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. I see Steve's picture on the altar, so let's see what it looks like. And I'm not used to... Coming to City Center, I live in North County, so I don't come here very often. So it's also emotional for me to come here and see some old friends. I can't believe Paul is here. Great to see you, Paul. Thank you. And Blanche and Christina and many others And then to see fresh new faces.

[01:02]

Pretty inspiring. I'm ready to just pass out right now. I'm not going to say anything. So, what to say? Oh boy, oh boy. Well, fortunately, I don't have to think of anything to say because I have a prepared speech. I write a lot for the Buddhist magazines. They will often send me an email and say, how about if you write this? And I say, that's an interesting idea. Sure. Because I have a writing habit I just can't seem to get rid of. So they recently, one of them, I think it's, I always get mixed up, which is which, but I believe it's Buddhadharma is doing an issue on teachers and teaching.

[02:07]

And they asked me to write about that. And they said, we would like you to write something about that, but personal, make it really personal. So I said, okay. Because now all writing has to be personal. You tell your story and everything. So I said, good, that'll be interesting. So I wrote for them a piece which will appear in the magazine called No Teachers of Zen. So that's my talk today, No Teachers of Zen. One of my favorite Zen stories is about teachers. The great Zen teacher Huangbo strides into the hall and says to the assembled monastics, You people are all dreg slurpers. If you go on like this, when will you ever see today?

[03:11]

Don't you know that in all of China there are no teachers of Zen? And then some brave monastic comes forward and says to him, then what about all these people, like yourself, who set up Zen places and students flock to them like birds. What about that? And Huangbo says, I don't say there's no Zen, only that there's no teachers of Zen. As an independent-minded person, some would say stubborn person, I find this story very appealing and I always have. And I've never been attracted to Zen masters or gurus of any kind. Powerful, charismatic, spiritual guides have never interested me. There may or may not actually be such special people, but in any case, I've never been interested.

[04:19]

I've always assumed that I know what I need to know for my living and that when I don't, know enough and I need to know more, somehow I'm going to find out. No wisdom, no experience that is not my own could ever be worthwhile. So what would be the point in spiritual teachers? What benefit could anybody possibly derive from hanging around some supposed sage? Somebody else's enlightenment is wonderful for them, but it's not going to do me any good at all. When I began my Zen study, my interest was first and foremost to learn how to do Zazen so that I could find out for myself what Zen was all about. So I was very happy to listen to talks and receive instructions that might help to orient me to the practice. But the idea that following a Zen teacher and hanging on his every word and deed, and I say his because in those days all Zen teachers were men, the idea that this would somehow help me become enlightened seemed not only unappealing but also wrong.

[05:44]

And so my idea was more or less the same as Huangbo's. Yes, There is Zen, but no teachers of Zen. I recognized that people would have credentials and then they would set up shop and they would welcome students because we all need some structure and a place to practice, it helps. But the teacher cannot teach you and the practice is up to you entirely, which amounts to good old American individualism. I believed in this so much that I really didn't have any interest in encountering teachers. Though at that very time that I began, there were several really wonderful, famous, important, historical Asian Zen teachers teaching and other Buddhist teachers teaching in America. I came to San Francisco Zen Center in the summer or spring of 1970. Suzuki Roshi was still alive and still going.

[06:50]

But I had no interest whatsoever. I never heard him speak. I never met him. When I saw notice of his funeral, I didn't bother to even think about attending. I didn't know why would I go to his funeral. When his successor, the first American Zen master, was installed as abbot, I also thought, what would be the point in attending that? Now I kind of regret all these things. But at the time, I never gave it a second thought. Now, when I say all this, it might seem like I was a rebellious Zen student. But I wasn't. I didn't have any problem respecting my teachers. I enjoyed listening to their talks. I would go to Doksan regularly according to the schedule. To rebel, to challenge, to deny a teacher is to set up in your own mind a teacher who actually fulfills the ideal requirements that the teacher in front of you is failing to fulfill.

