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. Good morning. Can everybody hear me? All the way in the back? That's great. I want to thank Jiryu for inviting me. to speak here, and Fu, the abiding abbot here at Green Gulch, for hosting me. And I see many old friends here in the audience. I'm just sort of curious, how many of you are here at Green Gulch for the first time? Well, welcome to Green Gulch. I hope you enjoy the day out here. We're having a beautiful spring day at Green Gulch. Really nice to be here. I normally lecture at the City Center. It's a rare opportunity for me to come out here to Green Goat.

[01:02]

For those who don't know me, my name is Ed Sadezon, and I have newly become the central abbot of Zen Center, taking Linda Cutts' place after 15 years being abbots of Zen Center. I was, before that, the abiding abbot at the City Center, where I've been spending most of my time. So recently I've been talking about Dogen's essay, The Genjo Koan, and it's translated in many different ways, the koan of the present moment or the koan of everyday life. So Zen practice is a matter of being present with our lives and acting in that present moment in a skillful, helpful way, hopefully with some wisdom and kindness. And koan in the title, the koan of our everyday life, sort of implies, we all know what a koan is, it's become part of the American language, a kind of inquiry or question.

[02:08]

How do we act in the present moment? What is our responsibility in this present moment? And part of what I think about that is what's important is to recognize the depth and poignancy in each moment. And each moment of our life, even if we're just driving a car or brushing our teeth, has a kind of depth and poignancy in it. Suzuki Roshi used to say, how to apply Zen in everyday life is not difficult. If we live in each moment, that is Zen. Whether you are sitting or working, living in each moment is Zen. Zen is our everyday life. So a question I have is, are we alive in each moment? Are we really present for this moment of our life? And I think it doesn't take much reflection to realize a lot of times we aren't.

[03:09]

It's not so easy to be awake and present in any moment. We get so distracted by our daily problems and our tasks. They consume us and it becomes easy to live in a small world created by our mind. burdened by these many problems. We get preoccupied by bills, dental appointments, to-do lists, and all the other points of our respective timelines. This is a girl who used to say, I think sometimes you think your problems are more important than the fact that you are alive. I certainly sometimes think that. We forget our true nature. which is beyond description, interconnected with everything, and yet charged with infinite possibilities. Recently, I read Neil deGrasse and Tyson's book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, a perfect book for busy people, which I am, even though as Zen students, we're not supposed to be busy people, right?

[04:18]

There's that famous koan, you know, where a monk was sweeping the... a walkway in the temple, and his good friend came up to him and said, too busy. You look too busy to me, you monk that's supposed to be so calm. And the monk responded, don't you see the one who is not busy? Don't you see the one who is not busy? The koan goes on, but we should remember there is one who is not busy. One in you. Some part of you who is not busy in the midst of all your daily activities. Anyway, it was a good read and, you know, one of the things that I, you know, the vastness of the universe, you know, ten billion galaxies, ten billion galaxies, galaxies rotating within galaxies, rotating galaxies. So anyway, you know, and a hundred billion stars in each galaxy.

[05:21]

And we can actually tell that there's planets around all these stars in our Milky Way by the wobble in the stars that's created by the gravitational pull of the planets. So I looked up on the internet to see, because I'd heard some story that there were as many connections in the human brain as there are stars in the universe. And because the internet knows everything, it turns out there's, what is it, 4,000 trillion connections in your brain. 4,000 trillion connections, which, of course, is a lot less than the number of stars in the universe. So, on the other hand, pretty good. This is just to say that we're a little bigger. We're living in a bigger space, and we're a little bigger than we imagine ourselves a lot of the time. But I digress. I want to get back to the problem at hand is what...

[06:21]

extent can we be more awake and more present? Suki Roshi would say, we lose ourselves. This is a quote from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. Even in zazen you will lose yourself. When you become sleepy or when your mind starts to wander about, you lose yourself. When your legs become painful. Why are my legs painful, you ask? You lose yourself. Because you lose yourself, your problem will be a problem for yourself. If you do not lose yourself, even though you have difficulty, there is no problem whatsoever. He goes on, he says, when your life is always a part of your surroundings, in other words, when you are called back to yourself in this present moment, then there is no problem. So today I want to share a wonderful koan relevant to this, coming back to the present moment, this called... Case 12 of the Gateless Barrier. Rion Calls Master is the title of the case.

