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What Is the Role of a Monastery in Today’s World?
Sozan Michael McCord considers the deeper purpose of monasteries—not only as places of study and community, but as spaces that preserve and sustain collective practice, creating lasting impact beyond the moment of gathering.
The talk explores the role of monasteries as settings for grounding and sustaining collective practice, emphasizing their importance in fostering presence, awareness, and adaptability. Practical examples highlight how rituals within monasteries help individuals become more grounded, thus facilitating awareness and an adaptive response to life's challenges. The symbolic ceremony of Sajiki is discussed as a representation of hosting unresolved parts of oneself, allowing acceptance and nourishment to foster inner peace.
Referenced Works:
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Sajiki Ceremony: A symbolic practice in Zen Buddhism focusing on hosting and being generous to the unresolved aspects of oneself, likened to "hungry ghosts," fostering acceptance and grounding.
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Tenzo Kyokun (Instructions for the Cook) by Eihei Dogen: Although not directly cited, the reference to the role of the Tenzo aligns with Dogen's teachings on mindfulness and being present in daily monastic duties, highlighting the integration of mindfulness in routine tasks.
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"Shoveling Snow with Buddha" by Billy Collins: This poem illustrates the value of presence and mindfulness in seemingly mundane tasks, embodying the monastic teachings of being present and grounded in daily life.
AI Suggested Title: Monasteries: Foundations of Mindful Practice
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, everyone. Good to have you here. I'm curious if there's anyone here at the Dharma Talk for the first time here. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. There's always someone. It's their first time. So hopefully what happens here will be positive, and you'll come back. This is a place that we invite people to come and use as their place to have as refuge and to, as we say, unpack this one mystery that is this life. So great to have you with us. Welcome. Well, there are a lot of things that we could be doing this morning.
[01:03]
I mean, I look at all the people in this room, and I think if we spent two hours, however long it took you to come here, be here for the talk, and then go out, if we spent those two hours, there might be, what, 60 people in here, 50 people in here. We'd have 100, 120 hours where we could have cleaned up a neighborhood or we could have done all sorts of things with those people hours and we are here. What's going on here? Why is this important? What is the purpose of a monastery and why spend our time in places like these when the world has so much, you don't have to even turn on the news to know that right now there's so many things. that the world needs people for, to address, to put their attention to. So what is the importance of coming to a monastery, to living at a monastery?
[02:07]
What is going on here this morning at Green Gulch Farm, Green Dragon Temple Monastery? I'll get to that. So years ago, I was living at Tassajara. It's a monastery off the grid that we have a part of the three temples that make up San Francisco's Zen Center. And we have a shop there. And in the shop, sometimes bats get into the shop. And in the springtime, sometimes there's little baby bats that get in there. And unfortunately, someone had left out some electrical tape in the shop and a little kind of ball, and it had the sticky side still available. And this little baby bat had gotten its wing stuck to this piece of electrical tape with this little ball on the other end. And we came in one morning, and it was flopping around. And we thought, well, we certainly have to help this bat.
[03:12]
It's probably not going to like it. But what can we do? So we finally figured out a way to get a pillowcase over it and to kind of hold it down as gently as we could and to start to get that electrical tape off of the wing of the bat. And as we started to do the first little pulling apart, that paper-thin wing of the bat started to tear. And we were just horrified. We were like, ah, what do we do? And the bat, of course, was even more worried because of what was going on. And now it really started to thrash around. It doesn't know that we're trying to help the bat. It doesn't get the fact that we're trying to help it. It just is terrified. It's unsettled. It's ungrounded. I don't know if you've ever felt that way before. unsettled, ungrounded, not knowing where help might be, thrashing about inside.
[04:18]
Eventually, this person found this thing that we were using that was a biodegradable solvent, and we were able to actually get the tape off of the bat's wing without tearing any more of it. And the baby bat flew up into a little alcove, and we don't know what happened after that. Probably sat up there for a few days terrified about his experience with the electrical tape. But this is what happens in our life in so many ways. Little tiny micro moments where, oh, someone said something. Someone did something. Or a big thing that happens. And we feel ungrounded. We feel unsettled. And have you noticed that when you're in that state, how you don't see as clearly? how you don't learn as easily, you don't listen as well, you don't even understand with peripheral vision what's happening around you as well. People have noticed this since there were humans.
