This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. So I'm really not supposed to be here today, which is what I've come here to talk about. As Yunnan was sweeping the ground, his brother monk Dao Wu said, too busy. Yunnan said, you should know there's one who isn't busy. Dao Wu said, if so, then there's a second moon. Yunnan held up the broom and said, which moon is this? So,

[01:04]

For some reason, this story occurred to me, this exchange between Yunnan and his Dharma brother, and it seemed very relevant to me, particularly today, because truly I only found out a few days ago that I was supposed to be giving the talk today. And I wouldn't have even found it out then, except someone emailed me to say they were looking forward to hearing me lecture. So right away I called Jeremy, who schedules the lectures, and I said, this just can't be true. This isn't possible, you know. And he listened to me quietly. And I went on and on. I tried all these different escape strategies. You know, I threatened, did I threaten to kill myself? I think I did. I said, okay. And he listened. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, he was very good. He just listened, which is the right thing to do.

[02:07]

And finally, realizing there wasn't a way out, I said, OK, I'll do it. So anyway, really giving a talk isn't so bad. There's kind of the anxiety of coming in the room with all of you in here. But once that's over, it's not so bad. I'm already feeling better. But the thing is, I'm also giving a number of other talks this upcoming week because we're beginning Sesshin this evening at 7.45. So that's not so bad either, actually. The thing is, it takes me a long time to prepare a talk. My brain just doesn't produce talks, you know, they're just gonna come out in paragraphs. So I have to think about them and I have kind of a slow drip rate. So the really bad thing was I just didn't have any time.

[03:10]

That was the bad thing. Too busy, too busy. And I never seemed to have time. Much too busy. So this is the real life problem that I had, have, that I thought maybe many of you could relate to. Just too busy, no time. So this situation reminded me of the dialogue between Dao and Yunyan, and this talk of one who's not busy. I mean, how exciting is that? And I can remember actually that that's what brought me to the Zen Center in the first place. I was looking for the one who wasn't so busy, harassed, stressed, so on, afraid. And as I recall, although it was many years ago now, I did find someone who was a lot like that, not so busy. And I think it had to do with the fact that I moved into a monastery.

[04:15]

My job was in the kitchen, chopping carrots and grating onions. And on my time off, I went for long walks. And I didn't talk to people too much because it's not allowed. I rested and I sat quite a bit of meditation each day. And I didn't have a cell phone or a computer because they didn't exist yet. So all in all, it seemed like much of my time at Tassahara, I felt as though I were kind of happily alone. The Zen poet, Philip Whelan, said to us one time, Zen Center's a great place for loners who can't stand to be alone. So, and then, about 24 years ago, I decided to enter into a relationship.

[05:19]

And as a result of the relationship, we adopted a baby and then, It wasn't very long before I had a car and a watch and a calendar and a computer and a DVD player and a washing machine, a stove, a refrigerator, and I'm not kidding, and all of the accessories one needs for a too busy life. So I'm pretty sure it's something I did, you know, that resulted in me sitting here with this microphone on today keeping a promise that I made, although it got misplaced on my calendar somehow, to talk about the Buddhist teaching. Despite the fact that I just don't have any time to prepare. I'm too busy. You should have seen me typing.

[06:24]

What am I going to say? What am I going to say? Anyway, we'll see. I'm not sure it's gonna be very coherent, but you don't mind, do you? So anyway, what I thought I would do today is mostly autobiographical because that way I didn't have to look up any facts, which I, of course, had no time to do. So basically I'm gonna tell you some stories about my early years of Zen training. And really there are no facts in these stories, it's just stories. Stories about my memory of things long ago. So to begin with, what I call my life today has a great deal to do with a sequence of decisions that I made earlier on, as do all of our lives, right? We made some decisions, and that determined the course of how things went from there.

[07:28]

And one of those decisions I made, which was particularly eventful, was to just say yes. Just say yes. Yes, I will. Regardless of what I was asked or who asked me, which was kind of a daring thing to do when I think about it. But that was my practice. I would say yes. Yes, I will. And then when I thought about that, I reflected on some other decisions that I made that resulted in me deciding to live in this community in the first place and to begin to study the teachings of the Buddha, the Buddha Dharma, which are still inspiring me, always inspire me, every day. And what it was about those teachings that little by little made me into a willingly busy person. Because the truth is, I am very grateful to be busy. Even more to the point, I am grateful that I want to do anything at all.

