This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I asked you to do something unusual this evening, which was to join me in the boughs. And the boughs are about taking Buddha's seat and speaking Buddha's words. This is not my seat. This is Buddha's seat. And every one of us sits in Buddha's seat when we sit zazen. There isn't another place that's Buddha's seat except the seat that we sit in. And it's not like we don't have to sit. Even though Buddha is resuming Buddha's seat, we still sit and practice the way.

[01:07]

This was Dogen's question. The founder of our school in Japan asked, if everyone's already completely enlightened, why do we have to sit? And I think the response is, we sit because we're human. We sit because in sitting, we completely resume our true human body and true human life. And this week, several people are here engaged in a Dharma transmission ceremony. This is the first time that I have... performed this ceremony of transmitting the Dharma to the next generation, who's actually the same generation in age as me.

[02:08]

Although I've assisted in the ceremony approximately a billion times, it's very different to actually do this ceremony. But one of the things that strikes me the most about this ceremony is that... its complete similarity to the first ceremony of receiving the vows. So every full moon, we recite Bodhisattva's precepts, the precepts of an awakening being. We'll do that ceremony Friday night. And then you can take those vows yourself, You can receive those vows yourself in front of a group of friends and witnesses in a ceremony called Jukai, receiving the precepts. And, for instance, Camilla recently received the precepts from Joan Amaral, and that was a few weeks ago.

[03:12]

And that ceremony has such a purity, an energy, a light. a vitality about it. Everybody was helping the people there receive their vows. And I mention this similarity between Jukai receiving the precepts and Dharma transmission. And in Japan, the form of the ceremonies of Jukai and Dharma Transmission are very similar. They're the most similar of any of the ordination ceremonies that there are. Why is this important for people who maybe aren't going to receive the precepts and are here helping the monastery to survive by volunteering?

[04:14]

And why is this important for all of us I think it's because the Jukai ceremony acknowledges a very fundamental part of our lives, the deepest and most sincere and authentic request that every person has. Now, we don't necessarily know what our deep and inmost request actually is unless and until we attend to that request unless and until we honor that request by sitting, by sitting with it. It's such a big request that we have to take the time to understand what it is. But when you sit or maybe when you hear somebody say something that echoes your own request, your own inmost request, you'll know because it will have a visceral impact

[05:17]

or it has had a visceral impact on you. Those words of intention are true and authentic, and that's how we know that that is our inmost request. And the precepts, the way that we behave when we're behaving as our most awakened selves. They're an enactment, as close of an enactment as we can get in human behavior to living our inmost request. So in Zen practice, and particularly in our style of Zen practice, We have a request that's so big that it can't really be put into words, but when a word hints at it or reminds us of it, we know.

[06:25]

But we also have precepts that say how an awakened person lives life. And in any action or in any situation, the precepts give us a way to understand whether we're acting or whether we're receiving life in an awakened way. So, dharma transmission. In dharma transmission, you know, we think, again, we think that this is special. We think that this happens pretty late in a person's sitting career after they've maybe become a professional Buddhist and... you know, that this is an important ceremony. But from my point of view, if the person isn't as completely innocent and pure in their request at the time of dharma transmission as they were the very first day they began to sit, then transmission is impossible.

[07:42]

There has to be that openness and that vulnerability to the authentic, what's authentically important and real for us. So I have no idea whether what I'm saying makes sense or whether it's Buddhist or Zen. But these are some of the thoughts that I've been having about Dharma transmission and particularly in this my spiritual home here, Tassahara. So what is dharma and what is transmitted in dharma transmission? Well, one of the features of the ceremony is that it gives you what you already have. So we can say it's just like every other ceremony that we do, whether it's a ceremony of a spontaneous ceremony, like the moment that a new baby gets put in our hands, and we'll say basically this upwelling of emotion comes up in which one says, oh, I'll do anything for you, baby.

