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, everybody. Good evening, everybody here and everybody watching online. My name is Shundo, for those who don't know me. I lived in this building for a number of years, a number of years ago. It's lovely to be here. Thank you Tanto Tim for inviting me to give the first talk of the second half of 2026. How is this year going for you so far? It's nice to see people I've practiced with over the years in the row, residents and non-residents. So who was watching the US-Bosnia game just now?

[01:01]

Anybody? One or two. One or two, yes. So, you know, the US is turning 250 next week, which I'm not going to talk about because I'm English. But it's great that you finally managed to catch up with what the rest of the world has known, that the kind of football you play with the feet is actually a really great thing. I was watching the England game earlier in the World Cup, which is about halfway through. And I think what people are discovering this time around, if they haven't discovered it before, is the kind of communal aspect. I mean, there is some kind of gross commercialism and some maximalism that's going on around the edges. But once you get into the games, the crowd takes over and the joy of the game takes over. And even if you don't like the sport, it's an opportunity for sympathetic joy, which is one of the heavenly qualities that we try to cultivate. And I discovered this myself for the first time a number of years ago when the Giants won the World Series.

[02:04]

World Series, it's not quite like the World Cup, but there was a huge parade downtown. And I don't know anything about baseball, but the joy of everyone attending the parade was really quite fantastic. So I want to rewind for a moment. We just chanted together a little short verse in English. I kind of regret that we don't do the Japanese anymore, and it's been long enough that we haven't done the Japanese version. I really had to go and look it up. And interestingly, the words we chant here are slightly different to the words in the official Sotoshu scripture book, which is a wonderful book some of you may possess or may have seen. But we vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Taste the truth. And in the official version, this sutra opening verse, and I have put a bookmark on it here.

[03:05]

Doesn't mean I'm going to find it. The official version is, may we unfold the meaning of the Tathagata's truth. And for me, unfold is a little different to tasting. So this is a sutra book that you can unfold, a very traditional kind of sutra book. And if I was a very well-trained Japanese monk, I could do a beautiful flip from side to side. And this is how the sutras are read. But unfolding to me has a very different feeling from tasting. And tasting is a very personal thing. It's not listening. It's not hearing. It's not even understanding. But tasting is something we have to do for ourselves. And I'm going to demonstrate by taking a drink of this water. Because only I can taste this water.

[04:08]

No one else knows how warm or cold that is. So what does it mean to taste the Tatagata's truth of the Tathagata's words. So there's two quotes I want to share, which may help with this topic, but they may not. And the first is from one of Thomas Cleary's Zen compilations. There are a number of books that he wrote which Wonderful to read. The teacher in this case is named Qi Chui, and I can't find out anything about this teacher at all, but I still like the quote. It says, when a master craftsman instructs people, he can give them compass and ruler, but cannot give them skill. The function of Zen teachers is otherwise. First, they take away your compass and ruler.

[05:14]

then wait until you can cut squares and circles freehand, spontaneously conforming to compass and ruler. Thus, the skill is therein. Even so, this too is a temporary by-road, a little resting place. And here's the other quote. So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences. do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. And if you didn't recognize that, it's from the recent papal encyclical.

[06:14]

Probably the first time I've ever quoted the Pope in a Dharma talk. But I think it's a pretty good quote. And I think he's a pretty good Pope. It also seems to me that kind of maybe the most pressing issue of our time. I know Michael was speaking about this a couple of weeks ago as well. You know, we had this headlong rush to outsource critical faculties and our information gathering. And we have what I just saw referred to as the mindless anthropomorphism of large language models. So how does our practice of not being mindless, but being mindful, how does our mindful awareness stand up against this? And I had a reason for thinking about this topic, or I had an initial reason for thinking about this, About a month ago, I was at a gathering of what's called the Gen X teachers. And this is a cross-Buddhist organization where the only criteria really is your age.

[07:22]

So Abbott, Marco and David both qualify and we're at the gathering. And it's a wonderful chance to get together with Buddhist teachers from various traditions and just compare notes really about how the teaching is going what's important. And these are people that, you know, have been meeting together for about 15 years now, every other year. So there's a great sense of ease of being in this group. And we were talking about, you know, one of the pressing things was, you know, how people maybe lose themselves online. And teacher Kim Allen, who some of you may know, who teaches with Gil Fronsdale down the peninsula. talking about her experience of the young and online, she said this phrase that really struck me, which is, they have no inner basis for integrity. No inner basis for integrity. And I wonder why that struck me so much, but I think it really strikes to the heart of what it means to practice and what it means to be a human being.

