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. Welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. All of you who are here in the room and everyone joining us online. Am I reverberating like a... Wow, wow, wow. Is it okay? Can you hear me okay? Great. So, let's see. So this morning, we had a ceremony to honor the first ordained nun way back 2,500 plus years ago. Mahapajapati. How many people were at the ceremony this morning?

[01:06]

How many people would have been there had you known it was happening? So the ceremony this morning started in the zendo and our practice period leader and senior Dharma teacher Christina Lerenher read from the read a version of the story of Mahapajapati's going forth and seeking full ordination, because full ordination had not been approved for women at that time. This is, I think, I read somewhere around five years after the Buddha had been teaching for some time, so five years. And... In the reading, I'll read just a piece of it. So, how it was read this morning. So the Mahapajapati was the Buddha's aunt, maternal aunt, and foster mother who raised the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, from infancy.

[02:20]

And after witnessing his profound transformation, his awakening, and the benefit of that to countless disciples at this time, she herself recognized that the path to liberation was open to all seekers, regardless of their gender. The story goes, with unwavering conviction, she and a number of Shakyan women took an unprecedented step, shaving the head, putting on the yellow cloth, and sitting out on foot to Vashali to request full ordination from the Buddha, undeterred by hardship or uncertainty. So, this story, a few years ago, we were reading the more historically

[03:23]

encapsulated story from the Pali Canon, which had a little bit more detail, some of which is disputed. Scholars have disputed some of it. And we changed the ceremony a little bit. So I want to talk about that, why we would do that, what it means to do that, and whether I'm not really asking whether you agree or not. But I just wanted to have that be a point of consideration. So in the story we read this morning, that Christina read this morning, Mahapajapati and her 500 shakin, probably mostly noble women, joined her in shaving the head and donning the robe and walking from Kapalavastu to Vaisali, about 150 miles on foot.

[04:28]

When she arrived outside of the hall with a pointed roof in the great wood where the Buddha was staying, she stood outside and it says, with her feet swollen from the journey, her limbs covered in dust. And yet, despite the physical toll of the Buddha, Her resolve remained firm. And she waited. So what the story kind of, what the story leaves out is that prior to this, while in Kapila Vastu, Mahapjapiti had gone to the Buddha and asked for full ordination. She asked him and he said, no. So she asked him again. And again, he said no. And she asked him again. And he denied her a third time. So with that as the background, what does she do?

[05:32]

She shaves her head, she puts on robes, and she takes 500 women and walks to Bashali. This is probably some time after this happened. So in this story, when she's asked and refused again and again. I just want to notice that she doesn't argue with him. She doesn't get into a debate, at least as far as the polycanon reports. And yet she did not accept this decision. This decision that just by virtue of having a female form, somehow she did not get to do this. She did not get to enter the full ordination path. She did not get to leave home and worldly affairs. Just think about what that means for a moment, to leave home and worldly affairs, to focus entirely and completely on waking up.

[06:36]

So this was being denied to her. So rather than submit to this answer, she gathered 500 women who all shaved their heads, donned the yellow cloth, and walked the 150 miles with her. And then it says in the original telling in the Pali verse that she had feet swollen. Okay, so the same thing is said. Her feet are swollen and she's caked with dust. It also mentions that she stood outside where the Buddha was residing, and wept and sobbed. We kind of moved that out. I'm just kind of pointing out some of the alterations that were made. So I just want to invite everyone to settle into your body for a moment and imagine a time which I am sure every single person in this room has experienced.

[07:48]

a time when you were told by some authority figure, maybe a parent, maybe a sibling, maybe a boss, maybe an institution, that you were told that you were not worthy, or that you were shamed, or you were told, uh-uh, this is not for you, when deep in your heart you know that not to be true. Just feel what that feels like. Maybe it was because of your gender, maybe because of your race, maybe because of your sexual orientation, or maybe the food you eat, the clothes you wear, where you came from, what your background is, physical ability, education, class, any number of different things. Or you were told, uh-uh.

