This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Welcome to Green Dragon Temple. This is a room. we call the zendo. This is where we take care of important business. What's most important to know what's happening moment by moment. For most of us it takes a little, say, process of coming to this moment. I don't know if everyone here feels that you've actually arrived.

[01:06]

Have you arrived? I think this is, you know, it's good to know this is a unique occasion. People gathered here today are here this one time. And to fully appreciate that, sometimes I think, oh, I missed something. I'm not fully present. So then, what's the practice to ask? Where is the present moment? What does it feel like to be right here? So this can be expressed in various ways. In China, maybe eighth century, if you can imagine, there were a couple of monks who are good friends.

[02:15]

They're Dharma brothers. They've been practicing together under the same teacher for some time. And then maybe it's raining. They get together for some dry place and what to do. One of them takes out his little sewing kit and starts threading the needle. And the other one says, what are you doing? He says, mending. And then he says, so how is it for you, mending? one stitch is like the next. And then the first monk says, we've been traveling together for 20 years. How can you say such a thing?

[03:18]

Where do you come up with such craftiness and strategies? And so then the other monk says, well, how do you mend? How is it when you're mending? And the first one says, it's like the entire earth spewing forth fire. So I really like that story. And I've been working with Lee Lipp this weekend teaching something about how mindfulness practice, attention to this moment transforms. And how there's inner, there may be inner fire and outer fire. Inner fire may feel like that.

[04:26]

The entire, the entire earth. spewing forth flames. Outer fire may feel a little cooler, depending on proximity. Sometimes we meet each other as fire. So fire is in my mind a little bit because there's a book release called Fire Monks. And the author, Colleen Bush, is here. Colleen, good to see you. This book has to do with a story of fire in Tassajara, around Tassajara, our monastery down in Monterey County in the Los Padres National Forest in the Ventana Wilderness.

[05:31]

I know many of you have been there. But I think the story really has to do with how you meet your life. How you meet your life moment by moment. I want to read a section from... Dogen Zenji, Gesen Master Dogen. This is from the instructions to the cook. So there's very specific ways that you need to meet your life if you're a cook in the monastery. But then there's some very great overriding principles. Dogen says, with resolve and sincerity, one should aim to exceed the ancients in purity and surpass the former worthies in attentiveness.

[06:40]

The way to put that aspiration into practice in one's own person is, for example, to take the same materials that one's predecessor spent to make a soup of the crudest greens and use them now to make a soup of the finest cream. This is difficult to do, he says. So, you know, we've always known this is difficult to do. What's the soup of the crudest greens and what's the soup of the finest cream? Is it the same soup? You know, we say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Do you see the soup as poor and inferior and you want some other soup? Or do you see this soup as the production of the total unified activity of the universe manifesting itself?

[07:42]

We have this opportunity to take a look. And also take a look at ourselves and how we tend to maybe have some bias one way or another. Dogen goes on to say, after he says, this is difficult to do, he says, why is that? Because present and past are completely different, like the distance between heaven and earth, how could we ever be able to equal the stature of our ancestors? Nevertheless, when we work mindfully, therein lies the principle, that makes it possible to surpass our predecessors. So the most fundamental thing he points to here is attentive, carefully attending mindfulness. Says that you do not grasp the certainty of this principle is because your thinking scatters.

[08:57]

So if you don't have confidence in this principle of mindful attentiveness to living this moment, meeting this moment, there's some way in which this moment is being obscured. The way this moment is being obscured is by the mind scattering. He says, the mind scattering like wild horses and your emotions run wild like monkeys in a forest. So it points to thinking, thinking, scattering, and emotions like monkeys. This may be, I don't know if he's disparaging monkeys. Monkeys may actually be paying attention. But when you look at them, okay. This is an image of kind of scattered, distracted, But sometimes monkeys are used as an image of a grasping mind.

[10:00]

The mind that hangs on to something even when it's foolish to be holding on to something. When I first came to Zen Center, one of the teachers was talking about a monkey trap that was a hollowed out coconut shell with a little hole and put a little tasty morsel inside. And on the other end of the coconut shell is a cord that runs back to someone who's watching the monkey approach and reach in and grab hold of the little morsel. But inside, the monkey can't get his fist out. So he gets dragged along until he's captured. So there's maybe that image of monkey mind grasping at something. Consumed with the idea that, oh, this is... going to be really tasty. Hadogan says, if you can make those monkeys and horses just once, take the backward step that turns the light and shines it inward, then naturally you will become completely integrated.

