This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. My name is Christina Lehnherr. My Dharma name is Kiku for etzu, which means loom of emptiness, the weaving loom, of emptiness, dharma joy. I have been a resident at Zen Center for about 18 some years over the last 30 some years. I'm originally from Switzerland and these five days I'm here with 11 wonderful people the students schedule in the morning and then being on their own schedule, Sangha week schedule or time off and guests in the evening.

[01:16]

So we get to have the best of both worlds in some ways. I wanted to thank the leadership here for the invitation to speak for a little bit tonight, and to all the students here for taking such wonderful care of this space. There's a profound sense of kindness, generosity, and gentleness that kind of permeates everything And that actually also inspires me to talk about tonight a little bit about the radicalness of this practice. Because it can only be really addressed when it goes hand in hand with profound kindness, gentleness, and generosity.

[02:26]

so that it doesn't turn into something harsh. This is a practice of transformation. And many of us come to Zen Center and think of it as a refuge. And the way we think of the refuge is, oh, if I come here, everybody, is intentional so they will all be peaceful and I will not have to deal with a lot of pain and suffering or I can get away from my pain and suffering or from the pain and suffering that I perceive in the world and I'm safe here. And we do. You know, every morning we chant, I take refuge in Buddha, I take refuge in Sangha, in Dharma, I take refuge in Sangha.

[03:29]

So the word refuge is very important in this practice. But the refuge that Dharma or Buddha talks about is the refuge of a liberated being, the refuge of we have when we are fully in touch with reality as it is. Not with the reality we keep constructing, we keep laying over, we keep creating, actually, by our conditioning, by our delusions, which is a human condition. You know, in the Christian tradition it says you have to become like a child, kind of this innocent childlike openness to what is without having already preformed ideas what things are.

[04:38]

It does specifically not say you have to stay like a child. So it's actually a pathway and it's a path of transformation. And that's quite challenging, that challenges us at the core, that challenges us where we have opinions, where we have interpretations of what's happening, where we have judgments about things, and we believe those. We believe what we think about ourselves and we believe what we think about other people, which is, according to Buddhism, complete delusion. So the practice is radical to kind of get past that. And that's not an easy task. That's a very challenging task.

[05:40]

task that requires patience, tolerance, generosity, perseverance, not giving up. Dalai Lama says, never give up. Help me out. Looking for the six parameters. Energy and wisdom. Yes. So because I feel there is a great deal of capacity for kindness, for caretaking in its best way, how you take care of the food, how you take care of the guests, how you take care of the plants, and how you take care of yourself and take care of each other.

[06:49]

Because we are all absolutely, uncomparably individuals while we are simultaneously very, very same. And how to hold those two things and be respectful and radically respectful of the differences that we bring by our physical genetic outfitting, by how our family culture was, how our societal culture was, where we grew up, in what economic situations we grew up, what happened to us while we were growing up, how we coped, what coping mechanisms we developed.

[07:50]

These are all conditionings we bring to this place. And the radicalness of this practice is we are completely, absolutely responsible for them. No one else is responsible. Norman Fisher, in his book, Lawjong, The Zen Practice of Compassion, says, whatever happened to you in your life, all the difficulties, the pains, the joys, the sufferings, the injustices that weren't things that weren't your fault, things that were your fault, things that were clearly somebody else's fault, they are now part of our very own life, and we are 100 percent responsible for them.

[08:54]

We cannot, or we can, but if we do, it is a hindrance, Blame. If we stay blaming, it's his fault, it's her fault. She did that to me and he did this to me. That is hindering finding refuge. That is hindering us to wake up. That is actually continuing to create pain and suffering for ourselves. And we would so much love to give it away, to find others to join in, yes, it's really this person's fault, or yes, this is really the institution's shortcoming, or somebody else should fix it for me. And to just refrain from that. So the interesting thing is,

[09:57]

in this practice I find, which is also kind of a radical thought for me, is it's not so much about doing as it is about just not doing what we usually do, just refraining from that. And if you think about it deeply, you could also think you could just, when you have the impulse to just relax, and just wait. Just not follow the impulse. Just take a breath, look around, look for something that's pleasing to you. For example, if you're in a pain or if your mind goes churning around with something that happened and you felt really was, you know, why did this person now look with me with this face or was sharp with me and I didn't, you know, to just, just what relaxes me, what

[10:58]

takes me away from filling in the blanks by assigning intentions, which is usually not the person says, that was my intention, it's that we fill in a blank. We don't know. And so we fill it in, and depending on how it feels, we fill it in, oh, this person must love me, or this person must hate me, depending on what... It's our interpretation. And we usually don't go back and say, was that your intention? Or I think that's what's happening, is that what's happening. So the practice is very much about letting things be. Letting yourself be, letting things outside of you be. And be as a verb, not as a... So because they keep moving. And if we don't grasp them and make them into something, we can maybe see that something else is happening that is very different than what would be our interpretation of it.

