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. Happy Father's Day to those of you who are fathers. Congratulations on being a father. I myself am a father. And we have two sons, and they're both fathers. We already have had our Father's Day calls from all of them. So I do appreciate the joys and challenges of being a father. And if you're not a father, you have had a father. And I hope that you can think today of your father whether he's around or not, with gratitude.

[01:05]

Also today is the 19th of June, Juneteenth, a really important American holiday that has been coming into focus only in the last few years for more people as we contemplate with confusion and sorrow the racial history of our country. On June 19th, 1865, a couple of months after Lee surrendered at Appomattox, although the militia of the state of Texas had not surrendered. They were still at war.

[02:08]

But on that day, the Union General, Gordon Granger, arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced to the people there that all slaves were from that moment on free, people who were entitled to the same rights and privileges, as anyone else in the state of Texas and anywhere else in the Union. And this news was received with tremendous jubilation by the African-American people in Galveston and all over the state. And it was received with dismay and resistance by white Texans. So June 18th commemorates the end of slavery in America. This holiday has been observed since then, since the 1870s, but almost exclusively in the African-American community. It's a joyful holiday.

[03:14]

In 1980, it became an official holiday in the state of Texas. And last year, partly in response to the continuous shock, of our awakening to racial injustice. It finally became a national holiday. And I know my grandchildren told me they have the day off from school tomorrow because of Juneteenth. So they're really happy. And this afternoon, we see by the arrangement in Zendo and the altar looking a little different, that we're having a very important funeral ceremony here for our teacher, Sojin, Mel Weitzman. And I think Mel would be very, very happy to know that his funeral was taking place on Juneteenth.

[04:17]

And so this morning my talk is dedicated to him and is really for him and from him and about him. I'm a lucky person because I had my teacher for 50 years, right? That's pretty unusual and lucky. He is also the teacher of my wife, Kathy. And he was also the teacher of my very, very close friend in this life, Alan Liu, who later became the famous rabbi, Alan Liu. But in the early years of the Berkeley Zen Center, which we always called the Berkeley Zendo, in the 1970s, we were all studying closely together. It was a very small group. We all lived together. We saw each other every single day.

[05:21]

And even though we didn't really know it at the time, we were, of course, all influenced by Mel's personality, his steadiness, And this is in spirit. Just like when you're young, you don't realize you're doing it. You imprint on a parent and that parent's image and feeling for life goes inside of you. Sometimes you don't like it later on, but it does anyway. In just that way, we all imprinted on Mel like a bunch of baby ducks. In later years, we moved to Tassajara and then Green Gulch, and we became students of Zen Center. But we always stayed in touch with Mel. Some years later, Mel became an abbot of Zen Center, and we got to practice more closely with him.

[06:23]

And then when I became an abbot of Zen Center, for a brief time, we were co-abbots together. had a wonderful time working together. And he was our teacher, but also our family. We were like family together, close to his wife, Liz, as we remained. We always had birthday dinners together every year. So he was constantly in our hearts for all those years, even closer than our own. And he remains so. Because in the relationship to a teacher, death certainly is an important transition. It certainly gets your attention. But it doesn't end the relationship. The power and strength and beauty of the relationship goes on.

[07:30]

Mel was born in the year of the Great Crash, 1929, near Hollywood. And when he was a kid, he and his friends played in the empty lots and vacant studio sets of the golden age of Hollywood. His father, who mistrusted, educated and fancy people, a trait he shared, I think, with his son, worked for Roosevelt's WPA. And then when that closed down, he worked in a clothing store that had a sign in the window that said, going on a business sale. I remember this because there was a store in our town that was open for many years and it always had a sign in the window that said going out of business sale.

[08:35]

His mother was originally from New York but moved to Hollywood because her sister was an expert seamstress and she worked with her sister sewing underwear for Hollywood starlets until her children were born. Mel from an early age, was always doodling and drawing, just like one of our sons. And so he always knew he wanted to be an artist, as our son is also an artist. In 1941, at the end of that year, when the war came to America, Mill's dad got a job in the shipyards at Long Beach. So the family moved to Long Beach, and that's where Mel went to high school, and I guess because of the war, in addition to being an artist, he also decided that he wanted to be a soldier. So in high school, he joined the Marine Reserves.

[09:41]

And when he graduated from high school in 1947, he went on active duty, which enabled him in 1949 to use the GI Bill to to attend art school in San Francisco. And he studied with the great Bay Area representational painters David Parks and Elmer Bischoff, who were pretty famous today. I recently went to see a David Parks show, and SF MoMA wrote beautiful work. But his main teacher was the abstract expressionist Clifford Still, who has a permanent... room, I think, at SFMOMA. He married the poet Ruth Weiss, who actually fled Germany with her parents as a child. They were Jewish, fled fleeing for their lives. And he and Ruth lived in North Beach in the 1950s, which was the center of the beatnik era.