[08:51]

Where do you feel that in your body when you recall an experience such as that? Maybe you feel it in your gut. Maybe in your heart. Maybe in your throat. Maybe in your hands. Maybe your hands feel itchy. To be told this kind of message, to receive this kind of message, it doesn't stay in the conceptual or abstract realm. It becomes bodily memory that is carried around. And maybe if it's said again and again and again, it becomes lodged. It becomes something that maybe you internalize and believe yourself, despite a deeper feeling that it's not the truth. It may lead to some chronic, low-grade activation You may not even be aware of it. It might be under the surface. Maybe it has the effect of creating some form of vigilance.

[09:57]

Vigilance about whether you are welcome, whether you belong, whether you're enough, whether you're too much. So as the story goes, Ananda comes upon her and the 500 women. And as we heard this morning, Ananda asks her, what's going on here? He sees her distressed state. He sees all these women standing outside the Buddha's residence. He inquires and she replies, Venerable Ananda, I have come seeking the going forth, yet the Blessed One has not permitted it. It says, Recognizing the deep sincerity and steadfastness of Mahapajapati, Ananda went to the Buddha and implored him to allow women the opportunity for full ordination.

[11:03]

In the reading this morning, it goes on, Though the Buddha at first remained silent, Ananda skillfully asked, Lord, are women capable, after going forth from the house life, into homelessness in the law and discipline declared by the perfect one of realizing the fruit of stream entry, once returner, non-returner, or arhatship. They are, Ananda, the Buddha affirmed. If that is so, Ananda continued, would it not be good if women could obtain the going forth? In the original story that we modified, I wouldn't say we changed it fundamentally, but in the original story, it again goes on one time after another, where the Ananda asks for him, the Buddha, to ordain Mahapishapati and her 500 followers.

[12:21]

And each time the Buddha denied him, after the first time saying no, the second time saying no, the third time saying, enough, Ananda. So how does that land compared to the Buddha remained silent until Ananda took a different tact? where Ananda asks this as a different question, not one about whether the Buddha should or should not ordain women, but whether they are capable of attaining enlightenment, which the Buddha's answer was unequivocal. Yes, they are capable. So Ananda says, well, if that's so, Lord, then wouldn't it be good if women could obtain the going forth? And in the version that we read, it just kind of goes into... Recognizing her realization, determination, and capacity as a leader, the Buddha established the Bhikkhuni order with Mahapjapati as its first ordained member.

[13:38]

So, again, notice that Ananda doesn't argue or debate with the Buddha at all. He asks, he's denied, and he just asks a different question. In the reading this morning, it then goes on to say, when receiving the precepts, and it doesn't mention the difference between the 227 precepts that monks, male gone-forth ones, are given, that the women nuns are given between 311 to 364 rules. So it's a discrepancy of almost 100 rules. But not only those distinctions, but also the eight Garudamas, the eight special rules, or the eight heavy rules that are given really as a condition for

[14:45]

the Buddha saying yes. I'm not going to get into the eight rules exactly, but in the reading this morning, we call that when receiving the precepts, including the eight heavy rules of subordination, which is an interesting word at an ordination ceremony, the eight heavy rules of subordination, which are all, each of the eight ones specify how nuns are less than. Each of the eight ones. Whether it's about how to show respect or what rules there are for being on retreat, who's able to give or receive instruction, what needs to be in place for there to be a closing ceremony, for a ceremony to be legitimate, whether how discipline is given, how ordinations are given, how admonishments are given, and how instructions are limited. So each of them are placing women, placing the nuns below the monks.

[15:52]

As an example, a nun who has been ordained for a hundred years still has to bow down to a monk who was ordained that day. So we kind of just call them the eight heavy rules of subordination in our reading this morning. And then Mahapajapati, it says that she wholeheartedly accepts them, declaring, just as a youth fond of adornments would joyfully place a garland of jasmine upon their head, so too do I accept these precepts, never to be transgressed as long as life lasts. So, again, Mahabhapiti doesn't hesitate or resist, at least not according to the story, but she wholeheartedly accepts them. So the difference between these two stories, and there's more differences as we will see. In the literal version, it really feels a certain way.