[09:12]

That's a spontaneous ceremony of recognition between a person who has functioning arms and legs in an adult mind and a completely new human. That moment when you see the baby for the first time and something comes up in you, a sense of intention in relation to the child. And there are more complex ceremonies, like the ones we do here every day, like morning service or evening service or well-being ceremony. They have forms. You can do them right and wrong, even though there is no right and wrong. There are ways that we do the ceremony and ways that we don't do the ceremony. So it's more complex. And the Dharma transmission ceremony that Catherine is doing right now, that Yvonne did many years ago, has about 40 little ceremonies that are part of it.

[10:22]

Some of them are littler and some of them are bigger and fancier. And preparing for the ceremony is a lot like a treasure hunt. There are about 1,000 or 2,000 objects that have to be collected. people and resources and scheduling and rooms and time. Really weird stuff has to be found. One time I was making whisks for a Dharma transmission ceremony. The fly whisk is given as part of the ceremony. So you'll see abbots and senior people use them. in ceremonies. Senior ordained people use them in ceremonies. It's a handle that has usually a horse hair tuft on the end of it, originally used for flies, but now used for ceremonial purposes. And so I wanted to see if we could make these objects in America.

[11:24]

And the first time I did it, I wondered what it was made out of, and I felt it. It felt like horsehair to me. And so I went to the one place I knew would have horsehair, which was the Cremona Violins in San Francisco. And I asked if they had any horsehair that they would be willing to sell me. And they asked what it was for, and I explained. And they were so intrigued by the idea that they brought out some a whole big bunch of horse hair, beautiful, smooth horse hair that was just too short for violin bows and gave it to me. They became involved. And then I made the whisks, and they were too heavy. That group of people had very heavy whisks, and when they used them, there was a physical danger to the people around them.

[12:28]

because they were so heavy. So then I was racking my brains to think, well, what fiber could I use that wouldn't catch fire if you accidentally flicked it towards the incense? Then I was in New York, and I saw a woman of the street walking past, and she was wearing a fall. And I asked her where she got it. And it was on Broadway. You know, all the way downtown, there were a lot of little stands on the street, and one of them was selling hair falls for $2 a piece, made out of some sort of synthetic fiber. And I bought about 30 of them and started making whisks out of these falls. And they worked really well, and it's more like the ones from Japan than... any other fiber. I don't know why I tell you this, but the people who heard about the ceremony were very interested, and the guy who was selling the falls was trying to help me decide whether platinum blonde would be the best color.

[13:40]

He got really emotionally involved when he heard what it was for. And I think this is very much like the... ceremony of recognizing a new baby. Everybody is interested because a new teacher is a baby teacher, even if they've been teaching for a long time. It takes several years to grow into receiving these vows. But what is transmitted? Well, there's a generational transmission of the historical form of the practice that we've done. That's one side of it. And there's also a wide transmission of what is common to everyone or acknowledgement of what is common to everyone, the awakening mind that is common to everyone, that

[14:49]

that is transmitted. And there's an acknowledgement of skill in showing and speaking about and personally experiencing the life of, a life of awakening as an ordained person. In our tradition, ordained people do this. And lay people do this too, but do it in a special form that exactly duplicates the form of each person's life. Priests do it in the historical form of the Buddha. So I think that the essence of priest transmission, the important part about priest transmission, is that you may not... show this all the time, but you're responsible for the historical continuity of the lineage of practice.

[15:58]

And lay people, I think the really important responsibility that each lay person has is given the form of my life, given the responsibilities, the talents, the relationships, the accountabilities, the cells of my body. How does the truth arise hand in hand with every single truth on this planet? And so I think that lay people have a responsibility to keep the practice mapped onto the world, mapped onto the variety of life. Priests have a responsibility to keep the practice mapped onto the tradition and the form so that it can continue. Each group of people has a responsibility of continuity and of a wide view.

[17:09]

But what is transmitted in normal life? What's the difference if the Dharma is transmitted or not? Well, I think we have to go back to why Buddha started to teach in the first place, why he wanted to study and do his great vow in the first place, why he wanted to enact his his intention in the first place, and that was that he saw that people suffer and that suffering is normal. Now, we think of suffering as a very big word, a very big act, and sometimes it is. There's a suffering when someone dies or when we become sick or when we experience betrayal or traumatization. Those are big events. But there's also just the normal suffering of everyday life, which I personally think of as, oh, there's always something, isn't there?

