This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to the bright lights of Unity Church. This is our first one-day sit. of the fall practice period. We're sitting all day today. I can put these on without messing up the microphone. Welcome to the people online. Thank you for making time to join us today. Welcome everyone who's in the room. My name's Tim Wicks, and I currently serve as Tanto, which means Head of Practice. at San Francisco Zen Center's city center, which is just up the street.

[01:03]

We're undergoing a year-long renovation in the building. We're just coming down to the final weeks of it. And we are deeply grateful to Unity Church and to Haight Street Arts Center, who've let us come and have our one-day sits. here and there. It's good to have good neighbors. So I'm leading the practice period with two other people, with Tova Green, who's here today, and with Eli Brown-Stevenson, who's at a board meeting right now. And I'd like to thank both of them for co-leading this practice period with me. And as always, I'd like to thank my teacher, Rinso. Ed Satterson for trying very hard to teach me about kindness. Since I was a little boy, I have always enjoyed listening to the blues, especially the great urban blues shouters like Jimmy Rushing, Big Joe Turner and Jimmy Witherspoon.

[02:22]

They're called blues shouters because they shout. They have loud voices. They shout, and there's something of the truth in what it is that they yell. Truth about life's ups and downs. And in our Zen practice, we try to face the difficulties of being alive head-on also, just like in the blues. Life is hard. It's difficult to be alive in a human body. And it's also... Very beautiful at times. So there's many tools that we use in Zen to face life as it is, in all its beauty, in all its difficulty. The most important one is our Zazen practice, our sitting practice, which is what we've been doing all morning and will do for the rest of the day together. Another tool that we use are called koans. Koans are a means of awakening.

[03:26]

They're used more in the Rinzai school of Zen, but we sometimes call them sayings or stories. They're basically writings that some people see as riddles or puzzles. But they're more than that. They're vehicles for going deeper into our practice, vehicles for awakening. There's nothing like them in the English language. We're not sure how it is that they came to be developed in China between the 10th and 13th century. In China, they're called gongan, which means public case. So by borrowing from legal jargon, they're given a kind of clinical seriousness that their often humorous content belies. So we at San Francisco Zen Center, we're the Soto School of Zen.

[04:29]

And although we use koans, our main focus is on sitting meditation, as I mentioned. Some people call the Rinzai school the warriors, in part because of their sometimes more dramatic, very male, some would say militaristic character. And the Soto school are the farmers. We're pretty low-key in comparison. There are some practitioners, like the late... Robert Aiken Roshi, who trained in both Rinzai and Soto schools. Aiken Roshi likens koans to taishos, or shout presentations, talks that are designed to give encouragement during zazen. And I like this reference to koans and the connection it has to an exclamation of the truth, just like with the blues shouters. Last week, at last week's Dharma Talk, central abbot David Zimmerman quoted from a koan from Wutsu, and it was called Meeting Someone Attained in the Tao.

[05:42]

My first teacher, Michael Wenger, asked me to work with another koan of Wutsu's called Wutsu's Buffalo Passes Through the Window. And here is... the koan, which is called a case. Wutu said, it's like a buffalo that passes through a latticed window. Its head, horns, and four legs all pass through. Why can't its tail pass through as well? And that's it. That's the koan right there. So this is a part of a collection of koans called the Muminkan, or the Gateless Gate. And it was compiled by... someone named Wu Man, and he comments after that case, and this is his comment, and then he gives a verse. If you can get upside down with this one, he says, discern it clearly and give a turning word to it, then you can meet the teachings.

[06:49]

But if it's not yet clear, pay close attention to the tale, and you will resolve it at last. And then... The tale on the beast. Thank you. Passing through, falling in a ditch, turning beyond, all is lost. This tiny little tale, what a wonderful thing it is, the tale of the beast, once again. Pretty much all tales spoken here are going to refer to the ox's tail. Because in all three of these, in the verse that I just read, in Wu Man's comment, and in the case itself, the tail is focused on. So here's a buffalo, an ox, a symbol of power. And there are sculptures with the Buddha sitting on an ox, which is a metaphor for the power of the teachings, and the Buddha as the tamer of human suffering.

