This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. A few days before summer solstice. It actually feels like summer today. Finally, fog came in. And we'll see the sun again in September. It's also on the calendar. It's noted as Father's Day. And I've had the occasion to give talks here before on Mother's Day, but not on Father's Day. So I thought I would have Father's Day. Informer be the theme. I heard on the radio yesterday that retailers are saying that people are spending 10% more for fathers this year.

[01:11]

And the implication was this should be good for fathers. Is this what fathers really need? Another tie. kind of jokes around that but for me fathers the whole matter of honoring ancestors comes up the whole matter of the interplay of blessings and forgiveness comes up and it includes mothers as well like my mother when I was growing up in the 50s in Kansas, when Mother's Day came along, my mother invariably said it should be called Parents' Day because there was no Father's Day on the calendar until 1966 when Lyndon Johnson proclaimed Father's Day.

[02:26]

But Mother's Day had been installed by Woodrow Wilson back in 1914. So there were 52 years of this discrepancy in my mother's mind, anyway. She was quite generous. But I was actually relieved that there wasn't a Father's Day because I had an argument with my father starting from, I think, about the age of four. LAUGHTER Maybe I'll come back to that. But I wanted to begin with the thought of twining, actually, of the entanglement of generations. And begin reading a little quote from Dogen, Zen Master Dogen, from the... He wrote this in 1243, in Shopogenzo Kato.

[03:35]

Twining vines. Whenever I... Now I say twining vines, I think DNA. But Dogen, in the 13th century, did not know about DNA. But he knew something about lineage, and he knew something about the responsibility of blessings, the responsibility of transmissions. And he took this, what had been a negative phrase in Buddhist culture, entangling vines, going back to, say, I don't know, but at least Buddha Gosa, and the Vasudhimaga path of purification. Some of you may know that there's this intro saying something about a tangle. Everything, the whole world is a tangle. And who can untangle the tangle?

[04:38]

But Dogen Zen is actually penetrating right through and including all the fibers of this tangle. Twisting vines. So he quotes his teacher, twisting vines. Twining vines. Ancient twisted karma gets in there. He quotes his teacher. He says, Ru Jing, my late master, old Buddha, said, Gourd vines entangle with gourd vines. Gourd vines entangle with gourd vines means that Buddha ancestors thoroughly experienced Buddha ancestors. Buddha ancestors merged with Buddha ancestors in realization. Those who notice that inheriting Dharma is twining vines are rare.

[05:45]

Can you hear me in the back or around okay? Yeah, this is working. So then he goes on to tell the story of Bodhidharma giving his blessing, his transmission blessing to his disciples. So I'll read that little section. Bodhidharma, many of you may know, is our first, we count Bodhidharma as our first Zen ancestor, actually founder of Zen in China. But he came from India to China. Bodhidharma once said to his students, the time has come. Can you express your understanding? One of the students, Tao Fu, said, My present view is that we should neither be attached to letters nor apart from letters and allow the way to function freely. Bodhidharma said, You have attained my skin.

[06:51]

The nun, Songshi, said, My view is that it is like the joy of seeing Akshobhya Buddha's land just once and not again. Bodhidharma said, You... have attained my flesh. Daoyu said, the four great elements are originally empty and the five skandhas do not exist. Therefore, I see nothing to be attained. Bodhidharma said, you have attained my bones. Finally, Huike bowed three times, stood up, and then returned and sat where he was. Bodhidharma said, You have attained my marrow. Then Dogen comments, he says, Investigate these words of Bodhidharma. You have attained my skin, flesh, bones, and marrow. These are the ancestors' words. All four students had attainment and understanding.

