This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening, everyone. I'd like to thank the Tonto for inviting me to give this talk. And my teacher, Agent Linda Ruth Cutts, for her support and guidance. And thank you to all of you for being here as well. From the Jewel Ornament of Liberation. As silver is found in and may be refined from its ore, sesame oil pressed from its seed, and butter churned from milk, so in all beings may Buddhahood become a reality. In early June, this valley was filled with thousands upon thousands of California tortoiseshell butterflies.

[01:09]

Those of you who were here at the time may recall walking around Tassajara like you were in a blissful dream or maybe a music video with butterflies swarming through the air around you. The air was so dense with them that the stellar jays and lizards would just sit back and butterflies would approach and they would gobble them up, have a little butterfly snack. But before they were famous as butterflies, those California tortoiseshells were larvae, otherwise known as caterpillars. And in late May, I went on several hikes on the Horse Pasture Trail, the Church Creek Trail, and the Tony Trail, where instead of being surrounded by magical, beautiful butterflies, I was surrounded by black caterpillars. They covered the ceanothus bushes and completely defoliated them, eating all of the leaves until they were just skeletons.

[02:12]

And the sound of their leaf eating was like this dull rustling noise constantly in the background. They covered the ground so that it was impossible to walk without stepping on them. And they would fall from the bushes onto my hair and my legs. It was a little bit creepy. And then the munching gradually stopped as all those caterpillars attached themselves to the bushes, hung upside down, got very, very still, and then transformed into pupae by molting into shiny chrysalises. For hundreds and hundreds of years, people fought caterpillars and butterflies were two completely distinct beings, that the chrysalis was a kind of burial shroud for the caterpillar and that the butterfly was a new life. Many Christians saw metamorphosis as a spiritual metaphor for human life and afterlife, where the caterpillar is our lowly earthbound body and the butterfly is our perfect soul in heaven.

[03:22]

I used to think that after a caterpillar formed a chrysalis around itself, it just grew some wings on the sides of its caterpillar body, then emerged as a butterfly. But the process is way more interesting than that. First of all, caterpillars have genes in their bodies which are programmed to self-destruct. But the entire time that they're caterpillars, these genes are blocked. by a very important hormone called the juvenile hormone. And once the caterpillar has eaten enough leaves and grown big enough, it begins metamorphosis, and the juvenile hormone lowers its levels. It's all timed perfectly. If the hormone levels were to lower too soon, the caterpillar would disintegrate and die. But as it is, the hormone levels only lower once the caterpillar has formed a protective chrysalis around itself. Then the juvenile hormone triggers various enzymes in the caterpillar that it's time to turn into goo.

[04:32]

And the caterpillar basically digests itself. Within 24 hours of forming the chrysalis, their caterpillar self completely disintegrates. What used to be the caterpillar's eyes are reabsorbed, their internal organs are recycled, their muscles, their gut... their salivary glands, there's a complete breakdown and rebuilding of their internal and external structures, a complete metamorphosis. And when they're in the chrysalis, they can't move, they have no mouth parts, no legs, just this protective shell around the mush that has become their self. And then they chant the heart sutra. no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, and turn into butterflies. Maybe. But this biological meltdown is only half the story. There's another seemingly conflicting reality happening at the same time because there actually is some continuity between the caterpillar and the butterfly.

[05:39]

There's this radical change happening, but also... All the information that the caterpillar needs to make its new butterfly body is in the caterpillar from the start. The potential for transformation exists even before it's visible from the outside. This information that the caterpillar needs to turn into a butterfly is located in what are called the imaginal disks, where the genes that the juvenile hormone is blocking are, and when all the other cells inside the caterpillar disintegrate, the imaginal disks kick into action and start making a butterfly. And what I really love about this is the fuel that the imaginal disks use to turn into a butterfly comes from the goo, which is really rich in protein, as you might imagine. So the disintegrated caterpillar goo is the force or the energy that helps create the butterfly.

