contact, through intimacy, through exchange, through conversation, there may be this turning, turning towards. So in this conversation, what is it that allows people to stay and practice over time? This is part of a conversation we're right now having at Zen Center.

[09:45]

How is it, what are the causes and conditions for someone to want to come and practice over time, either residentially or in their own lives? And if we knew what those causes and conditions were, could we help create them or make them more accessible or let people know that those causes and conditions are here through getting the word out in some way, not proselytizing, but just making it accessible? And it's very hard to land on what is it that allows someone to practice over time, to continue their practice, or to want to come and stay residentially, as someone said, as a lifer, you know, for a long time. But if you look at what the elements are, nothing holds for each person.

[10:46]

Each person is uniquely, case by case, uniquely themselves. And it's mysterious how it is that someone has affinity over time and how it is that someone individuates in such a way that they turn in another direction. So it's very mysterious. The word mysterious means to shut your mouth, keep your mouth shut. We don't really know, we can't really say. So we continue our conversation, and so you can think of this talk as just part of a conversation that we're all in together. So I wanted to talk a little bit about,

[11:47]

especially at this time of year, about the consumerism, consumer mentality, and how that relates to the understanding of our practice. So my daughter just came back from college, and she mentioned how simple our holiday period was this year. She just felt it wasn't very materialistic or very consumer-oriented. We visited some family and friends and had some solid kind of people evenings, and the gifts that we exchanged were relatively low-key, and the decorations in the house or around Greenbelch were kind of low-key, and it felt very grounded to her, very simple. So I just wanted to say a little bit about consumerism, per se.

[12:54]

The word consume means to completely take up or obtain and destroy, also. Like food, when you consume it, it's completely transformed. And this was one of the gifts for this holiday called Eco-Psychology, Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. And I just wanted to read something from an essay called Are We Happy Yet? talking about consumption and greed. So consumption in the United States, it's become the primary goal of our economic policy. And after World War II, this is a quote from Victor Labal, who was a retailing analyst.

[13:57]

So this is a quote soon after World War II, so in the 50s. Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced and discarded at an ever-increasing rate. So this person is basically saying that in place of our spiritual life, our relationships, our satisfactions, human satisfactions, our spiritual satisfactions, we make the consumption of goods into rituals. Now this I think, we're familiar with this, how this has become so much of what's going on,

[15:03]

and the hollowness, the emptiness, using the word emptiness as vapidness, in terms of trying to satisfy ourselves through more and more and more consumption. And it's like samsara, where part of samsara, or the endless wheel of suffering, is the fact that part of samsara is fooling ourselves that if we just got a little bit more, or tried a little bit harder, doubled our income, got a new outfit, a new friend, a new relationship, and so forth, then we would find satisfaction and be happy. Part of samsara is that that way of thinking, that is the samsaric way of thinking, and we are fooled by it over and over again, and begin the seeking with a renewed effort,

[16:09]

looking for this way to satisfy ourselves. And it's the same with consumption. Going after material goods, and then we get the material goods, let's say, I'm talking about a certain segment of the population, and then we find that the satisfaction wasn't there, it was all a kind of big disappointment. And so we think, well, it wasn't that, we need to get the next thing in the next hand, and we go round and round on this samsaric consumption turning wheel. So, recently someone came to speak with me in one-on-one interview, and they said, for this New Year's Eve, I'm going to make a resolution.

