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. How are you doing? Pretty good? I'm really happy to be here. Happy to be here in this hall. Happy to be here with you. Happy to share the Dharma together. I want to say something about how we listen to the Dharma. The great sage, Saint Benedict said, we listen with the ear of the heart. We listen with the ear of the heart. We listen so that we might truly hear the Dharma.

[01:03]

So we listen to Dharma talks, we study, we read, so that we might truly hear. We're very lucky to have Amitabha Buddha here with us today. He tells us to remember. He is the Bodhisattva of faith, the Buddha of faith. There's many things I could say about Amitabha Buddha, but very grateful to have him here. We listen together. So I'm not going to tell you something today that you don't already know i'm simply going to point some things out to you our hearts our minds naturally turn towards realizing our life the dharma is in your blood and bones You already are of it.

[02:07]

We naturally realize our human life. So I just want to encourage you to be at ease. Allow yourself to be here as you are. And let's explore the Dharma together. What I'm going to do is... Excuse me. What I'm going to do is talk a bit and read a bit from the book as we go along. So as David said, my name is Jakku Kinst. I was ordained right here in this hall in 1988. And then I trained for a number of years at Tassahara and here. And then I came to realize that I wanted to study more. In particular, I had a very compelling question. My question was, what works? What works to support us, to support a person, to fully engage and embody the teachings and the practices of Soto Zen?

[03:16]

How can we understand what's helpful? And so I went to graduate school. As David said, I got an MA in counseling, trained as a psychotherapist, trained as a chaplain, completed a PhD in Buddhism and Psychological Theory, and wrote a dissertation on what works. Always, I was guided by the Dharma and guided by my vow as a priest. For the last 10 years, I've been teaching at the Institute of Buddhist Studies and the Graduate Theological Union. So I... I mention these things and I review these things because I want us to remember that there are many, many ways to have a life dedicated to the Dharma. There are as many ways to realize the Dharma as there are people. And if there's anything this book is about, it's that we practice as we are.

[04:23]

We return to our practice over and over. And we do it as the complex, most often pretty flawed human beings that we are in the life that we have. We, these humans, are the subject of Zen practice, not an ideal version of who we are. So I want us to always remember that Zen practice is gritty and robust. It's meant for fields and kitchens and streets as much as it's meant for zendos. It's like a pair of work boots, really comfortable, sturdy, strong work boots, not a pair of magical glass slippers that carry us off to another realm. Our roots are in monastic practice of monasteries filled with human beings.

[05:23]

That's true. But our roots are equally in small temples with ordinary people going about ordinary lives, communities of human beings coming together to try and find the way. So we honestly investigate this question of what works for ourselves and our sanghas, and we craft lives out of that of genuine inspiration together. We come to know dedicated effort, a good dose of humility, humor, kindness, and wholesome, unstoppable determination. And we're also willing to be surprised, upended, transformed. We make a kind of pilgrimage out of our lives every day. Every day, a pilgrimage of realization. So there's a lot I could say about Zen teachings, but I want to...

[06:26]

which as I understand is the theme of this practice period, radical trust. But I want to say something about how we study. An image often used in Buddhist teachings to portray the interdependent nature of reality is that of a jeweled net. each jewel reflecting and reflected by all others. When we enter the world of Soto Zen teachings and practice, we are entering just such a multifaceted, interconnected web of jewels. In our studies, we move from one jewel to the next, and it gradually becomes clear to us that we are on an endless journey of ever-deepening richness. Anyone taking up this study must be willing to tolerate complexity, and the experience of ambiguity and paradox. For the Soto Zen practitioner, the willingness to abide with complexity, ambiguity and paradox is essential.

[07:33]

As is an understanding that what is most important is not achieving complete or perfect understanding, but deeply engaging with the practice based on the teachings. Only through embodying the teachings in this sort of engaged practice can the true fruit of study be realized? So there's two essential parts of this Buddhist practice, Buddhist teachings, that I want to emphasize. As many of you are aware, emptiness... Have anybody heard about the teachings of emptiness? Anybody not heard about the teachings of emptiness? Okay. So maybe you have some idea of what that is? Right? Maybe? So... Probably many of you know this, but I want to emphasize this. This is very important. Emptiness does not mean empty of reality or worth. It means emptiness, empty of separateness, empty of isolation, empty of permanence.

[08:42]

This is another way of saying, the flip side of this is that everything is interconnected. Each thing is interconnection. And it's also its unique form. What Dogen Zanji calls unique particularity. So the great teacher John Muir, anybody know John Muir? The great teacher John Muir said, when we pick out anything, we find it is hitched to the entire universe. When we pick out anything, we find it is hitched to the entire universe. So in Soto Zen, we take this one step further and we say this hitchness itself is the truth of reality. The truth of every aspect of reality. So this includes ourselves, yeah? So we can think of the self in many ways. Mostly we make it a lot more complicated than it needs to be. It's pretty simple, really.

