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. The Dharma does not rise up alone. It can't emerge without reliance on the world. If I take up the challenge of speaking... I must surely borrow the form and the emptiness of the mountains and hills and the great earth, the call of the magpies and the cries of the crows. The water flows and the flowers blossom, brilliantly preaching without ceasing. In this way, there is no restraint. This is a poem by Chan Master Zhuryong.

[01:00]

a 17th century nun and teacher. I received this in the mail recently. It's an invitation to a Shouseau ceremony for a friend of mine, Florence Kaplow. The Shouseau is the head monk during a practice period, the one maybe most responsible for modeling the practice for everyone in the practice period, and whose main function is to be a friend to everyone. And it's their initiation into teaching. They're invited by their teacher to co-lead the practice period. And then at the end of the practice period, there's a big ceremony where everyone in the practice period asks them their most heartfelt practice question, and the Shusou must respond. And it's kind of the first, well, during the practice period, the Shusou has some opportunity to give some talks, but the practice period is the first opportunity that that Zen student will have to start to offer The Dharma, this is obviously a very fitting invitation about taking up the challenge of speaking.

[02:06]

And it spoke to me as well in my responsibility today to take up the challenge of speaking, although I have been shiso and have given some Dharma talks. This is actually my first Sunday talk, my first public Sunday talk. So it feels like somewhat like an initiation for me, for me too. So it's a... hopeful reminder that I'm not solely responsible for the Dharma, you know, it comes from the world, the kind of call and response pattern. Although I must say that the images that the world offers for my imagination these days aren't so much of the natural world, the mountains and hills and although those are all wonderful Dharma teachers, but lately the images that I've been most absorbed by have been about baseball. So I have some aspiration to weave baseball into my Dharma talk today.

[03:15]

But maybe before I go there, and partly to explain why I'm going there, I want to talk a little bit about wholeheartedness and vulnerability and shame. I'm wondering... Any of you are familiar with some TED Talks that were given by Brene Brown? I'm seeing some heads nod. So I'm sorry for those of you who've already, you know, kind of seen the talks. I'm going to kind of recapitulate those talks somewhat because I thought they were just so wonderful. And in some ways spoke, I felt very much, to our practice. And they kind of served in some ways as kind of a launching point or inspiration for me for maybe talking about baseball.

[04:25]

So Brene Brown is a social worker and a researcher. And she's done a lot of research on shame. And the way she came to study shame was that she was actually not interested in shame, but she was interested in connection. Because from her point of view as a social worker, connection is why we're here. It's the most important thing to us, love and belonging. And I think we have that understanding in our Zen practice too. We sometimes say intimacy. What's the business beneath the ropes? Intimacy. So that's maybe what we try and stay closest to. So she was interested in connection and love and belonging. And so she started to do some research. She started to talk to people about their experiences.

[05:28]

And what she found was that if you ask people about love and belonging and connection, what they very well ended up talking about was heartache and heartbreak and exclusion and being disconnected. And this was kind of puzzling to her. And and she was kind of wondering what was going on, and she basically kind of came to that there's a kind of excruciating vulnerability that some people have that kind of makes it difficult for them to feel connected, and that this excruciating vulnerability is kind of rooted in shame. And she basically defined shame as... in this context, the kind of fear of disconnection. So it's precisely the kind of fear of disconnection which disconnects us. And it's the fear of disconnection based on an idea that there's something about us that if other people knew about or saw, they wouldn't feel that we were worthy of connection.

[06:45]

That's our idea, you know, that if other people saw this, we wouldn't be worthy of connection. And precisely what you need in order to feel connected, to have belonging, and to allow yourself to be seen, to be really, really seen. So if you have this feeling like there's something about you, that if it's seen, you wouldn't be connected, then you end up not letting yourself be seen and consequently aren't connected, can't be connected. And so she went on to do a lot of research about this, and she found that not everyone, this isn't the case for everyone, so not everyone has this kind of excruciating vulnerability, kind of rooted in shame, which prevents them from feeling connected. Some people actually don't have such a problem with kind of love and connection and belonging. And... And so she kind of wanted to understand, well, what's the difference between these two people, people that have this problem and the people that don't?