[16:57]

And I'll just give an example of the feeling from my own and maybe a few others' perspectives. About two years ago, the first time I did the ceremony here, I believe, was the first time I did the ceremony here as the officiant. We were in the renovation. It was held in the Zendo, not in the Buddha Hall. But as, after the ceremony, walking up the street with several other women, it's kind of like, we're just walking up the street, and the comment was made like, oh, God, that sucked. Here we are. I think there were like four of us. Yeah. And one person said, fuck that. So it led to this really strong reaction. So here's a ceremony meant to celebrate the establishment of the women's order. And all of us were like, that really sucked.

[18:01]

This is not OK. And yet, you could say that we whitewashed the ceremony, that we You know, we're trying to protect ourselves from what happened. Or you could ask the question, what are we honoring? So in the reading, the original reading as well, it kind of centers Ananda as like, isn't Ananda great? Which he is. I just want to say Ananda. Thank you, Ananda. And to center Ananda's experience as like, oh, he came in and, you know, got this done for the women." It's like, come on. So this revised version, you know, it doesn't hide the fact that Mahapishapati did not get a clean victory, that her ordination still comes at an expense of subordination.

[19:11]

the fact that she still joyfully accepts these precepts, what does it say about, I don't know, the relation between institutional injustice and spiritual freedom? There's something, I think, profound about that. Despite institutional injustice, there is spiritual freedom. So I just want to note that that's something that was retained despite its kind of like, ah, ouch feeling. So the revised version, I think it's what communities do to make a story livable, inspiring for modern practitioners. Despite her taking on these eight special roles plus all the others, She's predicted to attain Buddhahood in the future.

[20:16]

She becomes fully enlightened as an arat. And yet, it's also walking up the street with four other women to feel the trauma in it. And as I invited you all to check inside at a time when you, too, were denied based on what? Discrimination. Rigid, fixed views that hold you and don't let you be whole. This is something that each of us has experienced. So this feeling of less than or being told not good enough, there's an explicit way that this is a form of oppression, right?

[21:25]

And we see examples of this more and more today. Maybe not 88 heavy rules, but the rhetoric that is being... increasingly found in the world, in America today, maybe it's just, well, women shouldn't be in combat roles. Women shouldn't vote. These are things that are being brought forward in more and more the public sphere. Things are regressing. We see this in the highest good that a woman can be is a wife and a mother. In seeing how sexual violence is, if not tolerated, is not seen as serious enough, we see it in the removal of honors bestowed upon people who are in minority

[22:36]

Positions. We'll just remove that statue. We'll remove that name from this honor. We're just going to do that. Why? Because that's DEI and we need to get rid of it. This is what we see happening. All of the anti-diversity and equity and inclusion actions that have become executive orders day by day. Indeed, many civil and human rights, we see them being rolled back. So explicitly, this is explicit. But then, looking again outside of the conceptual into what does implicit trauma do in the body, how does it get internalized as maybe it's true, maybe I am less than, maybe I'm less likely to raise my hand, to use my voice, maybe I want to... gargle with mouthwash before walking into the office because I might smell like curry.

[23:42]

Right? Self-deprecation, a denial of one's experience, a form of gaslighting, an internalized fear maybe that your voice is not welcome or it does not have weight, that you have to prove yourself again and again. Just as a note, even in the story of... So today we did a memorial service for Mahapajapati. We focused on the going forth. But in the Pali's canon, at her pari nirvana, as she is taking her last... She goes to the Buddha. I'll go more into detail in a bit. But as she goes to the Buddha to say, I'm going to die. I'm going to... relinquish the life force this happened about three months before the Buddha himself died but while she's there going to him and it's extolling how her spiritual virtues and how her spiritual powers it says in the story that there were those who doubted it so the Buddha asked her to prove it and then she did some spiritual magical things at the end so even at the end

[25:05]

It's still there. So when we look at the echo, I want to read the echo, the dedication at the end of the ceremony. In our echo, it says, in the pure reality body, there is no coming, no going, no female, no male. No silence or sound. So it starts off that way. It's shining a light on the dismantling of binary, rigid, fixed categories. This is touching the absolute. In the pure reality body, there is no coming, no going, no female, no male, no silence, no sound. And then, the next line.

