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. Thanks, Matt, for the introduction. I'd like to thank our beloved Nancy Petran, The head of practice, Artanto at City Center, for inviting me to sit in the Dharma seat tonight. And our City Center, Abbott David Zimmerman. Thanks to him. He's at Tassajara right now. Starting in practice periods. And as always, I would like to thank my teacher, Rinso Ed Satterson, for... perhaps against his own better judgment, taking me as his student.

[01:00]

Thank you. And thank you to all of you for coming here in your busy lives to do this thing that we're doing a lot now, that I'm going to talk about a little bit about what we're doing, meeting virtually. We're all kind of tired of it. At the same time, we keep doing it because as I hear more and more these days, it's better than nothing. It's better than not being able to meet at all. We get just a little taste of the Dharma. It's not at all like meeting in person, but we keep doing it. And as I think probably most of you know, the word virtual means nearly or not quite complete. It provides just a little thread for us to, if we choose, pick up and follow.

[02:04]

My voice is being created in my vocal cords. My vocal cords are vibrating and making noise, and they're coming into the microphone right here. And somehow with electricity, I don't really know how it works. It's coming into your houses, where you all are, into your rooms. through your computer, and it's entering into your body through your eyes and your ears. And through that method, it's entering into your brain, and you're choosing to pick up that thread, that virtual, that nearly Tim Wicks, and walk with it or reject it, if you will. You're welcome to. It's a good thing about virtual. You can say, yeah, it's not the real McCoy. Our Zen training at San Francisco Zen Center is really about teaching us to recognize these threads, these clues of reality, and to pick them up if we choose so.

[03:15]

And as I think, as you probably all know, the central practice that we have, our foundation practice is called Zazen. Zah means sitting and Zen means concentration. This is what it is that we do. This is our initial training and what it is that we spend so much time doing. And it starts with being taught how to sit, your posture, your physical posture. And then we're asked to focus on our breath because we need an object to focus on because our thoughts are driving us crazy and distracting us from what it is that Zen. purports to train us to do. And then our awareness goes from our breath to our body, to doing scans of our body, to understanding what it is that's going on inside our internal experiences.

[04:18]

And hopefully talking about that with someone, practice discussion is an integral part our sitting practice, talking about all the things that come up in the body. Anxiety is a massive one for many people, but there's a lot of other things that come up. Anger, grief, sadness, joy, laughter sometimes at the most inappropriate times, especially in the beginning. And then our awareness goes out to The zendo, the room that we practice in at City Center. It's a beautiful zendo. If you haven't had a chance to come and sit there when we're allowed to after the pandemic, I strongly encourage you to do so. We've got a lot of forums about how it is that we enter the zendo in a very specific way. And the idea is to be present as we come into this room. We bow to our cushions. We turn around.

[05:20]

We bow to the rest of the sangha. We sit on our cushions, and then we face the wall. And our awareness is spreading out from our bodies, our breath, out to the rest of the Zendo and the other people who we are in close proximity with. In Zen, we really focus on sitting as a group, sitting together. Other kinds of meditation, it's fine. You can go and sit on your own. That's okay. But for us, sitting in groups is critical to our training and to our practice. There's some kind of communication you begin to realize that goes on when people are in close proximity. You can call it energy. There's sort of an energy that happens. Mirror neurons. It's got a lot of different names because we don't really know how to describe it because it is this thread once again.

[06:20]

that we can pick up and follow if we choose to do so. We're training in the Zendo. We're training our heart, mind, and body to actually feel people. Occasionally in the Zendo, you'll hear someone will start to cry. We keep tissues always in the Zendo. And this is a safe place to cry. And some people will want to get up and walk over and see how it is that the person's doing. For those of us with a little bit of experience, now to just sit with the person as they're crying so that we begin to actually grieve with them in this process of expanding our awareness out to the Zendo and out to the other people and begin to be sensitive. to the experiences that other people are communicating with us. The idea is for us to hold this thread of actually sitting together as one entity.

[07:31]

And this can be a very powerful experience. If you've never had a chance to sit a day long or preferably a whole sashim, five or seven days at San Francisco Zen Center, Please try to make time in your life to do it. It's a very rare experience and a very powerful experience of fine-tuning this ability to actually feel other people. Now, it's not that we're no longer individuals with individual thoughts. Begin to get the idea of this thread that we're both individuals and we're sitting together. We're learning this idea that we are not actually separate, permanent selves, which is such a huge occupation for us in our culture. We're beginning to be trained to learn, is it possible that this idea of a permanently separate self might actually not be true?

