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 evening, everyone. My name is Tova Green and I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to speak tonight. I want to thank David Zimmerman, our Head of Practice for inviting me and also my teacher, Agent Linda Cutts, for all the support she's given me over, we've worked together now for 20 years. Quite remarkable. I wonder, is anyone here for the first time tonight? A special welcome to you. So I thought tonight I would dedicate my talk to two people who... died in the past week much too young.

[01:03]

I think I may take the liberty of saying that. One was a Zen and yoga teacher, Michael Stone, who died at the age of 42 very suddenly. And the other was the son of a friend who practices here, Desmond Creedy. And I think Desmond was in his 20s and he, 28, And I just can imagine the grief these families are feeling about the sudden loss of these two wonderful people. And for me it's always a reminder of how precious our lives are and we never know how much time we have. So it's... as it says on the Han life is fleeting gone the Han is an instrument downstairs that is sounded when it's time for us to go to the meditation hall for those of you who are new and it has written on it don't waste your life so I think that's always a good reminder how precious life is

[02:29]

So I recently spent two weeks at Tassajara, two separate weeks. I was back here in between for a week. The first time I went for a poetry retreat with Jane Hirshfield, who's a poet who lives in Marin, and also was a Zen student for many years a few decades ago, and her life and poetry are permeated by practice. And then last week I was there co-leading with my friend Dana Takagi who teaches in Santa Cruz the LGBTQ study week. And the theme of the study week was widening our sense of self. So I thought that would be my topic for tonight. And when I mentioned to one person this morning that about I was going to talk about widening our sense or ourselves.

[03:32]

He said, well, what do you mean by that? And how does one do that? So I'll be exploring that tonight with a story and a poem. And I'll be talking about some of the things that we studied and shared in the retreat last week. And in terms of finding or coming upon a wider sense of self, I'm thinking also about that part of ourselves that engages with other people and with the wider world. So the story I'd like to start with is from a collection of 100 stories about our women ancestors.

[04:34]

It's called The Hidden Lamp. And it's called The Hidden Lamp because women's stories, we don't see them as commonly as we do stories of men. story collections, the koan collections, are stories of a male teacher and his male student or two Dharma brothers. Occasionally there are women who appear. So Sue Moon and Florence Kaplow, who edited The Hidden Lamp, looked far and wide for stories of women ancestors, starting from the time of the Buddha, the Buddha's adopted mother, Mahapajapati was the first nun that the Buddha ordained, who the Buddha ordained. And there were many others. And then stories of our Chinese and Japanese women ancestors and of some contemporary women teachers as well.

[05:40]

And each of these hundred stories has with it a commentary by a contemporary woman teacher. So it's a real treasure store of stories. And the one that I'll share tonight is one that we studied at Tassahara last week. It's called Mo Shan's Mountain Summit. And for those of you who chant, know the women ancestors whose names we chant, Mo Shan Liao Ran is one of those women, one of our Chinese ancestors. So... This is a story. The monk, Guanxi Shuren, was sent by his teacher, Master Linji Yishuan, to meet Master Mo Shan Liao Ran, a powerful woman teacher. When he arrived at Mount Mo Shan, many of the names of Chinese teachers are named, I'm not sure if the mountain was named for the...

[06:50]

for the teacher, or the teacher was named for the mountain. Do you know that? I don't know. But Mount Moshan, Moshan is her name, where she taught. When he arrived, he refused to bow to her or to take off his traveling hat. He asked, what is Moshan? Moshan replied, the summit cannot be seen. He then asked, who is the master of Mount Moshan? She replied, without the form of a man or a woman. He shouted, why doesn't she transform herself? And she replied, she is not a wild fox spirit nor a ghost. What would you have her become? Guanxi bowed and took off his hat. He became the gardener at her monastery and stayed for three years.

[07:51]

So there was some shift that happened in that dialogue where Guan Shi realized that Mo Shan Liaran could be a teacher for him. When he first met her, I think that refusing to bow to her or take off his traveling hat was a real sign of disrespect. So the commentary about this story was written by Shinshu Roberts, who's a teacher in, I think it's her Zen center. She and her partner Jakku Kinst have a small Zen center near Santa Cruz, and Shinshu frequently comes here to lead a class on Dogen on Sundays. And so I'll just share a little bit of her commentary.