[10:52]

So they were beatniks, and Mel drove a cab and painted boats while he worked on his own painting. And I remember in the ancient days of the Berkeley Zendo, there was a huge canvas of Mel's that hung in the hallway. As I recall, it was a big rough blue painting with a yellow gash in the middle of it. He had founded the Berkeley Zen Center in a Berkeley house on Dwight Way in 1967 with Suzuki Roshi's blessing. Mel from childhood had always a religious interest and sensibility. Beat writers always pointed out that the word beat in beatnik didn't mean beat as in beaten down. It meant beat as in beatific.

[11:56]

or beatitude. And it really is true that for many of the beat writers and beat painters and beat poets and people who followed that movement, it really was a revolt against conventional materialism and a turn toward religious exploration. Our dear friend and teacher, Philip Whalen, was also a beat writer, and he became a Zen Center priest. So Mel began his Zen practice in 1964, not too long after Suzuki Roshi came to America. At the very beginnings of the Zen Center, he was the fifth person to be ordained as a priest by Suzuki Roshi in 1969. And there is a famous sepia-tinted photo of Mel, a very handsome and resolute

[12:59]

young man having his head shaved in the ceremony by Suzuki Roshi. And you can see that the ceremony took place upstairs in the attic Zendo of Berkeley Zen Center. You could see the rafters in the attic. And from that time, Mel was the main priest at the Berkeley Zen Center. He went to Zazen every single day, morning and evening. He puttered around the temple, which was also his place of residence. From 1967 until January the 7th, 2001, when he died, he was still the chief priest, the abbot of the temple. That's a good long run, don't you think? His practice was stable. Steady, faithful, grounded, straightforward.

[14:03]

And he was unfailingly dedicated to guiding others in the way. From the time he began until the very end. For the last, I don't know how many years, 20 or 25 years, Mel has been writing his book. he always had to take long breaks because he was busy with other things sessions and ceremonies different things coming up but whenever he had the time he would turn his attention to his book that jack shoemaker who now has counterpoint press had asked him to write so he was dutifully writing away and i'm sure he must have carefully gone over and over again many of the pages he liked things to be just right And he was never quite satisfied, so he kept on working. But in the last year or so of his life, when he knew he had cancer and he wasn't going to live too long during that year, he was really happy.

[15:18]

I don't think I ever saw him as happy in his whole life as he was during that last year. But it also made him get more serious about his book. And he had a few of his close students, Kika and Ron, and maybe there were others, helping him. And he worked at it every single day until it was time for him to go to bed and die. And so now I think sometime in the near future the book will be published, finally. I'm not sure. under what title, but I know the manuscript has a working title, The Grinding Stone, after an old Chinese poem that always hung on Sojin's bulletin board, like a grinding stone. Monks ought to behave like a grinding stone. Chang's song comes to sharpen his knife.

[16:21]

Litsu, comes to grind his axe. Everybody wants to have their metals improved in any way. Everybody who wants to have their metals improved in any way makes use of the stone. Each time the stone is rubbed, it wears out. But it makes no complaint. Nor does it boast. of its usefulness. Those who come, go home benefited. Some of them may not be quite appreciative of the stone, but the stone remains ever content. I've known quite a number of Zen teachers in my life.

[17:23]

And I observe that the character of Zen teachers is often quite paradoxical, which can be confusing. If you ask me, what kind of person was Sojin? I might say, well, he was very opinionated and sharp. And he never liked to take anybody else's word for anything. Which I think would be true. But if you ask me another time, I would say, he was extremely kind, amazingly kind. And he would listen to other people. And he would help other people to find their own natural path. no matter what it was, no matter how much it differed from his own.

[18:26]

He was profoundly wide and permissive. And that is also true. So I had a conversation with Sojin about my talk this morning. What did he want me to say? And he said, don't say anything. I'll do the talking. So here are some words from Sojin's manuscript. Our Zen practice is very simple, and yet the focus is easy to miss. As a matter of fact, it's so simple, that sometimes we don't see what's right under our feet or our nodes. To be able to take hold of and seize this moment, to not get lost in the world, not to give way to confusion and doubt, is pretty difficult.

[19:40]

And yet, this simple practice is not so difficult if we always ask the question, Where am I and what am I doing? This what is it is a koan for each one of us. I've always felt that this what is it was Suzuki Roshi's unstated koan for us. I could sometimes hear him saying this in a casual way, but loaded with meaning. If someone pointed out something to him, he might say, what is it? After all, what is this bao? How do we become aware of the absolute quality of our life in each moment's activity? It's maybe not so difficult to be aware of what we're doing, but to be aware of the absolute quality of our life in each activity is easy to miss.

[20:48]

And here I apologize, Sojin, for interrupting you, but When I read this, I thought, this is so great. This is the difference between what people now refer to as mindfulness that everybody is so excited about and Zen practice. In Zen practice, we're not just aware of something. We are aware of the absolute quality of something. Very wonderful insight, I think. Thank you, Sojin. So back to your words. How to express Buddha nature in the simplest act of our lives. Simplest acts of our lives. How to express whole being, which is not just our personality. Whenever someone asked Master Gute a question, he raised one finger.

