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. Good morning. It's a different soundscape out there with the rain in the Sendo hearing. the swish of the rain and the carts go by. I always find it comforting to sit in the rain. Perhaps you do too. And this morning I noticed as I was standing upstairs just before coming down, standing outside Blanche's door, there's a beautiful arrangement of dogwood stem and peony which really makes me think of spring. I used to live on the East Coast, and the dogwood trees were one of the first to blossom in the spring with their four-petaled white flowers, really beautiful.

[01:10]

And this dogwood branch is exquisite. I hope you get a chance to see it when you're on the second floor. I had a dream fragment this morning, which I've been puzzling over. I dreamt I was at a party and I was wearing my bathrobe. I have a very nice bathrobe. It's cotton flannel, dark blue with flowers on it, but I wouldn't wear it to a party. And I was thinking, what could that mean? And I think two things. One is maybe feeling a little more exposed than usual. with Sashin and giving three talks in one week, which is unusual for me. And also yesterday, I missed the group that went walking. So I set out, I was a little late, so I set out on my own walking up Page Street in my robes.

[02:19]

And somehow when we do that as a group, it feels ordinary, but doing it on my own page, and then cross to hate, and people were kind of looking at me. And then at some point, I met up with the group, and it felt like a great relief to be just ordinary again, walking along with a number of people all wearing dark clothes, some of us wearing robes. But I thought that also... might have something to do with the dream that I had this morning. So today I'd like to continue with the themes I brought up two days ago, vow, and thought I'd talk a little more about intimacy, partly because of Ken's question. And I thought my response was maybe part of what intimacy is, but there's so much more to talk about.

[03:22]

That's what I'll be focusing on. And the chapter in Living by Vow that I looked at for today is the chapter on the robe chant, which we also chant every morning. And probably, like some of the other chants, we don't think about it too much. But it does end with the... saving all beings, which in some translations is, I vow to save all beings. So it's the first line of the Bodhisattva bow. I thought we could chant it together, just once, the English part. Join me. Great robe of liberation, healed far beyond form and emptiness, wearing the Tathagata's teaching, saving all beings.

[04:40]

So I like to go to sewing class on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. And often when I'm there working on a project, someone comes in who's about to begin sewing... the raksu, and it's their first class. And one of the sewing teachers begins by telling them the story of how Buddha's robe came to be. So Buddha's robe can be a raksu or an okesha. And the story goes, Many of you probably have heard this in the sewing room, but I'm sure some of you have not. So it's a lovely story. And various people tell it, and they all have their own unique way of telling it. But the story is basically the same, that there was a king, a lay student of the Buddhas, who was on his way to meet with the Buddha

[05:53]

And he thought he saw someone who was a religious person, but he didn't know if this was a disciple of the Buddhas or not. So he got out of his cart and approached this person and found out that the person was not a disciple of the Buddha. And he felt a bit embarrassed. And then when he met with the Buddha, he said... wouldn't it be helpful if all your disciples wore something that would identify them? So people could easily see who your disciples were when they approached them. And soon after that, the Buddha and his attendant, Ananda, were walking in the fields, and they were walking by rice fields. It was springtime, and the Rice fields were particularly beautiful, listening. And the Buddha said to Ananda, wouldn't it be beautiful if the robes had this rice field pattern?

[07:03]

And Ananda agreed and said, well, I'll figure out how to create a robe that looks like a rice field. So whether this story is true or not, our robes are said to, look like rice fields, the patterns of, the Aksu has five panels, five Joes, each one made of one long, one short piece, and they're staggered, so they look like fields, and the ocasa is similar, just has more pieces to it. And there is a, so the first line of the rogue chant, daizai, daizai means how great or magnificent, how great or magnificent is this robe that we sew and wear. And Dogen first heard this verse that we now chant every morning when he was in China visiting Diantang Monastery in 1223.

[08:11]

That's about 800 years ago. And he noticed in the monk's hall that the monks put their folded ocasas on their heads every morning and then did this chant. He had read of this practice before going to China, but he had never seen it or heard it, and he was very deeply impressed. He wrote a fascicle called Kesa Koduku, which is in praise of the Okesa, Kesa Kudoku. And he wrote, At that time, I felt that I had never before seen such a gracious thing. My body was filled with delight, and tears of joy silently fell and moistened the lapel of my robe. And he then took a vow, and his vow was to transmit that practice to Japan.

