This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I was just, I had a family interaction this morning before I came over here. And, uh, Somehow I thought I could just move that to the side. It doesn't quite work that way, does it? And I'll just say that this is what occurred to me as I was walking over here from my apartment. I've entitled this talk Surrender to Love. And it's called this because a couple days ago I was walking by the programming department and Chris said to me, what's your talk called?

[01:07]

I had no idea. I knew I'd started to work on it. And it was one of those, you know, you put like five ideas together and then you see which ones as you cull, as you sort of hone in on the central topic, what emerges. So the... The request for a name shaped the talk. But the word surrender is very applicable to the family situation that came up this morning. So the world works in wondrous ways. So I'm going to give you the talk I thought I was going to give you, and then we'll see how this other incident may or may not itself into the talk. By the way, my name is Susan, Susan O'Connell. I'm a priest here at San Francisco Zen Center, and I've lived here 19 plus years, and I'm really happy about that.

[02:18]

This practice period, which is being led by Abbott Ed, and supported by the Shusou, Nancy, is looking into Suzuki Roshi's teachings. So we have the great gift of having someone like Ed, someone like Blanche, who knew Suzuki Roshi, who are able to focus on those teachings and pass those teachings to us through their bodies, through their words. So it's a gift to have that focus on Suzuki Roshi to remind us of the roots of our practice, the roots of our school. So knowing I was going to give a talk, I was asked to give a talk, I thought, well, I better look into some Suzuki Roshi teachings to line myself up with the practice period. And I could tell you that I did a lot of research and investigation, but I have the great good fortune of having a Dharma brother, whose name is Charlie Bacorny, who does the website with the Suzuki Roshi Talks.

[03:27]

So I called him up and I said, could you just pull out all the talks that you can find from Suzuki Roshi on community? What did he have to say about community? Because that's my life. Community life is my life. So he did it for me. You should all be so lucky. And when he pulled these talks forward, there were several. There were quite a few that mentioned different aspects of community, sangha as we call it, community, community of practice. And I've taken some excerpts from a couple of them to anchor my talk. So the first one goes like this. To take refuge in the three treasures, we must come with pure heart or faith. No matter when or whether at the time of the Buddha's appearance in the world or after his disappearance, we repeat with clasped hands and bowed head, like this, I take refuge in the Buddha.

[04:35]

I take refuge in the teaching. I take refuge in the Buddhist community. I take refuge in the Buddha because he is our great teacher. I take refuge in the teaching because of its curative effect. I like the way that feels. Curative effect of the teachings. I take refuge in the Buddhist community because here we find wisdom and warmth, warmth, warmth. So we're all, that's the end of the quote. So we're all members of communities. Everyone in this room is in a family community, a community of two in a romantic relationship, a work community, a practice community. Here at Zen Center, the residents are in this combination of a work and practice community.

[05:43]

And there are even couples here practicing in that way. So that's a very tight community experience, very rich, very dense community experience. And daily, we open the doors of this building to share this community and this space with the wider Sangha of practice. The people and the plants and the animals and the elements, Just like you. This is for you. Even you out there too. Everyone that has the intention to live in harmony. The doors are open. So do you feel that warmth? Do you feel warm, warm, warm? On Saturday, we lay out tea and cookies. And Dharma words.

[06:45]

And smiles. And we do our best to meet you. To meet your curiosity. Your shyness. Your resistance. Your difficulties. Your sameness and your difference. your deep intentions, and your suffering. What kind of practice are we encouraged to do that allows this offering of warmth to happen? Because if we can practice and then we can share those practices with you, you can use them in your communities. This is our job, is to figure out how to live in the world, to be in this kind of petri dish, in this kind of cauldron of residential community life in order to figure out what are the ways to live like this in this world?

[08:02]

What are the ways? What are the practices? What are the supports? What are the questions? What are the teachings? And then share them with you. so that you can try them. Because as the Buddha says, don't believe what I say. Check it out for yourself. Do these practices and see what the results are in your life and see if you want to continue doing them or not. Here's a second Suzuki Roshi passage. And I'm going to read it the way it was written. This hasn't been kind of smoothed out into, like, Zen Mind Beginner's Mind was taken, and all the ums and errs and laughs and hesitations and attempts at a word and then retracking were taken out. So this is the way it is in the transcript, Suzuki Roshi said. The other day, by some chance, I talked about kerosene lamp.

