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. Well, I'd like to begin today by remembering four Zen priests who've passed away in the last few months. Each one a truly remarkable, memorable, almost legendary person and a treasure of the sangha. Thanks. So I just want to mention their names and remember them for a moment. I think that it's true that Jerome Peterson

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Chikgu Do, Jerome Peterson, died while walking down the hallway at 300 Page Street, Zen Center, where he lived for many years. Jerome was in his 80s. He was truly a remarkable and very unusual person. And he looked it. He was very unusual looking. I couldn't even begin to describe what Jerome looked like. He had the oddest posture in zazen. When he settled down into his seat on the tan, it was hard to tell if there was anyone there or whether it was just a big pile of robes with possibly a bald head popping out somewhere, but you never could tell, like, where exactly. Somebody was telling me that

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the first time they ever sat session. They were having such a hard time, and they looked over at Jerome, and they felt so much better. And I don't know if this is a true story about him, but someone told me this, and I believe it. They said that for years, Jerome had a very small reading group, and they were reading the Avatamsaka Sutra. And it's a very long sutra. They would read just for a few hours a week. And it took them 18 years to read through the sutra. And then when they got to the last page, Jerome simply started over again at the beginning without comment, without saying a word. He began again. And then here in this room,

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In fact, I think the last time that I was in this room, maybe a couple weeks ago or so, it was for a large funeral ceremony for Darlene Cohen, who was a very well-loved Zen teacher. And I'm sure many of you heard her give a talk here. She was especially known for her work with chronic pain. which was very personal for her because she had had really debilitating rheumatoid arthritis, which I think somehow began when she lived here at Green Gulch in her 20s many years ago. So she made this path of dealing with chronic pain her way through Dharma and through life and was able to help many, many people over the years. We have a student in one of our groups in the Pacific Northwest who also has had this from childhood and looked to Darlene as her example and her mentor.

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Darlene was a lively, plain-speaking, fun-loving person. I remember in the 1980s in Zen Center in the city, Michael Wenger decided that we needed like an in-house newsletter. So we started this, I forget what the name of it was, but I remember well that he engaged Darlene to write a gossip column for this newsletter. I think she, yeah, Dear Abidahmur. I remember it was a silly name. And I was astonished by this gossip column. It was so well written and so very, very wicked. And I don't know, but maybe that was Darlene's first published writing. But this got her going, and she kept writing after that and went on to publish several wonderful books that I'm sure many of you know about.

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And if you don't, I'm sure you can find them here in the bookstore and other places. The two titles that I know about are The One Who's Not Busy and Turning Suffering Inside Out, both of which are really good books. So losing Darlene, she was just sort of getting going good. It was really a blow to many of us. So it's good at least that we have these books that will help her teachings to survive. She was only 66 years old, which seems not so old these days for dying, although I guess you're old enough to die when you're 66. She had cancer. went on for a while, and she maintained her good spirits and full schedule as long as she possibly could. And when it was time to give up, she put a great deal of effort into planning her funeral, empowered her disciples, and let go peacefully.

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It's usual in Zen funerals that there's a procession, a fairly large procession in with people carrying different things to put on the altar that memorialize the person. And there's often as many as six, eight, ten, twelve people in a procession. According to her instructions, Darlene's procession had 32 people in it. I think the world's record so far. And this afternoon, over at the city center, we're going to have another funeral. This one for Lou Hartman, who many of you probably know. He died just a few weeks ago in his 90s. And he was also a remarkable and an extremely lovable person for a curmudgeon. He was very lovable. And I see some faces in the assembly here of...

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old-timers who would remember him from the days when, many decades ago, he lived here at Green Gulch, and wherever there was dishwashing going on or cleaning work, you would see him there. Before he was practicing Zen, he had lots of jobs, and in the 50s he was a famous radio personality in San Francisco. Somehow, I don't know why, but the radio show was named the Jim Grady Show. So whoever was doing that show was always called Jim Grady. So Lou was known as Jim Grady on the Jim Grady Show. And he was very political and very outspoken and serious about his politics, which is why he got blacklisted in the 1950s and was not able to work again. As a Zen priest,

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He practiced simplicity and humility and always absolutely refused any leadership roles, any teaching roles. And he washed dishes. That's what he did and took care of things, took care of altars, did small repairs around the temple. I was telling Blanche the other day that about 25 years ago, I loaned Lou my gizmo that clips my hair, you know, when it gets long, a little buzz machine. I loaned it to him. He needed it about 25 years ago. And I kept it in a very thin cardboard box that it came in. So when he returned it to me, he had duct taped the box, you know, perfectly. It was like a work of art, this box. And I just finally fell apart about it less than a year ago.

