Then face the altar. .

[10:30]

. . Good evening, everyone. My name is Shundell. Am I audible? How's that? So I guess I'm going to be looking over this way this evening. Let me start by reading a poem. It's a poem that some of you may know. Some of you may know very well. Some of you may not know. Even now, decades after, I wash my face in with cold water, not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted unwanted.

[11:43]

It's called A Cedary Fragrance by Jane Hirschfeld. So thank you to Tim for inviting me to give the talk. Thank you to the Abbots. Civil Abbott, senior Dharma teachers, my teacher Zachary, all in attendance. And it's wonderful to be back in the building again. Who is back in this room for a talk for the first time in a while? Anybody? Yes. Sounds different. I walked in here at 7.30 like it was a different kind of silence. It's interesting. And I just had a little peek upstairs. There's new things and... old things and beautiful new things and venerable old things. And I would like to dedicate this talk to Peter Schneider, whose name is on the altar, a disciple of Suzuki Roshi, who died just a few days ago. I did meet him a few times when I was living here.

[12:48]

He was a very wonderful person, continued teaching in Northridge, which is a place, I think, that is struggling at the moment. So I also want to put our thoughts out to everyone who's in L.A. and the surrounding areas right now and suffering with the wildfires, which some of us know about. I had a class at noon and two people were closely by the fire areas and so it was a good chance for them to sit. So let me read the poem again. Even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water, not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted. So this is a poem about Tassajara, for those of you who've been at the Training Monastery.

[13:49]

I believe there is still no warm water in the cabins. I know there is hot water that is extended down to the Zendo bathrooms, which is a new thing. But in the cabins, there is no hot water in the sinks. So you can be prepared and bring a thermos with you in the evening to wash your face in warm water in the morning. I never bothered to do that. I used to have a hot water bottle to warm my bed up, but I never had a thermos to wash my face in warm water. So I wash my face in cold water every day. And it was a great wake up early in the morning, winter and summer, to have that cold water on the face and to be there for another day. I think some of you may be having memories of that too. So the poem is very evocative for that. There's practice of washing in cold water. I had another practice when I lived at Tassajara, which was going into the creek every day, winter and summer. I made it a little easier on myself because I would generally be in the steam room first, and I'd go back into the hot plunge afterwards.

[14:54]

But nevertheless, going into the creek every day, when it was swollen in the winter, I'd have to hold onto the handrail to immerse myself when the creek was running hard. On a hot day, obviously, going into the creek is quite a pleasure to cool down. But there's still that one moment right before you jump in, which is like, Am I going to do it? Yes, I'm going to do it. And that yes, I will, that's a part of the thing at Tassahara, part of the practice. We often say that, or I often heard it said, that it didn't necessarily matter who was leading the practice period. The real teacher was the schedule, the monastic schedule. So you don't want to wake up every morning at a ridiculous time. You don't necessarily want to go to the Zendo every time. Even when I was used to the regular schedule, I found that stretching that to do sesshin was a bit of an imposition.

[15:56]

Maybe you just get tired of doing orioke all the time. Maybe you don't really want to work in the kitchen, in the kitchen where it would be cold enough that you would go into the walk-in to warm up on a cold day. Maybe you didn't want to be kokyo. I remember when I was first asked to lead the chant, I struggled with it because I felt historically that I didn't have a voice. I was not encouraged to project myself loudly growing up in England. And I remember talking with the Tanto at the time about that. And it took some time to realize that it wasn't just about me or how I felt about it or what I wanted. But to be in that role, to lead the chant in the morning, to be expressing the Dharma, whether you wanted to or not, So we practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted. And so by showing up for the schedule, by showing up every morning, getting out of bed every morning, sitting every day, then you get to choose to make the unwanted wanted.

