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. I'm very happy to be here. I'm only here for a short time. And it's good to see all the old students and meet new people. And I've been asked to give a talk. Well, I'm going to introduce myself. My name is Mel Weitzman, and my Dharma teacher, Suzuki Roshi, gave me the name Sojin. So I usually go by Sojin, Mel Weitzman. And I started practicing in 1964, and Suzuki Roshi ordained me as a priest in 1969. And so I have been, we started Tassahara, actually, in 1967.

[01:11]

And we also started the Berkeley Zen Center in 1967. And Suzuki Roshi asked me to find a place for the Berkeley Zen Center. And so I did. And we developed, we've been developing the Berkeley Zen Center ever since. And 1988, I was asked to be co-abbit of San Francisco Zen Center. So I was co-abbit until 1997, nine years. And so now I'm mostly in Berkeley, and I come to Tassajara occasionally. Sometimes I do a practice period. I did one five years ago. But I used to do these practice periods every year while I was Abbot. And I kind of missed that. But I think there's something in the offing next year.

[02:14]

So tonight, I'm going to read you a poem. It's a kind of poem, I guess. And I'll tell you how this came about. Usually when I come down or go to some place where I haven't been practicing for a while, I ask somebody, what should I talk about? Because I always want to talk about something that's relevant to the members. So I asked my... Jisha, my attendant, Graham, who happens to also be the Tenzo, or the head of the kitchen, I said, you got any idea what I should talk about? And he said, well, I've been talking, since he's the Tenzo, I've been talking about Master Dogen's teaching about the practice in the kitchen called Tenzo Kyokun.

[03:28]

the practice of the head of the kitchen. And so he said that he'd been working on this poem, and he asked if I would say something about this poem. So that's why I'm going to talk about this poem. I love this poem. This is one of my favorite Zen poems. And it so epitomizes our practice. And certainly epitomizes Suzuki Roshi's teaching. So this poem actually is not by Dogen, Master Dogen. It's by Xue Du, who collected all the koan cases for the Bluecliffe record, the very famous, well-known collection of Zen stories, which we think of as koans.

[04:41]

So here's the poem. 1735. The truth you search for cannot be grasped. As night advances, a bright moon illuminates the whole ocean. The dragon's jewels are found in every wave. Looking for the moon, it is here, in this wave, in the next. So I'm going to talk about these lines. You should have gotten the whole thing already. I think you did. But I'm going to help you digest it. So there are various ways that commentators see this poem. They're mostly the same, but I'm going to add my commentary to this.

[05:53]

So... One, seven, three, five. The truth you search for cannot be grasped. So usually we say one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. But here, one, seven, three, five, it's like random. We try to, you know, our effort is to make our life make sense. And so we organize our life in a way that seems to make sense. But no matter how we organize our life to make sense, there's always something that doesn't make sense. It doesn't add up, always. So no matter how we plan, something intervenes. And something turns us off course. Or the best laid plans, right? is kind of like that. It's kind of like we want to know the truth and we search for the truth.

[06:59]

We search in various ways. Religion, science, fashion. Some people do. Possessions. Oh, and looking for something. to grasp the truth. What is that thing that I can really hold on to that is the truth? So he says one, seven, three, five. Doesn't make a lot of sense. The truth you search for cannot be grasped. So truth is like something very basic and all religious practices are looking for or seem to be based on is the truth Buddhism I remember Suzuki Roshi my teacher our teacher talking about you know Buddhism may not be the best religion but it always keeps us

[08:19]

searching it always keeps us the truth of dharma is never really expressed except through our actions there's not something that you can grasp and say this is the truth as soon as you do that it melts in your hand it's like washing a dirt clog to keep it clean it falls apart in your hand. So where is this truth? What is this truth? What's the final note? So then the poem says, switches a little bit, adds a new element. It says, as night advances, a bright ocean, a bright moon, illuminates the whole ocean. So as night advances, if there's no moon, the ocean and the sky all turn the same color, all turn dark.