[08:59]

She says, don't get caught by talk of foxes, ghosts, and gender. Let go of attachment to surface appearances and be present for what is actually happening. Mo Shan shows Guan Xi that he cannot rely on such distinctions as gender to be the basis for the practice of discovering the truth. None of us wants to be put in a box, yet we often want to pin down and define the other. And so we may get caught in our ideas of who can teach us, who we can learn from, based on some fixed ideas that we may have about. and students. And I think that came up during the study week in various ways. One of the students in the group was assigned to work in the kitchen at Tassajara.

[10:00]

And this is someone who cooked a lot at home and very much enjoys cooking. And the person in charge of the kitchen that day was was several decades younger than she. She was asked to chop a gallon of onions and the kitchen manager, who was this younger student, showed her exactly the size of the pieces of onion that she needed to cut and how to cut the onion. And the participant in the retreat initially felt really irritated when she was told how to cut an onion. She had been cutting an onion all her life. And I think partly she was irritated because someone, a student who was so much younger than she, was telling her what to do. And yet...

[11:03]

We worked with some communication guidelines in the retreat, and one of them was a guideline to try it on. And it's meant as a guideline for speech, but I think it applies to all our experience in life. So if you hear something that you disagree with, can you explore it instead of immediately saying, well, I don't agree with you or I don't like that way of thinking can you think about what the person who's speaking might mean by what they're saying or what might have led them to say what they're saying and if you're invited to try a different way of doing something can you experiment with it and see if it works for you often when I give zazen instruction. In our practice, we keep our eyes partly open and cast down, but many people are used to meditating with their eyes shut.

[12:11]

So I will say, well, could you try it? Just try it and see. So the student, I think, remembered that communication agreement and took a few deep breaths. and decided to try on this new way of cutting onions. And realized that she had some pretty fixed ideas about who she could learn from. And so I think that was an important way of widening her perspective. And I think that can... happen any time that we may find we learn something from a baby or a person we might initially not be drawn to at all. And we have a conversation and there can be some moment of realization or connection that surprises us.

[13:19]

So in a way, the whole world is constantly teaching us And Suzuki Roshi, Zen Center's founder, talks about having a big mind, an open mind, a beginner's mind, a mind that can allow us to meet each experience freshly, even if it's something we've done many times. And Dogen, Mehe Dogen, who brought Soto Zen from... China to Japan. He lived in the 1200s, wrote many wonderful teachings. He uses the phrase magnanimous mind. So magnanimous mind, big mind, beginner's mind. These are all phrases that can actually think be very powerful in terms of widening our perspective and

[14:27]

helping us realize that sometimes, especially when we're caught up in our own repetitive thoughts sometimes, that there can be more spaciousness. And there are many ways of finding these moments of spaciousness. For me, one thing I do every morning before I go to the zendo is... make a cup of green tea and take it to the courtyard and look up at the sky. There's just a little square of sky you can see from the courtyard because it's bound by the buildings. But it just helps me feel that I'm part of something so much bigger than me or this building or San Francisco or even the United States. The galaxy is huge and vast. That's a just a good reminder every morning.

[15:30]

And so we can learn from chopping an onion, holding a baby, listening to a friend's experience, and also, of course, meditation can widen our sense of self. One person who came to the study week, who lives alone, talked with me today, and he said... When I hear people's stories, it takes me out of a sense of isolation. I become open-minded to other people and realize how extraordinary each one is. So coming back to meditation, when I settle into my body and notice my breath, sometimes I notice my self-talk. And I may find myself criticizing myself or someone else or comparing myself to someone else. Perhaps you've experienced this as well, getting into that kind of small mind.

[16:35]

I think that's another phrase Suzuki Roshi sometimes uses. And sometimes in those moments, just coming back to my breath, or feeling the sensation of my sit bones on the cushion, or hearing a sound, not necessarily a pleasant sound, it could be a bird, but it could also be a car honking. It just kind of takes me out of that constricted mind and into a way of experiencing my body, my breath in that moment. Recently I was talking with a student who realized that she was constantly criticizing herself. And she also realized that her negative view of herself was predisposing her to find fault with others at work, and particularly a young man she was supervising on her job.