[07:52]

And she basically came to that there's kind of one major determining factor, which is that the people who were capable of love and belonging and connection basically felt that they were worthy of it. And that was kind of the simple thing. So it kind of comes back to this thing that the kind of feeling of worthiness or unworthiness is kind of what makes it possible. And so she was interested in studying these people who felt worthy of connection. And something about the research that she did, the interviews, the way she saw them, she came up with a term for these people, wholehearted. And when I saw this in the video, it really kind of jumped out at me, because that's kind of like a... slogan for zen practice you know the wholehearted the wholehearted way so this researcher who was onto something about wholeheartedness i was very interested in and um and so she she kind of again kind of determined what what these people who are live wholeheartedly who have this feeling of kind of worthiness what do they have in common and she basically um came up with three three things um courage and she distinguishes um courage from

[09:07]

from bravery, you know, kind of taking courage from its root, the Latin word cur, meaning heart, meaning the capacity to basically just to speak from the heart or to tell your story from your heart, with your whole heart. And then compassion, and primarily she indicates compassion to one's self, kindness to one's self. That was one of the kind of key characteristics of these people who felt worthiness, And because it's only through kind of compassion and kindness to oneself that one's also able to be kind and compassionate to others. And then finally, the third thing is connection. And this may seem a little circular, but in this case, she's talking about their capacity for connection as a result of their authenticity, which she kind of understood as their ability to let go of who they think they should be, to just be who they are. And again, this is kind of precisely what you need to do for connection because this kind of relates to allowing yourself to be seen.

[10:12]

You need to kind of be who you are to be seen, to feel connected. So these people were wholehearted. They were able to do this. And again, this kind of immediately kind of rang some Zen bells for me because one of my favorite Suzuki Roshi teachings is when you are you, Zen is Zen. So there's this real emphasis in Zen too on kind of completely being yourself. So she was curious, what was the difference in the relationship to the vulnerability for the people who had a sense of kind of worthiness and those that didn't? And it wasn't that the people who had some sense of their own worthiness of connection kind of felt more comfortable being vulnerable, although they also didn't talk about a kind of like excruciating painfulness around it. It really wasn't about comfort or discomfort, it was about they just saw it as necessary, that it was necessary to be vulnerable, that they kind of saw that was a necessary part of living.

[11:18]

You know, being willing to be the first one to say, I love you, or be willing to do something where there's no guarantee of a result. being willing to kind of stay with situations of great deal of kind of tension and ambiguity without kind of running away, like, you know, waiting for the doctor to call after getting a mammogram, willingness to invest in a relationship even if you don't know it's gonna work out. These people thought that this was all fundamental, that you just had to do this kind of to live your life. This was, to Brené Brown, this was deeply troubling because she kind of self-confessedly said, you know, she became a researcher because, you know, the explicit purpose of research is to control and predict.

[12:22]

And so she was kind of a vulnerability foe herself. And so apparently this caused some big... change in her life. She talks about kind of breakdown in her life and change that she needed to go through once she discovered as a researcher that this was actually the path to the whole heart of living and that her modus operandi as a researcher was taking her in the wrong direction if what she was after was kind of controlling and predicting. And so... So these choices of the wholehearted kind of allow them to live fully, you know, and that vulnerability is also the kind of birthplace of joy and creativity, belonging, love. But for those who have this kind of excruciating, you know, pain around vulnerability, who weren't able to live wholeheartedly, you know, the consequences are rather severe and they're...

[13:24]

from her point of view, almost kind of epidemic, that if one can't kind of tolerate vulnerability, then what we generally try to do is numb it. We try and make it go away, the kind of difficult feelings of fear and grief and shame. And we numb it by buying things, by eating things, by... addicting ourselves to various things, to medicating ourselves. She says basically we're the most in debt, obese, addicted, medicated society in the history of our country, culture in the history of our country. And the problem is you can't selectively numb your emotions. So if you're numbing, the reason that we kind of resort to these things is because if we're numbing, We're numbing our grief and our fear and our pain. We're also numbing our joy and our gratitude and our happiness. So then we're not getting any nourishment.

[14:27]

So we kind of go to these kind of alternative ways to sustain ourself. Some other things that we do, you know, if we can't kind of tolerate vulnerability and ambiguity is we... We make everything, we try and make everything certain. You know, and this is kind of also her take on what's happened to religion for the most part, you know, in our country is that religion, which was once kind of based in kind of faith and mystery, really in the uncertain, in the unknown, you know, has become all about certainty, you know, and dogma and maybe politics the same way that we've really lost our capacity for discourse and conversation. because there's kind of clinging to views, kind of certainty of views. And so all that's left then is to kind of blame others. And she says the kind of definition of blame in her research world is a kind of way to discharge pain and discomfort.

