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, everybody. My name is Shundo, for those of you who don't know me. And it's lovely to see everybody. I had one of those soft moments at the end of the community meeting last night where we came out of the little triad and I looked around the room and thought, well, these are all really good people. So it's really nice to have these good people around. And I know there are some visitors here who might not usually be here who are here tonight, who I know. So I'm happy to see you all here, especially. And thank you to Greg for finding space in the calendar for me. It's a busy calendar. Just because it's my day off doesn't mean I'm not honored to give a talk.

[01:01]

Although I probably would be in bed by now if I wasn't doing this. I want to thank my teachers as well, different teachers. Setsuan Galen Godwin, the abbot at Houston Zen Center, who was the director here when I spent my first summer here in 2002, from whom I received Jukai, and Ryushin Paul Haller, who ordained me as a priest in 2009, and Mjogan Steve Stuckey, with whom I trained as head monk here in 2012. I also want to thank the weather gods for making it unseasonably cool, because I probably won't dissolve into a puddle of sweat before the end of this. People have been asking me what I am going to talk about, so a lot of people, and I don't really know what I'm going to talk about, but let's start with a Chinese poem that some of you may know, written by a lay practitioner named Dong Po. The voices of the river valley are the Buddha's wide and long tongue. The form of the mountains is nothing other than his pure body.

[02:05]

Through the night, I hear 84,000 verses. On another day, how can I explain them to others? Let's add some perspective with a different line of poetry, which may be less well-known, but from about the same time in China by the Zen teacher Tongang Chang Ja. Chang Cha. How will you sing the song of returning home? All being well, we might add in some Song of the Jewel, Marissa Mahdi, Song of Enlightenment, and a bit of Dogen, and we'll see where that takes us. So, personally, this has been a very strange week for me, and it really demonstrates the inadvisability of having plans and trying to have them come to fruition. So on Monday morning, I got up and expected to have a day off, and then the rest of the week looked like I was going to do a town trip on Tuesday, I was going to give a class on Wednesday, I was going to be morning doshi on Thursday, do a stone office talk on Friday and give the talk tonight. I thought, well, that's a really good week.

[03:08]

I'm kind of looking forward to this. And then, you know, I was busy preparing for my class, which was, you know, quite a big thing. It was going to be the first of two or three. And I hadn't really thought about... what I was going to say for this until I thought, well, I'll get through Wednesday's class and then see what I want to say. But then I got back from a run on Monday morning and even before I got to the bathhouse, I was told, oh, we had to switch the town trip. You're going to be doing a town trip on Friday instead of Tuesday. Is that okay? I was going, yeah, that's not a problem. That's fine. And then before I got back to my cabin, you know, I had a bath and I walked back to my cabin, there was a note from Linda saying, so there was a family medical emergency in the city. Can you step in and help teach the yoga retreat for the next four days? So I needed a cup of coffee before deciding on that one. But I said yes, and I was very glad that I did. So, you know, this was... And it looked for a moment like I was going to have to give the talk on Wednesday as well, which would have been quite something.

[04:08]

But luckily, Leslie did that. And I have to say, she did talk on the lines from the Tenzo Kyokun that I had been thinking about using. So... This may not be the talk that I was going to give. And I remember Lou Hartman in the city always used to say, I had this amazing talk prepared and then something else happened and now I can't give that talk. And he did that so many times I began to think it was just his way of saying, you can't plan for anything. And you definitely can't say what you think you're going to say. But really it has been an amazing week. I love teaching, so it was a great honour to be able to help teach in that retreat. And with a little aside from... going into Monterey and Seaside and Pacific Grove yesterday. I've had a very lovely time. Of course, we had this amazing thunderstorm on Thursday night as well, which I don't think anyone was really expecting. So I'm, you know, poised and ready. Last summer, I was also asked to give a talk here in the Zendo, which was great. At the time, I was the director at City Centre, and I was just coming in for a few days to lead a retreat, and I was very busy coming into it.