[08:00]

So as I mentioned, we just started this practice period, and in this practice period, we're studying, among other things, the ten ox herding drawings. And these are famous Zen drawings. that I won't go into detail about here because we're going to do so elsewhere in the practice period. If, however, you're not in the practice period and you're interested, you can just look up the 10 ox herding pictures. They depict our path to awakening. In the drawings, the ox is the mind of the practitioner. And in this koan, it is as well. Here you have the ox, which is almost completely passed through the window, but its tail remains. So we practice with our karmic consequences. Our karmic consequences are just the history of our lives, our family and our community histories.

[09:03]

We practice with the things we have done and those which we haven't done. And we do this for a long time. We practice for a long time. We work with the Dharma gates of dysfunctional families, with trauma. And for me, it was with the addiction to drugs and alcohol that I'd been before I came to practice. And for many of us, there's an attempt to purify our pasts, to become completely removed from our troubled karmic conditions, to become clean and have no trace of our difficulties left. And some writing is misunderstood to point us in that direction. For instance, Ehei Dogen, who was the founder of our school in 12th century Japan, in this famous passage from the Genjo Koan, he writes, to study the Buddha way is to study the self.

[10:07]

To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly. And this last section, no trace continues endlessly, gave me the mistaken impression that I could somehow become completely removed from my past, and pure in some way without remnants of my past, ignorances and delusions. Back to Wu Men's comment, in quotes, pay close attention to the tale and you will resolve it at last, in quote. The tale, what seems like the problem here, is actually the solution. Many of us at Zen Center have multiple jobs.

[11:17]

It's just part of what it takes to run a modern Buddhist temple in the United States. And it's true that as well as being tanto, I'm the sewing teacher here at City Center. And a sewing teacher helps people make their robes. So I have an okesa on a robe that I made. Actually, I didn't make this one. It's a loaner from Christina Lenher because mine... The one that I made is in such shameful disrepair for a sewing teacher to have. A robe like that is a disgrace. And I couldn't wear it in front of you. And other people have on a smaller robe, which is also a Buddha's robe, which looks like a little bib, and that's called a rakasu. And so when you study with a teacher, after you've been studying for a while and your teacher thinks that you're ready, your teacher sends you to sewing class to sew your robe. And you need to have a teacher to help you do that. And I was trained in sewing by Zenke Blanche Hartman, who was the first abbess of City Center.

[12:24]

And early in my training, when I was eager to show progress in my ability, I went ahead and attached the face to the straps of my lei rakasu without her attention. When you finish your robe, you finish sewing your robe, you give it to your teacher, who then writes your new Dharma name on the back on a piece of silk that's attached to the back of the rakasu. And in a public ceremony, your teacher then gives you back the robe as you receive the 16 Bodhisattva precepts publicly. This is called the Jukai ceremony. And a couple of days after my jukai ceremony, Blanche and I were eating dinner in the dining room, and she suddenly grabbed my rakasu and pointed out that I'd sewn the face onto the straps upside down. Massive faux pas, especially for someone who's in training as a sewing teacher.

[13:28]

I was absolutely horrified, and I told her that I would fix it immediately. Without missing a beat, she said, no, you won't. You'll wear it upside down. You have upside down practice. And so I did. I wore the Raksu upside down, thinking that everyone in the world would see the mistake I had made and that I would have to cultivate yet more humility to get by. Needless to say, no one ever noticed. Upside down practice. I've tried to cultivate this practice in my time since then. because it's a way of speaking about beginner's mind. Having an open perspective to what practice brings forth. To look at things in a different way than that seen through the expert's eyes. If you can go upside down with this one, says Wu Men in his commentary, if you can go upside down and give a turning word to it,

[14:36]

then you can meet the teachings. But if it is not yet clear, pay close attention to the tale, and you will resolve it at last. So our robes are made of panels. The small rakasu is made of five panels, and the larger okesa, like the one I have on, is made of seven panels. Each panel in these robes is made up of a short piece and a long piece. The rakasu has five short pieces and five long pieces. Each short piece is the delusion of ignorance piece, and the long ones are the wisdom pieces. When you become a priest, you get two wisdom pieces to each delusion piece, this in the hopes... that you have a little bit more wisdom than when you did Jukai. So people are surprised when I tell them about the meaning of the robe and its pieces.

