This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. How nice to sit here together. Well, excuse me. Maybe we should start with some meditation practice for the children, meaning all of us.

[01:02]

So these instructions are for the children, meaning all of us. You ready? Everybody ready? Is she ready? She doesn't look that ready. No, not ready. Well, that's a way of being ready, I guess. So, when you meditate, actually, it's not you that's meditating. You know that, right? you put your body inside the body of Buddha. And that's how you meditate. Because nobody can meditate, really. Only the Buddha can do that. So let's close our eyes and sit up straight and imagine that our body is the body of Buddha.

[02:08]

Beautiful, dignified human body. And let's begin... by putting our thumb and forefinger on our earlobes and very gently pulling down. Because you know the Buddha doesn't have regular earlobes. The Buddha has long earlobes that hang down. That's how you can tell a Buddha. Just look for the earlobes. So we should gently pull down on our earlobes. and feel our earlobes gently coming down just like the Buddha's earlobes. And then, you know the Buddha does not have a regular

[03:16]

top of the head. He has a little mountain on the top of his head. So let's now put our fingertips on the tops of our head, right in the middle. And if you pay close attention, you can hear a little mountain coming up in the middle of your head. You can hear it with your fingertips. So feel that little mountain coming up in the middle of your head. Can you feel it? You really have to pay close attention. And also, as you know, the Buddha doesn't only have two eyes, he has another eye, an invisible eye, in the middle of his forehead. So let's put our fingertips in the middle of our forehead and feel the Buddha's wisdom eye it's warm you can feel the warmth of it right in the middle of your forehead can you feel that?

[04:34]

Now we can put our hands in our laps again. And all at the same time we can feel our earlobes long and a mountain on the top of our head and a warm spot between the eyes. And then we can feel our breathing. Nicely breathing in and nicely breathing out. So smooth. And, you know, the Buddha's body is glowing. So now we have to make our body glowing because we're inside the Buddha's body. And the way we do that is to pay attention to every breath and when we breathe in, breathe in light.

[05:59]

And when we breathe out, breathe out light until our whole body is bathed in light. It'll take you a few breaths to get there. But after three or four breaths, your whole body can be glowing with light. And you can feel it from the inside. And now, for our last practice, we're going to do the supreme practice of all the Buddhas. The greatest practice ever. And that's the practice of listening.

[07:05]

Listening to sound and listening to silence. So listen very closely now to what I'm going to say. This is very important. In a minute, our Eno is going to strike the bell. And when she strikes the bell, we're all going to listen very, very strong to the sound of the bell. And we're going to listen for the moment when the sound of the bell disappears into silence. And at that moment, Just at that exact moment, when the sound of the bell disappears into silence, you're going to stand up at that exact moment. Everybody's going to stand up. Even the people on the tans, I think, you can stand up. But you have to really, really listen because it's not easy to hear the sound of silence, right?

[08:15]

So, We'll see how we can do with this. Is everybody ready? You ready? Everybody ready? I forgot to say that I'm the only one that's not going to stand up. And the reason for that is I'm so strapped into my little Zendo spaceship here with my robes and my little lectern that it would be so hard to stand up and sit down again that I'm not doing it. But thank you for doing it. And now that you're standing up, you guys can go out and play. Thank you very much for paying attention to all this. Hi, Betsy.

[09:18]

Good to see you. Well, this morning I want to give a talk and the title of the talk is No Teachers of Zen.

[11:17]

And many of you know I have a horrible writing habit. I'm always writing and even though it's so troublesome I keep doing it anyway. And so I write a lot for the Buddhist magazines and they often will get a hold of me and say, we need somebody to write this. And I'll say, fine, I'll write that. So this is an essay I wrote for Buddhadharma, which has actually just come out in Buddhadharma. So those of you who see Buddhadharma will have seen this essay maybe. Because they did an issue on Buddhist teachers, and they asked me would I write an article for that. And I've given this maybe once or twice as a Dharma talk already, so I apologize to those of you who may have already heard it, but my fingers are crossed that it's worth repeating. So that if you already heard it, you won't mind somewhat sharing it again. Sorry. Because I think you heard it.

