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. It's a poem by Juan Ramon Jimenez. I feel that my boat has bumped there at the bottom. into something big. And nothing happens. Nothing. Quiet. Waves. Nothing happens. Or has everything happened? And we are already at rest in something new. The first time I heard that poem, it had a ring of profound truth. Has something happened?

[01:04]

Is anything happening right now? Do we know what's happening in our own lives or in the lives of the people around us? Or have we already moved on into something new? So these past few weeks, it seems as though some very big things have happened. I get the headlines of the New Yorker every morning. Most days I just delete them. But sometimes I'm like, what? Really? So there have been some giant bumps and some giant waves in our oceanic collective national consciousness. I mean, I was really amazed to learn that the Supreme Court just this week has passed a new law that anyone, any citizen can marry anyone they choose, whether male or female.

[02:19]

So congratulations to you all. Finally. And how did that happen? And what's happening now? Well, one of the things that happened is that I began to reflect on myself as a little girl. And how I had been taught somehow, I don't think it was directly, but I deeply believed it, that if I were even to think that another girl's body was beautiful, I would go straight to hell. And I would face social ostracism and possibly suicide or even worse. I wasn't very old, maybe 12. But I knew. And the words gay and lesbian and homosexual, as many of you remember, were not to be spoken except

[03:34]

in whispers as insult, using slang. Even those words were taboo. Taboos from the tongan, meaning to be set apart or forbidden. So although I can acknowledge the great blessing of growing up and being born in San Francisco, Still, most of my life, lesbians and gays have been set apart and set upon by folks who view themselves as normal and decent. Like, for those of you who remember Dan White, And even though I don't think his crime could really be seen as a hate crime because he was seriously mentally ill, still the culture of San Francisco at that time was rife with fear about the Castro, the rainbow flags, and the so-called gay agenda.

[04:54]

Do you remember? Fear. And at the same time, it seems really ironic to me now that we were being forbidden to even say the words homosexual. Right there in my public high school, we all stood around naked in complete denial of the fact that we were beautiful. Utterly beautiful. Every one of us. And on the other side of the wall were beautiful young men who were also entering into their sexual maturity. That's what scares us. It scares them too. It's a big thing, a big bump in all of our lives.

[05:55]

So on June 26th of 2015, the whole nation has bumped. amazing. It's just amazing. And despite all the very good that we hope will come from this, already we are at rest in something new. Something uncomfortably familiar. Because there are still many more terrible things that we have been told and taught and learned about other people. Things that we've been telling ourselves for a very long time. And we don't have to look very far here in Marin to see what those things are.

[06:59]

So it may be a comfort that we're not the only ones. It's kind of worldwide human behavior. We've always, as humans, have used filters with which to not only judge, but then to marginalize others of our kind, humankind. And probably since the beginning of language itself, if not some gene at the beginning of life. hard to know. In Buddhism we say beginningless, greed, hate, and delusion, because it's hard to know. When did it start? So in this tradition we always begin studying human beings by looking first at ourselves. What Dogen means when he says to turn the light around, turn the light of your conscious awareness onto yourself, you know. I'm a prime example of a human being, so why not start here?

[08:10]

And when we do turn the light around, we begin to see such things as the filters that we use. They basically come in three flavors, and they're called feelings. I like it, I don't like it, or I'm not sure if I like it or not. Also called greed, hate, and delusion. So when feelings are combined with a driver that is a mental factor by the name of chaytana in Sanskrit, chaytana means your intentions or your volition or your will. Your will. I will. So will is what basically determines the ethical quality of any action we take. And it's the basis for the Buddhist precepts. You know, we say, I will be kind.

[09:14]

I will not steal. I will not lie. I will not kill. I will not slander. And so on. It's my will, my volition, my intention not to do so. And during the ceremony, precept ceremony, the preceptor says to the those receiving precepts, even after achieving Buddhahood, will you continue this truthful practice? And we respond, yes, I will. Yes, I will. There's power in that word and that intention. So volition, or will, is a really big deal in the Buddha's teaching, and particularly when it combines with these feelings, the filters. I like you, I don't like you, or I'm not sure if I like you yet or not. And these together become the basis for all the varieties of righteous, self-righteous, and unrighteous behaviors.