[11:12]

Just take the backward, excuse me, the backward step shining the light inward, then naturally, it will become completely integrated. This is the means by which we, who are ordinarily set in motion by things, become able to set things into motion. Harmonizing and purifying yourself in this manner, do not lose either the I, wisdom, the one I, or the two I's of discriminating consciousness. So he says harmonizing in this way, you don't lose either one of your capacities, the capacity to see things as one and to see things as each precise and particular.

[12:18]

So we all have this this capacity, and we often get caught with limiting ourselves, seeing things in just one way. So I want to come back for a moment to the Fire Monks. There's a book called, the book is called Fire Monks. Someone actually came up to me this morning and said, I hear you're one of the fire monks. And I thought, I wonder about that. In our workshop yesterday, and talking about feeling of anger, my own experience of fire has been my own anger. Or more properly, rage. Probably everyone here knows that you've been mistreated in some way.

[13:27]

Sometime in your life, maybe you were mistreated. Even by people with good intentions. In my case, I was a difficult child. My parents, particularly my father, you know, had the best intentions and treated me very well, he thought. And I thought I was really being put upon. Simply because he had his idea about how I should be. This is a fundamental problem. Anytime someone else has an idea about how you should be, or even if you have an idea about how you yourself should be, And then you're not that way. So this made me very angry. But I couldn't be angry because our family didn't condone. We were a peaceful family.

[14:31]

We were a harmonious family. So my experience of being a fire monk is sitting here Sometimes in this endo and sometimes in other meditations hall, particularly during seshin, where you go for a sip for some days and feeling how angry I am. Feeling the intensity of that and trying to get away from it and not being able to get away from it. And finally deciding, oh, I actually have to meet this. And what does it mean to meet it? It means to become very intimately familiar with the experience. now even though it's the experience now is referring to some things in the past but the experience right now is what's coloring the things in the past so when someone says you know are you a fire monk well sometimes maybe sometimes i do get angry so for me it means more like that but there's

[15:41]

This reference in the book to a cartoon that Tom Myers created after the fire at Tassajara, in which, and there's a little copy of, a print of the cartoon in the book, but it has someone meeting fire, a little monk meeting fire. And the little monk is saying to the fire, you know, I feel your... You're angry. The fire says something like, well, what do you expect? I'm fire. And the little monk says, I haven't looked at this for a while, so I don't exactly remember, but the monk says, well, when were you born? And the fire says, June 21st. The little monk says, well, you're a cancer. You're a cancer sign. You actually need more water. Yeah. Something like that.

[16:44]

So they have this dialogue, and then the fire finally says, I guess I do need to calm down a bit. And then when the fire professionals appear on the scene, and then there's a little character, a little baby that says, I want to be a fire monk when I grow up. So I thought, well, that's kind of cute. I want to say a couple of things about Tassahara and fire. Tassahara will hopefully be a Zen monastery for a long time to come, and many fires will come. And we never know how to respond, actually. So I don't want the story in this book to be like some kind of an obligation of how you should respond. some particular expectation, because each situation is different.

[17:49]

Each situation being different means that, as practitioners, we're willing to be in the place of not knowing. And at the same time, not setting aside or discriminating consciousness. As Dogen says, you need both the mind that doesn't know. That's actually the mind of wisdom. The mind of wisdom doesn't know and knows it's impossible to know and is willing to be present in not knowing. And the mind of discriminating consciousness is paying attention to the exact details of the situation, not ignoring anything, knowing that everything counts. Every detail counts. In this case, in 2008, so this is about the third anniversary of that fire. In this case, we had a lot of time to prepare Tassahara.

[18:55]

Many people helped to prepare Tassahara after the lightning struck and the fire started, and there were many days, weeks, before the fire came in. I'm actually concerned that we don't maintain our vigilance 20 years from now. or whenever the next fire comes in, because we won't always have three weeks. We may have three hours. We may have virtually no time at all. It may be that the only thing to do is get out of there. So it depends on preparation. This time, the creek was running well. I'm very grateful to Tassar Creek. supplying a continuous supply of water. We had enough pumps to pump the water. We had a system to distribute the water over the rooftops of virtually every building at Tassajara.