[08:46]

It might be a myth. We are investigating the self in this central practice, in our Zazen practice, but we're trying to take that out into the world, that broadening awareness, that broadening concentration out into all of our activities and investigating this idea. Oh, is there really such a thing as a separate self? The Zendo is really our laboratory where we're making discoveries. the self and where it begins and where it ends. And being introduced to this idea that we call emptiness, which I hate. I hate the word emptiness. Well, because it's such an empty word. And we look for more words. Non-self. We talk about it a lot, even though

[09:50]

We frown on talking in Zen, especially in Zen, we frown on it, but we talk a lot about it because it is just a thread that we're following. It's a very thin thread. We at San Francisco Zen Center, we're Mahayana practitioners. There's three sort of major schools now. Vajrayana, the Tibetans, the diamond vehicle. Yana means vehicle. the Theravadans, which was my first practice before I came to San Francisco Zen Center, which has as its ideal, what's called the Arhat ideal, the idea of the monk working towards on their own, working towards enlightenment. In our Mahayana practice, we have what's called the Bodhisattva ideal. And as many of you know, the Bodhisattva is...

[10:51]

And I'm really simplifying here. Bodhisattva is a being which works towards enlightenment, that undergoes this training and this introduction to the idea of non-self or emptiness. And I use this illustration of here is the world of samsara, we call it, the cycle of birth and death, the world of suffering. And over here is nirvana. And we work towards getting up over this wall. The arhat goes ahead and jumps over into nirvana. But even though we can see nirvana over here, the bodhisattva ideal, the Mahayanas, we say we're going to stay in the world of the suffering because we're not going to be enlightened until all beings can be enlightened. We study... what are called the Prajna Paramita Sutras.

[11:52]

Prajna is wisdom. Paramita is perfection. Perfection of wisdom sutras. And sutra actually, by the way, means threat. I think probably many of you know. It's a Sanskrit word that somehow influenced the French sutra. And, you know, we use sutras to secure a wound. tie together a wound. But it also in Sanskrit means law or rule. Part of our training, the sutras are purported to be the actual words of the Buddha. And the Prashan and Paramita sutras are made up of a bunch of different sutras. And some of them are very short, like a heart sutra, which we chant. in one form or another, on a daily basis at San Francisco Zen Center in our ceremonies. Another one of them is the Diamond Sutra. And the Diamond Sutra, actually, you can read it in a few hours.

[12:58]

I once wrote it out, and you can have some fun doing that. I wrote it out in my really crude calligraphy, which is an amazing thing to do. But in the Diamond Sutra, and these sutras, they're stories. They're stories oftentimes of conversations. Sometimes they're stories within stories, like the Lotus Sutra. But in the Diamond Sutra, the Diamond Sutra is the story of a conversation between the Buddha and Subhuti. Subhuti was one of the Buddha's main disciples. He's oftentimes considered to be the disciple who was most acquainted with this concept of emptiness. And in the Diamond Sutra, over and over again, it's relentless. The angles from which the Buddha and Sabuti try to investigate this idea of a separate, isolated, permanent self.

[14:00]

Anyone, says the Buddha to Sabuti, who even for a moment grasps a thread of non-self and freedom of suffering. In fact, why don't I just read it instead of... Paraphrasing it. Anyone who for only a second gives rise to a pure and clear confidence upon hearing these words of the Buddha. The Buddha sees and knows that person. And he or she will obtain immediate... immeasurable happiness because of this understanding. Why? They're constantly asking each other why. Why? Because that kind of person is not caught up in the idea of a self, a person, a living being, or a lifespan. They're not caught up in the idea of a dharma or the idea of a non-dharma.

[15:07]

So they're not either fixed to the teachings or do they reject the teachings. They're not caught up in the notion... This is a sign, and that is not a sign, that there are words, that there are symbols. Why? If you are caught up in the idea of a dharma, you're also caught up in the ideas of a self. If you're too fixed to these teachings, you're caught up in the idea of a self, a person, a living being, and a lifespan. If you're caught up in the idea that there is no dharma, you are still caught up in the ideas of a self, a person, a living being, and a lifespan. That is why we should not get caught up in dharmas or in the idea that dharmas do not exist. This is the hidden meaning when the Buddha says, monks, you should know that all of the teachings I give to you are a raft. All teachings must be abandoned.