[10:19]

And we have to choose which of these patterns we're going to follow because we can apply this structure of the mind to just about anything that we see. We can apply it to beauty or to class or age or race. We can apply it to politics, religion, disabilities. In fact, we know all of these because we keep making laws to stop ourselves. Don't do that. Don't behave that way. That's not righteous. It's not right. We do know. I remember when my daughter, Sabrina, was in preschool. She has a disability, uses a wheelchair. So sometimes it was hard for her with the other kids, especially when she's little. Now she kind of, she's pretty strong, pretty great. Anyway, in preschool, one of the rules the kids made up for themselves was everyone can play.

[11:28]

It was a rule. And it was on the wall in the classroom. Everybody can play. And they would enforce it on the playground. Sabrina would come up to a group of kids and somebody would say, oh, you can't play because we're doing this or that. And one of the kids would say, no, everybody can play. It's a rule. It's a law. A good law. So these mental forces that drive our lives are what the Buddha called our karma. meaning our actions. Our actions. And karmic actions have the force of law, just like the one the kids made up, in that good actions lead to good results and bad actions lead to horror, as we have seen again and again. At least that's how it works in our dreams, because that's what karma is.

[12:31]

It's a dream. It's a fantasy. An illusion. Which most of us humans is what we're all about. Dreams. According to the Buddha's insight into the workings of his own conscious mind, prior to having a concept for something, so this means your mind too, prior for having a concept, for example, that's beautiful, or... what someone's race might be or whatever it is, whether you like them or not. Prior to that concept, the only experience that we have are of transient particularities. A little splash of color, a little blip of sound, a little molecule of odor, just very rapidly passing through our senses. That's it. No story there. So there isn't a coherent story that's taking place before our eyes.

[13:35]

We know that from our family members when they developed Alzheimer's. What? What are you talking about? There's no story. And yet we do our best to convince each other that it's so. You know, we argue. I'm right. No, I'm right. So the Buddha said famously in response to argumentation, I find no evidence for or against anything. Who could argue with that? So this is pretty radical. And he said, you know, because arguing leads to quarrels and quarrels leads to fighting and fighting leads to harm, so why don't we just not argue? for starters. So I think this is the same insight that the poet had when he says, nothing happens, nothing.

[14:44]

Quiet, waves, waves of color, waves of sound. Nothing is happening. And this is the actual truth of our experience. There is nothing happening outside of the notions that we so skillfully use to create our world. Right now, I'm making use of the English language, which for some of you may be totally unintelligible. I don't know. Does anyone here not speak English? And if you can answer that question... Aha! So... So notions that we carry are kind of like our inheritance from our ancestors, and then we in turn pass that inheritance on to our children. We've inherited language, and we are teaching. We have a two-year-old right now. We are teaching words, and he's like a little sponge.

[15:49]

He's catching them all. It's really quite fun. So in other words, stories are both a source of our freedom, and they're also our trap. the same time. Works both ways. Which is why the Buddha said in a very famous set of verses called the Dhammapada, which I'm rather fond of reciting, what we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday. And our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow. Our life is a creation of our mind. He beat me. She cheated me. They lied to me. Those who think such thoughts will not be free from hate. He beat me. She cheated me. They lied to me. Those who think not such thoughts will be free from hate, because hate is not conquered by hate. Hate is conquered by love.

[16:50]

This is the eternal law. And those who know this law do not fight against each other. I'm also fond of these words by the marvelous teacher and composer John Cage, who, if you don't know him, it's really worth going on YouTube and watching him perform on Water Walk. I forget the show. It was back in the 50s. Anyway, it's amazing. Amazing. It was I've Got a Secret. Bill Collin? Anybody my age? Please. So John Cage said, the first thing I ask myself when something doesn't seem beautiful is, why do I think it's not beautiful? And very shortly I discover that there is no reason.

