This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening, everybody. Good evening. Good evening, people on this side of the room. Good evening, people watching via Zoom. I know some of you it's morning or afternoon. And welcome. So I think most of us know each other. My name is Shozan Victoria Austin. I'm a priest here. And I want to just acknowledge all the changes that have taken place this week in the world, in this country, in our city, probably in our families and friends, and in this building.

[01:15]

So I want to congratulate the kitchen crew in particular. The kitchen crew is starting. to revitalize the Zen kitchen here in this building after a year of no Zen kitchen, which means, you know, it's kind of like reconstituting the kitchen practice with a whole new group of people. And it's wonderful. It's wonderful that we have this. It's wonderful that we can do this activity. The kitchen and the Zen Doe are the two hands that come together to form the bow that we give to the world. Doesn't mean the other positions aren't important, but the kitchen and the zendo in particular show the wisdom and the compassion side of what we do. It's really important, but I'm off topic.

[02:19]

Excuse me. I want to thank you, Tim, for inviting me to speak. I'm not ready, so I'm going to have to give more lectures on this subject. But I'll broach the subject, today's subject, even though I'm not really ready, scholastically ready, to talk about it. And I haven't been witnessing the practice this time long enough to really talk about it. You know, as I said, this week we woke up We wake up to a very different country and a very different world. And in the past weeks, many of our loved ones have struggled. The loved ones we know and also the loved ones we don't know have struggled severely through flames and war, catastrophe, social conditions.

[03:21]

They've struggled in all sorts of way. And so my heart and mind has been turning to the subject of refuge. You know, what is refuge? Where can we find our refuge, particularly in times of change, in times of calamity, catastrophe, or even just what we don't want? Yesterday I was driving to the airport and I heard a first responder from the fires being interviewed. And she's been a first responder, an emergency responder, for several years. And I was going to turn it off to focus more on the driving, but then she started speaking in ways that just caught me. I just had to continue to hear. Because she started to talk about what lives on, what gives life, during a disaster or during a catastrophe or during an event or series of events we can't stand.

[04:29]

So I kept it on. I was struck by her message. She said she's seen many burned houses, many ruined roads, many blasted pipes, many grieving people who have suffered losses. But what she has never seen in her work is a failure of the value of community, the refuge of community. And I thought, wow, I have to hear the rest of what she has to say. But then I got to the airport, so I had to turn the radio off. And so I never got to hear the end of the interview. But my heart and mind continue to think about the question that was... bubbling up during the drive. So where is the community in which we can find safety and peace? When it seems like the very ground under us is continuously shifting, and we don't know really how to balance in those circumstances.

[05:42]

So I want to mention that on Saturday, if you didn't hear it, listen to the tape. Jisan Tova, who's sitting back there, gave a Dharma talk that I'm going to remember for a very long time. So she wove together the story of her own personal awakening to racial injustice with teachings of Reverend Martin Luther King, our Zen Buddhist founder, Ehe Dogen, who founded our lineage in Japan, and my Dharma brother, Hozon Allen Sanaki. who passed away a couple weeks ago, and with whom she shared decades of commitment to the practice of socially engaged Buddhism. And Tova quoted two sermons of Reverend King that are in the book Strength to Love. And the first was called On Being a Good Neighbor, where he says something that's very much like what Dogen Zenji says about mountains.

[06:48]

So Dogen Zenji says, mountains belong to those who love them. And Reverend King says that a neighbor is someone who cares about the person near them. And the lecture is about, the sermon is about altruism. Altruism is at the heart of our own vow to wake up, which is not just waking up. We're waking up for everybody's benefit today. for everybody's blessing. We're waking up knowing that our own struggles and our own awakening only have meaning when they're offered to the world. It can be offered to the world from inside. It can be offered to the world through our actions. So that vow of altruism, as His Holiness says previously, His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, my religion is kindness.

[07:50]

It's altruism. That's the gist. So on being a good neighbor is about that subject. He says, I must not ignore the wounded man on life's Jericho road because he's part of me. I'm part of him. Some other time I'll talk about Tozan's enlightenment poem, but he is just me. I'm not he. you know, about non-objectification, but tonight's not that night. But I want to say that for people who don't already practice socially engaged Buddhism, the sense of I'm part of them, they're part of me, is at the core, isn't it? So, you know, Hozan and I had many conversations with in the years that we could have conversations. I'm still having conversations with him, even though he's gone.