[07:26]

I think I'll have a drink of water before I take on Rion's case. The priest Rion called Master to himself. every day and answered himself, yes. Then he would say, be aware. And he would reply, yes. Then he would say, don't be deceived by anyone. Or he'd say, don't be fooled by anything. And he would say, no, I won't. That's the entire koan. That was his practice, apparently. He would go around, and even in lectures, he would call out to himself, Master. Yes. Are you awake? Yes. Don't be fooled by anything. No, I won't. So I think we should practice this there this morning.

[08:32]

So everybody call out their name. So I would say, Ed. Yes. So now we're going to do this together. So all of you call out your name and say yes. Ed. Yes. Are you awake? Yes. Now we're going to say together, don't be fooled by anything. Don't be fooled by anything. No, I won't. Excellent. You have just practiced a great teaching from the 8th century China. There's some comments and verses related to this, but I'm going to deal with them later in the talk. Of course, we're always talking to ourselves, you know, internally. This is an example of talking in a particular way to himself. He would talk out loud. Sometimes we just don't realize.

[09:35]

Maybe it would be interesting if we talked out loud to ourselves more than if we just talked to ourselves. This calling out is a kind of feeling yourself being here. Here I am. Feel yourself being alive. Here I am. I'm alive. It brings you back into the present moment, freeing yourself from whatever habitual thoughts you're involved in. I was thinking of an example. I think standing in checkout lines is just such a great practice for all of us in this modern world. Quite often in the checkout line, wherever it is, you might be slightly irritated by the speed with which the line is going. But this is a moment. This is your life at that moment. And just to stop and take a breath and just feel your human body and being alive instead of...

[10:37]

You have various theories about why it's going slow, of course. The checkout person, the person that's checking out, why don't they have more staff? You have a lot of things you're thinking about, but you could also just be there, enjoy being alive, maybe look around. You might catch an eye of another customer, and they might smile and say, yeah. Might even have a little conversation. Before you know it, you're with the checkout person. And if nothing else, if all you do is just sort of wake up to being present and preparing yourself to interact with this person who has had some kind of day for sure, and if you're ready to be efficient with all of your cards and various instruments you're using to pay with whatever they may be, and you're also ready to look at them and have a smile and be kind, you can make that interaction something different than if you're just, like, irritated for some reason.

[11:38]

So check out lying practice, great practice. So this calling out to yourself in the present moment is a way of inquiring and ask to be open, open to this moment, this eternal moment, this indescribable moment, and every moment of our life is that way. And this koan has a lot in it. It's like a pretty concise description of Zen. I think that's what I like about koans. You know, we have vast libraries full of literature about what Buddhism is about, but the Chinese tradition of sort of encapsulating the essence of Zen practice and just a little saying, you know, wake up. Wake up to this moment and don't be fooled by anything. So, of course, the question is, who's calling who when you call out to yourself? Is this just sort of Ed saying, hey, Ed, remember to get your keys before you leave the house?

[12:46]

Or does it raise the larger question of who you are, who you're calling, who's the self that's being called here? When you say, Ed, who is that? I remember where Steve Stuckey, a dear friend of ours, a past habit of Zen Center, he studied internal family systems a lot. According to this theory, which he taught in some workshop I was in, we have lots of different personalities, sub-personalities in our brain, and they're always talking to each other and vying for who's running the show. Sometimes the child in you is running the show, sometimes the parent, your father, is running the show. Of course, part of this theory is there's a bigger self that should be running the show, the mature part of yourself that should be running the show. So maybe when we're calling out, we're calling out for that person to take charge. In Zen, we have this idea of a way-seeking mind.

[13:50]

What's the mind that's moving you in the direction of freedom and love and compassion? Maybe that's the mind you're calling, speaking to. Shibayama, in his commentary on this koan, says, Master here means absolute subjectivity. That's the absolute you that transcends both subjectivity and objectivity. Riyan gave the name Master as the ever-unnameable reality. Maybe that's what you're calling out to, the ever-unnameable reality of this moment. And there's many Zen teachers that have some way of calling out this. Gutai used to use his finger. Somebody said, what's the reality this moment he put his finger up? I wouldn't recommend everybody put your finger up. Gutai's student put his finger up once and Gutai cut it off. So maybe you have to really be able to demonstrate the ever unnameable reality if you're going to use that technique.

