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. Welcome to Beginners Mind Temple. Are there any people here for the first time? Welcome. you especially, and to the online practice period people that are remotely listening. Good evening and welcome to you. I think it's posted outside that Linda Cutts is giving the talk tonight. I am not Linda Cutts. Abbas Linda Cutts is unfortunately ill tonight and asked me to give the lecture, which is what I'm doing. I'm Ed For those people who don't know me, Ed Sadezan, I'm the abiding abbot here at City Center Temple.

[01:04]

So, given that I had about 30 minutes to put this lecture together, I thought I would do two things. One, this is the first lecture I will have given since I got back from leading the winter practice period at Tassara. When I run into people, they always say, well, Ed, what was it like down at Tassar this winter? So I thought I would share a few thoughts and stories about the Tassar winter practice period and try to tie that in with the theme of the practice period here, which is upright and complete speech. So for those of you who don't know what the winter practice period at Tassar is, It's a 90-day period of time which goes from January 4th to April 4th, and students commit to being there and not leaving Tassar for the entire time, and it's a fairly rigorous training schedule. We get up at, I don't know, I think I got up at 3.40 in the morning, and most students got up at 3.50 in the morning, and the Zazan starts at 4.20, and this goes on until 9 o'clock at night, and...

[02:19]

ten periods of zaza, and all three meals are done formally in the zendo, doing oryoki, and their schedule is just sort of pretty complete throughout the whole day. There's an hour and a half of work in the afternoon and a time for exercise and bath, and it's silent from 7.30 at night through lunch. And we had 60 people who came, signed up for this practice period, 20 of them were the Tangaryo students, which means they're new for the first time. And they get to sit five days straight before the rest of us arrive. And then, of course, we start off with a five-day sashin, and then a month later we do a seven-day sashin, and then we end with a seven-day sashin, which really isn't as bad as it sounds because there's not much difference between the daily schedule and the sashin schedule. So it's really basically a three-month sashin. So that's your basic layout of a tasara practice period.

[03:24]

And of course, this was the 99th practice period we've done at tasara, which was really, I felt, quite good. The first practice period at tasara was in 1967, 50 years ago. And Suzuki Roshi, at the end of that practice period, gave a lecture where he That was the first practice period ever given outside the Orient. Tassar was the first temple authorized to give on those 90-day practice periods, which are sort of a formal thing. And he said the main reason, or one of the primary reasons he founded Tassar was to have practice periods, and he hoped that we would do at least one practice period every year since its founding, and we've done two. Even though Zen Center has gone through various ups and downs over the years, we have managed to always do two formal practice periods at Tasa every year. So it's a special thing to do. And for some reason, is my sound okay?

[04:25]

Doesn't seem to be fitting in the normal. Maybe this is what I need. But this practice period had some special elements, like it rained. And for those of you who are in Crete or Romania or various parts of the world and listening online, you may not have known that we had epic rains in California this winter. I think we beat almost all the records in the last hundred years. And, of course, the fact that we'd had the Sobranas fire all through the mountains last summer meant that when the rain came down, the water just poured down Tussara Creek. It was marvelous to see. It would rain and the creek would rise six feet. First thing it did is washed out that marvelous bridge that goes from the flats over into the other area. That was gone. Then soon after that, we had, over a year, since we're off the grid at Tussara, built these ingenious heating systems that would use our hot water from the springs and run them to the dining room and to some of the rooms and up into the Zendo area.

[05:36]

But, of course, that got flooded out, so no heat. Mud. The road got washed out. Slides, mudslides slip out, so the road was impassable a lot of times. So it added a lot of drama to a practice period, which already has a fair amount of drama. So I had a poem that I read the first day of practice period, which I'm going to read here. This is by... Sudang Po, probably the most famous Chinese poet of the Tang period. The sounds of the creek are the teachings, the broad, long tongue of Buddha. The colors of the mountains are nothing but the pure body of Buddha. All night long I hear 84,000 gaddas. Tomorrow how can I tell them to others? So if you wanted Buddha to speak to you, the creek was doing it.