[05:21]
When I get a little stirred up like that baby bat, I am ungrounded and I don't have all of my faculties. And I am in a place where I'm just thrashing about wondering why all these people are messing with my wing. Not aware that maybe that was even help You know, you can choke on the smallest thing, just a little tiny pebble. You can choke. And it's not because the airway is so narrow that you can't breathe around that pebble. But it's because of the constriction. It's the reaction to the pebble. The constriction of the muscles around that little pebble. And because of that, I can't breathe. My reaction... to what actually happened, makes it to where I can't breathe. And so we have places where we can come and do a little bit of settling, a little bit of grounding, some way to start with what might eventually end up being in a place where we have
[06:40]
the capacity to see, and then maybe to react. Now, next month, we'll be having a ceremony here called Sajiki. And Sajiki is, you know, in mythology, they have these hungry ghosts, and these are supposed to be souls that are kind of reborn in a realm of insatiable hunger. They can't really get... satisfied they're even embodied by having these huge heads and these little tiny necks so it's like you can eat but you really can't swallow you know can't digest and this is due to their past selfish or greedy actions and they're trapped in this realm and they're perpetually thirsty and hungry and unable to find true nourishment and it is symbolic of the parts of us that are not settled yet.
[07:42]
They're still wrapped up in greed, hate, and delusion. You know, when we first had this ceremony and I was new to Zen Center, I thought it was kind of like Buddhist Halloween. And I was like, I don't know if this is really my thing. Okay. But then we reverse everything. We have like the altar over here and we put a whole bunch of offerings out to the hungry ghosts. We actually play host to the hungry ghost, these insatiable beings that are tied up with, you know, greed, hate, and delusion that are unable to be satisfied. And symbolically, this is us, this is ourselves. How am I with my shadow side? Am I able to be a host? A generous host? that lets it settle, that's willing to put out fruit and gifts. And just for one day, look at that shadow side and say, you can't do anything until you settle.
[08:49]
You can't do anything until you feel accepted, until you feel apart, until you feel grounded. You're just going to thrash around like a baby bat. And so we're going to put out offerings to you. so that you can come and you can have some nourishment, some sense of being cared for. And I invite you to come to Sajiki when we have that. And I guess I should check with the, you know... The public comes? Okay. That's pretty sure. Pretty sure that the... Yeah, so... All of a sudden we've got 60 people here waiting to... feed their hungry ghosts and um yes please do come that'll be announced on our website but but that's a different attitude toward that little micro moment when you feel that twinge in your chest or your stomach or the middle of your back and you think i wish i was a different person i wish i reacted differently i'm x years old how come i haven't settled this by now
[09:56]
What is it to be host to the hungry ghosts? What is it to be host to the parts of us that are not yet resolved? I mean, if all the parts of you were resolved, you'd probably just turn into a pure beam of light and disappear. I don't know. I mean, the parts of me that are not resolved are very apparent to the people who know me, and they can tell you all about those parts. And then there's some of those parts that I'm aware of. I often talk in our Young Urban Zen group about awareness of ourself and writing a list of the 10 people that you're closest to. And then on one side of the paper, for each person, you write all the stuff that you think that that person is great at, all their attributes and how they show up that you appreciate. And then on the other side of the list, you write the stuff that you think they could probably work on.
[11:01]
Now, for each of the 10 people that are closest to you, I'm sure you could think of stuff for each of those people that they could work on. Something. You could come up with something. So then I just turn it around and I think about myself. Well, if the 10 closest people to me were writing a list about Michael, what would be on that other side of the list? What do people think that I should be working on? And then some of those things I might be aware of, but how do I hold those things that I become aware of? Do I hold it with antagonism? Do I hold it with harshness? I often ask folks, if you raise someone from age zero to age five with the voice in your head, would they be a healthy human? How do we actually hold How are we actually a host to the things that are not yet resolved?
[12:03]
And so we have this ceremony where we bring in food and offerings and we make peace with and we help them settle. And in the monastery, one of the very first things is grounding. We have all of these things. rituals that you have that we do when we come in and you could just come into your seat and just plop down and start sitting meditation but we don't do that we have this whole thing where we we play a woodblock a hahn and wherever you are in the monastery you start to come back to your shashu form and you come to a little bit of like a somatic pose ears over the shoulders nose in alignment with the navel kind of bringing yourself back to your body bringing yourself through the door, what foot you step through the door with, all these things, all the way until you get to the place where you're facing the wall. Those things can seem like a whole bunch of arduous gymnastics, but it's actually grounding. It's bringing you back to the body.
