This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everyone. On behalf of the San Francisco Zen Center, I'd like to offer a warm welcome to our speaker today, panel-wise. Thank you, Peter. Thank you. Pan is a Buddhist teacher and an executive who has been practicing in the Zen and Tarabana tradition for almost 30 years. Her Zen path includes five years at Tassajara and Green Balch, and also being chiseau with Rob Anderson at Green Balch Bar in the mid-90s, and she was at Tassajara and Green Balch in the late 80s. It was at Tassajara that she met her husband, Eugene Cash, who is also a teacher in the Theravadan Vipassana tradition.

[01:01]

And together, they lead the SF Insights, which meets on weekly basis at the humanitarian church street there. Besides leading summer retreats at Tulsa Harder on a yearly basis, Pam also co-leads the Community Darwin Leaders Program at Spirit Block. And she is the founder of Appropriate Response, a company dedicated to bringing wisdom and compassion to the workplace. So, Pam, I'd like to have you here. Listening to David introduce me, mostly I thought, am I that old? Because I began my practice here, actually, in this very room, almost 30 years ago. And as I've been walking around a bit in the Zen center here, just flooded with kind of visceral memory of the very early days of my own practice.

[02:09]

The sounds, the sound of the Han of the bell. I remember actually very much the particular slant of light that I'm now seeing from this side. through these beautiful arching windows. And the squishy feel of the tatami mats under the toes. So I want to open today with a story about something that happened for me that was very impressed me very deeply and has really followed me through now many decades of my practice. and it began here in the Buddha Hall. When I was in the first several months of my practice, I was told that there was this Japanese teacher coming to visit, and he would be giving a talk on Saturday morning, just like this, but a long time ago.

[03:18]

And his name was Kobinchino, And I remember, without any intentional irreverence, that I told my friends that I was going to the San Francisco Zen Center to hear a talk by Cappuccino Roshi. And I came and sat somewhere over there. I don't know if I was on the floor or a chair. And waited and watched as... Kogan came into the room. Kogan was a very slight man with a wonderfully warm and very gentle demeanor. And he had this sort of cloud-like feel to him as he moved around the room. And I remember watching him as he walked in, and when he stopped to bow at this statue behind me,

[04:21]

It was as if he were engaging in an intimate conversation with the statue. And I watched myself and everyone else in the room really just watching him move. It was quite extraordinary. And he sat down and he gave a talk. And I don't remember anything that he said. But what I do remember was an interaction that I had with him after in the dining room. the back of the dining room post-talk Q&A, which I believe we have today as well. So after the talk, everyone moved into the dining room, and in the same beautiful presence of movement, he situated himself on the couch and crossed his legs and tucked his robes, and someone had put this beautiful celadon tea set in front of him. And he leaned over and poured himself a cup of tea and lifted it with two hands.

[05:29]

You watch the steam coming from the cup. And he took a sip and he placed the cup down and he looked out in the audience and he said, any questions? And I was sitting right in the front and before I knew it, my hand had shot up. Like about like that with some intensity. And I don't know if this is still true at Zen Center, but at the time that I was there, that wasn't exactly a really cool thing to do. I didn't know that the sort of enthusiasm and energy that I brought was, you know, not exactly the style of the place that I was sitting. But I didn't know that. So my hand shot up and he said yes. And I said, What is the Dharma?

[06:30]

And this wave of laughter rolled through the room. For those who don't know, asking, it's like saying, what is the truth? So everyone laughed and Kogan chuckled. And he said, I don't know. But I was not to be daunted by that. And I said, no, no, really. I'm new here. And I keep hearing this word, Dharma, and I don't know what it means. What does it mean? Now I had definitely crossed over the line from demure to not so cool, but there it was. And Coben paused. He did this beautiful thing with his mouth. I will say that after this interaction with him, I followed him around for quite some time. I followed him to New Mexico and then... sat with him for very many years at his temple at Jokoji. So he hooked me in that first interaction.

