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 afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon. Thank you again for inviting me to talk here. Today I want to start... I want to talk about transformation. And I want to start from the Cherbo Genzo Zui Longhi, which I'm sure has passed through your hands once in a while. When we were in the monastery, we had to leave this every day at tea, at Chosang, which is mid-19. And we had to sit and listen to it first in Japanese, then in English, and then French, and then German.

[01:03]

So we never really got to the end of the book by the end of the practice period. But eventually I did. And one of the favorite parts of this book, this is a book that is Dogen wrote, and it's directed at monks. So the language of it is all about monastic practice, and so on. But it's very easy to extend that to non-monastic practice because, as you know, Dogen said monastic practice and lay practice, there is no difference. So kind of keep that in mind even though you may hear, you know, that language. Dogen instructed, in the ocean, there is a place called the Dragon Gate where vast waves rise incessantly. Without fail, all fish once having passed through this gate become dragons. Thus the place is called the Draggy Gate.

[02:06]

The vast waves there are not different from those in any other place, and the water is also ordinary salt water. Despite that, mysteriously enough, when fish cross that place, they all become dragons. Their scales do not change, and their bodies stay the same. However, they suddenly become dragons. The way of Zen monks or Zen practitioners is also like this. Although it is not a special place, if you enter a monastery, without fail you will become a Buddha or a patriarch. You eat meals and wear clothes as usual, thus you stave off hunger and keep off cold just the same as other people do. Still, if you shave your head, Put on a queso and eat brewed for breakfast and rice for lunch. You will immediately become a monk of Zen. Do not seek afar to become a Buddha or a patriarch. Becoming one who either passes you the Dragon Gate or not depends only on entering a monastery, just the same as the fish.

[03:15]

That's that thing. For me, this seems a fitting metaphor for practice, present practice. All it is is going through gate after gate after gate. Seeing an opportunity and taking it or not taking it. All are gates. It's He says that, you know, the fish go through the gate and they come out looking exactly the same on the other side. Doesn't make sense, maybe, but then it does because you all know what that means. You all know what that is. Sometimes the gate is so big that you don't even know you pass the line until you, you know, maybe kind of look behind you and say,

[04:20]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And that's transformation. We all come to this practice sometimes, or most of us come to this practice thinking of it as something that is going to improve us, make us better, make us grow, make us happier. And, yeah, maybe it'll do some of those things. But mostly it's going to help you become. What it's going to help you become, you cannot possibly know. But it is transformation itself for him. When I think of this gate that he's talking about, I think about Tori gate. Everybody know what I'm talking about with the Tori gate. We see it in Japan. And the funny thing about those gates, you know, I know nothing about Japanese culture.

[05:24]

I'm not gonna lie. The ignorant American, and I walked around Japan being that ignorant American. Sorry. It's not to be, but, you know, sometimes, you know, you just gotta own it. And you see these giant gates sitting out in the middle of nowhere. And it's really funny because, you know, you can go through the gate, You can go around the gate. You know, it's a gate too. And on the other side of the gate, you know, it's the same forest. You know, you go up the stairs and it's just like more of the same. But when you go through the gate with intention, not as an ignorant person, you know, then you go up to the gate and you bow. And you walk through. There is a difference on the other side. It's not a difference.

[06:26]

There's nothing magical about it. The difference on the other side is more subtle. This subtle kind of understanding that you're moving into a sacred space. You might not understand the sacredness of the place if you're walking in there with your American mind and not understanding calming or spirits or any of those things, but it's there and it's feelable even though you don't know what it is. When we do things like, we do lots of things into them. We take Jukai, for example. When we do Jukai at my temple, my teacher is such that she explains absolutely nothing.

[07:30]

You sign up for Jukai, and you sew your rock suit, and she tells you a little bit about sewing the rock suit, and she might invite Timoy San to come and help you do your rock suit, but she tells you absolutely nothing. And you're sitting there sewing your socks and... And you either get it or you don't. And that's how she works. And that's that kind of game. You kind of walk through it and you... do the gesture, and by the time you get to the end of that ratsu, if you ever do, because you know how sewing a ratsu is, you start with 50 people signed up, and you get two at the jukai ceremony, not knowing what they've gotten into.