[06:39]

Kabarga Creek is a small creek that runs right by the Zendo, and then there's the main Tassar Creek. It was so loud the entire 90 days, you had to really speak up in the Zendo to have people hear you when you gave lectures. The sounds of the creek. I've always loved the sounds of the Tassar Creek. They're a teaching. That's what this poem says. In fact, it's the sounds of the mountains are really the teaching. And it goes along with what this practice period here in the city is about, which is speech. And the other part of speech, the other side of speech, is listening. And given that at an Atasar practice period, you're in silence from 7.30 at night till after lunch the next day, you have a lot of time to listen. to everything that's going on around you. And of course, one of the most important things you end up listening to, especially since you're sitting all that zazen, is what's going on in your mind.

[07:50]

All these voices in your mind talking to you day and night, just like the creek. Will it ever stop? Will it ever stop? And it's interesting to get that intimate with your mind, to really see the ways in which your mind shapes the world you live in. And particularly interesting to notice how your mind punishes you. Very critical, anyways. I think Blanche said something like, and I've certainly had friends say it, nobody is as hard on you as you are in your mind. You wouldn't put up with anybody treating you like you treat yourself in your head. Oh, I was so bad at that. I'm so horrible. So after a while, it doesn't matter, though.

[08:54]

You start a practice period often. It's cold. It's muddy. It's raining. There's no heat in the dorm. I was promised heat in the dorm. Why is the maintenance crew not fixing the heat in the dorm? I think they're sending the heat somewhere else. Why is this person you put me in as a roommate doesn't ever smile at me? This person on my serving crew never follows my directions. Tsukiroshi said in that speech on practice periods, group practice is the fastest way to develop your practice. It's the best way. But it is something to live with 60 strangers that intimately, sitting next to the same person hour after hour in the zendo. Why did I get next to that person that weaves back and forth and makes all that noise? Why can't they settle down? I hate the way they bow to their cushion.

[09:56]

It's endless, this stuff that's going on in your head. And so for, say, maybe the first three or four weeks, especially since it's dark at that time. Tassar is in a narrow canyon, so January is pretty dark. And it's hard to get used to that tight a schedule. You're only sleeping six hours. You're exhausted. you're not good at the oreo-ki food, eating, and so pretty soon you're pretty unhappy with things, until you realize, wow, this whole situation is just a mirror on my own mind. My unhappiness has nothing to do with the person serving on my crew, has nothing to do with the hot water that's not heating my dorm. I mean, it has something to do with it, but fundamentally, I'm just getting a really big, clear picture of my mind.

[11:04]

And it's unrelenting. I can't get away from it. And so... And of course, the other thing that's happening is you're sitting all that zazen. which means you're starting to get in touch with your body. You're starting to wake up to, actually wake up to what's really going on around here. All that wonderful food you're eating that's just being served to you, the smell of the trees. In the morning, one of the things the abbot does is do a little jundo, it's called, where you walk from various different parts of the... of the Tassar campus and bow and offer incense. So I go to the Kaisando and I walk to the kitchen and bow to the kitchen. And of course, it's four o'clock in the morning.

[12:07]

And if it's one of those days when it's not raining, you know, and of course the trees don't have any leaves on them because it's winter time. And so you're looking through these tree branches to stars like you never see here in the city because there's nothing. There's no light pollution at Tassar. There's no light for five miles in any direction. And you're just amazing how many stars you can see when you're in a place like that. So you wake up in the morning walking under a starlit night into a zendo with 50 people trying hard to live their life as uprightly as they can. And all of a sudden you can sit there and you're... starting to feel, settle into what your actual living experience is, aside from this sort of mental world you create.

