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. And welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. I'm not going to ask who's here for the first time, because we're all here for the first time. Not to say that the question isn't relevant. And that's part of what I want to talk about this morning. In Buddhism, there's a teaching of two truths. Quite literally, we're all here for the first time. This moment hasn't occurred before, so we're all in it together.

[01:05]

We're creating it. Every single one of us. is a relevant part of it. Without any one of us, it would be a different moment than that would be for the first time. And then in another way, there's just conventional statement. Who's here for the first time? Welcome. No, you're welcome. So about a month ago I gave a talk, and I talked about this statement, which is the heart of the Heart Sutra, a Buddhist sutra, that we chant frequently. With nothing to attain, the Bodhisattva relies on Prajnaparamita, and thus the mind is no hindrance. Without hindrance, no fear exists. And the crux, the heart of this heart, of the Heart Sutra, is this notion in Buddhism of shunyata, interbeing, and has two aspects to it.

[02:28]

One aspect you might call deconstruction. Conventional wisdom says, who's here for the first time? We all more or less understand that means who hasn't been in this building before. And then there's another truth which says this moment has never happened before. This is the first time for this moment. How can you possibly have believed it before? So two truths. And the second truth we could say this moment's never happened before. It's a sort of... deconstruction of the conventional truth. Like I was sitting upstairs preparing for this talk, in about a quarter to ten, the level of noise, the level of conversation rose up.

[03:32]

And I thought, what's that? And I thought, oh, the residents are coming out of their Saturday morning residence community meeting. and it sounded animated and kind of happy. And I thought, oh, must have been a good meeting. Who needs the details? Sometimes it's a helpful way to check in with yourself. Usually, the details are so intriguing, they're so important, what I think, my opinion, my perspective. To get a little dramatic, it's a matter of life and death. If you disagree with me, you're impinging upon my right to be myself. To check in and just... What's the weather like?

[04:38]

What's the internal weather like? What's the emotional... affectation of right now not so much to get busy judging it buildings getting a little more animated and then it gives you some kind of notion that's the product of this morning's residence meeting I have no idea what they talked about So deconstruction. So you check in, you get the affect, and then it sort of leads you into, is there a particular content going on right now?

[05:46]

Is there a particular emotional disposition? And then if you attend to that, you can start to see how that comes into being. What's underneath that? And then you attend to that, and we start to experience almost how Well, what did they talk about? Well, they talked about this. The topic for this morning, I have no idea what it was. The topic of this morning was food. You know, in the early 80s and late 70s, we didn't talk about food here because it was too loaded a subject. It was too hot a button to talk, you can't talk about food.

[06:49]

I remember someone animatedly saying, why do we have sugar on the table? Why don't we just put heroin on the table? That's how loaded it was. And now we laugh. Then it was like the air became a little bit electric. Is it okay to put sugar on the table? Or is it a deep offense to the spiritual discipline? I don't know how we got beyond that. And every now and then, you know, someone will say, our diet's too meager, and someone will say, our diet's too rich.

[08:07]

And usually to me that means, it's pretty good. I remember instructing the Eno once. The Eno is the person who takes care of the Zendo in particular. And I said, whenever... The same number of people say it's too cold as say it's too hot. You've got it about right. We've got equal complaints. Our subjective experience is so provocative for us. It's so significant. It's so relevant. that we're drawn into being entranced by it. If this feeling is so strong, my perspective must be right.

[09:11]

No, that's just your perspective. And that's just your strong feeling. This is the kind of deconstruction. And then the heart sutra is saying, with nothing to attain. So, if my opinion is that sugar and heroin are equally unhelpful, inappropriate to practice, well then, obviously, we shouldn't have sugar. But my opinion. can we deconstruct? That's my opinion. That opinion was born of, at that time, we were very, there was a lot of interest in macrobiotics. And to broaden it out, what is the diet that's most conducive to spiritual practice?

[10:18]

We were, and not exactly intentionally, It's not like we posted on the bulletin board. The question of the month is, what is the diet? It was in the air. We'd have a head cook who'd be macrobiotic, and they'd serve nothing but macrobiotic diet. In its city center, those who were inclined would eat out more often. At Tassajara, sometimes they'd sneak into the kitchen at night and take more food. And you hear it now and you think, that's amazing. That's how it was. This passionate involvement in getting what we need.

