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, everyone. Is that too loud? No? Just for me? Welcome. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. City Center, San Francisco Zen Center, the Buddha Hall, Wednesday night. My name is Erin, and I'm a priest. And recently I decided to return to residential practice. So I've been living here at City Center for about six weeks now, I think. It actually feels like a lot longer. and I work as a high school teacher, student, a high school teacher when I'm not here, which is most of the day.

[01:11]

And so this week is our last week of school, and I think today actually was the last day of final exams. Tomorrow we have our last faculty meeting, and graduation. And so it's been feeling like a kind of moment where things are a little bit exciting, but also vulnerable, a little shaky. As those of you know who've ever been to school, or maybe who live in a practice center like this, or who go to work, our usual schedules, we can get really used to them and the particular shape that we enter when we are in our kind of normal, ordinary lives.

[02:13]

And so when anything changes, it can feel really disorienting. So this week, I actually teach yoga at the school, so I don't have a final exam. We don't have a final exam. But those of us who don't have official exams, we serve as proctors for some of the tests. And the space where I usually teach yoga, some of which is restorative relaxation yoga, is the gymnasium. And this week there were maybe, I counted, about 100 tables set up in the gym. with about three chairs at each table. And every day this week, the students would wait outside the door until their teachers gave them the instructions, let them in, and they found the color of their exam, sat down, and had to kind of finish their work, their expression for the year.

[03:26]

And a couple of times when I wasn't proctoring, I snuck around back of the gym where I store my props there, and there are these windows looking into the gym. And looking out at their faces, the kids, they all looked so human. It's kind of the quietest moment on campus, and I really don't hear much except breathing. And looking out at their little faces, some of them probably were quite scared. At least I know a lot of them that I talked to were feeling quite overwhelmed by, I imagine, both the ending and the request that they express something, maybe that they weren't prepared for. So I've just been feeling that quality of shifting and change and transformation. and all of the potential that such a moment holds, but also the potential for us, for people in that kind of place, to respond in ways that we might later feel regret about.

[04:42]

And so tonight I want to talk about a practice that we do here, and that connects us to all of the different lineages of Buddhism, Buddhist practice around the world, which is called taking refuge. And many of you, I can see from the outfits you're wearing, have taken refuge in a very formal way. And some of you may have experienced a service here or somewhere else where you may have chanted the refuges and taken refuge that way. And some of you might be new to the idea. You might have heard of the idea of taking refuge. And so tonight I want to talk about this idea and this practice and kind of something about what it means, especially

[05:51]

coming from that space where I forgot to say that I'm also in that space of kind of shaky, it's tender and a little cracked open. And so how can we meet that? And for me, this practice of taking refuge has been extremely helpful. So I also wanted to say... At City Center, I think this is true, so you guys can correct me. We chant the refuges every morning at morning service. Is this true? Except Saturday morning. I haven't been able to come to morning service very often. And I think during Sashin, I imagine we also perhaps chant them before going to sleep at the very end of the day. the Pali refuges.

[06:53]

They're quite beautiful song-like refuges. And you can see some people wearing various shapes of robes around these big robes like this that are called ocasas and little robes, hanging robes like this called roxus. And you might notice if you look at somebody close to you, these little teeny tiny stitches. Some of you may actually be working on such things right now. And this robe is called Buddha's robe, and the stitch that we make to create this robe, to put these kind of various pieces of fabric together is called the taking refuge stitch, and taking refuge in Buddha stitch. So one of the practices, the main practices before receiving Buddha's robe, is to actually make it in that way, with this mind of taking refuge, of taking refuge in Buddha, in awakeness.

[08:02]

I made this very complicated. I was hoping I would just not need a paper, but then I was very scared. So I tried to tape it together, and then I taped it together backwards. I don't even know. Okay. So I think in English, when we hear the word refuge, we may have a certain idea. If you just kind of close your eyes, or you don't have to close your eyes, but if you just think of that word refuge, at least what comes to my mind is something like a shelter, a place to go for, protection, and safety. Maybe a place that someone would go when they're really in quite a lot of danger. And sometimes we may call people in such a situation refugees, people who are fleeing from something quite threatening, whether it's natural or human.