[15:34]

So when we blame, we're just discharging our own kind of pain and discomfort because we can't feel it. The other things that we do to kind of you know, get away from vulnerabilities is we try and be perfect. We try and perfect ourselves so there's no, so that we aren't vulnerable, you know. And we pretend, you know, we pretend that what we do doesn't affect other people, that we're not connected to other people. So, so I guess one of the kind of remedies to this, you know, let me let ourselves be seen. You know, love with wholeheartedness, though there's no guarantee that that will be returned. You know, practice gratitude and joy. And maybe, I don't know, most importantly or as importantly and maybe as or most difficultly, live with some feeling of I am enough. You know, the inability to tolerate vulnerability also has to deal with some feeling like I'm not enough and that we have to do more.

[16:41]

but I have some feeling just as I am, you know, I am enough. And that she thinks will kind of help. You know, she just said a few more things about shame, you know, that the way shame often kind of manifests is kind of in her own inner critic, that kind of internal voice that we have that basically tells us that we're never good enough. And if we can somehow get past that one, then it kind of tells us, well, who do you think you are? Do you think you're good enough? Well, who do you think you are? You know, now you're arrogant. And she does give kind of one major antidote to shame, which is empathy. You know, shame... grows in secrecy, you know, in silence and in judgment.

[17:45]

What she says about shame is we all have it. You know, the only people who don't have shame are people who have no capacity for kind of empathy and connection, essentially psychopaths. You know, everyone's kind of sort of normal capacities for connection and empathy all have some degree of shame. But if we can't acknowledge it, if we can't feel it, then it kind of goes underground. It's difficult to talk about. And if we don't talk about it, it actually grows. But if you can kind of bring shame to light and especially kind of douse it with empathy, respond to it with empathy, then it can't exist. It doesn't have a chance. So a big encouragement there for us to be kind of empathic with ourselves and one another. Am I going to make a leap? So when I recently saw this, I guess it was sent to me by... I've been doing some autobiographical improvisation.

[19:03]

I've been kind of learning how to perform and teach autobiographical improvisation. These are big issues in that. in that work, because what the work actually calls for is kind of spontaneous expressions from one's life that really come out of the body, you know, kind of unpremeditated. And consequently, what can happen for people is that they do experience a lot of shame. It's a very vulnerable work, and they do experience shame. And so it was kind of sent to me in the kind of context of that. And I guess I got it kind of as I was thinking about this talk. And... not knowing so much what I was going to talk about. And then, you know, when I kind of had picked out this, I think it was like I picked out this date for myself. I feel like I've been encouraged in my kind of position at the temple here to like try doing this, try doing these Sunday morning talks. And there were a couple that had possibilities that kind of opened up and I kind of deferred and found someone else to give the talks and kind of finally felt like I should kind of make the, make the plunge.

[20:08]

And when I, And when I kind of picked the date here in October, at the time, it seemed like it was plenty of time. And, you know, I surely could come up with something to think about. And then as the date came closer, the baseball season was also coming to a close. And I found myself more and more absorbed with baseball. And the Giants in particular. And, um, and, uh, this was kind of a problem because, um, well, actually, because I was kind of ashamed of it. Um, um, anyway, baseball, I've come to realize it's kind of like this very kind of core part of myself. But when I, when I came to kind of Zen practice, I, I basically saw it as kind of one of those worldly affairs that one is supposed to renounce. Um, and, uh, And I remember, you know, heading off to going off to Tassajara, which is kind of the most monastic of the locations.

[21:14]

And I did have that kind of spirit when I left for Tassajara, like kind of, I'm going and I may never come back. It was this real quality of like leaving the world, you know. And I remember the kind of ambivalence with which I regarded, like the newspapers and the sports section. And I would, you know... Not to think so highly of those other Zen monks who were, like, reading the sports section and all the time, like, totally wanting to know, like, how the giants were doing. Anyways, this has been on for some years, the three years that I lived at Tathara. And then I moved to Green Gulch. And at Green Gulch, you can actually, like, have a radio in your room. And so I remember after having been at Tasa for about three and a half years, living here in Cloud Hall, just kind of right upstairs from the Zendo, still has a very kind of quiet, kind of monastic feeling that I did have a little boombox that I plugged in, and I would occasionally listen to Giants games.

[22:21]

And it kind of felt like contraband. It felt like actually things like smuggling into the monastery. It had a very kind of illicit quality to me. But I also remember like how vivid it felt to me, you know, like after having been at Tassajara for years, like listening to these ball games on the radio in Cloud Hall, it was just like, anyway, baseball was always vivid to me, but just even more, even more so, totally, totally. But at the same time, I did have kind of like this schizophrenic attitude to it. I remember at the time I was the office manager and there was an older man who kind of lived at Green Goals or Priest, kind of definitely my senior, you know, in practice. but who, for whatever reason, I happen to be supervising in that role, who wanted to take a day off to go see the Giants. And I thought, how could someone ignore their monastic duties to go to a baseball game?