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It lasted 25 years, this very thin cardboard box, because of his duct tape work. I hope that some of you have been lucky enough to hear Lou give a Dharma talk. He didn't do it very often, but when he did, it was quite special. And he would always give the same talk. He would walk into the zendo. He would sit down, looking really kind of perplexed and upset. And he would say, I had a whole talk prepared. But just as I was walking into the zendo, or sometimes it would be just an hour ago, or just yesterday, something happened to me. that totally changed my life so completely that everything I believed before right now is completely out the window and the talk that I had planned to give you is no longer relevant.

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And then he would talk about all the things in his life that similarly had failed him. His family of origin that he believed in so much proved to be unreliable. Christianity, he was a preacher, a Christian preacher as a kid. That proved to be unreliable. Marxism was unreliable. Everything was unreliable all the way up to and including his faith in Zen Buddhism, which had just on the way to the Zendo or yesterday or the day before been completely shattered. And now he had absolutely nothing to believe in and absolutely nothing to say. And it would take him about 40 minutes to explain all this. And that would be his talk. But amazingly enough, every time he did this, it seemed like it was the first time.

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It seemed completely sincere and completely real. It did not seem like he was making this up. Maybe he forgot that he had... gone through this the last time, I don't know. But it always seemed very sincere that when he was speaking, it was as if his cherished beliefs had just now been shattered. And this was the last straw for him. This was absolutely the end of the line. And the only thing he had left was this moment of saying so. I was... lucky enough to have been able to spend a little bit of time with Lou during the last days of his life. He had a fall, he had a lot of pain, medications that really addled his brain. So it was really a marvelous thing to witness him thinking through in his own way what life and death was all about and what he should do now, which direction he should go.

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And we spoke about this, and he was thinking very hard about it. He died with his children and his grandchildren nearby, and Blanche was there all the time. Many of you know Blanche, I'm sure, who was one of our abbesses at Zen Center some time ago. A 62-year marriage. The fourth priest that I'll just mention briefly is Wendy Matlow, who we just had word of, her death. Her dharma name is Yogi Shogetsu. And she was ordained with me and my wife, Kathy, and a group of others on January the 6th, 1980. I think that she's the first member of our ordination group to pass away. And I had not seen her for many years, but we would hear of her many difficulties.

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She lost her husband. She had a lot of medical problems, including being hit by a car, I think. So when she got breast cancer, she didn't really have much reserve. She was pretty young, maybe around 60, maybe not yet 60. So anyway... I just wanted to tell you about these four great people, Zen priests, more or less in the first generation of people ordained here at Zen Center, when Zen Center was just getting going. So, a generation is now beginning to pass from the scene. here at Zen Center and throughout our nation and the world, our generation, my generation.

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So this is good, no? That's what happens. Generation comes and expresses itself and passes on. Necessary thing to make room for the next generation. Still pretty sad. And I hope and I pray that there are new people coming with the same passion and the same commitment for practice that Jerome and Darlene and Lou and Wendy had. A new generation of remarkable people will become remarkable because of the background of dharma. And I'm sure that there are such people already here, already preparing themselves and all of us for a new era.

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I think we all know how precious life is and how precious Dharma is, and we need some people to make it a life's work. So my words today are dedicated to the memory of these four remarkable Zen priests and also dedicated to those who are coming to replace them. And I want to talk a little bit about a Zen story that seems to me in the spirit of our friends. And the story is called, When You Greet Me, I Vow. This is the story. Long Tan was making rice cakes for a living. When he met Tianhuang, the Zen priest, he bowed in recognition and left his household and followed Tianhuang. Tianhuang said, be my attendant.

