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 morning, everybody. Welcome to San Francisco Zen Center, to City Center. My name is Jordan Thorne, and I'm I'm the treasurer of Zen Center. It's a new position. I've started it in the beginning of September. This is a really beautiful day, actually. Beautiful fall morning. Made a little complicated for myself by the fact that actually I've got a cold. I've been under the weather for a few days. And, you know, when you're hanging around by yourself at home, you think about things like, why do they call it a cold?

[01:01]

Actually, because I'm kind of warm. I've got a warm. And this morning when I woke up, for those who don't know, this is just a little different than my regular beautiful voice. And I said, good morning, Jordan, to myself, to hear me. what it sounded like. And, of course, the very first time you speak in the day, when you've got a frog, it sounded just so horrible. I thought, oh, God, I can't even give the lecture. At 6.30 this morning, Blanche, I looked up your phone number. Yeah. And then I thought, no, I can't do that to her. And also, I can't do that to myself. You know, I need, you know, it's... I have a kind of love-hate relationship with lectures, with Dharma talks, and one thing I love is when they're over. And I didn't want to take away that sweet experience. When you've got a cold, orange juice is like comfort food.

[02:15]

and I made some fresh-squeezed orange juice for myself this morning. And after I squeezed it, I took a sip, and I kind of recoiled, and I thought, these are the worst oranges ever. And then I realized I couldn't taste, they didn't taste like oranges, but that's because my palate, my kind of taste buds are completely flattened. Anyway, so here we are together. on this Saturday morning. And I think that's kind of what I want to talk about, is what brings us together here in this room. Some years ago, I walked up to, in the 1970s, to put a date range to it, some years ago I walked up to the Zen Center and for the first time I rang the doorbell. And I know I shouldn't have been surprised after ringing the doorbell when someone opened the door.

[03:24]

But nonetheless, when the door opened, I was very nervous. There's a person on the other side of that door, a Zen student. And I felt intimidated and nervous, and I felt kind of skeptical about some uncertainty about why I was there, what brought me to that spot. And still, that's my question today. What brings us to this place? What brings us to what moves me, what moves all of us? What's a common thing we share that gives rise to the thought of trying to understand what practice is, what Buddhist practice is, what Zen practice might be? Oops. So I want to talk about how I understand our shared yearning, desire, heartfelt need.

[04:52]

And there is in Buddhism a word called bodhisattva. If you don't know what bodhisattva means, raise your hand. Would somebody who knows what it means Say, what is a bodhisattva? An awakening being. An enlightened, an enlightened, enlightening, an enlightening being. Someone who dedicates themselves towards understanding how to live their life and how also to encourage other people to live their other lives in a way that's positive. And it also means other things, too. It's a big word. But I want to say that I believe all of us in this room, just by the fact of putting ourselves here, are bodhisattvas, people who have engaged, who have entered the path of practice, awakened a heart of practice, a heart of desire for understanding our place.

[05:58]

And this fact that just... by the fact that together we've already aroused the thought of waking up is actually a tremendous backdrop, background to Zen, the spirit of our Zen endeavor. So Buddhism is a teaching, is a religion, is a practice that is founded on awakening. Buddha awakened one, Buddhism. And while it is a practice that's based on awakening, it also is a way that includes our delusion. Because we need to include our delusions if we want to find out how to wake up.

[07:06]

And You know, there is a beautiful teaching just to notice to know that fresh flowers in a lovely vase on the altar behind us will wilt. This beautiful sunny day will turn to evening and nighttime. One metaphor for Buddhism is, it's called the middle way. And I think this is a beautiful, it's so simple a thing, the middle way. But I think it's a beautifully powerful, strong encouragement to understanding how we should move through our lives. So Zazen, or Zen practice, is a training to understand how to walk

[08:12]

in the middle of our lives without leaning to the left or to the right, but being upright. But the question is, it's easy to say we walk in the middle of our life being upright, neither leaning left or right. How do we actually gain some confidence or experience at doing this? Not being... buffeted by what happens, but actually being kind of a still point in the middle of it. Well, at a Zen center, we talk about meditation. We encourage people to practice something called Zazen, which is basically a formal practice of sitting in concentration, in mindfulness, with awareness of your breath. And it's a kind of, in some ways, Sitting zazen is a little bit like a hothouse that creates a nurturing environment for us to notice how we're doing.

