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 morning. Thank you, Timo, for inviting me to give this talk. Thank you, Jiryu, for sitting so close in case something bad happens up here. I think that's part of the abbot's job, is to catch. So thank you. My name is Mary Stairs. My dharma name is Anryu Soen. And I stumble on that because my second name was recently changed. during a ceremony called Dharma Transmission.

[01:00]

The first name was given to me by Arlene Luke, who is a long-term resident at Green Gulch. Some of you would know her, probably. And that name means gentle dragon. The second name, Soen, is two syllables, one syllable each from Ed Sadezan's name, which is Inzan Linzo. And so I feel that I carry both of those teachers in my heart, and I wish to express gratitude to them for all the years of patience and direction they've given me. I've been in and out in many different positions at all three temples of San Francisco's Zen Center, and currently I find myself working on the projects called Enso Village and Enso Verde. which some of you may know of. It's a senior living community that has been built.

[02:05]

The one at Enso Village, it opened in November to residents. And the Enso Verde project, we're thinking it will open sometime in 2028. And it's in the development stage. So one of the things that I find by working in this job and also studying the Dharma for all these years, is that for me, it's an encouragement to think about and try to understand what reality is. I thought I'd think about that out loud with you today. So it sounds so simple, reality. And I think for me anyway, it's like many of these concepts or these ideas that are brought forth as I study the Dharma.

[03:12]

It's like, it should be so simple. It sounds so easy. However, there are so many layers to the experience of reality, our experience of reality, that for me anyway, it's taken... decades now of practice and of consideration. This past week, I was reading one of Suzuki Roshi's essays, and I read it a number of times, and I have read it before, but just like much Dharma that I read, or if I'm listening to a Dharma talk, I'll read it, and then a few years later, I'll pick it up, and I'll be like, I never saw this before. I never... I never put this idea together. I never thought about this. So for me, reality, the experience of reality, is an ongoing knot, let's say. And the reason why it's coming up for me a lot right now is because the elders at Enso Village are realizing that they have moved into a place for the last time.

[04:23]

And unlike the excitement of going to college, leaving your home and meeting new friends and having so many possibilities and so much life in front of you, they're going through this really interesting, or my observation of what's happening there, is they're going through a grieving process while simultaneously being ecstatic about the fact that there's so much fullness in their life. They're meeting new friends. They're living in a new place. They're exploring a town they haven't lived in before. So this richness, along with the idea that they're all in the last years of their lives, have come crashing together in this very interesting soup. And for a lot of those folks, for the first three months, I think most of them were just like, I have no idea what's going on here, but I'm angry and I'm sad and I'm happy and I'm scared and I want somebody to tell me to do, but don't you dare tell me what to do.

[05:41]

So all of these emotions started arising for many of the residents that moved there. And I think people, For most of them, they have had in their lives a desire to practice. They have practiced. Most of them have not lived in community. So they get a chance now to form a community of practitioners and to talk to each other about this, which they did. Not all of them, but many of them sought out new friends and And started discussing their experience. And realizing that they were having these emotions, but that might not be the real thing that was going on. So they might be angry that their electrical system or the heating system is not working very well. And that's real.

[06:44]

But underneath that, the question was, so what's really going on? So in response to that, I think I've been thinking about what's really going on. And I think it's a great question. Because what's really going on for me will never, ever be what's really going on for you. Or you. Or you. And before I started practicing, I think my experience often was... If that person just would listen to what I'm saying, my life would be better. And theirs would too. And I believe that. And I think that's the experience of a lot of us. We believe that our experience is shared by everybody in the world. And if we all did the same thing my way, things would be sorted out just like that.

[07:46]

So... I came to practice and I started, I came to Tassajara first. Well, I came to Gampo Abbey first. But I came to Tassajara working in the kitchen and I started realizing that my experience of the world was not necessarily the same experience of the person who was cutting carrots beside me. I remember having this conversation with this young lad, and he said, you know, in my family, we ate in front of the TV off paper plates every meal. And that stopped my mind because I grew up in a family where we sat down to dinner. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. She made the meal or had some kind of...

[08:50]

terrible help from children. And we would sit down together. And I don't know if we talked about the day so much. I don't remember. But we would have this sit-down meal, not in front of the TV. So when this young lad said this to me, I was like, what would that be like? And I actually was quite curious about that. And I think at that time my mind was soft enough to not think, well, that is awful. That must have been terrible. I think my mind at that point was more like, wow, that is not a shared experience between us. There is no overlap between what my dinner experience was in the family. No apparent overlap. I think the TV is a complicating factor because it's talking at you, and so it distracts the energy of the room.