[08:36]

But by the time you finish sewing that ratsu, something has happened. And even then, you might not understand what's happened. But you know it's happened. And that's what you got to take with you. Same with this practice. You walk up and you sit down in the zendo and it feels good or it hurts or it's boring. But the bell rings when you get up. And next time it rings, you sit back down. And you sit in that boring space You sit in that painful space and you try it again. Gates and gates and gates. Different every time, but also the same. I'm not gonna sit and tell you, I'll tell you stories of transformations or whatever, if you want magic stories.

[09:40]

I don't have any magic stories. Whenever somebody asks me, How I got into Zen, I always say I couldn't write a novel about it because nothing happened. I found a group to sit with and I sat for many years and nothing seemed to happen. But everything in my life changed anyway. Now, it might have been going in that direction anyhow, but the person who went in whatever direction she was going, was not the same person as before the sitting on that cushion. There's no checklist to say, I achieved this, and I've fixed that, and I understand this. There's none of that. It's just what it is.

[10:44]

And so, in saying this, I can't promise you that your transformation will be wonderful, miraculous, beautiful, you know, everybody will see it and you'll get prizes for it. Because you won't. But every time you go through that gate, every time you make the vow, every time you have the intention, that is... the enlightenment that Logan promises. And it's just so boring and so small and so subtle that it's going to take you years to actually see it. And you'll only see it when you look back and maybe say, oh, that is different. I am different. The world looks a little different. Whatever, you know, different means to you.

[11:48]

So I've gone through a lot of gates in hindsight. And one that's been coming up in my mind lately, I was initially going to talk to you about oryoki and no, I was not going to sit here and teach you how to do oryoki because you just come up and slap on it. Okay. But there was an incident around Oyoki that became a big gate for me. And it showed me something that I didn't want to see, that I didn't think existed in me, and that if you ask other people, they would say, You know, that's not you at all. Because I'm a very good actress. Probably.

[12:54]

Maybe not as good as I think. But, you know, I can pull it off. Orioki is a difficult practice for me. And oddly enough, it's also probably the thing of the... you know, little practices that we do, the physical practices that we do. It's probably the thing that I do the best because I just can't stand it. It gets in the way of my food and my eating. It seems to take longer than it actually does. And there's so many little it's and it's to remember. And I'm not a detailed person. But somehow I got this practice down. I got it down so well that I did a couple of character spirits in Japan where they are sticklers for these kinds of things and actually had, I don't know if y'all know, I'm not even going to mention his name, there's one particular teacher, he's come to America and everybody was scared of him.

[14:03]

And I actually had him standing over me, looking down into my area as I'm doing it, and he said not a word. And I said, I got real proud of myself that for a few minutes because, you know, if he couldn't find it, if he couldn't find any mistakes, then I was going to, you know. So, there are different parts of orioki, as you know. You know, there's the orioki part where you're actually eating, and there's the serving part. And this is a story about the serving part. I was at an angle, as I said, and there was this one woman there who was, let's put it this way, she was very overbearing and troubling. She was going to be the headlong, quote-unquote, headlong of the angle, and she took it to heart.

[15:06]

And she was... Italian which means nothing because this is not the cultural thing that's special to Italians. But for some reason I think she felt that she had to be very masculine in a very sort of macho way. She was very tall, she was very imposing. She was older, but you could tell she had been a very beautiful woman in her youth. But she was being this manly kind of thing. And she was not in my work group, my real. She had another work group. So whatever she did was not necessarily directed at me. But she was very tough on those people. She yelled at them. She cursed at them. She made me feel bad at every turn because it was almost like an act, you can almost see the act.

[16:12]

She made people cry. You make people cry, you make Chino mad. Whether I have a right to be or not. It's kind of, it's a trigger. I hate that word. It's a little bit of a trigger to see other people being, you know, in my opinion, being put upon. And so we listened to this day after day after day. At one point, one of her teammates, she had a problem with some type of food that she couldn't have. And they're all sitting in their teen row on the tans. And she decided that somehow she would let this woman stand out in front of the Japanese because there was that thing in front of the Japanese. You know, they're going to act a certain way in front of the Japanese.

