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. So welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple, especially those of you who are here for the first time. Just remember that since it's Beginner's Mind Temple, you have the edge on the rest of us. We have to work on being beginners. It just comes naturally to you. So I'm not sure. Often on the first Saturday of the month, we have the first segment of the talk is dedicated to the children. However, we have just... one person who might fall into that category in the conventional way of looking at it.

[01:03]

What's your daughter's name? Eva. Eva. I have a question for you, okay? And then I won't put you on the spot anymore. What's the best poem your mother ever read to you? Think about it. Maybe it's just an image that comes in it. Eva's mother, Denise, is a poet. A little prompting from mom. Okay. You sure? Not even an image? A cow, a horse, a cloud, field of grass, children playing. Nothing. Okay. Sorry, Denise.

[02:06]

You try your best. Oh, well. Sorry to put you on the spot. Last weekend, I was teaching at Kasahara with a poet named Naomi Shihabnai. you may or may not know and then she flew back to San Antonio where she lives and then on Wednesday she was doing part of the wonder of interconnected world she was doing a class from San Antonio connected to Baghdad her father was Palestinian And she has spent quite a bit of time in the Middle East, and so she has this kind of dual world, Western and Middle Eastern.

[03:08]

And at Tassajara, especially when you go for a workshop, things are quite lovely. Somebody else cooks all your food, washes all your dishes. You have no bills to pay, no laundry to do. You just have all this spacious time to savor the moment. And especially when you have a gifted, charming poet to bring forth the joys and beauties of the world. It's quite wonderful. And it seems... Naomi has come for five years in a row. It seems that for her, too, it's quite wonderful. And then on the way, as we were driving back to the city, she was talking about Baghdad, just in a very human way.

[04:15]

What do you say? What do you say to someone who lives in a place where suicide bombings and shootings are commonplace? or an everyday event. And just to think that in the midst of that you're still worrying about your job, about your relationship, about when you're going to go buy groceries, about how your kids are going to do at school if there is a school, and how your kids are going to do at school if there isn't a school. she said to me, what would you do? And I said, I would just remember, I don't know what their world is.

[05:16]

I don't know what it's like to live under those conditions. So then she emailed me a couple of days later and said, yeah, that worked. They needed to talk. They needed to speak their truth. They needed to let something be acknowledged by themselves and whoever was kind enough to listen. In this case, Naomi. And you know, Naomi was at Tassajara. She gave a reading, as poets are usually asked to do. And she was asked to read almost what I think has become her signature poem. And it's when she's written, probably over 20 years ago. She actually, I'm looking at the book to see when the book was published.

[06:21]

80, hmm. So, how about 30 years ago? She was on her honeymoon in Colombia. And the bus was stopped by bandits. Her and her husband were taking a bus ride, and the bus was stopped by bandits. And the bandits took everything they had, except the clothes on their back and their shoes. And so they ended up getting off the bus in a little village in the middle of nowhere, actually in the middle of Colombia, which is the center of the universe for whoever lives there, right? And the villagers, in response to these strangers, responded with kindness. Took care of them, gave them a place to stay, gave them some clothes to keep them warm in the cold nights, fed them.

[07:26]

So she wrote a poem called Kindness. That has become her signature poem. I'll read you a little bit of the start of it so you get the flavor of it. Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things. Feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth, what you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved. All this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be. between the regions of kindness. How fierce the world is. How close that fierceness is both the kindness and suffering.

[08:30]

In many ways this is the primary teaching of Buddhism. That this fierce world, as David White says, with its fierce need to change us, is both so close to kindness and so close to suffering. And within the context of Buddhism, the response to this is to take refuge. Classically said, to take refuge in Buddha, take refuge in Dharma, take refuge in Sangha. And that's what I'd like to talk about this morning. I think part of the challenge for us when we read spiritual literature, the experience of our lives may stand in contrast to a certain way of expressing that, to take refuge in Buddha.

[10:10]

We may think this is something different. from what we're doing every day. We may think this refers to some world other than the world we're living in. We may think that the world we live in is different from a small village in the remote mountains of Colombia or the sprawling streets of war-torn Baghdad. In a very immediate way, in a very fundamental way, it's no different. It's all just human beings getting up in the morning. There's a wonderful poem by Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Up Early. Why I... because my cell phone goes off.