[17:08]

And sometimes you do want to do it, but sometimes you don't. And one thing that really I learned at Tassar is that getting to do what you want all the time is kind of overrated. Actually, there is an incredible value in having your time and your options constrained like that. I often think of Suzuki Roshi, who founded San Francisco Zen Center and moved into this building with the community in 1969. And he was often dealing with young folks who were living the 60s lifestyle with their ideas of freedom. And he was constantly reminding people in talks that freedom without this sense of discipline, without this sense of structure, without this sense of having a limit on your activity, was not real freedom.

[18:14]

And recently I came across a talk in a group that I was studying with from October 1965 so a whole sixty years ago which in those days would have been back at the Sukoji temple in Japantown and he's talking about you know the practice of sitting all day together I think at those times there were regular monthly one-day sittings and I think quite a lot of the people were coming time and time again so there was a developing community he said our vital freedom will be like running water originating from a mountain, passing through valleys and fields, reaching the sea. There is no freedom for the water to return to the mountain. But at the same time, there is vital freedom. This kind of life is called religious life. To attain it is to practice zazen without the idea of gaining. So the freedom we get is the freedom within these constraints, the freedom of running water going from the mountain to the sea.

[19:25]

I'm not an expert on Chinese characters, but I've always understood that the character for Dharma has some notion of water finding its natural level. That is the natural law. Water runs from the mountain down to the sea. And this vital freedom Whenever I hear the word vital, I always think of Dogen, a Japanese founder, who always talked about the vitality, the vital moment. So this aliveness that comes through the restriction, through getting up every morning, through sitting, through doing Oryoki, through working in the kitchen, through being the Kokyo, through being the door watch, through being the person who does the recordings. This kind of life is called religious life. We choose it, but then we submit to it. And we practice Zazen without the idea of gaining.

[20:27]

Something that Suzuki Roshi said again and again and again. So again, I think he was often confronted with these students in the 60s who had this notion of freedom and what freedom meant, which seemed to be sticking it to the system. But 60 years on, what does our freedom look like? Is it the freedom to be scrolling endlessly? Is it the freedom to be tuning out? Is it the freedom to be just going within and ignoring what is going on around us? And last month, I had the opportunity to go down to Tassahara for the day for the Shusō ceremony, where the head monk for the practice period gets to answer questions from everybody. It's always a wonderful ceremony. I sometimes think that Zen Center functions as a teacher factory, and every Shusō is a freshly minted teacher.

[21:36]

And this particular Shusō, Gentoku Mike, somebody I have practiced with at Tassajara over the years, and always knew him to be a wholehearted student, somebody who would get up and sit and do what was asked, take on responsibility, give himself wholeheartedly to the practice. And then, as so often happens, when you get to be sitting on the Dharma seat for the first time, if you so, and sitting in the middle, of the ceremony fielding everybody's questions, you get to see not just wholeheartedness, but open-heartedness. This is a quality that I think that the former Shusos, those who have been through this particular mill or ringer, they're always looking out for this open-heartedness, this ability to meet people's questions exactly where they are.

[22:40]

And so these two qualities, these wholeheartedness and openheartedness, I think, are what we can develop and what we can practice through the restrictions of our practice, through the periods of Sazen. And again, when I read Suzuki Roshi's talks, he's often batting away any idea about enlightenment or attaining enlightenment. I think, again, people had this idea of something they could get and that Suzuki Hiroshi was a person who could tell you how to get it. But the word that he used quite often and that Sojin Mal Weitzman, the late abbot at Berkeley's end center, also used is composure. And there's something about facing the difficult things, facing our restrictions, facing our limitation, pushing ourselves through wholeheartedly, that leaves us with this kind of composure, which is how we meet the unwanted.

[23:56]

And we can think about the things that we might feel are unwanted now, whether it's the fires in L.A. or a new government coming in, or maybe even You know, some people often say, dealing with their families. How can I deal with my family? How can practice help me with that? When we feel that we have maybe no control over climate or government or other people, how can we still meet these difficult situations? And this is something that we do all the time in Zazen. Whatever we're sitting quietly, something will arise. maybe more or less comfortable. The quieter we get, the deeper the things come up from, I think. And so we're confronted with all these parts of ourselves that may seem unwanted. The voices that say, you're not good enough. You're not the person who could be doing this.