[13:07]
And we've all been in those places before where we wish that we could be a little bit more grounded. We wish that we could feel like we feel when we're sitting in a park, on a park bench on a beautiful day, and we're going to meet our best friend for lunch at our favorite restaurant. We feel kind of open and free and creative and unworried. Don't you wish you could feel like that when you're in the middle of a conversation that isn't going so well? Even if it's not terrible, but you know you just aren't thinking quite as clearly. You're not nearly as creative. A little bit more worried. Years ago when I was there at Tassajara, I keep saying years ago, I don't know how long years ago is. Is it more than five, more than 10? You have to get to like 25 or 50 before it's years ago. I mean, I don't know what years ago is these days. But anyway, sometime back there, I was the Tenzo, the person who manages the kitchen and the kitchen practice and offerings when they were at Tassajara.
[14:11]
And I had a guest cook in the summer. We have people that come into the monastery and they had dinner that used to be served at 7 p.m. And we used to have this thing where the guest cook and their assist would make dinner for about 70 to 80 people. And they would spend six hours making dinner from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. And other people would have done most of the prep. We would have still done a lot of the last minute prep. But you're kind of on a clock for six hours to get this whole thing done. And somewhere at around, I think it was about 5 p.m., I forget what I did, but it was not going to be that dinner. Oh, I know what it was. I used the wrong tofu. The tofu that I was supposed to actually compost, I did not compost. And the tofu that I was supposed to use, I composted. And then I had made the dinner with the tofu I was supposed to compost.
[15:14]
And then I realized it. And now I've got two hours before all the people are going to be there for dinner, and I've just ruined dinner. And I had never had, or maybe I just wasn't aware, because I had been at the monastery then for about five years, and I had some awareness maybe of my body, but I had what I consider to be my first panic attack. And I just couldn't think. I just couldn't think. I was so worried, you know. And we have the center island in that kitchen, and I just started walking around the center island, just kind of like, oh boy. Oh boy. That's all I could do. I could just like walk around the center island, just like, oh boy. What are we going to do, you know? And I really couldn't think of like what I was going to do, you know? And then after a while, I came back to like a breath practice and I like sat and, you know, I didn't do something miraculous that changed everything other than just kind of like slowing down for a little bit.
[16:25]
But I was so ungrounded, I couldn't think. I couldn't come up with an idea for dinner, you know? And eventually me and the guest cook assist did get our wits about us and we got together and we made something that was 25 minutes late and it wasn't an awesome dinner, but it was biodegradable and people ate it and that was dinner, you know? But there are very few... spiritual if any spiritual practices that you will come across where you solve the mind with the mind you know almost every spiritual practice you will find you start with grounding in the body you start with settling something that has to do with breath has to do with how you're looking at things has to do with how what your posture is has to do with the speed that you're moving the whole attitude of the body language. And so in the monastery, we start with presence, with grounding.
[17:32]
You ever been with someone where just their presence, they just seemed like they were just grounded. They didn't have to say anything. Just their presence. Just like, yeah, okay, I want what they have. You know, they didn't say a golden sentence. They were just there. but it was obvious that what was going on inside them, something was happening there where they seemed grounded. And that's why this tradition is so much about warm hand to warm hand is that there's all these rituals about, you know, how to get to your seat in the Zendo. And those can be really great for grounding and getting in your body. And there's also learning from teachers and the people around you. And the wind of the family house, as we call it. How we ground ourselves in our practice and how we learn from the people who are several years further along in their practice and how they're grounded. And so we start with presence, with grounding, with the body. And then from there, you have the opportunity to become more aware.
[18:37]
Because just like that baby bat, we can't be terribly aware that help is happening or even what's going on when we're so flustered that we're just flapping all around. We're not aware of what's happening. So there's really no chance for awareness until there is some grounding. And then when there's some settling and some grounding, then we have the opportunity for awareness to start to become aware of what's going on. Sometimes we play this dyad in some of our training in the monastery where we sit facing each other, and one person is the asker, and the other person is the answerer. And the person who's the asker, for two minutes we do this, and we do it with eye contact. I mean, two minutes of eye contact is pretty intimate these days. So one person's asking, the other person's answering. And the person asking says, what's happening now?