[08:32]

Because there was a time in my young life when going back to bed was the thing I liked to do, or daydream. So that most of my day was spent in doing one of those two things. I don't even know if I... was even there at all. It wasn't a matter of busy or not busy. It was kind of like gone. Gone girl, lost in a dream. So as I mentioned in the one day sitting on Saturday, while I was a new student at Tassajara, which was back in the 1980s, I participated in a ceremony there in which the students all come forward and ask the teacher a question, one after the other. And the other students are sitting in rows around the room. And this ceremony is called Shosan. So the teacher is sitting on a kind of a dragon seat, you know, in the center of the room and sporting, as they say, devil eyes. So it's a little scary kind of theater that we do together.

[09:37]

So I went forward and that time, the teacher at Tassajara was Sojin Mel Weitzman, who is the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center and former abbot of San Francisco Zen Center and who, If you haven't met already, he's well worth getting to know. Anyway, I went up and I said to him, dreams are sweet. I love to sleep. What do you have to offer? And he said, in a not so gentle way, go wash your face. Well, this is kind of a big whack to my young psyche, you know. I haven't forgotten it. This is many, many years ago now, many decades ago. Go wash your face. That kind of thing didn't happen in the California Unified School District where I was educated. I don't remember a teacher ever confronting me or speaking to me directly at all.

[10:40]

I don't remember my parents doing it or my grandparents. I pretty much educated myself as far as I can tell. Not all my guesses were all that good. So I think that's one of the reasons I've never forgotten Mel's kind and firm instruction to me. Go wash your face. To which I added, who are you? What are you doing here on the planet? What can you do? What do you know? Who could you be of any use to, including yourself? What have you learned? Who are you anyway? So this was a flood of self-reflection, which I don't think would have come about if I hadn't been confronted in the way that I was by this kind and fierce Zen master. He doesn't look fierce. He looks like Yodo Roshi.

[11:41]

You know, he's got fuzzy ears and gentle, kind of a gentle face, but he's fierce. So this confrontation, although it was uncomfortable, it made me feel seen. Finally, someone saw me, someone looked at me, that the face in the mirror wasn't just mine. There was someone else looking back. In fact, there are many others looking back, as there are right now. All of you, I'm pretty sure, I can tell, are looking at me, but I don't know if you know that I can see you too. This is a two-way mirror. Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. Sangha is the great mirror in which all of us are reflected. All of us who've come here to practice together the Buddha way, the teaching of the Buddha. So anyway, at that point, I started using the time at the monastery to study this person that I had become, to really become more curious about who I was and who I wanted to be.

[12:54]

What kind of person did I want to be? And was there any possibility of making a change from one to the other? I think that may be our hope. Somehow we can change. Because in truth I had gone to the monastery to hide. I wanted to hide. I wanted to hide from the world and I mostly wanted to hide from the person that I thought I had come to be. Which basically at age 30 was lonely. unhappy and kind of lost. You know, I didn't have a job, a career, I didn't have a child or a partner, I didn't have a home, money, or any of the other things that my society seemed to offer to me. Things that truly I really didn't want. There was something else that I wanted, you know, way down inside of me, but I didn't know what it was.

[13:55]

And I didn't know how to find it. That deepest wish. So right there was the problem. And I could see that. I could see the problem. But not what to do. What to do about it. Or even who to ask or who to tell. So later in the same week after this confrontation with Mel, I was assigned to the cabin crew at Tassahara. And so I went down to one of the cabins and I had my cleaning equipment and we were getting ready for the arrival of the summer guests. So I opened the door of the cabin and something quite amazing appeared before me in the room. It was a vase full of wild flowers. sitting on the bedside table. It's a oak grass, golden poppy, and forget-me-nots.

[14:57]

Which I haven't. I haven't forgotten. And that's what nailed me to Buddhist practice, to Zen Center, and to a commitment to study my life. I mean, I think that might sound sort of strange, but It really wasn't strange at all, you know. Well, maybe it was, I don't know, but anyway. And the main thing is that that's not the end of the story, you know, it's just the beginning of the story. It's where things started for me. So there I was in the monastery, holding a broom in one hand, like Yunnan, and a dustpan in the other. And those flowers kind of induced an experience which I don't think I remembered having since I was a young child. An experience of a simpler version of myself with all the time in the world.