[09:05]

You know, when kerosene lamp is just oil, you know, kerosene oil, it doesn't work. Kerosene lamp will work when it is in a state of combustion by aid of air. And even though you have kerosene lamp and air, it doesn't work. When you're using it, use matches, you know. It will work. It will start to work. And this flame of matches is our practice, which is transmitted from Buddha to us. By aid of matches and by aid of air, kerosene will start to work. This is actually our zazen practice. The quote continues, if you have no Buddha, it doesn't work.

[10:12]

If you have no friend, no Sangha, it doesn't work. When we practice Zazen in this way, by the aid of Sangha, helped by Buddha, we can practice our Zazen in the true sense, and we will have bright light here in Tassahara Zendo. So this bright light in the zendo is also the fire of combustion, of sangha rubbing up against itself. It's the practice of zazen meeting our actual life. And it is this fire of combustion that creates the warmth. the glowing embers of our experience of forgetting and then remembering that there's no reason not to love each other.

[11:25]

We let our ideas of a separate self fall away, leaving the ground of our being. which I propose to you, is what love is. When there is no resistance, what's left is love. When there is no protecting, what's left is love. Not romantic, sentimental, preferential love. ignited by a particular personality that we're drawn to or a body type we feel comfortable with, to a cultural affinity that puts us at ease, but the love that needs no doing. This love that is actually the way things are.

[12:37]

I'm going to go sideways a bit here to talk about the surrender part of my talk. Recently, I've been under a lot of stress. Does anyone else resonate with that statement? Is that anyone else true for anyone else? Yeah, I can see some heads nodding. And because of that feeling of stress, I've been doing two things. the thing I do habitually, which is to churn out solution after solution after solution. And the other thing that I have been doing habitually, and this habitual is due, I think, to the many years of exposure to the Dharma and to the support of the teacher, my teachers, my many teachers, my particular teacher,

[13:43]

Tenshin Roshi, but all of the rest of you who are my teachers, and to the structure, the inescapability of this structure I have voluntarily entered into called residential community. So this other habit, there's the solution habit, but this other habit was to ask the question, What is the practice to meet this stress? Now, I don't want to discourage you because some of you may have an idea that 25 or so years of Zen practice would make that answer to the question automatic. But I ask myself this question several times a day for over a month. My life was at a boiling point, right?

[14:44]

So what is the practice with this? What is the practice with this? I had no idea what the answer was, but I had faith that asking the question was a wholesome way to just become better friends with the stress, to just become more intimate with the stress. One day, there's a happy ending to this story. One day, just a couple of weeks ago, simultaneously with having reached, kind of exhausted my list of possible solutions. So sometimes it takes that, right? You have to get to the end of the road. We do this practice. We do it in entering this temple for residential... But also at Tassajara, when you go down there for a three-month practice period in the winter, at Tassajara we do it for five days, and here we do it for one day.

[15:50]

It's called tangario. And you sit in the zendo from morning until evening. Meals are delivered. You can get up and... have a little half-hour break after a meal. You can use the restroom. But other than that, you sit there with no bells, no breaks, nothing but sitting. And my experience was about day three, you run out of every strategy you could possibly try to not be there, to adjust the situation so that it was better. So you adjust it so that it's better, And then it changes. You have to make another adjustment. And all that energy used for all those adjustments to try to make it less bad or more wonderful don't work. But it takes days, days and days and days for that to occur, for the giving up to occur, for the surrender to occur.

[16:55]

So in my case, in this life... without the actual advantage of sitting in front of a wall, but having many, many, many distractions just like you have, it took getting through all my possible solutions, and then up came two things. It was both an experience, a body, sensate feeling, and a word that came up in a related time period. And the experience was first, and it was a matter of great peace and ease, followed by the word surrender. Surrender. Try it. Just the word.

[17:56]

what does that do to your body and mind? Just let that word be there. Surrender. Surrender is, but don't give up. Those are not the same thing. So I don't give up. People who know me, I'm like a terrier. I keep after things. I don't give up. But I I actually now really appreciate surrender. So what does surrender mean? Let's open that up a little bit more, okay? To me, it means to stop protecting myself from what might happen. So that's kind of a negative. It's like a... less of a bad thing.