[19:42]
And the person that is answering just says the first thing, like, I'm self-conscious. I don't know what to say. And you keep doing that, what's happening now? And then the person answers, my nose is itching. What's happening now? I'm worried that I'm going to give a bad answer. What's happening now? I'm feeling really relaxed in my body. What's happening now? And you keep going back and forth for a couple of minutes. What's happening now? Being aware of what's happening in the moment. And it's symbolic of our practice of being in the moment and trying to be aware of what's happening now. What's the moment asking for? This person that's in front of me that maybe I find incredibly interesting, or maybe I find incredibly boring, or maybe I find incredibly green. What's happening now? Noticing my body. noticing what the moment is asking for and not what I'm inclined to maybe do, which is, you know, propel this conversation that I find really interesting with this really interesting person, even though I really need to go somewhere else, or maybe this person that I find kind of boring trying to skip through the conversation and, you know, not really giving them my full attention or the person that is maybe grading or whatever, and just trying to shut the conversation down and really not giving what they're saying any sort of attention or awareness or whatever.
[21:05]
What's happening now? And so the awareness is what happens once we get grounded and settled. And so the practices allow for that grounding and settling. It doesn't force it, believe me. I've been here and not been grounded and settled. But it at least presents the opportunity and it gives you a container where you can be grounded and settled. And then from there, awareness has the opportunity to take some root. to be able to see what's happening now, what the moment is asking for. And then the last part is adaptability. to actually respond to what the moment is asking for. Because now I have a little bit of awareness of what the moment might be asking for. Now, of course, awareness is a direction, not a destination. So I keep becoming more aware of ways in which, oh, this is what the moment's asking for. And then 10 years later, you're just like, oh, but then there's so much more context here or more nuance or more whatever. It's something that someone grows in.
[22:06]
But you keep taking your best stab at what the moment is asking for based upon the awareness that you have. And then from there, it's the opportunity to adapt to what the moment is asking for. The opportunity. Now, I might choose not to do what the moment is asking for because I just don't want to and because I don't like what the moment is asking for. And we've all been there before where you kind of know what to do. You have the awareness of what the moment is asking for, but you're just resistant. It's like, I'm not gonna do that. And this is really where the practice, where the rubber meets the road, is get plagued by awareness. You start to become more aware, more grounded, more aware of what you should be doing. And you're like, oh, shoot. I really wish I was ignorant back when I wasn't really clear about this. But this is the process of setting up these temples to give people a place where they can ground. They can be present. They can be here.
[23:08]
They can be in their body. then we can have some awareness that starts to creep into our daily life. Some clarity starts to happen. Like that mountain lake, you know, when you have the storm, you can't see anything on the surface. And then when it settles, you start to get some clarity. You get to see the reflections. Oh, that's what's going on. And so then the last part, of course, do I really want to, am I willing to adapt to what I am aware of? presence, awareness, adaptability. Setting up these monasteries so that people have a place to ground. Because we're in all sorts of settings in our daily lives where it just isn't set up for being grounded. Have you noticed that? There's just so much of society that isn't set up for that. But if you're coming here or you're doing it at home or you're really working on the body practice and getting grounded and what helps you,
[24:11]
You learn different ways you can start taking it out into the other places. Because Zen is a 24-7 thing. It isn't a destination that come and you do it here. We just do it here. Like you come and you have a place to practice the violin or a place to practice basketball. It's a place to practice. But it's not where the game takes place. The game takes place out there. The game takes place, well, unless you live in the monastery, then the game takes place here all the time. But, you know, you take it out. And that is where you are using those principles. Like, for instance, just as one example, whenever we drink water, we ask that people sit down and that they give it their full attention and that they use two hands. And they just drink water. Now, have you ever felt plagued by your mobile phone? I mean, these things that are just so powerful and amazing that you take the most recent mobile phone and 40 years ago you could have ruled the planet with it.
[25:15]
Now you just take it for granted and we just throw it in our back pocket or throw it on the bed or whatever. What if for the next month, every time you picked up that mobile phone, you did it with two hands and you just gave it like your full attention? And there was only one place that it lived at home, and one place that it lived at work, and one place that it lived in your bag. And you always, you maybe even took the case off of it. You're just like, I'm going to treat this like my own eyes. And you gave it some sort of veneration. And then you started to have a relationship with it where it wasn't just something that interrupted you all the time. But then maybe you would start taking it into... Oh, well, how is this thing programmed? And what do I want to come forward? And how do I want to come to it? There's infinite ways you can take what's in the monastery out into the world. At one point in time, I realized that as much as I love pizza, I never just eat pizza.