[09:31]

And you can't see where the horizon is. And when it's really dark, you can't see anything. So this darkness is an important aspect. In Buddhism, we have the dark and the light. usually when people talk about dark and light they talk about good and evil but that's not the way we talk about it in Buddhism sometimes we do but dark means the absolute side that which we cannot possibly penetrate by itself and light is like enlightenment. When the moon expresses enlightenment.

[10:32]

The moon is usually used that way to express enlightenment. So as night advances, a bright moon illuminates the whole ocean. Bright moon is like our illumination is like the phenomenal side. We usually are interested in the phenomenal side. And the dark side is usually ignored. And why not? We live our life in the dualistic world. good and bad, right and wrong, like and dislike, love and hate, and so forth.

[11:35]

The dark side is no duality at all. Simply the oneness of everything. But it's too hard to grasp. It's too hard for us to grasp the oneness of everything. That's why when we try to grasp it, it's too vast. So what do we do? So then he introduces another aspect. The dragon's jewels are found in every wave. So here we have the ocean and the waves. The ocean is this vast ocean of I don't want to say the universe, but I will. Because that's where our conception goes to. That's as far as our conception reaches. So it's vaster than the universe, of course.

[12:40]

But let's say universe. The dragon's jewels are found in every wave. So our life is like a wavelength on the ocean of reality. The dark is called reality because there is no coming or going. Nothing is temporary in that realm of reality. But in this life of temporality, how do we deal with that? So what are the dragon's jewels? The dragon's jewels are found in every wave. When the moon illuminates the ocean, it illuminates the waves. So the waves are like you and me. We're waves in the great ocean of the absolute.

[13:48]

People have different names for it, but I'm not going to deposit one of those names. You already know what they are. We don't call it anything. We're very careful not to call it, sometimes we call it Dharmakaya or Buddha nature or whatever, but those are just temporary needs to ease our mind. So the dragon's jewels are like that which we're, you know, little bits of reality. That's something that we can actually engage with that gives us religious security. The dragon's jewels. Great. The dragon's jewels are found in every way. In other words, that reality which we're looking for is found everywhere.

[14:48]

But we're always looking for it even though it's found everywhere. The most... profound teaching is found in the most simple, unassuming presence. This is why Zen practice in its simplicity, when it really is simple, is so profound. because we don't look beyond what's right there in front of us. If we want to find the ultimate reality, it's right there in front of us in our every activity, in the most common action.

[15:55]

He says, the dragon's jewels are found in every wave. Looking for the moon, it's here, in this wave, in the next wave. When we first began, in 1967 when we purchased Tassajara, it was a resort. It was very run down. And our practice, although we were sitting zazen, which is, of course, the center of our practice, mostly what we did was work. Work became the practice. We called stones. We built that kitchen, one stone at a time. That was our first big project to build that kitchen, one stone at a time.

[16:59]

And there were big, long lines of Zen students, or whoever we were at that time, passing stones in a big, long line and putting them together and made that kitchen. And little by little, the work practice became what our practice was. And to me, it was like a grassroots project. We weren't asking for a lot. We were just doing everything ourselves. And to me, that was the epitome of our practice. We think of spiritual practice often as something divorced from ordinary life. Sometimes people think when you do zazen, or meditation, it's something outside of your ordinary life.

[18:00]

Sometimes people say, oh, my ordinary life is so busy, it's great to be able to sit zazen and relax. That's not our practice. When there's no difference between your ordinary activity and zazen, that's practice. Whether you're in the zindo, or in the marketplace, or attending to your children, or whatever, that's practice. When every activity, no matter how minute, is practiced at this moment, that's practice. Practice is to be right here in this moment. It doesn't matter what the activity is. Of course it matters. It matters what we do. But although it matters what we do, it's not what we do that matters.

