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. Good evening, everyone. First, can you hear me all right? I can be rather soft-spoken. Signal me if you can. Thank you. So first... Thank you all for coming out, especially those of you who were long days of need to support our practice here. A particular thank you to Anna Mako, our sister, for your generous offer to be on the seat tonight, and to Anna David for your warm and generous support, please. So glad to see you all here.

[01:08]

Some of you old friends, some of you new, they're friends, some for the first time. Whenever I come into Tassajara, I have a feeling of peace, of timelessness, of ease, and usually of a great deal of joy to be here. And for some reason, the last few times I've been here, what comes to mind for me is the ,, and particular lines in it. This time I've been reflecting on the line, Buddhas and ancestors of old were as we. When I come down here into the valley, The rocks are old buddhas.

[02:10]

I love the rocks here. And of course we all have some relationship probably to the stories of the construction of the stone walls of the days that Tassajara was being built. I'm thinking of a particular rock this time though. Several years ago I was here when we had been through some years of drought. Trees were Not doing well. They looked really thirsty. It was kind of sad. The creek was all dried up. I don't even think there were the little mossy pools that are a usual summer event. And so the rocks were all laid bare. And I saw phenomenal, interesting kinds of formations that I'd never seen before. One of them particularly top of my eye. It was about six inches tall.

[03:12]

It sits on my desk at home. Don't tell anyone. And it has layers of sediment, layers of metamorphic rock, and a layer in between. I mean, there are many different layers of many different colors. It's quite remarkable old, worn rock that actually looks like a stuma. And in one part of the rock are little porous things, and I realized that those are little creatures that once lived here. One time I passed that rock around as part of a talk I gave, and it happened that it was a geologist in the audience who said to me that rock was over 50 million years old. So I'm thinking about that, the age of this valley, the life that has been lived here, the timelessness of this place that's so accessible to us in this ancient, warm valley.

[04:21]

Not long ago, someone who was newly arrived here but had been a former student, I asked them what it was like being on the outside. And they said, you know it's hard, but when I come here, I feel like everything is clear. Buddhas and ancestors of old are as we. We, too, will be Buddhas and ancestors. The work of Tassahara is, maybe in some way, creating Buddhas and ancestors, helping us clarify the way, helping us enter our life fully in one way. The work here at East Valley is for life to realize and manifest life.

[05:28]

Each of us has a story. I'd like to tell you the story of my teacher, I'll call him Mel for the first part of this because that's who he was. He was a pretty straightforward person. He didn't stand out at all, kind of an ordinary Joe. He grew up, as we all grow up, his circumstances were poor but happy. He grew up at the end of the Depression and through World War II as the clouds were forming over Europe of the impending war and genocide. He was an active listener to that. And he decided when he came of age he wanted to be a soldier. He also knew from a very young age that he wanted to be an artist, even younger than that.

[06:35]

And so when he was old enough after the end of World War II, he enlisted in the Marine Corps. His work was preparing fighter planes. And his job was to inspect them every morning before they went out on flight. One day, he sent out two planes. And that day, Only one returned. Someone presented him with the helmet of the pilot of the plane that did not return. That was an extraordinary experience. He'd never had an experience like that. And he felt the great responsibility of taking care of another life for the first time. So he moved on to San Francisco, where he could get into art school.

[07:49]

Maybe he was going to be a graphic artist, because that's how he made a living then. But he happened to fall into the circle with an abstract impressionist painter. It's a style of painting, but it's very intuitive. It suited him. And so he studied with Clifford Stills. And he became good. Very good. He got to be pretty well known. He decided to commit, he decided to stop commercial art school and pick up whatever work he could do so that he could paint. He was a cab driver, a house painter, little odds and ends. And at that time he was hanging out with the art scenes in San Francisco, in North Beach. meeting lots of beat poets who were doing interesting and experimental things to open their mind, and lots of other painters.

[08:52]

And he decided he wanted it was time in his life to have a spiritual journey. It had been in the back of his mind since he was young, but this was the time. And so he went looking, thinking he would find an ascetic rabbi. But instead, someone told him about You know the ending of the story. Someone told him about this little Japanese man in Japan. He went, and somehow the first period of zazen, he knew. He knew he was in the right place. Maybe like you knew when you first came and sat down. Or when you, like me, bowed to my cushion and the people on either side bowed back and I bursted to tears knowing I was in the right place. How was it for you?