[12:27]

No teachers of Zen. And I should tell you before I present this that They said to me, and we want you to make it personal. Make it personal. I said, okay, I'll make it personal. Whatever that means, personal. One of my favorite Zen stories is about teachers. The great Zen teacher Huangbo strides into the hall and says to the assembled monastics, You people are all dreg slurpers. If you go on like this, when will you ever see today? Don't you know that in all of China there are no teachers of Zen? So then an intrepid monastic hearing this comes forward and says to him, but then, okay, then what about all those people?

[13:33]

Like you, for instance, who set up Zen places that students flock to like birds. And Huangbo says, I don't say there's no Zen, only that there are no teachers. So I've always found this story very appealing. I've never myself been attracted to Zen masters or gurus of any sort in any field. Powerful, famous, charismatic, spiritual guides. Usually if I see such people in the vicinity, I go in the other direction. And maybe it's all fake. Maybe there aren't any people like that. And maybe it's not fake. I don't know. But in any case, whether it's fake or not, I have never been interested in it.

[14:34]

I've always assumed that I know what I need to know for my own living. And that when I don't, and I need to find out more, I'll have to find out for myself. No wisdom, no experience that isn't my own can be worthwhile for me. So what is the point in spiritual teachers? What benefit could possibly be gained from hanging around some supposed sage? Even if they are completely enlightened, what good does that do me? Their enlightenment is not going to rub off on me. So when I began to study Zen, my interest was not to find a great Zen master. My interest was... first and foremost, to learn how to do Zazen, so that I could find out for myself what this practice is all about.

[15:40]

And I was perfectly happy to listen to talks and instructions that would help to orient me toward the practice. But the idea that following a Zen teacher and hanging on his every word and deed, and I say his because in those days, unlike today, all the Zen teachers were guys. Now, I would say, Half of them, or more than half of them, are women. But in those days, it was this guy. Why would you want to hang around him? How was that going to help you to become awakened? This seemed to me not only unappealing, but also wrong. Because I had pretty much the same idea as Huangbo, that there is Zen, but there are no teachers of Zen. Now, I understand that people with credentials will set up shop and they will welcome students, which is necessary because we don't do this on our own.

[16:42]

We need some structure. We need a place to practice. But the teacher cannot teach you. The practice is up to you. In other words, good old American individualism, which we all grew up on, and I believed it. so much that I honestly had no interest in encountering teachers. Though at the time that I began studying, there were many still alive, and not alive now, but many great Asian teachers that I could have encountered. I first came to Zen Center in the spring or so of 1970. Suzuki Roshi was still alive then. But I made no effort to hear him speak. I never saw him. I never met him. When I saw notice of his funeral, I thought, why would I go to that?

[17:44]

I never knew the guy. And when I saw notice of the installation of his first successor, which was a big deal, the first American Zen master, I wasn't interested to go to that. Looking back on this now, I regret it. Too bad for me. It was a missed opportunity. But that's how I was at the time. So when I say all this, it might imply that I was a rebellious Zen student, but that's not true. I was not rebellious. I had no problem respecting my teachers, listening to their talks, going for a regularly scheduled Doka-san to reflexively rebel. or deny a teacher is to set up a teacher in your mind who fulfills the ideal requirements that the teacher in front of you is failing to fulfill. And I had no such idea.

[18:46]

So I didn't mind going to the teachers. But I was at the Zen Center to study Zen. I had my own reasons for wanting to do that. And since the teachers were in charge of the Zen Center, I would be cooperative with them. Why wouldn't I be? But whatever benefit I got out of the practice was going to be my own affair. No one else was going to give it to me or even lead me to it. So I recount all this because they asked me to be personal. Also, it's very easy to write about things that happened to you because you already know that. You don't have to do research. It just takes time. So I got so many words out of that part of the essay. But also, that's how I felt then.

