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 evening. It's really a remarkable and wonderful thing to be invited to give a talk at Tassajara Thank you very much, Greg, for inviting me. I thought I would talk about the question of how can we trust our life? What does it take to trust our life? Maybe we would just start with a little exercise that we did this in the yoga retreat that I'm co-leading with James.

[01:09]

I'd like to ask everyone to take a moment and ask you to do something very simple. You can close your eyes or keep them open. It doesn't matter. It might be easier to close your eyes. But I'd like you to take one full conscious breath. really full and conscious, like be really aware of your breath. And again, if you close your eyes, it might make it a little bit easier. Maybe as if it were your first breath or if it were your last. Take one full breath with me. And then a question arises, how do you know that you're breathing?

[02:12]

What are the indications? I mean, you can say, of course I'm breathing. I know that I'm breathing. But how do you know? Can you feel the difference between the inhalation and the exhalation? Can you feel the arc of it? The point at which the inhalation becomes the exhalation? What signals are you given in the body that let you know that you're breathing and where you are in the breath? We take these things for granted. When we breathe, how far does our breath reach? Do we fully commit to a breath or sometimes does it just go a little bit in and out? Is there a right way or a wrong way? How do you know? And when you're breathing, what do you notice? Can you see and even can you feel the flow?

[03:24]

And if you try and hold on to any part of that flow, what happens? What happens if you try and stop it or make it go faster? You can't do it. Our grasping mind has a really difficult time sometimes being with the present moment. Oftentimes, anyone who has a meditation practice will find that you try and bring your mind back to the present moment again and again, and it spins off in stories, ideas, planning for the future, hurts from the past. It's really hard to stay focused and present to this moment over and over again, this moment again and again. And of course, in terms of our life, being human, we have these big brains. We've got this nice neocortex, a thinking brain. We try and figure out our experience.

[04:25]

We make sense of it. We find some meaning, usually with our ideas, our concepts. And sometimes what we do is we go up into our heads to try and make sense. We go up into our heads. And we look for, like, the right answer. What should I do with my life? Should I leave this person that I'm with? Should I leave this job? Should I take this job? What if they put me in the dining room? So we look for the right answers, and we like to, I mean, we just naturally weigh pros and cons. We naturally say, well, these are the good points, and these are the bad points. This is very natural. This is natural to being a human being. that we do this, and we think, and we strategize, we plan, we control, or we like to try, at least, to control our life, our circumstances. And of course we do, right?

[05:28]

Of course we have to try, or so we think. The sad thing is that when we move through the world like this, with that as our primary tool in our toolbox, where our world is confined by our intellectual understanding or our conceptual thought, we actually move away from the ability to contact, to directly contact our experience. And as soon as we go up into planning, into figuring it out, I mean, I am so guilty of this. throughout my life, we move away from what's inside, from directly contacting like the breath, the feeling of it. And when we do that, there's very little chance for actually touching that direct experience.

[06:31]

What is it right now? What is this right now? And this is part of the nature of the mind that's thinking, the thinking mind, the discriminating mind. We try and control, we try and move away from things that we don't like. We try and bring things that we do like towards us. Again, very natural, natural thing to do. And no one's suggesting that you, you know, do something like unnatural. But the problem is that when we avoid or reject... the whole of our life, we run into a disturbance. It doesn't work so well. I mean, we can think it does, and we can act as if it does help to avoid the people we don't like, to avoid the foods we don't like, to avoid sensations we don't like, to think that moving towards sensations that make us feel good is going to help us be happy, right?

[07:41]

And of course, we would prefer that our lives were filled with, that we could avoid discomfort, distress, tragedy, divorce, separation, loneliness, all forms of suffering, and even death. In fact, sometimes we might even think that living means being happy, being healthy, and getting to do what we like to do, and that that's a life. Oftentimes we have this idea that that's really living. But the Buddha taught that this is ignorance. Ignorance, the term for ignorance is avidya. Vidya, the root of avidya, it's the same as in the word video, to see. Avidya is not seeing. Not seeing clearly. the scope of it, right?

