This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I don't know. So given that, I'm going to take a shot at pronouncing his last name. Moolinkans? Wow, it's photological. Well done, thank you. Over the years, in the last 10 or so years, maybe even longer, Jonah and I have ended up in the same workshop at Tassara.

[01:05]

And it became clear to us that we were kindred spirits, that we both had in our own way a deep sense of the spiritual and the significance of it in a human life. then it's always been my notion, seemingly, without ever intending it, that there is endless spiritual activity in our societies. And each one has a profound teaching that's a treasure. So when I heard that Jonah was in the... What's that long word you came up with? The mythological poetic tradition.

[02:07]

Mythopoet. Mythopoet tradition. He actually likes to just say storyteller. I think an impressive title is much better. And so we decided to do a workshop together. The workshop is called The Path of Wholeness. You know, I've become intrigued by certain words and phrases that we have built into our way of talking. Wholeness means something to us. And if you parse the word out and think wholehearted and wholesome, You get that wholehearted way of facing your life and being present for it. And then the wholesome, you have the quality of virtuous conduct, or to use a Pali word, kusala, conduct that's in accordance with awakening.

[03:25]

So we thought, how about we do one workshop or retreat, whatever you want to call it, about the standard Buddhist way of thinking and practicing and we contrast and compare and match notes on the mythological And of course, you're probably puzzled by what the mythopoetic way is. So, I'll stand up and read a Seamus Heaney poem. Being from Ireland and Seamus Heaney, I always get a kick out of having an excuse to read one of his poems. So listen to this and listen to how a myth is presented.

[04:34]

The way normally we have a normal and we think, well, this is the way the world is. Let's try to be rational and moral about how we relate to it all. And yet, the human condition has a spin-off into all sorts of works of deep virtue and terrible things. But fortunately, this one is about deep virtue. But listen carefully to the description. The adults say, with the monks of Clonmacnois were all at prayers in the oratory. A ship appeared above them in the air. Happens every day, right?

[05:42]

The anchor dragged along behind so deep it hooked itself into the altar rails. And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, a crewman shinned down and grappled down the rope, shinned and grappled down the rope, and struggled to release it, but in vain. This man can't bear our life here and will drown. Let that one sink in. This man can't bear our life here and will drown, the abbot said, unless we help him. So they did. And the freed ship sailed on, and the man climbed back up out of the marvelous, as he'd known it.

[06:46]

So those two lines, those two notions, a ship appeared in the air while the monks were saying their prayers in the monastery. And then somehow the ship got stuck, tangled up, and the monks volunteered to free it. And the abbot said, unless we help them, he'll drown. around in what? The vicissitudes of everyday, common everyday life. And they did. And the freed ship sailed and the man climbed up, climbed up out of the marvelous and he had known it.

[07:56]

This is indeed the myth in poetic form. And it presents something in a wonderfully straightforward way. But it's almost impossible to think, well, this is just a normal thing. This happens every day. There's ships sailing through the air at Kassahara. This way in which the myth contradicts the normal and presents something that within the normal is impossible. And then what do we make of its proposition? This is the function of the myth.

[09:15]

And when we contrast it to Buddhism, you know, like it used to be very common to say, monkey mind. You know, oh, I was sitting there and I was caught up in monkey mind. You know, we've turned mind and the activity of the mind into a handicap. If only I could quiet my mind, I'd get enlightened in a flash. Well, actually, both Zen, when it's in the Koen study, in Zen, part of that study is learning how to engage mind as an agent and an ally of awakening. Like when you contemplate, it's an intentional way of engaging mind and taking in the sacred.

[10:27]

Want to go or shall I go a little longer? I think you go a little longer. Say a little more. Or read another. Okay. So first of all, in our workshop, we extended the notion of wholeness. There's a way in which Like in Ireland, when I was growing up, if someone was distracted, or you would say, oh, he's not all there. He's sitting there, but he's looking out the window, or he's so agitated, he's not all there. And Jonah will expand upon that in a moment.