[08:33]

because integrity is something that is very hard to achieve and easily lost. But I think all of us at one point or other in our lives realize there is a deeper question at stake in our lives rather than just the usual milestones. And with these days, with social media and AI, we have new ways to question what it means to be human. How can we hold firm, hold our humanity firm against these advances? Maybe think about the moral and not just the mathematical. It may be a rear-guard action right now, but recognizing the value of our own humanity. And for me, Buddha was the great diagnostician of what it means to be a human. I think his his awakening of what it takes for us to flourish as humans is still unsurpassed 2,500 years later.

[09:42]

And so we can hold that maybe as a counterpoint to this headlong rush towards artificial everything. Now some part of my teaching these days is offering meditation to people who don't live at the temple, don't have necessarily that serious a practice or that deeper practice or ongoing practice. But maybe they sit once a week or maybe once a day, maybe in the middle of the day, a very busy day. So I think about this sense of stillness within busyness, just even achieving for a moment that sense of stillness. in the middle of everything that's going on. And even as we do that, recognizing what remains busy even as we get still. There's a phrase in a poem that we chant here called the Jewel Mirror Samadhi by our ancestor Dongshan, who lived about 1,200 years ago

[11:02]

A thousand years ago in China. And then there's a line outwardly still while inwardly moving like a tethered colt or a trapped rat. And there's something about the concreteness of these analogies that you can picture. You can picture a colt that is tied up but does not want to be tied up. Or a rat that is in a corner and doesn't know what to do. There's a appearance of stillness, but we know that inside, a lot is happening. And I remember my days at Tassajara, which are many years ago now, sitting outwardly still while inwardly moving. There was an awful lot of Zazen, and sometimes I didn't want to be sitting Zazen. It was hard for me to sit still. It was hard for me to adapt to the schedule as it was. But then I had signed up to be there and nobody was keeping me there. And in spite of whatever stories I might have had about wanting to sit as I was in or not wanting to sit as I was in, I kept on sitting.

[12:11]

I kept on showing up. Because somewhere I could feel a transformation happening. And it felt like an important thing to allow to happen. And in these days, no matter whether we do it at the monastery or we do it once a week in an online class, there is something about sitting still and going inwards. As our other ancestor Dogen from Japan says, learning the backwards step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate yourself. This was from the first work that he wrote when he was 27 years old and had just been training in China. The text is called the Universal Recommendation for Zazen or the Fukan Zazengi. Now he partly borrowed some of the phrases from earlier Chinese texts and he revised it during his life, but still at 27 to have this absolute certainty about what needed to be done as a human being.

[13:22]

And just to fill out the passage from the Fukan Zazengi, he says, you should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech. So this outward search and this outward impulse that we so often have, looking for things to fill us up, looking for things to understand, looking for things to hear, looking for things to entertain us, cease from practice based on that. Learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate yourself. And I know it's difficult for some people to do that. In one sense, I didn't struggle when I started sitting zazen because I had, by that stage, spent a lot of time alone with my thoughts. And so that practice wasn't especially difficult for me. But I know for some people it's very hard. It's very hard to be with their own body and all the experience that it carries.

[14:27]

But there's something transformative that can happen through that. And as Dogen puts it, body and mind of themselves will drop away and your original face will be manifest. So just to unpack those phrases for those who are not so familiar with them. body and mind are themselves dropping away. It doesn't sound like what's going to happen when you turn the light inwardly to illuminate yourself. It seems like you're focusing more on yourself, not letting the self drop away. But part of the miraculous practices of Zazen is that this is what happens, more or less. It may not happen in such a radical way as Dogen experienced it in China. But it's this way that your sense of self starts to drop away. And your original face, this original face is an image that comes through the Zen literature from China.

[15:41]

The sense of the absolute inner being, not the inner being that is bound by causes and conditions or personal karma, cultural karma, societal karma, but the absolute inward self that is not an individual. And how I think this practice works is that when we turn the light inwardly, we learn to be with ourselves. We learn to be with whatever arises inwardly about ourselves, what trains of thought we have, what emotional unpackings might start to happen in the silence. And we start to see the particular patterns of our delusions. And through some kind of alchemy, I think, we start having compassion and patience for our own delusion.