[25:00]

Who do you think you are? Whatever voices you have going on in your head that put you down, wherever they came from, And you keep sitting with those and meeting them, making those unwanted voices wanted, or at least a little more welcome. And we also practice respect for the objects around us, whether it's our robes or our bowls or the bells, the chant books. But we can extend it to everything. There's a famous Suzuki Roshi talk about scraping the dining room chairs across the floor, not showing enough respect for the chairs. So Marinus Endo, if someone's in the dining room scraping the chairs, and I hope the chairs are still here. I think they were the original chairs from 1922 when the building was built.

[26:01]

Pick up the chair. Treat the chair with respect. Treat everything with respect. Allow everything to have its value as part of the absolute that is manifesting in this moment. And doing this beyond our ideas of convenient or inconvenient or good or bad or necessary or unnecessary. Here is the world showing up for us. And can we show up for the world as well, just like we do in Zazen? I think right now we need people to be showing up to set this kind of example. Now that the building is open again, people will start coming again. We can start being a beacon once more from Zen Center. It seems that perhaps fewer people are willing to go through the kinds of hardship that a practice spirit at Tassahara offers, to go through those difficulties and find

[27:10]

the wholeheartedness and openheartedness that can arise from that. But I think what we can do, those of us who are here, those of us who are connected as part of the Sangha, we can be there as examples. In the same way that when I came to Zen Center, I was inspired by the examples of the elders who were here 25 years ago. Their steadiness, their maturity, their composure. saw this openness and settledness, and in many cases, a freedom from the tyranny of preferences. We all have our opinions, we all have our ideas, we all have our foibles, but being able to put those aside and meet person, situation, object, wholeheartedly

[28:11]

and open-heartedly. So when the whole world is distracted, can we be present? When the whole world seems to be in the thrall of AI, can we be human? When money and power seem to be the most seductive and prevalent things that people are chasing, can we be kind? I was talking with the people in LA today and remembering Rebecca Solnit's book about altruism and how people come together in disaster times, in times of real difficulties. We all have this ability and this capacity to show up for each other. And the Zen Center community is a very powerful community. There are people at the practice period who I remember from my first summer at Tassahara more than 20 years ago. Maybe they've been and gone in that time.

[29:14]

They're still connected with the community. And everyone who is there and who is here can be a beacon to others. And even as we lose people like Peter Schneider who have that direct connection with Suzuki Roshi as one of his priests and somebody who interviewed him quite extensively in 1969 to kind of tease out stories from his earlier life through the transmission the face-to-face transmission that we practice here this living together warm-heartedly openly we get to embody the teaching and whether people are here for this face-to-face transmission or online we can still be offering this example in this practice So even now, decades after, I wash my face with cold water, not for discipline, nor memory, nor the icy awakening slap, but to practice choosing to make the unwanted wanted.

[30:45]

I think I thought of this poem because I was sick just before Christmas. I had a fever and spent a couple of days lying in bed, not really able to do anything. And I remember thinking, I'll start thinking about my talk when I get better. And then when I started looking at some of my notes, I realized that I'd actually, one night before I'd gone to sleep, dictated some voice notes into my phone about this poem and some of my thoughts about it. And I'd completely forgotten about it in the meantime. So nobody wants to be sick over Christmas. I certainly don't want to be sick. I really wanted to have a nice relaxing time, and instead I got to hibernate for a week. But that's what happens. We have plans, and we get to practice with what actually arises. And it seems that through a quirk of the calendar, I often get to give a talk around New Year. I think last year and year before [...] that.