[06:43]

There's also a recent study that found that moths and butterflies can remember things that they learned when they were caterpillars, that somehow their caterpillar memories survive this extreme biological meltdown that happens when they're in a chrysalis. So I think many of us come to practice with a wish to transform ourselves. We're kind of like caterpillars who want to become butterflies, but usually we want to skip over the part where we turn into goo. So tonight I'd like to talk a bit about the concept of transformation in our practice, how we are always changing and never completely different, and the role that trust plays in our transformative practice, and the importance of being completely ourselves. completely a caterpillar, completely a butterfly, and maybe the most interesting of all, completely goo.

[07:45]

I can remember various times in my life when I was moving to a new place, starting a new job, or coming to practice Zen on an organic farm in Marin County, when I had a vision of the totally different person that I would be. and I felt the freedom and joy of starting over fresh. I imagine most of you have experienced that feeling, and you have probably also experienced that moment or moments not far along into our quote-unquote new lives when we are reminded that we are still ourselves no matter what. We live in a culture that teaches us that we need to get things in order to be happy. that changing our external circumstances is the way to create internal satisfaction. We seek security and fulfillment outside of ourselves or in some imagined future state.

[08:49]

When we want something and we get it, there is a moment of satisfaction, but if we look closely at our experience, we might see that the satisfaction is not from the pleasure of experiencing the thing itself, but from the fact that we're no longer engaged in the act of grasping. The act of wanting and grasping creates a tension that is painful, that arises out of our feelings of longing and incompleteness, a feeling that we are separate and not whole. And once that brief feeling of satisfaction falls away, we tend to search for something new to grasp at. And the tighter we grasp, or the more we try to know the unknowable, the more separate we feel. When we feel ourselves attaching to an object outside of ourselves, whether it be a person, intoxicants, our cell phone, food, the bathhouse, or even Zen practice, or the idea of the better self that we will become,

[10:03]

there's usually some suffering that we're trying to escape, and we lose touch with what is really happening. Suffering is caused not so much by external events, but by our expectations and ideas of those events. And happiness is caused not by changing our circumstances, but by changing the way our mind relates to those circumstances. by appreciating what we have with a mind of gratitude and total absorption and engagement in what's happening, just as it is. True transformation doesn't begin with, I should be different. Transformation begins with, this very life itself is a vast field of liberation. I've never been a caterpillar, as far as I'm aware, but I'm pretty sure that caterpillars are not trying or yearning to be butterflies. I don't think they're involved in a prolonged inner debate about whether they should become a butterfly or remain a caterpillar.

[11:10]

I don't think they're afraid of turning into goo. I don't think they hesitate. They just get very still and they stay completely with what's happening without rushing and without waiting. This is our universal, timeless practice of zazen, which all beings participate in. Sitting still with great energy, completely relaxed and completely alert. In the Zen tradition, we talk about identifying oneself in this very body with the Buddha. Buddha. And zazen is taking the posture of a Buddha. Whether we feel enlightened or not, we take this noble posture, kind of like faking it till you make it. The caterpillar doesn't wait until it feels like a butterfly to enter the chrysalis. It enters the chrysalis with trust. And through this activity, it loosens its limited ideas about the boundaries of itself.

[12:16]

One of the inner calls or requests that first drew me to practice was an urge to rid myself of layers that I felt had accumulated on me over time and were weighing me down. I remember an almost physical experience of feeling like there was some essential pure self that was covered in layers, covered in habitual patterns that had become more and more fixed. I was drawn to a Rumi poem goes, I honor those who try to rid themselves of any lying, who empty the self and have only clear being there. I think sometimes people think of enlightenment or awakening as something to strive for and attain, but over time I have come to understand awakening not as manifesting something that we don't have yet, but just about uncovering what is already and always there, our true nature and

[13:21]

our latent butterfly genes. When we begin a sitting practice, we might have some idea that when we sit zazen, our mind should immediately be empty of thoughts and worries and judgments. But zazen is not about repressing our thoughts or attaining some idealized state. Zazen can be defined as, ultimately, the practice of patience. Patience, in this sense, doesn't mean waiting patiently for something to get better. Patience is the capacity to be with what is true in this moment, right now, and then to be with what is true in the next moment, which might be completely different. Through the act of sitting zazen, we cultivate a deep, fundamental patience with this person, this mind, this body. Patience that does not squirm or try to escape from what is or be someone different.

