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. Good evening. those of us who have been here for most of the summer, for a number of people, it's getting to be a time where things are not quite as bright and shiny as they might have been in the beginning and where certain aspects of Tassajara or the people or the schedule or the bugs are getting to be irritating.

[01:01]

Or somebody said to me, even boring. Now, that person is just a little bit precocious. Because for most people, boring comes a little bit later, I think. But, you know, some people are fast. But a number of people have talked to me about being bothered by service. By the service, you know. And one person even said he was thinking of leaving because everything was great except And I thought, well, that seems extreme. You know, like service is like a half hour out of the day, right? 20 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the evening. It seemed like service would have to be pretty bothersome, too. But I don't know. Maybe it is that bothersome. It's very interesting how bothersome service can be. One of the people asked me, well, how was it for you when you first started? Did you hate service?

[02:02]

Did you like service? And I had to admit that for me, I didn't, in the beginning, I didn't realize there was such a thing as service because Keith, my husband, and I went, we wanted to come to Tassajara, but you couldn't come to Tassajara directly in those days unless you came and did a practice period, which I was nowhere near ready for that. So we went to the city center, and there, you know, you sit, those of you, a lot of you have been there, You go in to sit zazen in the basement. So there's an outside door that goes in at the basement level, and you sit zazen, and then everybody leaves. And it turns out some people go upstairs and do service. But we just went out the door again, the door we'd come in. And it took a couple of months to realize there was something called service, and then there was something called dinner on some nights. So when I found out there was service and then experienced it, I think maybe all of you know, maybe not, is the chanting and bowing thing that we do.

[03:06]

20 minutes in the morning, 10 minutes in the evening. Anyway, when I found out there was this thing called service where you'd be like standing up, not sitting cross-legged, chanting, you know, moving a little bit, I was thrilled because Zazen was so painful. And I really, you know, every period, At the end of the period, 40-minute periods, at the end of the period, I would decide, I am not doing this. Never again. This is terrible. Why am I doing this? And then I'd get up, and we'd go out the door, and then I'd come back. I feel like something in me knew that I needed it. I needed the stability or something. And I enjoyed the feeling of community and like-minded people I don't know how much of that I was getting because I was just sitting there thinking for 30 minutes and then suffering for 10 minutes.

[04:12]

But service really kind of enacted it. There was this thing I could do that was moving and not so painful. So I'm not saying that as an example. I'm just saying that's another way that someone might experience it. But for those who are having some difficulty with it here, I can understand that. I think a lot of Westerners come to Zen thinking, here's this simple, maybe almost pure thing I can do, where I just sit down quietly and don't get wrapped up in a lot of... doctrine and beliefs and maybe some pressure that some of us have felt from our religions of origin or various parts of our lives. And then to come to a Zen place and find all this ritual is sometimes a little bit of a problem.

[05:13]

And what's this bowing? Who are we bowing to? What is that about? And what are we chanting? What is all these words that... Some are not even in English, and yet I'm supposed to be saying this. So I wanted to say a few things about possible ways of looking at service. You know, one way is to, I think most of the Japanese teachers I know and Mel Weissman would say, just do it. You know, you ask them what's going on, they say, just do it. Like, you know, stop trying to figure it out. Just experience it and see what is it for you. So that's probably a very good answer, and I should probably stop right there. But I'm going to go ahead and say a few other thoughts.

[06:19]

You know, I think that this, in my experience, this Soto Zen practice is very much a body practice. We have lots of thoughts about it. We have lots of emotions and ideas that come up during it. And that's all part of it. But one of the main effects it has on us is really through our body or starts with our body. And... Again, putting probably unnecessary or not quite accurate words to it, zazen itself in some ways I think is very stabilizing and sort of by stability increases our capacity to be with ourselves and with our lives. And service, in a way, the bowing and the chanting together, I think, I believe, actually increases our flexibility about living with each other. It's like we change our body rhythms a little bit to make way for each other.

[07:23]

So sometimes the bowing is faster, sometimes it's slower, and you might even have the feeling like that's too fast or that's too slow. So slow, we're never going to get out of here today. But in fact, because the bell goes and we bow when the bell goes and we actually change our body rhythms, and I think it has an impact on... how we live with each other, and the same with the chanting. Somebody said to me, they were having a hard time with service, and I said, well, so what are you doing during the chanting? They said, I'm just sitting there trying to get through it. I said, that's very dangerous. It's much easier if you chant along, because if the chanting sounds particularly bad... you can sort of drown it out. So I feel like in some way we haven't quite come together as a group yet in terms of our morning chanting this summer. And chanting will help. If you just throw yourself into it, go ahead and chant with us.