[17:10]

I'm going to do some things that really help me, that I find really satisfying. One of those is to just come to Green Gulch more regularly on Sundays. I love coming, but I don't make it a regular thing, so I want to do that. I want to spend more time by the ocean, and I mentioned you can do those two things together, you can take a little walk, combine those, and I also want to see friends. I'd like to see my friends more often. So these are the New Year's resolutions. Now the problem with New Year's resolutions is when we set up a kind of resolution in a big way, there's a kind of shadow to it that gets set up maybe in the unconscious of some resistance about doing that great big change in our lives. So New Year's resolutions, just like diet plans, they often don't work. So how is it that we can make changes in our lives that are small and meaningful and ongoing and continue,

[18:20]

rather than big giant changes that are bound to fall apart? And also there have been studies, these are kind of odd studies, about what makes people happy. Often what actually makes people happy in this essay, Are We Happy Yet?, in these polls and so forth, have to do with things that do not need to be consumed in the usual way, meaning destroyed. The things that make people happy are spiritual practice, relationships with family and friends, music, being in nature, literature, sports, education, learning something new,

[19:25]

finding out about something, very simple things that are sustainable over time in all cultures. Dance is another. These kinds of things are what actually make people happy, and they, relatively speaking, they don't have much to do with actual wealth or consuming. So how is it that we can turn our lives, and I think we know this, these kinds of human activities, this is not a surprise. And yet, in our culture, we are often driven to keep up with longer work hours, less time for these kinds of activities that we call leisure, and leisure becomes so expensive that we've got to do something with our leisure time. We can't just let it, we can't just take a walk.

[20:32]

We've got to do something, because it's so precious. It's a kind of odd way that that, the very thing that was supposed to help us have more leisure to do these things that matter to us, that time gets withered away and shrunken. So in this new year, 2001, the year of the snake, it occurred to me that the 2001 Space Odyssey, somehow I saw in my mind 2001 Snake Odyssey for this year, 2001 Snake Odyssey. What are those things in our life that are renewing, transforming, self-renewing? The snake, by the way, the snake loses its skin and is connected with, from ancient times, self-renewal and transformation. The snake is also connected with the moon in many ancient religious

[21:40]

iconography because the moon also renews itself. It grows and diminishes and then there's this dark time and then it comes back again. So the snake and the moon are completely connected in ancient religions. In the United States, the Native Americans that were around Ohio, what's now Ohio, called the Adena tribe, who lived from about 800 B.C. to 900 A.D., created these earth mounds. You're probably familiar with them, but there's one earth mound that's called the snake earth mound, or the serpent mound, and it stretches for 1,400 feet and it snakes around this earth mound and around what they call a cosmic egg.

[22:44]

The snake lays eggs that are perfectly round and white like the moon, so there's a kind of cluster of associations from the natural world and symbolically that connect the snake with renewal, transformation, the moon, and wisdom. The moon, the snake, and feminine goddess religions and wisdom, this is all clustered together. So this is the year of the snake, so what might be our renewal this year? To continue in a transformation or a conversion, a turning towards that is meaningful, that comes from our deepest human needs, kind of rebirth.

[23:46]

We talk about our practice periods are times when we have longer extended emphasis on the schedule of sitting, meditation, and the Zen Do as the center of the hub of life. The Zen Do is always the center of the hub of life, but there are times when people come from outside to participate with us called practice periods, and we sometimes talk about those as putting a snake in a bamboo tube, putting a snake in a bamboo tube. So here you have this snake that has this enormous energy and vitality and wisdom, and yet it sometimes just... Snake, by the way, comes from the word that means crawling and creeping, and snail comes from the same root. So the snake can go all over the place, and this kind of energy can be unformed, can be formlessly all over,

[24:55]

and there may be trouble, lots of trouble that someone can get into with this kind of energy. So we put the snake into the bamboo tube, which is the schedule of the practice period, the schedule of any kind of schedule you make for yourself. It doesn't have to be Zen center's traditional schedule. Whatever schedule you make for yourself of doing those things that really matter to you, that really are kind to yourself, transforming, self-renewing, nurturing, can be a bamboo tube. And when you put the snake in, the snake goes through, and yet continues to move in a habitual way, and bump, bump, bump into the sides of the bamboo tube, which can hurt. You get bruised. But the bamboo tube as a container can hold us where we can learn what's going on, what's our tendency,

[26:05]

why do we keep bumping that same old elbow the same old way? Can we learn from that? So in this year of the snake, this image of putting a snake in a bamboo tube, what bamboo tubes are coming up for you naturally, what are you drawn towards that you know deeply are not hollow, that actually sustain you, and help you, and help others around you. So this is a kind of snake wisdom, for the year of the snake. This consumerism and materialism is not just connected up with goods and services, and new this and new that.