[13:08]

And it's quite wonderful. By by the end of almost every practice period, these 60 people, no matter, even if there were ones that you weren't getting along with at the beginning, feel like your closest and dearest friends. Because you've worked so hard together to do this thing, to repair the road, to fix the pumps that don't work, to figure out how to get along and carry food up through the rain to the Zendo. One of the things that we do in Zen Center is if two people are not getting along well, and usually one of them comes and complains to somebody, and if it's bad enough that they can't work it out, and we have little sort of ways to have difficult conversations, but if it's bad enough that they can't work it out, we have mediated conversations, which I would have between two people.

[14:23]

And one of the things I noticed is that most of the time, It's what somebody said to somebody else. So-and-so said this to me. They disrespected me. These words that we use. I mean, it's fine when you're criticizing yourself, even though you're really just causing too much suffering yourself. But, I mean, you all know this. You're tired. You're in a bad mood. You're short. Somebody's been irritating you. And you say that one thing. that is just going to hurt them. It's amazing to me, actually, and sometimes these rifts will last forever. I mean, this is a very common experience. I mean, my next door neighbor's father died. Father and mother lived in the house, but siblings came to take care of it all, and

[15:30]

and they got in such a fight over how the father was taken care of in the end, in terms of his illness, how the assets of the family were dispersed, and things were said, and they haven't spoken to each other since then, ten years. We know this is the world we live in. So how do we... And it's hard to get over. I've sat in meetings where... good-hearted people just cannot forgive each other for the speech they've said, for the words they've said. So this practice period that we're in now, we're talking about, well, what can we do about that? What are the ways that we can learn to talk more carefully with each other? Because none of us want to cause that kind of harm to another person. So last night in Linda's lecture, she talked about five conditions of skillful speech.

[16:41]

And I'm going to repeat them again for those of you that weren't in the practice period. And they are the questions you have. Do I speak at the right time or not? Is this the right time? And is this the right place? Is this the right moment to speak? to the person about one's disagreements. Do I speak the facts or not? Is what I'm saying to a person true? Am I speaking harshly or gently? Do my words benefit beings or not? Is this beneficial to the person? Is what I'm going to say actually going to be helpful to them? And what is my motivation? Am I speaking with a good heart or is my heart malicious? So these are the five conditions laid out by Buddha about how to speak. Sometimes it's summarized by, well I don't have what it's summarized by here.

[17:46]

I think it's, is it true? Is it the right time? Is it spoken gently? Is it of benefit? And is it, delivered with a kind heart. So it turned out that Suzuki Roshi in one of his marvelous lectures on the precepts, in fact the only lecture on the precepts that's in the two books he did on the book Not Always So, talked about it in terms of how a teacher should talk to a student and it was so beautifully put forward that I thought I would read it here to you tonight. This is another way you put the lecture together in 30 minutes. As you pick one of your favorite sections from Suzuki Roshi. So here we go. How a teacher points out the student's mistake is very important. It's the same as if you're just talking to anybody.

[18:51]

If a teacher thinks that what his student did is a mistake, he is not a true teacher. It may be a mistake, but on the other hand, it is an expression of the student's true nature. When we understand this, we have respect for our student's true nature, and we will be careful how we point out mistakes. It may be a mistake, but on the other hand, it's an expression of the student's true nature. I always felt when Suzuki Roshi... interacted with me, and I certainly saw it was the case when he interacted with other people, is he interacted with you as if you were Buddha. That kind of respect. So if you've done something, well, there must be some reason. Let's be careful about how we point out someone's quote-unquote mistake. So he says... In the scriptures, five points are made about how to be careful.

[19:54]

One is that the teacher has to choose his opportunity and not point out the student's mistake in front of many people. That's choosing the right time and place. Don't point out a student's mistake in front of many people. If possible, a teacher points out the mistake personally in an appropriate time and place. It's just, I was talking, there was a student had come in and told me he was having trouble with this other student and he really needed to talk to him about this thing. And I said, well, I think it'd be good if you just approached him at an appropriate time and way and said you wanted to talk to him about this thing. So... By that I meant that he would probably go to the person at some point in time and say, you know, there's something that's up between us. I'd love to have a conversation with you sometime. Is this a good time? And if so, maybe we could go to some place and talk, and if not, maybe we could schedule a time to talk.