[07:33]

So he pursed his lips and waited. And then he did this beautiful thing. He leaned over and he picked up the teapot that was in front of him and he lifted it up. And he looked right at me and he said, the Dharma, the Dharma, is what holds this teapot together. And he put the teapot down. I had no idea what he was talking about. None. But it touched me. Something about what he said, and perhaps something about how he said it, touched me so deeply. And so this morning I want to do my best to... talk a bit about how I've come to understand that teaching from him all those years ago over the last almost three decades.

[08:37]

One of the central teachings in all of Buddhist traditions is the teaching of what's called in Pali, Patika Samuppada. the teaching of dependent co-arising, the teaching that because of this, that arises. Because of that, this comes to be. This is the teaching of how things come into being. And it was in the Buddha's, somehow, the really revolutionary part of the Buddha's early teaching was the understanding that there is no separate, solid anything. And that teaching, that understanding, that insight was woven into the early Theravada teaching as the teaching of anatta, of no separate, solid self.

[09:43]

So the Buddha looked and looked. And as hard as he looked, he couldn't find anything that was a solid sense of I, me, or mine. And in the beautiful unfolding of those teachings in the Mahayana tradition, that understanding of no separate solid me, no separate solid self, was expanded to the understanding that in fact there is no separate solid anything. We and life itself are not made up of separate objects banging into each other. We're not made up of molecules, or even moments, that what there is, is what in the Mahayana tradition and particularly emphasized in Zen, is this teaching of emptiness, a teaching of no separate solid anything. There's a term in the Theravadan tradition

[10:55]

called stream entry or entering the stream. And it's understood in a way, or here's how I understand it, which is that when a person's understanding of that truth, of the non-separateness, of the aliveness of life itself is realized, not just as an idea or even an experience, but as a living reality, that is a... indication of what's called entering the stream, which I myself like to call becoming the stream. So we claim the truth of our stream or our river-like nature. There's a beautiful opening line from a book. I heard this here somewhere in the first decade or so of my practice. I can't remember whose talk it was.

[11:56]

But this is an opening line from a book called The Hungry Road by Ben Okri. Ben Okri is a Nigerian writer and the book opens something like this. He says, in the beginning, in the beginning there was a river and then the river was paved over and became a road and soon the road spread out and covered everything. But because The road was really a river. It was always hungry. So we have this asphalt-creating mind. We have a mind that takes the river, the living river of our experience, of our life itself, and turns it into bite-sized, chewable packages. So I look out and I see a blue shirt. or a video camera, or the sunlight coming through the room, or the sound of the clock.

[13:01]

This is very useful for us, for navigating through our life. But at some point, I call this the freeze frame capacity of the mind. So the mind takes all the fluidity that's here and freeze frames it, turns it into something that we can say, yes, this is a watch. And not only that, it's my watch. And then what happens over time as the pavement spreads is, I'm going to switch metaphors here, we go from a road to, I've been using the metaphor of our river-like nature turns into a bunch of people in an ice cube tray. We get frozen by our ideas and our beliefs. and our sureness of who we are and who other people are and how things go. We forget the river under the road. And the road is good, especially if you want to get somewhere fast.

[14:04]

But if all we're doing is running around getting somewhere fast, we find ourselves hungry. And so that hunger is because we've locked ourselves into a tight little cube of frozen water. And you know how it is. You can get used to most just about anything. And so we get comfortable in our little ice cube tray. And maybe occasionally we think, you know, I'm going to paint the walls or put in a little umbrella, stick it in my ice cube tray to spice things up. But at some point, we start to really feel the pinch of it. We start to feel how all of our sureness and our knowing and our opinions are kind of tight. you know, it's like, it's kind of cold in here. And I wish, but there's only one way out. And the only way that we get out of our ice cube tray is we have to melt.

[15:06]

This is how we return to the river that we are. So there's... Many of you probably know the ritual of the chanting of the Heart Sutra in Zen temples around the world. And the Heart Sutra is the pith teaching of the beautiful wisdom beyond wisdom, the Prajnaparamita teachings. And I think of Prajna Paramita as the wisdom beyond wisdom is the wisdom that can't be freeze-framed. It's not going to fit in an ice cube tray no matter how hard we try. It's pointing us to something that is fluid and raucous and sometimes very still and totally alive. So when I was living here...

