Good morning. Good morning. Well, we certainly live in interesting times. I think of, I'm sure I've mentioned this support group that I've been wanting to form for many, many years called Buddhists Against Change. That it's hard. Change is hard being with what we don't know. And It's interesting how at the moment, as it should, this virus certainly has our attention, as does our politics of the day and climate change and inequality. And I think the question that arises again and again is, how do we live? How can we best respond and meet situations in our world.

[01:04]

And then, of course, there's all of the issues from our families and addictions and suffering and depression. There's an amazing story in yesterday's New York Times about the middle-class America living life in despair and the amount of people who are suffering because of various factors increasing dramatically. So I'm thinking a lot about a quote by Shinryu Suzuki that is in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, where he says, and this is my somewhat, someone could probably find it for me. I tried finding it and I was not able to, but I know it's there. where he says the purpose of our lives is to cross this shore, to cross from the shore of suffering to the shore of freedom.

[02:15]

This is the purpose of our lives. And then in his next sentence he says, and the secret is to realize that we cross that shore with every step that we take. So I think for me, when I read those and hear those lines, I have to let it sink in, right? That the purpose of our lives is to cross this shore from suffering to freedom, and that the secret is to realize that we cross that shore with every step, or in meditation, perhaps with every breath that we take. And this is, you know, it's one thing to say this, but the question is how do we live it? And especially how do we live it in the midst of the changes in our world and in whatever is happening in our own lives?

[03:19]

And we're in the midst here of about a three-and-a-half-week intensive, the subject of... Zen and work, and Susan and I have been working together and studying with a group here and online, Dogen's. I think it's a beautiful thing. I'm often reminding people in the work that I do of doing mindfulness work with for-profit and non-profit and corporate organizations. that the idea of integrating mindfulness practice and work is not only is it not new, but it's at least a 700-year-old idea from this piece of writing by Dogen, Instructions to the Head Cook, the Tenzo Kyokan. And it's filled with just beautiful stories. And so the short answer of what to do is...

[04:28]

is that we need to practice. And there's a story from the Tenzo Kyokan in which Dogen... So Dogen was really taken by this work practice and these head cooks in monasteries and the wisdom that they seem to exude and his sense that there was something about developing one's practice and one's character through work. And he met... He met a variety of Tenzos, and one, he asked directly the question, what is practice? The question was, what is practice? And this Tenzo said, nothing in the entire universe is hidden. Nothing in the entire universe is hidden, was his answer to what is practice. And I've been... like, well, what did he mean by that?

[05:29]

But it's interesting to think about what is hidden. And it's wonderful to be here in this urban temple. And I've been realizing that the natural world is hidden here. There's a few trees, but mostly we humans have managed to cover up a lot of the the natural world. I did notice the moon last night, but not so many stars. And I think our connection with the natural world, to some degree, has been hidden. I think there's been a lot of the work, I think, of Zen practice is to unearth our feelings and emotions, to work to see how easily we can hide. what we're feeling. We can hide our deep emotional lives.

[06:31]

It's hard to be emotionally vulnerable. It's easy to stay hidden. It's safe to stay hidden. So to come back to that practice is nothing in the entire universe is hidden. And I think we easily hide our deep longing and need for connection with others can also be hidden. I was working with a business leader the other day who mentioned that she noticed that she had a constant bias for action. That was her bias. She had a bias for action. And I looked at her and suggested, what would happen if she shifted to a bias for connection? And so often in the world of work and in general, this world of busyness that we live in.

[07:33]

I've been noticing, and probably in this audience, there's probably less, well, I'm not sure if there's less habit here than in the world of the constant checking of phones and messages. I've noticed for many of the people that I work with, they tell me it's the first thing that they do in the morning when they get up is check messages. Check all day long, on vacation, and even at night. I'm leaving one's phone on. I had dinner the other night with a CEO friend, and I mentioned this, and she looked at me, and she said, check, [...] guilty. And I felt like I have to be careful. I don't want people to feel guilty. And yet, there's something about how busyness, I think, can hide our connection. And I think we also, another thing that I think is easily hidden is what work is and our true connection with our work lives.