[11:24]

And sometimes that's utterly obvious for us. I need more cheese. You don't get cheese in a macrobiotic diet. And then sometimes it's mysterious. You feel a sense of lacking, yearning. And so this statement is formative. with nothing to attain, clinging to nothing, with no agenda. Bodhisattva relies on... The Bodhisattva trusts Prajnaparamini, trusts the suchness of every moment. Every moment is what it is. None of us have been in this moment before. Here it is. We've made this commitment to this moment.

[12:29]

You've no idea what's going to come out of my mouth next. Already I'm deviating off what I thought I was going to talk about. We're constantly being asked, be in the moment. Not just to discover to what degree the moment will give you what you want or need or comply with your definitions of how things should be. Can you rely on the moment as the moment? Can you enter into that uncertainty? Can you enter into that act of trust? Can you rely on this to just be itself?

[13:33]

And of course, that in itself, with nothing to attain, the bodhisattva relies on the moment to just being the moment. That's what it is to awaken. We could stop right there. Of course, that's the heart of practice. That's what happens every time we sit down to meditate. That's what happens. That's the request. that arises every time we are aware, or engaging awareness. And then when we do it, the Heart Super says, and the mind is no hindrance. The mind is just part of the amazing play of the moment. distance from it. Now, to hear the phrase, someone said, in the mythology of the past, thus I have heard, someone said, heroin is no different from sugar.

[14:52]

Now it has a kind of patina of a marvelous event. Not marvelous because of its profound accuracy, but just that passion of being. And I'll come back to that in a minute. So in the last talk, I was talking about this deconstruction, and I read this poem, and I'm not going to dwell on it very much. the gist of the poem is this. The poet heard leaves falling on the roof. Now, how boring is that? How inconsequential. How unremarkable. Guess what? He took all those, tossed them aside,

[15:58]

and made it remarkable in its singularity. And this moment was itself. In the language of the Heart Sutra, with nothing to attain, the hearing of the leaves became what it already was, the moment of experience. Had I not been awake, I would have missed it. A wind that rose and whirled until the roof pattered with quick leaves of the sycamore. A wind that rose and whirled until the roof pattered with quick leaves of the sycamore. And got me up, the whole of me a patter, alive and kicking like an electric fence. Had I not been awake, I would have missed it.

[17:02]

So this kind of deconstruction, usually with so much going on, so much clamor, so much intrigue and drama, known and unknown, and then punctuated by directly experiencing the phenomena of the moment. That kind of deconstruction. In the Heart Sutra, there's negation. No caught up in your ideas. No caught up in your opinions. No caught up in your judgments. Just a patter enlivened by the energy of the moment like an electric fence. Alive and ticking. like an electric fence. And yet, this is only one aspect.

[18:12]

So the deconstruction, and then we could say the other side of shunyata, interbeing, you know, the root of it, we might say, these moments of existence. And then the other side of it is what we do with it. We create a world out of it. Sometimes we create a world singularly, sometimes we create a world collectively. The sun goes round the earth. Well, at one point, as an article of faith in Christianity, the earth, the sun went round the earth. which proved the earth was the center of the universe as per God's design. And of course, this was a living manifestation of this is it.

[19:15]

And when Copernicus had the audacity to say something different, it was considered to be an assault on dependence of Christianity. And now, in a scientific age, we say, the earth goes around the sun, the sun's part of the solar system, the solar system's part of the galaxy, and this galaxy is one of... And then we get to the very edge of our human knowledge. We're not quite sure. what it's part of, what? A hundred billion? A thousand billion? Galaxies. Each one of them so large that it challenges our conceptual ability to even conceive of it.

[20:22]

So we have that the tail of that being just the earth goes around the sun. And then we have this intrigue of human life. But we all know the sun comes up, goes across the heavens and sets. And when it comes up, you know, usually I feel pretty good, you know? Ah, dawn, rising light, a little golden. sense of optimism. And then it sats red, pinkish. Settledness. And can we live in those two worlds? This world of This is what it is regardless of how you feel about it.

[21:39]

The earth goes around the sun whether you like it or not. No one's asking if you feel good we'll all agree the earth goes around the sun. Nope. And yet the subjective world where we do have feelings about the relationship between the earth and the sun We have feelings about pretty much everything that happens for us. We can try to deconstruct to the binary of pleasant and unpleasant and try to notice. It's a little bit like, as I was saying at the start, ticking the temperature. What's the weather of your experience at the moment? listening to the clamor of the students talking and thinking, hmm, sounds like it was a good meeting. Listening to the clamor of your own being.