[16:01]

Not busy. Just like those flowers sitting there on the table. With all the time in the world. And seemingly eternally so. The universe in one verse. Just this is it. So for the duration of that timeless moment, I felt loving and grateful, I felt calm, and I felt deeply happy. And then there was this kind of voice, although not a real voice, probably my voice, my thinking voice, that said something to the effect, not these same words, but something like that. There is one who's not busy, and that one is you, right now. It's you. So that experience didn't last terribly long because the crew had arrived and I got back to working in the cabins, cleaning and dusting and so on and so forth.

[17:03]

But that vision of this second moon, of a lighter and a brighter me, grew solid inside of me, some secret chamber in my heart. And the desire to know that feeling again became like this fervent quest. I must find my way back to that place. Because I finally knew what it was in life that I truly wanted. I wanted to be happy. That was all. That was all. But there was a catch. I didn't want that happiness to ever end. I think in the religion of my childhood, they call that heaven. I wanted to live in heaven. We have this verse in our chant book called the Meditation on Loving Kindness. May all beings be happy.

[18:07]

It's a little bit like a prayer. May they be joyous and live in safety. All living beings, whether weak or strong, in high or middle or low realms of existence, small or great, visible or invisible, near or far, Born or to be born, may all beings be happy. So, I was imagining that each of you probably has a similar story from your childhood or sometime in your life. You know, when the world simply stopped, or maybe even collapsed, things fell apart. And then after a while, kind of reassembled themselves into the familiar version that's surrounding all of us right now. We're the ones who made it through, particularly through the 60s. Those are hard times. Dreams seem very real. And sometimes it's frightening, you know, oftentimes when the world falls apart.

[19:15]

It's very frightening. But other times I think it's just a great relief. Something like what Master Dogen said about his own experience of waking up in the world. He said, dropping off body and mind, dropping off body and mind. Great relief. One of our now famous carpenters, Paul Disco, who built the guest house and a number of other buildings at Zen Center, said to a number of us when we first arrived at Green Gulch, Zen is not about something you're gonna get, it's about what you're gonna lose. So anyway, after my years of monastic training, I returned to the city center in San Francisco to continue my Zen practice. And I fell into a kind of a pit. You know, I went back to feeling really sad. And so one day I went downstairs and Brother David Stendelrost was visiting and he was standing there in the hallway.

[20:23]

And I don't know if any of you know him, he's a wonderful Benedictine monk, very kind-hearted, very gentle-spoken. He was wearing his monastic robes and he looks like a saint. Yeah, probably is. Anyway, As soon as I saw him, I started to cry. And I said to him, you know, I was really sad and I kind of lost my way. I just wanted to be happy and I didn't know how to be happy and so on and so forth. So he held me for a bit and then he told me a story about a spiritual emergency. He said, you're having a spiritual emergency. And he said, it's like a butterfly, you know. First it's a caterpillar, this soft-bodied creature, and then it wraps itself in a protective shell and hangs upside down from a tree, which sounded a lot like Zen meditation. And then after a while, he didn't say how long, this kind of butterfly soup turns into a butterfly, and you're good to go.

[21:35]

And I thought, yeah, and fly away. Just what I had in mind. I don't know if it was his soft voice and his lovely face, but I felt a lot better. I felt comforted by Brother David and the butterfly. And then as I continued down the hallway, I was still crying and I opened the door to go outside and Reb Anderson was coming upstairs, for all of you who know him. And he looked at me and said in a very matter-of-fact way, are you having a good time? Which was so absurd, right? That I started to laugh, just as you all did. It's like, are you serious? I'm having a good time, I'm crying. But pretty quickly, the tears of sadness became tears of joy. It was kind of delightful, this switch, the relief.

[22:38]

And even then I could see that joy and sorrow are conjoined twins. They're two sides of a balanced being. It's just that we get stuck with leaning too far into one side or to the other. When really we have to keep ourselves moving all the time like a seal on a ball. Joy and sorrow, joy and sorrow. Don't lean. Turning away and touching are both wrong. Light and dark, good and bad, right and wrong, you and me. Just two sides of the same coin. When one side is illuminated, the other side is dark. When you only see the sorrow, you can't see the joy. But they're both there. They belong together. You can't get one without the other. No love, no loss. You don't wanna feel lost, then don't love anybody. So these are our choices. Human choices. So I think this is part of what makes the Zen thing so truly inexplicable.