[08:43]

That if you step back, I think we can see that work, is activity that supports human beings, that work is, in one way or another, providing services or goods that people need and that helps people. And it's gotten confusing in that it's been hidden by some idea of creating wealth or one's identity, and certainly identity and... And money are certainly important pieces of work. But work itself is activity that helps others. And that seems to have been hidden. And I think certainly this statement by Suzuki Roshi that the purpose of our lives

[09:49]

is to cross over from real, to find real freedom, to shift from limited, limited way of seeing and thinking and being to be, to find a sense of incredible responsiveness and freedom in our lives. And I went to a talk last week about... the non-dual teaching, and it was kind of comparing the Buddhist philosophy, Buddhist psychology around the non-dual teaching and the diamond heart philosophy. And on the one hand, I really appreciated it, and I was also completely bored. And I thought, this is what I love about the Zen school, that the Zen school takes these ideas, around non-duality and makes them into poetry and storytelling.

[10:53]

And one of my favorite stories from the Tenzo Kyokan is, this is Dogen telling the story about Tozan and where someone asks, well, Tozan asks one of the Tenzos, do you wash the sand from the rice, or do you wash the rice from the sand? And the Tenzo responds, I wash them both. And Dogen, Dongshan, Tozan Ryokan says, well then, what will the monks eat? And without hesitating, the Tenzo just puts his hand over the bowl. Rice, and Dongshan responds, you will probably meet a true person. And I know for most of the many years that I've read that story, it was kind of a throwaway.

[12:01]

Like, oh, just like, this is ridiculous. Like, what does this mean? You know, do you wash the rice from the sand or the sand from the rice? And I washed both. But as I was listening to this lecture about rice, non-duality and about achieving awakening by letting go of all of our limited ideas about good and bad and right and wrong. It grabbed me that that's what this story is. This story is like poetry. This story is like these people who are living, living in the world with purpose, with And that in this conversation, this conversation was an expression of freedom, an expression of joy, of playfulness. And there's also, you know, in some way, this story, I think, is a nice story to go with.

[13:05]

The other story that is quite wonderful and prominent in the Tenzo Kyokan, it's just a couple of paragraphs at the end, in which... Dogen instructs that the Tenzo should always work with these three minds, joyful mind, grandmother mind, or parental mind, or perhaps the mind of unconditional love, and wise mind or great mind. And I think that this story about washing the sand from the rice or the rice from the sand, it's playful. There's something loving about it. And this statement at the end that you will probably meet a true person, again, this feels to me like kind of talking about wise mind and great, great mind. And this question of what does it mean to be a true person?

[14:09]

And what does it mean that... nothing in the universe is hidden. And in a very practical way, and in the kind of using a work story to illuminate this idea, I think about a... Many years ago, I was asked to facilitate the middle section of a, I think it was a three-day retreat that was happening at Green Gulch. It was a retreat of CEOs who were all on the board of a nonprofit. And they were meeting to, their task was to come up with the strategic plan for this organization during this retreat. And I walked in, in the middle of this three days, and someone, one of the CEOs came out to,

[15:11]

greet me and said, this retreat is not going well. We just fired the last facilitator. Welcome. And I walked in and I could feel the tension. And I did a few minutes of sitting with them and I decided to get them into small groups and have them ask for each person to speak to the question, why are you here on the earth? Why are you here on this planet? How's it going? And what might you do in response to how you've answered these questions? And I was relieved to see that they actually... They got into small groups, and people really got into talking about these. And I could see there was even some tears, some handkerchiefs coming out in some of the groups as people were engaging in these questions.

[16:16]

And then there were about 16. These 16 CEOs came back into the room, and the feeling of it was so different that they had plunged right in, like, let's figure out the strategic plan. Let's get to work. Let's get to action. And what was hidden was their emotions. What was hidden was they were not connected with each other. And they kind of got this, that they needed first to reveal their own hearts. They needed to first reveal their own kind of common humanity. And I heard that the rest of this retreat went much, much better. They were able to be much more effective in... creating this plan. And someone afterwards told me that they were a little bit nervous about bringing me in to this meeting because one of the people thought that this mindfulness stuff is kind of woo-woo.