[09:16]

And we are still doing that practice. I looked around this morning and it was actually very moving to see everybody in the half dark who was putting their raksu or okesa on their heads and then chanting, the rogue chant. So Dogen also said in that fascicle, we should understand that the okesa, or the kesa, is what all Buddhas have respected and taken refuge in. The kesa is the Buddha's body and the Buddha's mind. And he used several different terms. We say great robe of liberation in the chant and field of virtue and the robe of formlessness, so great robe of liberation, field far beyond form and emptiness.

[10:20]

One translation I heard at the Village Zendo is field, full of, field of, a field of benefaction is how they say the second line. So the field, the rice field, a benefaction or blessing. It can be a blessing to wear the robe. And the robe of liberation in part refers to the origin of the robes in the time of the Buddha. Robes then were made from scraps of fabric that were generally thrown away. So often there would be fabric that was found at charnel grounds where bodies were cremated. scraps of fabric that were different colors and some of them rags. And so they would be cut into pieces, washed and dried, and then sewn together.

[11:26]

And they dyed these pieces of fabric in dark colors rather than red, yellow, blue, or white. but they mix different colors together so that the cloth would then be rendered useless and of no value. And even today when we sew a raksu or an opesa, we cut a piece of cloth that's whole into all these pieces so that cloth is basically not of use for anything else. But when we sew it, And in sewing, we also take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha with every stitch. So the robe is imbued with the quality of our attention when we sew. And it comes to have a sacred meaning, which it didn't have initially.

[12:30]

And the robe has some of the... basic teachings of the Buddha inherent in it. One of those is impermanence. Robes don't last forever. I find my robe, it is constantly losing stitches and, you know, There are places that need to be mended, and no sooner do I mend one place than I notice another place that needs to be mended. And as robes age, no matter how careful we are when we sew them initially, the thread just wears out. And it's common that in the sewing room we'll see people mending robes for themselves or for teachers, or just robes don't.

[13:32]

have this quality, the robes have this quality of impermanence. And the last line of the robe chant, vowing to save all beings, is part of the intention in sewing a robe in the first place to make a decision to receive the precepts in Jukai ceremony. Jukai literally means ju is receive and kai is precepts. My teacher calls that ceremony a bodhisattva initiation ceremony, where we are initiated by receiving the precepts and taking the bodhisattva vow. And she sees the sewing of the robe part of the initiation.

[14:37]

So from the time you start sewing your raksu or okesa, you're beginning the process of bodhisattva initiation, which then is shared publicly in that beautiful ceremony. And Dogen encouraged people to sew their own okesas and venerate them and to this day when we sew our okesa we then carry it you know at eye level if we take it on a trip we put it on top of everything else I once had a very important lesson from you Blanche I don't know if you remember this but I was walking with you I think it was at Green Gulch and I was carrying my rakasu and I was about to have a conversation with you because I wanted to be ordained as a priest. And it was requested that I see all the senior Dharma teachers and have a conversation with them about why I wanted to be ordained.

[15:46]

And you asked me, you dropped something. And I picked it up and I put it on top of my rock soup. And you said, oh no, never do that. You know, hold the rock soup on top. whatever else you might be holding. So I think that's the way in which we venerate and appreciate our robes. So there's a way in which the robe, also when we receive it in a ceremony, it connects us. It's not just the robe, but the whole ceremony connects us with sangha. And often many people will put stitches in our robes or make an envelope for us. And so the robe is a way of also expressing our intimacy or our connection with others in the sangha.

[16:50]

And I'm going to make a transition now to talking about intimacy and intimacy with others. with a poem by Enkyo Roshi and a story about a robe that her sangha made for her. So the poem is, this patchwork robe chatters sometimes and sometimes is quiet. All the different pieces making one thing held together by thread and dye, so like our lives, touching, shifting, changing, in the dark, in the light. So, so like our lives, touching, shifting, changing. And she received a robe from her community

[17:56]

that was made in the tradition of the original robes in the time of the Buddha, made from scraps of fabric for many different people in her sangha. And this is what she says about it. The different pieces represent parts of people's lives, little pieces of cloth that had meaning for them. in one just part of a shirt with funny little Scotty dogs, I see Raymond, who gave the piece before he died of AIDS. There's a very old fragment from Anraku's mother's kimono, a remnant from the 1940s. Next to it is a piece of Linda Hart's blouse. Linda died young of breast cancer, In the little book in which people recorded something about the item they contributed, Linda wrote, I just wanted to give you a cheap blouse.