[09:19]

or other kind of threat. And we may actually have a vision of an actual physical structure with a roof, a place where people could hopefully settle for a bit in the midst of all of the fear and pain and agitation that they might be experiencing. that perhaps this would be a place where they could sit down and rest, maybe receive some nourishment, have a bit of space before figuring out what to do next. In Buddhism, Buddhist practice, we have a similar... way of thinking about refuge, but there definitely are some twists and turns that I think are quite interesting and I found very rich to work with.

[10:32]

I found out this week in preparing for this talk and thinking about refuge that one of the first places where refuge comes up in specific Buddhist teachings is the Dhammapada. And there's a verse that's quite beautiful, I think, that the Buddha offered. And I have a translation from one of our teachers, Gil Fronstal, where I think this might be the first place where the Buddha actually talks about this practice of taking refuge. People threatened by fear go to many refuges, to mountains, forests, parks, trees, and shrines. None of these is a secure refuge. None is a supreme refuge. Not by going to such a refuge is one released from all suffering.

[11:39]

But when someone going for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha sees with right insight the four noble truths, suffering, the arising of suffering, the overcoming of suffering, and the eightfold path leading to the ending of suffering, then this is the secure refuge. This is the supreme refuge. By going to such a refuge, one is released from all suffering. Right away, in this small verse, this small section, the long piece, the Buddha points out something that I think is really important for us as humans, which is that we really do get scared.

[12:43]

We're scared a lot of the time. We're probably scared a lot of the time. And we actually, biologically, We have this protective instinct. We have a natural alert system which tries to let us know, to discern through the senses what's happening and see if we're okay or if we need to do something, if we need to prepare for some change. And we really do have a lot of things that we could be scared of. We can get hurt, but by lots of different things in lots of different ways. We can get hurt physically. We can feel a lot of hurt emotionally and mentally. And we actually are going to die. And I think this is very frightening for us. And this is really our basic condition.

[13:46]

So it's quite interesting, I think, that the Buddha points this out. That when you're scared, one who's frightened tries to go to all these different places to find relief from that fear. But only by seeing the reality of our condition that we're probably going to get hurt at some point. We are going to die, and there's going to be pain. and we're not going to like it, and we're not going to like everything, that just being able to see that is the refuge. That's kind of an interesting way to think about shelter, to think about protection. How do you take shelter in something that's so inherently shaky and unpredictable and sounds a bit unreliable?

[14:51]

if what we're looking for is some way to avoid all of those uncomfortable, painful qualities. In his verse, the Buddha mentions places that, for me, when I read it, sounded actually quite beautiful, like mountains and forests and shrines. But I was thinking for myself about some of the places that... I go for refuge when I'm scared, and I was thinking of things like control, like a mental quality of wanting to, of tightness, of avoiding things, of pushing the feeling away, of trying to distract myself with something, of talking about things that aren't really touching where I really am, or of even maybe kind of hurting myself in a way, perhaps ignoring some kind of pain that I'm in, or doing something else that later I realize, oh,

[16:17]

hmm, that wasn't quite how I meant to respond, and I must have been scared to do that again. And so I'm sure we can all think of those things, those places that we go, and we might actually go to the forest sometimes for refuge. It doesn't sound so bad. But more likely the things that we might have questions about that we might want to look into and see if there might be something else to do, some other way to respond, are usually those habits involving body, speech, and mind. So the Buddha then goes on to tell us that the only place we can actually find true refuge, and he... go so far, so calmly and so confidently as to say freedom from all suffering, is to actually wake up to what's happening, to our real situation, to be right in the middle of that truth, even though we don't know how to be there.