[05:13]

I thought, what am I going to talk about? What am I going to talk about? And I really couldn't. think of anything until I got here. And then the day I got here, I kind of arrived and went through that lovely slowing down process of getting off the stage, slowing and walking around. Ah, here we are again. Got in the bathhouse, went to the creek, sat in the creek, trying to think about something. And this dragonfly was swimming a lot more flying along in front of me. And it kept just like dipping into the creek. I'm not sure what they do when they're dipping into the creek, but just watch that. And just watching that opened me up to like, oh, now I know what I can talk about. which was very nice. And I had a similar moment earlier this summer, which I know some of you have heard me talk about. But in the coffee-tea area, after dinner, you know, we'd be leaning on the railings, and for quite a few consecutive evenings, we'd see this turtle swimming about in the creek. And again, I don't know if it was feeding or just frolicking about. It seemed to be having fun. I think EJ thought it should be called Swifty. It was definitely, you know, motoring around the creek. And at a certain stage, I realized...

[06:14]

I have nothing better to do with my time than watch a turtle swimming around the creek. And that was such a nice feeling. You know, thinking about, you know, my body's shifting. It's like, well, now I'm at Tassajara. And what am I doing at Tassajara? Well, I'm doing three months of work practice, having given up being director in the city, and I have much less stress and responsibility. I'm on the shop crew, so I get to play with rocks and try to fix things. We also do other things like making beds and busing and looking after the bathhouse occasionally and doing town trips. And I also get to drive stages. And there's somewhat of a new phenomenon. I used to drive stages before and I don't remember it happening quite so much, but that was a number of years ago now. Driving in is lovely. You get these people, especially people who've never been... Tassajara before, and you get to say, oh, okay, well, here we are, and we're going here, and you'll be able to see this, and we're going over there, and there's Tassajara. Right down the bottom, you can't even see it yet. I always enjoy that experience. And then on the way out, it's very interesting, about halfway down to Janesburg, you get to Little Bear's Ranch, this beautiful flat area with oak trees, and suddenly everyone's devices start beeping and buzzing and making a noise.

[07:25]

LAUGHTER They're getting back into signal range, and suddenly this transition happens from Tassajara time and Tassajara space to suddenly we're approaching back to the real world. And what's very interesting is the kind of range of responses that people have when their phones start beeping again. You can kind of feel this jolting happen. And I've heard things like, oh, it's my son. I'm just going to reply to him. I'm not going to read the other ones. I'm not going to look at anything until I get home. And I told work I was not available till tomorrow morning, so that's just it. But this is something that we're all dealing with in one way or another. Sorry, it's the first time I've needed to use glasses for a talk, so bear with me. So just noticing... Just noticing that shift between... You know, the space that we inhabit here in the mountains and this going back to our ordinary life.

[08:27]

And it reminds me that one of the gifts we have being at Tassara is that there is no signal. It's a really wonderful thing. And it's an increasingly rare thing, it seems, these days. And in recent years, I've been working with young urban Zen people, roughly in a 25 to 35-year-old age group. And we've brought a few of them down here, and we've taken them to Green Gulch, where there is also no cell phone reception. And the last time I spent a weekend at Green Gulch, which lasted from Friday evening to Sunday lunchtime. At the closing circle, one of the young men, who was probably college age, said, I think this is the longest I've been in my whole life without checking my cell phone. Which is like, wow. But then when we bring people down here for a week, people seem to give it up very easily. And that really makes me wonder how it is that we get so ensnared with everything when we're out there and how easy... when it's so easy to give up when we come here? And what does that say? Why is it we need permission to say we're disconnected right now? And then what happens to us when we have no signal, when we can't be reached by the outside world?