[15:44]

Most of us would like to banish our ignorance and delusion. We just want to be associated with the much more attractive wisdom. But we don't banish it. We actually sew the ignorance and the wisdom together so that they're connected. They're both a part of the whole picture. They're both a part of our awakening. To see wisdom as separate from ignorance, or even something that can be separated out from wisdom, is to be dualistic. And that's a mistake in our practice. That's the practice of separation. We learn to see the interconnectedness of all being, and this includes our ignorance. Chakyamuni Buddha developed his teachings in response to clinging. He said that we cling to the opposites of old age, sickness and death, and are in a perpetual state of suffering because of it.

[16:52]

Addiction is clinging on steroids, a deformed kind of clinging. And one of the main characteristics of addiction is obviously self-centeredness. And when I'd been in recovery for a decade and a half and had become a priest at Zen Center, it was clear to me that despite a lot of recovery, Zen practice and lots of therapy, I still had a remnant of self-centeredness that was alive in me. A couple of small things had happened and I had a moment of clarity about who it is that I was. I'd been trying to purify myself in ways that were not to that point possible. I still had the central characteristics of the condition that I came to Zen to address that were alive and well in me. Diminished greatly, but still active. This was the remnant of who I was before the path began, and it was the ox's tail that didn't pass through the window.

[17:57]

Back to Wu Men's comment. If it's not clear yet, pay close attention to the tail and you will resolve it at last. And Dogen, to study the Buddha way, is to study the self. We see what it is that arises in Zazen, and we study it as Dogen asks us to. Everything arises, comes into being, and passes into emptiness. So it's very important to speak to a teacher. As these arisings happen, we don't stress individual sitting, but doing so with a group of other people. And that includes practice discussion with someone who's on the path with you. Sometimes it's painful what arises. What I learned early on is that nothing that arises in my being is unique to me.

[19:06]

There's someone else who's had similar things arise while sitting, and there's a way to be with these things as they go through the process of arising and passing away. There's wisdom in everything, even somehow in delusion. In sewing together delusion with wisdom, we are identifying interconnectedness. The ox has disappeared through the window, but the tail is a remnant of what it is that has passed. Study this tale, study the self-centeredness, which is a part of addiction. It won't be any news to you that we live in a self-centered, addictive culture. It seems like modern capitalism thrives on our addictive behavior. In a constant search for youth, good health, and avoidance of death, we're told that certain things will help us be happy.

[20:09]

Even though I've had over 25 years since my last drink or drug, I'm still an addict, living in an environment that encourages the condition. My condition is relegated, on the outside at least, somewhat to cigarettes and vanilla ice cream now. But still, the internal conditions remain. People are surprised sometimes when I tell them that I still need to go to meetings. It's often said that recovery is not a cure for addiction, but just a treatment. So you have to keep treating it in order to have a successful recovery. Maybe one day you'll be able to take a pill and be done with it. But I'm fine with the present model. I have a community of people who are working on the same thing, and many of them are doing so within a Buddhist context. The two disciplines have much in common. We study the self together in a way that gives us special knowledge for a common form of suffering in our culture.

[21:19]

We study the self and get to see inside both ourselves and the world in which we live. And there's always more to learn. It would be easy to say that there is nothing new for me to discover. That's the attitude of the expert. And that is the end of new possibilities, new perspectives. So today we sit together. Be kind to yourself. Don't bite off more than you can chew. Take small bites. Have practice discussion if you need to with senior Dharma teacher Paul Howler, Tova Green or myself if you need. And I'm going to finish up with a poem right here by Jane Hirshfield.

[22:24]

And it's called Optimism. More and more I have come to admire resilience, not the simple resistance of a pillow whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree. Finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another, a blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs, all this resinous, unretractable earth. Thank you all very much. 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.

[23:31]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[23:44]

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