[26:18]
And I mean, I eat pizza, but I eat pizza and listen to music. I eat pizza and talk on the phone. I eat pizza and listen to podcasts. I eat pizza and talk to people. You know, I even sometimes eat pizza standing up, walking around my apartment, you know. But what is it to just eat pizza? Just to sit. When we have meals here, we have this silent time at the beginning. And And we ask the people not be wearing headphones, listening to podcasts or whatever. It's just you and your food. And it's a golden time to just give your full attention to eating. And sometimes when I would do this thing at home with my pizza, piece of pizza on the plate, totally silent, I'm all by myself, I realized I feel a little bit lonely or I feel a little bit anxious. or I feel like eating way more pizza than I should. And I start to become more aware of actually what I'm feeling when I'm eating pizza.
[27:26]
But I have all these distractions going on, so I'm not even aware of what's going on when I'm eating. And we have this one little, you know, principle in the monastery where we have silent time before we start talking. Ten minutes at the beginning of every meal. You get your food, you sit down, At first, when I came to the monastery, I was like, okay, I'm going to come 10 minutes late. I want to talk to my friends, and I don't want to be sitting there with my food. But then I started realizing the purpose of it. It's like, oh, yeah, this is a time I can take back. This is a time I can be grounded, can be with the thing that's in front of me. There are infinite ways you can take the stuff that's in the monastery out to where we live. And so they're here so that you can see them as a collection. You can see them as a practice. You can get grounded in them, but not because that's where they live is here. This is the practice place. There was a time not so long ago when I'm working, I work as an administrator at Zen Center in the administrative offices.
[28:38]
And I was having a lot of just meetings on a screen with Zoom one after another. And I was really busy this period of time. And during the end of the year, oftentimes we send different thank you cards to people. As an administrator, they wanted me to write a little thank you note to these folks. And they gave me a stack of about 100 of them. And they kept sitting there on my desk. And I just never got to them. And I'm like, I'm going to have to dedicate like three hours this weekend to like doing cards. But then stuff had come up on the weekend. And then eventually got to the place. The only way I was going to be able to do it was during the workday. So, in between my Zoom meetings, I would do three cards. And I felt kind of burdened by this. But what I noticed after a couple days is that my meetings went better. And I would stop my meeting... And then I would put my mind into this kind of tactical thing, thinking about another person, expressing gratitude to them in between my meetings.
[29:46]
And then I would go to the next meeting and I wouldn't feel quite as wound. And I'm like, okay, this is Zen at work. This is Zen with my office job. This is Zen with, this is the work practice of being in a place that has a desk and a computer. And so I've taken that practice and used that along with many others in order to help a role that largely has to do with sitting at a desk and looking at a screen. But it just grounded me. And there's these little clues that you find in the monastery that you can take out and you can bring to other places. Practice is a setup. It's a setup for something that's going to happen. You don't know how it's going to work. You might feel different about your mobile phone. You might feel different about your pizza. You might feel different about that next Zoom meeting. But the beauty of it is that it's not about self-help.
[30:48]
Do A to get B. It's that over time, these things actually elicit different things that come forward inside my reaction to stimulus from the outside. I start to become someone who is a little bit more grounded. And I don't know when it is that I'm going to become less this or less that, the thing that I came to Zen for. But I just know over a period of time in my rearview mirror, I'm not in Kansas anymore. I just know that somehow or another it took root over some period of time. You know, it's like going to sleep. You know, it's like, it's a setup. We do this every day and that's how practice works. You know, you don't just go, oh, I got to go to sleep. It's 10 p.m. And you walk into your room, you lie down on your bed and go, you know. No, you don't do that, you know. You start to wind down. You change your clothes. You change the lighting. You probably don't do anything that's terribly high energy, hopefully. You don't eat some huge thing five minutes before bed, drink a whole bunch of caffeine.
[31:51]
No, you do all these things that you think are going to support sleep. And you probably have a place where you do sleep that supports sleep. And then eventually, through all of this stuff that you're doing, you don't know when it happens, but at some point, you're just sleeping. And that's what the practice is that we're doing here. We don't know at what point this will take root and you will become less anxious, less angry, less worried, less jealous, less petty. All the stuff that, you know, we try to hide. I generally try to hide all the ways that I'm still five or 10, you know, so that you won't think that I'm anything but beautiful, strong, and brave. But then there's all these things where I notice in my body, based upon that thing that just happened, I'm like, oh yeah, wish I was older. You ever have that feeling? The wish I was older feeling? It's not about being older. Everyone is just on their own trajectory of getting settled in the different points and areas of their life.