[09:34]

What do we do? What happens? What do we get? And I think most of us would agree we get more space and time to line with what is right in front of us and who is right in front of us. and what is all around us, and also what is inside us. So I get to watch dragonflies and watch turtles. We get to listen to the creek, we get to listen to the crickets. And we get to look at the mountains. And I think many people, you know, especially the Zazen practice, but also even just doing yoga or Qigama or any other practice, we really get to start paying attention to the internal signals that our bodies are giving us. we often don't spend a lot of time paying attention to. And as Leslie said on Wednesday, that might be seen as something of a selfish activity. But I think that the practices that we offer, both in Zazen practice and also just being immersed in this wonderful, miraculous, wilderness nature around us, they allow us, as Dogen says, to forget the self.

[10:41]

And when we forget the self, we are actualized by myriad things. And I think this is the experience that Dongpo had that allowed him to write this poem. So I'll read it again. The voices of the river valley are the Buddha's wide and long tongue. The form of the mountains is nothing other than his pure body. Through the night I hear 84,000 verses. On another day, how can I explain them to others? So it's a classic Zen moment. And how can we explain this to others? And how can we manifest a response to this experience of the absolute in a relative world. So there were many lovely people on the retreat that I was helping with, and they all seemed to enjoy the zazen, and they certainly did a lot of yoga. And they expressed, as many people do when they're here, their gratitude for having or allowing themselves this time and space to

[11:47]

Enjoy and recharge. And then when it came to asking questions, the questions were all about, how can I take this back to the rest of my life? And how can I do this when things get tough? It is all very welcoming here and spending the time in these beautiful surroundings, nourishing and taking care of ourselves. But how do we make this practice valuable for all aspects of our life? And I think the first thing to realize is that we all have the capacity within us if we can find a way to align with those internal signals that we spend so much time ignoring. So this was Buddha's wonderful realization that we all have the potential for enlightenment. Or as Dogen puts it beautifully in the Genjo Koan, when you first seek Dharma, you imagine you are far away from its environs. But Dharma is already correctly transmitted. You are immediately your original self. There's a question of actually paying attention to that and allowing it to happen. So can we believe in that non-separation?

[12:47]

And not just in those quiet moments where we're sitting Zazen in the mountains or watching dragonflies and looking at turtles. But can we do it in all circumstances? And I think somehow we think we have to make these great efforts to be perfect and to be better people. In fact, no one needs you to be perfect except for that critical voice in your head that keeps telling you. What you need to be is human and fully yourself. So there's a Chinese poem that I'll talk about in my class, which is a week from today, if you're still here, you can come, called The Song of Enlightenment, the Shodoka. And in it, Yoko Daishi says, The real nature of ignorance is the Buddha nature. Our empty and illusory body is the Dharma body. And I think this is what the song of returning home can sound like. If we can accept ourselves as who we are, these deluded bodies, human beings, full of karmic formations. The idea of the song of returning home brought to my mind lines from the Fukan Zazengi that many of you will know, which in the translation I tend to prefer says, why leave behind the seat in your own home to wander in vain through the dusty realms of other lands?

[14:05]

And this takes me back to my first time here in 2002. And So my first practice period, Blanche, was still the abbess, and it was her last practice period as abbess at Tassajara. And the weather was about as faffinous as you can imagine at the end of the practice period during the seven-day Rahatsu Sashin in December. We had two or three storms coming in one after the other, like heavy, heavy rain. And so Kabarga Creek was roaring. Most of you probably have not seen it running very much, but it was actually roaring. It was several feet deep and pouring into Tassajara Creek, which is also roaring. There was dark skies and a lot of rain happening. And at the end of Rahatsu, Blanchard had a Shosan, a question and answer ceremony, and we eventually decided that we would need microphones in order to be heard for that. But then a few days later, when we had the Shuso ceremony, which is the traditional end of the training period, we were very insistent, like no mics at the Shuso ceremony. So we all had to really speak out loud to be heard over the roaring creek and the rain.