[09:45]

The self is the way we organize reality. Okay? It's the way we organize reality. It is mutable, ephemeral. It's an organizing structure that arises and is always completely embedded in relational reality. And it's a never apart from that relational reality. So that's it. It's pretty simple. The teachings of no self. Anybody heard of that? Teachings of no self? No? Okay, well, I'm going to tell you something about it. A little bit. Oftentimes when people hear the teachings of no self, they think that no self exists or that no self should exist. But that's not what it means. The teachings of no self mean that we are not fixed. We are not permanent, separate, isolated. We are hitchedness. We are this dynamic reality.

[10:48]

we are, as Dogen says, a flower of emptiness, a mutable articulation of reality. So the teachings of no self are not aimed at erasing ordinary personality, diminishing our worth, our needs, our vitality. The self is not a problem to be solved or an obstacle to be obliterated. Quite the opposite. The teachings are about liberation from constricted states of suffering, liberation from the delusions that we have about this self. They aim for our full participation with kindness and clear thinking, not in withdrawal. It's also true that when we let these teachings sink in, when we allow them to touch us, they are deeply, deeply challenging because they ask us to risk a new way of being.

[11:56]

So this is what I had to say about it. Soto Zen practice is rooted in the Buddhist teachings that challenge the very foundation of our usual lived experience, the self. It asks the practitioner to enter each moment wholeheartedly let go of the self as it has been pitchily experienced and allow a different subjective experience to emerge. This is not an abstract disembodied process, but one that is lived out in detail day by day and reverberates throughout every dimension of the practitioner's experience. From the perspective of Soto Zen, Releasing the hold on the self is a necessary and radical event that is liberating. It is also a process that leads the practitioner to the edge of the known and beyond. The practice requires a willingness to allow everything on which one has relied and on which and what is most intimately known that is the self and one's notions about the nature of reality to shift and change.

[13:09]

If we look closely at this process, we find the ability to allow it is intimately linked with our experience of trust. And it requires an encounter with trust. Ultimately, it requires trust in life itself. So we become intimate with ourselves. And as we do this, we become intimate intimate with trust. So I'll just give you a little definition here. We say, trust is not easy to pin down. But Webster says, trust is akin to the English word trio, which means true. It has a meaning of assured reliance, of character, ability, strength, or truth, as well as confidence. Faith is a close relative of trust. and it comes from the Latin fetus, akin to fidere.

[14:11]

Confidence, in turn, shares the root of fidere. It means a consciousness of feeling sure. So we can think of trust as a sense of confidence that what is present is true and reliable. We think of this in terms of the physical world, The sun's going to come up, we put water on to boil, it's going to boil. We think of it interpersonally, that people will not misrepresent themselves to us, that when they say they're going to show up at Pagin Laguna at 3 o'clock, unless something strange happens, they do. And we talk about trusting ourselves, inner trust, sure of oneself. This is an inner sense of reliability. a way of thinking we can cope. So when we investigate trust, we investigate the roots of the self because our self takes shape in relationships.

[15:24]

So personally, I found the writings of Heinz Kohat Ernest Wolf, D.W. Winnicott, Eric Erickson, some of you may have heard of these people. Very helpful. They help me understand how the self is formed, how it's sustained and matures, the relationships of trust in the self, how we are supported and challenged to heal and grow and change, what happens when we're frightened, traumatized, isolated. how we can foster inner and outer environments and communities that support the practice and realization of Soto Zen by real people. So in terms of Buddhist practice, we can think of trust in two ways. But these are not really sequential, okay? The reason I...

[16:26]

mentioned that they're not sequential is that sometimes people think they need to have some kind of a perfect self before they can practice you know I've got to create this really confident striding being you know then I can sit down but you know if that were true the zendos would be empty because the zendos are filled with suffering people who struggle like us It's not about perfection. When we try and come up with an ideal self, we waste a lot of time, actually. And good luck with that. It doesn't happen anyway. So let's just skip that part, shall we all agree to skip that part? And just practice as we are. I really...

[17:26]

I hope you do that. Practice with intelligence and vigor, kindness and integrity as the flawed human being that you are. So the first dimension of trust is pretty easy to understand. The second is a little more challenging, but we'll give it a whirl. The first dimension of trust that I'm going to talk about today is a trust in the teachings. the practice and our ability to fruitfully engage in it. The capacity to be present. In this process, we test the teachings and the practice. We're skeptical. We question. We doubt. We wrestle. We examine. This is absolutely essential. Without real and solid questioning and testing, we cannot make the teachings real for ourselves. And one of the things that we can trust is that the Dharma is very tough.