[14:57]

So this is a study, as the Genjo Kohan says, to study Zen is to study the self. This is a study all the time. What is this self that we're calling out to? Is it the problems that I have? We get so consumed by whatever problem we're in. But the problem becomes a limitation you've imposed on yourself. Oh, everything is just shrinking down the vastness into thoughts and feelings around the problems. We're much bigger than that. We're part of this unnameable, immeasurable vastness. So when we call and we answer, we are an ordinary person who was born in a particular place, grew up, ate meals, went to school, etc., and we're something bigger than all that. We forget the vastness. A million times a day we forget. So really practice is no mystery. It's nothing difficult. It's just a matter of remembering who we are, both our very specific thing we're experiencing and something much bigger than that.

[16:14]

We lose ourselves lost in the world we create in our mind. So then, what's the don't be fooled by anything? this sort of issue. Do we notice all the ways we fool ourselves in our mind? I was thinking about a sashin I was in once where I was just driving myself miserable because I was not dealing with my pain. I wasn't dealing with my physical pain. I wasn't dealing with my emotional pain. I was convinced I was the worst Zen student in the world. I was just really giving myself an enormous hard time. And I I was talking to a friend of mine about it and he said, Ed, you wouldn't let anybody treat yourself that badly. You would not let anybody talk to yourself that badly, criticize yourself that much. What's going on? Stop it. That's what he said, stop it.

[17:23]

As if you could just stop it. But I did. I stopped it. Because I saw how clearly I was fooling myself. I was just caught up in something. We don't need to let our mind run our life. I mean, we imagine that our thinking mind is really the CEO of this operation. But I was reading a recent book on the psychology of evolution. And of course, we all know that your emotional life is what runs your life. your limbic brain, which is always tracking what's going on in the world and responding to it and reaching out for some connection, some real life connection, something called love. That's what's running the show. And according to this book, your thinking brain is just your PR agency that's busy telling you that what you're doing is good and convincing the world that what you're doing is good.

[18:30]

So I think it's useful to be a somewhat, as Suzuki was saying, not always so, somewhat a little bit skeptical about this thinking brain that's going on. Not be so fooled by the thinking brain and pay a little bit more attention to what's really driving your life, which is this deep desire to have a real connection to this world and other people. So what's traditional in... and discussing this koan is to talk about techniques that Robert Aiken did in his commentary about, well, how do you wake yourself up to the present moment? I mean, it's easy enough to say, well, I'm going to wake myself up, and then you're lost in your confusion for minutes or hours or days or maybe not years, but anyway, lost. So... Of course, in a temple like this, a monastery, we have all kinds of techniques.

[19:34]

So when you step into this zendo, if you step in on the left side of the door, you step in with your left foot. And if you step in on the right side of the door, you step in with your right foot. This was a basic instruction given to me many years ago when I was a new Zen student, which I thought, well, I was here to understand some deep philosophy. What's this going on? with stepping through doors with left and right feet. But I noticed when I was head of the shop and I stepped through with my right foot when I was supposed to step through with my left foot, I noticed that I'd stepped through the zendo with the wrong foot. And I noticed that I had been thinking about what was wrong with the carburetor instead of noticing that I was entering the zendo and that maybe I should prepare to meditate and let the carburetor go for 40 minutes. So that little simple technique woke me up to entering a room. And I think it's a wonderful technique, actually, to think about every time you move from one room to another room, to notice that you're moving from one space to another space, and let the entering, going through a doorway, be a chance to wake up to what's new in front of you.

[20:50]

I was in business for many years. And, you know, you'd be coming from your office where you'd been on the phone and the Internet and all kinds of things, and you'd be going to a meeting room. It's useful before you step into that meeting room and meet with a bunch of people to discuss something, to be present as you enter the room, to see who's in the room, to be prepared to encounter that activity and drop the other activity. So we have other techniques in temples, like if we go to the bathhouse, we have a bath gatha. A saying we stop, usually offer, do a bow and say, as I bathe this body, I bow with all sentient beings to wash body and mind, all dust and confusion, and feel healthy and clean within and without. To wash body and mind of all dust and confusion and feel healthy and clean without. This is elevating an ordinary activity of washing yourself, of taking a shower, into something sacred.