[10:01]

Whereas I think at our dinner table, maybe it was the food that distracted our energy or something. So I think that talking about, talking with other people in a community of practitioners allowed... and I've used this word a couple times already, it allowed my mind to soften to the idea that people have other experience, which is neither good nor bad. It's neither positive experience necessarily. It's not negative experience necessarily. It is their reality. And so that opened up... in my mind about how to relate with the idea and the reality I'm using this word a lot of other people's not shared experience with mine and I think what I have come to is the curiosity around that is the

[11:19]

is the value. Landing on an answer isn't necessarily what's important. It's working towards, and I don't know how else to describe this, but it's like having the shape of a mind that allows for curiosity rather than fixed ideas or fixed answers or judgment. And I was reading this week in a book of Suzuki Roshi's talks called Not Always So. It's a collection of Suzuki Roshi's talks by Edward S.B. Brown. And there's a talk that was entitled, probably by Edward S.B.

[12:27]

Every day life is like a movie. And this is one of these experiences I had where I've seen that before. I've heard this before. And it had a very different impression on me in the context of reality. And in the context of Zen practice and sitting practice. Because everything that goes on, all phenomena, is happening to us all the time. All the sensory input, all our thinking, it is the mind's job, I believe, to produce thoughts. The mind doesn't stop producing thoughts. I think the point of practice, is to understand that that's like the movie, the production of thoughts, and it's going to happen.

[13:37]

And then what we are examining, what I'm examining, is one movie happening at once, or are seven movies showing for me at the same time? And if there are seven movies showing at the same time, I can't make sense of anything. So through practice, through sitting, it's this experience of you see less or you get involved in less input. It's not that it's not happening because it's happening. It's that we're not taken away. by the fact that it's all happening. So our experience becomes more precise, slower. We don't have to follow thoughts. It's like taking a very untrained dog for a walk.

[14:44]

So we've all seen that. We've all been standing somewhere. Yesterday I was at the market, and there was this woman that had this small dog. And that small dog was all over my partner, Aaron. And the woman was like, oh, she really likes people. And everybody else was kind of backing up going, whoa, because this dog was just kind of out of control. That's the mind that is coming for the first time to Zazen. It is leading you on the walk of your life. And everybody else is going, whoa, watch that happen. And then over time, the dog slows down. It starts trusting. It starts healing. Then there are those super dogs that, you know, like, they dance with people or they do obstacle courses.

[15:47]

I think that that is this... That is a possibility for us. If we stick with this idea that the mind is powerful and we have confidence in our mind to be led rather than it not even leading but like taking us for a run or on a wild ride. So Reality is an experience of precision. Suzuki Roshi also had this phrase called things as it is.

[16:52]

It doesn't make sense in English. It's not a grammatically correct sentence. But things I imagine when I think about that statement are phenomena. It's a plural idea. It's all of the senses collecting information, my mind generating thoughts, the experience of the zendo, the experience of all of you sitting in here, the smells, that are wafting towards me, the light as it's changing. This is plural phenomena. As it is, it's a singular idea. So he's combining this idea of plurality with singularity and this movement from multitudes to the mind being able to focus on one thing. And it's not that the multitudes are a bad thing and that the singularity is a better thing.

[17:59]

It's that there is tension between those two ideas and because of that tension there is this wonderful life we have. So this is what I've been thinking about. And One of the things I appreciate about Suzuki Roshi and the teachings that he presented for us is that he played with language in a certain way that forced us to think about something that doesn't come easy to us. And if we had these direct answers, we wouldn't be able to understand. I think it's about practice. This is why it's called practice.

[19:00]

It's like this slow movement of exploration, of curiosity, involving patience, diligence, many concepts. And this is difficult in our culture because as we go to school, or this was my experience in school, the most important thing when I was going to school is having the right answer. One answer. The right one. Buddhism doesn't work that way from what I can tell. There is a... And partly it doesn't work that way is because... The way I look at the world, the way I experience the world, is completely different than the way that Jiryu experiences the world. And so my right answer will never, ever be his right answer.