[17:55]

So although this is a time for celebration of this newly minted right for gays to marry, we haven't yet finished grieving for the loss of rights to Americans of African descent. That was the week before. That big bump from Charleston, South Carolina. The right to life. This right has been withheld from not just African-Americans, but many others throughout the world today, right now. People are being killed, driven from their homes. And they are intentional and willful targets of economic and physical brutality for no reason whatsoever except that We felt like it, and then we did it.

[19:03]

Feelings and will combine. This is very bad karma. It's the very kind of dream we have that we call a nightmare. And we need to wake up, you know, as a people. As people. So I've been personally feeling pretty turned around by all the events of the last few weeks, which maybe you can tell. I almost apologize for this talk today because I thought, this has been a hard one to give birth to. There's a lot of feelings running around inside of me. So, you know, this isn't really news that we've been hearing. There's nothing really new. about any of it. It's been going on as long as we know. It's what we learned in school as a world history. Tribal warfare, genocide, empires rising and falling, great conquerors, eras, dynasties, slave labor, with no end in sight.

[20:20]

And there is no reason at all for any of it. It's not reasoned. just because we feel like it, and then we do it. So I'm still looking and listening for some good news, because I would like to be very hopeful and grateful, and I would like to celebrate, because, you know, it's a wonderful world. We're lucky to be alive, truly. And yet I also know that I'm very privileged, supremely privileged. clothing and food and friends and safety. And I feel as though there must be some way to give back some fair portion of what I have received in my lifetime. I've never gone a day without food or shelter. And I don't know how to do it.

[21:27]

You know, I don't know. I don't have that much that would go around very far. You know, I have some clothes and a few thousand dollars and a lot of books, a computer and a car. And, you know, you're all welcome to them. But probably have your own. But it did remind me of a story that I heard when I first came to Zen Center many years ago. It was brand new, in the door. wondering what kind of a weird place it was. Who were these people? So I went to the full moon ceremony, which really is weird. Still. And it was up on the roof of the Page Street building. Everyone was lined up in rows, and the teacher was in the middle, and they were all chanting and bowing and chanting and bowing for a long time. And... And then the teacher told a story of how the rabbit got in the moon. And this is one of the earliest stories from a collection of Buddhist literature called the Jataka Tales, which I think may have been written for children.

[22:36]

I don't know. But in the Jataka Tales, the Buddha had been reincarnating many lifetimes as different animals, a monkey and a deer and a tiger maybe. I don't know. Many different animals. There are 30 or 40 of these stories. And in each of them, he pretty much protects his flock or his herd or his troop from harm by sacrificing himself. And although that's not the most popular form of philanthropy anymore, it's certainly worth considering what it would mean to give of yourself. So in this story, There is a monkey, an otter, a jackal, and a rabbit who have resolved to practice charity on the day of the full moon, believing that a demonstration of their great virtue would earn them a great reward. So an old man enters the forest begging for food, and the monkey gathers fruit from the trees, the otter collects fish, while the jackal, wrongfully, pilfers a pot of milk curd from a nearby farmhouse.

[23:52]

The rabbit, on the other hand, who knew only how to gather grass, feels very sad at having nothing else to offer, when suddenly she realizes that she can offer her own body by throwing herself into the fire which the old man had built to keep himself warm. The old man then reveals himself to be Chakra, lord of the gods. who then saves the rabbit, happy ending, by transforming the flames into lotus petals. Chakra, being deeply touched by the rabbit's virtue, then draws the likeness of a bunny in the face of the moon for all to see. And it is said that this lunar image is draped in smoke that arose when the rabbit cast herself into the fire. I don't know how many of you know about the bunny in the moon, but... Pretty soon. When's the full moon? July 1st?

[24:56]

July 1st. Look up if it's not foggy and you'll see there's a bunny. It's a wonderful bunny. It starts over in this side of the moon and her ears are there and then her haunches are here. So this story became an inspiration for my early years of practice. This idea that we could give of ourselves, you know, of our bodies and of our minds in the service of others. And then later on I learned that this is the inspiration for the bodhisattva vow. You know, I vow to live for the benefit of all beings. Very simple to say and, of course, very hard to do. How do you do that? So this is what I came up with as a response to the koan that I'd been carrying since I was a little child. When I first learned about such things as warfare and genocide, I was born in the early 50s, so it took a while, but I began to realize what had been going on in the Second World War.