[19:04]

I've never forgotten that wisecrack pointing to the all-embracing and humble qualities of a robe. There are many other pieces as well, from a school uniform, a waiter's apron, a silk tie, a dishcloth, a piece of old embroidery. It's awesome to see all these pieces together forming one robe. The robe calls to mind people I see every day, those who are far away, those whose relationships with others and with me have changed, and those who have died. The robe can... So that robe literally was a robe of relationship. And then she said, and the robe was given to her, but it doesn't belong to her. It's the sangha's robe. So if at some time she leaves the sangha, I don't know what will happen to that robe, whether it will belong to the next Roshi or whether it will be cremated with Roshi Enkyo O'Hara.

[20:14]

But it's both a symbol of intimacy and connection and also of impermanence and how, she said, the changing nature of life and of relationships and one of the basic teachings of the Buddha. So in our lives, she talks about how in our lives we function in many different roles and Even in the sangha, we have different roles that change from time to time, different work practice positions, roles that we take on just for sushin, like server or soku or head of a dish crew or doan.

[21:15]

These roles that we take on, we do them as fully as we can. and embrace them, and then we let go and move on to another role. And these roles also are ways of connecting with one another. And we need all of the roles in order for us to function as a community. And certainly in Sashin, it's a dependent co-arising those of us sitting, those of us supporting us in the kitchen, those of us who are taking care of the different elements of each day, from the wake-up bell to the refuges at night. And each of these roles is

[22:22]

unique and yet we are connected as one sangha. And Enkyo Roshi talks about relationship as a way in which one person or thing involves another. It's truly impossible to express the subtlety of this relationship between our uniqueness and our interdependence. And yet it is critically important, she says, to our life and relationship, to our ability to be intimate with those we love and with those with whom we come in contact in everyday life, to be fully ourselves as we connect with others. And problems can arise if we... put aside or don't recognize some parts of ourselves in a relationship.

[23:25]

If we put them on hold and say, you know, my needs are not so important. I can attest to that. I was in a wonderful relationship, but there were some difficulties, a nine-year relationship in which my partner had very strong needs around food, when she needed to eat and what she needed to eat. And for a number of years I just followed her lead and would eat at the times when she ate and I didn't really take into account my own rhythm, my own needs around eating. Finally, when I began to realize this was not working for me, we had a conversation about it, and it was very helpful. I mean, it could be about if you're, you could be in a relationship with a friend, a partner, someone, a colleague at work, where you may start noticing that you are not paying attention to something about your own

[24:44]

work style, or need for time alone, or wish to be together with your friend, and maybe that's not a good time for your friend, where things need to get negotiated and talked about, and that's another aspect of intimacy. But I think even when we think about intimacy with ourselves, you know, we are complicated, we have many parts to ourselves, and sometimes we don't recognize a voice inside ourselves that's saying, pay attention, you know, this is something I need, and can we listen? And sometimes it's a matter of negotiating with ourselves, even around something like when to rest and when to engage in an activity, or when to pay attention to that pain of the knee and move.

[25:52]

So, Enkyo talks about a saying that I hadn't heard before, A duck's legs are short. A crane's legs are long. Any of you heard of that as a sensei? I think what it's about is that we're different. You know, I'm a duck and I have short legs. I have to accept and come to appreciate my duckness. I can't aspire to be a crane. And sometimes when we have Our minds compare ourselves to others and we want to be like someone else or feel somehow we fall short of what we want to be. But we can't be a crane. We can't be someone else. And so how do we come to accept who we are and appreciate the strengths of a duck?

[26:59]

I mean, a duck would have a great time on a day like this. So a crane might also. But what about a duck? It's precious and just ducky, you know. We do have that word, ducky. So intimacy and closeness have to do with a willingness to enter into an affinity with a part of ourself or with another person, and to recognize, especially with another person, both our connectedness and our differences, and to value that. Enkyo refers to a Japanese word, mitsu, which is it's like the density of cotton batting in a futon.

[28:01]

That solidity, it seems like the futon is just one piece of cotton batting and yet if you look at the batting carefully it's made up of many different threads and each thread is distinct. So to appreciate both the connection and the individuality And I think this is, you know, true in many different kinds of relationships. I thought I would illustrate this with an example of the teacher-student relationship and share a story from the book that recently came out called Hidden Lamp, which is a collection of 100 Zen koans about women and commentaries with commentaries by 100 contemporary women.