[26:12]

From this solitary body, myriad awakened ones appear to teach, responding to beings like the moon shining in water. In brightness, the Buddha's foster mother appeared in this world with compassion and wisdom vast and wide. Today, in honor and celebration of her life, we have... offered light, flowers, petals, sweet water, rice and tea, and chanted the great, compassionate mind Durrani. We dedicate the merit and virtue of the ceremony to Acharya Mahapashapati Gautami, who set forth on her path 2,500 years ago, establishing the wholeness of the home leaver's way, which is in direct opposition to the rigid binaries of pigeonholing people into fixed views, into categories.

[27:16]

With red heart and steadfast resolve, she encounters, sorry, she encourages beings to find their own voice and realize Buddha Dharma. Maybe at the time she didn't realize what she was up to or what the reverberations would be 2,500 years later. And then it ends with, May her pure practice and devotion dissolve barriers to understanding and awareness, and may we and all beings practice together endlessly. So, in this echo, just to say that it starts with bringing in the absolute perspective, the ultimate perspective, and then it it shines on the relative. So this tension, I think this ceremony very much illustrates this tension between the absolute and relative.

[28:20]

Oftentimes we may feel like we need to fall in one side or the other, right? That's our dichotomized thinking. It's either this or that, right? It can't be both. And yet, What happens when we fall into the absolute? If we do that, we can actually bypass real suffering. And I'll give you an example of this. When I was a student at Tassajara, actually right before I went to Tassajara, I had the fortune of having a dinner with a Korean Zen abbot. And we were just talking about Buddha Dharma, as one does. And in our conversation, he mentions that Prajnatara, the 28th ancestor in the Zen lineage, the teacher of Bodhidharma, he mentions that Prajnatara is a woman in the Korean lineage.

[29:21]

And I was like, what? Because I'd never heard that before. And people call it the male ancestors. When we chant them, they're the male ancestors. And Prajnatara is right there in the middle at 28. So I had heard this and then at one point while I was at Tassajara and just during the summer and there was a visiting teacher, a senior Dharma teacher, and I was very excited. Somehow our chanting, the lineage came up and women ancestors and how we started chanting the women ancestors due to the efforts of people here at San Francisco Zen Center to make it whole, to honor the whole. And so I brought up, well, you know, I heard that Prajnatara is a woman, and this teacher, I don't think he meant any harm. What is his response to me? No male, no female. Which, you know, all right.

[30:25]

But it didn't fit well with me, right? So that's falling into the absolute. That's... diminishing that's that's negating the real lived experience of yes there is male and female yes there are categories that people are put into and then held to against their will against their agency so in that sense that was a kind of I think a kind of spiritual bypass if we fall into well no male no female and that's where we land and that's where we stay And in that sense, it's kind of in its most seductive form, right? Because it looks like the highest teaching. But emptiness does not deny or erase the relative truth. Imagine saying to somebody whose own sense of self has been systematically denigrated, imagine saying to that person, well, it's all empty.

[31:31]

Yourself is all empty. That's not liberation. And then somatically looking into the body, to fall into that, what would it feel like to fall into the Absolute without regard for the relative? I think it would feel like dissociation. It would feel like numbing out. It would feel like cutting off, not allowing the full spectrum of one's experience. It's kind of like a premature transcendence into some form of rigidity. Now, on the other hand, we might find ourselves falling too far into the relative where conventional categories are fixed as absolutes. And this true would deny a lived experience. There are many examples of this. One that comes up frequently today is just the feeling of going to get your passport or your driver's license as a transgender person and being told no.