[15:11]

And I was just starting to practice, and I'd come from England. And the Shouseau, the head monk at that time, was England, who'd come from Dublin. And so I was still thinking of this line of Dogen as kind of like a geographical thing. Like, why leave behind a seat in your own home to wander in vain through the dusty realms of other lands? It's like, why did we come here to do this? And his answer was, you're deluded. And I couldn't quite hear him say, I'm deluded or you're deluded? And he said, we're all deluded. So can we accept that we're all deluded? Are we okay with that? Can we allow ourselves to be not this person we think we are, or this person we want to be, or are supposed to be striving to be, but just the people we are right now? And can we experience in a way that is beyond our conception, to meet each moment that comes up for us? Can we do this forgetting the self and being actualized by myriad things? And how is it we do that? So this morning I happened to pick up the Tenzo Kyokun, which is Dogen's instructions for the cook.

[16:14]

I love teaching on the Tenzo Kyokun because Dogen is very explicit about taking what appears to be everyday activity, which is cooking food, and constantly showing us how practice, and for him this is practice realization, as our continual undivided activity can be manifest. So I'm going to read three short lines from the very beginning. So talking about cooking, he says... After all, isn't this the single color of diligently engaging the way? If you do not have the mind of the way, then all of this hard work is meaningless and not beneficial. And on the next page he says, it has been said that for the Tenzo, rolling up the sleeves is the mind of the way. And that is something we have inscribed in the shop above the altar. So that's what it looks like for the Tenzo, rolling up the sleeves. And it looks like for a lot of us when we're here, rolling up the sleeves, getting down to work. And singing the song of returning home, I think for the tens though, probably sounds like washing rice and cooking soup.

[17:16]

What does it sound like for you? What activities do you have that you can manifest this practice in? You know, we start on the cushion where we have to take it outside to all kinds of activities. And there is no set answer to this. I can't give you any answer to this. It's what arises in each moment for each of us in our lives. And then there's another famous Chinese poem which we chant in the morning, we chanted a few days ago, the Dual Mera Samadhi. There's a line which I'll give you two translations from. I like having alternate translations of things because first of all, everything is coming from Chinese so any translation is going to be somewhat inaccurate. But instead of having just like one certain view or one certain way of looking at something, it gives you a kind of a slightly different perspective and a little bit of uncertainty in how we approach it. So the first translation is, the meaning is not in the words, but it responds to the inquiring impulse.

[18:18]

And the second one is, the meaning is not in the words, but a pivotal moment brings it forth. And one of the Chinese characters in the second half, and Lucy, you're going to have to correct me on this if I'm getting it wrong, In the second half of that phrase is qi, which is the same as qigong and tai chi, qi, or in Japanese ki, which is the ki in reiki or aikido. And among the translations that is offered in Charlie Piccourney's invaluable study guide to the dual mirror samadhi are energy, function, loom, like a weaver's loom, mechanism, seizing opportunity, or a crucial moment. But there are a number of other translations that are offered. So looking at Both of those possibilities. It seems there are different things that come up, at least for me. So responding to the inquiring impulse brings to my mind the idea of way-seeking mind that we all bring to this practice. And a sense of curiosity about what is happening. How do we meet this moment? We have this inquiring impulse. What's going on? How am I going to do this?

[19:21]

And to do this, you need to let go of habitual stories and your usual attitudes or any sense of certainty. And again, forgetting the self. and forgetting the self, being actualized by myriad things. And in thinking about it as a pivotal moment brings it forth, for me, it kind of feels like this dynamic, deep internal energy meeting the circumstances that is in front of you. Again, that's something that Leslie talked about on Wednesday. So each moment is alive and real and present. And it's not just some scenario that's playing out in front of us, according to some script in our head that we think we can tune into or tune out of. So there is no prescription for what to do, just a request to be alive and responsive. And I think our Zazen practice, as we go deeper into it, gives us the resilience and flexibility to do this, to listen to the signals inside and outside at the present moment. And so when we do that, I think our illusory body becomes the Dharma body, and the form of the mountains become the Dharma body as well.