[21:52]

And to some extent, we should be elevating all of our activity into something sacred because every moment of our life is sacred. So these sort of vows or gathas are ways of doing that. We also do it when we're eating. We say, for the sake of enlightenment, we now receive this food. The first portion is to end all evil. The second is to cultivate all good. The third is to free all beings. It's a kind of vow, and it reminds you in that moment that you're not just eating food, you're doing something more than that. You're dedicating your life to the betterment of the world, making that activity a sacred thing. There are many other practices. One of my favorite practices that I learned at Tassar is when you pass somebody in the pathway, you bow to them. It's a beautiful thing.

[22:57]

You don't have to have a conversation, you just bow. And since a lot of times in monasteries you're in silence, so bowing is a good way. One of my good, one of my teacher actually, Lou Richman, asked Suzuki Roshi one time when he was passing someone and he bowed to them, he felt very angry at that person. And he said, what do you think about that? Suzuki Roshi said, I mean, if that's what you felt, that's fine. But in bowing to him, there was some kind of physical recognition of your shared connection, something meaningful. When I was in business, I used to use the phone as another one of these techniques. If I happened to have visited the person I was calling, in some other state or something in their office and I knew what their office looked like, I would kind of imagine them in their office. When I'd call them, if they answered the phone, I sort of felt like I was present with them instead of looking at an email while I'm dialing or something, actually be present.

[24:09]

Not so common anymore now that you actually get a hold of anybody. And somehow when I was writing this out, I remembered that my father, whenever he answered the phone, he would say, my father's name was Jim. Jim here is always so up, so present. I thought, well, geez, my dad, I wasn't even a Zen student then. And here my father's got this marvelous practice of calling out to himself like Rian did. That was his way of, he just wanted to make sure that he was there for that phone call. So much to do and so little time. I'll just mention that every activity can be an activity that is raised to the sacred and one of my favorite activities is washing dishes, which I do every Thursday at City Center and obviously when I'm at

[25:18]

home on the weekends. Dishwashing can be such a marvelous thing to do, I would recommend it as a practice to pay attention to. And every chore can be a moment of practice in that way. This is Zen practice to look at these things. To lift up our lives to a level of dignity and reality that they deserve and need to be. It's this lack of lifting up our activity that ultimately makes us feel dissatisfied and causes our unhappiness, our suffering and the suffering of others. So, now we get to go on to the commentary. These wonderful koans which start off so simple and follows the commentary.

[26:18]

So here's Uman's comment. Old Riyan buys himself and sells himself. He brings forth lots of angel faces and demon masks and plays with them. Why? Look! One kind calls, one kind answers, one kind is aware, and one kind will not be deceived by others. If you still cling to understanding, you're in trouble. If you try to imitate Ruyen, your discernment is altogether that of a fox. Beautiful, it's kind of self-explanatory. Our conversations with ourself, it's kind of buying and selling our different parts to ourselves, convincing ourselves that this thing we're doing is great or that thing we're doing, bringing forth angel faces and demon faces, playing with them. So how do we do that in a way that is our life?

[27:27]

I mean, we're busily enacting many different parts of ourself in any given time, depending on what the situation calls for. How do we do that in a way that is something that's not just habitual? But that's a lie. And the character that says looked is a character in Chinese that means it's like a shout, like cats. It scares away the demons and the angels. Scare away your false ideas about yourself and look at the real one who's there. One kind calls, one kind answers. And we can get too attached to these things. Ed, yes. Oh, well, I'm very aware today. Quite awake. I'm alert. I'm not being fooled by anything. Well, the minute you said that, you're completely fooled by everything.

[28:31]

So you don't, you know, yes, we're practicing all these practices and we get quite attached to them, but we don't want to get so attached that we're fooled by them. Don't cling to some understanding you have of what's going on. This is how you stay fresh to the moment. If you try to imitate Ruyen, your discernment is altogether that of a fox. So you can't just routinely say, well, I'm just going to call out to myself every day just like Ruyen did and I'll wake up. You have to make it your own. And, of course, this is a wonderful... aspect of Zen that sort of permeates everything. There's a famous... I always kind of like this time in a lecture when the kitchen staff leaves to prepare the food for this marvelous lunch.