[09:56]

He and Suzuki Roshi seemed to understand each other or at least Suzuki Roshi understood him and so he kept coming again and again, and he started to really pay attention. And he noticed that Suzuki Roshi's life was like a mantra. It was like a phrase, a prayerful phrase that was being repeated over and over again. So every day Suzuki Roshi would do the same thing. He'd get up, he'd put on his robes, he'd go down to the Zenda, Light a stick of incense and do some boughs. It was astounding. Kind of is astounding. You do the same thing every day. It was astounding that that ritual, that that structure, provided a container for life that Mel Intuited included so much.

[11:07]

And he wondered how that worked and made a life study of it. Many years later, in the Berkeley Zendo, we would have oryoki meetings, meals on the taan for sushine and on Saturdays, and he would almost always be the last one to set out his oryoki. He was always so carefully bending over and folding the wrapping cloth just so, Not that it was always a perfect rectangle, but it was always taken care of, just so. The bowls would go up. And finally, after all of us are waiting, the satsua goes down. Not hurried. I don't think he paid any attention. He was just so totally with that Oriyogisa.

[12:09]

One of our sangha members said, he opens Oriopi is a love letter to his teacher. People in Berkeley, you can imagine in a certain time, people at Berkeley often ask in a lecture, why don't we talk about love? And he would say, that's everything we do. We talk about love. That's a good word. I think in this case, love in action might be devotion. Devotion is a kind of attitude of loyalty, focus, and attention. It's an action. Go back a second.

[13:14]

It's a kind of attitude. It's the attitude with which he would most mornings adjust the altar not to correct anything, but to harmonize it. When the zendo was built in the 70s, he had picked every floorboard and chose where it went and helped put them all down. I think that was clearly Suzuki Roshi. in the same way he placed the rocks, perhaps. It's the same way that the cooks get to know the stove and adjust the heat and know which pans cook a little lopsided. And it's the same way in which we slice the vegetables and chop them so that they'll all be cooked in the same way, no matter what the chop is. It's that kind of devotion

[14:17]

with a full-hearted attention to what you're doing and why you're doing it in the mantra of your life, in the mantra of this container. Devotion is also an action, an action of giving up to some purpose. And heaven knows our practice is all about giving up. Just to come here, we give up time, sometimes days, sometimes months, sometimes years. We give up livelihood, careers, a certain kind of life, to make this devotion. Revering Buddhas and ancestors, we are one Buddha.

[15:25]

We are one Buddha and one ancestor. Awakening Bodhi mind, we are one Bodhi mind. The greatest giving up is Zazen. That is the heart of our practice, is Zazen. We give up. and we pay attention to the breath. We surrender. We surrender to the breath, becoming intimate with it, always knowing where it is, always feeling it in our body. We surrender to the posture. No matter what its shape or how uncomfortable we are, we take the opportunity to tune in and see what our body-mind is teaching us. There is so much wisdom in the body-mind. Complete wisdom in the body-mind.

[16:31]

And we give up to the schedule. No choices. We create our own mantra within the container of the schedule to help us see what's vital and fresh and be completely present without our ideas about what we want. And it's not easy work, as everyone here knows. The pain in the knee that won't give ground, especially when at the 40-minute mark the teacher says, let's sit another 10 minutes, or walks out the door who knows when to return. or the ice pick retreat of three days of every day sitting down and feeling the ice pick that might have been a beloved parent's death up here. That's a big surrender to keep showing up to that.

[17:37]

There's a surrender of all the thoughts we like that we're attached to, the storylines that keep coming, whether they're things that we want or things that we want to change. and may go away, there's the surrender of that over and over and over again, sometimes for years, some of them, until we get bored and tired and can see through. How many reruns of the same episode can we listen to? I wonder how many periods of zazen all of our ancestors put together sat so that we could do this practice, so that we would know how to wake up. How many sashins getting up at three in the morning and sitting until the third watch of the night in some days?