[29:04]

And this story, it's called You, Why You? You Uses Her Full Strength. The commentary is by someone named Meg Porter Alexander, who is a student of Norman Fishers. She came to Zen Center many years ago, but I actually met her when we were both in our 20s, way before either one of us was a Zen student, and she and I both took part in the voter registration project in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we lived in the basement of a black church for several weeks in the summer of 1963. and went out every day to register people to vote. And I didn't see her again until maybe it was 10 years ago when we both were at a birthday party of a friend from Zen Center, and we recognized one another.

[30:16]

It was amazing. You know, we think we change. Well, we do, but we also, there's something that stays. And it was wonderful to see her again and to find out that we had both become Zen students. And so she says a little bit about her path in her commentary on this koan. Yu uses her full strength. The lay woman, Yu Dao Po, made donuts for a living. She also studied Chan. Chinese Zen, with Master Langye Huijie, who told her to contemplate Linji's phrase, the true person of no rank. So it's like a capping phrase or a key phrase in a koan, the true person of no rank. So one day, Yu Daopo and her husband were delivering doughnuts

[31:19]

and as they walked through the street, they met a beggar who was singing, Happiness in the Lotus Land. Yu was suddenly enlightened, and she threw the tray of doughnuts to the ground. Her husband scolded her, Have you gone crazy? Yu slapped him, saying, This is not a realm you understand. She then went to see Langye, her teacher, who immediately verified her awakening. One day after this, Lange asked the assembly, which one is the true person of no rank? You shouted out this verse. There is a true person of no rank who has six arms and three heads. When she uses her full strength to cut, Mount Wa is split into two. Her strength is like the ever-flowing water, not caring, about the coming of spring."

[32:22]

So this is Meg Porter Alexander's reflection on the koan. Thirty-five years ago, when I put on my black robe and headed to the mountain monastery of Tassajara, stories like this, though always of men, were an entry to Zen practice for me. stories made enlightenment something personal and embodied and radical. And I will say that if you look in any of the traditional book of koans, the book of Serenity or the Blue Cliff Record, The Gate, almost all the stories are stories about men, men, Dharma brothers, teacher, student. And one of the gifts of this book, The Hidden Lamp, is that... Florence Kaplow and Sue Moon, who edited it, searched out all these stories, which are there, but they were not easy to find.

[33:23]

And it's wonderful to have a book with a hundred stories about women. And she says, most of us who came to Zen in the 1970s were young and sincere. We were desperate to be comfortable with ourselves, and at the same time, determined to make a difference in the world. We brought all forms of suffering with us to the cushion, to the embrace of Suzuki Roshi's teaching. And with practice, through practice, something in us was transformed. The intensity of practice opened our senses, allowed us to hold our difficulties and cultivate our strength. When I read the story of you, I imagine a woman I might have known or been, someone needing to break open, someone prepared for the effort this would take, a woman whose heart-mind responded deeply to a generous teacher, a teacher whose vision of sangha was wide and inclusive.

[34:35]

I'm going to skip some, and she says, could see the person of no rank in her when she couldn't see it for herself. And by her efforts, she became that person of no rank, that person whose sense of herself was deeply rooted and radically expansive. I think that's a wonderful description of the teacher-student relationship or how it sometimes can be when a teacher can see something in us as students that we may not see. or be aware of and help us express it and discover it, express it, and find our own voice as Yu Dao Po did. So I'm gonna just check the time. Okay, so I can... to say a little bit more, and then I'd like to open it to questions or comments.

[35:44]

I thought I would come back to a poem that Enkio quotes in this chapter on intimacy with others and how this intimacy might look. It's a poem by Daito Kokushi, a medieval Zen master who lived under a bridge in Kyoto with homeless people. And the poem is very short. It seems like a good poem for today, although the sound seems to be coming out. It says, rain, no umbrella, getting soaked. I'll just use the rain as my raincoat. Rain, no umbrella, getting soaked. I'll just use the rain as my raincoat.

[36:45]

So facing yourself intimately and without judgment is like finding yourself in a sudden downpour without an umbrella or a shelter. You try to escape the cold. Can you just open to it and be fully present? with the brain. So we do have some time for questions or comments. Anything you're becoming intimate with during this machine? You mentioned being a duck.