[14:24]

And this is the kind of ironic thing about transformation in my experience. Change happens not when we try to change, but when we accept things the way they are in the most radical, complete sense. Not with a kind of complacency or giving up, but by so deeply and fully inhabiting our body and mind and emotions and life that transformation is just the natural, spontaneous result. So during Zazen, thoughts arise, fantasies, opinions, judgments, plans, over and over, but we don't act on them. We just recognize them and return to the breath. And over time, this helps to cut that habitual connection between our thoughts and what we're doing. We sit there thinking, I have to do this, I have to be this way. But instead of reacting habitually, we just remain still through it. We see the loop that our mind is on.

[15:28]

And when we let go of our story about ourself, a kind of spaciousness is created and life can take over. Practice, mostly, is not so much about doing something or carrying ourselves forward. or trying to transform ourselves as it is about letting go, releasing our grip, and taking the backward step. When we carry ourselves forward into our lives, grasping at myriad things, our shoulders hunch up and the whole world is seen through the lens of our personal agenda and our preconceived ideas. But when we drop our shoulders, open our chest and heart, myriad things can come forth and experience themselves. And we're able to meet things just as they are, with openness, curiosity, without anything extra added on, allowing the layers that have accumulated and accreted on ourselves to fall away.

[16:38]

In Each moment is the universe, Katagiri Roshi writes, Zazen doesn't give you something. It's the complete opposite. In Zazen, you will find many things about yourself that you never noticed before. Things you did not want to see, so you hid them under many layers of decoration. When you start to practice Zazen, something leads you to gradually take those layers off. What leads you to take off your layers day in and day out? Impermanence takes them off. Whether you like it or dislike it, the more you practice, the more layers of decoration you remove without any reservation. If you practice hard and one by one remove the layers that cover you, finally there is nothing left to take off and nothing that separates you from other beings. This kind of radical acceptance of our life the way it is can happen in activity and interaction, not just in stillness and zazen.

[17:56]

I have been tenzo, or head of the kitchen, here at Tassajara for almost a year now, and my practice as tenzo can be summed up in the words total engagement. The kitchen is an extremely active, exciting space dynamic, intense place to be, and I have taken up the practice of just showing up and being as available, responsive, and present as I can be for the 10,000 things, the endless stream of questions and unexpected occurrences and ingredients that didn't arrive with the produce order. Suzuki Roshi used to say, my Buddha nature is saying hi or yes. When someone approaches you, can you meet them completely? Can you drop whatever you are working on or thinking about? Can you drop your ideas about that person? Every day in the kitchen, we chant a section of the Tenzo Kyokun, or instructions to the cook, written by our ancestor, Ehei Dogen.

[19:07]

And in Uchiyama Roshi's commentary to the Tenzo Kyokun, he writes, As one practicing the Buddha Dharma in the role of the Tenzo, you should prepare food with all the ardor of your life and with wholehearted sincerity. By throwing our life force into our work, every situation literally comes to life and that in turn generates clarity and vividness. When the situation is full of life, we become more alive as a result. This means then... that our life force has breathed a vividness into the situation. Even when we're experiencing exhaustion or resistance, if we can give whatever we have to give to our activities, our Dharma friends, we may see that the energy we give is the energy we receive. And that fully inhabiting the experience itself, whatever it may be, gives us life in return.

[20:12]

This is allowing ourselves to be transformed by the situation and in turn transforming the situation. So we're constantly learning and changing and transforming. Our cells are regenerating. Practice is transforming the way that we act and respond to each other. And we're also the same person. We have our own particular karma, our own deep paths and grooves in our minds that have been laid down over time. Both are true. Always changing, never completely different. Over time, as our practice deepens, we see glimpses of old patterns, moments when we're triggered and start to respond the way that we used to, but there's a little more space. There's recognition that this is not substantial. This is just the mind veering off in the direction of the groove that it laid down.