[21:02]

But no. As is the case with these things, he was so needed to get this off his chest that The person he wanted to talk to was on his way. It was day off after, you know, at Tassar every fifth day. It was a day off. He was on his way to get some coffee. There were five other people there, and he just barged in and, you know, just darted in on him. That's not choosing the right time and place. But it's easy for us to do that when we've got something in our, you know, on our chest about something. We just... Especially if we're angry. That's why it's always good if you're angry, do a mindfulness practice. First notice, am I actually angry? That's the first trick, is to actually notice and admit that you're angry. Because most of the time, we get angry so quick we don't even... And then once you've noticed that you're angry, say...

[22:07]

wow, I'm going to accept the fact that I'm angry, even though a part of me is saying, oh, I'm a Zen student, I never should be angry. So I must not really be angry. I think I'll ignore my anger. No, you go, oh, I'm angry. Because Zen students get angry just like everybody else. And really investigate what your anger feels like, what thoughts are going in your head, what emotions are going on with you. And then, of course, this is the famous acronym for mindfulness. What are the three words? RAIN. Recognize, accept, investigate, and N, non-identify. This isn't who I am. This is what's going on in me, but this does not find me. So if you've gone through that process at least by then, and maybe take three deep breaths, you will not immediately act out of your anger in a way that will cause you problems that will take a long time to get fixed.

[23:15]

So, choose the right time, choose the right place. Secondly, this is Zagroshi, the teacher is reminded to be truthful, which means the teacher does not point out his disciples' mistakes just because he thinks it is a mistake. When the teacher understands why the disciple did so, then he can be truthful. It's hard to know exactly what is true. I mean, so often we think, well, this is true what I'm saying to you. But especially... Nowadays in modern America, we have all these ways of practicing this. We don't say, you did this to me because we don't know what they were doing. We can say, I felt hurt by what you said. That's true. Your own personal experience of what happened is true, not necessarily what your mind thinks they did to you is true.

[24:26]

You can say that's what my mind thinks, but I'll be open to the fact that that's not correct. The third reminder for the teacher is to be gentle and calm and speak in a low voice rather than shouting. This is something very delicate, like truthfulness. But the scripture puts emphasis on having a calm, gentle attitude when talking about someone's mistakes. Ah. The fourth one is that a teacher gives advice or points out the disciples mistakes solely for the sake of helping him and does not do this just to get something off his chest.

[25:27]

Here the teacher is very careful noticing when the student is making some excuse for what he did or when the student is not serious enough. Just how often do we actually point out something to somebody just to get it off our chest whether or not it's really helpful for them. I love the sentence. Here the teacher is very careful, noticing when the student is making some excuse for what he did or when the student is not serious enough. Then the teacher should ignore him until he becomes more serious. There's a story that Zuckeroshi ignored Richard Baker for a year. I don't know if this is really true, but it's one of those sort of myths going around. I do know that one time Stiguroshi walked up to me and I had been wanting to talk to him about something, but I was so depressed and messed up that I just, I was leaning back on a chair sort of there and I didn't even get up, you know, and he just turned around, turned away and walked away from me, ignored me.

[26:41]

until you become more serious. It's interesting, isn't it? Even though we give advice only for the sake of helping the student, still this does not mean to always be easy with the student. Sometimes we should be very tough with the students or we cannot help in a true sense. So this is also true of our difficult conversations with other people. It doesn't mean that we always, sometimes we have to have a difficult conversation. Sometimes we have to confront someone with areas in which we're not getting along or not working out well and we have to know how to do that in a good way. I think you have to have the attitude that your approach to this is that it's going to be helpful in your relationship with them.