[27:14]

We can take that same kind of mind, the samsaric thinking mind, and even though we may let go of a lot of things, and a lot of interest, or things just don't interest us anymore in that realm, we may use that same kind of thinking and apply it to our spiritual practice. You've probably heard of the book from the 70s called Spiritual Materialism by Chogyam Rinpoche, Thungpa Rinpoche, which I always thought was a really wonderful title, kind of a wake-up title. Oh yeah, let's not kid ourselves here. What may I be doing that's just the same pattern, the same bumping in, but just a new container. And using that kind of thinking, can I get more of fill-in-the-blank of the spiritual life, that's really based on greediness, or the belief that if I could just get more of this, or if I could just accomplish this kind of practice, this stage of practice, then I would be satisfied.

[28:31]

But that's the same kind of circular thinking, just applied in more subtle realms. And I think it gets more dangerous because for someone looking in, they might say, Oh, what a marvelous practitioner you are, and a kind of idealized transference or something, a lot of projection about those people who are doing this practice and looking a certain way by virtue of outward signs. And yet, there may be just as much attachment, greed, going after, trying to get things to satisfy something, but just using different means. So I think that's something that's a very important point to remember in your spiritual practice, because we can get off very easily in that way.

[29:34]

So what is right effort in our Zazen practice, in our sitting meditation practice, or any of the other myriad practices? What is right effort? There's a term called Tathagatagarbha. The Tathagata is an epitaph or another name used for the Buddha or the awakened one. The Tathagata is the thus-come-one, the one who is arriving at this moment, awake and aware, thus-come. And Garbha is a Sanskrit word that has a lot of different meanings, but that seem to be also a cluster of meanings. So the Garbha is a covering. It's also sometimes used as matrix or womb, and also fetus or embryo.

[30:42]

You have both Garbha as womb and embryo, also a calyx. I think that's how you pronounce it. That's the cup-like leaves or petals of a blossom that are around the inner parts of the flower. That's Garbha also in Sanskrit, what's inside of the flower. So this Tathagatagarbha, the Buddha womb or embryo, or it's also from Tathagatagarbha, from this teaching around the Tathagatagarbha, also came in the Chinese-Japanese development of the same Tathagatagarbha, came the term Buddha-nature, Buddha-gatu, Buddha-nature.

[31:42]

So the teaching of Tathagatagarbha or Buddha-nature is that each and every being, each and every person has or is Tathagatagarbha. Has, is Tathagatagarbha, meaning there is Tathagata or Buddha within, or if we start talking about within and without, it begins to get very set in our minds, but is already, each person is already Buddha, Tathagata, but there's this Garbha or this covering of our delusions or our belief in our separate self or our small mind or egoistic ideas, so that it's not realized. But the teaching is that each person is Tathagatagarbha or Buddha-nature.

[32:45]

The embryo or the embryos is not everything it needs, but it isn't fully realized yet, it isn't fully born. So this sitting with that kind of faith or sitting Zazen, practicing with this faith that there already is Buddha-nature, there's nothing we have to go searching after or trying to get, because that kind of thinking just sends us off around and around in an unsatisfying turn of this wheel of samsara with our own practice. This is what Suzuki Roshi calls gaining idea, sitting with gaining idea. And it's just as in consumerism,

[33:48]

the aspect of consumerism that is destroying our world, destroying the earth. In that same way, this gaining idea can destroy our practice actually. It can eat away at our practice. It can cause our relations with one another to become disharmonious. So for me, this is a very important point to look at. What is right effort? What is sitting or doing or practicing any practice with the understanding, with the faith you might say, that Tathagatagarbha, Buddha-nature is there right now. It doesn't have to be gotten from outside. You can't get it from outside. There is no outside from which to go to get it to bring in. The family jewels are already in the family.