[17:19]

And she was going to make this woman feel bad by making her stand out. So she wanted everybody, when it came to this particular food, to make a point of skipping her and going to the next person, so it would be obvious that she was not taking food, so they could see that she was not taking food. Okay, and the woman was taking this, and that's fine, and they did it a couple of times. So here comes the hero! And I've decided, in carrying my suit, which she can't eat, that I am not going to skip her. I'm going to go to her and pretend that you know, I didn't hear the instructions to skip over, or whatever. When you serve Orioki, and I'm probably explaining to people who already know this, you serve two people at a time, okay? So you stand between the two people, and you bow, you serve one, and you serve the other.

[18:21]

Okay, so I came to her, and, you know, The Italian woman is sitting right here, and the other woman is sitting right there. That's the other thing. They were sitting right next to each other. So instead of skipping her, I went right between them, as you would, and I bowed. I didn't particularly try to serve her. She didn't lift her bowl, but I did it so that, you know, the Japanese would not be necessarily noticed that she's not taking a slip. And I started to serve. the nemesis that I made to my nemesis. And she picked up her bowl and she slammed it down. Do not, sir. Do not. Yeah, she's doing the stage whisper. Do not, sir. Do not. Come over here. You stand over here. Okay. I'm holding a big bucket of soup in my hand.

[19:26]

Okay. And my face, yeah. And, you know, I'm African-American, but y'all want to see it, but our faces do turn that thing. It got hot. It got, you know, and it just, you know, blazing hot. And I had the suit laid on, and I had to freeze, because you know where that bucket was going. It was a, you know, choice of going to jail or throwing a bucket of hot soup over this woman in a Japanese monastery, getting deported and so on. And what? What? Coffee hot soup. That wasn't an option.

[20:29]

So I stopped. And I froze. And I could see her in the corner of my eye making all sorts of gestures. And that's all I could hear. And then it was like, you know, I'm not making fun of her Italian accent and beautiful. But, you know, that's all I heard. And I'm holding it. And I'm holding it. And I'm waiting. And For a minute, it was Mussolini met Idi Amin at a soda over some soup. That's how big it got. That's how big it felt. And I just had to stop. And I waited for her to... I waited for a signal from her, I think. Because if I had moved, I knew what was going to happen. And it was going to happen. And it never occurred to me that I would hurt somebody that like, that soup's hot.

[21:34]

It's a lot of soup. And just looking at that, that minute. And finally she put the bowl down, she said something, and she found the bowl down, and I could move again without that. And I passed her by. I couldn't serve her then. I couldn't serve her. I passed her by, and I went on over to the next person, and I finished my row. And by the time I got to the row, it was gone. Not really. This is down, but I know. This is no longer dangerous. And I went back. She held out her bowl. I served the soup. She muttered something I didn't understand. And I went back and I continued with the service. That was a big fat gate for me. And it wasn't, you know, these gates, they're not entrances to anything. They're not exits either. And just to see that for that moment and realize that how dangerous I am.

[22:45]

I'm actually dangerous. I could hurt people. Don't want to see that. And for a long time, I didn't want to see it. You know, I put it down. I made jokes about it, you know, and that kind of thing, and cried about it at one point. But wasn't really owning it. Wasn't really holding it. And that's such a little thing, isn't it? A bowl of soup. My thinking, I'm right. And I don't know whether it was right or wrong. It didn't, I mean, whatever. I don't think it mattered in the long run, you know. And the Japanese saw me. You know, they didn't do anything about it. They just said, you know, there's just this, you know. Oh, Chino, son, are you all right? I'm fine.

[23:49]

Yeah. I think I'm fine. But they didn't say anything. I didn't get punished or anything. And nobody got punished because nothing happened. A little bit of nothing. There was one point where I'm not sure why she did this. We passed each of them in the hall. It was Benito and Edie. met in the hall. And she just grabbed me and she hugged me. Oh, Jesus, I'm so sorry, so sorry, so sorry. It wasn't a very sorry feeling kind of thing. But, you know, she kind of apologized or whatever. And we went on our way. And we didn't become friends. Unlike in, you know, Tanko's story, we didn't become fast friends in the happily ever after. You know, the angle ended, you know, she still acted like a fool, and, you know, and I still got mad every time I saw her, kind of, in my opinion, messing with somebody.