[26:06]

Lots of photographs. So a koan such as this one, how do we bring an end to this terrible torture and violence of our fellow human beings? That was my koan. Koan is usually asked of a teacher, please tell me. Say something. Speak. Following the Charleston slayings, I wrote to a few of my friends who are teachers. who also happened to be people of color, to tell them my feelings of heart sickness about what had happened and about the terrible suffering of African-American people in this country and wishing safety for them and for their families. And one of them, a woman I greatly respect, responded, I too extend my love and wishes for safety from harm to each of my sisters and their families.

[27:13]

We are bearing witness to what we know has always been there. I, for one, am also heartsick with the deep, unacknowledged suffering of white people for who this illness of violence and hatred is their unattended legacy. Unattended legacy. Is that what's happening? Is this our unattended legacy? I think so. And without really knowing what to do or what to say, still, this is all I have to offer. Some words and some ritual. From a tradition which I have personally adopted in hopes that it would be the solution to my koan. my public case, you know. How to stop the senseless violence and hatred toward our fellow humans, toward animals, and toward this very earth, the air and the water that we need to sustain our life.

[28:22]

The bowing and chanting and offering of flowers and incense and candlelight arises not only from a deep wish to honor the Buddhist teaching, but even more so to promote it. You know, it's subtle, it's profound, it's hard, it's difficult. You have to put your bunny in the moon. But I think that the Buddha himself a person of color, really nailed it. He really understood what's wrong with us. Both the cause and the cure for human suffering, which begins and ends with each one, you know, right where I sit, right where you sit, each of us.

[29:28]

So, Here at Zen Center, we take turns coming up here to tell you the stories about this teaching and how it came by texts and by ritual objects from India, traveling by camel, by ship, and on foot into the Himalayas, into China. And in doing so, it transformed and permeated those cultures. Maybe now it's passed beyond them. I don't know. I don't know how alive Buddhism is any longer in the cultures in which it originated and was adopted. Hopefully so. Maybe it'll come back around the earth, you know, just moving around. But it has transformed, you know, Tibet and Mongolia, Nepal and Burma and Thailand and Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China, Japan, Korea for centuries.

[30:32]

And that sounded like good news to me. So these teachings are now passing to us here in the New World, where we're sitting right now. And it's our turn to see if we can make a difference here. Or as the Buddhas and ancestors did, at least to die trying. As inheritors of the Buddha Dharma, we here at the Zen Center do want to share it with you. We really do. Because it's inspired our lives. And we have endeavored to learn it so that we can teach it. However, along with the momentous national events of the past few weeks, there was a very small bump that took place here last week at the Zen Center in the form of a three-day seminar for our senior teachers given by Dr. Robert Scharf from UC Berkeley, who is a professor of East Asian studies and an expert on two centuries of Buddhist culture, language, and sociology.

[31:47]

And I was embarrassed listening to him because I really don't know very much about this tradition. So I thought, maybe I'd better just add a disclaimer to everything I ever say from this seat. Just please know that you should take it with a grain of salt. The word salt in Latin is the same word as wit. I thought that was good. A grain of wit or a grain of salt, either way. So he told us that such things as that our beloved lineage of Zen ancestors, which I had truly believed began with Shakyamuni Buddha and was passed from hand to hand all the way up to my teacher and then to me. So I love that story. However, it's not true. In fact, it was made up in China about the Song Dynasty.

[32:55]

1500 years after the Buddha had passed away. And this is a literary practice which scholars call retroactive attribution. As are most stories about religious figures and dynastic leadership. Presidents of the United States. Their portraits hung. Their mausoleums. Anyway, we make up stories about our mythic characters that we wish ourselves to be, probably. Idealized forms of human beings, such as the ones on our altars. Sweet. A sweet idea. We also heard the word apocryphal a number of times, which means made up, about a number of the texts which we truly love. And we also heard that Buddhism became popular in China mostly because of its similarity to ancestor worship.