[20:25]

And pain and suffering can also be met as the Dharma body. because we can be clear about the impermanence of good things, bad things, happy times, sad times. We can be at ease at meeting any circumstance, any opportunity, any moment. And because we're humans with highly developed neocortexes in our brains, we're convinced we can think our way around everything. But I think this practice offers us a different way. As Dogen puts it in the Benda-wa, when you let go, it fills your hands. You have this ability, physical ability to deal with things. It's not a mental thing. It's right there in your body. And that's your internal chi, I hope. And I think when that happens, we can hear a Buddha's voice in the sounds of the valley streams. And we can hear the song of returning home to our place in this moment. This moment with the warm air and perhaps the cooling breezes and the crickets and the sleepiness and the bright lights and thoughts of bed.

[21:30]

or maybe going for a late night bath. And I think for me, over the years, this has allowed me so much joy in meeting these things, even if they're not great things. Sometimes there's just letting go of these traditional attitudes I had, or karmic attitudes I had, brings forth so much more ease and joy in this. And so I wish that for everybody, so we can play with these pivotal moments and meet everything as it comes. And there's maybe a California iteration of this Dharma, which I saw on a sticker of the mug of somebody who was attending the retreat. May all beings be stoked. All right, that was about 25 minutes. It's just that I was expecting. So I never intend to speak longer than I need to. And I'm sure some of you would love to go to bed. But if you'd like to ask a question, I'd be happy to try and answer it. And please imagine that you're

[22:31]

speaking over the sounds of the roaring Cobargo Creek. Oh, wonderful. There's a hand. Lucy! Trust you. Dharma, sister, what do you have to say? Free Valley? Read the Tenso Kyokun. Read the Tenso Kyokun. Okay. And where may we find it? Oh, in good bookstores everywhere. No, I think the thing to do, I think, you know, people come here and they say, oh, yeah, this nourishes me for the whole year or, you know, I get all this amazing calm and relaxation and that really helps me in the months to come. But I think there are so many things we can do through the day, you know, even if it's only like taking two breaths before we get out of bed or exhaling before we answer the phone or...

[23:35]

You know, one of the yoga teachers is saying, I'm having a digital free day every week, and that's my intention. You know, I'm just not going to answer the phone one day a week. So we can allow ourselves to do these things. We don't have to be told, you have no signal, sorry. Otherwise, you have to be on all the time. You know, we can make these choices, I hope. So from small things to big things. Yes. How do you do it? Good intention. Yes, Kika. Glad you think so. Slowly, usually. Slowly. It's interesting.

[24:39]

I mean, I've had such a great time in the last few weeks, and it's hard to kind of remember back to like, oh yeah, I had all these meetings, I was really stressed all the time. I think pausing and noticing is always the first step. It's not always possible. It might take me all day to pause and notice that I've been stressed all day, but pausing and noticing is always helpful. Right. Oh, both the poems again. Okay. No, that's okay. Well, the first one is, and I didn't actually say where it's from, it's from the Ten Verses of Unfathomable Depths, which is subject to a commentary by Seke Harada in a new book, which may or may not be in the bookstore, but I bought it months ago, and now I actually have the time to read it. The other one, Dogen quotes in Songs of Valley Streams, whatever that fascicle is called, number 10 in the Shogor Genzo, although this isn't that translation. But the voices of the river valley are the Buddha's wide and long tongue.

[25:40]

The form of the mountains is nothing other than his pure body. Through the night I hear 84,000 verses. On another day, how can I explain them to others? And so the other line, which comes actually from a verse titled The Song of Not Returning Home, says, How will you sing the song of returning home? How will you do it? So I hope we can all find a way to do that. I'll tell you tomorrow. Okay, thank you very much. Let's go to bed. 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.

[26:43]

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