[24:55]

But the angle ended, and we went our separate ways, and I've never seen her in life again. But one year, my teacher went to Pudinji, which is her, I shouldn't say her monastery, but she went to her monastery to visit, and she met her. And she took care of my teacher, you know, in such a gracious way that she, my teacher came back, oh, it was so wonderful. They gave me cheese, and maybe this, and I got this bowl, you know, and they took a year there, and I'm like, Yeah, same person. But then later, they sent a picture back of all of them standing there with my teacher. And there was this beautiful woman who I found that I had some love for somehow. Since then, I've learned that

[26:01]

During the time that she was there, she had recently, not so recently, but her teacher had passed away, and she was taking over this new version of that group. Big fat responsibility. Makes you really scared. Makes you want to be tough. Makes you want to get it right. And maybe that's what I was saying. but couldn't see because I had all this judgment about things. And that's not to say that I agree with people acting crazy and making other people feel bad and making people cry. But my compassion had to be a little bit bigger than that. And maybe that's what I got when I walked through that gate and saw how little my compassion was. Took me months to get past being angry with her at the algo.

[27:05]

Took me years to really see, you know, who's the monster here? So, as we're swimming through these gates in this practice, you know, every day, every day, every time you sit on a cushion, there's another gate. A little tiny one, maybe. every time we come up against, you know, some difficulty in our practice, every time we want to get up and leave, because you just can't think that this is helping me anymore. Another gate, another gate, another gate. There's a place in Japan that I got to live in called, because I want to tell you what it is, The Mountain of a Thousand Gates. Some of y'all know what I'm talking about.

[28:05]

The big red Tory gates that go all up the mountain, and some of them are this close together. You know, just can't even get a piece of paper through it. Fushimi Inari. Fushimi Inari. You know. Okay. It's a beautiful place if you ever get to visit it. It's gate after [...] gate. Thousands of... Walk through that. That's what practice is known. And it's all transforming you. You can't see that transformation yourself most of the time. In fact, if you're doing this practice, you will never see it. See the Buddha? Kill the Buddha? You look in the mirror and you see the Buddha? Crack that mirror. You're not seeing anything. That's a delusion. But if you're left sweating shoes every day doing that practice, all you have to do is do that.

[29:11]

Don't worry about what it looks like. Don't worry about if you feel like it's working, because it won't feel like it's working. When you're doing something, you're not doing anything. When you're being in your practice, that's all you can do. All you can do, all you have to do is be in that practice and let it transform you. Zen gives you no prizes. There's no prize, there's no diploma at the end, I don't care how many robes you sew, I don't care how many you wear at the same time. Wear every single one of them you got and wear mine and it won't mean a thing. And it doesn't matter if you have a railroad. But the practice is the same. Again and again and again. Continuous. Continuous. Go. Go. Go.

[30:13]

Keep going. Keep going. A friend of mine, her teacher recently died, Arata Roshi. And every time she talks about him, she cries. The very last thing she hadn't seen him in years and she did not get to go to visit him before he died. But she says the last thing he ever said to her was continue. Doesn't seem like a loving word, does it? Continue. What else is she supposed to say it? What else can you say to yourself? Continue. Continue your practice. I don't have much to say today, so I'm hoping you all have other things that you want to talk about or questions.

[31:15]

But I do want to thank you all for giving me this opportunity to be here at Casa Casa and to meet you all and continue my practice with you for this little bit of time. So, it's very dangerous. Thank you very much. Is there anyone who has anything they'd like to ask or talk about? Or, you know, the whole world is open to your time. Thank you very much for your talk. When, you know, as happens, people get... discouraged or bored or disillusioned like uh you know do you have any uh is there something that works for you like like how do you reconnect with uh you know this this wholeheartedness that dovin talks about you know that i think we all aspire to but sometimes

[32:22]

It's just not there. The wheel of Dharma gone flat, you know? Well, you just continue doing it. It doesn't get exciting where I live. If you get bored up in here, I'm kind of looking at a chance. Because I live in North Carolina, and I live in this little... dinky temple that is basically the home of a family home that was built in 1985. And it looks like that. And we have a small yard. It's kind of a small yard and whatever. A little bit of land around it. And my day is the same every day. It's the same every day. You get up, you light the candle at 5.30, you ring the bell, Somebody might come through, though I might not. So it gets really boring. But you keep doing it every day, and then all of a sudden it's not boring.