[16:07]

not to mention non-teachings. So he says here, if a person just gets a little thread of this, even if it's just four lines, they're able to clearly understand that little thread right there. The Buddha knows that person. The implication is that that person can know the Buddha. And this is a thread for us to pick up if we so choose to do so. It invites us to investigate space and time. Dogen. Ehei Dogen was our 12th century founder in Japan. He was disappointed, to say the very least. about the way that it is that Buddhism had developed in Japan over the previous five or six centuries.

[17:11]

He felt like it had been corrupted in many different ways. So he went to China to the source, what he thought was the source of true Buddhism, and brought it back to Japan and set up the school that we have continued here in the United States. And in his article called Uji, which is Time Being, he invites us further to investigate this idea of going between people and space, opening our awareness to beyond the present moment, into the past, into the future. And he writes, there are myriads of forms and hundreds of grasses. Grasses are here an expression of form, of actual form, throughout the entire earth.

[18:14]

And yet each grass and each form itself is the entire earth. He's asking us to open our awareness out to all grasses throughout the earth. I mean, how many are there? Many, many, many grasses. And the study of this is the beginning of our practice. When you're at this place, there is just one grass. When we enter the zendo, we think we are entering. And the first time you go in there, it's kind of scary. You feel like you're going in there as a separate individual. And there's a bunch of these other people who are sitting together. But slowly, after doing it over and over again, we begin to enter the actual group of sitting in the zendo. When you're at this place, there is just one grass. There is just one form. There is understanding of form and no understanding of form. So even though when we enter into this endo as an individual that we think is separate, we're very aware of that. But we also don't have an understanding because we're not a separate individual.

[19:18]

There is understanding of grass and no understanding of grass. Since there is nothing but just this moment, the time being of being in time, is all the time there is. Asking us to, in this moment, connect it with all moments that there are. Grasp being, form being, are both time. Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now, whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment. He's asking us to investigate this. He's constantly saying investigate. Investigate, investigate, investigate. Because that's what our central practice is. Is investigating this idea of a separate self. Each moment, he says...

[20:22]

is not separated, it's not detached from the previous moments. In the Abhidharma, which is the commentaries of one of the three baskets of Buddhism, moments are split up actually into these little micro moments where there's an attempt to like really on a microscopic level split up each moment. But actually in our experience, we don't do that. In our experience, it's very difficult to say without a clock measuring the beginning and the ending of a second. It's very difficult to say when one moment ends and another moment begins. And this is what Dogen is inviting us to do, is to spread out our awareness into time. He's inviting us to grasp this thread of flow which can be perceived and entered with our body and our mind. Only with practice. Reflect now, he says.

[21:27]

Investigate, he says. And you can have doubt. In fact, in Zen, we value doubt. We value doubt because it encourages this investigation. And we pursue that doubt in the investigation. because of our natural inclination to move towards the end of suffering, towards liberation from our suffering. The Buddha said, I teach one thing and one thing only, suffering and the end of suffering. And that's what all of the teachings of Buddhism are, which always sounded like two things to me. But once again, this is Buddhism, and I'm being invited to connect. So in London, England, where I grew up, I was born in this country, but I grew up in London.

[22:32]

And in London, there's a zoo. And I used to go to that zoo. I'd get on the big red bus and sit at the back, which is where the cool kids sit up on top in the back. And I'd go down to Regent's Park Zoo, London Zoo, it's called. And it was built in the 1840s. It's like one of the oldest zoos in the Western world. It was originally built as a laboratory, as a place to observe animals. But quickly they saw the popularity of people wanting to be in close proximity to other animals, especially those that they weren't familiar with. And it became London Zoo. And I always, it was free to get into, you've got to pay now. But it was free to get into. And I always would gravitate towards the big cat house. And in the big cat house, I would always go to see this one tiger.