[32:45]

I don't care what you think, how you feel, how you identify, you have to choose male or female. In fact, you don't even get to choose. however you were assigned at birth, that's it. There is no other gender between male and female. Imagine the violence that does to one to be so completely denied and told your experience is not real. And then there's the, you know, that's being imposed on from the outside. But we can also see how one can internally... fall too far into the relative imagine that you um you know you take up an identity kind of as armor or as defining you many times you might you know even be like it might not be good for you but it might still happen you might see yourself as a victim i'm the oppressed one i can that's how i relate to everything always that's falling too far into the relative right how do we find the middle way

[33:52]

Another example today which I read about, I don't think I have any, I have to confess, I don't have any, like, lived experience of relating to this, but I read about what seems to be a radicalization of younger men, many younger men, not all younger men, of course, but There's this, through the influencer world, and I guess maybe it's going down the rabbit hole, submitting to the algorithm, where what is given to you, what is fed to you in your pursuit of learning about the world becomes more and more extreme. You see it in the... the increasing contempt, the increasing misogyny.

[35:08]

And not only that, again, that's the othering. What does it do to the inside to fall into such views? Anytime there's a binary, I suspect that one becomes better. and one becomes worse. It's like, it kind of naturally happens when you say, over here, separate but equal? No. It doesn't really work, does it? One ends up oftentimes being subjugated to the other. And in those situations, I think that's a form of internalized binding to a category? What is the experience of being hooked into a rage loop? What is it like to have this kind of dopamine hit of outrage and then find another one that's even more outrageous and then you just keep going and soon you find yourself saying horrible things and it's like, what is the root?

[36:21]

What's the pain, the trauma underneath it? that is maybe unacknowledged, whether it be loneliness, fear of not making it in the world, economic insecurity, purposelessness, fear of not being accepted, not being loved, being told, you're not good enough. And the response may be to subjugate. Again, more of the rigidity, the fragmentation, the polarization, the binary. And this behavior causes real harm. If we fall too much in the absolute, maybe we don't see that. We fall too far into the relative.

[37:24]

Maybe we don't find compassion. Maybe we don't really make room. How do we make room for both? Mahabhijapati, in the story that we celebrated this morning, she didn't argue. She didn't rebel. Well, I guess she did. Yeah, she rebelled. But she didn't do it with... with hatred. She didn't hate the gatekeeper. She didn't resort to violence. She just kept walking toward the gate that appeared to be closed, with red heart and steadfast resolve. How do we hold both the absolute and the relative? How do we say, uh-uh, this is not okay, on the one hand? And how do we say, at the same time, you are more than the story that you see yourself as?

[38:25]

Whether you're the aggressor, whether you're the aggressed to, you are more than this. So Mahapajapati accepted the eight rules and with an image of joyfully placing a garland on her head, is a fully realized or to become fully realized arhat accepting an institutional injustice without at the time without resistance to taking on these rules but it's not passivity perhaps she knew a deeper truth that the institution or the rules can't touch that she is capable of Maybe that was enough to sustain her. In my own life with the topic of gender, and this is Women's History Month, I myself find that I can fall into the absolute.

[39:41]

That's probably the direction I fall sometimes with regard to gender in particular. So when I came back to San Francisco Zen Center after being gone for 10 years in Austin, and there's a cultural move that has been taken of inviting people to introduce themselves and to share their gender pronouns. When I came to the first work meeting I came to where it wasn't a request to share. It wasn't like, if you like. It was just like... tell me your name and tell me what your gender pronoun is. And that really pissed me off. I was like, I don't want to tell, what are you talking about? You want me to choose? You don't get to ask me that. I mean, it was really, it felt violent to have me like, okay, you have to choose now. And so when I do say anything, I feel kind of bad about it sometimes. I say any pronouns are fine. It's true.