[19:49]

But I don't completely agree with myself now. But that gives you an idea of how I was thinking at the time. I certainly... had no idea whatsoever that one day I would be giving a Dharma talk in the famous Green Gulch Farm Zen Center. This was the farthest thing from my mind. My idea was that I was going to get what I needed from the practice and then move on with my vague life as a poet. And somehow I was going to survive. That was my idea. My wife Kathy and I were ordained together as Zen Buddhist priests in January of 1980 because our teacher required us to either do that and continue to practice full-time in the center or move out and get a life.

[20:54]

Because at the time we already had two children. So it's like... get a life or get ordained. And get ordained seemed like the lesser of two evils. I myself was far less ready for that step than she was, but somehow I managed with her help. In 1988, when my teacher offered me Shiho, which is the... name of Dharma Transmission Ceremony full ordination as a Soto Zen priest when I was offered Shiho in 1988 I was really surprised because in those days in American Zen Shiho was very rare very rare although it was not rare then nor is it rare now in Japan every young man whose daddy is a

[21:58]

abbot of a temple, we received Shiho by the age of 25. But nevertheless, in America then it was very rare and very rarefied. And people presumed that only deeply enlightened people could receive Shiho, which explains why I was so surprised. Nevertheless, I went ahead with the process and I became an official Zen teacher, Zen priest, a role that I found at first disturbing because it was so far from my self-concept and I was very ill-prepared for it and not all that suited for it. But eventually, with Huangbo in mind, I began to get used to the social designation Zen priest. Zen teacher, although I actually don't ever use the word teacher myself, it seems odd.

[23:03]

But since then, I've always tried to do the best I could to help people practice. But I think there's more to this no teachers of Zen than meets the eye. I still believe that students are responsible for their own practice and their own awakening. Nobody can communicate to you a truth worth knowing. The only worthwhile truth is the one that you find uniquely for your own life. On the other hand, I've come to see that Zen is not a lone ranger practice. It is not rugged individualism. and that Zen teachers are important to the practice, as the tradition certainly indicates and as experience proves. Yes, there are no teachers of Zen because Zen isn't teachable subject matter or skill.

[24:12]

Although there are plenty of specific things to be learned, like how to sit in meditation, how you're supposed to walk into a zendo, how you're supposed to strike a proper bell at the proper time, liturgy, some acquaintance with the traditionalist literature, many things that you need to learn. Still, it's clear that Zen itself, while not exactly something other than these things, isn't... exactly the same as these things either if you read Zen literature this is very obvious to anybody Zen is a lot more slippery than just how do you strike a bell the Heart Sutra says all dharmas are empty the Dharma is empty Zen is empty empty of specific

[25:18]

content, empty of form, empty of doctrine, empty of style, empty of faith that can be codified and defined. Zen is more than all of that. So what is there to teach? What is it? And what is there to teach? But, yes, there are Zen teachers because Zen practice is not nothing. real transformation occurs. Zen teachers cannot show you how to effect this transformation. They can't cause it to happen in you by some, like, mystical means. And they're not masters of it. Because who could be master of something that's so indefinable? And yet, they play an essential role in the process. If you figure, you know, an ordinary educational model. How does it work?

[26:19]

Well, there are teachers who teach, there are students who learn, there's subject matter, there's standards of knowledge, and there's an educational institution which contains and certifies the educational process. In many ways, Zen might look like this, but in fact, it's not exactly an educational It's a transformational proposition. It's a process in which both teacher and student are fully engaged, each playing his or her proper role. And it's the process itself in its entirety that affects the transformation. You could think of it like a complicated machine with lots of moving parts that interact in a complex system. Each part affecting every other part. There's no part in that kind of machine that teaches and another part that learns.

[27:24]

It wouldn't make sense to think of it like that. Yet, if you turn the machine on and you run it for a while, something will happen. A product will be produced. In this case, a seasoned Zen practitioner who will embody in his or her own unique way, and that's an important point, in his or her own unique way, the values, the commitments, and mostly the feeling of and the vision of a life of practice that will happen. So it's exactly as Huangbo says. Yes, there really is Zen, and it really does matter. But strictly speaking, there are no teachers. Although, that's right, the machine won't turn unless all the parts are there fully functioning. in their proper places. So the teacher, who's not actually teaching anything, has to take his or her place in the process.