[29:35]

The same thing happens at City Center, the same thing happens at Tassar, wherever you are. Just a reminder, it's time to wrap it up. There's food to be cooked by people. So, anyway, Yanto was Riyan's teacher. And Yanto is a fairly famous person and he was in very many stories in the Zen koans. And anyway, he and his traveling partner, Shui Feng, had been caught in a snowstorm and had retreated into some hut. And they were waiting out the snowstorm. And Shui Feng was a very ardent student, so he was sitting meditation all the time. And Yento was a kind of cocky student, so he was sleeping all the time. Anyway, they got into a conversation and Yento was kind of criticizing him for sitting so much, so ardently.

[30:43]

And he said, well, He said, I can't settle down. I still haven't solved the fundamental problem. So Yento said, well, tell me all about it. And so he tells him a whole bunch of stuff about all these big experiences he's had that haven't quite settled him. And Yento says, don't you know that what enters from the gate cannot be the treasure of the house, the family jewels? If you want to propagate the great teaching, it must flow point by point from within your own breast to cover heaven and earth. Only then will it be the action of someone with spiritual power. Don't you know that what enters from the gate, all the stuff that's coming at you, telling you how to practice then, cannot be the treasure of the house. The treasure of the house, your practice has to flow point by point from your own breast to cover heaven and earth. So this is kind of the point of that last part of the sentence.

[31:44]

We have to do practice from inside ourself. We have to make it real for ourself. Moving on to Wumman's verse. Those who search for the way do not realize the truth. They only know their old, discriminating consciousness. This is the cause of endless cycles of birth and death, yet stupid people take it for the original self. This is a an old poem that was written two centuries earlier by Changsha, a very famous teacher, and Wu Man used it here because he thought it was so appropriate to this case. Those who search for the way do not realize the truth. The truth here is the everlasting truth. What are we talking about when we're talking about the everlasting truth? And here's another story. When Ru Yan met Yanto, his teacher, this was their interchange. Ruyan asked Yantu, what is the original everlasting truth?

[32:51]

Good question. What is the unnameable reality? What is the truth of my life? Yantu said, it moved. Ruyan said, what about when it moves? Yantu said, you don't see the everlasting truth. Beautiful. Ruyan fell silent. Yanto continued, If you affirm this, you are not yet rid of the root of your defilement. If you do not affirm it, you are immersed in endless birth and death. You know, from time to time, we have some sense of our life, of this moment, of this place, of actually being alive. a trace of realization, you would say. And Dogen's statement in the Genjo Koan, no trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly.

[33:58]

We cannot hold on to this. This truth of our life is so big, it cannot be held on to, it cannot be grasped. And yet, we have to feel it in some way, sense, this life. So all we ever actually know is this old discriminating consciousness. That's because our knowing is only through discrimination, through separation. Our knowing is only that way. We long for unity. We long for that intimate connection with our life and with other people. We know in our hearts that we are in exile, lost in the endless rounds of birth and death, and we long to come home.

[35:01]

We can come home. If we work with our practice, we can be touched by oneness. We can have a real sense of it, not only in our exalted, transcendent moments, but in our ordinary moments, too. The issue is not that we only know ordinary discriminating consciousness and we want to know something else. It's that we take that discriminating consciousness for all that we are, not recognizing that the original self, the true self, both is that and much more. so much more there is no boundary at all. Once we appreciate this, not as a thought or a belief, but as a daily felt experience, something we can absolutely rely on without defining it or possessing it, then it can become a part of our life.

[36:11]

Whatever our problem, difficult relationships, demanding job requirements, a grieving heart, that is your life. We don't notice how marvelous it is to be alive because we are so busy and consumed by our problems. And we don't notice how brief it is and how great it is that we are all together. We forget. We forget to be grateful to live a human life. This is natural. It's part of being a human being to forget. But I think if we practice, it will be more difficult to forget. We will forget less often. So I wish you all a happy day.

[37:16]

an opportunity to continuously practice. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to spend this morning with you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:57]

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