[18:44]

How many periods have you sat in that devotion? your mind asking for wholeness. Because they extend their compassion freely and without limit, we are able to attain the Buddha way and let go of the attainment. Sorry to have to read it. My mind's a little tired tonight. Because of their steadfast sitting, they help us. This is the path of devotion. The teaching of Zazen is, again, to quote our founder and my teacher both, is just not to be selfish. That sounds a little harsh, doesn't it? Because it's so hard not to be selfish. And that's the point.

[19:47]

The point is to understand that selfishness. and learn how to be our self within it. And slowly over time, sometimes very slowly, and sometimes with sudden bursts of possibility, that doorway enters. That's what he meant when he said, you don't try. be like to give up all those views? The fixed idea of a self? What would it be like to give up the idea that you're necessarily kind or helpful and just be? What would it be like to accept the parts that you hope practice will take away as just an essential part

[20:56]

of your very being to be lived and worked, lived and accepted in a way that's skillful? What would it be like? Who might you be? What possibilities might open up in that case? What would it be like to give up all the cherished views and opinions, the ones so cherished that you can't imagine being yourself if you didn't express them and insist on them? What mouse would you see? What else would you learn? How might your mind soften? Can you imagine would you still feel like you were you? What would it be like to, in some fundamental way, deeply fundamental way,

[21:56]

Know that we're never alone. Know that we're never separate. What would that be like? And what would it be like to know that just like you and me, everyone is self-centered. Everyone is the center of their own stage. By definition, we have to be. The center of our own stage is how we know where we're going to tomorrow if we're leaving. It's how we know how to take care of our life, who our relations were, what our responsibilities are. And what if we could understand always that everyone else sees their world in that way. Wouldn't that break down some of the walls between us when we think it's a log driving lane?

[23:05]

What are they doing in it? The field of zazen is really that large. The field of Zazen can really contain all of those possibilities. About 20 years ago, some people from Berkeley Zen Center went on a trip to China. They went to retrace the steps of Dogen, and you can imagine, they went to see Ryu Jing's temple. and they saw that 1,500-year-old cypress tree that's still in your heart. So Jin's first step in arriving there, the first thing he wanted to do was we all hurried to see the building that had the artifacts and documents and collected stuff from the temple life.

[24:19]

And he wanted to see one thing in particular. That one thing in particular was in this old concrete building without any temperature control, without any control of a wide, not something that you would necessarily put a thousand-year-old document in, with a glass case that was no special glass case. And in there was original manuscript from Ongjir. The author of the book translated is Silent Illumination. That writing, which is a highly poetic, impressionistic, mystical writing, is an early description of what would become Shikantaza. Dovid would write about many times in his own way.

[25:22]

But for Sojin, perhaps because he was who he was, Hangzhou's work had particular meaning. And he went to that glass case, and he stood before it, he bent over it, with the same kind of divided, deeply interested and attentive expression on his face. for quite some time. I don't think he could read ancient Chinese kanji. In fact, I'm sure he couldn't. But he was studying the art. He was studying the strokes. He was getting inside the mind of that master to understand something about who he was. And maybe, maybe he was making his prayers and thanks to him also. were all that he'd done to support the practice that we have today.

[26:23]

Again, from the Because they extend their compassion to us freely and without limit, we attain Buddhahood and let go of the attainment. We come back into this realm and live our lives here with no idea of attainment. In the Mahayana, this will come together, I hope, In the Mahayana, there are different ways about talking about interdependency. That interdependency that's being talked about in this fascicle. One of them you may be very familiar with is the teaching of Idris Net. People hear about Idris Net, probably. The idea is that Brahma had a envisioned had a huge net, I mean unimaginably, beyond imagination, net, each crossing containing a jewel.

[28:02]

And that represented each of us. Each of us is a jewel. Each of us connected to the other with that jewel. And the idea is that wherever you move or tug, whatever someone does at one place, It's felt or experienced or influenced somewhere else. In the Uchiyama Okamura version of Indra's net, it's a little bit more, it's extended a little bit. It's not a simple net. There are many, many threads connected to each point. And those many, many threads wind up in a little tangle. They're all interrelated in the same way. We're all tangled up with each other, and our past is all tangled up with us, and our ancestors, et cetera, et cetera.