[27:47]

Hopefully helpful to you, hopefully helpful to them, and hopefully helpful in their relationship. And the last point, as the way Suzuki Roshi summarizes these points, is to point out the student's mistake with compassion, which means the teacher is not just the teacher, but also the disciple's friend. As a friend, the teacher points out some problem or gives them advice. So it is not easy to be a teacher or a student, and we cannot rely on anything, even the precepts. I like that, the way he says that. We cannot rely on anything, even the precepts. You know, the precepts are... the vows we take. We have the clear mind precepts, not to kill, not to steal. Many of them are around speech, not to slander, not to lie. But you can't even rely on those written precepts because figuring out how to actually communicate with somebody, how to speak your truth to somebody, is beyond anything that can be written down.

[29:01]

cannot rely on anything. We have to make our utmost effort to help each other. And we do not observe our precepts just for the sake of precepts or practice rituals for the perfection of rituals. We are studying how to express our true nature. Thank you very much. How to express our true nature. How to be authentic in expressing what's really going on with us. That's a complete and upright speech. So I was mentioning earlier that one of the nice things about Tassar is there's so much silence there. And so how you get to this place where you can express yourself authentically is by having some direct experience of reality unmediated by language.

[30:24]

And so here's a famous koan about that. You know, I had described Tasara with all the mud and the rain. Oh, it's cold. I forgot to mention it's cold, Tasara. But then everything changes by mid-March. All the trees that I told you I was looking at, all the beautiful stars through are leafing out with maple blossoms on the beautiful big maple trees and the sycamores are coming out. And of course we have beautiful fruit trees, flowering red buds. So Tasara just busts out with springtime And it always reminds me of this marvelous poem, Koan. This is a case from The Gateless Barrier, case 47 in the Book of Srevendi, or case 37 from The Gateless Barrier. Zhao Zhou, a very famous then teacher, which I could talk a lot about because I love him a lot, was the head of a monastery, and a monk asked Zhao Zhou,

[31:31]

What is the meaning of bodhidharmas coming from the West? This is a very famous way of phrasing many things. It's a fancy way of saying, what's the meaning of Zen? But we phrase it this way for a variety of other reasons. But anyway, I'll skip over that. What's the meaning of Zen? And Zhao Zhao says, the oak tree in the courtyard. So that's the koan. What's the meaning of Zen? The oak tree in the courtyard. This is one of those beautiful, how many people have heard this koan before? Quite a few, right? How many haven't? Oh, good. So for you that haven't, this is a classic. Koans are sort of stories that you can mull over and try to get at the essence of what it's about. So usually along with a koan, there's some commentary, and Wumann's comment is, if you can see intimately into the essence of Jiaojiao's response, there's no Shakyamuni in the past, there's no Maitreya in the future.

[32:43]

So Shakyamuni was a thousand years earlier, and Maitreya is the Buddha of the future. So there's no Shakyamuni in the past, there's no Maitreya in the future. So this is a koan that's pointing to the immediate moment of awareness of What is the immediate moment of, can you meet a tree in the courtyard? I imagine, I actually went to Zhao Zhou's temple in China, and it got rebuilt, but there are these marvelous, they're cypress trees there, but 500-year-old cypress trees, huge cypress trees in the courtyard. It's quite possible that Zhao Zhou was standing under one of these beautiful trees, and a monk came up and said, what's the meaning of Zen? He said, the tree, can you see the tree? Can you actually meet the tree? And trees are such magnificent beings, aren't they? Can you actually like, I mean everywhere we walk, even in the city we have trees around, we have beautiful trees in the courtyard.

[33:48]

In fact, I gave a lecture, a longer lecture on this whole koan at Tashara and somebody gave me a tree book afterwards The Hidden Life of Trees, I think is the title of it. And this person has been studying trees for us, and it turns out the trees talk to each other. They feed each other. If a tree is not doing well, the other trees send nutrients over to it. And even if the tree is off by itself and doesn't have any roots that are connected to the other trees, the mushrooms, Fungi, all the mushrooms in the forest bed send the nutrients over to the tree that needs help. In fact, they've done studies where if an insect starts eating one tree and it starts doing all its chemical defenses against the insect, that tree immediately sends information through its root system and through the little mushrooms off to the other tree. So the other trees start putting out the chemicals to keep the insects away.