[23:22]

It's a very, very split personality, very conflicted. I was. Anyway, and maybe not that extreme, but in some ways, I feel like that's kind of continued for years, that kind of feeling. And maybe baseball's kind of a key, you find a very clear example, but this whole issue of renunciation, I think, has been kind of confusing to me. Like, what is renunciation? And it's very central to our... In fact, just on Sunday, we had a bodhisattva initiation, a ceremony where people take precepts to kind of enter the bodhisattva path. And part of that ceremony says something like this, walking the path of the bodhisattva is accomplished through the spirit and actuality of renunciation. All the Buddha ancestors of the bodhisattva precept lineage have practiced and are still practicing renunciation of all attachments.

[24:30]

Renunciation is an unsurpassable way of harmonizing body and mind with the Buddha way. If one gives up attachments, one is free. One is a Buddha. So I think even as I was kind of like illicitly listening to baseball games, whatever my relationship was, it always felt to me like an attachment. It felt like this is something I'm kind of tolerating about my current self until I can get... improve until I get better, until I can get rid of this attachment. But I think I definitely saw it in that frame. And then I think my relationship just started to get a little murkier when in working with my teacher who I think was trying to find some way to kind of connect more deeply with me. And I think someday when I was talking to her, something must have popped out about baseball and its kind of childhood meaning for me. And then I found her talking to me about baseball more, engaging me, asking me questions about baseball.

[25:35]

So this thing that I thought was kind of a hindrance, an attachment, something to be rid of, was now somehow being brought forward in my practice. And this has been actually a little bit confusing for me. So kind of recognizing this, you know, recognizing that, yeah, maybe I had some shame around this thing, which was kind of a core part of myself. And then hearing this Brene Brown lecture, I thought, well, maybe this is an example, you know, maybe it's an example of something that I feel like it's, The Sangha, for instance, my teacher, she has a lot of compassion for me, but if the Sangha knew this about me, then they'd be much more lowly, I mean, just as I had of other practitioners. And so I thought, well, what a good opportunity to let myself be seen, to kind of bring out my shame and let myself be seen.

[26:42]

And that may feel like overstatement. People may feel like it's hard to believe someone would actually have kind of shame about this, but... I think, especially when we do this practice, maybe in this kind of residential, kind of quasi-monastic way for years, we do kind of internalize a lot of constraint and prohibition and precisely this thing that kind of Bernie Brown kind of cautions against, like, thinking you need to be a certain way rather than just being yourself. I think it's very natural to do that. Also in kind of groups that live closely together, there's some, I think, just natural human tendency toward conformity. So anyway, something in the world just may feel like Why would anyone feel shame about that? I think genuinely there has been something like that for me. So that's when it kind of came to mind. Maybe that would be something to talk about. And I'd also gotten the advice at some point by giving Dharma talks that it's helpful to wait as close to the time of the Dharma talk to kind of...

[27:48]

Compose it, if that's what you do, or, you know, as possible, so that it's actually most fresh, most kind of, you know, alive, that it's most aligned, you know, most authentic. Again, for these reasons of kind of wholeheartedness, like if we want to really be yourself and really be seen, then you want to give a talk that's authentic for you that moment, really. And so I don't know if it was procrastination or trying to follow this good advice, you know, but it's kind of putting off, you know. You know, working on the talk, somebody's like, well, maybe I'll talk about baseball. And then the Giants win their division. It's very exciting. And they get into the playoffs. And I don't know if it was kind of a, I don't know what it was. There's a really beautiful essay about baseball that I've long appreciated called The Green Fields of the Mind. which was written by A. Bartlett Giamatti.

[28:50]

He was actually the former president of Yale University, but also former commissioner of the National League and then commissioner of baseball. And I think he actually had a similar issue in his life because he was a very serious academic. He was a brilliant Renaissance scholar. And I think pretty much everyone in academia just could not understand his passion for baseball, which he wrote about, you know. And then he gave up. this, you know, kind of prestigious job in academia to then, you know, work, you know, become the commissioner of the National League, which, again, I think the folks in his world just saw as, like, very crass direction to kind of go in, you know? But he, but I think he's someone who didn't, you know, see the game, let's say, as a worldly, worldly affair, you know, the way that I had, you know, seen it as primarily maybe kind of post-industrial kind of mass entertainment, you know, designed to kind of distract us, maybe just in these ways that Brené Brown was talking about, these kind of addictive things.