[11:11]

Someone said to me recently, in a casual way, they said, oh, and then I wake up with a sense of dread. A kind of, oh no, another day. that way in which the ferocity of life can incline us towards the fragility of our suffering. And how do we hold that tenderly, compassionately, skillfully? And how do we discover in that holding something about kindness? something about compassion. So, especially in the spirit of Zen practice, taking refuge is not so much a simple prescription.

[12:33]

To take refuge, we do this, we don't do that. It's more like a relationship. And like any relationship, it's an ongoing discovery. And as you work with it, you discover there's many aspects to it, there's many facets to it. You know, sometimes taking refuge in Buddha, being the moment, Being what is. Not being lost in preoccupation, distraction. Not allowing the difficulty that's here to become generalized and swamp you into a morass.

[13:35]

Not to just spend all your time wishing for something entirely different than here. You know, all these different movements, all these different movements of our mind and heart, each one of them asks a question, what is it to practice with this? When this is what arises, what is taking refuge in Buddha? Sometimes discipline. Okay. Don't get carried away. Don't become reactive. Don't let the habit energy take over and dictate. Meet it afresh.

[14:41]

Meet it just as it is. Let it be more simple. And this is something that zazen is so good for. Just discovering how to stay present. How to keep returning like a heartbeat. Okay, what's happening now? What's happening now? And to let that returning not be so much of a struggle, a determined effort to control, but more just dancing with the movement of mind and heart. And let that dance happen here. So that kind of discipline.

[15:46]

Sometimes it's about A willingness to just be. Like a patience. Okay. This is how it is right now. It's difficult. It's delightful. It's boring. It's intensely exciting. Okay? This is how it is. Sometimes a curiosity. How amazing, but I have no idea when that sign is going to happen. And how to let the interruption be more like an exclamation mark than

[16:53]

I don't know what. A reason for distress. That kind of curiosity. What's going to come to mind next? I was talking to someone recently and they were explained to me why they didn't want to have a relationship with someone. And then in the details of explaining, they added the detail that they had emailed the person 300 times. And I thought, how curious our minds and hearts are. That we could say those two things and not see, is there something here that's a little more complex and you just don't want to do this?

[18:04]

That kind of curiosity. It's not so determined to know but more interested in discovering, exploring. Even me, you know, this habit energy that has been with us since we were born. Well, maybe it took a few months to get it going. Rilke wrote this peculiar poem. Excuse me for describing it like that. I remember watching this documentary about Leonard Cohen.

[19:08]

And you know, Leonard Cohen's been a lifelong Zen student. And at one point he decided that he would literally drop everything and go to the monastery. I think about 15 years ago. I'm not totally sure, but somewhere around that. So he did. He decided he would spend 10 years with his teacher in a monastery, Mount Baldy, with Suzuki Roshi. And while he was at the monastery, his manager, or someone of his entourage, spent all his money. So when he came out of the monastery, he was totally broke. To his surprise. I think he did see a certain kind of appropriateness.

[20:10]

Anyway, in the documentary, he was talking about life. And he was saying... Well, the one thing I've learned is you can make life an issue of success, of achievement. But really, it's not. It's not about pouring all your life energy into succeeding. So in this poem, Rilke takes that notion. I think for most of us there's some sense. At least we've got to overcome something. We've got to defend against harm, or our enemies, or them, however we construe them. Rokey takes it and turns it upside down and extols the virtue of defeat. For some reason he calls the poem, The Man Watching.

[21:18]

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after so many dull days, on my worried window panes, there's a storm coming. The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on across the woods and across time, and the world looks as if it had no age. What we choose to fight is so tiny, What fights us is so great. If only we would let ourselves be dominated, as things do, by some intense storm. We would become strong and not need names. When we win, it's with small things. And the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.

[22:23]

Whoever is beaten or who simply declined to fight went away proud and strengthened and graved from that harsh hand that needed her as if to change her shape. Winning does not tempt that person. That is how she grows, by being defeated decisively. by constantly greater things. The sense that life, with its determined energy, with its complexities, with its ever-changing presentation, is inviting us into something larger than the preoccupations of me. something larger than the agendas that I set and call success.

[23:30]

That something can open in this engagement. Taking refuge in Buddha. You know, really, you only have to sit still for a couple of moments and watch the play of your mind and heart. to just see the vitality of your own being, to see that it's not really under your control, that this great life force that we participate in is passing through in its endless array of manifestations. This is what Rilke, to my mind, is what Rilke is pointing at. Let yourself be part of everything.