[08:54]

That part of our relationship doesn't change all that much, actually. But how do we realize our Zen Buddhist teachings in ways that promote peace, equity, a sense of... meeting intimacy with everyone we meet. So underlying socially engaged Buddhism is the sense that the world and everyone in it is beloved community. And so that beloved community is a Kingian concept and teaching. And so later, Tova quoted another sermon, The Man Who Was a Fool. I don't know if you remember that from Saturday, but it was about someone who, anyway, I won't go into the story, but Reverend King commented that modern civilization, particularly Western civilization, he said, has fallen into a trap

[10:15]

which is to take our material wealth for granted, and even worse, to identify it as our worthy desire, acquisition as our worthy desire or the goal of our lives, and to ignore instead what the material possessions that we have are actually for. our purpose. So again, I want to ask, where is the community in which we can find the safety, the peace, the refuge to practice with our deepest purpose? When it seems like the ground continually shifts, how can we find that refuge and how can we be that refuge or be part of that refuge in the world? So in a few minutes I'm going to speak about the teachings of Keizan Jokin, Dayosho, great teacher Keizan, who's the other founder of Soto Zen in Japan.

[11:28]

But I want to hold them in the context of another teaching of Reverend King's. So he gave a sermon called The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life in the same book, Strength to Love. in which he was talking about what is the stable foundation for a community of interconnection and refuge. So again, what is the foundation that makes it safe, that makes it a refuge? And I'm quoting him in particular as a great spiritual leader, as a man of peace, but also as a teacher who... who, in his words, gives the essence of, I think, what the West has to offer the 2,500 years of Buddhist practice. So I think holding his teachings is important, and working with them is important.

[12:33]

He was a man of our society, and particularly the suffering of our society, the society that we're in today. So in this sermon, the three dimensions of a complete life, this is what he says. So it's a story. Many, many centuries ago, a man by the name of John was in prison out on a lonely, obscure island called Patmos. While in this situation, John imagined that he saw the new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God. So if you want to look it up, it's in the 16th chapter of the book of Revelation.

[13:34]

So in describing the city, John says this, The length and the height and the breadth of it are equal. The length and the height and the breadth of this city are equal. In other words, the city of ideal humanity is not an unbalanced entity. It is complete on all sides. So Reverend King asks us, because the book of Revelations is really hard to understand for anyone who's ever read it, It's completely arcane, and there's all sorts of wild imagery that make it very difficult to understand as a teaching for everyday life. So Reverend King is kind enough in this sermon to demystify what the three dimensions are. So he says that length is the push of one's life forward to achieve its personal ends and its ambition.

[14:40]

the dimension of length is the inward concern for one's own welfare, in other words, self-development. And he says that the breadth or the width is the outward concern for the welfare of others, so self and others, and the height he identifies as the upward reach of God. And so in Buddhist language, we can... Christianity and Buddhism do not map one-on-one, okay? But in this case, in this dimensionality of spiritual life, of a complete life, I think that we can talk about the three dimensions, the length being our historical body, our form, our karma, our record of action that exists imprinted in body, speech, and mind. And the breadth is inclusivity, all beings, not one being.

[15:43]

And the height can be known as what's not measurable, the potential, shunyata, which I'm not going to say is emptiness because that's a terrible, terrible, actually a terrible translation of what it means. So emptiness, infinitude, is probably a little bit better potential that we don't know. That's the sense of it. So teachings of Keizan are really interesting because there aren't that many of them. Not that many of them that have been identified as his teaching. And it's said that Dogen Zenji gave us the... like the teachings of Zen or the philosophy of Zen. And that Kezan Zenji gave us, well, the person who said this said that he gave us the sect of Zen.

[16:47]

But I prefer to think of it as kind of the glue of Zen. What's held it together as a practice and a lineage all this time? What holds it together now? So... So... His last will and testament is a document called the Tozan Jin Mirai Sai. Anyway, it's the last will and testament, the temple testament or wishes for the entire future. This Jin Mirai Sai. is a very important phrase. It's a phrase that's used when making vows. In the entire future, I will not abandon my practice.

[17:48]

I will not abandon you. So it's a kind of jinn mirai-sai, in the entire future. It's the kind of thing you would say when you were talking about an intention that goes through every moment. And this last will and testament is a really, really interesting document because unlike most other documents, it starts out by talking about this woman, Sonin, who donated the land for Kezon to establish his temple. And he talks about the land. But the way he talks about it, he's not just talking about the land. He's talking about the foundation of giving. That's the foundation of the Sangha. And he asks that there be built a stupa, a Mount of the Five Elders, behind the Buddha Hall, which is kind of above the Buddha Hall, that has the bones and relics of some of the ancestors in it, and that everybody in the entire future

[19:01]

take care of this altogether. And that if there's people from his lineage not available, that he wants people from other lineages to do it. And he wants lay people and priests together to take care of it. And not just take care of that, but take care of the practice with one mind, one taste of practice. And in order to do that, he wants them, he wants a layperson representative and a priest representative, each to make a copy of his last will and testament, and then to sign it together ceremonially and seal it together, and then for the layperson to keep it in his home and for the priest to keep it in the temple in a high place. What would happen if all of us or a representative for each of us were to make a copy of some document that was our heritage for the entire future and that included the ability to make of the sangha, of our resources, a pure land based on giving?