[08:44]

Not seeing clearly things as they are. Or as Suzuki Roji like to say, things as it is. So in a sense, avidya is not being with life as it is. It describes a state of body and mind that's unconnected or unengaged with engaging the present moment. thinking about the past, projecting into the future, not being settled or able to be settled with what is. Because what is is not in the past and not in the future. It's right now. This moment, this is what is. In this school, how many of you here are new to Buddhism. Just a few of you.

[09:49]

In this school, the general, the characteristic of this school of Buddhism is the practice of zazen. So the practice of upright sitting. One description of zazen is, I like to think of it as an unremitting attention to the present moment. our present experience in the present moment. With nothing excluded, actually. So when the monks at Tassajara come into the zendo and they sit down, they prepare their seat, they find their foundation, they take great care, they find an upright posture, they pay attention to their posture, and then with eyes open, they open their awareness up to their experience all of it not just to the parts of their experience they like or maybe the parts of the experience they don't like but to every part of it the whole of the experience maybe even a definition I mean if you want to define it which I will for this moment

[11:08]

of Zazen is an intention or vow, a commitment to accept the whole of our experience as it is, with nothing left out, especially the parts we would rather leave out. And I could say without judgment, but anybody who said Zazen knows that that's not true. All of it, of the judgment, inclusive of every movement of the mind, every ache of the body, every little piece of the experience is engaged with in Zazen. And how many chances in a lifetime do we have where we actually do that outside of our practice? Here we... extend that practice in a setting like this.

[12:10]

The training is to extend that practice throughout your day, throughout the night, whether you're cleaning dishes, making beds, chopping carrots for bag lunch, to pay unremitting attention to your present experience. And we fly off that again and again and again and keep returning. We return over and over again. What's happening now? What do I notice? What is this inhalation? What is this exhalation? Not in a conceptual way, but how does it register in my heart, in my gut, and in my mind? What is this? If we don't give ourselves the opportunity to fully look at this question, to fully open the space to be curious about what answer might bubble up.

[13:12]

If we don't do that, how can we possibly trust our life? I say with acceptance, you know, to accept. But that doesn't mean, acceptance doesn't mean like you don't have preferences. Anyone ever tried not to have preferences? Did it work? Good luck. But sometimes people think that, oh, I need to let go of my preferences. That's something to work with, to letting go of a preference. But if you try to let go of something before it registers, it just comes back, right? If you try to let go of something before you really see it, before you can feel it, Maybe you can let go of it. But if you feel it fully, oh, this is what it's like to have a strong preference. Really, you can feel it when it's very strong, right?

[14:16]

Especially when you're not getting it. And maybe when you are, too. There's a Pali word called nekama, which is, the English translation is renunciation. which is an interesting word. Oftentimes it conjures up this feeling of depriving yourself. I'm going to renounce that. I'm going to take a path of renunciation and deprive myself. It has that connotation. But the word literally means to go out into the wide open. You can think of it as renouncing your stories, your attachments, the way you think things need to be in order to be happy. All these limitations that actually we put on ourselves, right? Going out into the wide open means setting those down, examining them, not unwittingly just buying into them.

[15:20]

It means opening up to our whole experience. And so when we find that we have an attachment, when we find we have a judgment, right? Okay, what is this? How does it feel in my body? Where is it? How do I know it's a judgment? Just like how do you know you're breathing? So how do you let go of attachments? Can you let go of attachments? There's this famous story of Ajahn Chah. I know many of you have probably heard it. He had a favorite teacup. And at one point, one of his students said, you seem like you're really attached to your teacup, Master. Because he always, you know, he would use that teacup and he would prefer that over the others. And he said, yeah, you know, how can I be attached to the teacup?