[23:50]

The teachers are not trying to clarify anything for us. They're just trying to get us to loosen up, not get stuck. Just make sure that the pivot is always moving. So that's pretty much what made me decide to stay the course at the San Francisco Zen Center. It's those crazy things that the Zen guys did and said and had been doing insane for hundreds of years. And crazy is another one of those things. Normal people don't say things like that. So normal and crazy are two sides of the same coin. All you normal people need crazy to balance you out. For sure. And vice versa. You crazy people. Little normal is really good. So I think what the Zen teachers do is the same thing that my therapist would do, which is called, in psychology, I think it's called a, what is it called?

[24:50]

Oh, a pattern interruption technique. We're patterned. We have these habits of thought. And then this, you know, this way of speaking to us kind of interrupts that pattern and breaks us free, loosens us up. Kind of like when the baby's being hit by the older brother, and you say to the older brother, no, you can't hit the baby again, but would you like a cookie? It's like that. Look over here. Just change that pattern. Break up the set. So at the time, as I mentioned, I was also seeing a therapist, a wonderful human being, And so I told him about Brother David and Reb and the butterfly and all of that. And I said, you know, I feel as though I got the butterfly part, but the wings won't open and I can't fly.

[25:52]

You know, they're stuck down somehow. And I'm sitting on the edge of a cliff where I've been sitting my entire life. And I just like the wind is blowing up from the canyon and I'm going on and on with this metaphor. And he said, And then he said, well, maybe you're not on the edge of a cliff. Maybe it's a curb. And you could just hop down. So I think it's infuriating sometimes the way, you know, people like us with vivid imaginations can't get our problems taken seriously. So... As a result of my good fortune in finding these crazy teachers and friends, I eventually was dissuaded from continuing on this path of misery that I had been on for a great deal of my life. It had become a routinized path, routinized way of thinking. So actually I do have one fact.

[26:57]

I looked up the word misery and it's the same root as miser. And misery comes from not being generous. Ungenerous makes us miserable, which is probably the great illness of our age, if not all ages. And this miserliness is the opposite of the bodhisattva vow, which is to live for the benefit of all beings, giving them everything you have all the time, that spirit of In fact, entering into the Bodhisattva training program begins with Dhanaparamita, which means giving. To give yourself, to give your time, to give your attention, to give your wealth, to give your love to others. And the amazing thing about giving is that giving from the front, you fill up from the back.

[28:01]

This is actually the great secret of a truly happy life. You cannot fill up from the front. That's what gluttons and thieves try to do. You have to fill up from this mystery that happens when you give everything away. Great leap of faith there. So anyway, back to the story of the vase full of flowers. Well, I don't know if it was a fanciful thing or not, this vision that I had standing there in the cabin. It certainly seemed to me that the veil had lifted between the worlds and I had seen this more luminous version of reality. I mean, could it really have just been a vase of flowers? Well, no, no, no. I was sure that I had a vision, that a messenger had been sent and that I was Yeah.

[29:05]

You know, I had seen the gateway to another world, the world beyond conditions, beyond time. And it was calling to me to fly away. Like that song in South Pacific, you know, Bali High. We're so romantic. You know, we all just go, oh yeah, take me out of here. So what I wanted was to escape from what the Buddha said is truly the nature of our life, which is impermanence, suffering, no self. I mean, who wants to do that? But that's what's happening. Yeah, I know, but I don't like it. So anyway, at least that's what's happening until we begin to see things a different way, which means begin to think a different way. Thinking is what causes the world. That's what the Buddha said in his Dhammapada. Our life is a creation of our mind. This is the most important teaching. I think we all by now know this word projection.

[30:08]

Well, that's kind of a summary of what the Buddha taught and what he realized. It's a projection, the world, of your mind. You call it miserable or happy. Yours or mine, lost or found. Dungshan called on Zen Master Yunnan and asked, who can hear the teaching of inanimate things? Yunnan said, it can be heard by the inanimate. Dungshan said, do you hear it? Yunnan said, well, if I hear it, you wouldn't hear my teaching. Dungshan said, well, if so, then I don't hear your teaching. Yunnan said, if you don't even hear my teaching, how much less the teaching of the inanimate. So this is my story. So Dengshan calls on Zen master Yunnan and asks, who can hear the teaching of inanimate things, of the wildflowers? Yunnan says, it can be heard by the inanimate.

