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. Benjamin, I wonder if you could just pass this around so that people can feel it. This was on a... Anna might want to touch it also. It was made by Sojin Mel Weitzman for my Dharma transmission. And so those of us who studied with him as he was our Hanshi, our original teacher, he made things for us with his hands. And so I want you to have a chance to feel the work that went into it and to understand that kind of gift.

[01:07]

And you can get it back when the lecture's over. Okay, thank you. And I want to thank various people for this lecture. This is the first time that I've sat on this platform and given this talk since October 2019. And so I'm feeling the passage of time and everything that has happened between then and today. And just thinking about everything that's happened and the people who have suffered, the people who have died, The weddings, the funerals, the ordinations, the practice periods, the coming, the going, the no coming, the no going. So much has occurred.

[02:09]

And I want to thank Kodo for opening this topic last week that I'm about to speak about. And I want to thank Tonto Ana. and Abbott David for inviting me to give this talk. And I also want to thank the people who are coming in as Abbots, as well as the people who have served in that way in the past for this talk, because I'm going to continue the topic of succession. And this lecture, you know, I have about two weeks of material for this lecture. So anyway, we'll get started. And Kodo, if you're listening at home, I want to say that nothing that I'm saying actually contradicts what you said in your talk.

[03:14]

But I think it takes about four or five or six or ten lectures to unpack this subject. And I want to encourage the people who are listening at home or online to comment on this, to be part of this conversation, because by doing that, you make it alive. So just to refresh your memory in case a lot has happened since last week. So last Wednesday, Kodo-san gave a lecture. in which he began the lecture by saying that next year was going to be a transition for us, that many of the elders in the community are moving, and so there's a generational shift. And so his main question was, how do we stay centered and alive? And he gave this wonderful quote by Mahler, tradition is tending the flame, not worshiping the ashes.

[04:18]

Just to go over the gist of his lecture, in case you weren't there or in case you don't remember it, he gave some definitions in that he defined the inmost request as the center. Remember his story about being near the walk-in, and he said, this will be the center of my life. At that moment, he realized that nothing else would be as important. This will be the center of my life. And he also made a functional definition of the inmost request, what that turned into, as an intention. So it wasn't just a feeling, but that feeling transformed into an intention as it does for many of us. And so what he was suggesting is that we can keep close to that and keep clarifying it by knowing that what our inmost request is, by following this intention, which is deeper than any pleasure or pain, any like or dislike, any joy or grief, and that we can persist in developing skill in following our inmost, our deepest intention, our inmost request.

[05:39]

We can develop skill so that we transcend what we usually think of as normal. and enter the realm where our life is alive, where what we do gives life. And so, you know, I think that his argument was a really good way to start. His description was a really good way to start this conversation because... Staying with the basic intention is kind of a time-honored way in our tradition to be with what gives life. So because the request is in most, it really motivates us. So like, for instance, if we're in the kitchen and we think it's a chore, that's not very motivating. But if we're in the kitchen and we're practicing Buddha's way, and that's what we want to do, that really is motivating.

[06:46]

It's like, oh, chop, [...] right? Instead of chop, [...] right? So it has life for us. And so it's time-tested. It's really part of our tradition. You know, what is the practice asking of us now is another way to say. what is our inmost request. And so because it's deep and because it's true to what we really want out of life, staying with our inmost intention is really grounding. You know, to realize our inmost intention gives us a sense of depth and meaning and resilience that allows us to to kind of absorb, digest, and make sense of, meaning of, and develop from all the difficulties that we face in practice.

[07:58]

So it's direct experience. It's a difference between giving a person a fish and teaching them to fish, to quote a cliche. And so... This is really important that if we each know and follow and persist in our inmost request, in our basic intention, in a way that gives life, then as individuals in the community, maybe we could make it to clarify and keep close to what's most important in ways that allow us to weather the extremes of emotion or events that we have to field. Okay, but I want to actually kind of recontextualize this and flip it a little bit and go into it a little bit more. And Brian, if you could let me know when it's about 8.20 or something, that will help me be quiet so that we can actually have a participatory event.

[09:07]

So I want to say that... To structurally define our inmost request as individual is true, but for a generational transition in the Sangha, we need to define our inmost request as a Sangha. That their individual generational shift is a community event, a collective issue, and we need to respond to it together. And so I would like to redefine our inmost request as a sangha, as a sangha refuge request, as the gestalt of what practitioners hold in common as the center of our collective life, not just our individual life. And I think that that will help us understand a little more about how to work with this transition as a sangha. Oh, footnote. begin their practice as abbots, the only thing that allows them to do that, it doesn't matter if the board asks them to do it.

[10:17]

Well, it matters in that that's the opening. But just like Tinkerbell needing for us to clap our hands, the abbots need a sense of invitation and continuous daily invitation for that give and take. of Sangha life to become real in a new way. So it is our job to create that sense of invitation and we have to do it together. And if we're unclear on who we are or what we really need out of life, if we're willing to remain unclear and just kind of shove that responsibility onto the new abbot, the community will go down. And so it's our responsibility to keep it up, to keep it alive, to keep rising mind for discovering what's really important to us, not just individually, but as a sangha that we're willing to take refuge in.