[17:41]

It feels so edgy and we want to do something. to get away from it. We want to move. And I've been having this... I really appreciated your talk, Judith. Last week I've been having this constant feeling about standing still in the middle of the forest. And I think that the practice that Buddha's offering here in this verse about the refuges is about sitting down, about being still. about just stopping. Just stopping and looking into what it is that we're up to. What are we doing? What's happening? So as long as we are responding to our fear or fear of threat in ways that confirm

[18:42]

This idea of separateness that make us separate, even that tightening, that tightening that I can always find when I know I'm up to no good, that's always going to, that's never going to feel like a real refuge, even if it's familiar, even if there's some way in which it's kind of comfortable because we know it. And even we're like, well, I don't really want to do that, but I don't know what else to do, and at least I know. I know that kind of discomfort, so I think I'll just tighten again. Try later. I think that a lot of times we... we find it really difficult to stay close to our experience.

[19:46]

It can be really scary and overwhelming. And in this way, I think the practice of taking refuge is really quite a courageous practice. And we don't have to think, oh, now I'm being courageous. But it just is when people are trying to stay still and open and not do that thing again that causes, that just accelerates the suffering. It's really a courageous act. I also wanted to acknowledge that in our precept ceremony, in the lineage Soto Zen precept ceremony, we receive these three refuges, which I think I'm on the wrong page now.

[21:02]

We receive these three refuges as the first of our 16 precepts. And before we do that, we... we chant the repentance vows. So we actually acknowledge in the ceremony our humanness, our tendency to make mistakes. And from that space of just acknowledging, whoops, I'm a human being. I made that mistake again. Then we ask for refuge. We ask for a different... way of being, a different way of being in the world and relating to all of our experiences, all of our perceptions. I forgot to say something really important.

[22:25]

I'm not quite done yet, but just to let you know what the refuges are. Sorry. So many of you know this already, I know, but some of you might be new. And when we chant the refuges, it's a three-part chant, and it's very simple. The simplest version is very simple. We say, I take refuge in Buddha. I take refuge in Dharma. I take refuge in Sangha. And then in our tradition here, we have some additions in some of the ceremonies, which I'll talk about a little bit. In its simplest form, it's just simply taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And so as I mentioned, this collection of three is known in Buddhism as the triple treasure and also forms our precepts.

[23:33]

It's a precept also to take refuge. And I think one of the reasons that we, one of the things that we're doing when we chant these refuges, when we just say refuge, say the words, let them come into our bodies and send them back out, is there some kind of acknowledgement of a real person's practice journey, of the historical Shakyamuni Buddha and his willingness to sit down, his willingness to try this really difficult thing. of sitting down in the middle of confusion, pain and uncertainty, and having already made an enormous amount of effort, which is how many of us might feel a lot of the time, like, wow, I've already tried all of these things, and I still feel uneasy.

[24:36]

I still feel confused. I'm still, you know, like that. And so by... taking refuge in a human being, in human beings' ability to sit down and actually understand, to actually open to really understanding the way that the universe actually works, to understanding his relationship to everything in the universe. That itself, I think, is an acknowledgement of that possibility in us too. And it's kind of amazing that this practice, these words, these ideas, which even when they're just ideas and we don't really know about them yet, and maybe we're not sure about chanting refuges or even that word, it's kind of miraculous that we're in this room

[25:45]

that we're able to hear these words that we can chant the refuges 2,500 years or so, 7,000 miles, I look that up, away, and all of it warm hand to [...] warm hand right here. And so if it's just even that, much of just saying, wow, somebody really was willing to be bored and agitated to be able to do this practice. It's kind of something, something to feel maybe might have resonance. Hello?

[27:00]

My ear changed. As you can imagine, we have... a lot of ways that we practice taking refuge, aside from just speaking the words, aside from just saying, I take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. And I think one of our main practices, which I'm sure is quite obvious, is our practice of Zazen. As I was sitting this afternoon, I was struck by what a place of refuge that practice is for me. And I wasn't feeling so comfortable, actually, physically.