[08:27]

And some kind of coming together starts to happen. Bowing itself, you know, it can be seen as bowing to something. It can be seen as bowing to ourselves, to our Buddha nature. It can be seen as bowing to the universe, bowing to everything, a kind of showing respect. Uchiyama Roshi, the day he was dying, the day that he died that evening, he wrote this poem, which he wrote. titled Just Bow. So this is kind of the culmination, the thing he most wanted to express just as he was dying. Putting my right and left hand together as one, I just bow. Just bow to become one with Buddha. Just bow to become one with everything I encounter.

[09:29]

Just bow to become one with all... Myriad things, with all myriad things. Just bow as life becomes life. So some deep feeling that can come from just bowing, just bowing, even though our resistance might come up. What is this? I'll come back to our resistance in a minute. So I think there are these... you know, particular effects, maybe, of bowing and chanting and coming together, whether we want to or not. But also tonight I wanted to talk a little bit about how it fits into the overall weave of Tassajara. And one way of thinking about what is Tassajara, what are we doing here?

[10:32]

And I wanted to start with a quote from Dogen, which is surprising to me about, you know, sometimes Dogen can be so esoteric. We just had a class about Dogen, and it was quite wonderful how understandable Shinshu made Dogen. But I think we can tell from what she was saying that he can be pretty complex. So this quote is always surprising and heartening to me. It's from The Only a Buddha and a Buddha. When you have unsurpassed wisdom, you are called Buddha. When a Buddha has unsurpassed wisdom, it is called unsurpassed wisdom. Not to know what it is like on this path is foolish.

[11:33]

Not to know what it is like on this path of unsurpassed wisdom is foolish. What it is like is to be unstained. Being unstained is like meeting a person and not considering what he looks like. It is also like not wishing for more color or brightness when viewing flowers or the moon. So being unstained, so having this unsurpassed wisdom is like being unstained. Being unstained is like meeting a person and not considering what he looks like. Also, it is like not wishing for more color or brightness when viewing flowers or the moon. In a way, there's nothing more natural, more organic than looking at a flower or looking at the moon and just there it is.

[12:39]

It's either wonderful or you don't even notice it because it's just a flower of the moon. If it isn't like... You're a flower that you're about to enter in some big contest and it has to be the most, you know, mostly you're just like happy to see a flower or you're not paying so much attention, right? And even people can be like this to us. We can meet somebody and it doesn't really matter to us what they look like. On the other hand, nothing is more unnatural than doing that with ourselves or even with somebody or something that is close to us, right? It's rare as the time that we look at ourselves or think about ourselves and we have no opinion. It's just we don't wish for anything to be different. This is just the way it is. That is a rare occurrence to have some thought or some experience or some feeling about ourselves and it's just, it's unstained.

[13:47]

It isn't stained by our imagination of how it should be. And that's kind of what the problem is, is that we carry around, I believe all of us, most of us, carry around a kind of idealized self or an idea of an idealized self that is often... not so conscious, sometimes more conscious, sometimes less conscious, that we are sort of constantly checking ourselves by. We're constantly seeing, do I add up? Am I matching what I think I should be? And we even believe that's our job to do that, to have this plan for who we are making out of ourselves. Dogen goes on to say, to be unstained does not mean that you try to forcefully exclude intention or discrimination or that you establish a state of non-intention.

[14:59]

Being unstained cannot be intended or discriminated at all. So being unstained, we can't decide to be unstained. If that thought comes up, it's already stained. It's already to... decide I should just accept myself the way I am, is already trying to make ourselves different than we are. Because already we have this idealized self. We don't think we should have that. It's too judgmental. It's kind of a catch-22. We can't really do it. There's no way to get to this place in some way that we're thinking up. To intend it, to discriminate it, is already stained with this idea of how we should be. So I believe that a monastic setting or this monastic setting, Tassajara, is one way of describing what it's doing is creating a space where we are encouraged and allowed and supported to be unstained, to be more unstained.

[16:14]

to be more meeting ourselves and things that have to do with us, that we care about in a, this is what's happening, instead of, oh, it should be more like this, it should be more like this. We're encouraged, we're supported, we're allowed to do that. We are also, off and on, forced to do that. Forced, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, more into that mindset. So a couple of the ways that that happens, I mean, in some ways, I think everything here, especially for the students, but I think also for the guests who come for a shorter amount of time, supports that. It's like it's saying... It's okay.