[21:52]

When he raised one finger, he was saying, this is it. This is it. Everything in the whole universe belongs to this one finger, and this one finger belongs to the whole universe, the whole dharmadhatu. The whole universe is supporting this finger. When we say we're doing something like walking or eating, what does that really mean? What is that? If we can keep our attention on this is it, then we always have our practice. It's not that we know something, but we will be expressing right understanding. I may know what something is, yet not know that this is it. Even though I don't understand it, I know it. Enlightenment is our nature, our true nature. that is always with us.

[22:53]

When we say, get enlightened, we don't mean we get something. It means to bring forth light, to let go so that light can shine forth. Enlightenment is an expression of our true nature, but that doesn't mean that we necessarily realize it. So what's before realization? Obscurity. Confusion. Dualistic thinking. Yours and mine. Right and wrong. Good and bad. After enlightenment, there's confusion. Right and wrong. Good and bad. But it's not the same. We sometimes think that enlightenment means the reconciliation of all dualities. You and I may be angry with each other before enlightenment, but And when we become enlightened, we reconcile anger with serenity. After enlightenment, we may still get angry, but the anger is not the same because you are not attached to that feeling.

[24:03]

Suzuki Roshi used to say that we are all half good, and half bad. No matter how righteous we may feel, we have to reflect on this. And Suzuki Roshi did not exclude himself. I want to tell you that he was not infallible. He had faults. And we should be careful not to deify him. I don't think he would feel good about that. But because he was always working on his shortcomings, we didn't see them as faults. We saw them as his practice. I think it was because he could see his own faults so clearly that he was empathetic with us. Loving kindness, sympathetic joy, compassion, and equanimity are aspects of love free from self-interest.

[25:14]

expressed the Buddhist temperament, and Suzuki Roshi embodied them. He worked with the most difficult people, never rejecting them, never criticizing them, but understanding something about their problems and addressing them as Buddha and exercising enormous patience. He was not always successful. but the truth of his humble way continues to have a positive effect in the world today. Sorry, Sojin, to interrupt again, but again, when I read that, I was so moved by it. We're all so troubled by our world and trying to figure out what can we do to fix... Our world, it's frustrating not to know what to do or to be able to do anything.

[26:19]

But isn't this wonderful to think of? Just to have a positive effect by our conduct. To live dedicated to that. That I might have a positive effect. wonderful, and we can all do that. Back to Sojin's words. From time to time, we have difficult encounters with people, both inside and outside the Sangha. Finding a middle ground between affirmation of the person and And acknowledging your differences is a wonderful practice opportunity for a Zen student. Practice involves using skillful means instead of reactivity.

[27:25]

Reactivity brings forth defensiveness in another person, and that muddies the water. Without denying our emotions and feelings, how can we rise to a place of equanimity where the solutions become obvious to everyone, without carrying any defensive baggage at the bottom of our hearts. Someone said to me, I don't feel loved, but I realize that if I love everyone, I will be loved in return. The vow to awaken with all beings must be more than just lip service. Our bodhisattva practice is to help all beings in their quest for fundamental maturity and realization.

[28:34]

Enlightened practice, therefore, is to stop seeking enlightenment and practice for the sake of practice, which matures oneself on the one hand and others as well. Some time ago, I ran across a little kid's book from Singapore called The Adventures of Leo. Rahula leads the way. It's about a boy named Leo. One day his mother said, why don't you go to the temple and offer flowers to the Buddha? So he went to the temple to offer the flowers, and behind the Buddha was a little boy. Looked a lot like him. His own age, 10. There was a little monk named Rahula with a shaved head and a robe. And they became friends and they went around together. And whenever they encountered a tricky situation, Rahula always gave Leo a good teaching about it. And they got into a fight one time with some kids and Rahula helped him to understand.

[29:43]

Whatever situation Leo found himself in, Rahula was always there to teach him how to deal with it. Leo and Rahula are two sides of each one of us, the ordinary side and the Buddha side. When we are mature enough to let the Buddha be in the lead, then we can really help people. And when these two sides become one side, we can forget all about ourselves and help others. practice, we fall down. When we fall down, we get up. That's the rhythm of practice. Negotiating our way through difficulty and adversity gives us the strength and confidence to live our life one moment at a time in the faith that we are Buddha.

[30:48]

So this is our aspiration. No gaining mind, but strong practice to express the way and to embody the way. When you have this, nothing can stop you, even though you have many obstacles and barriers. When you become one with Dharma, it is transmitted to you by the universe, and you will have found your own true way. These are some words from my precious teacher. You'll be able to read them yourself when the book comes. What a noble and beautiful thing just to live.

[31:59]

a life, doing your best, dedicated to having a positive effect, helping other people, not needing or wanting too much, and then at the end, with a lot of joy, and full willingness, to give up your life and move on. Beautiful thing. Thank you very much for listening to our words today, some of mine, but mostly his. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive

[33:02]

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.

[33:23]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.56