[18:29]

It can stand up to anything. You can throw anything at it, and it'll be there for you. When I first encountered the Dharma, I came from a pretty political background, and I was really skeptical. But I was drawn to it at the same time. I was going to school in L.A., and I went to Zazen Instruction at CCLA. And I felt very drawn to it. But I was wondering, who are these people in black wandering around with shaved heads? I don't know about them. So I found a woman priest and made an appointment with her. And I said, I'm a feminist and I'm a lesbian and is there room for me here? I don't intend to leave anything at the door. Can I practice? And she gave me the perfect answer.

[19:33]

She said, Zen is about being completely who you are. Isn't that a great answer? So when she answered me in this way, she was respecting me. And she was challenging me. And she was inviting me. She also handed me a profound question. that has stayed with me all these years. Who are we? How are we? How are we who we most deeply are? What is that? In order to answer that question, we have to have this deep engagement. We grapple with, who are we? We come to know ourselves. We learn to be present for ourselves and others. We learn to be present for the whole range of our experience. This can be tough going sometimes. If you sit down and spend any time with your own mind and heart, it can be pretty shocking.

[20:39]

Don't you think? Anger, jealousy, bliss, lust, you name it, it's all there. So it's really, really helpful to have others that guide and support us. to embed ourselves in a relational reality in which we're seen or guided. Dogen says, it is imperative for those who practice the way to believe in it. Those who have faith in the way should know for certain that they are unfailingly in the way from the very beginning. Believing in such a manner and penetrating the way thus, practice accordingly. Such is the fundamental learning of the way. As we practice and are supported in our practice, we develop a sense of inner stability and worth. That we're capable of fruitfully engaging. Not perfectly, but fruitfully engaging in the practice.

[21:40]

That we will not be dismantled by it. That the obstacles that arise are not insurmountable. In fact, they're opportunities. Our vulnerabilities, our struggles... our opportunities. They don't disqualify us from practice. They ask us to look deeply at what it means to be supported. To cultivate humility, humor, integrity, community, compassion, intelligence, wisdom. We are not in the business of perfection. Cohut says something very interesting. Throughout this life, a person will experience himself as a cohesive, harmonious, firm unit in time and space, connected with his past and pointing meaningfully into the creative, productive future only as long as each stage in his life he experiences certain representatives of his human surround as joyfully responding to him,

[22:55]

as available to him as sources of idealized strength and calmness, as being silently present and in essence like him, and at any rate capable of grasping his inner life more or less accurately. So if we think about a supportive environment for us to practice, we can think about being seen, as Buddha by Buddha, being seen by our teachers and fellow practitioners, by having images, stories, people that we can rely on, that inspire us, that bring us energy, that we can trust for guidance. And the sense of twinship, the sense of alikeness, When I read this, I thought of entering the Zendo where everybody's sitting, silently sitting, and like us.

[23:59]

Not just the people that are there, but all the people that have ever been there, and all of the Buddhists and ancestors. So these things call us and ask us to create communities. To create environments in which we're in relationship with others who see and respect us as capable and worthy. We have respected others on which we can rely for guidance when times are tough. We come to know that we are fundamentally not different from our fellow practitioners. We are hitchedness. We are flawed. We have intention. So we give this trust, we develop this trust in relationship. We come to know that we do not need to defend against reality.

[25:04]

We give this trust to ourselves and to others, and we learn that the teachings are worthy of allowing into our world, even when we don't fully understand them. This allows for the second dimension of trust, because when we hear the teachings, the very basis of our self is challenged and transformed all the way through. When we allow this, we come to know in our bones, if even briefly, that we are not the self we supposed ourselves to be. We are not a separate, solid entity at war with reality, scrambling to get what we can. We are the fluid, dependently arisen phenomenon that Dogen teaches us about. We are completely and dynamically a part of all else.

[26:08]

We realize even for a moment that this is our true nature. This is a radical act based on radical trust, and it must grow from our involvement in practice and be sustained by a trustworthy environment. There's no other way. So we must know that the teachings and the practice support us so we can flourish. That we can do it in a wholesome way. To realize this dimension of trust is to realize who we truly are. To express who we truly are is to compassionately and fully engage in the world. And this involves a profound shift that is fundamental change fundamental spinning around and movement away from our self-obsessed reality. We have an experience then of reality in which the self is fully and heartily included, but it's not the center of the universe.