[16:47]

So instead of the self-judgment and self-criticism and self-blame, the shame and guilt that we might normally think of. And we start to befriend these things. We start to be okay with them. And as we do that with our own delusion and our own karma, we start having compassion and patience with other people's delusion and other people's karma. And we stay in this kind of compassionate curiosity for what is arising, not necessarily always able to stick with it. always able to deal with the stuff that shows up, but giving it our best effort. And from this comes this kind of inner force, which is very different from any kind of external validation that we might be getting. And there's something about doing this continuously over time.

[17:51]

where we start to make the practice our own. Suzuki Roshi, the founder of these temples, had a phrase that he liked to use, or a word that he liked to use, which was composure, a sense of finding composure. And my notion is that he used this word sometimes as a synonym for enlightenment. And I think his original students in the 1960s were very interested in enlightenment, because that's what they'd read about and that's what they wanted. And again, this is kind of like this external grasping for things. And I think that's how Suzuki Roshi saw it. These people were kind of wanting something that wasn't theirs, that they thought they could get, especially by coming to Zen Center. So I think he used this word composure just to cast a different light onto the sense of what happens when body and mind drops away.

[18:59]

Let's have this stability. And I think from this comes a kind of equanimity And we start to develop this inner integrity. We're not pulled off base by adversity. We have this resilience and compassion to deal with our own delusions and our own karmic tendencies. And we start developing this openness to get out of our own way and be present for others. Now, among one of my earliest experiences at Tassahara was practicing with Ryushin and we're studying the wholehearted way, which is another text by Dogen he wrote when he was 31, not long after he wrote the Fukan Zazengi.

[20:10]

And somewhere near the beginning there's a phrase, we are no longer concerned with conceptual distinctions. And I seem to remember we spent a lot of time discussing that. What does it mean to no longer be concerned? with conceptual distinctions. Is that like the large language model, not knowing good or evil? And the way I see it now is that these conceptual distinctions are going to arise, inevitably. Our mind always comes up with this stuff. Right now, I'm feeling kind of warm. When I came into the room in my ordinary clothes, I thought it was quite cool. I don't know if they've shut the windows since then, but conceptual distinctions are immediately arising. We can't stop that happening. But we can no longer be bothered by them, which is not getting pulled apart by our stories and opinions and values and judgments.

[21:12]

We notice this stuff coming up, but okay, stuff's coming up. And we try to stay with that kind of composure. And Suzuki Roshi used a similar phrase, don't be bothered by your mind. Whatever your mind is doing, don't let it upset you. Don't let it knock you off base. Don't let it disrupt your sense of inner integrity, inner composure. So will a large language model ever taste the truth of its doctor's words? I did actually ask one of them not too long ago to summarize the Shobogenzo for me, which is Dogen's long 95-chapter work, which is very dense and difficult to understand. And it did a reasonable job, I have to say. But I did catch it out a couple of times, and it was borrowing quotes that weren't from the Shobogenzo to represent the Shobogenzo.

[22:21]

So when a master craftsman instructs people, he can give them compass and ruler but cannot give them skill. The function of Zen teachers is otherwise. First, they take away your compass and ruler. Then wait till you can cut squares and circles freehand, spontaneously conforming to compass and ruler. Thus, the skill is therein. Even so, this too is a temporary by-road. a little resting place. So the function of the teacher and the practice itself is to stop you relying on the externals in the way that we tend to rely on externals. How is it to cut squares and circles freehand? How is it to find that kind of skill without props, without looking outside?

[23:30]

Even so, this too is a temporary by-road, a little resting place. I think I'm reading that as like, you don't get stuck there showing off how you can do squares and circles. Once you understand that kind of capacity, it's not something to get excited about or post on social media. It's just there. It's something you can carry with you. And when you can carry it with you, it can go anywhere. I'm glad the crows are still doing their thing out here. It's very encouraging. So how is it to taste the truth of the Tatagata's words? I'll stop for questions.