[17:14]

You fit. Somehow you fit in here. We don't always feel that, of course. But nonetheless, people keep bowing to us. They keep feeding us. They keep working with us. They keep sitting with us. And they're saying, whether they know it or not, sometimes they're not saying it consciously. In fact, sometimes consciously they're saying the opposite. Like, you're not okay in this way. You need to be different in this way. But still, they keep staying with us and allowing us to be who we are. And that whole... That whole morning schedule is one way that that's done. In fact, in some monasteries, like I've heard in Japanese monasteries, where I've never been, but I've heard that at least in some of them, basically you have almost no personal space.

[18:25]

It's like the monks sleep in the zendo. They have those wider tons and they sleep. Everybody sleeps in the zendo. usually, you know, either men or women, sleep in the Zendo, and then they have a changing room that they share with everybody. And they go there to change, and they keep their thing. They've got a little cupboard that they keep their things in, and they have no personal space. This is, you know, I have sometimes imagined this and been very grateful that I'm at Tassajara, where I have my cabin I can go to. And those of you who have roommates are probably, you know, hoping that you stay long enough that you can have a room by yourself, because we really do appreciate that. going to our own little space. There's a different kind of there. But there's something quite amazing about not having that kind of space. Something about meeting the strength of our sense of self. Like I am somebody who needs space.

[19:30]

I'm somebody who it's hard to have people right next to me all the time and having to do what we're all doing, you know, to be part of that. And that's one of the ways that the whole morning schedule kind of puts us in that place where that, you know, little squealing self comes out. It's like, you know, get up, the wake-up bell happens, you get up, you go to the Zendo, you know, you... Then we do service, then we do soji, then we do breakfast, then we do work meeting. It's like you just are flowing along. There's not much space there to figure out, who am I? What do I want to do? I mean, that thought comes up for us, but there's not much space to really focus on it. You have to wait until your personal day. And then you might have something else you want to do, or your break in the afternoon or the evening. And by that time, probably all you want to do is go take a bath. take a nap or something.

[20:32]

But that feeling of, wait a minute, who am I? I need some personal space. That kind of contraction that happens around that is very useful to see because just seeing it puts it a little bit more in perspective. It changes it a little bit. It shows it, oh, there's something in me that's wanting some identity, you know, wanting to be special, wanting to be not just one of the crowd. So both on that side and then on the side of also carrying us along and actually finding out I'm living a full life in this no, or not no, but little identity, you know, some not much space to make an identity, and yet I have a whole life going on. As someone said to me, you know, I go to Zazen in the morning, I'm in a bad mood, and I sit there and I think this is terrible, I hate it, and I don't know if I should stay, and then I go to breakfast, and I'm not happy with the breakfast, and then the clappers happen at breakfast, and the people across from me say, good morning, how are you doing?

[21:48]

And I say, I'm great, hi. Yeah, good morning, you know? Or the opposite. You might sit in zazen, and it's wonderful, and then you go to breakfast, and whatever, and then, you know, how are you? We don't have a solid self. We don't have something we can say, this is what I am, this is who I am, and it becomes so apparent in this situation of kind of being without, it's not that it's different, but in a different situation where, say, if in your other life, one of your other lives, you actually have the space to make your own decisions, get up when you want to get up and eat what you want for breakfast and do what you want to do with your day. It's not that it's really different, but still, you are being made by the things around you. You are responding to them.

[22:50]

but it's harder to feel it because it feels like you're deciding everything. Some life situations, not monastic, but outside life situations, are very much like monastic situations, like where your life, you don't decide when you get up and you don't decide what happens next and you just live your life because there are enough requirements on it that it's sort of like being in a monastery and you can... possible you don't have the same kind of support usually in that kind of situation but it's possible to see oh I am I'm an alive active being who is not really making my life again we have this feeling that it's my job to make my life it's my job to make myself into the right person and when we have that feeling it starts to expand and take into effect everything, you know.

[23:51]

It's like, because I have an idea of the person I'm supposed to be, and then when I'm walking down the road and somebody comes up to me and says, I don't like blah, blah, blah, and something to me goes, you know, it feels like this person has made me into the person I don't want to be, the person I'm not supposed to be. It's very, and then I need to make them be different, you know, either by being happy, you know, we can try to make them happy, or we could just try to make them be further away from us. So, you know, we can just, like, get away from them in some way, make them be different, at least in their distance from us. So that feeling of needing to make things be the way that they should be expands and eventually, you know, takes in the whole universe. Most of us never get that far. But we get pretty far out there about what we feel like we need to control, essentially.