[21:16]

And through practice, we are laying down new grooves, new patterns. As silver is found in and may be refined from its ore, sesame oil pressed from its seed and butter churned from milk, so in all beings may Buddhahood become a reality. So silver and ore are not one and not two. Sesame oil and sesame seeds look differently, behave differently, but there is no oil without the seed. So too do we change and transform, but there is nothing in us that we don't already have. Dogen tells us that those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings, and those who have great realization of delusion are Buddhas. Delusion and enlightenment are not one and not two, just like the caterpillar and the butterfly are not one and not two.

[22:23]

Likewise, the energy within us craves and is deluded can be transformed to compassion and generosity. It's the same energy source, the same goo. There's a tantric sutra which says, by whatever thing the world is bound, by that the bond is unfastened. Transformation occurs at the root, where delusion and awakening are one. One of the kitchen crew's favorite sections in the Tenzo Kyokun that we coincidentally chanted today is about how our thinking scatters like wild birds and our emotions scamper around like monkeys in the forest. And Dogen writes that if those monkeys and birds once took the backward step of inner illumination, naturally you would become integrated. This is a means whereby although you are turned around by things, you can also turn things around.

[23:31]

I love this image that the same force which turns us around or causes chaos and confusion in our minds is also the force which brings understanding and clarity. One fluid turning that is completely integrated. Again, it's not so much about the content of our delusions and ideas as it is about the way that we relate to them, the spaciousness we give them, whether we allow ourselves to be turned by them. The Buddha said, those who are unawakened grasp their thoughts and feelings, their body, their perceptions and consciousness, and take them as solid, separate from the rest. Those who are awakened have the same thoughts and feelings, perceptions, body, and consciousness, but they are not grasped, not held, not taken as oneself.

[24:34]

This turning towards an awakened state happens when we pay attention to our karma, our intentional actions of body, speech, and mind. When we pay attention to and thoroughly study our intentions, our perception becomes more and more subtle and more information is revealed about what creates those intentions. The more we look at our habit energy, the more we realize it's not as strong as we thought, that our habits are not made of anything substantial. They are impermanent. But if we don't study our habit energy carefully, if we don't pay attention, the patterns have a tendency to get stronger. So the more familiar we are with our conditioned thoughts, the more they lose their authority over us. They're no longer connected to our sense of self-worth or our deep-rooted and somewhat misdirected survival instincts.

[25:44]

This studying of our karma and our intentions is the caterpillar digesting itself. We form a relatively safe and stable chrysalis, which is zazen and sangha and the forms of our life together. And then we do the messy work of turning ourselves inside out, studying our idea of our self until it disintegrates. And that goo of our dissolved self is the fuel of awakening, the fuel that makes a butterfly. So as we study our karma and our habits and those habits and ways of thinking and approaching our lives start to loosen up, trust naturally builds. Trust has been a koan for me in this life. I used to think that trusting another person meant being able to rely on them not to change or not to change too much, to be able to predict the way they would relate to me.

[26:49]

Similarly, I thought that trusting myself more would require a more firm idea of who I was, that if I could clarify and pinpoint my identity more thoroughly, I would trust myself more deeply. I don't think I consciously defined it that way, but looking back, I realized that's essentially what I thought. When I first moved to Green Gulch Farm in 2003, I remember Tenchin Reb Anderson saying in a Dharma talk, no being is worthy of trust. And similarly, Suzuki Roshi once said, I don't trust anything but my feet and my black cushion. At first, I thought this sounded pretty harsh and cold, like trying to cut oneself off from feeling. It reminded me of that Simon and Garfunkel song. I am a rock. I am an island. A rock feels no pain and an island never cries. Over time, I've come to have a more nuanced view of trust.

[27:53]

Acknowledging that no being is worthy of trust doesn't mean that we don't love others and experience intimacy with them. But it does mean recognizing that other people will not do what we want them to do, that ultimately we don't know who we are in any kind of fixed, easily definable way, that everyone we love will eventually die, and that we too will eventually die. And when we accept that, a deeper and more settled kind of trust is cultivated, a trust that's down in our gut. We can't trust things to stay the way they are, but we can trust impermanence, reality, the nature of things. Sojin Mel Weitzman once said, our natural way is to look for security in something fixed and permanent. But since this is not possible, why not find it in the way things actually are, in constant flux, in letting go?