[09:25]

But also, We don't just... So we talk about Zazen at the Zen Center. Zazen is the word we use for meditation. We encourage people to do it, but it's very also important to know that in the course of any day, even if you're following the schedule here at City Center, if you're fully following just a couple times a day, you might practice meditation. Most of the day, we're actually walking around doing those things we do. taking care of business, not sitting still and facing a wall. And that's just the way it should be. We train ourselves through sitting meditation, by noticing ourselves in that context, we train ourselves so that we can walk in this world with people and be straightforward

[10:36]

and directly with them. So it's kind of a hallmark of Zen. It's kind of a trademark of Zen that the time we spend at work at play, we treat with the same value as we do the time we spend in the meditation hall. Because this is a kind of attitude of non-duality, this is how we, this is the foundation of our understanding how to live. There's a famous expression, famous koan in the Zen tradition, a great master Ma Su was asked, What is Buddha? He said, this very mind is Buddha.

[11:39]

What is Buddha? This very mind is Buddha. He didn't, by that, he didn't mean this very mind when I'm in the meditation hall in concentration is Buddha. No, he said this very mind. Right now, this very mind is Buddha. This big view is the way we understand Zazen. Suzuki Roshi, in a lecture in 1964, he said, when you accept everything, everything is beyond dimensions. The earth is not great, nor a grain of sand small. In the realm of great activity, picking up a grain of sand is the same as taking up the whole universe. To save one sentient being, this is the bodhisattva's endeavor, to save one sentient being, to save all sentient beings. He said, to save one sentient being is to save all sentient beings.

[12:42]

Your effort of this moment to benefit one person is the same as the eternal vow of Buddha. Mel Weitzman, who's head of the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center and... former Abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, was once asked, what is nirvana? I didn't hear that question, so I'm told that he was asked that, and I was told I heard his reply, which was, when asked, what is nirvana, he said, nirvana is doing one thing completely. So by practicing zazen, by going to the meditation hall and practicing trying to follow the instruction to be mindful of our breath and intimate with what arises, we learn how to do one thing completely. And through this effort, through learning, through paying attention to the smallest details of the one thing in front of us, our life can be changed.

[13:55]

Our life is changed. As Suzuki Raji said, picking up a grain of sand, we can see that we're picking up the whole universe. Or we might see. Maybe I hope we can see. Picking up a grain of sand, we're picking up the whole universe. And this is the same spirit where by meeting one person completely and straightforwardly, we learn how to meet everyone straightforwardly. in a helpful way. Paying attention to the smallest parts of our attention, our mindfulness, of our momentary experience of how the day unfolds. Paying attention as we're making dinner or paying attention, for instance, as Vernet brought this

[15:04]

a little lectern in front of me, and I tried to be mindful as I put my hands in Gosho. In these simple actions, if done completely, there is a gateway, there can be a gateway that opens to a big space. One of the things I think you can find, you might find in meditation practice, is that the biggest space you can imagine in your heart can open by paying attention to the smallest bits of your breath, the smallest fleeting moments of your breath. It's kind of paradoxical that our heart can open wide when we pay attention to small, detailed aspect. of this instant that's changing always.

[16:06]

But this is actually only possible if you make the effort. I think that anyway. Maybe it's possible just always and we don't notice it. So this effort to be present opens the door of our life to a large space in our hearts. But this is not a gift for us to keep this large space in our heart. This is not for us. If we keep it for ourselves, it immediately diminishes and shrivels and kind of disappears and becomes a shadow.

[17:14]

But if we care for the people that we live with and love, we need to give them this sort of space. We need to offer this open-hearted space to them. It might be I'm going to say, not that it might be, I'm going to say that in order to realize a lovely kind of intimacy with people, it's necessary to begin, and this might seem odd, but we need to begin by creating a distance, a lovely distance so that that other person can express their own self and be who they are, which isn't very often who we think they should be or even want them to be. In our practice, I might say Zen practice, but I may just say in our life, we need to let go of the previously figured out ideas about who we are and who our friends are and how we all connect.

[18:32]

we don't we don't I don't maybe I don't know when I say we this extravaganza of Zen practice you know you might take on for various individual reasons we might take on we don't undertake it to become someone other than who we already are. But that's a person we have to discover, strangely. We have to kind of set forth on a journey to find out who we already are. A heroic journey, perhaps, if we want to frame it in such ways. When last week, Fu, Schroeder from Gringold spoke here in this room, and she talked about how when Buddha was under the bow tree, the story is he was besieged by demon hordes, you know, and lascivious dancing maidens and various things.