[34:51]

You can't bring them in from outside. That's another image of this Tathagatagarbha, that it's like a jewel in a dust heap or like a golden nugget all wrapped up in rags. These are the images that are used for Tathagatagarbha in the Tathagatagarbha Sutra. There's all these different similes of what this is to drive home this point that this is already there. This is your birthright. This is our birthright. So sitting with that kind of faith, I'm using the word faith right now somehow, with that faith or that understanding is sitting with right effort rather than the consumer mind. Okay, I'm going to do this many periods of zazen and then this is going to happen and then I'll get to this stage and that stage. And yet I think 30 years ago when I came in the door of Zen Center, I don't think it would have been possible for me to come in the door

[35:55]

without some idea that this practice was going to help me somehow. If someone were to tell me about, actually I did hear about Buddha Nature and when I heard it, it was like the good news. It was like good news, chariots are coming. It was just like this was amazing grace to hear that this was possible, but it felt very, very far away. Although something resonated within me that I could drop this kind of worldly chasing and running and trying to get better that I already was, there was Buddha Nature already there. I just had to realize it. There's this quote from an advertising agent in this essay

[36:57]

that the job of the advertising agency, this is B. Earl Puppet, head of the Allied Stores Corporation, put it 40 years ago, it is our job to make women unhappy with what they have. And so if you're born with long hair, short hair, curly hair, straight hair, it doesn't matter, it is our job to make you unhappy with what you have. You know, too big, too small, too dark, too light, whatever. And so that we can get those products that will make it right. So to drop that, to drop that and drop into we have everything we need and this is not to diminish the enormous need that many, many, many people,

[38:08]

millions of people have in this world. I feel like the fact that you're all here listening means that you have enough to get you up in the morning and dressed and out here somehow to listen to this talk, to go for a walk. So I don't mean to minimize the need in this world. But it turns out that this happiness does not depend on relative wealth, actually. It has to do with our human relationships and these other areas of our life. So Suzuki Roshi talks about this point in many different places about gaining idea, but in this one lecture in the Windmill from 99 Spring Summer,

[39:16]

he talks about being warm-hearted. You may think you need to be warm-hearted and kind, we need to be warm-hearted and kind with ourselves because this mind that goes round and round trying to get more things is not very kind to the world and to our own psyche and our own reality of our own life. It is not warm-hearted and kind. It's always saying you don't have what it takes, you're not good enough, you have got to try harder and get working. It doesn't leave any room. This is not kind. So you may think you are very warm-hearted, but when you try to understand how warm, you cannot actually measure the temperature of your feeling. Yet when you see yourself in the mirror or water with warm feeling, that is actually you, and whatever you do, you are there. This is looking at the whole world and everything that we see as our own big mind,

[40:35]

as a reflection of our own thus-come-one, the Tathagata. And when you look that way, look at yourself and the whole world that way, with warm feeling and kindness, there is nothing to get. There is nothing we need to bring in. In 1971, when I came that first year, Suzuki Roshi was still alive and living at Page Street, and I remember going up to the roof garden at 300 Page Street. There is a garden, and I was up there just looking out over the city and wandering around, and Suzuki Roshi came up just all by himself, and I thought, oh, now is my chance, the Zen Master has come. So I was kind of, I don't know what, I was really ready for some koan to happen right then and there. And it did. What happened was, he pointed to this,

[41:39]

there's windows, kind of windbreak up on the roof garden, these windows, and he pointed to the window and he said, look. And I looked, and I didn't see anything, I just saw the window and San Francisco. And I said, the buildings? And he said, no, look, look. And I looked, and I was just straining and struggling, what is he asking me to look at, you know, this is my chance, don't blow it, girl, you know. And I was saying other things, you mean that, you mean that? I was looking through the window out into San Francisco, I said, that over there? And he said, no, look. And then finally he had to tell me, he said, the reflection, there was like a wind chime that had a little moving little diddly-bop on the bottom that was being reflected on the window in a very beautiful way. And he said, the reflection. But I had, there was the reflection on the window, but I had been looking right through it out, somewhere out into San Francisco.