[18:58]

But on another side, Cermenda means to me to dwell in love. A love that has the flavor of equanimity. Non-preferential, pervasive love. And why do I say surrender to love? Because love isn't something that we do. It's something we actually are. It takes no effort whatsoever. And it's what's revealed when we stop resisting. This is not easy to do because we've been brought up to judge and label and protect because we believe we're separate from everything and everyone.

[20:12]

So surrendering to love, this is very difficult. My teacher, Tenshin Roshi, several years back for quite a while had this basic teaching. and it really sticks with me, it's really helpful to me, and that is, accept whatever comes with no complaints whatsoever. Accept whatever comes with no complaints whatsoever. That's a meditation instruction, and it's a life instruction. So what does it mean to accept? What are we accepting? Well, we're accepting the thoughts and the feelings and anyone or anything that is right there with us now.

[21:16]

Whatever this moment brings, the first thing we do is accept it fully. Even if it's something we don't like. And you will find, I think, I did find, that with this acceptance, with this surrender, comes peace. A ground of peace. When this surrender happened to me, and it, by the way, wasn't something I did. I wish we could do it. I don't think we can do it. It happened. It fell away. Something fell away. So the pressure that I was feeling that was building up in the marrow of my bones, it released itself. And in its place, a buoyancy, buoyancy arose.

[22:18]

You know how people ask you, how are you? And I try to be very honest. And usually for many months now, I've been saying, how are you? I'm tired. People would ask, I'm tired. I thought that was good for them to know. that I was quite tired. But for the past week or so, people have asked me how you are, and I may still be tired, I don't know. But it's like, I'm fine. I'm actually fine. I'm tired. But I'm not weighted down by that. I'm not weighted down. The buoyancy and the surrender come together. I was fighting what was. I was trying to narrow the river of incoming requests. I was trying to change the nature of the fire of community life.

[23:20]

The fire that was appearing in the form of accusations and disdain and expectations and demands. And also the fire... of a fear of failure, of afraid of not being able to meet the situation skillfully. And that was tightening me and exhausting me. This fire of community life is a gift because we need to see what we're holding onto in order to let it go. the monks who lived down in Tassajara. How many of you don't know what Tassajara is? A couple, okay. So we have three temples in the kind of mandala of Zen Center. There's this urban temple, Beginner's Mind Temple. There's a temple at Green Gulch Farm, which is an organic farm, and it's in Marin.

[24:26]

And then there's a temple in the middle of the Ventana Wilderness called Tassajara. So in the summer, it's open to people. It's a hot springs, and people come there and enjoy the summertime and do retreats and workshops. In the winter, we shut it down, and it's for monastic retreat. So you go down for three months, and you don't leave. And then we have a little bit of break around the holidays, and then you go back for another three months, and you don't leave, and you sit, and you meditate, and you study. But in the summer, the monks, who had been there in this very inward investigation, they then turn to serve the guests in the summer. You can imagine that's quite a shift. It's quite a shift that happens. So sometimes the monks at Tassajara say that the summer guest season is too difficult.

[25:28]

and that we should only have monastic practice all year round. Some of you may have even said this in this room. And I hear, I don't know if this is true, that when Suzuki Roshi heard this, so this has been going on from the beginning, he said, if we did not already have guest season, we would have to invent it. So... The Sangha practice in the monastery is not easy. It's a difficult practice. The Sangha community practice is a difficult practice because in the absence of large irritations, the small ones fill the universe. You get to know everyone's toes, you know, because you're looking down a lot. And so you really, you know, and some of those toes you may not like very much. And you notice the kind of pulling away from toes and other things like that. But Sangha practice in the city, Sangha practice in the world, is a quantum leap greater in terms of difficulty.

[26:39]

And we embrace this, we embrace this, we do this with each other, not only to ignite the kerosene lamp oil of our Buddha nature, but to do this, as I said, so that we can teach ourselves and share with you what we've learned about how to heal the world, how to heal the whole community of life, how to share with you this residual warmth, which I hope you feel when you come here, and how to inspire you Sit in the middle of your own fires until all solutions are burned away. And you surrender to that ground of love. That ground of love. So I bet you this...