[28:03]

The cushion that I landed on was kind of weird and bumpy, and my foot was asleep, and I don't know, my nose was running. but just to have an invitation, permission, and a group of people. This is the other part, the group of people who want to come into a room like that in the middle of the afternoon and sit down and just breathe. It's kind of extraordinary. And so I think when we do this practice, when we just... Sit down. And we take up this practice of non-doing. Some of us might actually fold our legs into weird shapes so it would be actually really hard to get up and do anything quickly. And then we have this mudra way of holding our hands that I was listening to

[29:14]

Huitzu Suzuki Roshi's talk from just before I moved in here for the mountain seat ceremony. And he was talking about this, you should work on your mudra. And he mentioned, when you have your hands like this, you're sitting there, you're doing nothing, and you're holding the universe. You're holding the whole universe. So there's a way in which this posture, the way that hopefully we find some way to be in a posture where we can settle, and then this little refuge that we make, even if we don't do, maybe we do this, but there's some kind of way that we're offering refuge while we're taking refuge. We're giving refuge, taking refuge. And I think that when we we take refuge in Sangha, part of that practice is that when someone is taking refuge, is really taking refuge, is really vowing to do this difficult, unusual, ordinary, radical thing, it's like a refuge for us, too.

[30:44]

kind of gives us permission because we know maybe that person has a habit of getting angry and maybe we've experienced that habit in crossing paths with them. But then when we see year after year, a lot of us practice together year after year, we see the way that this person's working so hard to take on that habit. We see people working year after year to try to settle, to try to really take refuge. At least for me, it's really inspiring, and it gives me permission, it gives me encouragement to really take on the practice as well, to take on the practice of refuge. wanted to say that the word that the Buddha used in the little verse that I read from the Dhammapada, the word for refuge, I think it was from Pali, actually, this translation, is sarana.

[32:14]

I don't know how to pronounce it. Sarana. And You might recognize that from the Pali chants, Buddha, Sadanam, and it means refuge, kind of like a shelter. But the word that we use in Zen, in Soto Zen, with our sewing, is kie, namo kie butsu. And kie is a very interesting character. It's a very interesting collection of And I read that our teacher, Dogen Zenji, translated, I'm sure he's probably translated this a number of ways, but he's translated Kie as returning to, depending upon, and wholeheartedly throwing oneself into, which we translate as refuge, which is kind of interesting.

[33:18]

And I've also heard it translated as plunging, plunging into. So as we're sewing, or as we're just doing the silent refuge of bowing, or as we're sitting down or standing still, that feeling of just plunging in wholeheartedly of being willing, of being brave enough to open, to try something different, to open to that one who's afraid and look a little closer, look into it, instead of just responding in our usual way. how to watch when I walked in.

[34:34]

It's 824? Oh, perfect. The last thing I wanted to say. One more practice that I think we offer here and that is a big part of our Zen tradition is this idea of a schedule. This idea of making a really big deal out of moment-by-moment life unfolding and kind of writing it down and posting it, and then agreeing to follow the schedule. And for many of us, if you don't live here, you can actually do this practice just by, probably already do this, but maybe not in such a big deal way. but you can write down what you imagine your day could be, how you'd like your day to be, and then see what happens.

[35:42]

And here, many of us, I know, struggle with following every single thing completely and finding a way to balance. But that's another way to really investigate what we're up to and where we're... kind of going off here and there, wandering off from what we intended, from our commitment. And in this way, that schedule itself is a kind of a refuge for helping us awake up. So I just wanted to mention that. I think I have time for just one question. I guess I have a question about a sign in particular. I'm wondering, is it supposed to be for everyone?

[36:52]

I'm wondering, is it supposed to be for everyone? Yes. Cue up. I've been practicing, like, and I guess playing with what feels rather you're useful and noticing where resistance comes up and wondering, like, is this for me, is this not for me? Yes. How does it feel here, right now? I mean, I feel like I can work a lot. the mirror that kind of holds up to my response. I feel like, I feel like, what'd you say? I feel like I can learn a lot from this mirror.

[37:53]

It folds up. It's not necessarily fun. You haven't been here long enough yet. It gets really, really fun. Thank you very much, everyone. 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.

[38:46]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.98