[17:46]

And when he gave her a small gift, her first thought was that he was cozying up to her. and when her keys were missing one day she assumed he'd taken them and this was very painful for her that she just had such a negative view of this student and she began to ask herself what would it take not to speak to herself so harshly and also not to view this young man so harshly and began that began, I think, a way of opening more widely to herself and to him. When we're very hard on ourselves, very self-critical sometimes, it carries over into how we interact with other people. So finding a way to shift that and develop

[18:49]

an appreciation for oneself and others is a way of widening that constriction of the mind. So poetry can also help us open to a wider view of ourselves and of the world around us. And I think like Zen practice, poetry can help us notice things that we might otherwise forget or just not pay attention to. And an image or a phrase, a succinct phrase can help us wake up to our experience. And there are a number of poems that I love that I thought I could share to illustrate that, but I decided to share one by a poet named Marie Howe.

[19:50]

She lives in New York and she's a very passionate poet and wrote a beautiful book of poems some years ago about the death of her brother at age 28 of AIDS. She's also a wonderful poetry teacher. I had the good fortune of going to a retreat with her earlier this year. This poem is called The World. I couldn't tell one song from another. Which bird said what? Or to whom? Or for what reason? The oak tree seemed to be writing something using very few words. I couldn't decide which door to open. They looked the same. Or what would happen when I did reach out and turn a knob.

[20:51]

I thought I was safe standing there, but my death remembered its date. Only so many summer nights still stood before me. Full moon, waning moon, October mornings. What to make of them? Which door? I couldn't tell which stars were which or how far away any one of them was or which were still burning or not, their light moving through space like a long, late train. And I've lived on this earth so long, 50 winters, 50 springs and summers, and all this time stars in the sky, in daylight when I couldn't see them, And at night when most nights I didn't look. So just that realization that most nights she didn't look and what she was missing.

[22:01]

I think this poem is partly responsible for my practice of looking up at the sky every morning, you know, to realize that there is something up there that is so beautiful and precious, even when it's foggy and I can't see the stars. It's still quite wonderful to take a look. So, one of my friends who has an aversion to poetry. Not everybody likes poetry. I mean I know that there may be some of you in this room who don't like poetry. But one of my friends who knows I love poetry asked me why I spend so much time reading and writing poetry. And I thought about it and I think it's because poetry can be full of surprises and poems can wake me up, can wake any of us up.

[23:05]

I like Marie Howe's poem and I often don't understand a poem the first time I read it or hear it. And that's another thing I like about poetry. Like Zen stories, if I keep coming back to the poem little by little, it reveals more to me each time. And sometimes it requires patience. like getting to know a person. You don't really get to know someone the first time you have a conversation with them. It takes time. So poems are like that. And they can also give me a glimpse into someone else's reality, how someone else sees the world, sees the city, sees... So how someone else experiences emotions. And as I learn more about poems, I learn that really good poems have within them some moment of transformation, some shift or leap or surprise.

[24:14]

It can be in an image or it can be just an insight that suddenly sheds some light on something I've been pondering about. So I think... Jane Hirschfield called her retreat poetry, practice, and plenitude. And by plenitude, she meant not just abundance, but that way of opening up into a more spacious place. And like practice and practice, poetry can help us get there. So I think that's why I really am drawn to poetry. So I want to get back to the workshop, because we started with a couple of stories from Hidden Lamp, but then we went on and discussed a chapter from Enkyo, Pat O'Hara's book called Most Intimate.

[25:18]

Enkyo is the teacher at the village Zendo in New York, and she wrote of her experience in this book and in a chapter called Living in the Suffering World, of one day listening to a student in her sangha, his name was Robert, and Robert had just gotten off the phone and was, so this zendo is in a loft in lower Manhattan, and so Enkyo had just come, taken the elevator down, and saw this student slumped on the floor, and went over and asked him what had happened, and he'd just gotten a phone call that he had been diagnosed with AIDS, and in the same phone call found out that his mother, who he was very close to, had leukemia. And so Enkyo sat down and talked with him, and I have some words that she...

[26:26]

about that experience. She said that talking with him broke through her self-protective shell that distanced her, had distanced her from the suffering of others. And she said, I say self-protective because I think we often separate from the suffering of others out of fear. We do not want to really own our own illness, old age, addiction, or disability, so we move away from it in others. But moving away stops us from intimate action. This day was different, and I would be different from then on. It began, of course, with Robert, just listening to him. listening without trying to fix or change, opening my mind and heart to this man who was suffering.