[19:01]

What matters is how present we are in each moment. Because what the most important thing is, what is the most important thing? Time. Time is the most important thing. And so what is time? Time is the past, and time is the future. But the time of the present is not really time in that sense. You can't grasp the present. We can't grasp the past either. We can't grasp the future. But to be totally in time is our practice, which is really hard. It's not that practice is hard because your legs hurt. It's hard because it's really difficult to be totally in time on this moment and totally experience the time of this moment, which will never

[20:20]

We say they never come again, but... So I want to explain a little bit about my understanding of time. There's continuous time and discontinuous time. Continuous time is simply now. Discontinuous time is cutting the pie into pieces called one o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock. That's discontinuous time. And that's where we usually spend our time, is in discontinuity, which is okay. We need to do that. That's how we organize our life and activity. But basically, it's not divided. We just put that divided grid on top of now. So it's really hard to miss now, because now doesn't come or go.

[21:21]

It's just always now. Wherever you are, whenever you are, it's always now. And we talk about past, and we talk about future. The past is just an idea, and it has its monuments, but it's an idea. And the future is also an idea, because there's no such thing as the future. It's just an idea. I remember Suzuki Roshi, I had this friend who had an interview with Suzuki Roshi. He was kind of a lazy guy. Actually, I liked him, but he was lazy. And Suzuki Roshi gave him some kind of thing to do. And he said, well, okay, I'll do that tomorrow. And Suzuki Roshi looked at him and said, you think there's a tomorrow? Tomorrow is just our idea.

[22:25]

And we plan for tomorrow, the future, but boom. Just an idea. But we should keep planning for it. But the most important thing is what we do now, because what we do now determines what we will do next. That's really important. Because what we call karma is our volitional action. which, the way I think about it, is when we do something once, we experience that activity. And then we have a choice. I can do it again, or I can forget about it. If I do it again, it reinforces what I have done before. I still have a choice whether to continue or not. If I do it a third time, usually that's the beginning of a habit.

[23:29]

And then we continue in that line because it's hard to get out of our conditioned habits. So we're creatures of habit, and we create habits, and so the direction we go in is really important. That's why we talk about desire. And often we talk about desire as something not so good, but desire is neither good nor bad. Desire is simply the impulse to do something. And we have desire that goes off in one direction, or desire that goes off in another direction, and we get hooked. Desire gets hooked. Not by what we chase, but hooked by our own mind. What I call, when we go chasing after things, our desire goes one way and we get hooked.

[24:38]

When we put our desire, when our desire is directed toward practice, it's no longer called desire. It's called way-seeking mind. It's not seeking after something. It's simply putting our effort into bringing forth the truth or reality. So it's very hard because we have these two sides of our personality. One side is ordinary person. The other side is Buddha. So as Suzuki Roshi said, we're both ordinary and Buddha. At some point, our ordinary, our Buddha mind appears for some strange reason. And then we start to question our activity, whether or not it's, you know, because it hurts.

[25:39]

You know, our karma hurts. So then we raise the thought of, what do I do about that? And that's called the thought of enlightenment. That's an enlightened thought. And enlightenment leads us to practice and develops, allows our Buddha mind to unfold. So that's a little bit straying off the point, but instead of chasing after things, we learn how to appreciate what we have. We learn how to appreciate what's in front of us. When we know how to appreciate what's in front of us instead of complaining, when we know how to see everything in an equal way. So there's two aspects to our life.

[26:42]

One is the discriminating aspect and the non-discriminating aspect. The discriminating aspect is based on like and dislike and advancement and hierarchy and so forth, which is not bad. But because so much of our activity is ruled by desire, we don't think it's so good. But it's good. The other side is the horizontal, which is equality. Everything is really equal. So where equality and hierarchy meet, that's where our life is. That's where our life is lived, right at that point. So when we can accept what's in front of us and experience what's in front of us without desiring something and simply

[27:50]

being one with what's in front of us, then we're just total time. It's non-discriminated time. We do have to discriminate all the time, you know, but our discrimination is not based on self-centeredness. So when Buddha leans, self-centeredness is in the background. When we allow Buddha to lead, this is what we call our better nature. Not dividing up the world into good and bad and right and wrong and like and dislike, but simply seeing everything as it is, then we can make decisions.