[08:11]

So if you feel compelled to rebel, it's probably because you actually do believe in an idealized, almighty Zen master. I didn't, so I didn't have any need to rebel. I was at the Zen Center to study Zen. That's what it was set up for. So naturally, I would be cooperative with the people in charge. But I knew that whatever benefit I was going to get out of it would be up to me. So I'm recounting all this now because they said be personal. But not that I agree with all these things now, but that's how I felt at the time. And I want to give a sense of how I was thinking in those days. Certainly never occurred to me that I would myself become a so-called Zen teacher.

[09:19]

This was... the furthest thing from my mind. My idea was that I would get what I needed from the practice. Hopefully it wouldn't take very long. And then I would go forth with my vague and impossible life as a poet. And somehow I would survive. I didn't know how. My wife Kathy and I were ordained as Zen priests in January 6, 1980. because our teacher at the time required us to either do that and therefore continue to practice at the center full time or to move out and get a life. Because we had already two children, two young children. So we could not imagine how we could go and

[10:25]

get jobs and so on, so we decided we would stay. And if we had to get ordained in order to do that, then, well, it was better than the alternative. Not to say that we took this casually. Actually, I had a hard time with it myself, a much more difficult time than Kathy did. But eventually, I managed to figure out how I could do it. And in 1988, when my teacher offered me Shiho, Dharma Transmission, which is full ordination as a Soto Zen priest, I was quite surprised. In those days, in American Zen, Shiho was very rare. Although, as you know, it's not rare. It wasn't rare then, and it's not rare now in Japan. commonplace, but in America it was very rare.

[11:26]

And people in those days presumed that only deeply enlightened people could receive Shiho, which is why I was so surprised and shocked when it was offered to me. Still, I thought, well, these people must know what they're doing. So I went ahead, and then I was an official Zen teacher. a state which I found at first quite disturbing because I was so ill-prepared for it and ill-suited for it and it was nothing that I ever wanted to do. But eventually, with Huangbo in mind, I came to accept the social designation Zen teacher or Zen priest. And ever since then, I have done my best to try to help people practice. But there is more to this no Zen teachers than meets the eye.

[12:33]

I still believe, as I did then, that students are responsible for their own practice and their own awakening. No one can communicate a truth worth knowing. The only worthwhile truth is the one you find uniquely for your own life. I still think that's so. Thank God, because if I were responsible for everybody that I practice with, I would go bananas. I figure it's their problem, not mine. On the other hand, I think we all know that Zen is not Lone Ranger practice. And now I see that Zen teachers really are important to the practice. And the tradition certainly says so. and experience proves the tradition to be correct. So, yes, there are no Zen teachers, because Zen isn't teachable subject matter.

[13:42]

It's not a skill. Although there are many specific things to be learned. Meditation, for one thing. How to walk into a Zen though, how to strike a proper bell at a proper time, some acquaintance with the tradition's literature, and many other specific things to be learned. It's pretty clear that Zen itself, while not exactly something other than these things, is also not exactly the same as these things either, which the literature also says. Zen is somehow more slippery than just how you strike a bell. The Heart Sutra says all dharmas are empty, and Zen also is empty, empty of any content, empty of any form, empty of doctrine, style, or faith that can be codified or defined.

[14:51]

So what would there be to teach? But yes, there are Zen teachers because Zen practice is not nothing. It may be empty, but that doesn't mean it's nothing. Something really happens. Probably everybody sitting here in this room knows that. Something really happens in your practice. There really is transformation. Zen teachers can't show you how to effect this transformation. They cannot cause it to happen in you. And they are not actually teachers of it or masters of it, because who could be a master of an indefinable, empty feeling for living? Nevertheless, Zen teachers do play an essential role. In the ordinary educational model, there are teachers who teach, students who learn, subject matter, standards of knowledge,

[15:58]

and an educational institution which contains and certifies the educational process. In some ways, Zen might look like this, but in reality, it's not an educational process. It's a transformational process in which both teacher and student fully engage, each one playing his or her proper role. And it's the process itself that effects the transformation. Maybe you could think of it like a machine that has lots of moving parts. And each part, when it moves, affects each other part. You wouldn't say that one part of the machine teaches and another part of the machine learns. Yet if you run the machine for a while, something happens. A product is produced. In this case, a seasoned Zen practitioner.