[38:08]

If we think we're a duck, how do we know? Is it possible there's a crane in there? Do we really know who we are at a basic level? I would say yes. Well, yes and no. That's a penetrating question. That's a very, that's one of those questions we can turn, you know, as a turning phrase. Do we really know who we are? Because in one sense, we are not separate from any other being. So yes, there is a crane in there. If we're a duck, there is a crane in there. And an elephant and, you know, a lion. and yet in the conventional so each of us is very complex and we are made of so many causes and conditions that people in our lives who brought us up

[39:31]

our ancestors, our friends and family and colleagues. And on some level, we're connected with everyone and everything. They're all part of us. And yet, how is it that on a conventional level, we have an identity, but it's not fixed. And I think being aware of the fluidity of it, and that, yes, we can express ourselves perhaps as a crane, even if we are a duck. We may find within us, you know, I'm thinking about line from Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes. We all contain multitudes. Thank you for that. Basically, when I was thinking, I feel like you already answered, recontained multitudes.

[40:47]

But I was thinking of the last poem you read about no umbrella and getting soaked. And I kind of brought her back to this morning. I was out walking. Initially, I didn't have enough, well, I was getting soaked, but then I was at rock right by my car, and I have umbrellas in there, so I took one out. And then I lost all the intimacy with the rain all of a sudden, but then I wasn't getting much wet. And just kind of the balance of my life, when I used my technology to avoid natural elements, or when I embraced them, kind of pallid verbs, the two together in my life. I haven't quite figured out what feels right, so. Thanks. It's a balancing act, you know. I think when we sit Sashin, in a way, we expose ourselves to the rain and being soaked and we leave our technology behind.

[41:52]

It's rare in many of our lives to be able to do that. And I had a thought this morning also that sitting sasheen is in a way like going backpacking, where you, bye kitchen. Where you leave behind what's not essential. You can only carry a limited amount in your backpacks, so you pare down. And when we sit sasheen, we pare down in many ways. We don't eat our favorite. chocolate or toast or whatever it is, you know, we wear this pretty similar clothes every day. We, you know, there are a lot of decisions we don't have to make if we truly eat what's offered and follow the schedule. It just, life is much simpler. And so we can do that for Sashin or perhaps for a longer practice period at Tassajara or

[42:56]

on a backpacking trip but then I think that always helps when we come back to our everyday lives to think about what do I really need do I want to have a time everyday when I might be technology free or is it useful to continue the practice of eating what's offered or whatever practice. So I think one gift of Sashin is to help us to realize that we may not eat everything we think we do or that there's some value in simplifying and really meeting the rain. I think that's one of the, you know, even though we don't sew our robes that way, when friends put stitches in our robes, it's like that.

[44:25]

So everybody's energy is in the robe and It has extra meaning when we wear it. Bob? Intimacy reminds me of nature. I'll go out on my bike and I'll be in awe. And I'll see trees growing towards the sun and things looking towards just naturally. And then for me, I think I tap into that I'm just nature. and I see the magic coming through me to be whatever I do. That's a beautiful description, intimacy with nature, yeah. Thank you. What was that?

[45:27]

This is a question. I was just thinking about the question about being a crane and not duck, although that's, of course, just a metaphor since we're talking about human experience. And I think that, for me, that teaching has been really useful in the sense of that we can't change who we are. or that I can't change who I am, but I understand how, well, for me, the usefulness of it is an acceptance, and like you said, not comparing or contrasting myself with others. And then it doesn't seem that I can't change or that I might not change, but I think that it's just the thing of, if we actually can accept who we are in this moment, then it actually opens up the possibility for change, if that's what needs to happen or what's the healthiest thing.

[46:35]

Well, I think the key thing that in this moment, the phrase in this moment, if we can accept who we are in this moment, but we have to know we're not going to stay in this moment, and things will change us. You know, we don't always... drive the changes, but we're not going to stay the same, you know, for all kinds of reasons, aging being one of them, and accepting that is helpful, just accepting that we're going to change can be helpful. We can't force it, I guess, is what I heard you saying. Is that right? Yeah, I think we can, well, if We can't force it, no. But if there's a way in which we would like to change, sometimes we can by setting an intention, like setting an intention to exercise every day.

[47:39]

If we want to be stronger, that's one of mine. But fundamentally, there's something that is recognizable in us over time, but I'm sure you're not the same you were when you were, well, 10 years ago or 20 years ago, and yet someone you knew then saw you now, they would know it was you. So there's this paradox about change and how we change, but something stays the same and something changes. No, maybe this would be a good time to close. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive.

[48:42]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Domo.

[48:56]

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