[07:54]

Each understanding is skin, flesh, bones, and marrow leaping out of body and mind. Skin, flesh, bones, and marrow... dropping away body and mind. Those who have not received authentic transmission think that Bodhidharma's words, skin, flesh, bones, marrow, are not equal in depth. Know that skin, flesh, bones, and marrow do not mean that one understanding is deeper than another. Even if there are superior or inferior views, in Bodhidharma's words there is only attaining me or my dog and says it's translated here my so there is only attaining this so this is an absolute approval we might say today this is unconditional love or unconditional acceptance unconditional blessing this is the same as

[09:03]

Suzuki Roshi saying, when you become you, when you become you, Zen becomes Zen. When you become you, Zen is Zen. So of course you are already you. What does it take to become you? So this matter of the blessing and the responsibility The interplay, as I was saying, of blessing and responsibility has to do with all levels. I think it's something to investigate for each of us in our society, in our family relations, in our religious institutions, in our spiritual practice. When I came to Zen Center in 1971, I actually started sitting Zazen in 71 and came here in 72.

[10:07]

And mostly at Green Goats because we opened up this room as a Zendo, I think maybe 72 or maybe 73, somewhere in there. It had been the barn. Hay was stored in here for the cattle underneath. And I sat a lot of Zazen in this room. And I didn't realize that part of the work I was doing was coming to terms with my own argument with my father. But sometime after sitting about five years here, I was sitting over there on that town, I remember. Some Sashin. And it occurred to me because there were old arguments coming up in my mind, old arguments, old injuries, old hurts, old times that I'd been slighted and misunderstood.

[11:17]

And I decided there to forgive my father. He was really a good person. In a way, you'd think it'd be very easy to forgive he was such a kind person, right? Not everyone's father is so kind. However, the essential problem was that he thought he knew what was best for me. He thought he had the position of being a kind of molder of me. And me... could see that he was imperfect and that he didn't know. So it was ego and ego. Little tiny kids can have a big ego. And fathers are actually sometimes afraid of what gets, say, aroused in them.

[12:29]

with their children. So their responses are maybe not so clear or complete. Anyway, I forgave my father sitting right here in this room, so it has a particular poignancy for me. And then, after that, every time the argument would come up, or some version of it or some different part of it would come up and I would remember, oh, I'm forgiving this person. He actually did what he thought he had to do. So over and over and over. And occasionally I would visit him and a couple times he actually came out here. And each time our relationship became clearer and after about 15 years it felt like oh there was some mutual actual just kind of clear appreciation.

[13:38]

He even accepted that I was a Buddhist priest. Very hard for a Mennonite to do. So this is one aspect then which is familial and cultural and needs to be investigated. And I imagine that for most people in the room, there's someone who is a blessing you would like and where you didn't get it. And it may be pretty important to accept that and to forgive that person or persons. Maybe a whole crowd. But often there's a key person. And if you can forgive that person, then it's much easier to forgive all the others. On the other side, the fathers often don't have the development

[14:56]

the spiritual development in themselves to understand the role of offering blessing of giving blessing and when I say fathers here I'm also saying mothers and I'm saying grandmothers and grandfathers everyone here is also an ancestor you may not know it yet it includes aunts and uncles too Sometimes aunts and uncles are the most important ones to be giving blessings. I want to read a poem about forgiving fathers. I have to sort through here to find it from Dick Laurie. This poem was I heard it first in the movie Smoke Signals.

[15:58]

Some of you may know the movie Smoke Signals, at the end of the movie. So this is, for those of you who don't know, it's worth experiencing this story. Maybe the first movie I hear from, it was all produced and by, and acted and everything by Native Americans, Spokane and Coeur d'Alene people. This poem is called Forgiving Our Fathers. Maybe in a dream, he's in your power. You twist his arm, but you're not sure it was he that stole your money. You feel calmer and you decide to let him go free. Or he's the one, as in a dream of mine, I must pull from the water. but I never knew it or wouldn't have done it until I saw the street theater play so close up I was moved to actions I'd never before taken.

[17:12]

Maybe for leaving us too often or forever when we were little. Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage or making us nervous because there seemed never to be any rage there at all. for marrying or not marrying our mothers, for divorcing or not divorcing our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning, for shutting doors, for speaking only through layers of cloth, or never speaking, or never being silent? in our age or in theirs or in their deaths, saying it to them or not saying it, if we forgive our fathers what is left. Saying it to them or not saying it, if we forgive our fathers what is left.