[11:25]

And so the functional definition is not just the inmost request of the sangha, of the collective, but the intentions. that the Sangha holds together as the ground of our practice together, as the ground of our life together, is what we really want from each other. We have to be able to meet and expect something mutually and not just of ourselves. So why is it important to have a collective definition? Why does it work better? for this particular situation of the generational shift. I think structurally, because it's verifiable, I can actually say, what's your intention? And then I can say, oh, mine's pretty similar. Can we have that be our intention? That's verifying in a very simple way.

[12:29]

And functionally, We can practice face-to-face. Like I can say, my intention is this, and Benjamin can say, yesterday you said it was that. And I can say, oh, thanks, Benjamin. And then I become more honest because of our Dharma friendship. So what needs work in our, like, if... Kodos and my lecture were one lecture. What would need work at this point? So, you know, so I just contrasted individual and collective, but there isn't just individual and collective. As we know, there are a lot of groups and kind of subgroups and affinities in this Sangha. Like even if we think, okay, there's yes. Yes. There's the people who are under a certain age. There's people who are over a certain age. So even by age, there's different affinities.

[13:32]

There's the people who live in the building, the people who live at 340 Page, the people who live in San Francisco, the people who live around the country and around the world. They all have different points of view. So many varieties need to be understood and given life. And so... This main point of inmost request and intention, I have faith. I'm confident that we can realize it, not just individually, but collectively. And that's part of my Sangha refuge for this year. But I need to understand how, and I can't do it by myself. I need you to help me understand, because this kind of commitment and refuge happens. It happens in dialogue and in interlock. Anyway, it happens together. And if we don't, we're likely to skip over the interests and needs of people who are or should be important to us in our functioning as a Sangha.

[14:53]

any group of people that has been marginalized systemically, or seniors who don't have 20 years of practice, so they don't fit in that model of senior practitioners going to Enzo Village. So there's a lot of groups that could easily be skipped over. So... So I think that Buddha's instruction to Ananda and the rest of the community at the time that he was dying, and, you know, I kind of lived it because I went to see the places, the villages where he gave his last words to, and I walked that route. And I discovered that he, through being there, that he must—he walked— more than 200 miles with dysentery and gave the same message over and over.

[16:01]

And this particular talk about be your own island and be your own refuge was a culmination of his teaching. And it was a wonderful teaching for that moment. It was how the Sangha continued. It was the foundation of practice from then on. And now, I think in this country, at this time, we need to heed Thich Nhat Hanh's words, Thay's words. which came from his sense of what the world needs today, that the next Buddha may be a Sangha.

[17:03]

If the next Buddha were a Sangha, what kind of Sangha would it be? That's my... note on this so if we focus on just our own island our own refuge today even though it's inclusive even though I together with all beings realize and the mountains the rivers and great earth even though I with all beings fully enter Buddha's way they the impact of my practice may not reach those people in functional ways or beings. It may not, if I practice as an island, the impact of my practice may not reach the environment. It may not reach my friends in other countries. It may not reach my friends who have experienced war or marginalization.

[18:09]

So I think we need to understand that the next Buddha may be Sangha. So what model of succession? So I just want to give a couple of models of succession that have happened in the history of Zen, because I think that the need for these models, the way that these models play out in real life, is changing right now, and rightly so. I think that we could call them face-to-face and side-by-side. Those are the two models that I want to bring up today. Face-to-face. Let's just give some examples from the website. How am I doing on time? Twelve? Thank you. So... I went to the website for San Francisco Zen Center to see if I could discover our community intention.

[19:15]

So I wrote one for the San Francisco Zen Center 30 years ago. So I wanted to see if it was the same or if it had changed, if there was more written in it. And I found these words on the website. So I found some face-to-face words and I found some side-by-side words. So you go to the website. You go to About Zen Center. I thought it would be there. And there's this wonderful image that happened during the pandemic. So the people who are doing graphics asked us to make mudras, to take photos of mudras on our computer screens or using our phones. And then... They took each mudra and split it up into four. So there's 56 people's mudras in one image. You have to see this. It's an about Zen center.

[20:18]

And you'll see what looks like, what's a quarter of 56, like 14 mudras or 28 mudras. Maybe it's 100. What's twice 56? 112. Okay, mudras. But anyway, it's a lot of mudras. And it looks like fewer, but if you look close, you see that they're cut into four. So check out the mudras. So what it says there is that the essence of practice is not just carried in the written teachings, but has been transmitted warm hand to warm hand in an unbroken succession of teachers to students. So that happens face-to-face in the teacher's room. It's called transmission. It's called practice discussion. It happens face-to-face where you say, what is the highest meaning of the holy truths?