[11:34]

And in the meantime, I want to read another one. St. Kevin and the Blackbird. And then there was St. Kevin and the Blackbird, a saint kneeling, arms outstretched inside his cell. But the cell is so narrow that one unturned up palm is out the window. His arms are out, but the cell is so small, his arms out the window. Stiff as a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands and lays its eggs in that hand and nestles down the nest, Kevin feels the worm's eggs, the small breast, the tucked neat head and the claws, and finding himself linked into the network of eternal life.

[12:41]

He's moved with pity. Now he must hold his hand like a branch out in the sun and the rain for weeks until the young are hatched and the fledglings are flown. And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow, imagine being Kevin. Which is he? Self-forgetful or in agony all the time? From the neck on down through his hurting forearms? His fingers sweeping? Does he still feel his knees? Because he's in kneeling position. Or has the shut-eyed blank of the under-earth crept up through him? Is there distance in his head? Alone and mirrored, clear in love's deep river.

[13:50]

To labor and to not seek reward, he prays. A prayer, his body, makes entirely. For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird, and on the banks, river bank, forgotten the river's name. Maybe too straightforward to be called a myth. But this way of not only tolerating the mind, but actually facilitating the mind's activity, its capacity for activity. That we have the capacity to contemplate. We have the capacity to lecto divina, which is to read the scriptures

[15:00]

and while we're reading them to enact the teachings that they're presenting. And somehow the mythical poetic expression can draw us into that world. And in its cautionary tale, it tells us this is not normal. In some ways, we are asking of ourselves in practice, in awakening, in being whole, to not let the normal fragmentation happen to us. No.

[16:01]

To let some other form of being come forward, speak its truth and its guidance. You know, usually we could say the path of awakening has kind of two tracks. One is we do the practice not knowing what's underneath. We go to the zendo and we sit and we sit and we sit. And sometimes we get a taste of concentration. We get a taste of clarity. And sometimes we don't. The mind just rattles around. And then we stand up And somehow we feel the virtue of that sitting.

[17:05]

Somehow. It's not something we can quantify, it's not something we can draw a linear path, a graph of how it all happened. So one category of awakening is Follow the schedule completely. Follow the dictates of practice. Follow the don't time, do good. And include everyone. And then the other aspect is we attend to what's going on for us intellectually, emotionally, psychologically. And as we do that, we learn about the human condition.

[18:13]

We learn how to be skillful with it. So we examine these two modalities of awakening, and then we contrasted them with the mytho-poetic way in which Jonah will talk about. This is my cue for this portion of the evening's entertainment. I'm the storyteller person, but I'm going to start with Dogen. You're going to start with what? Dogen. I can say, first, that it is such a gift to be here. I've been coming here for a long time, and as Paul said, very much part of the workshops that have been offered by Tassajara for decades, coming and sitting with Paul and Naomi Shihamnai, with Brother...

[19:29]

did some rest. And so I feel like I've been cultivated by this place in very important ways because I was, as I've shared with some of the participants this week, I struggled when I was doing my academic work in literature to sort of feel like I could fit in a world where if you're a professional and you care about literature, it has a very specific kind of slot. You specialize, you do certain kinds of things. And my exposure really to stories was how they activated me, how they brought me to life, how they seemed to be a kind of nourishment, how they became traveling companions for me in my life. And I just didn't really see any way of talking about that or sharing that or helping people have that experience, until I began doing workshops with poets and people who were not in the academic realm, but more attuned to the spiritual realm.