[28:27]

Or another analogy is like a mandala, in which every element in the mandala has its place. But really no element is sovereign. What matters is the overall pattern, the overall design. So in this way, teachers are important. not because of something they have that they can teach or something they have that they know, because they take their place. So in order to effectively take his or her place in this pattern, in this process, a teacher ideally would have certain capacities. Faith in the practice, I think, is the most important. And not just enthusiastic faith, I believe the practice is great, but faith grounded in experience over time. Faith that is not something only spoken about, but demonstrated in action.

[29:31]

Experience in the lived reality of the practice is the source of this kind of faith. The certain knowing to your very bones, that this practice is the truest way to live. And practice here doesn't just mean formal practice that happens at Green Gulch or in other temples and meditation halls. Here, practice means understanding and living with vision, a human life among others. Meditation is still pretty new. in our culture and it's pretty exciting and exotic to us so naturally we've overemphasized it and we've romanticized it romanticized all the wonderful kinds of unusual experiences that you can have in meditation practice but such experiences are just a matter of course I think they're among the least experienced the least important thing

[30:42]

or a teacher to have experienced. But you can rest assured that any Zen teacher will have experienced many, many things in meditation because they've practiced it for a long time and everybody will. If you sit there long enough, everything and anything is bound to come up. But it isn't that experience that matters as much as it is the folding of all that experience into a whole life and a whole view. But even this depth of faith, I would say, is not essential. It's basic, but it's not essential. Excuse me, I don't mean that. Scratch that. It's essential, but not sufficient. Ideally, a Zen teacher besides this would be a person who is willing to share life completely with others. This is not that easy.

[31:43]

It takes a wide and deep acceptance of and even a healthy interest in the many wily and wild manifestations of the human heart which will arise eventually in the course of practice over a lifetime. Practice with people for a while and you will definitely bear witness to births, deaths, marriages, divorces, love affairs, enlightenment experiences, endless tears, tragic illnesses, angry feuds, breaches, collapses, surprises of all sorts. Zen teacher will eventually live through all of this with others. Will live through almost everything human beings are capable of perpetrating. Which is why he or she needs long, long patience. Deep forbearance. Huge

[32:44]

forgiveness, and a healthy sense of the immense tragedy and beauty of every human life. The more the teacher of Zen has an idea of Zen that students must conform to, the more will everyone, including the teacher, suffer if not at first then later as people who were initially inspired by that brilliant idea of Zen will come to feel themselves oppressed or even betrayed by it no doubt there are many other important skills people would like their Zen teachers to have but deep faith and a willingness to share your life honestly are the core of what I have come to feel is the most important thing after having been doing this for a long time.

[33:55]

However, having said that, I should also say that I have seen Zen teachers who are seriously lacking in both of these essential qualities nevertheless benefit students enormously. which goes to show you that there are no universal prescriptions in Zen or in our lives. Another thing, Zen practice is inherently dialogical, interactive. Compared to other forms of Buddhism, where people are encouraged to go in caves or practice on their own, Zen is classically called together practice, everything together. Most of you know, in a formal Zen meal, everyone starts eating together and finishes eating together. In Zen walking meditation, people don't go out on their own and walk. They walk together in a single file at the same pace around the Zendo.

[35:00]

You sit in meditation, not in your own hut, but in a Zendo, side by side with others. Period starts, everyone starts, the period ends, everyone ends together. And if you think about the characteristic form of the Zen literature, it's completely dialogic. It's not people giving talks and teachings and writing lengthy texts. It's records of dialogues, conversations between practitioners. Rough and tumble, back and forth conversations in which teachings are not so much explained as demonstrated dynamically, within the interaction. And one of the characteristic classical Zen practices is the one-on-one meeting with the teacher, which is understood not as reporting in or asking for advice about your meditation practice or your life.

[36:05]

All these things might happen in the meeting, but the real understanding of the meeting is not that it's about those things, but it's a Dharma encounter. a chance to meet yourself nakedly in the process of meeting another person. So given this radically together style, it's clear that a Zen teacher has to be ready all of the time to let go of his life and be ready to enter the life of another. which is a beautiful thing. It's nice to let go of your life. It's such a bother, one's own life. This deep mutuality I really think is the essence of Zen practice and it's been wonderful training for a stubborn person like me.