[28:58]

What do we fear? We tend to fear that which threatens our small self or our idea of ourself our survival. We fear not being loved by others and therefore anything that might threaten that. Because of this fear, we defend our sense of self in various ways. Some of us tend to defend ourselves from hurt by trying to please or by perfectionism. Some of us defend ourselves by attacking others. Some of us defend ourselves by withdrawing. And some of us mix up an exciting cocktail of all of the above. These are the coping mechanisms which usually begin when we are very young and which create our personality. So how do we cultivate trust in the midst of all of our karmic baggage? By sitting quietly and noticing the way things are and accepting all of it, even the stuff we don't like and the stuff that scares us.

[30:04]

By being open to change, being open to things not being the way we think they are. Ultimately, we can trust this vast, complicated world of joy and suffering, autumn and spring. We can trust that it's all part of a single, continuous event. If a caterpillar identifies with being a caterpillar, or a wave in the ocean identifies with being a wave forever, a permanent wave, or a human identifies with their karmic patterns and personality, They will each get lost and attached to their sense of individuality. But a wave is an expression of the ocean, and each of us is an expression of life itself. When we identify with our particular body and mind, we limit our life. If we identify with life itself, there is less of a problem. It takes a lot of trust to come to Tassajara.

[31:12]

Whether we come as a student or a guest, just driving over the road alone takes a lot of trust. When we make the decision to come to Tassahara, to come to practice, we are deciding to give up some of our ways of doing things. Giving up the way we like to cook or the food we like to eat. Giving up the time we like to wake up. Giving up privacy. Living at Tassajara is an all-inclusive package. We live, work, socialize everything in this one place. And sometimes we can feel claustrophobic, like we have to be on all the time, that there's no place to hide. Ultimately, the beauty of this community is our shared intention to be free from self-centeredness and self-clinging. Through our practice, we set up an alternative structure for our life that makes interconnectedness apparent, more obvious, and disrupts our usual karmic patterns.

[32:18]

The many forms that we follow at Tassajara exist to reshape our minds, to help us to drop our habitual ways, to help us drop those coping mechanisms we've developed over time that have created our personalities. We often talk about how just coming here and following the schedule is enough. This place will transform us if we let it. Living in community helps us see over and over how none of those defensive protective strategies really works ultimately. How we're totally vulnerable to each other. We are goo. Transformation is happening all the time. It's very visible and tactile and palatable to us in the kitchen. Cooking is transformation. It is the transfer of energy from a heat source to food, which causes physical changes to that food.

[33:22]

Once a protein's shape has been changed by adding energy to it, you can't change it back by removing that energy. You can't uncook a steak. There's a lot of trust involved in cooking. in throwing something in a pot. And just like the trust of a caterpillar forming a chrysalis, there's no turning back. And in the same way, once you truly commit to a life of practice, you can't go back. There's no undoing this transformation that's happening here. Charlotte Joko Beck talks about transformation with the image of an ice cube. An ice cube that has become mushy can never forget its mushiness. And not only that, once an ice cube gets mushy, it spreads into a puddle and all the ice cubes around it melt too, into one big puddle. This can be scary or liberating or both, depending on if we're open to the idea of being transformed.

[34:32]

But as Mel says, We might as well accord with the way things are because they're going to happen either way. There's a passage in the Tenzo Kyokun where Dogen meets an old Tenzo working in the heat, drying mushrooms, and Dogen asks the Tenzo why he's working now when the sun is so hot. The Tenzo says, what time should I wait for? Because we could die at any moment, because we don't know what the future brings, now is the time to practice. Don't wait until you're a better person, or until you're not suffering, or until you're a little bit older and wiser. Don't wait until you're a butterfly. This suffering, deluded being is the one who will wake up. Now is the time to awaken. Now is the time to fully inhabit our lives and practice as if our heads were on fire or as if we were mushy goo in a chrysalis, because we are.

[35:42]

We are transforming every moment. Thank you very much. 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, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[36:07]

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