[24:35]

Let yourself be part of Baghdad. Let yourself be part of a village in remote Colombia. You know, at Tassajara, for many years, we had an abundance of blue jays. And if you know stellar jays, the blue jays we have at Tassajara in that ecosystem, they're very persistent. They're experts at snatching up scraps of food. And even on the way out, We set our bide lunches down to go into the zendo to bow out, to bow to the altar before we left, which is the tradition. And while we were in, the blue jays come down and pecked holes in the bags, just to remind us.

[25:40]

But anyway, over the years, we've created ways to enclose our eating areas so the jays get less to eat, less of the human food scraps. And then recently, we also created a new enclosure for our compost bins. So the grind squirrels who were feasting on the compost had to go back to their natural habitat. And as they did, both the squirrels and the blue jays, they both returned to eating the berries and the other things. that are part of their natural habitat. And we've noticed some of the changes that is created. There are now more, now there's now less blue jays and more of other birds. Just to say, this play of life is always going on.

[26:44]

And we're always part of it. And it's not just a human endeavor. It's not just a human drama. It's an all-being drama. It's not just me in my world. It's me and all beings in this great world. So in Buddhism, we say taking refuge in Sangha. That is, I engage and become part of greater being, I join with the world of greater being and all the beings in it. This is the nature of it. How could these bombings in Baghdad persist?

[27:49]

I have to confess that... I'm utterly confused who's bombing who in Iraq now. And why? When they were fighting the U.S. troops, that in its own cruel way made sense. But when they're bombing each other, when they're breaking into tribes that keep changing their relationship with each other, in terms of friend and enemy. And yet, does it do anything other than vividly demonstrate a human tendency that we all have of breaking the world into us and them? So taking refuge in sangha is simply to say, it's all us.

[28:50]

whether we want to see our relationship with the Blue Jays, or whether we want to see our relationship with the different tribal factions in Iraq, or Yemen, or Saudi Arabia, or Oklahoma, or wherever. So in the language of Buddhism, to take refuge in Sangha. As you walk down the street, the only person you will meet is us. But them is just construct that arises out of our fear, our confusion,

[29:58]

And how do we learn how to be such a way? How do we learn how to return to such a way? And this is to take refuge in Dharma. In some ways, an interplay between those moments of insight, those moments when something registers. Look at this. And the interplay between that and the habit energy of our mind, which in its pain, in its suffering, in its fear, in its confusion, sets up us and them. sets up some rigid way of thinking and being?

[31:10]

What is it to let those insights that naturally arise for us to guide us in our behaviors, in our way of relating? And how do we stay close enough to our experiences But those insights are not just once every five years, but maybe several times a day. Some of the famous Zen teachers, when asked about this, said, I stay close. I stay close to my experience. The sound of the cuckoo. calling me home. That's how he turned it into verse. The feelings in my heart, the attitude that arises when I'm creating us and them.

[32:29]

I read yesterday about a bomb that went off in Saddam Hussein's hometown. I thought they were, the Sunnis were the ones that were setting off the bombs trying to kill the Shiites. What a complex world we live in. And how do we learn What is right speech? What is kind speech? How do we learn how to talk to each other in a way that draws us closer and connects us rather than separates us?

[33:36]

In the spirit of Zen, the admonitions of practice are inquiry. How do you discover what right speech is? Well, pay attention to how you talk, what you say, how you say it, when you say it, with what attitude you say it. And then the very process conversation of engaging becomes an inquiry that can teach you. This kind of attitude, bringing this inquiry forth, is the wind of the Zen school, is how we express our practice. This is having the mind of a beginner.

[34:44]

Always exploring, always learning, always discovering. This is what holds taking refuge in Buddha and taking refuge in Sangha and teaches us how they are the same thing. How with the mind of inquiry, with the mind and heart, that enters the moment to experience it. Us and them become one. Buddha and being human are not different. Our suffering in some amazing way is linked to our kindness. Before we can know what kindness is, you must lose things.

[35:53]

Feel the future dissolve in a moment, like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted, and carefully saved. All this must go, so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel with the Indian and the white poncho lies dead at the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plants and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing inside. You must wake up with sorrow.

[36:53]

You must speak it till it fills your voice. Then only kindness makes sense. So that to face our life, Not so much with the hesitancy and fear, worrying if things are going to be to our liking, if we're going to get what we want. But with some extraordinary courage, this is what it is to be alive. And we're all part of it. And then being part of it, is difficult and a blessing, and they can't be separated. What a strange coin.

[37:56]

How does a human being navigate such a state of existence? Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge And this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:34]

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