[12:13]

And I think particularly in today's times, which so many things are now becoming visible that probably were there all along, but more under the surface, that is a call for us to really take the backward step, turn the light inward, and take full responsibility for what we feel, what we see, what we think, what we do, and not, oh, I do this because, or therefore, or not because, but really, we are the only ones who live our life. Each one, each one of us, including others, I mean, everybody has their own absolutely precious, unique life.

[13:39]

Nobody can see the world through my eyes. You can't see the tree I see. We can never see the tree exactly the same way. We can't even find out how differently we see it. Because nobody can live You know, Kodo Sovaki said you can't fart the fart for another person, to make that point clear. And so, in that sense, also nobody else can save us. No institution, no law, no nothing. It's really the liberation is completely and freely given in our own hands. And if we take that seriously, then all the precepts start making sense.

[14:40]

We will not speak ill of others. We won't go around trying to lobby against somebody or share our experience to save somebody to have the same experience, which is kind of robbing them of having a fresh and new encounter. It was very interesting when I was invited to be tanto at city center, which I had absolutely... I'd never spent a night there. I knew basically nobody there. I went for big ceremonies or on the way to Tassajara, just arrived in the morning and two hours later was on a... in a car to Tassajara. Some people who knew city center wanted to help me. They said they wanted to help me by giving me their view of city center.

[15:46]

Who was who and what I could expect from this person and not expect from that person. And this was one of the very rare situations where I had absolutely no idea what I was going to encounter. And for some happy karma, I realized that and I said, please don't tell me anything because it will shape my view. I will go look for what you told me because I will not have an unbiased eye. It's not possible. So we will become much more careful what we tell other people about other people, which is any way we shouldn't be doing because it's just our fantasy of a person. There's a beautiful poem by Jane Hirschfeld where she says, it was like this. And she talks about she ate chestnuts and she did this and she did this and that.

[16:51]

And then she dies. And then people tell their stories, but they're all their stories. They have nothing to do with her, even though they think they tell her story. So it's really radical when we take that on, when we are fully, completely responsible for all what has happened to us, how we carry. We're not responsible that it did happen to us. For some things we are, but there are some things we have absolutely no control over and won't have control over in the future. But we are completely responsible to how we hold these things, how we relate to what has happened to us, how it has impacted to us. And that is...

[17:52]

Nobody can do that for us. Nobody can take it away from us. Nobody can make it undone for us. So then do we look for friends who help us find a way to peacefully resolve that and integrate that in our life, the scars and the hurts and the the injuries and the pains and the joys, or do we go to people who reinforce our stance, our view? And when we look inside, Pema Churgen says that very beautifully, She says, learning to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves is important.

[19:05]

The reason it is important is that fundamentally when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and and what is brilliant, what is bitter, and what is sweet. It isn't just ourselves that we are discovering. We are discovering the universe. So when we look inside, we find that we too want to build walls. not maybe in Mexico on the border, but towards this person or towards this aspect inside myself that I don't want. I don't want to have it be part of me. I want to build a wall. And I'm trying to build a wall, which will take us in the wall in Mexico energy from places that they were actually designated for and would be useful there.

[20:16]

We do that with our... life energy. We will have racist or segregationist aspect in us where we just exclude and include and make little gated communities and private ownership of certain things and we find it all. And when we start understanding that and stay with that and understand that the practice is radically inclusive. There's no wiggle room. Inclusion is a prerequisite. Inclusion is actually what we already are, completely in this universe, interconnected. There's nobody not interconnected. then we begin to relax.

[21:20]

And we have all the time. There's no time pressure. That's the other thing. If we start looking into our own hearts, into our own experience with kindness and gentleness and generosity and patience, it will start to change by itself because our nature is completely... just basically waiting. And it's waiting as long as it takes. It's not going to say, well, you didn't do it yesterday, so forget it. It's a wonderful thing to start to notice that your life starts moving at its own pace, and transformation also happens at its own pace, and the whole universe is participating and helping you. So when we speak to others we speak about ourselves and not about others.