[42:40]

This, that, that? So this thing I read to you just now seemed a little out of context, but I wanted to tell that story. When Tozan looked in the river and saw his reflection, he was enlightened, this was one of our ancestors. And Suzuki Roshi, about that moment, when he sees, Tozan sees himself and says, I now am not it, it now is me. And also, if you look outside yourself, that's not it, you're going to never find it that way. If you seek outside yourself, I am now it, it now is not me. Wherever I go, I encounter it. So, on that koan, or that poem, Suzuki Roshi says, actually, you are in the river. You may say that it is just a shadow or a reflection, but if you see carefully with warm-hearted feeling, that is you.

[43:43]

So, that reminded me of this experience. You may say, oh, in fact, I did say, was he pointing this out? It's just a reflection of this little paper thing on the bottom of the wind chime. Why is he pointing this out? Because I was trying to get something more. There had to be something behind what he was doing. But he was just pointing out this reflection that was beautiful and catching the light. You may say that is just a shadow or a reflection, but if you see carefully with warm-hearted feeling, that is you. So, this is still a koan from what he was pointing out for me, right then and there, but my vow is with full confidence to sit knowing that that is me.

[44:44]

And these vows have enormous, as opposed to these New Year's resolutions, vows have enormous power, but very, very subtle. We actually talk about the inner cellular changes that happen when you make vows, and public vows, like receiving precepts. It's avijñapti rūpa, that's a subtle material, and there's a change in a very subtle way that you can't actually see necessarily, or someone may look radiant or calm after a wonderful ceremony, but the changes happen inside, and it's very subtle. And that doesn't set up, as I was saying, this counter-resistance that says, forget it, I'm going to have whatever I want. It's so subtle that that doesn't get created and constellated.

[45:52]

I was listening to NPR about a, maybe you caught this program, a violinist who had, a very good violinist who bought from a violinist who had muscular dystrophy. His name, I can't remember, June, some Delay, say, Jacqueline Dupre, and she had a Stradivarius, she had two, and he bought one of her Stradivarius violins and was playing one of the pieces that she always played, and he said the violin played it differently than other violins. He said the molecular structure of the violin, the wood molecules, after being played over and over, this concerto or whatever it was, conveys the music in a very particular way, different from another instrument. The molecules are actually changed by the playing. And I thought, Habeshnapti Rupa, there it is.

[46:54]

It's so subtle, but you can probably, with some kind of machine, measure how, but he could tell from his playing how different it was. And it's the same with our vows. We make these vows, and it's like, we're like Stradivarius violins, you know, and you make these vows, take these vows, receive, give and receive these vows, and there are changes that are made very subtly, and these are what turn us and help us to settle ourselves, settle where we need to settle, and where this turning of this endless wheel begins to turn the other way, turn back the other way. This is conversion. This is true conversion with no pressure. This is our own inner, thorough, thorough turning. So in Year of the Snake, I invite you all to use this place,

[48:09]

to come here, come here often, come here to do the things that are satisfying. There's wonderful ways you can participate here. We invite you to participate in working in the garden, helping out in the kitchen, helping by just coming on Sundays, but to become involved in many different ways. It may not seem like it's open, or that you're not invited because of this non-proselytizing way, you know, but I just want to extend this invitation to everyone to take care of this place and take care of yourself by taking care of this place so that we can maintain and sustain Buddhadharma forever. Happy New Year.

[49:10]

Thank you.

[49:12]

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