[16:12]

I lived at Zen Center for about five years, and we'd get up every morning and we would chant the Heart Sutra either in English or in Japanese. And I sometimes think of the Heart Sutra as the no, no, no sutra. It's the sutra that's emphasizing emptiness, emphasizing the no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, etc. And so I was... do my part, and chant in English or Japanese these words. And one morning I remember, sleepy, very early morning, I was living at Green Gulch Farm, and I suddenly had this big insight. And the insight came from the first line of the sutra, which goes like this. It says, Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva, when practicing deeply, perceived, that all five skandhas are empty and thus relieved all suffering.

[17:19]

So I spent a lot of time trying to understand what are five skandhas and what is empty and how does that relieve suffering. And then I got caught in the kind of continuation of the sutra, which was the no, no, no part. Anyway, this morning that I was chanting, I suddenly had this big insight, which is that... I realized that it's not so important to understand what awakening is. What's important is to understand what wakes up. And what the sutra says is that what wakes up is compassion. This was like, I couldn't believe that I hadn't gotten this before. Like, oh my God, it's compassion that wakes up. This is what the Heart Sutra is trying to say. Because Avalokiteshvara, for those who don't know the language of it, is the bodhisattva of great compassion.

[18:22]

So how do we do that? How do we melt? How do we wake up to compassion? And I think we get a hint from the translation of the name. Avalokiteshvara means one who hears, one who hears the cries of the world. So there's something about compassion and this capacity for deep, deep listening. When I was ordained, lay ordained, I was, as is the tradition here, given a new name, a Japanese name. And the name I was given was Mon, Itzu, An, Ka. And the first character, Mon, means to listen. The character is a picture of an ear at the gate. And Itzu is a single stroke.

[19:28]

Itzu or Ichi. And it can be translated alternately as each thing or oneness. And Anka means peaceful transformation. So the name itself echoes to the teaching of Avalokiteshvara, that when we listen deeply to each thing, to each moment, or we could say alternately, when we listen to oneness, when we feel in our bones the truth of the non-separateness of our life, this itself is transformation. I've studied for many years, looked for and listened to stories about listening. And I spent a period of time working in the business world, teaching some of the principles that I learned here, or doing my best to do that.

[20:32]

And one of the things that I did was to teach people how to pay attention by teaching through listening. that listening itself is a kind of powerful and potent fabric for healing our felt sense of separation. There's a beautiful story of George Washington Carver, who was a botanist and social activist. He was, as a little boy, was born to slave parents and was born in an unwell body. so he wasn't able to go out in the fields and pick cotton. And he had this amazing green thumb as a little boy, and he set up a plant hospital in the forest behind his house. And the story goes that all of the, particularly women in his community, would bring him their ailing houseplants, and he would take them to the hospital in the back of the house and heal them.

[21:37]

And one day... One of the women came to him to pick up her now thriving houseplant, and she looked at little George and said, how do you do it? What's your secret, little George? How do you heal all these plants? And he, I think of this as his pure Zen master moment, he looked at her and he said, when you listen to things, when you listen to things and love them, they will reveal themselves to you. So this kind of deep listening is not a small thing. It is actually exactly the balm we need, this listening with love that can help us to heal ourselves and to heal the sense of separation that we feel with other people and with the world itself. I still, how do we do that?

[22:45]

I had this dream about a year ago. About once a year I get what I think of as a kind of transmission dream. And in this dream, I was walking in the countryside. Beautiful green fields. And interestingly, there was no sound. It was like watching the TV on mute. So... There was no wind or bugs or birds, but I'm walking, and I see a house. And on the porch of the house is a woman, and she waves to me like this to come in to the house. So I do. I walk in, and I follow her into her kitchen. This is all done silently, wordlessly. And in the middle of the kitchen, about the size of this bowing mat, there's this huge basket. And in the basket is filled with puppies. And it's clear, without any words, that my job is to pick my puppy.