[20:41]

And so that became my way in, my way back. And happily, what I discovered is that the current way that we tend to learn literature and study literary stuff is a complete anomaly in world history. For the most part, in human cultures throughout history, story's function has been to be there as a way for people to become more free, to feel more whole, to have more options, to meet suffering with more guilt. So the traditional function of story up until pretty recently, was very functional. And most stories, irrespective of the culture, have a deeply spiritual component. What's a bit different than a body of work where you have practices or advices or orientations that are laid out is that the modality of story

[21:52]

bringing you insight and giving you tools of transformation, is just through the image. And often those are very strange images. A ship in the air, for example. But one way to put this is that, for me, as I came into Buddhism, first in Tibetan and then into the Plum Village tradition and then into Zen here, what I began to recognize is that both the mythopoetic or mythopoetic tradition and the spiritual traditions, particularly in the Buddhist realm, were trying to create experiences that would allow us to use the self, to look at the self, to be free of the self, as Catherine put it the other day. And to do the work that Paul is describing, which is to give us a way to meet the parts of the mind that are not helpful to us, but to use the mind to get to more liberation.

[23:09]

Now, for most people, when they hear me start to talk about mythology and folktales, they're thinking, what is this guy talking about? I know the groom fairy tales. Those do not seem spiritual to me. I think of... Cinderella and Jack and the Beanstalk. And so it's important to say that for most of us, most of the time, our encounters with mythology and fairy tale have been really diluted or polluted even. Even the grim fairy tales were really strongly distorted from the original fairy tales. And then they got distorted further. Disney and whatever. So by the time many of us get the stories, they don't have the content in them. And the second piece of that is that those stories were designed for adults, and we've sort of begun to move them into the realm for children. There's not a problem with that necessarily, but it meant that they got evacuated by a lot of wisdom that they hold. And so as I began to discover their kind of potency,

[24:16]

I began to want to share it and I began to feel this parallel and I began talking to Paul about it and it led me to I'll just give you the notion from Dogen the notion in Dogen that I find compelling is the backward step his advocacy to cease the intellectual the conceptual investigation take the backward step and shine the light upon the self. And shine the light upon the self. Thank you. And for me, the mythopoic tradition, whether it's a narrative poem like the two beautiful poems from Shenasini or an Arthurian myth or myths from Africa and the Inuit that we worked with this week, they give us ways to move past the conditioned, habituated mind of stratagems and hindrances and begin to kind of perceive and experience things at a register that feels kind of illogical or mysterious.

[25:30]

In one of the stories that I told our group this week called The Half Girl, which is a story from West Africa, a young woman who is only half a person, half a girl, has been on a journey to try to discover something about herself. And after a long, long time, she seems to see another half that's the opposite half of her. And we think maybe this will be a grand reunion, and it turns out not to be. They kind of get into a big tussle, but they're next to a river where she's going to have some relief, and they fall into the river. And in the story, the line, in all its variations, is always, they were in the river for a time. And the river is often called the sacred river. Maybe a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, a few months.

[26:39]

In the sacred river, a mysterious process happens. For us, it might be two minutes. It might be two years. And as Paul was sharing this image from Soda Zen, of walking through the mist, he began to put this together just in the last few days. There might be a correspondence there. You're in the water, you don't know how long there's a mysterious process, but you're available to it. And from that, in some indeterminate amount of time, wholeness, some version of the beginning of wholeness, at least, can emerge. So that's really the primary conviction, I guess, that I've had is that in the way that Zen practice can work with the mind, make it an ally to find more freedom and to arrive in more wholeness,

[27:48]

the mythopoeic tradition, recovered and received and worked with in the way that has been traditionally in traditional cultures, can do much the same thing. And so that's been the kind of grounding idea of the workshop, is to try this out together. And you'll have to talk to the students to see if it seems to be making sense in one way. But you want to pick up from there a little bit? Sure. Yeah. I'm happy to. Well, one thing I would like to mention before I do learning, what time do we have to end? Usually 8.40 or 8.45 at the latest. And so it's 8.18? Sorry, 8.16. What was it? It's 8.16 or 8.17. Okay, great. I'd like to mention, you know, if we say, well, Zen has its own equivalent stories.