[34:03]

Anyway, I took three days' worth of notes, and I may have time to read them, but I don't know. Anyway, it was the kind of bump that turns over your boat, you know, and dumps out a lot of the sacred things that you've carried around as belief. As one of the teachers said to Dr. Sharp, you mean there really isn't a Santa Claus? But even so, it's a good story, right? Santa, we tell our kids. It's a good story. A story of generosity. And so too is the story of Zen. It's a good story. I like it. It was interesting when I learned that in Japan... Yuki, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand that in Japan they celebrate Christmas, right? Isn't there like decorations? And so when the people on the street were asked what it's a celebration of, a great many of them said it was Santa Claus's birthday.

[35:09]

It's a good story. But then I thought, you know, having what you believe reduced to rubble or dumped out of your boat or whatever, is exactly what Zen is all about. That's what it says. It's about coming to realize that everything you think is simply that. It's what you think. That's all. And what you think does not really apply to the world around you. Unless, of course, you are in need of a hug. Because maybe that's the most we can give to each other, you know, is comfort and community and commitment. All those C-O-M words that come from the idea of being together, which is also the truth of our existence.

[36:12]

We're together. We're not alone. We belong together. We belong to each other. All of us. Humankind. I've been spending my evenings watching a BBC series on mammals, which is wonderful, who, when not eating or hunting, spend a lot of their time literally nitpicking and playing with each other, which is how they maintain harmony among themselves and intimacy. But there were also some scenes of some terrible violence, and particularly among some troops of monkeys who are losing their habitat. Some of the males killed one of their own male, you know, companions. Very unusual. This hadn't been seen before, but they're getting crowded. And so there's this kind of aberrant behavior that is overriding their usual non-violent means of resolving conflict among themselves.

[37:19]

And then I heard that basically these strategies, whether violent or non-violent, are learned by watching your elders. And even by copying members of another species, in fact, these orangutans who are in an enclosure because they're rescue animals, learn from the humans how to do things like wash their hands with soap. They're not taught this. They just watch, and then they do it. They wash their hands with soap. They like to hammer and saw with tools that they borrow. And they paddle around in canoes. It's amazing, you know. So the point is that as people of conscience, we are going to have to model the behavior that we want others to copy, our kids and our neighbors, you know. This is the big deal.

[38:22]

We're going to have to do it ourselves. Show them how we'd like them to behave. The old golden rule. And it may be that modeling is the only strategy for turning our world away from violence and toward nonviolence. Away from deception and brutality, toward generosity and honesty. In fact, we wouldn't be sitting here today if the Buddha had not modeled a peaceful way of life. And so too with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. They modeled a peaceful way of life. And although they were responded to with brutality, as was Jesus of Nazareth, another peaceful model, still we can see how their images have been carved in light of the full moon.

[39:23]

Hopefully forever. So I'm going to end today with beginning verses of a long Dharma poem called The Song of the Jewel Mir Samadhi, which is chanted as a sutra, or sacred text, in Zen temples, including this one, once a week in the morning. This poem, as far as we know, was written in the ninth century by Zen master Dongshan Nyangjie. In Chinese, in Japanese, it's pronounced tozan, tozan ryokai. And he's considered the founder of this school of Zen, this one where we are here, the sotozen school. So tozan is the toe of soto, and his disciple sozan is the so, soto. And what he said is that the teaching of thusness, of reality, has been intimately communicated by the Buddhas and the ancestors.

[40:23]

So now you have it. Keep it well. Filling a silver bowl with snow, hiding a heron in the moonlight. When you array them, they are not the same. When you mix them, you know where they are. The meaning is not in the words. Yet it responds to the inquiring impulse. If you're excited, it becomes a pitfall. If you miss it, you fall into doubt and vacillation. Turning away and touching are both wrong, for it is like a massive fire. Just to depict it in literary form is to relegate it to defilement. It is bright just at midnight. It doesn't appear at dawn. It acts as a guide for beings. Its use removes all pain. Although it is not fabricated, it is not without speech. It is like facing a jewel mirror.

[41:27]

Form and image behold each other. You are not it. It actually is you. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:06]

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