[23:37]

For some reason, I had a strong affinity with this tiger. Siberian tiger. Huge. And this tiger was in this very small Victorian cage. They've changed the cages now. But back then it was this maybe 15-foot square cage. And this beautiful, magnificent tiger would pace back and forth, turning quickly every time it reached the edges of the cage. Its eyes were glazed and it was panting. It was clear to me, obvious, the most casual observer, that this tiger wanted to be free. And I associated very strongly. As a little boy in a strange country, I was an immigrant with a dead mother. My mother had died, an absent alcoholic father. And this tiger's despair somehow was connected with my own despair.

[24:44]

Now, not very long after this, I was introduced to drugs, hash and drugs. were very available to 12 and 13-year-olds in London in the 1970s for a bunch of reasons that I won't go into right here. And when I first did drugs for a very brief period in time, I was free. I was free of my suffering. I was free of that despair, that unbearable consciousness that was reflected in my visits, in my sitting with this tiger. But drugs don't really work again in the same way that they did in the beginning. In the end, you're left kind of chasing that original high that you can never really get back again. In my case, I became an addict. I became a drug addict. And all throughout my 20s and 30s, I was a very functional drug addict, but a drug addict nonetheless.

[25:45]

And during my 20s and 30s, I... developed by being a drug addict, increasing isolation and growing despair. Never really finding any liberation, the liberation I was chasing from the shame and the compulsion to continue the behavior that I knew was killing me very slowly. High-functioning addicts and alcoholics. We're really into slow suicides, slow and painful. Eventually, when I was 39, actually, I got into recovery, and that was an accident. People sometimes have what they call a bottom that includes some kind of dramatic thing that happens, but that didn't happen to me. My bottom was a very long, slow bottom.

[26:47]

And I don't know why it was that I was able to get into recovery. But it was a thread that was offered to me by someone else, by someone else who was in recovery as a possibility. And recovery for addiction, there's lots of different kinds of recovery. There's harm reduction where you try to reduce the harm. to yourself and to the people around you, but continue using or drinking. There's the 12-step model, which is practiced in Alcoholics Anonymous. The key to any kind of recovery, and what is similar for all of them, is that you join with others. You join with others. You break the isolation, which is central to addiction. You join with others. and acknowledge what the truth is and that it's a problem. So there's plenty of... I was an alcoholic who knew I was an alcoholic for a long time and drug addict, but it was okay.

[27:53]

It was just this sad thing, and I mostly hung out with other alcoholics, but it wasn't really a problem. So you name what the truth is, and you are willing to label it as a problem, something that has to change. You say, I'm an addict. Now, how did others cope with this? This is joining together, joining Sangha, we would say in Buddhism. Now, I chose the 12 steps, mostly because that's the thread that was offered to me, and I followed it. And the 12 steps are a really very narrow program for coping with addiction. And many of you are familiar with them. Those of you who aren't can find out if you're interested. But because it's such a narrow program, but it's dealing with this deep difficulty of addiction, it's very intensive and it's very focused on investigating what it is that's behind addiction.

[29:02]

For me, my father was depressed. an alcoholic and untreated for his depression. And somehow this entered into me. We don't know if it's genetic or if it's environmental. We don't know what it is. The same was true for his father. I come from a long, tiresome line of alcoholics. My mother died. I was an immigrant. We were poor. All of these things played a central role in perpetuating my addiction. And the 12 steps act as an investigation of once you stop, because the 12 steps are an abstinence program. So you stop using whatever it is that you were doing, whatever it is that you're ingesting as an addict. And so you're left with your internal experience, untreated by drugs and alcohol, of many of the things, your karmic conditioning, we call it in Buddhism, that are behind the addicted behavior.

[30:07]

And this is, I've always thought, a great introduction to Buddhism. It was actually soon after I started my 12-step program that I came to San Francisco Zen Center, which had just started meditation and recovery, which is still going on on Monday nights, virtual, of course, right now. But it's still going on. And I came here while I was embarking on my Vipassana practice. I didn't like Zen Center very much. All the black and... all the forms and the rituals, but you better watch out. It sneaks up on you, and before you know it, you're really into it. I always thought that 12-step practice, this investigation of the internal experience, was such a great precursor for me to Buddhist training. I often think that many people in Buddhist communities would really benefit greatly from getting this labeling, this training of what the different elements of the internal experience are, and then expanding that out into Buddhist practice.