[24:54]

So to actually experience the possibility of resting in the moment, in this... Dependently co-arisen moment that we are all making, but not by our conscious intention, but by our life. And that's okay. And it's not a passive situation where actually we are participating. We are making it, but not by some idealized version, but by some actual way that we are right now that's changing. It can't exactly be gotten a hold of, but it's happening. and to actually settle in that and be actively alive in this moment-by-moment life. That's the possibility that is encouraged by life at Tassajara, I think is encouraged by Zen practice, and is a tremendous relief to us, and a...

[26:09]

a place from which we can actually be of benefit to those around us. So that's what I think service is doing. That's one of the roles it plays, you know, is to be part of this way that we live together. It's one of the things that we can do with each other where we can further experience that, just being here, just doing... what's happening, which can include I hate it. It can include, you know, tightening up around it in a way that makes it hard to chant. That can all be part of it. It's not really a problem for that to be part of it, but it isn't the end result of it. It's just part of it. Along with all the other things that we do with each other here at Tassajara. or not just at Tassajara, in this universe, the way we interact with each other.

[27:15]

So let me stop there and see if there are any thoughts or questions. Where's Mohammed? Mohammed, what do you think the purpose of a... The lecture is. Is that still a question? No, I don't think it's a question. Maybe it doesn't have to have a purpose. Doesn't have to have a purpose? Yeah. Yeah, maybe not. Yeah. Maybe it's just a way for us to be together. Yeah. Thank you. Tobias. Yes. Does not make sense to you, that name?

[28:16]

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think it probably comes from something like church service. You know... Pardon? You know, I don't know for sure, but I don't think of it so much as having, like... I mean, I think we are serving by doing it, just like we're serving by doing everything. But... And we don't talk about it so much that way, except the evening service is a memorial service for people who have died. That's what it actually is, the regular evening service. And maybe in that way, it's traditionally a service from Japan, a service to the community. But maybe it's just from my background. I would go to a church service, which is a little more like that than like zazen. I wasn't a Quaker, right? A Quaker might be more like Zazen, but the church services I went to, there was singing and things. Yeah, it could be called something different, like recitation.

[29:25]

It's just that to get to that place at Zen Center is a difficult project. Most of us have higher priorities than to change the name of it. Yes, Pideka? Yes. And that is important for us to have the space in order to create that. And the other point that I do, like I was hearing, is that we come together. That service is a way for us to be coming together at community and create community . I don't think I was saying that it's important for us to have the space to create our identity.

[30:27]

I think it's something that we experience as a need that actually isn't a need. That we actually have not an identity, but we have a kind of flowing, you know, we are and we're changing and that actually doesn't need our direction in the way that we feel like it does. So to live a monastic life, if we want to call it that, in some ways is to not have so much opportunity to do that. We still have plenty of opportunity, but not as much as we sometimes feel like we need. And so part of it is to find out that actually our life and our identity, if we want to call it that, goes on without our making it. Where we can experience that, yeah. Or we can experience it, or sometimes we don't experience it, but it's happening anyway.

[31:36]

I don't know whether consciously experience it or not, but it's kind of seeping into us the confidence, actually, that it's okay to not be controlling our life and ourself at all times. Thank you. Yes, Pitaka. Yes, the others are too long. In the summer, we have, you know, it's pretty constrained. If you're here for the practice period, you'll see that we do a lot of other chants. So we'll do some of those others. It's, you know, we just make some choices about which ones to chant. There are a whole lot that we can chant. Yes, Elia? Okay. from all non-English speakers.

[32:46]

When we chant the same with people who have this American English native language, then our translation is increased. Ah, yes. Another reason for service, so you can practice English without having to... Yes. And also I visited some other countries and had experience in Zenda, in service, in Poland, in Finland, in a few other countries. And we chant everywhere the Hatsutra in local language. And we find out how the same ideas that I know from my practice in Russian language How they are expressed on this language gives me better understanding of how to express myself. Great. Lucky for you, knowing so many languages. Yes. Thank you.

[33:48]

Anything else? Actually, it's pretty much time to end, so unless there's something urgent, we will stop now. 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.

[34:22]

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