[16:26]

To me, the teacup is already broken, which makes me love it even more. It's precious to me because I know it's already broken. And so it's not that we don't have attachments. It's not that we don't have preferences. But again, we allow ourselves to experience them, experience them fully. In this question of how do we trust our life, what comes up for me is the question of how do we connect more fully, more deeply How do we connect more deeply to our lives as we are living them? Rather than just going through the motions. And then the question comes up, how do you know that you're connecting deeply to your life? Does some part of you whisper it to you at night? Maybe you're not. Do you feel it in your gut?

[17:29]

This question of how do you know is... has been a huge koan for me throughout my time in practice. For me, many years, having a background in philosophy, I was interested in the concepts. How do you know something? And for me, it was an intellectual matter. Of course, I knew that there are other ways of knowing, but that's what I went to first. In the winter, the monks here eat All their meals, most of their meals, are eaten in the zendo in a ceremony called oryogi, which are the name of the bowls. So each monk has a set of bowls that they keep at their seat, and then the food comes in. Through a whole formal ceremony, they open the bowls, lay them out, receive the food, chant, take their first bite together. It's a beautiful ceremony. The meaning of the word oryogi is just enough.

[18:33]

How do you know when it's just enough? How do you know when you've had enough to eat? Is it an idea you have? Oh, it's one full bowl, and if it's my favorite soup, then maybe two servings, maybe three heaps of salad. You don't have some idea of it, right? You check inside. That's how we know. You don't have an idea of it. We don't need the idea. It's like how do you know you need to use the restroom, right? You don't go up into your head. You feel your bladder, right? There's an interesting study that I've just read about recently. It's an old study. Has anyone heard of this? It's called the Iowa Card Study. Yeah, some people? Or the Iowa Gambling Card Study. Okay, so imagine that you're hooked up to a bunch of receptors, polygraph, right?

[19:42]

And somebody sets out four decks of cards in front of you, two red, two blue. Okay? And you're told, we're going to play a game, and you're going to win money or you're going to lose money. And you can basically do what it is. You just flip cards. And based on the cards that you flip, you're either given cash or cash is taken away from you. Okay? And so you start flipping cards. And sometimes you get like 500 bucks and other times you lose 2,000. And so like the stakes are high here, especially if you're, you know, a 4,000 hour student, but you're losing and gaining money. And basically what they find is that after 50 flips of the cards, people start developing a hunch that they don't want to go towards the red deck. They want to stick with the blue deck. Okay. They develop a hunch. 80 cards in, they know. Okay. Okay. The red deck, if you play the red deck, you're going to lose money. Stick with the blue deck.

[20:43]

What do you think the polygraph says in terms of your anxiety, measuring your anxiety as you move your hand towards the red deck or the blue deck? Ten cards. Ten cards and its measurable change in your body. You start getting more anxious when you go towards that red deck. How is that possible? But it takes 50 cards before we develop a hunch, a conscious hunch, and yet our body is already conveying this information. How's that for knowing? Or at least suspecting? The head teacher, the newly installed abbot at Austin Zen Center, had a book on his dining room table that I picked up and looked at. It was kind of funny. It's... I think it's like a bestseller. It's called something like The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Has anyone heard of this book? It's by a woman named Marie Kondo. She's a Japanese tidying expert.

[21:48]

You heard of this book? Wow, okay. I just kind of flipped through it. One thing that caught my attention was when she was talking about kind of like organizing and getting rid of things, like when you become a pack rat and you end up going to Goodwill too many times. It was pretty stuffed. She said that she used to kind of pare down her things by looking at them and figuring out what she didn't like and getting rid of them. And she had this transformation. Actually, this is the wrong way to go about it. And what she started doing was... picking up each item and asking herself the question, does this bring me joy? If it didn't, if it did, she kept it. Can you imagine living that way in a sense of just trying that out? After I saw that, I went through my closet. I did.

[22:54]

So keeping things that spark joy. And again, this question, how do you know? How do you know what sparks joy? Do you? So it's a question. What do we move from in our life? Where do we move from? Do we move from our hearts? From our gut? From our ideas? What we think should be true? How do we live in a way that holds all of our experience, that doesn't discriminate against the dualistic way that our mind categorizes things? Feeling joy, moving from joy.

