This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, friends. It's wonderful to be here. Can you hear me okay? It sounds a little thin, but I have no control over that. Um... I'm really happy to be here. Uh, as I was collecting myself before coming down, I just felt suffused with emotion. Uh, tomorrow, uh, would be the 94th birthday of my late teacher, Sojin Roshi. Uh, and, uh, Also, coincidentally, Monday, I believe, is the 80th birthday of Tenjin Roshi.

[01:09]

I was remembering one time, it was quite a while ago, maybe more than 20 years ago, we all went out to a ballgame together, I think it was the A's, and Oitsu Roshi was here. We celebrated... their birthday at the ballpark, and it was flashing across the scoreboard at one point, happy birthday, Mel and Rip. And so, I was thinking about that, but just also thinking, the subject of my dog is what it means to have a teacher, and also what it means to me to have the teacher that I have had and other teachers as well. And so there's a kind of early section in my book, Turning Words, with encounters with Sojin.

[02:19]

And I'm going to talk about some of those, but also in a broader way, what it means to have a teacher to in my life and in my practice and to offer that as encouragement to all of you to find not necessarily a teacher but to find teachers who can be mirrors for us so that we can see ourselves clearly but I also think if I'm thinking of Mel, it's like the robe that I'm wearing, this raggedy patch robe monk, patched robe is one of his, which keeps getting patched. It was patched again during Sagine last two weeks ago.

[03:23]

And I wear it with great pleasure. It's an honor to The kotsu that I carried, the teaching stick, I was looking at it really carefully. This is one that he made and gave to me when we completed Dharma Transmission. And it is really perfect. It's just a beautiful piece of wood, but it's beautifully crafted and shaped. And what I would say is that wood was probably more responsive to him than some of us were. He could get this wood just right, but not so much all of us. And that's something that a teacher lives with.

[04:26]

They live with... the imperfections of students, and they live with their own imperfections. And we see with Sojin, some of you who knew him, he always had a dog. And he had these, he often had these kind of out there dogs who had some kinds of behavioral difficulties. And he would get rescue dogs and you could, when you watched him with his, with his dog, it's like, you could say, oh, this is really how he would like to work with us. You know, that didn't always work with the dogs and it certainly didn't always work with us, but you could see he was both really kind and

[05:27]

to the animals and also really tough with them. And that's actually the way I found him. So I wanted to, I'm not going to read verbatim from my book, but I wanted to give you some context and then perhaps we can talk a bit about this mysterious role of being a teacher, mysterious role of being a student. In the Zen tradition, we say that the Dharma is transmitted from warm hand to warm hand. With one hand, one receives the essence of Buddhist and ancestors' practice from one's root teacher. Just as Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was Sojin, Mel Weitzman's root teacher, Sojin is my root teacher.

[06:29]

It's been surprising to reflect on how traditional My path, my training path was with him. He was my teacher for more than 37 years. I had all of my ordinations with him. And I was around him pretty much on a daily basis when we were both in town. I began working on these stories in this book. Shortly after Sojun Roshi was diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 2019, the cancer advanced so slowly and Sojun tolerated his treatment so well that one could forget the sword hanging above his head. But it was always there, and in certain light, the sword's shadow was stark and clear. Towards the later months of 2020, cancer was taking its toll.

[07:35]

And our dear teacher weakened. He died at home in January of 2021. Even now, as I'm the second habit of Berkeley Zen Center, our kitchen window looks over the courtyard towards the door of what was his office and is now my office. And I noticed that unconsciously, I'm listening for the car door slamming in the driveway outside our house. I'm listening for the opening and closing of his office door. I look down out of our kitchen window to see if his shades are open. Always expecting him to be there. I searched the shifting sands of memory for Sojin's turning words, much the way he constantly shared Suzuki Roshi's words with us.

[08:49]

This is how our teachers continue to live across time and space. Like looking for the relics of our teacher that exist in the clouds, And in the sky. And in ourselves. We now carry. Those teachings. And. Each of you has the opportunity to do that. So. To tell a couple of stories. I think I'm just going to tell them. When I first came to Berkeley Zen Center, it was sometime in 19—well, it was the second time I came to Berkeley Zen Center. I came to Berkeley Zen Center in the summer of 1968 and began to sit at Dwight Way that summer.

[09:58]

We'd all come out from New York after a season of occupying the university president's office and living in it for a week and getting beaten and arrested. And we wanted to go to the promised land, to California. And we got to California. And what was happening? It was martial law in the streets of Berkeley. And there were teams of cops walking in two or three. And it was like, we need to come to California for this. But that summer we started, a group of us would come out together, started to practice at Berkeley Zen Center and at Sokoji. San Francisco Zen Center before it moved here. I wasn't ready to do that, but somehow a seed was planted. And when it came time in 1984, and I'd sort of run out of script for my life, I decided to turn back to practice.