[24:42]

Please. Thanks for the talk, David. And I just wanted to quickly share. It's a bit of an amusing anecdote. But today, I couldn't complete my work because I had to commute because of the traffic for the game. So yeah, then I ended up just not working. And then I have to finish a couple hours of work. So I was debating if I should come today or just skip it. And randomly, you know, my mind said, but what if David's speaking? It's so random. And I never look it up. So then I looked it up, and there you were. That's an amazing coincidence. I just wanted to share it. Well, thank you. I hope the traffic wasn't too bad. One day America will discover the joys of public transit as well. First off, thank you very much for your talk.

[25:58]

I had a question regarding the topic of compassion and viewing your thoughts with compassion and not letting them bother you. How is it that we can view commonly associated thoughts in our everyday with compassion? I'm going to try and answer that question. I think as human beings, we have a bias towards negativity. And I think we're very ready to judge. And I certainly grew up in a very judgy household. So there's an inbuilt negative thing going on there. And one of the ways I learned to deal with that, apart from not believing it quite so much, certainly when I came to live at Zentan and not articulating it quite so much, because that didn't really go down very well, was trying to counterbalance the negative stuff with positive things.

[27:07]

Because lots of positive things happen too, but we just don't give them the same weight as the negative stuff. And so when somebody treats you badly, you remember that. If you have an argument with somebody, you can bring up that energy very easily, like, oh, I can get really angry about this thing because they were wrong and I was right. But when something nice happens, you know, when somebody's very considerate, you know, you feel taken care of, you know, we just kind of notice and move on. So one of my practices was to really taste that nice feeling, to articulate it to myself, say, I felt really taken care of there. Thank you very much for doing that. Even if you don't get to say it to the person, just noticing that. And so then the kind of compassion starts building and you start you know, tipping the scales a little bit this way. And then it's a little more easily available at other times as well, I think. Not always. Does that help? Yes, thank you.

[28:19]

Anything to articulate from the online sangha? Thank you. I was thinking about, well, I'm also Gen X. And I can see, we were talking at dinner even tonight about the difference of people who sort of came into adulthood like socially during COVID. And I feel like, especially with the people who I work with who are like Yeah, I know there's some of you here.

[29:19]

But it's really interesting to me. And I was having a conversation with somebody today in which I was, like, praising them and then also had some other information to deliver that wasn't, like, criticism, but it wasn't praise. And he needed to deliver both of these pieces of information. And this was a young person. And first I did the praise. And then they said, okay, but there's a but. I can feel it coming, and I'm like, I mean, a little bit. And they said, don't, just don't. I can't handle it. Like, my nervous system can't handle it. Just give me until tomorrow. And I'm like, so I'm stopped in the moment, and I was like, am I really harming this person by delivering this other piece of information that actually isn't harmful at all to anyone? Or it's more like a question. And I was just kind of like, no, we have to continue.

[30:19]

And so when you were saying, like, how does it feel to taste the truth of the... Like, it made me think of that thing that happened today because it's like the truth, the real truth, has all of that inside of it. The real truth is never going to be, like, 100% praise. But it was just really interesting, like... I feel like I can tolerate that and even enjoy it, actually. And I don't know if it's a generational divide or if it's a social phenomena or what's going on, but I think it's really interesting because I feel like I find myself in that situation often where I notice this difficulty to tolerate a more holistic... message, I guess, or view of reality. And I think that AI feeds into that because the response of AI is like, oh, great idea.

[31:27]

You have really, but it's not real, you know? It's like all praise. Anyway, that's it. Thank you. I mean, I think maybe, you know, growing up in an analog world, as we did, maybe we learn to take a little more rough and tumble. But what I would trust about the young people I know is I trust them to be reliable narrators of their own experience. Because even with the stuff they have to put up with in terms of being constantly online or whatever, I think their inner experience is there and is felt. And so even if they can't, can't articulate it or even necessarily can't meet you where you want them to be, they're there where they need to be at that moment. And hopefully tomorrow you can have that conversation. I already had it today. Well, good. I was like, no, this is ridiculous. But I mean, maybe that's my growth edge. Yeah. But I think one thing, you know, I tend to feel these days is that...