[40:42]

Any pronouns are fine. And yet, when I go to the bathroom and it's men and women, I go to the women's room. At one point, David, Abbott David, we were talking about this. And I said something like, well, you know what I really feel like saying is, you know, I really feel like saying how I feel that day. Hi, I'm Mako. He, him. Because that's how I feel. And he was like... Please don't do that. You're just going to confuse people. And yet, when I hear about the male ancestors and I see Prajnatara being misgendered, it chafes at me. So on the one hand, there's the absolute. It doesn't matter. On the other hand, it sure does. It sure does. So how do I hold both of them? Whether we want it to or not, our conditioning is what we have to deal with.

[41:47]

We have to step into it and meet it. We can't deny it. If we deny it, we do so at our own peril. To deny it is to fragment, is to cut off one part of ourselves. It's moving, leading away from wholeness. So what heals us? If it's holding strongly to our stories, whether they're from an absolute or relative perspective, if it's not being able to let go of fixed views, if it's finding ourselves bound up in a rigid inflexibility, whether it's institutionally imposed, whether it's culturally bestowed or politically manufactured or personally told in our own bodies, this fragmentation, this partitioning ourselves, it locks us into a frozen moment.

[42:49]

This past weekend, last weekend, I and a number of people from Zen Center were given an opportunity to go for the weekend to a trauma workshop led by Bessel van der Kolk and a few others. The Bessel van der Kolk, for those of you who don't know, is a trauma researcher who wrote a number of years ago, The Body Keeps the Score. He's a somatic therapist and studied didn't start that way as a somatic therapist, but became one. I think he didn't say after the World Trade Center, it's when he started to turn to what is somatic? What is a somatic word? Because prior to that, the name of the game was psychoanalysis. And if you weren't doing psychoanalysis, if you weren't doing your story, you weren't funded, basically. So when we get fragmented and we get locked, or something happens, whether we're traumatized by the external or the internal, and we lock ourselves into some fixed moment, the threat response, it's a threat, right?

[43:57]

It keeps digging until we turn and face it. It doesn't turn off. And this can happen in so many different ways, right? It does happen in so many different ways, too. each of us. It shapes our identity. It makes it rigid. But why do we come to a place like this? Why do we come to therapy, for those who do go into therapy, to become whole? Maybe here we come because we We want to restore beginner's mind. Part of the workshop, we were shown some slides of children with their mothers kind of making faces at each other, co-regulating, right?

[44:59]

Little happy babies. How does this happy baby 10 years later, 20 years later, 50 years later, get rigid, get calcified, get fragmented? How does that turn, how do we turn away from that? I mean, Nessel van der Kolk basically throughout the workshop kept saying, you need to support parents giving resources to their children. That's how you stop it, right? But what if we're in a 54-year-old body? How do we do it then? What restores fluidity and... and reintegrates what heals the fragmentation that being a human in this world just inevitably leads to in many different ways. How do we counter falling into this rabbit hole of submitting to the algorithm that just feeds us something outrageous again and again, making us more and more angry, hateful, contemptful.

[46:09]

You know, when we have a threat, we are under threat. If what's being fed is feeling threatened, when we're under threat, you know, our frontal lobe, our executive function kind of turns off. And our reptilian brain, the fight-flight-freeze and fawn mechanism kicks into place. The brain drains out of our core and goes to our extremities so we can you know, fight or run. So at this workshop, I've said this before in some of our other groups that we've met here, throughout the workshop, I kept, we kind of, us Zen folk, we kind of stayed mostly together. It was kind of cute. There was a big, there was like 300, 400 people in one room in these little uncomfortable chairs. So we like kind of migrated and spread out. didn't say yes to the rigid body formation that we were asked to be in.

[47:12]

But I kept glancing at my Zen friends throughout the teachings because many of the things that were being offered as like, this is how you respond to trauma. This is how you heal. We're like, Zen 101. Again and again. I mean, of course, there's a lot there that was not, that was beyond that. But there are so many basics that were covered. So some examples, how do you be in the body, not your story? How do you let in bare sensation, the five sense doors, your breath, your posture? How do you attend to the present as opposed to getting whisked off into the narrative? I mentioned the infant and the mother kind of making faces at each other and mimicking one another. This is co-regulation this morning as we're doing the ceremony.