[23:57]

Where does joy come from? Where does appreciation and gratitude come from? It comes from the whole of our experience. Not just like defining our life in a way that's like, okay, I'm only going to have things that are nice around me. Can we open to all of our experience? Because if we start cutting out bits, we're not living. It's not life. A few days ago, the day before I left Austin to come here in the morning, we got a call at Austin Zen Center.

[25:00]

It was a call about Joan, who many of you may not know. There was a student here, his second summer here, who died. He died in the process of ringing the wake-up bell, so many of you maybe have heard the wake-up bell. The wake-up bell is a ceremony. It's a ceremony of waking up the monks to bring them to the zendo first thing in the morning. And it starts and ends with a hit on the hahn right outside. A loud hit and then there's a whole event that happens inside the zendo where the zendo itself is woken up with the bell. There's boughs. And then the student will run through the valley of Tassajara ringing the wake-up bell and back up to the zendo. And again bows. The bells put away and the Han is struck again. Do you all know what the Han is? Anyone not know the wooden block outside? Hans usually say different things.

[26:03]

They all have this similar meaning or similar message on them. The one here says, listen everyone. Birth and death, given once this moment, now is gone. Awake each one, awake. Don't waste this life. Despite the efforts of those who tried to resuscitate him, he died on the Zendo walkway here. And for those of you who know, Shon was... He loved running the wake-up bell. I think last summer he won an award for running the wake-up bell the most. In this question of how do you trust your life, What's amazing is that the one thing that we can trust in this life, the one thing that we trust is that we will die. That is the one inevitable thing of a life.

[27:08]

Why is that? Because death is a part of life as life is a part of death. You cannot have one without the other. Each one of us will have our own unique experience of death. Are we willing to experience our life fully, every part of it? Can we be present with the passing moments? Can we stop and ask ourselves, how am I living? You could ask, how do I want to live? And that's a very good question. But another question is just, how am I living? How does it register in this body? What am I moving from? I'd like to end with a short little story about there's a woman who was traveling through South America with her husband.

[28:18]

Some of you may know this story. Traveling through South America with her husband, she was taking an overnight bus trip I can't remember what country she was traveling through. I think she was going through multiple places. But she was taking an overnight bus trip with her husband in a very crowded bus when it was stopped by highway bandits. And they came in and they just robbed everybody blind. Everybody was robbed. And the person who was sitting in front of them, the seat in front of them, apparently stood up or did something and was shot right there in front of them. And she lost, you know, they lost, everybody in the bus lost all their belongings. She lost their passport visas. Everything was taken, all their cash. She's a writer. She's a poet. She happened to, they moved everyone off the bus and then the person who had died was pulled off the bus and left on the side of the road and the bus went on its way, got to the nearest town.

[29:22]

She got out. Her husband went to try and find help. And she was just sitting on this, like, bus bench. And she realized she had a piece of paper and a pencil in her pocket. And she wrote a poem. And many of you have heard this poem, I know, because I think the poet who wrote it was here just a couple weeks ago, and I think she may have read it. Before you know what kindness is, you must lose things. Feel the future dissolve in a moment, like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride, thinking the bus will never stop. The passengers eating maize and chicken

[30:23]

will stare out of the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow, as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of its cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore. Only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread. Only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say, It is I you have been looking for and then goes with you everywhere, like a shadow or a friend.

[31:27]

In learning how to trust one's life, to be able to feel the reaches of our experience, to understand sadness, to understand grief. Only then can we understand truly what joy is, what gratitude is. Only then can we live with trust. This is a practice of a lifetime. As I said, we're all going to have our own moment. It may be so beautiful as Shones with giving his life, with ending his life in the way he did, doing what he loved and what he vowed to do. I wonder if there are any questions or comments.

[32:51]

Well then let's go to bed. Thank you very much. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[33:34]

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