[19:56]

But if you looked at Buddha under the tree as he was in meditation, you wouldn't have seen any of those hordes or any of those temptations. They were in his heart. And they were something that he had to kind of go through in his own way. Buddha penetrated to what might be his original nature by being still, by paying attention to the one thing, which was that moment that he was sitting. It's a complicated moment. Here in this room it's full of the sounds of the street and the little creaks and noises of everybody's freaky bodies and chairs and the breeze. And it's exactly the moment that we need.

[21:02]

my understanding of Zen, which is imperfect, my imperfect understanding, is that Zen is pragmatic also. It's not a teaching about purity. It's a teaching about how to live a helpful life. And how that happens, how we learn to live a helpful life for each of us is going to be different. You know, our life is a kind of dream. Our hopes, our solace every day can seem like a challenge what we imagine we are is often so compelling that we can't let go of it we take it as true we take it as our solace

[22:40]

Zazen is an instruction on how to dissolve this delusion about ourself. It's a medicine to heal this sickness of understanding some idea we have about who we are. As Suzuki Roshi was once asked, he said, does a Zen master suffer in a way different than his students? And he answered, a Zen master suffers exactly the same way. If not, I don't think he's good enough. Zen master suffers exactly like everyone else because we take ourselves so seriously the whole thing gets complicated

[24:24]

It's appropriate that we take ourselves seriously. There's problems if we are too flippant. But we need to practice, like I said before, in the middle way. We need to trust our intention. In this process, practicing with a sangha is, sangha is a word which means community, means parish, like-minded souls. And in our Zen practice, practicing with a sangha, with other folks, is essential. Especially in the beginning, but also in the middle, and even at the end.

[25:28]

practicing with the sangha, practicing with others, letting others see who we are so we can get that feedback. Even though when people see who we are, we might be surprised and we might not even agree, but nonetheless we need to be open to it. It's not just a question of our realizing our own Buddha nature. It's a question of helping others realize who they are as well. In a very real way, we need the permission of our friends in order to change, in order to wake up. And it's one of the challenges that we, each of us, need to face to actually allow people to be someone different than who they first were when we knew them originally. At first, when you might come to a Zen center, a place like this, you might follow the schedule, like, you know, morning exhaust and service and whatever the schedule might be to you.

[26:49]

You might follow it because you're training yourself. It's a training. And later, after a while, perhaps you might have the sense that you're following this schedule or rhythm of practice. because you're expressing yourself. And from the outside, someone looking at us following the schedule might not see any difference between, the two don't look so different, and that's because they really aren't so different. Training ourselves, expressing ourselves, there's really no difference between the two. And in what I just said about schedule, you could substitute the word life. When we follow the schedule or when we live our life because we want to become something or someone different from whom we already are, then we're training ourself, which is okay, but also in some ways denies that we are

[28:04]

originally denies ourselves as Buddha. When we follow the schedule or live our life because this is how we understand the way to present ourselves helpfully because this is the way we want to live in harmony with other people in intimacy with the moment that arises. It might be and I hope it can be that doing this we're living our life as actualized Buddhas, a grandiose phrase, rather grandiose. And as we go on living our life, following the schedule, practicing with friends, really our life and the stream of this is quite delicate and fragile, to be honest. It's a delicate thing. We need our best intention to be brought forward over and over.

[29:08]

And we also need occasional skepticism, some questions, some doubt. Are we doing it right? Can we be more useful? Are we stuck? We have a lot of things in common. One of them is that we were born. I think I can say that. And when we were born, we were most likely innocent and sweet. The apple in our parents' eyes. Admirable little children. I hope we all had love and those things we needed in our youth.

[30:11]

But as time goes on and we get older and we grow, we discover that things are more complicated and we start to make choices for ourselves. We start to individuate ourselves. And necessarily we make our lives complicated so that we can discover, perhaps, how simple things really are. We need to actually make that discovery on our own. We can't just take it as word from someone else. In some ways, we have to get lost before we can become found.

[31:15]

I think when I came up the front step of the Zen Center and rang the doorbell years ago, it was because I felt lost. But you know, also, I wouldn't have maybe said that about myself then. I would have said maybe I was trying to find myself. summers are hot and autumn brings falling leaves winter is cold spring is a gift of fresh flowers now what brings us to this place what brings us to this room to this world where our footsteps echo down, always not taken.

[32:30]

Towards the doors never open that we wonder about. What lesson is there in a dream that has no end? you all. 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.

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