[27:29]

Later, there was listening and finding Chinese herbs and alternative healing practices for Robert, then listening and helping organize a meditation group for those with HIV and AIDS. Later still, it was listening and learning to insert an IV needle into his catheter. listening when hope faded and there was little to do but wait. Meanwhile, others joined to listen, to speak, and to share. We formed an HIV-AIDS network and then a national interfaith network. There were meetings, there were demonstrations. There was tremendous energy and love and reverence. Out of this synergy came more connections, more energy with what arose in our circle. prison work, hospital chaplaincy, a school that needed help. And many people at the village zendo to this day do prison work, and two members of the zendo have started a chaplaincy training program in New York.

[28:34]

But for Enkyo, the occurrence that just opened her to a growing ability to stay present with the suffering of others was listening to her sangha member's story. So this can happen for any of us. And you know, sometimes we feel there's so much suffering in the world, it's overwhelming. And we may shut down. It's just so painful. But if we can stay open... it may be possible to find a way to engage that actually relieves that sense of overwhelm. And nowadays, there's so many ways in which the world is crying out to us. And I'm not going to list all of them.

[29:39]

I think you all know them. But how do we decide? what issues to respond to, how to respond, can we find ways of responding with others so that we don't feel alone in our actions. I think these are really important questions for us. And so after reading this chapter in Enkyo's book, we, on the last day, looked at the work of a teacher named Joanna Macy. Joanna Macy is a woman in her 80s now who has been leading workshops for about 35 years starting with a workshop that was called Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age and now her

[30:40]

Her work is called The Work That Reconnects, kind of reconnects us with our deep caring about the world and with our own energy to find ways to engage with it. Joanna lives in Berkeley. She's a mother, grandmother, teacher, mentor. I met her in 1982 when I took one of her early workshops. I was living in Boston and I spent a weekend at a workshop with her and it really rekindled my energy for activist work. And we did... So one of the ways she teaches is through guided meditations and there's one that we shared Our last night at Tassajara, we invited members of the residential community to join us, and about 30 people came.

[31:46]

And one of the things we did was a guided meditation called the Great Ball of Merit, which I'm tempted to do, but I know that guided meditations on a Wednesday night can often put people to sleep, so maybe I'll just tell you about it. Keep your eyes open. And you can kind of imagine it as we go along. So this meditation, The Great Ball of Merit, actually comes from an old Buddhist text. It's the Prajnaparamita, Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines. And it's embedded in that text. And Joanna crafted it in a way that it's very easy to follow. So you start out. by just relaxing and then open your awareness to we'll start with the people in this room and then see if you can spread your awareness a little farther to the people to include all the people in San Francisco and then people all around the country that we're living in currently the US and then even wider

[33:05]

all around the world and imagine that each of these people, no matter what their walk of life is or their age, their race, or anything about them, that each of these people has in some way made a difference to someone else, has reached out to a stranger needing help, has taught a child, has taken care of someone who's ill and that each of these people has done some act of merit, or many acts of merit. And then if you can extend your awareness through time to all the people who ever lived on this planet, and imagine each of those people contributing their generosity, their caring, their kindness, And if you begin to gather all these countless acts of merit into a heap and then into a ball, it can be enormous.

[34:10]

And as you imagine this ball, you turn it and then release it to the healing of the earth, to benefit the healing of the earth. So this... is a version of what we call sympathetic joy, joy and the joy of others. And it comes from a sense of our all being interconnected that we're part of another image for that is Indra's net, that we're part of a net and each of us is a mirror in this or a jewel in this net that reflects every other jewel in the net. And when we imagine ourselves interconnected with all beings whether it's through sympathetic joy and this sense of gratitude for all the ways people have been a benefit to others throughout time or through tuning into the suffering of the world which is equally present for us.

[35:23]

It totally it can be very energizing and help us overcome that overwhelm that we get when we read the newspaper or listen to the news or watch it on TV or hear about some of the difficult situations our friends may be facing. So... I think that is... probably a good place to stop. Thank you for your attention. We have just a few more minutes, I think five minutes. If anyone has any questions or comments, we could probably take one or two. If not, then I would love to share one more poem. It's a short poem by Jane Hirshfield.

[36:28]

I'll leave you with this poem. It's called Tree. It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books. Already the first branch tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. So, I'll leave you with that thought. Maybe if you're leaving the building you can take a look and see if there are any stars up there or if you're in the building.

[37:33]

We have a wonderful roof up here in this building. We can go up and look at the sky and the amazing skyline of San Francisco which keeps changing. 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.

[38:18]

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