[28:57]

You know, there's one volume of 100 stories. There's one volume of 200 stories. And all together, there's about 3,000 koans. And a koan is a story. You know, it plucks out a particular moment. And then often it offers no context at all. The monk asked the teacher a question. Where were they? What part of China were they in? You know, and how long had the monk been practicing before he got to ask a question? And maybe he asked it ten times. often it's deboid of detail to just bring our pinpoint attention to the turning word there's a phrase the turning phrase that shifts our perspective usually what we do is we live within the world according to me and

[30:20]

even though part of it's conscious and part of it's not conscious for us. And usually we're quite devoted to it, and it takes significant effort to turn the light inward, you know, take the backward step and turn the light inward. So what we can say is we can say, well, it isn't that Zen has this purity over here, and then this indigenous... Often these myths grow for centuries. They're told for centuries as teaching tales. Jonah was saying, some of them are thousands of years old.

[31:25]

But in the Zen way, we engage the story, the Zen story. A monk asked the teacher, what is Buddha? The teacher said, you, you are Buddha. Instead of being caught up and struggling with all your own notions and desires and aversions, how do you turn that and look at it and learn from it about how not to be stuck in it? And these stories, they grew in a culture, most of them in China, not necessarily all of them.

[32:31]

I don't know Korean teachings, but I suspect all of those Far East countries, Japan, China, Korea, had all somewhat in Vietnam. They all had their own stories and they appeared in their own culture which gives them context and in some ways it's wonderful that we're so ignorant about the context or the cultural innuendos in a particular story because it allows us to just attend to the most important part.

[33:32]

How can this story turn me? How can I have a change of heart? You know, when we have a change of heart, it means that from those ingrained negative emotions, that we thought we had to cling to just to thrive. Now we can see how to drop them and have another emotional way of being in the world. And so... This is the great gift of... the West, the Zen heritage, as has been passed to us. You know, often I hear things like, oh, you have to do a mental somersault to understand it.

[34:38]

Come on. What the heck does that mean? Maybe it means instead of turning, you... turned in the air, your whole being. But there is a way we can take up these stories. And there's a lore to how you take them up and what preparatory understanding have to be in place to have the capacity to turn the story. And I'm not going to go into that tonight, because I want to ask, could you put up your hands, those of you who are foolish enough? Okay.

[35:46]

I am Frida Drabian-Castlehuyni. And I came to Tassajara as an ornament on the bow of a tall ship made from wood deep in the black forest of Germany. I had been put on this ship by my mother for singing the forbidden song and I was cast away to the wind and sea. My hair grew wild in a sea spray and my lips were painted shut. The red and orange of my robe that adorned my body was beautiful, but I couldn't move. We sailed many ports, and while the passengers that came and went admired my beauty, despite their admiration, I remained silent and alone. We sailed for years like this, and my loneliness only deepened.

[36:48]

And then we sailed into the canyon of Kasabara. It was one of the most beautiful places on earth. But I remained silent, as I had for a hundred years. But out of the shadows came a small group of women, and behind them several men. And instead of admiring me from afar, they crawled up onto the ship, and they made their way out onto the long bow that hung over the creek. And it was preparedness, because if they had fallen, they would have dashed onto the rocks below. And as they approached me, they stroked my face, they massaged my body, they kissed my cheeks, they brushed my hair. And I slowly began to soften, and I began to sing.

[37:55]

I'm here. [...] I'm here with my voice. H-9-3. pulled me back across the valley and has set foot on land for the first time in a hundred years. Did you hear how you were responded to? Did you hear that? So how that would become like a teaching tool? You would ask yourself what part of that story stands out for you?

[39:06]

What seems to be the most intriguing detail? What does it mean to say they stroked a piece of wood and it started to soften. And what does it mean for that entity to burst into song? And what's the teaching? What's the turning phrase, the turning image, the turning word of that myth. So how many more do we have? Okay, please.