[28:53]

When we see everything as it really is, then we can make, we can discriminate, and there's no problem. But ordinarily, our discriminating mind is based on like and dislike, good and bad, right and wrong. And we get very mixed up. So he says, the dragon's jewels are found in every wave. Looking for the moon, it is here in every wave. In other words, in every moment's activity is an entrance to enlightenment if we know how to let go and be one with what's in front of us. So as a Zen student, we always face what's in front of us, hopefully, with a clear mind.

[30:02]

Not based on self-centeredness, but Buddha-centric, Buddha-centeredness. We center ourselves on our Buddha nature rather than our discriminating mind. I was going to see what time it is. Five minutes? Five minutes. I was thinking about there's another talk that I wanted to I was thinking about giving here before I asked for this one. This is by Maha Goshenanda who was a Theravada monk very wonderful teacher and so he talks about what's life he says what is life life is eating and drinking through all of our senses and life is keeping keeping from being eaten what eats us

[31:28]

Time. What is time? Time is living in the past or living in the future. Feeding on the emotions. Beings who can say that they have been mentally healthy for even one minute are rare in the world. You know, often I'll think about or ask somebody are you sane? Oh yes, I'm sane. You know they're crazy. Because all of us have a little bit of insanity, you know. And if we don't know that, that's delusion. Beings who can say that they have been mentally healthy for even a minute, I read that, most of us suffer from clinging to pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings, and from hunger and thirst.

[32:34]

Most living beings have to eat and drink every second through their eyes, their ears, their nose, their tongue, their skin and nerves. We eat 24 hours a day without stopping. We crave food for the body, food for feeling, food for volitional action, and food for rebirth. We are what we eat and we are the world and we eat the world. I've often talked about this myself. I think of us as human beings sometimes as like earthworms. And we eat our way through the world, through all of our senses and our mind. And we're just big mouths. And then we leave this trail behind us. Someone gave a talk on this recently, and the speaker said, what's the most important thing for human beings?

[33:37]

And I said, pooping. He said, well, that's sort of connected to what I'm thinking. He was thinking eating. No, what's the most important thing, inhaling or exhaling? You can't have one without the other. Inhaling and exhaling are one breath. And we live breath to breath, actually. Our lives are one breath at a time. Breath to breath is how we... And as Suzuki Roshi, I remember, used to say, like, we just live our lives little by little. And what he meant was one moment at a time. He also said that. We just live our life one moment at a time.

[34:41]

This is enlightened activity. We're looking for something else. We're looking for some mental thing, you know, that... We'll finally have this flash. Our consciousness will expand. No matter how far our consciousness expands, it can't expand far enough. But if we really pay attention to our breathing, one breath, and appreciate each breath, that's enlightened activity. It's so close, and we're always looking so far. In our practice, we eat with, during the practice period, we eat with what we call the oryoki, three bowls, that are wrapped up in a cloth. And we eat in a kind of ritualistic way, right here in the zendo. We open the cloths, lay out the bowls, the servers come and serve the meal, and then we eat very nicely and mindfully, and then at the end,

[35:52]

They come around with water and we wash the bowls and everything is done. It's beautiful and simple and mindful. The most ordinary food eaten that way does not taste the same eaten in any other way. The satisfaction is not just in the food. The satisfaction is in the way it's served and the way we Just the movement of eating and the movement of unfolding and washing the bowls, the whole thing is wonderful. And the connection with the servers and the connection with the kitchen and the connection with the way the food comes to us and the connection with the way it grows and the connection with the sun and the moon and the sky. It's all there. We don't have to... As one Zen master once said, you don't have to peep at the moon with a telescope.

[36:57]

It's all right here in the most minute activity, the most ordinary activity. What is the way? Master Joshu asks Nansen, what is the way? And Nansen says, ordinary mind is the way. And Joshu says... Well, should I pursue it? And nonsense that if you pursue it, you stumble past. If you don't pursue it, nothing happens. So what are you going to do? That's a koan. So when eating, just eat. When walking, just walk. When breathing, just breathe. And appreciate everything. appreciate everything why not what is it that we want that's better than that it's hard to there are a lot of things that we want that we think are better than that but it's hard to get to that place so our practice is instead of taking on a lot of stuff how do we let go

[38:22]

so that we actually are not caught by things.

[38:49]

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