[20:28]

What would that be like? And if we signed it together in the presence of witnesses and were accountable to each other to do this. So this is not just a shaggy dog story because I'm actually aiming at something here. But I do want to talk about the values that underlie this idea. And so he was trying to nourish all dimensions equally. He was trying to nourish people's selves, so he would do things like make up ceremonies for particular occasions or honor Sonin. He learned inclusiveness from his mom, Akon. He asked that we practice altruistically for the benefit of everyone. his ceremonies and his writing down of the forms, we still use that today.

[21:33]

It's the rules and regulations of the Soto School, which we think are rules. But when he wrote them down, his idea was that if they were written down, then it was a reference book that anyone could use. So it was actually a revolutionary act because anyone could take these... documents and create a temple based on altruism wherever they stood. And so I'll just name a couple of concepts that underlie this. These are cultural concepts that in East Asia underlie a lot of the ways that people relate to each other. So in Japanese, one's called engi, interdependence. So in community, everyone depends on everyone else. And each role and each action is a gift, a gift of support.

[22:40]

And then ho-on, ho-on means, it's been translated as repay gratitude, but I think of it more as requiting the blessing. So those of us who have eaten in the zendo, using the traditional form of orioki, we say... I'm blanking out on the translation we use now. We say that the three wheels, giver, receiver, and gift. How does it go now? How does it go? The emptiness of the three wheels, giver, receiver, and gift. So the emptiness of the three wheels, giver, receiver, and gift, where the gift, the giver and the receiver, each depend on everyone and everything.

[23:52]

for their very existence and for their ability to relate. So there's an unpublished translation by Reho Hash of an ancient Chinese text called the Kikyo Mon, of which Kezan Zenji was extremely fond. So he tried to put it into action in his monastery. And I think it's worth mentioning because the ki-kyo-mon, the tortoise-shell mirror. Tortoise just means it's ancient and wise. And it has that connotation. It has 24 names of roles, of monastic roles. And each of those roles is stated in four different ways. And again, the underlying... philosophy of this is that a temple doesn't exist for the residence of a temple.

[24:57]

The temple exists to give hope and refuge. It can give hope and refuge by having people witness that it's a place of peace and harmony. It can give refuge by allowing people to come and stay. And it can give refuge by allowing people to practice in the way that the Buddha handed down through generation after generation until it reached us. So it can be a refuge through time, through space, and also because none of it is foreordained. So it's all extremely fragile. and the dream or creation of this moment that we each and all have to co-create. And I found the, yeah, it's time, right?

[25:59]

What about 15 minutes? Okay, I'll be fast. So the four things that he said about each role were, what is the role? Think about this for your own role. How do you know if you're doing it or not doing it? And how do you know if you're being supported or not being supported in your role? And it also, so what that implies is if you're a supporter of the role, how do you know if they're doing the role? How do you know if you're supporting it or not? So for Tenzo. To make offerings of food to the Sangha, there is the cook. This is a translation by Reho Hash. To make offerings of food to the Sangha, there is the cook. That's a pretty simple description, but covers a lot.

[27:05]

Now, Sangha, this is our role. Receiving food for the sake of realizing awakening. This is how we express gratitude to the cook. Receiving food for the sake of realizing awakening. Now, how do you know, how does the Tenzo know if they are not doing their job? Or if she's not doing her job. If the six flavors are not refined and meals with the three virtues are not provided, then the cook is not serving the assembly. That's how you know. I can say what those flavors and virtues are later, okay? And how we know, now, Sangha, listen, this is how we know if we're not upholding the gift of the kitchen. If we are greedy for certain foods, if we are critical or rude,

[28:12]

We are not showing appreciation for the cook. Okay? Take that home with you, okay? Tell it to the person you're feeding. Okay, don't really do that. But anyway, I'm going to be quiet now. I would be interested, if you have any comments about this, the three dimensions, how our roles are expressed as an offering, or even... What is the sacred function of your role? How do you know if you're not doing it? What are you asking or expecting or what should we ask or expect of people who support you? How do you know or how do we know if they're not doing it? And then, how do we speak about it with giving, with kind words? with appreciative action, beneficial action, and with identity action?

[29:21]

How do we do that? How do we live in all three dimensions? How do we do what we do as a refuge for all beings? Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[29:57]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_98.18