[29:04]

They're all linked together. I think of this internet as not just having three dimensions, but having four, because it contains all of history. all of cultural history, human history, geologic history, all of history is a part of the interconnection of Indrizna. No one's ever alone, really. The other teaching relates to these little tangled knots. Jules sounds very beautiful, and that's a wonderful image, isn't it? Think of us all kind of like Christmas time. This massive ball of light. I rather like the idea of the tango. It points to a kind of complicated relationship, an active relationship, I think.

[30:13]

Not something that could be on a static hanging net, really engaged. So, what are these points really? One way of thinking about ourselves in our lives is that, I'll say this comes from the Lotus Sutra, it's called the Ten Suchnesses, if you like knowing such things. And I like the word knowing that they're the suchnesses, because it means how these ten things manifest real time, in the moment, not static, but very alive. So these ten things, five of which are kind of what makes us us. In birding, there's a term called jis. Jis means that if you kind of watch how the bird hops and flies and takes off and lands and what it eats and its habitat, maybe in song, you can come pretty close to identifying many birds just by that familiarity.

[31:19]

It's the essence, if you will, of what makes that bird, that bird, that species. I don't think we know them well enough to talk about the individuals, most of us. So the five qualities that we all have are our form, what's our physical shape, our nature, It's our tendencies and personality-wise. It's our embodiment, how we enter in the world, how we greet people, how we move, what our, some people might call that an aura, what our embodiment is like. Our power or life energy, dynamic, quiet, and our function. What is it that we do with our lives?

[32:21]

And those are kind of how we know, if you want to know, we've been studying the self this week, so if you want to know kind of what that self is, even knowing that it's impermanent and always changing, these are factors that tend to be a part of who we are. My life work is taking care of very old, very sick people to the point where they die. And I can say as a matter of experience that people die exactly how they live. These five qualities seem to be inherent in a way that I think comforts most people as they perhaps lose some of the actual things they can do, or even part of their mind. So those are kind of the self, if you will, one version of a self.

[33:24]

And then other factors include our experiences, the causes that influence our life, the effects of our activity, those are over time, and the conditions that we find ourselves in, and the recompense, the fruit of that, what actually happens from that. Those are the nine basic qualities of our manifestation moment by moment. And there's a tenth. The tenth, I wish I knew the Japanese name, and maybe one of you all will, but I didn't have access to it down here. The tenth is called the ultimate identity from beginning to end. the ultimate identity from beginning to end, and that's that tango of knots. That's that multi-influenced, always changing, always in contact with the whole working of things, with the whole true reality of things, which in Zaza sometimes we can really notice.

[34:40]

attention to. I wanted to end with a little poem about all this. The poem is by Ryokan, and probably almost everyone here knows who Ryokan was, a much beloved and maybe one of the most famous Japanese poets, monks, who lived from about 1750 until the 1830s. He grew up too. In his case, he was born into a wealthy merchant class who lost everything in some upheaval. But an uncle had a gold mine where he could manage and recoup the family fortune. He reluctantly tried, and he was terrible at it.

[35:43]

He had no aptitude and no interest. And when he was about 17, he escaped off to the monastery where he met someone, causes and conditions of serendipity of life. And he spent the next 25 years there. Is that about right? Maybe a little less. 20-something years there until his teacher died. He never went to a temple again. He didn't really practice Zen in the way we think about practicing Zen, and so does Zen in community. I'm sure he sat often. He did calligraphy and wrote poems when he was asked, supported himself with takahatsu, begging, and liked to play with children, among other things. This is one of his poems. My fully awake mind had this memorized, but here it goes.

[36:49]

Without intending it, the flower attracts the butterfly. Without intending it, the butterfly meets the flower. When the flower opens, When the butterfly comes, the flower opens. I am the same. I may not know the other person, and they may not know me, but without knowing one another, we naturally follow the natural law. Let me read that one more time. Without intending it the flower attracts the butterfly.

[37:50]

Without intending it the butterfly seeks the flower. When the flower opens the butterfly comes. When the butterfly comes the flower opens. We are the same. We may not know other people, and they may not know us. But without knowing one another, we naturally follow the universal law. And so my question is, what's your flower's opening? What is your flower opening? You should have butterflies arrival. So I thank you very much for your kind attention. You were awake, so I had to stay awake.

[39:01]

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 sfcc.org and click Giving.

[39:21]

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