[31:12]

Flowers hear the flowers. Dengshan asks, do you hear it? Hoping at least that the Zen master can hear the teaching of the flowers. Yunnan says, Well, if I hear it, you wouldn't hear my teaching. You wouldn't be human. Dung San said, well, then I don't hear your teaching. I don't want to be human. I want to talk to the flowers and the stars and the jellyfish. I want to be special. Like you, teacher, aren't you special? Well, Nguyen says to him, well, if you don't even hear my teaching, how much less the teaching of the inanimate. If you can't do the human thing, you won't be able to hear the flowers. Dungshan was greatly enlightened at this, and he spoke a verse to Nguyen, wondrous, wondrous. The teaching of the inanimate is inconceivable. If you listen with your ears, you won't understand.

[32:14]

When you hear the sound with your eyes, then you will know. To this, you're not approved. But you know, even so, I think we really are destined to take the bait on the barbless hook. You know, we have to bite, we have to follow our dreams. Otherwise we won't learn what's on the other side of that. If we just stop. We need to find the journey back to our true selves. The one we imagine to be the second moon that we've lost somehow along the way. We've got to try to find it. It's not enough to just say, I lost it, it's okay. We've got to look and search and wonder and ask, where is it? Where's my moon? Have you seen my moon? Now this is why Brother Yunnan held up the broom at the talk of there being two moons. Which moon is this? Is it the first one? Or is it the second one? And have they ever been separated at all?

[33:16]

So whether a true messenger arrives or not, it doesn't matter. What matters is that we follow this trail of our dreams into the dark, into the dark forest, the dark woods, you know, what we call Zazen. And we don't know where those dreams will take us and we don't know if anyone's going to meet us along the way. And we don't know if they do meet us, what's going to happen to us and who we're going to become. We don't know. And not knowing is nearest. So these encounters along the trail are not something that we can plan for. We can't call forth the messengers or the teachers or the guides, the spirit guides. They come, they just arrive, kind of roll in at our feet or in our face. There they are. Sometimes they're frightening, like an ox-headed god, or sometimes they're soft, like a butterfly landing on a flower.

[34:26]

And even though we have a lot of genetic similarities, all of us here, we each have our own unique dream or experience of this moment, this connection, this confrontation with reality. And we alone must reveal that experience for ourselves, understand it, and then let it go. We need to hop down. Otherwise we'll get stuck in a dream, in a fantasy. Frozen. The second moon for an overly serious human is imagined that way, frozen, like silent, cold and pure. It's the eternal moment, right there in the middle of everything. moment in heaven when flowers don't fall and when weeds don't spread and where people we love don't grow sick and die, as is one of our dear friends in the house nearby over here, our dear Dagon, has grown old.

[35:46]

Never busy. So I want to propose that this dream of one who's not busy is exactly what the Buddha meant when he warned his monks against falling into the extreme of self-mortification, of killing off part of the living body, the part that, unlike heaven, does not go on forever. Birth and death together is what makes our life a universe, you know, seamless and whole. You know, which moon is this? Which moon is this? Seamless and whole. Not separate. So when I contrast my life today with all of its busyness, including joy and sorrow, with that moment back in Tassajara in the presence of the wildflowers, I really see that I deeply misunderstood the Buddha's teaching. I wanted an escape.

[36:52]

I wanted Zen practice to be an escape to some special place and therefore I was overlooking and undervaluing the earth beneath my feet and on my hands and in my nose. Ordinary life seemed like a shortest route to death by boredom. This is what I feared. So it took many years and many kind teachers and friends to overcome my infatuation with shamanic moments. But as it says in Case 21, the Book of Serenity, the doings of childhood seem shameful when you're old. And they certainly do. Except, you know, also I think they're supremely forgivable. That's what you're supposed to do when you're young. Run around chasing butterflies. But at the same time, perhaps as we grow older, our hearts will open to this remarkable world in which all of us can taste and touch and smell and hear and feel one another.

[38:00]

And then along with that, there will become some deep and dumb loyalty to the welfare of real people and real life, whether busy or not busy, happy or sad. The proof of our life really is in the taste of the soup. and the smell of the bread, which I think is what we're going to be offering you for lunch today. And I'm thinking right now that they're probably pretty busy over there getting ready to serve you. I hope they're happy. Wish that for them. So I wanted to end with a poem by one of my, if not my favorite poet, Kay Ryan, former poet laureate of the United States and a local Marin friend and wonderful human being. If she only had a minute, what would she put in it? She wouldn't put, she thinks, she would take.

[39:01]

Suck it up like a deep lake. On her last instant, feast on everything she had released, dismissed, or pushed away. She would make room and room as though her whole life of resistance had been for this one purpose. So on the last minute of the last day, she would drink and have it, ballooning like a gravid salmon or the moon. Thank you very much. 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. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[39:57]

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