[37:07]

It has really helped me. I know I would have had such a hard time if it weren't for practicing Zen and getting me over this to some extent anyway, expanding my horizons, being able to see many lives, not just my own. But it took me a while to get ready for this or even know that it was required. Soon after my Shiho ceremony in 1988, I read a line in a book, just a casual line in a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, which said something like, if you're practicing Zan and you cannot find a true teacher, you might as well not practice at all. Well, this line just sent me into a terrible tizzy. It got me all entangled in my net of unacknowledged preconceptions about Zen teachers.

[38:16]

It was very, very upsetting to me because it seemed to imply that there was some exalted state of one's being a true Zen teacher, a state that was unknown to me. And yet here I was, one of the very few American Zen people in those days with full Dharma transmission. And what the hell did I think I was doing? So it was really upsetting to me. And it took me a few uncomfortable years to finally catch up with Thich Nhat Hanh. I don't even remember where it was. Maybe it was like I had to go to India or someplace. I don't remember, but someplace. And I finally got to ask him about this. And he said to me very sweetly, Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry. We all help one another. The one-day person helps the person who just came in an hour ago.

[39:21]

The five-year person helps the one-year person. Everybody's helping everybody else according to their experience. And then I felt much better. Still, it took me a long time to feel comfortable in the teacher's seat. And this is really mostly what it is, right? You're sitting in a seat facing the altar, as I am now. It could feel weird, right, sitting in that seat. And it does at first, but after a while you get used to it. And for a long time I didn't realize how much I was caught by the idea that I was supposed to be someone that other people expected me to be. So that was a strain. But now I realize there is no one in particular I need to be. A formal Zen talk like this is not actually conceived of as some informational teaching.

[40:24]

The word for it in Japanese translates as more or less presenting the shout. And the sense of it is that you're just presenting the teaching mainly by being in your own body and speaking in your own voice, that itself is presenting the teaching. And I have always appreciated the fact that before you give a talk, you make, as I did this morning, three prostrations before the Buddha. These bows remind you that you're not giving this talk. This talk is not about you and anything that you think. This is the Buddha. giving the talk. And when you make those prostrations, you are praying to the Buddha, please, Buddha, let me do my best to channel your thought through my voice. In the faith, that whatever you say, whether it's right or whether it's wrong, will be of some use if you are sincere.

[41:37]

and you try your best. So you set your heart on that sincerity when you bow. I always do that. After some years I came to see that this was so in general about anything I did as a Zen teacher. If I was honest, if I tried my best, if I followed precepts, if I didn't pretend to be anyone, and isn't that so common? We were all pretending to be somebody, right? We're all in disguise as ourselves. But if I did my best not to pretend to be anyone and all that, everything would be all right. Which sounds simple-minded enough and is simple-minded, but actually not that easy to do. And anyway, what does everything would be okay actually mean? It certainly does not mean that things will never go wrong. It doesn't mean that.

[42:38]

In fact, things will certainly go wrong. Maybe another capacity a Zen teacher should develop is the resilience and breadth of view that will enable her to live with the fact that she is inevitably going to fail. At least this has been my personal experience. Occupying the teacher gear in the whirling Zen machine requires that you receive all and sundry with an open heart and the willingness and stamina to take full responsibility for each and every relationship you enter, which means to care and try your best to help. And people come to Zen practice as they do to any spiritual practice with plenty of human need. They come with trust. They come with mistrust. They come with tremendous wounds and hidden expectations. Of course, the Zen teacher, an imperfect human being, is going to disappoint a fair number of them.

[43:47]

You, the Zen teacher, will disappoint them on the first day, perhaps, which would be good, or decades later, which is not as good. You are going to misunderstand them. They are going to misunderstand you. You're going to say and do things that are hurtful, even though you never, never intended it. Meaning to straighten someone out, which I've learned is a highly dubious proposition to begin with. You will completely botch the job, reinforcing the behavior or view that you were trying to soften. Students who have practiced faithfully with you for years, maybe decades, will come to realize that it has all been a mistake and will leave creating enormous confusion and dissension in their wake.