[22:24]

And we help each other. We can help each other not to do that by making agreements. We can slow down so that we have more space to feel what we're feeling. Zazen is a wonderful place to get in touch slowly with things we don't know how to be with. And it always requires radical respect, which means no judgment. So when judgments come, we just say, thank you very much, but not very helpful right now. So we're also respectful. We're not saying, well, you're out of here. It's just, yeah, I heard you, but what is it? I'm not going to read it, but I have a text that whenever I read it, it fills me with such... It's like my body understands it and knows it's true much more than my mind.

[24:05]

My mind is still kind of caught in my own stuff. more actually than my body, interestingly. And I think that's probably true for all of us. If we start listening to our bodies, they know, they will tell you immediately when you're off because you start being tense. You know, you're not off tense when a tiger is chasing you. Then the tenseness is necessary to get out of the way. But so many times we're tense and We think it's a tiger, but we don't even look. We're just convinced and then we stay tense or this is an enemy. But if we really start also how we think affects how tense or relaxed our body is. If we have peaceful thoughts or kind thoughts or give somebody a credit, kind of not assuming a negativity, our bodies will be more relaxed and we will perceive more.

[25:06]

So I will give that text to the kanto for you to put up somewhere and you can read it. It's called Maha'ati, the Great Perfection. And it just talks about reality in such a beautiful way that you feel. We don't have to do more. What we have to do is less. much less than we think we have to do, which is not so easy to do less. So what I want to read to you to stop here is because for many of us it's fear that stops us from being present and staying open-minded or kindly curious, friendly curious to a situation.

[26:14]

And that is an advice Pema Chodron gave to, writes down in her book, When Things Fall Apart. Once there was a young woman, a young warrior. Her teacher told her that she had to do battle with fear. She didn't want to do that. It seemed too aggressive. It was scary. It seemed unfriendly. But the teacher said she had to do it and gave her the instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student warrior stood on one side and fear stood on the other. The warrior was feeling very small and fear was looking big and wrathful. They both had their weapons. the young warrior roused herself and went toward fear, prostrated three times, and said, May I have permission to go into battle with you?

[27:27]

Fear said, Thank you for showing me so much respect that you ask permission. Then the young warrior said, How can I defeat you? Fear replied, My weapons are that I talk fast and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved and you do whatever I say. If you don't do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don't do what I say, I have no power. In that way, the student warrior learned how to defeat fear.

[28:33]

And we can apply that to anything that we encounter. It's bow down with respect. Ask permission to engage. Ask for how is the best way to engage with you. In this case, it was how do I defeat you? It's not, oh, I have to know and I have to do it. It's actually... I have to ask permission. I have to inquire. And that is a respectful, friendly way of being. So on that note, I want to thank you again, because basically you made the talk. There's very little of what I said on my notes. And it comes from the energy in the room. And I'm a loom of emptiness, so it just wove itself.

[29:38]

and then it's gone again. So thank you very much. And if, can anybody ask a question? Is it too late? Quarter past nine. One question. Or comment, or none is fine too. Everybody can, oh, there's a hand, okay. So you talked about the internal walls and barriers and kind of mirroring the external barriers or walls that we point to. How would you, I mean, using that story as a sort of metaphor, like how in practice do we meet those walls, you know, on the cushion or off the cushion? Like, maybe could you give an example of how to engage those walls and that in the traditional way, even with the body.

[30:46]

Yes. I was just going to go to the body. That's my venue. Because I feel it's actually our vehicle of this life. Everything happens with it. So if I felt a wall or a barrier, I would go in, I would sense into my body and see if I can find where it's located. And then sometimes, you know, it's here or it's here or it's back here. And then I would just not try to change it. I would really try to feel the quality, feel its shape. Does it have a shape? What is its edge? Is it rough? Is it sharp? Is it soft? Where does it stop? And I would also go and look in my body, is there a place, and there generally is one or several places where it's completely at ease.

[31:50]

So then I would go to the place that's at ease, put up a hammock there, that's my hangout place, And then I would make little excursions to the edges of that wall with curiosity and just see what happens when I don't try to change it, but try to get to know it. So that's one answer. You're welcome. A very good night to everybody. 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.

[32:45]

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