[18:19]

So forgive, you know, the word has a number of meanings, but sometimes it's confused. because it has a number of meanings. So one meaning is to not expect reimbursement for a debt and forgive the debt. Another meaning is to pardon. Another meaning is to condone. So I want to separate, particularly distinguish the meaning of condone from the deeper meaning, which is to release without holding any resentment. So it's actually releasing of resentment by the person who's doing the forgiving. No more resentment, no more anger, no more ill will.

[19:27]

There may be anger that comes up, but one does not justify it or feed it. One can make this decision, and in making this decision, one becomes freed from the bondage of this, say, unresolved matter. One becomes freed from the bondage of holding a view that then contaminates in some way, stains and intrudes in all of your experience. In the teachings of the Buddha and in the Dhammapada, which is a collection of very early sayings, there's a statement... he abused me, he struck me, he overcame me, he robbed me.

[20:30]

And then the comment is, in those who harbor such thoughts, hatred will never cease. And then it repeats it, he abused me, he struck me, he overcame me, he robbed me. In those who do not harbor such thoughts, hatred will cease. So this puts the possibility of being liberated from hatred into the practice of experiencing the pain of being, in some case, abused, robbed, struck, hit, actually hit. Or even, we could say, simply disrespected, unappreciated. It puts the possibility of liberation right on the practitioner to say, oh, even if I experience this amount of pain and suffering, I have the possibility of not harboring ill will.

[21:49]

I have the possibility of not harboring resentment. So each of us really has that capacity. We have that capacity because we have this deep Buddha nature or true nature, which actually supports us all the time, and we usually don't fully have confidence. and the true nature that supports us all the time. Usually we take on an impossible task of trying to control things and solve things and fix things that are actually beyond our control or our capacity to solve. But we actually can cultivate the capacity to solve what is this argument we have within ourselves.

[22:55]

So the argument that I had with my father was actually an argument I had within myself. I'm sitting here peacefully in this room. He's 1,200 miles away. I'm having a big argument. So it's very clear then that it's all going on in this world. realm that I actually identify as a realm the field of awareness that I can actually work with now it's helpful to have received say some blessing from somewhere else and so I give I want to give credit to some other teachers there's a chair right there there's a bench there and there's a cushion here so even receiving the blessing of Dogen who lived centuries ago

[24:27]

This is something that's possible in our lineage. We receive the blessings of all of the ancestors and we call it a blood lineage or we call it a blood vein. And we say it begins before the historic Buddha. We say seven Buddhas before Buddha. So way beyond before anyone can remember So this is, and just before I forget to mention, the word blessing actually comes from the word blood. So there is this depth in all of these, Dogen saying skin, flesh, bones, marrow. There's blood in all of those. Now, since I mentioned DNA, I want to bring that in a little bit here.

[25:36]

In the current issue, I think it's the current spring issue of Inquiring Mind, one of my friends and one of our Zen priests, who's also a biologist, Florence Kaplow, wrote an article which he calls All My Relations. And I want to just read a little section from her where she took a class in genetics many years ago. And in that class, she learned, and this is quoting from her, she said, she learned, she said, we share 92% of our genes with mice. 44% with fruit flies. And... This was the moment when my world view turned upside down, 26% of our genes, with yeasts, those friendly single-celled organisms that help bread to rise.

[26:45]

Our ancestors differentiated from the ancestors of modern yeasts about one billion years ago. If I could go far enough back in my own family tree, And if I could look deeply enough into my own genetic structure, I would see our shared lineage, our family resemblance. Isn't that wonderful? So I want to honor, you know, my, what, billionth grandfather, great, great, great, billionth great grandfather, Good old yeast guy. So when we actually honor our ancestors, we realize that we have ancestors all around us. And then I just walked past a newspaper a couple days ago and I saw a headline that said something about trillions of bacteria that are living on our bodies.