[31:16]

And I've been so fortunate to be able to do that. Because 12-step work is really about understanding clean. It's about, I mean, obviously... Addiction is like clinging on steroids. And by studying addiction, we get this very special knowledge of what it means to be completely and utterly immersed in profound addiction. Now, at San Francisco Zen Center, for this whole 20 years that I've been coming here, we have been... talking about and caring about and trying to deepen our practice around racism. And a lot of people have thought there's a lot of talk and no action. And it might seem that way, especially to people of color.

[32:17]

But when looking, being a part of those discussions and looking much more closely at them, I feel, especially in these last conversations, couple of years, there has been more action, and the discussions are deeper, and changes are beginning to happen. We've had a lot of workshops, which people poo-poo, but they've actually been very helpful that Zimson has offered. Tova Green has led the Unpacking Whiteness group, which is just on hiatus for a little while right now. Right now, my Dharma brother, Eli Brown Stevenson, has agreed to take on the directorship of the DEIA, the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility group that we have here and help to take a leadership role in the work that we've been doing around racism. And during one of the workshops that we did was a scholar named Ibram X. Kendi who is a professor and he

[33:26]

has written many things, but he's also written a book that is called How to Be an Antiracist. And in the workshop, he said for him that racism under white supremacy, so perpetuated in a white-controlled culture, is kind of like alcoholism. It's kind of like an addiction. You know it's really bad for you. But you get something from it. You get privilege. You know it's bad for you. You know that it's actually killing people. But you keep doing it. And that's very similar to addiction. And as Buddhists, we know that what one person suffers with, we all suffer with. That is a part of our non-selves training to understand that. When my friend, Roger Hilliard, who was recently head monk, Shuso, at City Center, and I heard this in the workshop, and I already checked with him if it was okay to mention this.

[34:39]

He said it is. He and I both are very experienced in 12-step work. And when we heard this from Professor Kendi, a light went off for us. And we, after some discussion... thought that it was a good idea to develop based on our experience with 12-step work and anti-racist 12 steps. And I'm going to quickly tell you about this at the risk of virtue signaling. I'm going to just tell you a little bit about, we've been doing this for about a year now, and we've developed these anti-racist steps, and we're on step nine right now. Step nine in 12-step work is about making amends to both yourself, and the world around you. It's about connecting with your past, taking responsibility for what it is that you've done by being honest with another human being. This is essential, working with another human being. Now, our Zazen practice, as I mentioned before, begins on the cushion, and we find stability there as we spread our awareness out.

[35:54]

to the worlds, out to many different forms of consciousness and different elements that come up. Anxiety, including racism, things that come up around racism is something for us. It's appropriate for us to investigate while on the cushion, while in the Zendo, while in the building at San Francisco Zen Center to be aware of the building. We used to think there was a rock in the middle of it, but there isn't. It's, I think, sand. Roger has a home also in Bolinas. So we started to, as we had an awareness of our place, of where it is that we're practicing, and working the steps. And by the time we got to step nine, we have arrived now at trying to understand our... relationship with Native Americans.

[36:55]

And a lot of times you'll see, and I put it in my little box, Ramatush, unceded land, Ramatush Ohlone, that's the name of the people who originally occupied the land where San Francisco Zen Center stands. And the ninth step asks us to do more than simply put that label on. This is land acknowledgement. And for many Native Americans, land acknowledgement is a token action if it's not followed up with other deeper action. And that's where it is that we are right now, is trying to deepen that. And when I first tried to make contact with local Native Americans in the Bay Area in the early 2000s, there wasn't much information around the computer. The web was still sort of early. I was introduced to what's called institutional erasure, where I was actually told there were no more Ramatush left.

[38:08]

But this is not actually true. And so this is what it is that we're trying to do right now. I'm going to have Eli put my contact information. If you're interested in doing any of this work with Roger and I, you can get in touch with me. I want to just close now with a quote, which I found out is actually really well known. So I will apologize to those of you who've heard this before. But Roger and I just found this in our work last week. And it's a quote from a native Australian, sometimes called Aboriginal. And her name is Lila Watson. She's an academic and an administrator and an artist and a feminist. And she's in her 80s right now. And this is the quote that she said.

[39:09]

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, and let us walk together. End quote. And this is an illustration of the Bodhisatta way. Thank you all for listening to me. I'm sorry we don't have more time for conversation. Thank you once again. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge. and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:09]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_95.55