[11:06]

And I... I've told this story a lot. I called up the phone number for Berkeley Zen Center, and I said, you know, quite a while ago I had instruction, I had Zazen instruction, and I'm thinking I want to take up Zen practice again. What should I do? And the person on the other side of the phone, which is not Sojin, said, find a blank wall and sit down and stare at it. And I thought... really, this is what they're telling somebody who's calling cold over the phone? I said, this is the place for me. You know, so I went down there the next day. And when I walked in the gates on Russell Street, where we are now, I felt completely at home. And, you know, I asked myself, how did I know that I'm home? And I couldn't answer that question, but I knew it, and it was true.

[12:10]

And I've been there ever since, and I've been living there now for 38 years, which is kind of like an indeterminate sentence. But my children have grown up there. My wife is a teacher there, Lori, and now I'm the abbot. But when I got there, Sojin wasn't there. He was in Japan doing Dharma transmission with Uitsuroshi. And so I felt at home in this community and it all made sense to me and it was very horizontal. And then when he showed up, it all made sense to me. Again, this is the missing piece in the mandala that made the puzzle make sense. It's not that he was the center of everything or that he was egocentric or self-important.

[13:22]

It's just you could see that things had constellated around him. And you get a better sense of that. By the way, there's a His book is called Seeing One Thing Through. It's going to be out in November or December. And it's a part memoir and part collection of his talks. It's quite wonderful. But his model was just Suzuki Roshi sent him from San Francisco to Berkeley to just start a sitting group and take care of it. And he took care of it. was ordained there. A cover photo of the book is of his ordination in the old Zendo-Android way. And bit by bit, he became a teacher. And I think he became a great teacher, a really important teacher in our Zen legacy in the U.S.

[14:37]

It was clear he was a teacher, but I didn't know what a teacher was. And it took me a while to run through all of the permutations of possibilities of what I might see as a teacher. You know, is he my father? No. Is he my psychotherapist? No. Is he my friend? No. I didn't have a box to put him in because I had never had a Zen teacher. There's something else, something else that was, that had to be discovered and had to be discovered by, in the course of my practice, and it also had to be discovered in the course of our, the practice of our relationship together. Mostly, he just watched. This is what, if you're familiar with Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, there's this wonderful chapter called Control, which is my favorite chapter in the book.

[15:54]

And Suzuki Roshi says, the best way to control sentient beings, and this also... Implies by implication. Introspectively. Is to watch. Just watch them. Don't ignore them. And don't try to. Manipulate. Others. Or yourself. But just watch. And that's what Sojan did. He turned his attention. On me. But not in any. Mechanistic way. So he watched me for a while. I don't know how long. I don't know how long before it was a sort of a turning words encounter. And that encounter was very powerful for me and remains a teaching that I, I have to work with.

[17:00]

It's not, it's like, yes, I can do that, but I'll, so one day during Dokusan, Out of the blue, he just said, you should let things fall apart. And it was like, oh, I should let things fall apart. And that came from the observation that out of anxiety, I was trying to hold things together. I wanted people to do forms in a certain way. I wanted people to act in a certain way. And that applied to myself, of course. And he was saying, basically, you can't control these things.

[18:02]

Just watch them. Let them fall apart. And then see what happens next. this lesson and he applied it to himself. I remember one day, this is several years before the pandemic, he was giving a Dharma talk on Saturday and he said, you know, everything is going really great. And in a moment, he'd just go, and everyone kind of, But that's what happened. That's what happened to all of us. And I watched him. When it happened, he let it happen. And he took a big step back when the pandemic hit.

[19:06]

You know, we were all scrambling to figure out how to continue the practice, how to move to online resources and so forth. And he just stepped back. He just stayed home. He was sick at that point. But he stepped back and just watched and waited for things to take a certain form. And then he found a place to come forward when he was ready. And that was really powerful teaching to me. he was prepared to let things fall apart. And I will say we watched in his last illness, we watched that be the case for his own being, for his own body. And something, you know, these two things were happening simultaneously.

[20:13]

The one was he was getting sicker. And The other was that he was being stripped down to essence. And so in the last six or eight months of his life, Sojin met, I guess it was monthly or every few weeks, he had these Were you there then? Yeah, Heiko was there. And he would engage people, you know, eight or ten people of a night and just take questions. And we have recordings of these videos of them. He was totally alive. And the teaching that he was giving was so stripped down.

[21:19]

There was nothing missing. There was nothing diminished. And so he let things fall away and also continued. So the title of the book is Seeing One Thing Through. And I took that title. There's an exchange that he... that he quotes, he had an exchange with Suzuki Roshi, which may very well have happened in this building. He asked Suzuki Roshi, what is nirvana? And Suzuki Roshi said, seeing one thing through to the end. And we are so fortunate that All of our teachers, all of our late teachers, we think about Lange Hartman, we think about Steve Stuckey, we think about Suzuki Roshi and Sojin, and others, formally or informally, our teachers and others to come.

[22:36]

There's something about this practice that allows a space for someone to see one thing through. to the end irrespective of what questions there were so I think a week before he died I went to his house I visited him one afternoon, and Sojin was looking tired after lunch and meeting with another disciple who was wrestling with anticipatory grief.