[17:22]

And this was a group of more hardcore business people, but one of these leaders said, if what we did in this retreat was woo-woo, Let's do more of that. So I think this question of What does it mean to practice? And how can we respond to this direction of what is practice? Nothing in the universe is hidden. And one of the things that's been striking for me, I've been living here for four days now, and

[18:32]

And one of the striking things to me that maybe as residents you perhaps hardly notice is how everywhere you look here, the ordinary is being turned into the sacred. And I think what's been hidden, one of the main things that I think is hidden in our culture, is how sacred everything is. Here... It's unusual out there. When I'm at Google, they don't bow outside the bathrooms. There's no altars. There's very little kind of reminders, daily reminders of how sacred everything is. And I actually think that has been one of the main motivations for bringing mindfulness in and bringing meditation into the corporate world is... to bring in a sense of making things sacred. So it's interesting, even at places like Google and at other big companies, they're now starting meetings with a few minutes of quiet, with the intention of kind of revealing yourself to yourself, at least.

[19:51]

You know, there's a... Actually, I think this was Rabbi Alan Liu, who lived at Tassajara and then became a rabbi, was describing once that the Hebrew word prayer literally means to reveal the self to the self. To reveal the self to the self is what prayer means. And I think that's a pretty good definition of prayer. or zazen practice is revealing ourselves to ourselves. Making the universe our own. We are each. So I think when he said nothing in the universe is hidden, I think it starts with seeing how we each are like our own universe. It's amazing. We humans are just amazing creatures.

[20:53]

And I think part of this is seeing how mysterious and sacred we are, our bodies and minds and our ability to use our imaginations. So nothing in the universe is hidden. And to see meditation practice as with each breath of revealing ourselves, by coming into contact with our thinking minds, our feeling minds, with our bodies. And there's something about if you sit long enough, everything will be revealed. Everything will be revealed. And I think this is the feeling that we get when we sit for a one-day or several-day retreat or sitting. that the more that's revealed, the less we're holding on to things, the more freedom we find.

[22:04]

We find more a sense of freedom. Everything starts to look a bit humorous. We see that there's nothing to depend on. So this joke I made in the beginning about Buddhists against change, it's completely embracing. that there's nothing to depend on and finding comfort. Although perhaps we can depend on our practice. We can depend on impermanence. We can depend on turning anything ordinary into sacred, that everything, everything is mysterious. Everything is sacred. The sand and the rice. I think that's part of what he's saying in that story. Which are we taking care of? Are we taking care of the rice or are we taking care of the sand? We're taking care of everything.

[23:05]

Which is sacred? Which is more sacred? The sand or the... It's all sacred. It's like at the very beginning of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, of Suzuki Rishi saying, If we think when we die, this is the end of our lives, this is a mistaken idea. And if we think when we die that this is not the end of our lives, this is a mistaken idea. To me, it's almost the same as the question, do you wash the sand from the rice or the rice from the sand? It's this expression, this expression of this expression of living in a non-dual world. I want to just read a short poem by...

[24:17]

13th century Persian poet Hafez, which is interesting that Rumi and Hafez both were living and writing at around the same time Dogen was living and writing. It's amazing, I think, time in the world, the kind of 1300s. And this is just a short poem about this revealing the entire universe and living in this non-dual world and making everything sacred. He says, I have a thousand brilliant lies for the question, what is God? Now, so I have a thousand brilliant lies maybe for the question, what is practice? If you have trouble with the God word, what is, I think he's saying, what is the question, what is practice? What does it mean to be God? human being what does it mean to live in the world of turning the ordinary into sacred says if you think that the truth can be known from words if you think that the Sun and the ocean can pass through the tiny opening called the mouth oh someone should start laughing someone should start wildly laughing now

[25:48]

So it's a little bit like if we think we know what's going to happen next about anything, about this virus, about this presidential campaign, about climate change, someone should start laughing. Someone should start wildly laughing. And how can we find our deep sense of practice? of sacredness, of taking care of each other. Something about being here with each other and taking care of each other, even in the midst of finding our way with not spreading the virus with an attitude of care and love. and not with separation, seeing that we are literally all in this together.

[26:55]

So I think what we're going to do is chant, stop, take a five-minute break, and for anyone that would like to participate in question and answer, to come back here so that the... online community can join in question and answers. And then I'm also happy to go in the dining room and talk more. Okay. Thank you very much.

[27:32]

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