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From now on, I will teach you the essential Dharma gate. A year passed by and Long Tan said... you said you were going to teach me the essential Dharma gait, but I haven't received any instructions yet. Tian Huang said, but I've been teaching you for all this time. Lao Teng said, what have you been teaching me? Tian Huang said, when you greet me, I bow. When I sit, you stand beside me. when you bring tea, I receive it from you. Long Tan was silent for a while. Tian Huang said, when you see it, you just see it. When you think about it, you miss it. And then Long Tan had great enlightenment. So, this story is among my favorites.

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Zen stories because it just indicates the utter simplicity of our practice. Despite the exotic Chinese literary background, there isn't really that much to our practice. It's not a special insight. It's not a powerful experience. It's not some secret knowledge. I'm not saying there's nothing at all to it or that we're all wasting our time. There seems to be something to it. And I think when we practice over time, our lives do seem to change. And we do seem to live our lives and see our lives within a different framework. I hope, anyway, we do with more openness and ease. maybe with more kindness, maybe a little more wisdom.

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You might say that the practice seasons us and matures us. Although, who knows, maybe we become seasoned and mature, but can't we really say the practice did that? Maybe the practice is just a catalyst that allows nature to take its course. Nature doesn't always take its course, you know? We don't always grow up. So practice is not a something. It's not a skill. It's not a body of knowledge. And it's also not a matter of experience either, being experienced in the practice. Somehow you're smarter than somebody who's less experienced. I don't think so. Time just passes. We keep on practicing. Our lives are what they are, and that's enough.

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Over the course of time, we do pick up a feeling for life, a certain kind of flavor in our living. Maybe somebody would call it Zen or attribute it to Zen, but I don't even know what the word Zen means anymore, so I wouldn't call it Zen myself. And the main method is not meditation, although certainly we talk about meditation a lot and we do a lot of meditation. But the main method, as we see in this story, is hanging around together. This is the key point. it's easy to forget it or not even notice it in the context of our contemporary lives, which are so focused on individual achievement and development and training and acquisition.

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So we tend to understand the practice itself in those terms. We see Zen practice as another format for our self-development. another skill or technique or system of understanding that would help us figure out our lives and master them and be better off. I think that's how most of us would imagine that's what we're doing in Zen practice. But I don't think that's it. Because most of us don't live together as the ancients did. And as we still do here at Zen Center, at our three practice places, we might think that the practice isn't anymore about hanging around together like it was in ancient times. Like I say, those of us in the room who live at Zen Center do hang around together, but the rest of us might think, well,

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We don't really hang around with other practitioners. We hang around with our own friends and our own families and coworkers and our own lives. And we might come together to hang around with other practitioners once in a while, like Sunday morning at Green Gulch, but not that often. So you may think the hanging around part is not for us. But I think it is just as important for us as for for the ancients. What does it mean to hang out together? How much time does it take to hang out? It just takes a moment. To encounter one another, to know one another, is not necessarily a matter of lots of time. It literally does take a moment to observe and take in the presence of another.

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It takes a moment for that presence to go deep inside and impress us and change our lives. And maybe this is where the meditation practice really helps, because the meditation, and not only the meditation, but also the ritual and the statues and the lore, And the teachings help to create a non-ordinary, non-normal atmosphere in which these little moments can go deeply in and we can feel something about our lives we don't ordinarily feel. Not that this something isn't there anyway all the time. The potential for us to have a moment of true encounter is always there. In fact, you could say that is the essence of every moment.

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Every moment of lived time is a moment of encounter that will change us forever in very profound ways. I think we all know that, but we don't receive the moments of our lives in that way. We're busy thinking about something else and we don't notice. the depths of what's happening. So, meditation practice, the feeling of the temple, the rituals, the teachings, and so on, do help us. Make it more likely that we will remember that this is a moment of our lives in which something truly momentous is taking place. A great word, no? Momentous. According to the dictionary, it means extremely important or crucial, especially in its effect on the future course of events.

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That's momentous. Which, of course, comes from the word moment. An instant of time. a very short instant of time that has ultimate significance. Something is a moment, we say. It's momentous. In Zen, momentous moments are moments of profound teaching, such as the one Tianhuang mentions in our story. When we greet each other, we bow. We sit together in silence. We stand together. We walk together. We drink tea. Probably you've all heard the story of the student of the Hasidic Rebbe who said, I didn't come here to receive the Rebbe's teachings.