[27:48]

This sentence has been said in many, many Dharma talks. I'm going to say it right now. In order to do this, it is helpful to do zazen. In the zazen posture, our body and our mind have access to that ability, that power, that possibility to accept things as they are. whether agreeable or disagreeable. Accept whatever is, whatever arises with no complaints whatsoever. When we meditate, we focus on our body or our breath and bring the attention to the moment and stay alert. Now, this is, of course, an ongoing effort.

[28:53]

It is more important to continually bring ourselves into the state of acceptance frequently than it is to stay for long periods of time in that state. So sometimes when you're sitting here or you're sitting at home, you'll have this wonderful experience of just falling into... this kind of great acceptance. And then you think, well, that's it. You know, that's Zazen. No. Zazen is having that and then having it go away. And then seeing if it's there again and having it go away. It's practicing returning, returning, the frequency of returning. Because we have a lot of distractions in our everyday life. We don't have the benefit of that white wall. We have a lot of things that are pulling us and that strength to be able to return in the midst of all those distractions is what is the muscle, it's one of the muscles that's being developed in meditation.

[30:05]

So it's important to exercise this muscle, particularly when things are going wrong now I have a little bit more to go and I as I was writing this talk I realized there's a there's a shadow side to this topic or this kind of instruction about surrender which is you could sound like you're supposed to accept a difficult or a dangerous or an unwholesome situation so I want to just briefly open that up I found this little statement by Eckhart Tolle, which points to this. So I'm just going to read maybe two paragraphs because he says it quite well. He says, when there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and what is, that's the pain gap.

[31:11]

If you've lived long enough, you know... that things will go wrong quite often. It is precisely at those times that surrender needs to be practiced. Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with being. So you're out of the realm of thought and into this kind of basic Buddha field of being. Resistance is the mind. Surrender is a purely internal phenomena. It does not mean, however, that on the outer level, you cannot take action and change the situation. In fact, it's not the overall situation that you need to accept when you surrender, and this is key. It's just the tiny segment called now. That's what you're accepting.

[32:15]

not the content, but that this is what's happening. And not trying to move around and control that. You don't need to accept an undesirable or unpleasant life situation. You recognize fully that you want to get out of it. Then you narrow your attention to the present moment without labeling it in any way. Then, From that place, you take action. And you do all that you can do to get out of the mud. Such action, he says, I call positive action. It is far more effective than negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration. If I had kept trying to change

[33:17]

all the incoming that was coming to me, that's been coming to me recently, the actions that I would take would not be as helpful as actions that can arise from an awareness of the connection of all of us, a balanced place of I'm in this, other people are in this, how are we doing this together? What's the together response? that will come through this body and mind, but it's a together response. It's not weighted towards my own self-protection, my fear, my frustration, my exhaustion. So what we're surrendering to, I would say, is the reality of our non-separateness.

[34:20]

This is one of the most important teachings of Buddhism. There's the teaching of impermanence, all things change, which is helpful in terms of settling in to particularly negative situations. It's like, okay, okay, this will not last. That helps. That teaching, that understanding helps. But an even more broadly helpful teaching is this teaching of we are not separate. So when we surrender, what we're surrendering to is the peace of non-preference. The peace of not having to base our actions on protecting ourselves from the other, from the non-existing other. We need to understand... I'm writing this to myself. I need to understand to experience that defense is unnecessary and a counterproductive strategy for happiness.

[35:25]

I wrote that for myself. If we have a basic attitude of mistrust of ourselves or the world in general, it's going to be hard to surrender. Can we develop a sense of trust and confidence in ourselves and in others and in the wisdom of letting go? That's a trifecta. Ourselves, others, and the wisdom of letting go. If you feel like any of those you have a hesitation around, yourself, the other, as you perceive other, or this idea of letting go, see where your resistance is and go towards that and study it. Don't believe me. Check it out for yourself. Do you not quite trust yourself? Have you had some bad experiences with yourself? With your judgment? Have you had some feedback?

[36:28]

Do you not trust the other? Whatever that is in your life? Do you not trust what I'm saying about surrender? Is that too scary? What would it be to be unprotected? please go towards the one that is the hottest for you. Where's the fire? Where's the flame? Where's the pain? Where's the question? Go towards that, I suggest. So just a really short little story to end this talk, because the clock just said something my watch didn't say, but I believe the clock. Long ago, a monk asked an old master, when hundreds, thousands, or myriad of objects come all at once, what should be done? And the master replied, don't try to control them.

[37:38]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost 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. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:02]

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