[19:57]

Sprinkler systems that spread the water about. So all those were creating a place that was defensible, a refuge. So we were fortunate, I'd say. When I was at Tassajara a couple of weeks ago, someone asked, well, how do you feel about this story now about the fire? Well, the story is maybe helpful. I think it's helpful if people can see it as a story about one particular set of circumstances for how people can meet what happens, you know, with the mind that does not know and the mind that does know. The mind that knows that it's not possible to know what's happening and the mind that does know in detail what is the contour of the land, what are the resources at Tassajara, really knows where things are.

[21:14]

knows what the space is and how to move around in it. There's something that's kind of a knowledge that's in the body. So I hope that the book is helpful to inspire people to meet, for each one of you, to meet your own life, when sometimes it seems like fire, whether the fire is internal. in your own emotions, or the fire is in the surrounds, in the environment. So just like the two monks mending, one monk sees mending, oh, stitch by stitch. One stitch like the next. The other monk says, it's like the earth spewing forth fire. Now, do you think their mending looks the same?

[22:20]

I think about sewing a robe. This is, as we call, okay, Buddha's robe. And we have a practice here at Zen Center in our lineage of sewing our own robe. Or sometimes you see some people have a rock we call rakasu, a smaller version of the robe, which looks kind of like a bib. And people who become practitioners here, whether they're residents or not, can take the bodhisattva vows, take the precepts, receive them, and acknowledge that dedication and that commitment in sewing the rope. And each stitch is an opportunity for mindful attention. With each stitch, one dives into... the body of Buddha, the body of the mind that is boundless.

[23:21]

So I think actually that each of these two monks in the story would be sewing in a way that looks almost the same. Of course, each one has their own personality in the stitches, but the stitches are very regular. So when the one is sewing in the midst of fire and the other one is sewing as completely ordinary, stitch by stitch, amazing how this can look to someone looking at the mending, say, oh, yeah, it looks good. It looks like you're paying attention. It looks like there's mindfulness. in each stitch. So I want to acknowledge this in the case of the story of Tassajara and the fire and some people staying at Tassajara and most people not staying at Tassajara.

[24:42]

My feeling is, you know, everyone did the right thing according to their own true, sincere responsibility that each person, including the fire service, we had an event at City Center on Thursday, and there was one person from the command structure He was one of the people who was in charge of sending firefighting resources into the fire. And he explained why they didn't send in, why they decided not to send in professional resources to fight the fire. And I thought, yeah, his explanation made a lot of sense. I can see from his point of view that this, and I talked with him afterwards, I thanked him for coming and expressing himself. I felt, you know, this was just perfect.

[25:44]

He did what he needed to do. And that was part of what was actually supporting the whole situation. It's very interesting that what we intend as a result is not necessarily the result. So we have to take that into account. It's kind of mysterious sometimes how things unfold. So the person who, you know, there are a number of people who were, he said it was a very, they had a very kind of contentious decision-making meeting where someone else was arguing for sending in, you know, some professional firefighters. And he was holding the line saying, no, we must not do this. It's not, it doesn't really fit. our policies and our guidelines and our best judgment of what should be done.

[26:48]

So this is one of the things that I do want people to take away with, if you read the book, if you wish to, to take away from it some sense of the sincerity. And I think Colleen interviewed everyone very carefully and very respectfully. And putting together the book, I think she makes an effort to present everyone's role in a way that is as true as she could make it, to respect their own perspective and their own sincerity. So to realize then that this, maybe the message is that you can find some inspiration for yourself. After the event at City Center on Thursday, someone else came up to me who lived in Big Sur, and he said that he had read the book two days ago, or three days ago, and he had

[28:07]

he had found it very helpful in working with his own family difficulties. He said it helped him in working with his own son and his relationship with his son and some challenges they were having as a family. So I felt, okay, well, that's a good sign that this may be helpful in other ways. So... So right now I don't feel like I'm a fire monk. Who I am has to change moment by moment. Who you are I think also is a little different responding to circumstances as you go through the day. Sometimes you are dealing with lighting a stove. Sometimes you're involved in talking to a friend Sometimes you're involved in driving on the freeway.