[22:44]

How is it? How am I at right now? What's going on? And this is included in Prajnaparamita. This is the nature of our human life. The simple facts, as best we know them, and the human response. About a month ago, in fact, almost exactly a month ago, I was in Ireland leading a retreat. And I was born in Ireland, and I was born in a city in the north of Ireland, and I was born in a Catholic enclave in Ireland, in Belfast, your Christian identity is more of an ethnicity than simply a religious denomination.

[23:53]

And interestingly, in many parts of the world, Christianity, Islam, whatever, even Buddhism at times, has the flavor of an ethnicity and not just a spiritual identity. And it so happens that each time I go there, we go on retreat, and we go to the same place, a Catholic, what used to be a seminary, and now there are no seminariums, and they rank it out for retreats. In many... of the staff there, the people who work in the kitchen on the grounds, they come from the same city that I do. And in fact, many of us came from the same working class area. And when we were growing up, it was impoverished. So we have a kinship.

[24:54]

We went through a certain hardship. We were second class and we were empowered. It's interesting as humans, you know, when we share a suffering, when we share a difficulty, it can draw us closer. And sometimes it can set us up as enemies, but in this case, So often when I, usually when I go there, I will go into the kitchen and talk to the staff. And this time, one of the staff, not one of the kitchen workers, one of the maintenance staff asked to talk to me, which is really unusual, you know, I mean, a weird Zen guy, you know, walking around, not talking, and we do

[26:00]

We do walking, walking meditation, and we walk all over the place. And, you know, everybody's just trying to be a normal human being, and we're walking around in single file, like zombies, you know. So it was like crossing a barrier to say, you know, can I talk to you? And then in another way, it wasn't, you know, Ireland has... The archetype of the priest as the confidant is centuries and centuries old. And he told me, and many of the details I knew, his wife had died two years before. They were married over 30 years. And he became a recluse and stayed home and did a lot of drinking. And then slowly he came out of it and was starting to discover how to live in this new world of the absence of his wife.

[27:22]

And he got to the point where he was sort of being reflective on it. It wasn't that he wasn't grieving. And he was. But he got to the point of being reflective that even the time he spent alone and got drunk every night alone in this big, maybe not so big, but empty house. And then coming out of it. And then he'd done some things, you know, he's experimenting and a little embarrassing by their foolishness around exploring relationships and things like that. For propriety, I need to skip the details. And he laid all this out. And I thought, how can you judge a human life

[28:29]

How could you put any adjective on all of that? How could you say, well, that's exactly what he should have done? How could you say, that was terrible, he should never have done that? I mean, would you ever say to anybody, well, why don't you stay home and get drunk every night for a year? Well, I hope you wouldn't. I wouldn't. Thank goodness he survived it. Thank goodness, eventually he was able to drop it. We just say, don't grieve your wife of 30 years. We just say, don't go out and experiment on relationships. On this aspect of not only being willing to be a human being, but I would say this.

[29:39]

It's like a three-fold process that goes on for us. And the first part is kind of reconciliation. Maybe with the side order of forgiveness. And that's what struck me as he told me all this. He wasn't judging himself. And interestingly, he wasn't expecting to be judged either. Can we hold our human life like that as we take the temperature of it? Can it be okay? This moment is the culmination of all that happened in this life before, it all one way or another contributed to your being here right now.

[30:42]

And then even beyond that, you know, I grew up in a working class neighborhood in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on the edge of Europe, on planet Earth, And it's still relevant enough that I'd mention it. So this aspect of shunyata, it's more about appreciation. And we get to that appreciation through a kind of reconciliation. course there's things about your history that you have residual feelings about. I'm glad that happened.

[31:48]

I'm, I don't know, resentful, embarrassed, filled with guilt, sadness, regret that that happened. the whole gestalt of it. Can it be forgiven? Can there be a reconciliation? As we sit, can we listen deeply to the clamor of me being me? This is the request of Zazen.

[32:54]

Can we listen? Can we notice? Can we feel? Can we feel it as it ripples through the body, through the breath, as it creates images, memories, judgments, anticipations, a narrative? Something comes into mind and gets fed as a story. Around the earth now, truth-telling has become a process, like in South Africa. They set up this wonderful process. They've done something similar in Ireland to address what happened there. And then interestingly, inspired by one of the departments in Stanford, the people in South Africa coached the people in Northern Ireland.