[23:50]

I'm going to pick one of the group of puppies. And so I pet the puppies and play with them. And then it's clear, this is the one. This is my puppy. And I lean over and I pick up the puppy. I just realized this is like picking up the teapot, right? So I pick up the puppy and I'm holding it in the dream. And the puppy's looking at me and I'm looking at the puppy. And all of a sudden... fangs come out of the puppy's mouth. And, you know, in a dream. And then I have an insight. And I realize, oh, the puppy is just scared. And I hold the puppy, hold the puppy, hold the puppy. And we stand there together, the puppy and me looking at each other. And the fangs recede and the little cute fluffy puppy face comes back. And then the puppy morphs and turns into a baby.

[24:54]

And at the end of the dream, before I wake up, I'm holding this beautiful little baby to my chest. This is the power of deep listening, or what I sometimes call the power of being with. Being with. being with, particularly being with things when they're difficult. I remember going, I think it was with Reb Anderson, but I'm not sure that the conversation was with him. But I remember when I was a student going with my own cry to say, how can I keep my heart open in the midst of so many cries? my own, others, the world. How can I stand it? It feels so overwhelming. And he said something to me that, like Coben's words, stayed with me all this time.

[25:55]

He said, listen to the cries, hear the silence. And I'm not sure I still understand exactly what that means, but I want to... share a story from just a couple of weeks ago that brought some insight to me about what I think was meant. For about a dozen years, I've been meeting with a small group of women, there are seven of us, to talk about race and racism. And the women in the group are about half and half, African-American and Caucasian. And we came together because there are two of the women in the group, two of the white women had adopted two African-American kids, and now they have a whole gaggle of grandkids.

[27:05]

And they were struggling. And they wanted a place where they could come and have real conversation, share some of the difficulty. And so this group has now been meeting basically every other month for a day. We just met a couple of days ago. And when we came together, we did this radical thing, which was that we decided we weren't going to do anything. And this is a really sort of powerhouse group of women. many of whom spent their whole careers inside organizations doing diversity and inclusion work. But we said, we're not going to take on any projects, we're not going to do anything. What we're going to do is this radical move of just building relationship. And so every time we meet, we move from one house to another. We have this joke where we say, you know, you don't really get to know someone until you've peed in their toilet. So this was the sort of field of intimacy that we've grown over the years.

[28:10]

And we call ourselves, this is a good one for Zen Center, we call ourselves the IDK group. IDK stands for I don't know. So two weeks ago, our little group met with a number of other women. So there were a number of other groups... also women's circles that had been meeting. And we came together, there were 22 of us in total, for four days at a house on the beach to talk about dismantling racism. It was an extraordinary series of days for me, and I had been in this dialogue for many years already. But I heard something, something happened in that circle, that helped me understand something about hearing the cries, listening to the cries, hearing the silence. And what happened was in the first day of our meeting together, we were literally a circle.

[29:14]

And people went around and told their stories. And I cried all day. I didn't weep. I mean, I wouldn't sob, cry. I just sat and teared and teared and teared because all of the stories that I read about in the newspaper and we see on YouTube and TV were so personal. It was my father and my brother and my son and my grandson, and I just couldn't help crying all day. And I have to say that it felt so good to cry. It felt true. And the thing that I saw and heard and felt in that room was that as I listened to the cries, as I listened to the excruciating pain and sorrow and loss and oppression and injustice, what I heard, what I saw, what I felt was strength and courage and beauty.

[30:25]

felt like it opened for me an understanding of what it means to hear the cries, to listen to the cries and hear the silence, that I listened to the words and the content of the story and I took it in, but what I heard was something completely else. What I heard was this field of love, this fierce love and truth-telling that allowed there to be this deep, deep healing, for all of the women in the room. I told them that I was coming here today, and they promised that they would have their hands at my back, all of those women. One of them said, remember that you have us in your heart pocket. Beautiful way to say it. So listening to the cries, hearing the silence, can we hear the real pain of the world but also see right in the middle of it the courage, the strength, the beauty of us as human beings able to be with each other as we walk through the world in this odd phenomena of being human?