[44:59]

Your public words will, in being variously understood and misunderstood, create confusion among Sangha members, who will act out their confusion in sometimes painful and drastic ways. You will have all kinds of complicated and contradictory feelings about people who come to practice with you. You will love them. You will worry about them desperately. You will dread them. You will watch them making terrible mistakes you cannot prevent, which will hurt other people. You will watch them with awe. as they manipulate you, setting you up for all sorts of horrible falls that you can do absolutely nothing to prevent. And in the end, you'll realize what you should have known in the beginning. You cannot help them at all.

[46:04]

And you'll just have to watch them suffer or watch them make you suffer. and maintain your composure and good humor even so. Anyway, I'm just talking about myself. It's just my experience. Possibly unique to me, but I doubt it. I would think that other Zen teachers in the room could relate. I don't know. You'll tell me later. So now there are a lot of Zen teachers which is much better. In 1988, they were very cute. Now there's lots of them, which is wonderful for all of us, especially for the Zen teachers who can talk to each other and commiserate. They can compare notes. They can see where they make mistakes. They can learn from one another how to correct the mistakes. A lot of Zen teachers even try to take, like any other people in professional...

[47:09]

settings, take trainings and whatnot to get more psychologically capable or other kinds of trainings to learn different things so they can figure out how to be better with the various cockeyed things that students do and present themselves with. And I've learned a lot from commiserating with other teachers. I've learned a lot about my own mistakes. However, I think that just like Zen students can't learn from teachers. I don't think Zen teachers can learn how to teach either from anybody else. Each situation, each person is absolutely unique. And one's own response at the time to that other person must be and will inevitably be unique. And I always respond and trust completely my response. And, of course, I'm willing to change when it turns out that my response wasn't good.

[48:12]

But in the end, I know it's completely hopeless. I'm never going to get it right. It's always, at any time, going to be wrong. And sometimes getting it wrong is actually better than getting it right. Sometimes getting it wrong is more effective. So in the end, what I'm saying here is that it does turn out to be absolutely true that everything always turns out okay. When you trust the process of the practice more than you trust yourself, your limited self, more than you trust the limited sangha, more than you trust the limited formal practice or what happens to anybody in the short run, when you trust the practice in the widest scope, in the biggest context, you realize that the magic of the practice is even stronger than you ever could have imagined.

[49:22]

It's not limited to what you say or what anyone says or does. It's not limited to meditation or what takes place in meditation halls or on temple grounds. And I've seen this. I've seen this happen more than once, many times. that five years later, ten years later, twenty years later, sometimes thirty years later, maybe after leaving your presence and place of practice in a huff or in disgust, students' lives miraculously turn around because of unexpected circumstances that Buddha somehow placed in the middle of their lives long after. They left your temple. The perfect priest you thought you were ordaining turns out to absolutely need to completely fall apart, leave you, and go through many painful ups and downs for decades before she finally emerges as the Buddha who

[50:39]

you always knew she was. The wreck of a human being who was so profoundly disruptive and annoying and hard to deal with and totally hopeless comes back to visit you decades later shining with love. The crazy mixed up young woman who seemed headed for certain doom and leaves and you're so worried about her, now comes back with her three lovely children, grateful for the practice she seemed to have so powerfully resisted at the time she was doing it. These are things that have happened. And when you see these things happen over and over and over again, you do come around in the end finally to totally

[51:41]

trusting the practice and trusting our human life which helps you to trust yourself and the basic goodness of each and every person you will ever encounter in the practice practice awakens this basic human goodness and it does the rest on its own so you The Zen teacher simply has to be willing to be there and be amazed. So that's my talk on no teachers of Zen. It was very fun for me to think about this, a lifetime of Zen practice. I hope it inspires all of you to become teachers of Zen.

[52:44]

And I pretty much assume that you all will be, by and by. So, good luck with that. And if I can help in any way, be sure to email me. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[53:51]

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