[40:19]

from Lower Region Fjordlands, coming to see you all. And Seamus Henney, he's an old friend of ours, and we would go in the boats and he would see us. He would see us. So we're here to talk about not just a myth, but myth makers, and how myth makers around the world can join in To save our family. And our family. Is all the skies. The stars. The seas. Everything in the seas. And all. We are all family. I just got back. From a long trip. To Azoatea New Zealand. And the Bari brothers and sisters. Say hello. And that we're all on up. Family, family with all the plants, all the seeds, and all the skies.

[41:27]

And we treat each other with love and care like family because that's what we really are. And we came here to this place because of what we heard about your leaders and your teachers that talk about the mountains singing and dancing. And we wanted to come and see these mountains of Tassajara that sing and dance and these students that have drums and sit in quietness. So we are here to gather all the myth speakers and say hello and welcome. Thank you for welcoming us to your lands. We will be going back through the Pleiades, back to our home in the Northlands, but we will not forget you, the people of Kelsahara.

[42:28]

I had no idea that was going to happen. But it was amazing. And do we have someone else who wants to... Well, no one's appearing, and you don't have to live. Do you want to pick up? Yeah. So I wanted to... to offer something and thank you particularly for an image you gave me there Paul was saying we would try to the way we use the vehicle of story and image is to ask what's there in it for us and the way I put it which I've described to the

[43:52]

retreatants this time is, and the way I describe this to my students, is as intimate reading or intimate listening. Typically in school we're taught how to close read, you know, to really watch the details and pick out the symbols and figure out what the studying's doing and whether you're doing that like in an English class to interpret a story or as a creative writer. The goal there is to kind of figure out how meaning is made in the story analyze it, try to arrive at a defendable way of interpreting it. Intimate reading is not that. Intimate reading, intimate listening is imagining that for whatever reason, the story has come into your field of view. It's come into your life. And the person telling it doesn't really realize it, but this is all being orchestrated above because there's some gem in this story that is meant exactly for you. it's been placed in your path with a key in it.

[44:56]

And so we read or we listen with that heart, intimately. And the question that we ask is, where do I find myself in this story? Our first tendency usually is to say, do I identify with the protagonist or not? And that might be, But it might also be that you find yourself in the antagonist, or both, or in the setting, or in a gesture, or in a small detail. And for whatever reason, that moment resonates in you. And that's where we begin. And so, for example, the image I have from you right now is the image of the hills, the mountains, singing and dancing, but the community sitting in stillness. We also have the drumming, but like for me, it just stayed immediately like dropped in more than anything else.

[46:02]

And so when I asked myself, why am I identifying with that? Like what's happening there? And right now it's because I feel the gift of in this place having such being surrounded by such tremendous kind of virya, kind of energy that's automatically already here in the space, in both what's been created and what's here naturally, that then there is like a centering and an honoring and a diligent effort to be present. But I get that all image in a way that I don't get if it's explained to me. And then I have it in my heart I realize, ah, that's the yearning I have. I want that everywhere I go. I want to be in this environment everywhere I am. I want to be not just a stillness in the busy chaotic world, but I want to be a being that feels all the dancing and the singing and stuff and be available to it as my supportive environment and be available to it in my inquiry about my life.

[47:19]

So the image I would now feel like, Annette didn't notice, nobody in the room knew it, but that image came through her, unbeknownst maybe even to you, came to me, into my heart, so that I could be nourished by it, so that it could become a kind of North Star for me for a while, a day, a week, a year. And that's the process, which, you know, I won't be grandiose and say it's like a process that you might do in Zen, but it is a process rather than just a way to read and understand myth and go read a lot of myth and stuff, it'll be good for you. I don't really have what the, these are like vitamins, just, you know, you guys should do that instead of watching more White Lotus or something. Which is also myth, by the way. But instead, take into your listening or your reading an idea that something is being planted there just for you.