[27:18]

It's a big relief. Instead of obsessing about the self, we include it and allow it to be. Dogen says, faith, this is what he calls faith, shin, confidence, trust. Faith is so called when the entire body becomes faith itself. Faith is one with the fruit of enlightenment. The fruit of enlightenment is one with faith. Faith is the entrance to the ocean of the Dharma. Indeed, where faith is attained, there is a realization of the Buddhists and ancestors. There's much we could say about this. I encourage you to study this text. It's in the Shobha Genzo. When we enter the ocean of the Dharma, when we fully engage with practice, in that moment we become who we already are and faith is realized. The entire body, the entire universe becomes faith itself.

[28:25]

The dynamic reality of activity of this functioning event we call life. This is our practice. Zazen is the body and breath of faith, the activity of faith. Radical trust is this, that we risk realizing that we are completely and irrevocably of the way. From the beginning, no place to go, beyond our ideas, In each ordinary moment, we entrust ourselves completely to just this. Each moment that we realize this is a moment of liberation. So radical trust, faith, whatever you want to call it, is not something that comes at the end of our journey. It is our journey. In this life, right now,

[29:28]

over and over. These two dimensions of trust complement and complete each other. I think I'll skip this part. I do want to say, though, as we do this... One of the things I wanted to talk about is how this functions to give us a sense of authority in our lives. When we allow ourselves to first develop the sense of trust in which we wrestle with the teachings, we are present for our lives, we engage with trusted others, we bring a sense of presence to our moment-by-moment existence, we engage and we trust ourselves deeply, deeply, deeply, then we can allow this other dimension of trust to arise.

[30:34]

This is beyond knowing. It's beyond our contrivance. But when we do it, we find some voice in there. As a practitioner listens and responds, she allows herself to be challenged and threads her way to a ground of authority that allows her own personal Dharma voice to emerge. The word authority in this context is used in the sense of authentic, genuine, trustworthy, and honest. This meaning of authority is not a matter of repeating dogma or simply parodying what one has heard. but making the teachings one's own. This occurs in the process of challenging and being challenged by the teachings down to the bedrock of one's experience. This is the embodiment of the teachings and it is the work of a lifetime. The practitioner shares the journey with others, expresses what is real for her moment by moment without attempting to find an immutable truth

[31:49]

on which to hang her hopes and self-esteem. This confidence, Xin, is based on experience. It does not lead to a closing down or adopting rigid opinions and positions, but to a flowering of fundamental curiosity. It is both unshakable and completely fluid. Unshakable because when the practitioner knows her own embodied and connected experience, she is able to express it without fear. She knows simply that this is the truth of her life at this moment, and there is no self to defend. Fluid because it is based in and responsive to the ever-changing reality of the moment. This is what the great Zen master Lin Xi called Xin, confidence. Jishin, self-confidence, comprised of the character Ji and the character Shin.

[32:56]

Literally, it means self-trusting. But the self that Rinzai is talking about is not this frightened, separated self. It's a self that knows itself to be the activity of life itself. It knows itself to be an expression of interdependent reality. This is radical trust. This is our practice. The self that knows itself to be cannot be separated from faith or confidence or trust. How could it be separated from those things when it knows it's just this moment? So we enact this. It's a kind of listening. It's a kind of response of communion. This is another word that Dogen likes, responsive communion, of communion, of responsiveness. We flower as ourselves in that way. I mention this because it's important that we remember that the vital expression of personhood and engagement in the world is our way.

[34:12]

freed from a tyranny of perfectionism and rigidity born of fear, we can be thoroughly in the world. We can give fully to our communities. We can listen deeply and respond with others. Buddhism is above all. pragmatic tradition. The Buddha is often likened to a physician whose aim is to relieve suffering through effective and tested means. Teachers and communities of Soto Zen or any form of Buddhism offer the medicine of the Dharma and therefore are consistently engaged in the process of making that medicine useful without subverting its basic challenging to our ordinary way of understanding message.

[35:18]

To be real, the teachings must become real, must be evident in the moment-to-moment world of the practitioner's experience. Dogen, our founder, reminds us again and again, examine this, study this, make this real for yourselves. He offered a rigorous and compassionate practice meant to be enacted in all aspects of one's life. It is up to each of us to take up this challenge with honesty and compassion for ourselves and others, and to create environments and understandings that allow the teaching to take root, flourish, and transform our lives. So I want to invite you all to investigate this for yourselves, Seek out what supports and challenges you. Invite radical trust.

[36:24]

Invite yourself to experience faith. Don't hold back. Challenge yourself, the dharma, your teachers. Make it real. Make it real for yourself as an ordinary, flawed, changeable, dynamic person. gifted human being give yourself the respect the seenness the need for guidance the worthiness the fruitfulness that comes from being a part of this living way you have all you need You are utterly and completely already of the way from the beginning. So what I want to invite you to do is trust that completely with your whole life.

[37:26]

Okay? Okay. Great. Thank you very much. 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.

[38:01]

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