[29:56]

Like, I kind of thought about, you know, that's probably what major league sports are. And then actually there have been some talks, even from this very seat, where people have said things like that, like addiction, talking about addiction to major league sports. This kind of also reinforced my feeling of shame about it. And... I remember a couple years ago when the giants were, you know, on their way to winning the World Series. I think someone gave a talk from the seat and encouraged people to root against the giants, I think, as a way to kind of test their attachment, you know, their fixed view, you know. Do they have a fixed view? Is there any attachment here, clinging? Try rooting against the giants. See if you can do it. So all this meant you feel like just very bad Zen student, you know. So anyway, there's this essay by Bart Giamatti, which... It's kind of about the end of the 1977 baseball scene. He's a passionate Red Sox fan. Of course, the Red Sox, you know, until recently were this perennially kind of losing franchise. So for him, it was kind of a love affair with loss, you know, really.

[30:58]

And so he wrote this essay about that where he talks about, you know, the game being essentially designed to break your heart. Actually, I'll read you the beginning of the essay because that's kind of the part that's most poetic. It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again and it blossoms in the summer filling the afternoons and evenings and then as soon as the chill rains come It stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive. And then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.

[31:59]

And then he gives this kind of poetic account of the, basically the game, which was the last game of the season that year. The Red Sox were still ended up until the last day that they, lost to the Orioles, so of course the Yankees won the division, and they basically still had a chance up into the very last at-bat with their very best player, Jim Rice, but he hits a weak pop fly, and summer ends like that. And then he closes the essay and says, of course there are those who learn after the first few times, they grow out of sports, and there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. Buddhist insight. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown up or up to date. I am a simple creature tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever and it might as well be that state of being that is a game.

[33:02]

It might as well be that in a green field in the sun. It's this essay he writes. And I thought, well, that's perfect. How wonderful for a Dharma talk, especially if the Giants have just lost in the playoffs, you know, because then we'll all be feeling the same emotions. And then lo and behold, you know, they lost the first two games to the Reds terribly, you know, and looked like my Dharma talk was all coming together. And I... I was going to expose my shame about being a baseball fan, but at the same time have this opportunity to get this great teaching on impermanence, you know, and loss, you know, which is, of course, the true path to Buddhism, right? That's how we all find Buddhism is through impermanence. I even have this whole alternative narrative about how I came to Zen. In fact, you know, of course, living at Zen Center, you're very frequently asked, well, how did you come here? How did you get here? So there's a very kind of, at this point, fairly fixed, you know, story I have about,

[34:03]

you know, I don't always tell the whole thing to people, but essentially, you know, family trauma and, you know, kind of exposure as a teenager and personal angst and intellectual curiosity. Anyway, this whole kind of narrative about how I came to this. And then thinking about giving this talk, I had a whole alternative narrative, which is that Growing up a San Francisco Giants fan, just like Bart Giamatti being a Red Sox fan, the kind of perennial loss year after year had kind of given me these homeopathic doses of loss that led me to like seeking out Buddhism and Zen. So this was great. My talk was all lined up. But it was still hard to root against the Giants, even though that would have been the easiest thing in terms of my having a talk to give. But I was a little bit conflicted, to be honest. But then lo and behold, you know, they come back. And, you know, in this kind of remarkable way, you know, they won the last three games against the Reds to win the series. I guess something that no National League team has ever, ever done.

[35:07]

But it was, you know, this happened. When did they win their last game? Thursday? So it didn't give me much time to change my talk. And I kind of already committed, you know, to the baseball team. You know, once you've committed, it's hard to, you know, turn back. So I realized I'd have to have some other angle on it than baseball as a teacher of impermanence. So I guess I wanted to offer some other ways that maybe baseball has something to teach us about practice. I guess something else I was going to say, like the... The idea of impermanence, you know, that it's kind of, there's something about the kind of ambiguity, I don't know if ambiguity is the right word, but in kind of the end of Giamatti's essay where he kind of confesses to having to need to live with the illusion of something permanent and that being kind of the state of a game, the state of play.

[36:13]

And, yeah, he kind of cast it in that light as kind of an illusion or in contrast to those who have kind of clear insight that everything is impermanent and nothing lasts. But even at that point, even before I was going to more fully radically shift the direction we're talking, I wondered about that because I, just in his language, you know, about a game... that exists in the green field, in the sun. And maybe it's an illusion, but it had some feeling for me of actually kind of a practice of our own green valley and kind of freedom that we aspire to. And Buddhism, there is this teaching of radical impermanence, but there's also kind of the unconditioned. where the unborn, you know, and that was actually what Buddha was interested in. Buddha had these experiences of loss, you know, seeing a sick person, an old person, you know, a dying person, and a corpse.