[18:21]

You know, I get up to the dinner table and the broccoli is completely gone. No, this didn't really happen, okay? It didn't really happen, not at Tassajara, okay? The broccoli was fine, there was enough. And it was good. I shouldn't give feedback about the food. But anyway, there's always something. Or like I'm at Tassajara and the weather is beautiful and I didn't expect it. I thought it would be really hot. But there are flies. There's always something. So there's everyday suffering that we experience. But I think that the point of suffering is not what happens. The point is what we do with what happens. And that's a product of the conditions that we're born with, of what exactly is happening to us, and of our history and intention at this moment.

[19:31]

So it's a product of kind of what we... what we do, what we think, what we say, what we do. So we suffer. We suffer a little. We suffer a lot. We suffer a little for a long time. And it comes up again and again. And our lives, it becomes very confusing. difficult, painful, quite a lot in our lives. Things happen that shouldn't happen. People get poisoned by their own governments. Pollution happens, and we realize that our children aren't going to have the same opportunities that we had.

[20:34]

It's painful. It's normal to feel pain under the circumstances that arise. But I think the real issue is that when we feel pain, when we feel difficult emotions like grief, like shock and despair, or like anxiety or fear, or I think mad, sad, and scared pretty much covers it. You know, when we feel those emotions, if we don't have a depth, a sense of connection with everyone, with everything, with our lives at a very deep level,

[21:39]

If we don't have a sense of what to do, those emotions get locked up and hurt us and our environment in a variety of ways. So one of the things I wasn't able to do because of the thousand thing collection that Dharma transmission is, was to study a lot for this talk. And I brought out this book, Healing Through the Dark Emotions, that was used in practice period by Abbott Steve Stuckey a couple practice periods ago here. And one quote in this book I like very much. I was looking for it. And that is, there is nothing so whole as a broken heart.

[22:41]

There is nothing so whole as a broken heart. It's a quote from Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk, a Hasidic sage. Anyway, this book, Healing Through the Dark Emotions, The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair, by Miriam Greenspan, is about... basically about practicing friendliness and a sense of context and acceptance with our emotions so that we can be awakened by them instead of just suffering. And this is what the Buddha did. This is his message for us. He was moved by the human condition and wanted to really understand what to do and how to approach it. And his example resonates down through the ages to us and to many different cities because look at who's here.

[23:57]

You know? So that's what Dharma transmission is about. And so the way I have people prepare for Jukai, receiving the precepts, and the way I ask them to prepare for Dharma transmission is the same. So I ask people basically to prepare for these ceremonies as if they were about to die. So to take care of anything that's not finished in their lives. And a lot of times I'll ask them to involve the friends and enemies who know them the best. And so we do that. And so it's because there isn't any awakening without these triggers that would otherwise cause suffering.

[25:03]

One of the people who's helping me with the ceremony is my Dharma sister and one of my really close friends, Shinshu Roberts. She did the service this morning. And so there was one time in our long relationship during which... Shinshu said that she didn't want to work with me because I was a bully. It was the first day I was the president of San Francisco Zen Center. And that was such a hard thing for me to hear. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat, you know. And as I sat with it, I realized what she meant, and it was actually true. It was true in its own way. And so I practiced with that feedback and was able to learn how to take care of my life in a different way.

[26:15]

And I think that sometimes some of the things that happen that are the most jarring and painful, in which we suffer the most, are the ones that we end up using as... kind of long-term inspirations and triggers for our practice of awakening. It's a kind of a koan, a kind of a case, not just for ourselves, but also for the people around us. My parents were Holocaust survivors, and I have to tell you that growing up with them and receiving some of the training that they gave me, for example, about not trusting people because the Holocaust could happen any time. So I usually don't say so much personal in lecture, but I'm bringing up these examples because I'm sure you have one of your own.