[48:17]

We just recently, last week, we had a chanting review in the morning, a chanting practice where we tried to harmonize with one another. This is just basic Zen temple life. And this morning, as people were all invited to offer fragrance, at the little tables, each person in the ceremony was invited to come on offer. And one of the things that happens when you go up and offer, you go up and you bow, you take a little bit and you put it to your forehead, and then you step aside slightly, and the next person comes up and you bow together. And it's always kind of awkward when you're learning this, right? You're like, am I bowing, am I bowing? That's co-regulation. This is our nervous systems becoming attuned to one another We find this in our chanting. We find it in our bowing. When we bow to one another, we're not just bowing because it's a bow, right? We're actually bowing with another being.

[49:19]

We're recognizing their Buddha nature when we bow. We're bringing in wisdom and compassion in the bowing. Christina recently has been talking about bowing and how... how amazing it is to take up the practice of bowing, even if you're having a conflict with, especially if you're having a conflict with somebody, just to at least bow when you pass each other. You don't know words, but bowing together, if something softens, just our practice of returning to Zazen again and again. Atasahara, when there's a lot of periods during the day or here during Sashin, less so in Sashin because you're not talking, At Asahara, there's a mix of a lot of talking and a lot of sitting. And so there's lots of opportunities for getting into conflicts with people or having your feelings hurt or something. And what do we do? We go back to the Zendo. Sometimes it gets to the point where just going to the Zendo isn't helping or that's not enough.

[50:21]

And we have mediated conversations. We sit down with somebody who's going to hold space. Very similar to trauma therapy. When we do kokyo training, when we do our chanting, right, this being able to extend the exhale, right? If you just breathe out and say, have a long exhale, everyone just goes, and I breathe out, how long can you go? Now, if you breathe out while humming or making a sound, ah, I mean, I can go for a long time. It's a long exhale. So our kokyo training itself is somatic practice. They also brought up the practice of self-compassion.

[51:22]

So necessary when healing internally. Can you stand to love yourself? Can you open that door? Beginning with just noticing what's happening now, what's happening in the body, what happens when we take up a awake posture and bring our mindful attention to our breath, to the feeling of our seat, our buttocks on the cushions, our feet on the floor. These were all things that were brought up in the trauma workshop. It's like, this would be helpful for your clients. Yes. I'm so glad I live in a community where this is just part of our daily temple life. Side note, I was invited this past week to talk about Zen temple life with a group of high school students. My Dharma sister Erin Merck teaches.

[52:24]

high school. And so it's kind of cool to go from this trauma workshop into, like, what is Zen temple life and to kind of, you know, hear their questions and give them examples. So when we don't fall into our rigid views or we notice when we fall into rigid views and we allow for spaciousness, we allow that to soften and When we don't demand that reality actually fits into these narrow categories and be pigeonholed there, what opens when we pause and step away from doing that? What comes alive for us? This is why people come to a Zen temple, in part. A few other healing modalities or things that were brought up as examples of profound healing that Dr. van der Kolk brought up that I found really interesting and noteworthy.

[53:42]

He brought up the cultural revolution in China where following incredible violence and suppression of dissenting views, they weren't allowed to talk about it. So how do you process that kind of trauma when you're not allowed to even talk about it? He mentions that following that, in the late 80s, after Tiananmen Square, which is what the world saw, people started doing Qigong publicly in parks. moving together in an embodied way, co-regulating. And this is a response to trauma. After the World Trade Center at one of the hospitals, so people were given options to go into therapy. There was a lot of psychotherapy at that time. But one of the hospitals did a survey one year later of survivors from the World Trade Center, the bombing of the World Trade Center in 2001.

[54:54]

They had collected 125 survivors and asked them, what helped you? Process. Let go. Heal. Address the traumatic, the feeling in the body of panic, anxiety, depression, freaking out. What was the top responses? Acupuncture. Massage. Yoga. EMDR. Yoga being used for PTSD. Again, getting out of your head, getting out of your story, getting into your body, allowing things to be processed physically. How do we release these knots and tensions that are what happens when we get fixed and frozen in a moment of great stress? The use of rhythm and dance.