[27:56]

I didn't... didn't have time to read the article but but someone then said you know well most of who we think we are is is other organisms all living together usually in pretty good balance but sometimes not sometimes things really get seriously out of balance but there's a great interest in ancestry today and I think partly because of the mobility of people on the planet and people wanting to know their ancestors. William Henry Gates Jr. has a program, some of you may have seen, about discovering ancestors, which plums the historical records, but then also brings the DNA analysis in to see what percentage of one's own DNA came from where? Some ethnic group.

[29:01]

Sometimes it can be pretty precisely located. So there is an interest in this. But I think the most important for us is to honor the capacity of blessing. To honor the capacity of this kind of sacred blood that runs through all of our bodies. Honoring that capacity means that, one, as a father, and I am a father, I have three adult children and four grandchildren, and I don't think I'm doing a good enough job of blessing, haven't done a good enough job of blessing my children and my grandchildren. when one's biological or cultural family is inadequate. We're very fortunate to have a say global or say universal culture.

[30:13]

We have a universal culture in this, for those of us who are in this Zen practice, we have a universal culture As I said, a blessing that comes all the way back from infinite depth. And by joining it, by honoring our ancestors, by honoring Dogen, honoring Bodhidharma, and now we also have a lineage of female ancestors, of women, that we recite here regularly, and so we honor our ancestors, and in that we are also, say, receiving their blessing. And in a sense, this gives us the, kind of awakens our capacity. We already have the capacity, but it awakens our capacity to forgive.

[31:14]

Awakens our capacity to forgive all those from whom we, in our judgment, in our judging minds, felt their blessing was inadequate or downright harmful or just mildly aggravating. You know, whatever it is. And so this matter of resentment can sometimes just be a small thing. I just have a little bit of tension around this person or that person Buddhists talk about reincarnation, but now when we look at this whole thing of being closely related to yeast, I think it puts a different light on, a different spin on it. So all my relations means whoever you meet, whether you meet another human being or you meet an animal or you meet a tree or you meet any plant on the hillside.

[32:21]

We share these. We share so much. It's in our bones, in the marrow of our bones. So Dogen, in talking about skin, flesh, bones, marrow, saying all are equal, means that when you come from your own understanding, when you are not thrown off balance by arguments and resentments then you can't come from your own understanding and you have the capacity to bless whoever you meet you have the capacity to forgive the parts of yourself that are not even socially acceptable the parts of yourself that society would split off and condemn or reject.

[33:27]

But you have the capacity and you're supported in this lineage of practice. You're supported in this Dharma lineage to forgive and to go beyond that, to actually bless. So this is just a little bit of what comes up for me on Father's Day. I want to read just a few more. I want to read from another poem. This is a poem I read here a while ago. I don't know, a couple of years ago, I think. This is from Galway Kinnell. He's talking about blessings. And he's talking about the capacity of St. Francis to bless the sow, the mother pig.

[34:30]

But he starts off talking about a bud, the bud of a flower. He said, the bud stands for all things, even for those things that don't flower. For everything flowers from within of self-blessing. He's actually talking about this capacity that I'm saying, that we all share. Self-blessing, true nature. Though, and he continues, though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on the brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch. It is lovely until it flowers again from within of self-blessing. As St. Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow and told her in words and in touch blessings of the earth on the sow, and the sow began remembering all down her thick length, from the earthen snout all the way through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail, from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine down through the great broken heart,

[35:51]

to the sheer blue milk and dreaminess spurting and shuddering from the 14 teats into the 14 mouths sucking and blowing beneath them the long, perfect loveliness of sow. So he says, St. Francis blessed the sow like this and sometimes it is necessary to reteach each thing. Sometimes this is something that we can do for each other, and this is something that Bodhidharma did coming to China from India. Reteach a thing, its loveliness. Its loveliness in the sense of not comparative beauty, but of its absolute value. Loveliness of its own true being. So, to put the hand on the brow and retell it,

[36:52]

in loves, in words, and in touch. It is lovely. It is complete. You are complete. And this supports it until it flowers again from within of self-blessing. So I better stop. Thank you for listening. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:53]

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