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I didn't come here to study with him. I came here to see how he ties his shoes. So we spend time together tying our shoes. We get to know one another in this way. Not exchanging views and opinions and personal histories, although maybe we do that as well. But that's not really the point, because on a fundamental level, these things are not who we really are. They're just occasions. They're just occasional things. for us to be together face-to-face. Lately, as I'm sure all of you know, there's been all these studies about the brain and emotions somehow. If you mention the word brain, it's an attraction for funders.

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And they will give you piles of money. you say you want to build a meditation hall, it's much more difficult. But if you said we're going to put an MRI machine inside the meditation hall, you could get a lot of money. Anyway, so many studies and all kinds of books, one after the other, are written about this. And there's a new one out by, of all people, David Brooks, who's the New York Times columnist and TV columnist. It's funny, David Brooks is very shy, it seems. And yet he's on TV constantly being shy. Anyway, he wrote a new book about all this. I think it's called The Social Animal. I'm sure you've heard about it because he's been on every single radio and TV show talking about it.

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And it's all about the emotions. which he finds the study of the emotions very germane to his political and social commentary, because that's what he mostly does. So he's saying in the book that most of what goes on between us is not what seems to be going on. Most of what goes on between us is not conscious. It's subtle and pretty much unknown to us. It is exactly momentous. We stand in each other's presence. We drink in each other's being. We know each other and we influence each other in mysterious ways. This is true.

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And this is the actual teaching. We turn each other inside out simply by being in each other's presence. Breathing together, sitting together, walking, standing. Somebody said to me the other day, I know your feet are And I understood, you know, what the person meant. It's a funny thing to say, isn't it? A very intimate thing to say. We can know somebody quite well. They can be our good friend. We can know their story. We can know their issues, like we say. But maybe we don't know their feet. Maybe we don't know their hands.

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Maybe we don't know a turn of the head. Maybe we don't really know their face. Maybe we don't really know their voice. And yet, what are we if not our feet and our hands and our face and our voice in a turn of the head? It takes a moment to know these things about each other, a moment in which our minds are quiet and our hearts are completely open. So although probably most of us here in the room don't live together with other practitioners, in another way we do live together and we are living together right now. in this life, we have no one but each other, and there is no other life but our life together.

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So, it only takes a moment, but also it takes a long time, years, decades, in which there are many such moments. One moment is good and it may be enough, but also many such moments deepens our relationship. Time intensifies our concern and commitment to one another. One of the most beautiful experiences that we can have is to know the feeling that another person is really for us, really with us, come what may, and shares the deepest commitment that we have made in a lifetime. That we know this person and that this person knows us and shares this commitment with us.

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This is not a matter of what this person is gonna do for us. It goes far beyond that. It's much more important to us, that feeling that we have, that we are here for one another, come what may. When you have friends like that, you feel happy and you feel strong in your living. And you know that even if everyone were to disappear, you would still feel that way because it's clear that although this is given to you by others, it's not about a particular person or a particular group of people.

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It's about reality itself. Reality itself is lovely. Reality itself is loving. And this is not an idea you have or a belief. It's a sense of absolute certainty. So this maybe takes time. There may be more time. but it begins with a moment, and a moment, and a moment, and little by little, you feel this way. So I'm talking about, and this story is talking about, spiritual friendship, something deep and wonderful. And I think most people do not really appreciate the extent to which Zen is a very tender-hearted, Very other-oriented, very intimate tradition.

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It can fool you, you know, on the surface. It doesn't look like that. But when you think of it, all Zen stories, pretty much all of them, are about encounter. They're all about sharing life together. They're not about one person's insight. They're about people sharing life together. And more than... Buddhas and bodhisattvas, in Zen, we speak about ancestors. Ancestors who are people. People we feel grateful for. People we take deeply into our hearts. Just like we take into our hearts the presence of our biological ancestors. As if we were them. And we really are them in so many ways, right? Our DNA. is theirs. Our bodies actually come from them. In Zen, we take on the lineage.

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We join a lineage family. And the feeling is that we take on that family's DNA. And people in the lineage share a kind of family heritage in the same way that we share the heritage biologically. And it becomes who we are and what we are. So this is much more than, or depending on your point of view, a lot less than something that we could learn or accomplish or get good at. In a minute we'll chant the vow. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. So maybe all this that I'm saying here is more esoteric than I really mean it to be. As if somehow we Zenies had cornered the market on some kind of special spiritual intimacy that nobody else understands.