[20:04]

And so how does that work? How do we get to right? What does that even mean? So again, a question, and I don't have an answer for that. And if I did, I wouldn't want you to listen to it or believe in it. Because if it was right for me, chances are it wouldn't be right for you. We come with our experiences. We come with our upbringing. We come with our karma. We come with our attachments. Those are individual. So we practice with all those things. We think about where it brings us. How it shapes us. What we value. And through that understanding, we can accept, I think.

[21:13]

I think we grow to accept ourselves. Because I think, again, in our culture... Accepting ourselves is not straightforward. For many of us, it's a lifetime's effort in order to accept who we are and be supportive of ourselves. So, examining reality... takes many forms many paths many years my sister works with a woman and my sister works with many women many people she has

[22:27]

She's a nurse practitioner, and she does kind of home care for people who are in various stages of dementia. This will come up at Enzo Village, and it will come up at Enzo Verde. It might be coming up in your lives. And there's this idea that... At early stages of dementia, people like to be reminded of what day it is, what time it is, where they're living. It's good to orient people because they want that information. Then at a later stage, that information is not helpful to them.

[23:28]

It may be helpful... Because we aren't thinking about who they are any longer. We're thinking about who they were to us. So what is their reality? It isn't that it's five o'clock in the afternoon, necessarily. It's not that it's Tuesday. It might be that they're five and they miss their mother. So that's an interesting experience to be working with people like that. And we think that's really different than who we are. But I'm not sure that's so different. Because sometimes it's extremely important for us to know it's Sunday at 10 o'clock because I needed to get here. But other times, there are other things that are much more important. And that recedes to the background.

[24:30]

So then, what's the reality? It sounds like it's a static thing. I think it's an ever-changing thing. And that's what makes it terribly interesting. I, I, I believe that, um, practice sitting Zazen allows us to slow down and pinpoint moments. Um, there's this, uh, common way of thinking about one's experience when one first starts sitting that you experience your mind like a waterfall of thoughts.

[25:38]

And most people are astounded at how many thoughts are generated or it can almost feel after sitting particularly in Sashin against facing a wall that when you leave a period of Zazen you've just watched a full-blown movie. because the mind is so busy. And then if one continues on the path of practice, often one's experience is that the volume of thoughts doesn't distract us as much. I don't know if they lessen, I think they're not as distracting. So we don't follow these threads all the time. And I think that is very relieving. I think in our culture, slowing down is very relieving.

[26:50]

And not so supported. So while those of us who practice value this, there's a pretty intense pull from outside of this enclave to be busier, do more. do it all, right? I think about the, you know what, maybe the 80s, you know, when there was this big discovery about how women could do it all, have a family, have a full-time job, take care of parents, make all the food, do all the cleaning. They could do it all. Yeah.

[27:57]

Yeah, well, hard to get behind that. So I value the idea that I can, without judgment, slow down. I value the idea right now that aging isn't something to be afraid of or shunned or something like that. Again, I think our culture likes people to be about

[29:02]

and really buff. And I think there's a lot of mourning that goes on to be 63 and not as buff. So I think paying attention to body Paying attention to messages, both self-created and externally created, help with reality. Examining our or me examining what I value and what I support. In Tibetan practice, they like lists, Tibetans.

[30:12]

It makes things easy. And they talk about three kinds of confidence. And they are be decisive, know what is, see clearly. Very easy. It's another one of these like reality. Be decisive. Know what it is. See clearly. And I heard about those 24 years ago, those things. They've stuck with me ever since. Because I think those three things do give us confidence. If we can see something clearly, if we can know what it is, and if we can be decisive, I think that that builds our confidence. It allows us to see reality. And I think getting to a point where we feel confident is practice.

[31:21]

Being steadfast. Relying on Sangha. Relying on the Dharma. relying on the Buddha as a teacher. These things give us confidence. And that, I believe, allows us to better understand who we are and what is important to us. How to get there, how to have confidence, it's practice. It's keeping things in the front of your mind. Valuing. I'm always impressed by people that can sit up here and read a lecture.

[32:32]

And be very decisive and informative. I kind of like that. And that has never been my way. I have a hard time sitting up here. Being decisive. But what I do invite you to do with me. is believe that questions are important and answers less so. And that thinking about what is real for you and then having forbearance for that And at the same time, holding the belief that other people will have a different experience and having forbearance for that is important.

[33:49]

And I believe that if we could all move in that direction, things would be easier for us. Conversation would be richer. Politics would be different. I think there'd be more sharing. 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.

[34:45]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.85