[31:52]

And I think, you know, when was the last time I was feeling optimistic about the new year? You know, maybe in 2020, you know, but that was right before the pandemic. I think in 2021, I spoke right before January to 6th. So there was a sense of optimism about a new president coming in and the vaccines, but still not being out of the woods. And I think still we're really not out of the woods from the pandemic. I think we all are still suffering from it. And then obviously last year, this building closed down in the sense of going inwards or dispersing and closing down. So now we can open up again. And even if the wider world is maybe a little challenging in many areas, we can open the doors here and be a beacon again for everyone who needs the practice. everyone who has this notion that maybe making the unwanted wanted is a way to live life.

[32:52]

So I'll stop there. I see that Eno is already with a microphone if people have questions that they would like to ask. Yes, if you have a question, please raise your hand. I'll bring the microphone over to you. Great talk, Shannon. Thank you. You always say that. The question is this. What is the prerequisite for making the unwelcome welcome or even the welcome welcome? What has to be in place before that's even a logistical possibility? I think opening the mind. Yeah, and how does that fit into the sort of rubric that you're establishing?

[34:03]

Well, I think if Zazen has taught me anything is that most of what I think is rubbish. And so instead of just being blinkered by opinions, I'm a little readier to accept something coming in my direction. without knocking it away with prejudice and preconceptions and preconditions. Great. Next question. Thank you so much for your talk, Shundo. I really enjoyed it and appreciated it. There was a lot of wealth there, but I did not like that poem. I want to ask you about three aspects of the poem.

[35:12]

Firstly, she spoke about choosing. One of the things I've been taught in Zen practice is it's better to not pick and choose. The second thing is she spoke about making the wanted unwanted, which seems to me is like saying taking something that you have an aversion to, turn it into something that you grasp, as opposed to taking the unwanted and making it not unwanted. And I wanted to hear what do you think about my... How triggered I am by this poem? LAUGHTER I think you're hearing very closely to some definitions of those words that may not be her intention in writing a poem. So there are admonitions about picking and choosing. And it's good to watch what you pick and choose. But I think there's a quality of bravery of choosing to make the unwanted wanted.

[36:19]

Because let's face it, there are many things in life that we don't want. But surely we can make them not unwanted without making them into something that we're then grasping. Oh, I don't think we're grasping it. So it's down to semantics? I think you were hewing very closely to the words there. I'm sure you're right. Thank you very much. I wouldn't say that. Next question. Thank you for your talk. It's good to see you back at City Center after seeing you in the Valley for a day. I'm curious about a couple things you said about technology. I heard you say in a world where we're enthralled by AI, can we choose to be more human? And then I also heard you mention that you use the dictation feature in your phone for the voice notes, which is...

[37:21]

powered by AI. So I'm wondering, does that feature help you feel more human? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that seeming duality. Right. I mean, I've used the Notes app on my various devices for a long time because it's just a great, instead of having notepads, I just write everything down. And occasionally I try to dictate, my phone does not understand my voice very much. It doesn't understand Bodhisattva or Tassahara or anything like that. So it's really just a device for grabbing something that I can go back and look at and say, oh, I think I was trying to say something about this. So I find it very convenient. I've turned off, I think, every AI-assisted preference that I can on my phone, just not to let it run away with itself or run away with me or run away with anything else. Yeah. We're at an inflection point with this.

[38:22]

I keep reading about how things are going to transform in the next year or two or five. And I know that this particular part of San Francisco seems to be the nexus of young folk coming in to move fast and break things or whatever they're doing with this particular thing. And some of it may be amazing. Personally, I wonder why they can't use AI to get the traffic lights to have the traffic run smoother across the city. Just simple things like that. But what it seems to bring to me is that the qualities that will be needed or that we could, at the risk of being totally redundant as human beings, what can we do? We can show up for each other. We can be attentive with each other. I think I meant to say a little bit more about that, but in this world where everything is becoming automated, what do humans do? What is the power of being a human being?