[48:24]

Allow yourself, allow yourself to be hunted by beauty. Allow yourself to be prey for the right image and let it work on you alchemically. And you can read anything that way. I sometimes read stop signs this way. There's dry lawn, there's another stop sign in the street. This series of streets is just stop sign after stop sign after stop sign. And I'm like, oh, right, okay, stop. Got it. Recently I've been thinking about stay left except to pass. Politically. I keep seeing that, and I'm like, all right. Stay left except to pass. Mind the gap.

[49:25]

You know, there's lots of things. You just start reading intimately, and it can become a kind of noia. You know what paranoia is, right? Noia is more that everything in the world, in your view, is maybe being made available to you, to speak to you, to deepen you. So intimate reading is part of that. It's a kind of process. And to me, the common ground with Buddhist practice, with Zen practice, is it's a way to develop awareness. It's a way to become more aware. Awareness isn't just things on Zen. It's also in chopping vegetables and walking and brushing your teeth, as we know. But even in the reading of information, the phrases are there, letters. yourself be hunted by beauty. The stop sign isn't necessarily beauty, but there is some beauty. So I want to give you a tiny two-minute story. Can I do that? How much time do you have?

[50:28]

It is 8.38. You've got to leave me a couple of minutes. All right, I'll do it in one minute. Okay. It's a familiar setting, so this is easy. There's a monastery. It's not doing well. Things have not been going well. Some people have left. They're down to like a handful of people. The abbot is perplexed, doesn't really know what to do. And a rabbi who's visiting the area stops, and he eats and worships with them. The abbot is very taken by his ease and devotion, and he says, listen, I want to just be straight with you. Things aren't going great. Do you have any advice for me? And he says, no. I've spent time here. None of these guys are going to listen to me giving advice. But I will tell you something that you might share with them. The Messiah is here in this group. The abbot's pretty flabbergasted by this.

[51:32]

The rabbi leaves, and he goes and he shares it with them. And pretty soon the monks are kind of like, really? Oh, that doesn't seem possible. Bill's kind of a jerk over here. Sam over here, man, he never does the difference. He's always late. But they begin to look at one another and in the face of one another begin to see maybe the Messiah. And in the words of the other begin to hear the Messiah. And they begin to think, even as they are on the stone path together, maybe... Maybe it's me and I'm not aware of it. Maybe I'm the Messiah. And it's safe to say, shortly thereafter, the whole community is flourishing. So we have this image of them regarding one another on the field. And that image could work with us. As the storytellers will often say, what will you now do with that story?

[52:34]

How will you take that forward into your life and into your heart? So that's a very tiny example. One last detail I want to add, and that is that, you know, we could condense the complexity of the human existence down into two notions. That when we're looking to each situation, each experience, and reinforcing the self, well, guess what? The self is stronger. and more durable, and we're more inclined to stay within the strictures of it. And the more we can, I think, John just used the phrase, diligently present. The more we're diligently present for zazen, for work, practice, for how we're doing each other,

[53:44]

the more we can extract, you know, me, self. None of it has to be a self-image, a self-concern. We can enjoy the ebb and flow of existence, you know. We can take up the inter-being that we're part of. So our presence, our diligent practice sets the stage. It makes us more susceptible. We're less trapped within a version of normal. And, you know, in one state of mind, you could hear a beautiful, mythical, poetic teaching.

[54:55]

And then, in a few minutes, have totally forgotten it as you return to some old, tired concern you have about self, you know. So in a way, our daily practice, our momentary practice, helps us establish a basis that we're now susceptible to these stories. Now we're more likely to hear them and let them resonate within us. And for that reason, we'll end now. And so we're following your schedule. Thank you, Jordan. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. Those wonderful impromptu... Don't stick with us.

[56:03]

Thank you all. And thank you all for coming. And I hope in some way what we offered is of some help. And if it isn't, well, so be it. Thank you. Thank you. 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, visit sfzc.org and click Giving.

[56:54]

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