[34:51]

And they also put off scents which blow in the wind. Trees have figured out that they survive better as a forest together than standing on their competitive own. Anyway, trees are marvelous things, and I've always loved trees. In fact, my Buddhist name is Forest Teacher, or Grove of Ancestors, so I've been named after trees. So I would... So what's the point of all this? The point of all of this is, can you actually experience the moment? And we're using a tree as an example of experiencing the moment without necessarily writing a poem about it. I remember I was standing by the stream and one of the first butterflies of the spring season came soaring by me and just went down the stream.

[35:52]

It was beautiful. The sunlight was glistening off the stream, the bubbles, the little waterfalls, and it was just a perfect moment of life. And immediately my mind started saying, what a perfect moment. I think I'll give a lecture on this. And then, of course, it's gone, right, that moment. Now we're into our conceptual world. our world, which we live in all the time. And of course, it didn't hurt that I was sitting 10 hours of zazen a day. That helps you have more of these moments. But if all Zen was was just to have special moments of butterflies downstream, that would be nice, but you can solve that problem with other ways. I bring it up because I think the more that we actually can be in actual contact with our living life, our moment-by-moment experience of our physical, sensual life, step out of our conceptual world, the world of words that we live in all the time, then

[37:17]

we'll be grounded in a place that will allow our speech to be much more authentic and real. Our world will be more authentic because we'll be alive in an actual world instead of living in a land of dreams. So, of course, another Wuman verse on this koan goes, words do not convey the fact Language is not an expedient. Attached to words, your life is lost. Blocked by phrases, you are bewildered. So just accentuating it. Words do not convey the fact. Robert Aiken, when he wrote a commentary on this, I think if I can find it, said, it's such a beautiful way to put it. That's true, isn't it? In the pungent English proverb, find words but are no parseps, The word butter is neither smooth nor salty. It's true, you know.

[38:19]

Eating parsnips is a lot different than saying the words fine. Words no butter, no parsnips. So, where am I going with all this? I'm going somewhere. Trust me. We are somewhere. We're here. It's two minutes left. Well, I think I'm scheduled to also give the Saturday talk, so think of what I'm going to do is I'm going to finish on Saturday with a lot of what I have to say, but I'm going to read a poem by Mary Oliver that I think would be appropriate here. This is called... Well, no, I'm going to finish up with a little bit more of Wumann's verse. So, blocked by phrases, you are bewildered. And Robert Aiken says... This is not altogether bad. How else can one practice? Be bewildered by that.

[39:21]

The oak tree in the courtyard, be bewildered by that. Then you have a chance. A poem by Mary Oliver. I was walking by, he was sitting there. It was full morning, so the heat was heavy on his sand-colored head. and his webbed feet. I squatted beside him as the edge of the path. He didn't move." Oh, by the way, the title of this poem is Toad. I began to talk, talked about summer and about time, the pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night, about this cup we call life, about happiness and how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades. He looked neither up nor down, which didn't necessarily mean he was either afraid or asleep. I felt his energy stored under his tongue, or perhaps, and behind his bulging eyes.

[40:26]

Stored under his tongue, perhaps, and behind his bulging eyes. I talked about how the world seemed to me, five feet tall, the blue sky all around my head, and I said, I wondered how it seemed to him down there, intimate with the dust. He might have been Buddha, did not move, blink, or frown. Not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes as refined anguish of my language passed over him. I'm going to read that last sentence again. He might have been Buddha, did not move, blink, or frown. Not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes as refined anguish of language passed over him. Suki Roshi loved toads, loved frogs. He always thought frogs sat so well. If we could sit as well as frogs. So she was trying to relate to that toad just like Jaojo's monk was trying to relate to the tree.

[41:37]

I thought it was good. She got down there, she talked to him. And all that refined anguish, all those words of her life, it was good for her to see the toad, not... shedding tears over her anguish. 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.

[42:40]

For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:50]

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