[33:01]
just like falling asleep, we don't know when different things will take root. But if we start to design our lives where it's a setup for falling asleep, it's a setup for being more grounded, it's a setup for being more present, then we've taken the monastery and the purpose for being here this morning out into the world, and that's a gift to the world. That's something that the world can use. How many places can you think of that the world could use people that were a little bit more grounded. I mean, a little bit more aware. You know, we're learning how to be that gift by being here by engaging in this practice. Because the world needs people that are way more grounded, that can be in the difficult conversation and can have it unfold and have them not be entirely wound and just thinking in kind of ego land and defensive land and a reactive land and being able to hold things from a little bit broader perspective.
[34:06]
That's what the world needs. And that's why it's so important that we get together and remind each other of our practice on mornings like this. Because otherwise, it'd just be better if we were out cleaning up a neighborhood or doing something else with all these people hours. But we're here reminding ourselves of practice and coming back around because as humans, we forget. And just like we were talking about with warm hand to warm hand, with that person that we thought of, that we knew, that had a lot of presence, that was grounded. We're learning to be that person. We're learning to be with, just be with other people and to notice how other people are, especially those that help us, and learning to be that person for other folks. You absorb the example in the monastery.
[35:09]
And that's the goal of being here. I had a friend one time who lived in Montana growing up on a ranch, and they said, I learned everything I needed to know about mending a fence by working with this old cowboy. Now, if you know cowboy culture, I grew up in Oklahoma, so I knew a few cowboys. Cowboys don't say a lot of words. And my friend, she said, I grew up in Montana learning how to mend fences from this old cowboy. And she said, he might have said a sentence or two every day. But it wasn't about the words. It was about how the person went about the thing that they were doing, how they embodied it, the attitude, the presence, what they paid attention to, the body language. I don't know if you know the poet Billy Collins.
[36:14]
He's one of my favorite modern poets, was a poet laureate. I want to read you this poem about being with an old cowboy. But it's not an old cowboy, it's the spirit of being with an old cowboy. This is called Shoveling Snow with Buddha. Shoveling Snow with Buddha by Billy Collins. In the usual iconography of the temple or the local walk, you would never see him doing such a thing, tossing the dry snow over a mountain of his bare, round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot, a model of concentration. Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word for what he does or does not do. Even the season is wrong for him. In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid? Is this not implied by his serene expression, that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe? But here we are, working our way down the driveway one shovel full at a time.
[37:17]
We toss the light powder into the clear air. We feel the cold mist on our faces, and with every heave we disappear and become lost to each other in these sudden clouds of our own making, these fountain bursts of snow. This is so much better than a sermon in church. I say out loud, but Buddha keeps on shoveling. This is the true religion, the religion of snow and sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky. And I say this to him, but he's too busy to hear me. He has thrown himself into shoveling snow as if it were the purpose of existence, as if the sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway that you could back your car down easily and drive off into the vanities of the world with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio. All morning long, we work side by side, me with my commentary and he with his generous pocket of silence until the hour is nearly noon and the snow is piled high all around us. Then I hear him speak. After this, he asks, can we go inside and play cards?
[38:21]
Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk and bring some cups of chocolate to the table while you shuffle the deck. Ah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes and leaning for a moment on his shovel before he drives the thin blade again deep into the glittering white snow. Shoveling Snow with Buddha by Billy Collins. Being with someone that has presence that is grounded in what they're doing whether it's a zoom call or it's a ritual here in the monastery and learning how to be that person that is with the thing that's in front of them answering the question of what's happening now in a way that we are aware as far as we can tell most appropriate living up to that bodhisattva vow. The bodhisattva vow, of course, is the one of not being here just trying to seek Michael's end of suffering, but to climb up to that metaphorical wall that's looking down on maybe enlightenment or lack of suffering on the other side, but not doing it to get over there, but staying on the top of the wall to help other people up.
[39:43]
To be a gift to the world. We say that when we leave here, we leave with nothing. And we also say we leave here with gift-bestowing hands. And they're both true. Because we don't take anything with us. We are the gift. What happened here in the monastery, that is the gift. The grounding, the settling, the awareness. the ability or the opportunity now to adapt to what is happening now. And so I invite all of you to please keep coming back here and practicing with us, practicing wherever it is that you are, learning the things that help you be grounded with your computer screens or your pizza, and being that gift to the world and answering that question. of what's happening now.
[41:11]
giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.
[41:16]
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