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And to be perfectly honest with you, I used to think that. I used to think, you know, people in the world, how could they possibly understand this? But as time has gone on, the reason why I don't even hardly ever like to use the word Zen is because everything seems like Zen practice to me now. Almost everything. For instance, in the university, to take an example, I have a lot of friends who are professors who train graduate students. Some of them are Buddhist scholars training. future scholars, some of them are professors of poetry, training the next generation of poets, some of them are scientists, training research scientists. And when I talk to them about what they do, I notice that in their case too, there's a kind of bonding that takes place, a kind of imprinting, a true intimacy between students and their disciples.

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It's not understood that way or presented that way. It's presented as an intellectual tradition. But in the end, when you really look at what goes on, it turns out that it's much more than the ideas conveyed. It turns out that the ideas are just an excuse for deeper feelings of meaning and connection that people in a profession feel with one another. And this sense of intimate connection can extend to almost any form of human interaction. The deep connection expressed in this story of Long Tan and Tianhuang is something that we can feel if we allow it in all of our encounters. And maybe the virtue of our Zen practice is that it can remind us of and evoke this sense of connection. which I think we then see present everywhere, not just in the Zen community.

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In fact, to me it seems like a crucial point that we understand that this is not just in the Zen community, that it is something universal. Because when communities become exclusive, they become cultish, they really get screwed up. And they hurt people. And when you think about it, you know, all the world's great religions understand their message as universal, not exclusive. Even though feelings of exclusivity and specialness are natural when we feel we've found something really important. for human life, and so these things happen. But hopefully we mature, we get over them. When we don't, it's trouble.

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Tian Huang says, when you greet me, I bow. This bowing is an ancient form of greeting in India, a little foreign in our culture, where instead we have the handshake, which in a way is more intimate, you know, to actually take another person's hand. But they say that the origin of the handshake is suspicion and wariness. The handshake is a gesture of peace and harmlessness because it demonstrates that we are not holding a weapon in our hands. Our hands are empty of aggression, and we show this by offering our hand and taking the hand of another. So the good news... The handshake is more intimate than the bow. The bad news, this intimacy is predicated on the default possibility of aggression that we're now temporarily setting aside in order to shake hands with somebody.

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But it's always possibly there. So bowing is interesting. It becomes, in the Zen world, something we get used to doing. a greeting that feels natural to us. And it acknowledges a deep respect for one another and a feeling of friendliness, but also a distance. When you greet me, I bow. This expresses my deep love and respect for you. But the space between us, the warm, space between us, when we bow to one another, also expresses that this connection between us also depends on our aloneness. And we can never understand another person. We can never think we understand another person.

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The only place we can meet is in the empty space between us, a space charged with openness. silence and mystery. Tianlong says, when you see it, you just see it. When you think about it, you miss it. So it's so simple. When you see it, you just see it. It's not some big deal. It's very obvious that we encounter one another that we change one another, that there's such a profound connection between us. It's very obvious. And there's no trick to it, nothing special about it. It's just being human. Of course, you could also think about it. Mu Hartman spent his whole life thinking about it.

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And to me, it's very interesting and fun to think about it. As Dogen teaches us, thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it, is just another form of it. It's not about it. It actually is it. So, this morning, I have been talking to you because that's my job this morning. but I haven't really been talking to you about something. I have been bowing to you. I have been drinking tea with you. I have been sitting quietly with you. I have been practicing with you this ritual that we call in Zenitesho or Dharma talk.

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We've been doing this together. There's no doubt that if you were not here, I would not be sitting here talking. My talking only exists because of your listening. This is what we do for one another each and every day. Thank you for that and for your efforts to take care of your own practice and to continue the practice into the future. It is a rare and precious human treasure, although it's the most common thing in the world. And it's something that we need now, we needed before, we need now, and we will need maybe even more.

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in future times. So, let's all think about not so much our own lives and our own practice, but how can we help preserve this ancient treasure as an offering to human beings for the future. Thank you very much for listening. It's nice to see everybody today. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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