[17:00]

who embodies, in his or her unique way, the values, commitments, and mostly the feeling for and the vision of a life of practice. So, I think it's exactly as Huangbo says. There is Zen, but strictly speaking, no teachers of Zen, although, yes, The machine will not turn properly unless all the parts function fully in their proper places. The teacher, not actually teaching anything, must occupy his or her place in the process completely in order for it to work. Another analogy might be a mandala. Each element in the mandala has a crucial place in the overall design and there's no element that is sovereign or more important than any other element. It's the overall design and the harmony of it that matters.

[18:04]

So yes, in this way, teachers are important. So in order to effectively take his or her place in the pattern, in the machine, the teacher ideally would have certain capacities. Faith. in the practice, especially. And not just enthusiastic faith, you know, belief, but faith grounded in experience over time. Faith that's not just spoken of, but is demonstrated in action, in words, deeds. Experience in the lived reality of the practice is the source of this kind of faith. A certain knowing in your very bones that the practice really is the truest way to live.

[19:07]

And practice here doesn't only mean formal practice that happens in temples and meditation halls, it means understanding and living a human life among others. Meditation in our culture is actually really new. So naturally, we've made a big deal out of it. We've overemphasized it. We've romanticized it. We've romanticized especially the mystical experiences intensive meditation can produce. I think such experiences are just a matter of course. To me, they're among the least important things for a teacher to have experienced. but any Zen teacher will have experienced many such things. Because if you sit there long enough, almost anything and everything is bound to happen eventually. But it isn't the experiences that matter as much as it is how you fold those experiences into a whole life and a whole view.

[20:20]

But even this depth of faith though I think it's essential and basic, is not enough. Ideally, a Zen teacher is also willing and able to share life completely with others. This takes a wide and deep acceptance of and even an interest in the many wily and wild manifestations of the human heart. which will arise eventually in the course of practice over time. Practice with people for 20 or 30 years and you will bear witness to births, deaths, marriages, divorces, endless love affairs, endless enlightenment experiences, endless tears, tragedies, illnesses, angry feuds, breaches, collapses, and surprises of all sorts.

[21:28]

A Zen teacher will eventually live through with others almost everything human beings perpetrate. So he or she needs a lot of patience, a lot of forbearance, a huge amount of forgiveness, and a healthy sense of the immense tragedy and beauty of ordinary human life. The more the teacher has an idea of Zen that students must conform to, the more will everyone, including the teacher, suffer. If not at first, then later on as people who were initially inspired by that idea of Zen now feel themselves oppressed by it or even betrayed by it.

[22:37]

No doubt there are many other important skills people would like their Zen teachers to possess. But I would say deep faith and a willingness to share your life, honestly, are the most important things. But, I should say, I've also seen Zen teachers who don't have very strong capabilities in either one of these things also be of benefit to many students. So, there seems to be no universal prescriptions in Zen or in life. A Zen practice is dialogic and interactive. Compared to other forms of Buddhism, it is classically together practice. As probably everybody here has experienced, in a formal Zen meal, everybody starts eating together and ends together.

[23:49]

In Zen walkie meditation, You don't all go off on your own and walk. We all walk together in single file, evenly spaced. We don't meditate on our own. We meditate together, sitting side by side in a hall. And every period of meditation, we begin together and we end together. If you think of the form of Zen literature, Zen scripture, it's dialogical. It's records of people interacting, verbally and non-verbally, rough and tumble, back and forth interaction, in which the teachings are explored and brought forward, not so much by explanation, but by action. And one characteristic practice of Zen is the one-on-one meeting, doksan. Meeting with the teacher, which is viewed not as reporting in or asking for advice, but as Dharma encounter, a chance to meet oneself by meeting another.

[25:07]

Given this radically together style, it's clear that a Zen teacher has to be ready all the time. to let go of his life and be ready to enter the life of the other. And this deep mutuality is the essence of the Zen process. Great training for a stubborn person like me. It's really helped me a lot over the years to expand my horizons and soften a bit. It took me a long time to realize that that was required. Very soon after my Shiho ceremony, I was reading a book by Thich Nhat Hanh and it had a line in it that said something like this, if you cannot find a true teacher, it's better not to practice at all.