[39:25]

And really it is meeting. There's a psychologist who calls it micro-moments of positivity resonance, which is kind of a psychological way of saying you just meet somebody. You know, you might have done this with your teacher or, you know, with a Dharma friend or, you know, even out on the street. You know, I always give the example of crossing the road one day and looking at a bus driver and thinking, I'm going to smile at the bus driver and the bus driver's going to smile back. And it happened. And it made my day. It may have made the bus driver's day. I don't know. But just those moments, those are the kind of precious things that we can do that machines can't. You know, Waymos can be great for driving around the city and they're very exciting for tourists. but they can't meet you. You know, we can meet each other. And so that's what we, you know, as human beings, that's what we have to offer. And as Zen practitioners, I think we're in a good place because we practice doing this all the time. And so we have this particular gift of presence and continued presence and composed presence that I think is going to become more and more valuable.

[40:36]

So that's how I think about it. Well said. Thank you. Following onto that, I know I've told you that I've developed a really collegial relationship with ChatGPT over the course of the last six months. So my question to you is, do you really have a solid sense of what's different about having a conversation different on both sides of the conversation between having a conversation with, between, yeah, in the context of a conversation with ChatGPT, what are the things that are the same and what are the things that are different? Do you have a sense of that? Well, I'm going to assume that ChatGPT is very smart. All right, and there's one thing, another thing that I've learned through practice is being smart is not that great, really.

[41:39]

And what it can't do is give energy to the situation, the actual energy of being in a room together. Okay, so let's back off. This is starting to sound like the Turing test. Having a meeting on Zoom. Yeah, I mean, meetings on Zoom are, you know, the rubber bone of, you know, of meeting in real life. You know, they're a poor substitute. But nevertheless, you know, there can be meeting. You know, you and I and several others have fascinating conversations about Dogen. I haven't tried to chat with, chat to UTP, GPT about Dogen yet. I'm not sure how successful that would be. But there's something about all our fallibilities and particular quirks that I think are hopefully irreplaceable.

[42:50]

It's something to explore. I'm sure we're going to find out about it next year. Do we have another question? There's something you said that I originally had a strong aversion to, but then I started kind of liking it, the tyranny of preferences, something along those lines. The reason is, I think, I spent a lot of time with family the past couple of weeks, and there was a lot of tension and suffering exactly because of those preferences that didn't matter one way or another, but like clinging to them was like difficult for people. But at the same time, I'm thinking about it and it's like there are things that we have preferences for that like maybe they have a, I don't know, like function.

[44:03]

Like I have a preference for a certain type of cushion when I sit. Or maybe like I have a preference for like certain thing for breakfast, and it might not always be there. Right now, I didn't get the cushion that I would have picked. Yeah, me neither. And that's okay. I gave it a prod at 7.30. It's like, oh, that'll do. That'll do. I can do with that. So it's a dance that we do. I ate oatmeal, rice cereal, quinoa lina, various hot breakfast cereals in 15 years. I'm not sure I've eaten oatmeal since I left Zen Center. Not voluntarily anyway. That's just one of those things. I like muesli and granola. But you get to notice that. Every morning it's like, oh, it's oatmeal again. That's great. And sometimes you can hold that lightly and sometimes you notice how much you're getting triggered by it.

[45:06]

And so there's the dance that you have to deal with. Like, oh, is this worth making a big deal about? For breakfast cereal, I was much more interested in just getting fed, frankly. But in terms of other things, and again, especially family dynamics, it's like, what's the most skillful thing to do? What's the helpful thing to do here? Do I want to hold on to this preference and see how much suffering it causes, or can I let go of it, or try something different to maybe have a different outcome? Thank you. That was illuminating. We have time for one more question. Will it be? Maybe Parsa had the final question.

[46:12]

Shunda, thank you. Thank you. May our intention be ready to set up the leading and place We are in the village of the river, we are ready to visit our love, and we are ready to stay. We are ready to visit our world, and we are ready to visit the world. We are ready to visit the [...] world, and we are ready to visit the world. Thank you. Thank you.

[47:19]

Thank you for coming tonight.

[49:26]

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