[21:20]

And the teacher says, empty, not holy, or whatever it is. Go ask him. I'm tired. Whatever it is. So that's face-to-face teaching. And then there's side-by-side teaching, which is stated on the website as the San Francisco Zen Center community includes residents and non-residents at all three centers, priests and lay practitioners, long-term and short-term participants, and opportunities to attend a wide variety of events and programs. And then if you click through that page, you'll also find affiliated groups, including branching streams, which is 70 some odd Suzuki Roshi affiliated groups. So let's look how that face-to-face and side-by-side plays out in one of the traditional Zen stories. So this is a story about Umon or Yunnan.

[22:23]

A monk asked him, what are the teachings of a whole lifetime? Actually, it doesn't say that in the Chinese. It says a period period of buddhist life and the answer that is said in english is an appropriate response but actually um that's not what the chinese characters say so i i needed to do some research what are the teachings of a whole lifetime an appropriate response so i'm not going to go into the koans that go with this koan but um just a little bit about this one The face-to-face interpretation is the one that's commonly given. So it's commonly interpreted, including by Suzuki Roshi, as the teachings of Shakyamuni's lifetime, because it says periods and ages. And Suzuki Roshi used a translation that said, the teaching confronts each.

[23:24]

So it emphasizes that. If there's a teacher and a student in the room, each person that comes will receive a teaching. Or if there's a situation, the dharma of that situation will come face-to-face with you. So that's the interpretation that's commonly made of that story. But actually, the literal meaning of the characters, which I looked up, is the characters have in them arrow points meeting. And the two characters of what is meeting what are the same. It says each meets each. That can be interpreted a variety of ways. So anyway, I could say much, much more about the periods of the Buddhist teaching. But I want to go into just a little bit.

[24:28]

controversies that happened in the past about types of transmission that we're still living out today so today there's a question of are lay people teachers or just our priest teachers and if so how real is it and what can lay people teach and what can't they teach what can priests teach and what can't they teach so um I'm not saying that that was always a question in feudal Japan or in Chinese society or in Indian society, but the elements of face-to-face or side-by-side, face-to-face being what I think the emphasis of priest teaching is, and side-by-side is what I think the emphasis of lay teaching is. I think that that... has continued for a long time. So I want to tell a little bit about the story of Manzan Dohaku, who reformed Soto Zen about 400 years ago.

[25:36]

And so there were two forms of transmission at that time. One was face-to-face transmission, and one was institutional transmission conferred by a temple. So like, for instance, if I wanted... someone from Dharma Rain to come and be the abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, I would get a teacher in the San Francisco Zen Center lineage to give them new transmission and new documents so that they could be a San Francisco Zen Center teacher, so that they could be a San Francisco Zen Center abbot. Anyway, that was getting very, very confusing in Japan. And so Manzan and his friends thought, This is not right. Face-to-face transmission is how we transmit the teaching. And so let's just say that in this dialogue, A. Heiji was on one side of the fight and Sojiji was on the other side of the fight.

[26:45]

And there were a lot of ins and outs of it. It's very interesting, and I won't necessarily repeat right now, though, what the institutional arguments were for and against. I think we tend to repeat a lot of the same institutional arguments and can learn from the example of that story, but it's too complicated to go into right now, so I won't. I just want to say that there was a kind of a fight over how is responsibility in Dharma conferred? Is it institutional? Or is it this mystical thing that happens between teacher and student? And that's the part I want us to remember. And so I will stop soon to say that, just to say that both face-to-face and side-by-side transmission is necessary.

[27:49]

with face-to-face transmission from generation to generation, I think is the essence of priest training, that I vow to take up the form and practices that have been the look, the feel, the sound, the language that has body, speech, and mind language that has been given to me by my teacher generation to generation and express it in similar ways. so that it can be seen and recognized in this generation and passed to the next. That's what I think of as face to face. And then side by side, which I think is really the essence of lay teaching, is with my own form, with my own responsibility, with my own relationships, with my own needs, I vow to stand hand in hand, with all beings, realizing one Buddha nature in its infinite variety of forms.

[28:54]

And I think that without side-by-side transmission, face-to-face becomes narrow, dry, and irrelevant. And without face-to-face transmission, side-by-side transmission can become diffuse and confusing. And so I think that both are necessary and that it is necessary to have exemplars of each. And that when we're thinking about refreshing the Sangha and thinking about variety in the Sangha and how we can give life to the deep intention in everyone that comes from our inmost request, that... We need to realize both. We need to realize them together. We need to see them and honor them and value them in every practitioner in the proportions in which they actually hold them as true, as important, and as vital to them.

[30:01]

So I just want to do one more thing. And if you know this song, please join me in this song. We shall be known by the company we keep by the ones who circle round to tend these fires. We shall be known by the ones who sow and reap the seeds of change alive from deep within the earth. It is time now. It is time now that we thrive. It is time we lead ourselves into the well. It is time now, and what a time to be alive. In this great turning, we shall learn to lead in love. In this great turning, we shall learn to lead in love.

[31:08]

Thank you. 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.

[31:37]

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