[29:14]

There was a sign on the road here for quite a while. It said, be prepared to stop. And then they were doing a lot of construction up here. And it said, be prepared. I thought this was great. As you're approaching Green Gulch, as you're approaching Green Dragon Temple, you should be prepared to stop. We should probably have that sign just right outside the Zendo. So you can come in and you're ready and you know, okay, time to stop. And then when you sit down, okay, you become a person who is stopping, who is stopped. And then you may notice, so things that aren't stopped. You may notice the thoughts that come up that aren't stopped. You may notice the feelings that come up that may be even unwelcome.

[30:18]

So the unwelcoming part of you is resisting letting something else stop. You think it shouldn't be like that, right? To let things stop is to actually acknowledge that things are just the way they are right now. Completely to acknowledge and accept things right now can be no other way. Everything is completely dependent on everything else. Hard to accept. That everything right now is a product of the total history of the universe. It's in the word universe that it's one world, one world, universe. At this universe, this moment is one world and there's no other way that it can be at this moment.

[31:26]

Now what happens next depends on everyone. In Buddhism, it's always been a teaching that people do have a choice. Have a choice because of our awareness. We have a choice to see what is or not. We have a choice to see what is or avoid what is. So the fundamental practice that Nogin is talking about, this fundamental attentiveness or fundamental mindfulness, is exactly that. The willingness to see what is. Which includes seeing the mind that is distracted. Includes seeing the sensations as a kind of an inner seeing. Seeing the sensations in one's own body.

[32:28]

So for me to see fire in myself meant to intimately feel the texture of the tension in my own body, which I really didn't. I really, you know, I would rather not. Sometimes I say, you know, and sometimes it's true, you know, there's only so much reality that you can take. Sometimes we need a little respite. After all, we're only human. And yet it's helpful to come back again and again to mindfully being aware so that we can see what is and then respond. Respond realistically, respond more accurately, taking care of what is. So that's the part that is very active.

[33:34]

It's actually dynamic on both sides. To see what is, is dynamic attention. And then to see, is there a way that I can participate? Is there a way that this human body and mind is called forth to respond? But there is the universal energy that then is manifesting right here, right now, in this particular way, in this body, in this mind. And now I see I can help. I can help a little bit. Some specific way, it becomes clear. It includes helping take care of yourself, take care of this body, Very basic sometimes.

[34:35]

Sometimes if one ignores taking care of one's own body, it becomes more and more cranky. And then you're less and less able to see what's happening around you. So to step back, even take the backward step, tune into one's own body and say, oh, right now, a sip of water. The Buddha actually said at one time that everyone is on fire. So we need a sip of water. When I was teaching breath awareness meditation yesterday, I pointed out again, as I sometimes remind people, if you put your hand up here when you breathe out through the nose, you just do that for a moment.

[35:45]

You may notice it's warm, and you may notice it's moist. Feel that, a little moisture? With every bath, you're releasing moisture. If you don't do anything else but breathe, every once in a while you need to have a sip of water to keep in balance. So, Sometimes we have moments where we see how magnificent everything is, how everything is perfectly working together. And other times we have some kind of weariness. Oh, it looks like just one stitch, like another. It looks like the same routine. But if we pay close attention, if you pay close attention, you notice that each breath is different.

[36:50]

Each breath is its own. Each moment is its own moment. So I want to end that time today. I know there are announcements to be made and things like that. But I want to invite you to join me in... I don't know what it is. Is it a poem? A few phrases. Maybe it's a... Is it a benediction? Is it a song? Is it a song? It's a song. It goes like, I'll just tell you, and then we can all sing it together. It goes, same old, same old, same old slippers.

[37:55]

So there's three same olds, okay? And same old, same old, same old rice. This is every day. And same old, same old, same old glimpse, of paradise. And then we go, together. It's great to acknowledge the human condition, not together sometimes. Same old, same old, same old slippers. Same old, same old, same old rice. Same old, same old, same old glimpse of paradise. Oh,

[38:58]

I think we can do that a little better. I think, I know there was some tentativity there. Let's do it one more time and you can really do the oh. Same old, same old, same old slippers. Same old, same old, same old rice. Same old, same old, same old glimpse of paradise. Oh. Yeah, that's a good, complete out-breath on the oh. Thank you very much for listening. Please meet your life.

[40:03]

Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:32]

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