[23:43]

Sojin motioned me towards his easy chair in the front parlor and wheeled his walker over there. Reclaiming his breath and composure, he looked at me intently and said, what's going to happen to all my stuff? Although it was really out of character for Sojin to explore his feelings openly, I realized that I could take this question on two levels. I thought about all the robes and books and calligraphy tools, artwork, and... Ritual objects that filled his office at BCC. I thought about the stuff of his mind and body. What happens when we die? I was moved by the intimacy of this question. Irrespective of its meaning, I had no answer.

[24:46]

I don't know what happens when we die. But surely... We don't bring any of our stuff with us. Oh, maybe we carry our karma. Sojin was clear over the years that he didn't know. Buddhist doctrine proposes a lot of complicated theories about karma and rebirth. When asked about death and rebirth, Sojin often said, I don't remember. Now he would have another opportunity to find out. But alas, then he would not be likely to tell us about it. Maybe. I'm going to get to that. As for the material residue of 91 years, I said it would be helpful if he told me what he might want left to whom. He had no energy to deal with such things. This was hardly the main thing on his mind.

[25:50]

So I said, I'll do my best to make sure anyone who wants something to remember you by will have the opportunity. I thought of all the precious things he had worn and carried or handled and realized there was nothing beyond this conversation, beyond this moment that I wish to have. So, to have a teacher, is to let that being inhabit you somewhere, somehow. So since Sojin's death, I keep having dreams about him. He appears very vivid, and in the kind of quasi-lucidity of dreams, I think,

[26:53]

wait, you're not alive. And he gives me a weird look, you know. And often in these dreams, he's pretty critical, which is exactly how he was with me during his life. He was incredibly kind. I had I had almost 40 years with him, more intimacy than with any other figure other than my wife in my life. But it was not always fun. And he wasn't always right. And he wasn't always seeing things in what I felt was an accurate way. But what I did feel by having a teacher was he was kind of tough with me, and he was pretty critical, and he could say hard things to me.

[28:08]

And I understood that love was there at the same time, even though I may have felt his words might have seemed unfair to me. But my vow, And I encourage you in this. Sometimes I had to take a step back when receiving a criticism. And I just, either implicitly or explicitly, I would say, I really need to think about this. But when I would leave his room, My vow was, my understanding was, there's something he's getting at that I need to have a better understanding about.

[29:15]

There's some teaching in this encounter for me that right now, because it hurts, I'm not feeling. But I'm going to take this step back and contemplate this. And when I figure it out, when I would figure it out, I would always go back to him. And I would say, I might say, that hurt. But I would also say, this is what I understood. This is what you were getting at. And in that sense, we had a very honest relationship. The other principle that I held to, you know, he wasn't one for making up, for articulating rules or process.

[30:22]

He was a bad process person. meetings with him. I'm sure many of you have been in meetings with him here at Zen Center. Process was not his strong suit. For me, the principle that I would share with you as you're exploring a relationship with a teacher is or anyone actually, is a principle of mutual accountability. I did feel accountable to him. And I also felt that he was accountable to me. And sometimes that got us into tangles. But I have stayed with that.

[31:23]

And that is, that's what I articulate, people who want to be in relationship with me, that we have a relationship of mutual accountability, not a one-way, not a power relationship that flows from the teacher to the student in one direction, but it actually has to be, there has to be some very strong dynamic of mutuality because that mutuality is what puts us on the horizontal human plane. That mutuality is the principle of equality. The equality that exists to me inherently among each human being and maybe between and among species as well.

[32:27]

And so we have to be very careful that we don't just assume or adopt a relationship that seeds power or authority to one person, what we call them the teacher, or we call them the president, or we call them the general. You know, but... think about in Dogen's Bodhisattva Shishobo, the Bodhisattvas for Embracing Dharmas, in the last section, which is called identity action, which you could also translate as cooperation, he talks about the relationship of the ruler and the people, which is a Confucian model. And says, the people don't always understand that the ruler is there because the people allow him or her to be.

[33:43]

That they create each other. So that's that principle of mutuality. There it is, articulated by Dogen. in the 13th century. So, there's so much more I could say about Sojin, and maybe some of this will come out in the Q&A, but I think that I'd like to sing you a song to close this portion, and then we'll have time for a Q&A, if that's okay. No. sure what voice I have after talking.

[34:46]

This is a song that was written by Bernice Reagan Johnson of Sweet Honey and the Rock. I imagine some of you know of her. I think about Sojin, I think about Blanche, I think about Steve, Suzuki Roshi, and so many others. falling all around me they are falling all around me they are falling all around me the strongest leaves on my tree

[36:09]

Every letter brings the news that. Every letter brings the news that. Every letter brings the news that. The teachers of my life are moving on. Death comes and rests so heavy. Death comes and rests so heavy. Death comes and rests so heavy. Your face I'll never see. No more. But you're not really going to leave me.

[37:12]

You're not really going to leave me. You're not really going to leave me. It is your path I walk. It is your song I sing. It is your load I take on. It is your air I breathe. It's the record you set that makes me go on. It's your strength that helps me stand. No, you're not really going to leave me. I have tried to sing your song right. I'll try to sing your song right. I will try to sing my song right.

[38:16]

Be sure to let me hear from you. 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, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:53]

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