[37:23]

And that kind of inspired him to find, well, what, to look for what isn't subject to that loss. So there is actually this other side of Buddhism, too, that there is... can't quite say something, there's a way, I guess, there's a path which has some quality of freedom, which is somehow free in some way from that loss, not maybe free from the loss, but free from the suffering kind of attendant to it. So even in that essay, I thought, well, there's some other side here too, besides just the impermanence that's being alluded, that I feel is kind of at play. This kind of freedom. And so I started to think more about what baseball, oh my goodness, it's already 11 o'clock. It's always happening to me. I feel like I'm not going to have enough to say. I have too much. Okay.

[38:23]

You know, things that baseball might have to teach us about Zen practice. And I started to kind of shift this view of it as this kind of like post-industrial mass entertainment. designed to kind of addict us and distract us, like does it have some other function in our life? And I really started to take seriously the quality of the sport as itself a kind of religious experience or as a kind of, that had a number of elements that I felt like pertained to Buddhism or Zen practice. So, you know, for instance, they're both what you might say are auto-telec, that they're done for themselves, you know, auto-self-telec end. So they're ends in themselves. You know, so the game has meaning only unto itself. It doesn't have, you know, financial consequences, but it doesn't, in terms of the interior quality of the game, the game doesn't have consequence to anything else besides itself. And there's also this very kind of profound, you know, teaching of Zen, given by Zen master Dogen, the kind of founder of our Zen lineage, his formulation of this kind of freedom when I was talking about of practice realization.

[39:38]

the simultaneity of our practice, of our play, you could say, and its realization. It's freedom that we don't practice to attain something else. So if you don't play the game for some other reason than just to play the game. So this quality kind of struck me as being similar between the two. And then the quality of ceremony that it gives in practice as kind of deeply steeped in ceremony, the kind of forms of our practice and the rituals of our practice and their important ways that kind of the meaning of the practice reaches us, touches us. And I realized the same, I felt really true about baseball. I mean, obviously the personal rituals that many people have in terms of listening to games or going to games and where they sit or what they eat or how they get there. One of my favorite ways is to go by ferry. You can watch the moon on the way back.

[40:40]

But also within the game itself, there are these kind of rituals of the national anthem and the umpire shouting, play ball, and that, you know, take me out to the ball game, and then even kind of interior to the game. And of course, players, baseball players themselves, of course, known very much for their own personal rituals, because the game is so much one of timing and being in the moment, that many players have rituals and help them be present, help them be in the moment. So I was thinking, you know, this is kind of another kind of commonality between baseball and our practice. And then also it's their understanding or their basis on the kind of the purely conventional, you know, that... Baseball is totally rule-bound. It only exists as a convention, as an agreed-upon understanding of these are the rules and these are how we play. There's no kind of ultimate external authority of the game outside the game.

[41:48]

The game itself is constituted by the rules that everyone agrees to. And then whatever freedom or, I might even say, kind of transcendence is found in the game is only found by kind of being deeply... kind of rooted in these agreements. And in fact, that's also why there's so much kind of pain around kind of cheating, you know, drug use, steroid use that has happened in the game because it totally undermines this kind of quality of freedom or transcendence that we get from the game, which we have some understanding. We have some shared agreement that it comes from being a kind of complete agreement about the rules and the equipment and they're all doing things the same way. And it's by that kind of deeply grounded understanding of the conventional, then you can have a kind of experience, a kind of freedom or transcendence. And that's very much true of our practice for Buddhism, too, this kind of emphasis on the kind of conventional truth and the ultimate truth that Buddhism has a kind of understanding that our reality and the reality that we kind of engage in with one another, that we name and talk about, is merely conventional, that those things exist by agreement, you know, by kind of cultural...

[43:02]

interpersonal, social, you know, agreement. And, um, and part of the freedom that, um, Buddhism points to is seeing that that is merely conventional, um, seeing that that's not ultimately real. And then there's a kind of transcendence, let's say, that one can have, but one still needs to be kind of deeply rooted or grounded in that, in that conventional existence for that freedom to kind of be authentic. Um, So these were some elements of kind of similarity that I saw. I have a whole list of them, actually, so now I'm kind of puzzled as what to do. How did it go on with my Zen exegesis of baseball or somehow come to a quicker close? I guess quicker close reminds me of this other... that feels kind of transcendental to me about baseball, which, again, has some resonance to stand in Buddhist practice, which is the kind of timeless nature of it, that it's a game that has no clock, that the game's completely played according to its own inner logic.