[31:46]

So I want to close with a story about a modern-day bodhisattva. Some of you may know the work of a guy named Brian Stevenson. He's a lawyer, the founder, the executive director of an organization in Alabama called the Equal Justice Institute. And he has a new book out. It has a very Zen title. It's called Just Mercy. So like just sitting or just anything, this is his practice to bring to... He's a lawyer and he's spent decades advocating for, supporting people on death row. And he tells a story about how, as a young lawyer, he had a family friend who was a friend of another great bodhisattva, probably more well-known to most of us, Rosa Parks. And his friend, when Rosa was in town, would go and sit, and these older women would sit and talk together.

[33:01]

And the friend invited Brian to come and just listen. So he was invited to come and sit in the company of these old women and listen to their conversation, and he did. And he says he went and he listened and he went and he listened, and finally, on one of the visits, Rosa turned to him and said, so Brian, tell me about your work, what do you do? And he gave her his rap. He talked about the Equal Justice Institute and all of their efforts to eradicate racism and poverty and injustice. He told her that over the last 40 years, the prison population in the United States has gone from 300,000 to 2.3 million. That black men are six times as likely to be imprisoned as white men. That little boys, 13 years old, are locked up for nonviolent crimes for life. And that the rise in the prison population does not correlate to a rise in violent crime.

[34:08]

Violent crime has stayed steady through all those years. What it does is increase in the incarceration rates began with the war on drugs. If these continue, he told her, one in three black men born in 2001 will go to jail. So this is his work, is to undo that system. I was very happy to hear it even mentioned in the recent Democratic debate. So somehow his work has gotten this on the national radar. So he's telling her about all of this and his work and his efforts and all of the suffering that he wants to undo. And at the end of his speaking, she looks at him and she says, that is going to make you tired, tired, tired. And this is true for all of us when we face our suffering, our own and others.

[35:15]

that if we don't meet it with a kind of fierce love, that all that it does is make us tired. And then she went on, after telling him tired, tired, tired, and said, and that's why you need be brave, brave, brave. And so this morning, as I was reflecting on the early imprint of that I got from Coben and his teapot and the truth of the Dharma, of our shared connectedness. It struck me that the thing that I felt in him, the thing that impressed me and really the thing that he was pointing to when he said the Dharma is what holds this teapot together, is this fabric of There's no separate solid thing, and yet everything is connected.

[36:18]

And how does that hold? It holds because the threads of the fabric are made of love. And that love is needed when we sit down, that we bring a loving awareness to meet our own inner fangs, those scary places inside. That if we can be with, be with, be with, our own difficulty with kindness, with compassion, with love, that it will transform. And it's also true when we stand up, that there's a time for sitting down, there's a time for listening, and there's a time for responding. You heard the name of my company, it's called Appropriate Response, which is from a beautiful Zen story. So what is the teaching of the teacher's entire lifetime? This is in the story. What is the teaching of your entire lifetime?

[37:20]

A student comes to his teacher on his deathbed and says, and the teacher says, an appropriate response. In order for us to respond appropriately, we need to sit and listen with love, and sometimes we need to stand up, to engage, to speak. to act, to respond to the suffering around us, also with love. And I think that's what I felt in Coben. I felt it in the way he walked, in the way he engaged with the statue, in the way he engaged with the teapot and the teacup, and mostly with the way he engaged with me as a scared young Zen student. that he met me with love and that that's carried all of these years, even though I didn't really know what he was talking about. I felt something. And so it's my wish for me and for you and for all of us that as we go forward in our wide, aching world, that we can meet

[38:38]

the difficulties that we encounter with these qualities of deep listening, of compassion, and with love. And of course, it's a tall order. And of course, we will fall down. We'll goof it up. We'll mess it up. Dozens of times. But please don't let that stop you. Please bring enough love to yourselves, and enough care for the world that every time you fall down that you're willing to get up again. And that you, as I feel today, know that you have this web of interconnection that is holding you, just as I have the hands of these women at my back and in my heart pocket holding me today. Because nobody can do your practice for you. And at the same time, because it's true, that we are deeply, deeply connected, and the threads of that connectivity are love, because of that, we can keep standing up again.

[39:48]

We can be brave, brave, brave. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost, 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. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:20]

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