[33:30]

And then you want it to be boring again because there's too much stuff going on. But boring is part of doing this practice. Boring is your mind. not wanting to be where it is. Boring is not, in a sense, really not paying attention to what's going on. Because, you know, it's not exciting enough for you. You know, you need something to play with. You know, and all you can do is sit through that wanting to play with something. You know, you can... go into your mind and make up all kinds of stories and, you know, make plans, you know, do pretend, daydream, you know, and all that. It's just normal human being stuff. And there's nothing really wrong with that so long as you realize that that's what you're doing.

[34:35]

And it'll pass. It will pass. Just like all the rest of the movie. Your founders, you know, famous, I can't quote anything because I've gotten so old that I can't remember, but watch the movie for a minute. Watch your internet books, whatever. It'll go away. But remember, you don't have that much time to waste. And sometimes if you come back to that understanding, that there's not enough time to waste, you have a whole lifetime. that lifetime could be in tomorrow. That's all you can do. Recognize that you're bored. Recognize that it will pass. And keep going. This is your practice.

[35:37]

It's not for anybody to judge your practice. You can talk to your teacher about your practice and, you know, they can give you tips and things like that. But the one thing that a teacher really can't do, I think, is to criticize someone's practice because your practice is yours and you got to do it. And no amount of telling you and nobody, no amount of, you know, saying do it this way or that way is going to help that. So take responsibility for it. take responsibility for your boredom and find a way to do it. You think Dogen never got bored? I can't imagine that Dogen, you know, didn't have, you know, he probably had, he was probably riding chassicles in his sleep, you know, whatever. You know, all that paper he used for someone who said not to do so much riding, but, you know, It's normal.

[36:40]

It's fine. Just speak to him. Sure. This is it. My question is not really practice right at it, but I understand that you play some sort of role in like an overarching solo word or something. And I just wondered if you might tell us a little bit about that, because I don't really understand how that word works at all, and it would take a couple minutes to do. We don't understand how it works. It's not as overarching as you think. I'm with an organization, I'm on the board of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association, which is basically a bringing together of the Soto Zen Buddhist teachers that are out there, Buddhist priests in particular. And we are in the process of, in a sense, revamping the organization realigning it with what we need to do right now in Buddhism because it's been around for a while and it's kind of floundered and so we're trying to find a way to make it useful for us all again so I can't say much more than that it's not that exciting it's not we have conferences and things like that we used to have

[38:05]

Before I joined it, they used to have trainings and things like that. And we may be able to get back to doing some of that again, hopefully. So, yeah, that's all that is. You made it sound so big. It's not that big. Was there somebody else in the question? I really appreciate your experience. I know a lot of it gets memories. I think we work with folks who are women doing that and all they work through, say, or doing something. It's a moment that separates a lot of people from hearing something really new life-changing. I wonder if Barrett had been home once before he started to practice.

[39:06]

Were you able to stop or even these practice that you could do? They probably are. I probably wasn't aware of that. I'm not in jail. I haven't been to jail. I haven't actually heard anybody, you know, there's, like I said, there's those moments that separate. It doesn't separate us from the people who do. It's the moment that, you know, shows us how close we are to that and what's really inside and what we really have to work on and what is different between myself and say something. You know, I do prison outreach, too, and some of the folks that I have to deal with. It's not that you're not capable of saying things. It's that something intervened before it got there, and it might have been something that you grew up with.

[40:17]

You know, Zen practice is not the only thing that keeps us from, you know, doing real harm it might have been really the thing that comes up for me that helps people helps us see we have to see it first Zen practice helps you see that and gives you kind of a little bit of terms for it some kind of understanding of what it is. You know, there are people who have never hurt anybody, but they can't explain to you, oh, I did this practice, and this stopped me from doing it, or this person said this one thing, and that stopped me from doing it. You know, most of us can't explain why we don't go over that edge. We just, you know, we don't, because something is there, and sometimes it's practice, and, you know, I don't think any of us are better than any of the others.