[32:32]

people do know themselves. Even if they haven't developed that deep inner integrity, they do know themselves. I'm not ready to hear that right now. In the same way that we might not be ready to put on our best face today or whatever it is. Trust people to do that. But we do anyway, because we have to, I guess. So it's like, it's sort of this tension between like, I can't create this perfect world for you. Like, this is the reality of a situation. I don't know. I really need to perfume. I was watching this interview with a perfumer and they were like, how do you create these beautiful fruit scents? And she said, well, with every beautiful fruit scent, there's always an element that's really rotting and disgusting if you just smelled it on its own. But I put a little bit into that because otherwise it would just smell fake because fruit is always in a state of rotting if it's ripe.

[33:34]

And that's kind of how I feel about it. There's always going to be a little... Nothing's going to be perfectly palatable in that way. I don't know. Or else it's fake. Anyway. Thank you. Thank you. I was disappointed in myself recently because I just spoke very sharply. It was kind of a blurt, you know, to my close friend who I was talking to. I guess I could say that I was disappointed in what she said, but the point is my... I mean, I had felt like I have been working on, you know, separating, having that feeling and saying something.

[34:39]

And lately, there hasn't been, or at least that one time, there was another time too, that no pause, you know? And there's some, what? What would you recommend? Well, maybe you're just remembering the one negative time and forgetting the 20 times when you did remember not to say the blurty thing. So remember those. Yeah, okay. Because we're never going to get it perfect, as we were just now. But we keep trying. And you're at my recent class on the Bodhisattva Vows. I was thinking about talking about the Bodhisattva Vows a little bit. But we make these vows. We have these intentions. And I think Michael's talked about the particular part of the brain that you can actually activate to get that intention muscle going. So just stick with it. It might be one time out of 20 now. It might be one time out of 100 next year.

[35:40]

And that's great. That's great for everybody. Okay. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Tara. Sinko, please unmute. Hi, thank you for the talk today. I think what Dogen said, to study the Buddha's way is to study the self. I have a very interesting relationship with that. When I first heard about it, like a few years ago, I don't think I understand it, but I kind of intuitively like it. And I put my emphasis more on meditation and, you know, other things for the past few years. But recently, I don't know, somehow this coming back to me, maybe because I'm down or toxic hurt, it's about the study the self, that part.

[36:42]

Because I think, I'm a Jiachi person as well. I have a lot of opinions. I did my whatever, you know, things, training I did in, you know, make this mind to be like very opinionated. And I try to study that. And in the past, I feel like when I studied that, I'm trying to push it away. And I judge myself and judge others. It's like the layers and layers of reaction. And I think recently, somehow, I'm trying to accept that. I feel like the study, the self, I really like how he put it. It's like a scientific attitude. You don't have to say this is, like, maybe a little friendly. Not totally neutral to study. As a scientist, look at myself. Like, what am I doing now? And this is included. That's really hard to do because a lot of times I don't like what I see. But I feel it's so fruitful. Like, even once out of many times, if you can do it, with a little bit more neutral attitude.

[37:43]

Oh, I'm studying myself. This is the reaction I have when I get, like, look at my children making those mistakes. I'm like, I don't like it. I'm judging them. But that's what I'm doing. So I just want to get your thoughts on this, because I feel like the focus really a lot is on studying the self. But anyway. Well, the next line of the text is, to study the self is to forget the self. Yes, because I used to focus on the forget the self a lot. But I'm coming back to study the self. Yeah, it's not a good idea to forget it until you've studied it. Because if you've studied it, then you're not aware of what's going on. But if you studied it and then you forget it, at least you know what's there. But it's that critical thing of not being bothered by it so much. Yeah, I think I used to try to jump over the study and to forget about the self. It didn't work really well. So I'm kind of coming back. But anyway, so thanks so much for the talk. Keep going. And then the next step is being actualized by myriad things, which means you're open to the present moment.

[38:46]

So when you've done all of that, and you can put it away or put it down at least, then you get to hear the crows and get excited about the crows. Yeah, I mean, I had a conversation with my teacher, my Zen teacher, and sometimes I tell her about my parenting, and she feels like, I feel like you're trying to use your way to actualize things, not trying to be actualized by what's happening. She's like, oh yeah, sometimes I'm carrying my own concepts and trying to do the parenting. Anyway, so it is amazing quotes from Dogen. I love it. Keep going. Keep going. Thank you. Well, I think we may have reached bedtime. 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.

[39:50]

For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:00]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_93.63