[27:23]

And what I want to say is that these examples which are kind of the PhD course in human suffering, have real staying power. But to be able to work with them, you have to start small and train yourself, which is why we have monasteries. So you have to be able to start with lesser issues, or what would strike us as lesser issues, like people putting dirty spoons in the clean spoon jar. or not getting the room that you wanted. Things like that. Or, you know, having to drive your car over the Tassajara road and being concerned about the springs. Stuff like that. So very basic irritations are the stuff of the beginning of training and actually the end of training, too, because there isn't any difference between the end

[28:29]

and the beginning. If there were an end, it wouldn't be a valuable training. Anyway, I really, as a human being, do not know more than about one millionth of what there is to know about the Buddha Dharma. One of the features of Dharma transmission, like all the ordinations and vows and unlimited experiences we have, is that one realizes his or her smallness. No one is ready for an unconditioned experience. So we tend to damn our experiences with faint praise. You know? We tend to get into situations and then realize some of the most difficult content about the experience when we're halfway into it.

[29:42]

So for instance, if you receive the precepts, some of the feelings might be things like, could I really receive the precepts? When I sit down and someone says that sitting here is just like sitting on the Bodhi seat to become a Buddha, Really? Me? Receiving Dharma transmission? Who is ready to transmit the Dharma? You know? Who is ready to take the Buddha's seat? Well, fortunately, it remains the Buddha's seat and not my personal seat. You know? It remains the Buddha Dharma and not... not my dharma to give or my dharma to receive. Does that make sense to you? So I think this is a good stopping place.

[30:45]

And if you have any questions or comments about this, if this brings up anything for you that you would like to discuss, please let me know. This would be a good time. Anyone? Yeah. I can't actually see you, so could somebody just say something? So how long do we study for transmission? And in our tradition, well, in Japan, young men receive transmission after about three years of study. And here we receive transmission sometimes after about 30 years of study.

[31:49]

And I don't know, how many years had you been practicing before receiving dormant transmission? It was a long time, right? Yeah. Yeah. And long since passed. Right. So how do you put that together? Right, exactly. And I received Dharma transmission, let's see, 30 years and what, 25 years or something, 25 years. And some people, I think, have received it, Reb received it after 17 years or something, something like that. Tension Roshi. So there's a range. And I don't think that there's a particular curriculum of study that you have to pass. It's not like you have tests that are formalized tests.

[32:56]

And also, some of the people who don't receive Dharma transmission are at least as awake as some of the people who do. Receiving Dharma transmission isn't... nothing falls from the sky and makes you perfect. We're still the same human beings. We're humans, right? But what does happen is that there's a face-to-face, mind-to-mind meeting between teacher and student so that someone is willing to do that with someone else. And the person who does it has to be authorized and has to be using their authorization responsibly. That's why it takes a long time. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah.

[34:00]

Yes. that is I hear you and other people here, but not just here, talking about Zazen as sitting meditation. And I imagine that that is including walking, standing, and lying down. But I just want to check to see if that's perfect. Yes. I use the word sit in a very... broad way. So for instance, you know, sitting, standing, walking, and lying down are the Buddha's four noble postures of meditation. But actually meditation can be practiced in any posture. And a posture that is conducive to stillness

[35:05]

Stillness doesn't necessarily mean immobility, right? So let's say, for instance, if in times of my life where I've been adrenalinized, just like anybody else, I have various conditions that I work with in body and mind. And so, for instance, at a time in my life when I have a lot of issues to deal with, sitting still on a cushion may not be the right thing for me. Let's say if I want to have a meditation session in the midst, in the middle of the day. So walking might be good. Or lying down might be good. So yes, it does include those. So the... Sitting means staying on the point, staying face-to-face, particularly with the obstacles, with the suffering, with the despair, but not in a discursive way.