[44:19]

There's, again, no kind of external clock determining when it ends. And in fact, you could say that the game's so kind of that dictates of kind of conventional time that the base runners even run counterclockwise. The whole thing is kind of against time. And interestingly, Master Dogen has a teaching about time like that, that time's actually flowing backwards. Time is not the way that we think it is. Time's not apart from being. Time isn't actually moving. I mean, it's flowing, but it's flowing with being. It's not apart from being. So there's this kind of timeless quality to... to this realization in practice. It feels very akin to me to the timeless quality of, of baseball. Um, and there's also this teaching in Buddhism of, um, around the kind of momentariness, you know, you've all probably heard about, you know, staying in the moment, which of course also, uh, it's almost a cliche in our culture and, you know, easily picked up, you know, in sports, you know, and true, true.

[45:19]

I mean, no less true for maybe being cliche, but, um, even beyond that, there's this, um, teaching about time but isn't that it's both kind of continuous and discontinuous that um each each moment is in some continuity with the previous moment and in some ways it arises completely independently that kind of both these things are true it's paradoxical and i was thinking about that in terms of baseball that well there is no clock in baseball but there is a kind of way that the game moves there's a kind of time a rhythm to the game which mostly has to do with pitches right each play is initiated by a pitch so you could say each Each pitch is a moment, and there's a kind of continuity. The pitches build on each other. The count builds. What pitch the pitcher throws is determined by the count on the batter and all that's happened before in the game and all that might be anticipated that could happen in the game. And at the same time, each pitch is kind of uniquely and individually itself. It's a unique clip-thrown ball. It's a unique moment. So I was really happy when that occurred to me, this kind of deep...

[46:21]

resonance with time in baseball and Buddhism. And of course, the kind of appreciation for failure, you know, or mistake, you know, in, there's, again, Zen Master Dogen talks about his whole life being one continuous mistake. So there's much appreciation in our practice of the fact that it's, if not impossible, almost impossible to kind of like precisely hit the mark, you know, and that we're always in a process of kind of constant refinement when baseball managers refer to as adjustments. Pitchers and batters are always talking about needing to make adjustments, you know, so this is our kind of like dealing with our mistakes. And then it was kind of so evident, too, in this game, the third game between the Giants and the Reds, which the Giants kind of miraculously won through nine innings. They had one hit, you know, which meant that, you know, 27 times they got out and one time they got a hit.

[47:22]

A couple of those outs were sacrifices. Some player did the noble deed. They made something sacred by sacrificing themselves to help bring across the one run the Giants needed to send the game into extra innings. But everyone else got out, so there was this incredible failure rate. It almost literally was one continuous mistake for the Giants batters in that third game. Nonetheless, they somehow eked out a run in the 10th inning and won. We have a similar expression in Zen, you know, fall down nine times, get up ten. That's what the Giants did. Fell down nine innings and got up in the tenth. I'm being me. That was the point of today. There's also this, you know, the game... You know, I apologize for those of you who just aren't interested in baseball. Hopefully you're gleaning a little bit about Buddhism in this, you know, as we do this.

[48:25]

But the game also has this kind of quality of, like, restraint and release. You know, these moments of tension that kind of build and become more and more tense. You know, it's kind of a plot thickens with the runners on base and the count building. And... kind of concentration needing to kind of narrow, you know, at certain points in the game. And then maybe the third out is made and there's a kind of release from the whole situation. And this is kind of reminding me of a kind of similar thing in Zen practice called granting and grasping, you know, where the Zen master sometimes will be very strict with you, you know, and you need to be incredibly kind of precise. And other times there's kind of wide open field of play. Great, great release, this quality of restraint and release. again, had some kind of resonance with kind of granting and grasping. And there is, of course, the vulnerability that I began to talk with in the sport itself that, you know, the pitcher and the batter in some way stand kind of utterly alone, you know, facing one another.

[49:33]

They're really naked, you know, out there in those encounters. And... but at the same time, kind of part of a team or functioning as part of a group. But there's no kind of avoiding the vulnerability of those moments for them. And then maybe most importantly, I don't know, most importantly, The deepest theme, though, most resonant theme of the game, I feel, is the journey home. You know, that it's a game about, I mean, that's how you win, if you want to call it that, or that's the object, that's what you're striving for, is this process of having to leave home initially. The batter first has to leave home and get on base and then come back.