[34:04]

The people in Northern Ireland coached the people in Sri Lanka. This process of truth-telling. We're not going to decide who was right and who was wrong. We're going to listen deeply to how it was. So this is a helpful guide in sitting. Can you listen deeply to me being me? Not so you can fix it, not so you can judge it, but this process of reconciliation. Can you feel it? Can you notice, acknowledge, experience? In this experiencing, the reconciliation, it initiates acceptance.

[35:08]

That's where I was born, no matter what feelings I have about it. whether I'm ashamed and don't want anyone to know, or whether I think I'm special. Still the same. That's where I was born. And not to sterilize it, or to accept it, it has to have a neutrality. No. it can have the full abundance of all that it has. It cannot be held in awareness. And when we start to move in that way, it starts to have more of the flavor of appreciation. It's like this moment has its own enrichment, this life.

[36:16]

has its own enrichment. Not because of how wonderful you are or because of what great things you've accomplished or how special you and yours are in contrast to them and theirs. But this life force, this being, this kind of appreciation When we allow it, when we engage it, this moment is itself. And it's not so necessary to reference it by some other moment, some idealized moment or some... Well, when I was here last week, it was a much better talk. It made much more sense. Which brings me to the other poem I wanted to read.

[37:27]

Which is by the same poet, Seamus Heaney. And this one he calls Postscript. And sometime, make the time to drive out west into County Clare. along the flaggy shore. There's a place called the flaggy shore. And sometime make the time to drive out west into County Clare along the flaggy shore in September or October when the wind and the light are working off each other so that the ocean on one side is wild with foam and glitter and inland among the stones the surface of the slate gray lake is lit. by the earth-lightning of a flock of swans. That the surface of the slate-gray lake is lit by the earth-lightning of a flock of swans.

[38:36]

Now, if that isn't appreciation. Their feathers, ruffed and ruffling, white on white. Their fully-grown, head-strong-looking heads are cresting, are busy underwater. You know, the magical gift of the poet takes something that you've seen and ignored a thousand times and says, wait a minute, that's amazing. That's the moment. And sometimes make the time to drive out west into County Clare, along the flaggy shore, in September or October, when the wind and the light are working off each other, so that the ocean on one side is wild, with foam and glitter, and inland, among stones, the surface of the slate-gray lake,

[39:51]

is lit by the earth lightning of a flock of swans, their feathers ruffed and ruffling, white on white, their fully-grown, headstrong-looking heads tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Useless to think you'll park and capture it more thoroughly. Useless to think you'll park and capture it more thoroughly. You can't own the moment. You can't take it and put it in your pocket and take it and deposit it in the bank. It owns you more than you own it, but you get to participate. That electrical momentariness is a mutual event. We can participate. any time we're in the moment.

[40:54]

But it's useless to think. You can park and capture it more thoroughly. But what about not trying to capture it? What about opening through appreciation? What about forgetting the clamor of the self, the wanting more and wanting less, the echoes of past hurts or achievements? What about appreciation as it says in the sutras, being soaked in, like a sponge soaks in water.

[42:05]

So that the sponge and the water are not different. The word Zen comes from absorption. The water is absorbed by the sponge. and the sponge is absorbed by the water. Useless to think you'll park and capture it more thoroughly. You're neither here nor there. A hurry through which known and strange things pass. You're neither here nor there, but in the moment of experience, just this. It's neither definedness here or set separate from there.

[43:15]

It is. And in this is-ness, the hurry through which existence passes. In this is-ness the stuff of being alive, with its tragedies and triumphs, with its deep pains and its joys. How amazing. How could it be quantified? How could it be restricted to a particular adjective? A hurry through which known and strange things pass as big soft bufferings come at the car sideways and catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

[44:30]

as big soft bufferings come at the car sideways and catch the heart off guard and blow it open. In any word can be spoken in homage, and no words can fully express what that moment is. This strange dance, how much we want to be alive, how subjectively it makes sense to grasp it,

[45:32]

And yet, the energy of it, the appreciation of it, the open-heartedness of it, is revealed by allowing it to be. This is the dance of our practice. We watch this deep human tendency with compassion. with an extraordinary compassionate patience towards the human condition. Like listening to that person's story. Each time I would go, I would say, how was so-and-so? And they'd say, he's not coming out of the house. And they kept his job for him.

[46:36]

I find that very tender. He just didn't show up for work. And they kept the job. Of course, they live in a village, you know. Life is very connected. Who hasn't suffered? Who hasn't rattled the rind in the pain and grief and confusion that it created? And it blows like a car against the wind, the wind blowing against the car. and the heart is blown open. Thank you.

[47:40]

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.

[48:06]

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