[56:00]

and making music together for enslaved peoples. How is this a way to access the body, to heal, to co-regulate, to be supported? So I would say that Zen, the practice of Zen, is a integrator. It's the path to wholeness. Ideally, where we're going, it's not to go onto the cushion and start cutting yourself up into pieces. How do we make space? How do we become curious? Another recommended trauma therapy practice. In Zen, rather than trying to cut something out, we ask the question, how do we bring it into the room? How do we open our hearts? How do we do this safely? Not too fast. If you go too fast, you might re-traumatize yourself.

[57:01]

How do you do it in a safe way so that it can be processed, released? So I guess what I'm saying is it was very affirming to go to this trauma therapy workshop. Like, yeah, Zen. So getting back to Mahapajapati, and the end of her life story. It's said that she lived to 120. She led the bhikkhuni sangha throughout that time. She became an arhat. And then, when she was ready, there was a full moon in Vasali. Months, again, this is months before the Buddha's own parinirvana. She gathered her 500 bhikkhunis and she goes, to the Buddha to see the Buddha in the great wood in the temple with the pointed roof.

[58:03]

She goes there and she says to him, it was I who raised up your fleshy body. It was by your nurturing that my flawless Dharma body was raised. She asks for his forgiveness for anything that she might have done. His response was, What more could be said to one who is entering nirvana? The lay women who followed her wept. Mahapajapati said, enough. Enough weeping. Today is a day of joy. And then she returns to her sanctuary with the 500 bhikkhunis who all sit together. And as the story goes, she goes through, she's sitting and she goes through the jhanas in ascending and descending order. The description of her process mirrors the Buddha three months later, and then she passes into her final nirvana.

[59:10]

And then something curious happens, I'm kind of not sure about this, but it says, the story goes, that each of her 500 bhikkhunis followed after her, all one after the other, entering pari nirvana like lamps going out one by one. I was like, wow, that's a big loss for the community. But who knows what that's really pointing to. And again, as I mentioned, when she was... telling the Buddha that she was about to take her par nirvana. She was challenged by somebody in the community, like, oh, yeah. So here we are today, 2,500 years later, during what we call Women's History Month. We're absolutely... Overheating.

[60:27]

Oh, my gosh. There we go. Thank you. So we're still receiving the benefits, right? And yet, there's... It's endless, right? There's still a ways to go. There's still much to be countered, to be advocated for. The ending of the ceremony... You know, it brings up this image of a red heart. This is a very powerful Zen image, the red heart, one that is alive, embodied. It's a feeling heart. It doesn't transcend feeling or emotion. For those of you who were in the ceremony this morning, you might have noticed that I kind of Had some feelings during the reading where I burst into tears. I don't even know where that came from.

[61:27]

I mean, I do. I've been preparing this talk, so I know where it came from. But it was surprising to me. So with this red heart and a steadfast resolve. Okay, the steadfast resolve, again, this is not an armored, going-to-battle resolve. It's not rigid. It's just, I know where I'm going, and I'm going to walk there. It's the capacity to say, this is not okay, but then keeping it open, keeping the door ajar, moving forward, knowing in her bones, in her body, that the gate that looks closed is ultimately open. And just walking all the way to Vaishali anyway. So in our own practice, how do we welcome what's being offered in a Zen temple life?

[62:31]

It's not made explicit. We don't say, you know, we don't spell it out. It's one of the amazing things about Zen is you're just kind of thrown in and you kind of figure it out. But like, you know, again, very simple. Just sit. Let go of your story. Feel your feelings. Feel your body. Feel your breath. Stop identifying with your narrative. Chant harmoniously. Listen with your ears. Be wholehearted in your chanting. Your nervous system will thank you. Bow without reservation, especially if you feel like you're holding on to something. If you're holding a grudge, bow even deeper. These are the suggestions of a temple life. Thank you all very much for coming this morning. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

[63:38]

Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[63:57]

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