[50:34]

And if the game has some spiritual quality, I feel like it's kind of most clearly kind of expressed in that flow of the game, the intention of the game. And again, failure is such a big part of it. Most batters aren't even able to leave home. It takes quite an effort to leave home, to kind of set out on your own. And then once you do that, there's the... risk of being stranded. You know, stranded at first, stranded at second. You know, any names you die, you know, you die out on base and you don't make it home. And there are those fortunate few who, you know, hit home runs and, you know, with one kind of swift gesture can leave home and come back all at once. But for most players and most of us, we only get kind of partway on our own. And then we need the help of others to bring us in.

[51:35]

You know, baseball players, they need the help of their teammates to bring them home. As I think most of us do as well. And there's always that risk, though, even rounding third, coming home, that your way will somehow be barred by the catcher or be denied by the kind of authority of the umpire. Hmm. Hmm. Well, maybe I'll end my discussion about baseball with a quotation by Bart Giamatti's son. Bart Giamatti wrote a couple books on baseball. One's called A Great and Glorious Game. He didn't write that. That's actually a collection of his writings that was published posthumously. And then he wrote another book called Take Time for Paradise, which I think also he wrote it as a book, but I think it was published... Shortly after his death, you know, he had a kind of tragic death.

[52:38]

He was the commissioner of baseball during the Pete Rose scandal. So for those of you who know about baseball, you know Pete Rose, kind of hero of the game, the all-time hits leader of the game, but then was, as one speaks, after he stopped being a player, but he was still managing the Reds, the Senate Reds. He was discovered to have been... betting on the game or accused of betting and he kind of denied it all along. But there was, you know, investigations done and yeah, Giamatti had such concern for the kind of integrity of the game and the importance of the integrity of the game for it to be able to have the kind of transcendental meaning that he felt that it did for the fans, that he saw no other recourse but to banish Pete Rose from the game from ever having anything to do with it be in the Hall of Fame, having any role in the game, you know, is for one of the game's great, great icons.

[53:39]

And, you know, I'm sure Giamatti too, as a Renaissance scholar, felt the full impact of banishment. You know, I think in kind of the Shakespearean age, you know, banishment was the most severe punishment after death. So he banished Pete Rose from the game for gambling and then he had a heart attack. like Jiamatti had a heart attack like a week or so later, a month later, anyway, a short period of time after that, probably because of that kind of stress of the situation. So maybe unintentionally, the kind of great sacrifice he ended up making to kind of protect the integrity of the game. So this book, Take Time for Baird Heiss, came out just after he'd had that heart attack, and his son ended up writing an epilogue, which includes this... This quotation. Each season is a quest. Each game a journey. A journey that embodies its own unique, peculiar process.

[54:41]

A process whose very foundation is built on the game's elusive principles of simplicity. One pitch at a time. One at bat at a time. And one game at a time. And during this process, a process you must trust. and commit to if you are willing to make the constant necessary adjustments to stay in the moment and to have the conviction of awareness to never carry your last success or miscue with you to the plate and most important after the mastery of the details if you can remain mindful that the voyage is the thing you will be rewarded And that reward, no matter the journey's outcome, because the outcome is always a mystery, will be the character you acquired for having persevered.

[55:43]

So I thought this was a beautiful statement about baseball and could almost equally be said of our practice. So this week we start a practice period here at Green Gulch. I guess an eight-week period of time where we will kind of voluntarily, freely put ourselves under the constraints of ceremony and ritual and convention. And, you know, students This is a very large practice, but a lot of people are coming. And it's, of course, very beautiful here at Green Gold. You can imagine what people would want to be here. But the schedule is rather grueling. You know, you get up at 4.20 in the morning and basically scheduled all day until 9 o'clock with zazen and work and classes and kind of demanding. And so you might wonder why, you know, why one would do this.

[56:53]

And I think it's very similar to what we've been talking about, about baseball, and about kind of vulnerability, and needing to kind of face our difficult feelings, that that's the avenue, the path to coming home. And we can live our lives out in the world and seek various things, and then something happens, or Nothing happens, but we kind of wake up one day and we realize we're very far away from home. We don't even know who we are anymore. It's even happening in Zen Center, I guess. But there's something about this practice. I think that's why we engage in the practice is to come home again. So maybe I'll close with a poem by Derek Walcott. called Love After Love.

[57:59]

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome and say, sit here, eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine, give bread, give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your own image from the mirror. sit, feast on your life. Maybe one more time.

[59:01]

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome and say, sit here, eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself, Give wine, give bread, give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit, feast on your life. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support.

[60:19]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[60:23]

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