[41:25]

Every single one of us are totally capable of something ghost and heinous. But we're also capable of vast love. And we have to nurture that. And that's what practice is doing for me. I can't remember any time. I probably come some kid at school or something. I don't know. I don't even remember that. Maybe it's bad, but I don't remember. I don't remember ever doing that. But that was the trick that tricked me into believing that that was not there. The fact that you never did it before, you never acted on that, that kind of tricks you into believing something about yourself. It's just like, even, and I don't want to, well, yeah, I'm going to say, even racism, you know, we live in a racist society. How can we not possibly be racist?

[42:30]

How can we not possibly, you know, have absorbed some of that into us? And then when it happens, it's like, oh, my God, you know, it's either, oh, my God, I'm racist. Oh, no, that's not what I meant. You know, and it doesn't have, you know, anything to do, you know, but it's there. It's just there. You got to see it. If you see it, if you use your practice to get past the delusion of who you think you are, then you can fix, not fix it, you can heal it. You can break away from it until you do. You know, it's not about admitting anything. It's not about necessarily taking responsibility for anything because the only thing you're responsible for is what you have in you. It's really seeing and healing it.

[43:33]

And watching yourself do that stupid thing over and over and over and over again until it stops. You know, that's freezing. Don't lift that bucket. Don't lift that bucket. You know what that bucket means. You know what it can do. You know how badly it can hurt this person and how much it destroys you. Every time you let go, don't. And that's practice. That's a practice. It's not the only practice. But that's practice. You know. I don't know how much to say about that, but... Anyone else? Again?

[44:40]

Oh, I got a question. I was thinking if you could speak about sausage. Like, how do you engage with us? Yeah, I think over the winter and amongst the students, we're all beginning to have a lot of questions about what exactly it means to just sit and whether that's actually a little bit more complicated or needs a little bit more, even though it's non-complication. Yeah, how do you practice us? Just sitting. When I began, my teacher, she used to say this word a lot, shikantaza, just sitting. Her favorite quote that she attributes to Katagiri Voshi is, sit down and shut up. Just sitting. Just sitting. And not doing. Those are the words that come up for me.

[45:41]

And those are the words that I got from my teacher. What actually is happening on the... cushion changes from moment to moment. Zazen is that simple. Just sitting. You can make it complicated. But really, just sit there. Watch your posture. Maybe watch your breath. I don't necessarily do that, but Watch your posture, wash your breath. You just sit and just be there. There's nothing complicated about that. What's complicated is the resistance that we have to. That getting bored. That wanting to scratch your nose. Scratch your nose if you got to. I don't believe in pain and sin. That wanting to move.

[46:43]

That making those plans about, oh, my God, I've got to hit the bell in five minutes. Do I remember what I was... All the stuff that, you know, everybody experiences, I experience 20 years long, you know. Like I said, I can't describe to you, you know, how my Zazen develops, if it has. I can't see it. I still see the same things I saw 20 years ago. But I'm still there on that cushion. That effort is still being made. And it's such a... Zazen is so much... So wordless. I even have doubts about the way Dogen describes it.

[47:51]

It's like, how can we describe that? How can we put a word to that? It's very, you know, not something to describe. When you do Zazen, Probably the most that you can hope for is to touch that bit of openness, you know, that's always there. But, and it doesn't mean that you do it, and before I say that, there's no good zazen, there's no bad zazen, there's zazen. when you're doing that, when it's happening. You can't do that. You're being in it. And every once in a while, there'll be that point where you do feel the connection to anything.

[49:00]

It's self-leading. I don't see any Buddhas floating off in my head, you know, but... There may be, you know, it's so fleeting. And that's all, you know, that I can really describe, is that those very fleeting times when you're actually beings, I would say. You're actually there, and you know the whole world is with you. You know the whole universe is with you. You know all percent of you and you're beings out there. And then it's gone. And sometimes it's so pleading that you forget you see it. But it brings you back. It's part of what brings you back to that effort again and again.

[50:03]

Because you know it's there. You felt it. Can't describe it. You can't necessarily bring it back at will, but it's there. The limits of this body make it difficult to have that all the time. Because this is dukkha, this is our karma, to be in these bodies, to have this monkey crazy mind. I don't know if I'm answering that question or not. That's all I got. 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, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[51:08]

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