[36:21]

It means going right to the heart of whatever is happening in a direct way. And to do that, we have to be stable and focused, not in a pinpoint way, but in a wide way and an upright and stable way. So any posture that does that is a good posture and is what I mean by sitting. Sitting with difficult emotions? Sitting practice and practicing with difficult emotions? Yeah. I would say that the only way to practice with difficult emotions is to sit with them.

[37:24]

You know? Because difficult emotions, they're very bossy. You know, they're very dramatic and they take over. Because... We're so physiologically connected to difficult emotions. Like, for instance, let's say that we're suffering from, name a difficult emotion, okay? Frustration. Okay, so let's break down what happens when we're frustrated. So when we're frustrated, we have energy, huge energy and motivation, but we're stopped, right? So held in one place with a bunch of energy is frustration. So under those circumstances, there's the adrenaline of the desire to do plus being held in one place by something, whether it's an obstacle, physical obstacle, a social obstacle, a mental obstacle, a lack of some resource like skill or

[38:37]

a tool or equipment that we need to move forward, under those circumstances, we experience frustration. So one of the things to do with that is to stay with it. And when we stay with that experience of frustration, it matures for us. The experience matures, and we can understand what it is. So the first thing that we do is, even if we're scared of frustration, a lot of us are scared of frustration, and when we experience frustration, we want to turn away from it and get as far away from it as we can. I'm feeling so frustrated. And then, you know, what are normal things that people do when they're frustrated? They rage, they walk around the block, they do all sorts of things, right? But sitting with frustration doesn't mean holding the body immobile and just boiling.

[39:39]

Does that make sense? That sitting with frustration means having a body that's upright enough that we understand who it is who is frustrated and have a visceral experience of who it is who is frustrated. For you even to say, I'm frustrated, means that there's someone who's not frustrated or who's wider than the frustration who is frustrated. It's not that there's two people, right? But it means you're wider than that. And then we have to experience that breadth of experience. That's part of sitting too. So the body actually becomes wider. as well as taller and more upright. So the context of frustration means that we would understand the causes and conditions of frustration.

[40:42]

We'd understand the whole context of the frustration. Not that we would have thoughts about it, but we'd have a visceral experience of when I'm given a job And I don't even, I'm given the job of nailing in all the nails all around the Zendo. And all I have is this tiny little round hammer that's made for something completely different. I feel so frustrated because all I want to do is just one, two, three. Would you please just give me a regular hammer? You know, like that. We understand what the causes and conditions are, and so we understand the context of the situation. Or we understand, oh, this is Tassajara, and there's 22 people using hammers, and we only have 21.

[41:48]

So then you might know, because you understand the context, you might say, oh, when you... When you start measuring, could I borrow your hammer for 15 minutes? So there's a width to the experience, a breadth to the experience. It's contextual. And then we also understand the depth of the experience. So when we sit with the experience, we understand the depth of the experience. So like, for instance, I'm here at Tassajara, it's work period, and this is what Tassajara is like, you know? This is what Tassajara is like. We're down a 14-mile dirt road from anywhere. And basically the important reason for my being here is that I love Tassajara, I love being human, and I'm making an offering.

[42:55]

And if my offering is to stand at the zendo saying, hammer, hammer, hammer, that's what my offering is. That's depth. You understand what I'm saying? So sitting with frustration and sitting with any difficult emotion is to understand who's experiencing the emotion, so the upright quality of not being pushed, in some direction by the emotion. It's to understand the context of the emotion, the interdependence of that emotion with causes and conditions, and to understand the depth of our human life in which emotions are a feature.

[43:55]

of just being alive. Is that what you had in mind? How are we doing on time? Does anyone know what time it is? I think this is it. So it's time for all good Zen students to sit in a horizontal position. Okay, so anyway, thank you so much for taking Buddha's seat and expressing Buddha's vow. Thank you so much for supporting practice with your life, your energy, and your vacation hours. Thank you so much for

[44:59]

walking the path, and for sitting upright and listening at the end of a long day. And thank you for supporting this Dharma transmission with your presence, with your practice, with your smiles, and with the beauty of our human life together. I look forward to waking up and seeing you in the morning. 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.

[46:03]

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