[26:21]

And this really freaked me out. it got me all tangled up in the net of my preconceptions about Zen teachers. And it was very upsetting to me because it seemed to imply that Zen teachers had to have some exalted state of true teacherhood, which was something I knew that I did not possess. So what in the world did I think I was doing? It was like a kind of a crisis for me. Because here I was, one of the few people at the time, with full Dharma transmission, and now what? So it took me a few uncomfortable years to finally actually catch up with Thich Nhat Hanh. He's a hard person to get a hold of. But after a few years, I finally did get a hold of him. And I asked him about this. And he said something like, don't worry, we're all helping each other.

[27:28]

The one-day person is helping the person who just walks in the door. The five-year person is helping the one-year person. Everybody is helping according to their experience. After that, I felt a whole lot better. Still, it takes a long time to feel comfortable in the teacher's seat. In a way, that might be the whole thing about being a Zen priest or being a Zen teacher, feeling comfortable in your robes, sitting on your seat. For a while, I was unconsciously caught by the idea that I was supposed to be someone that others expected me to be. So naturally, I think everybody goes through this, I was straining to somehow be that person. But, of course, the truth is and was that There was no one in particular that I needed to be.

[28:33]

And a formal Zen talk, as you know, like this, is not really conceived of as a lecture on Zen. It's called presenting the shout, which means, in effect, expressing the teaching simply by opening your mouth and speaking in your own voice. And it has always meant a lot to me that whenever you give a tesho, you always bow. You offer incense and bow three times. Make three prostrations to the Buddha. And after the talk you do the same. And these bows, to me, are a chance for me to remember that it's not exactly me giving the talk. The Buddha is giving the talk. And since the Buddha has no vocal cords, he's relying on me for this next hour.

[29:35]

And when I bow, when I make prostrations, I'm praying to the Buddha to help me do a good job expressing what he wants me to express in the faith that whatever I say, whether it's right dharma or wrong dharma, will be of some use as long as I'm sincere and I'm trying my best. After some years I came to realize that this was so in general about anything I did as a Zen teacher. If I was honest, if I really made an effort and tried my best, if I followed precepts and didn't pretend to be someone I wasn't, everything would be okay. This sounds pretty simple-minded. It is pretty simple-minded, but it's actually true, I think.

[30:39]

However, it's not as easy to do as it sounds. And what do I mean by everything would be okay? I do not mean that things will never go wrong. In fact, things will certainly go wrong. Come to think of it, maybe another capacity a Zen teacher should have is deep resilience and breadth of you that will enable her to live with the fact that she is guaranteed to fail. Or at least, this has been my experience. When you are occupying the teaching teacher gear in the whirling Zen machine, it requires that you receive all and sundry with an open heart and the willingness and stamina to take full responsibility for each and every relationship you enter, which means to care and try your best to help.

[31:48]

In a situation in which people are coming to the practice, like they would come to any spiritual practice, plenty of human need. They come with trust. They come with mistrust. They come with enormous wounds. They come with explicit and hidden expectations. It is natural that the Zen teacher, who is after all a mere human being, is going to disappoint a fair number of them. Some will be disappointed on the first day, which is good. Others will take decades to be disappointed. Because you, the teacher, will misunderstand them.

[32:51]

They will misunderstand you. You will say and do things that are hurtful even though you never intended to. meaning to straighten someone out, which I have found is always a dubious proposition. You will completely botch the job and you will reinforce the behavior or view that you were trying to soften. Students who have practiced faithfully with you for years will realize it has all been a mistake and leave creating a wake of confusion and dissension behind them. Your public words and actions will, in being variously understood and misunderstood, create confusion among Sangha members who will act out their confusion in often painful ways. And you will have all kinds of contradictory and complicated feelings about the people who come to practice with you.

[34:01]

You'll love them, You'll worry about them. You'll dread them. You'll watch them make terrible mistakes that you cannot prevent. You'll watch them manipulate you in incredibly devious ways, setting you up for all kinds of falls, and you will fall. And in the end, you'll realize that you cannot really help them at all. and you'll be forced to watch them suffer, or watch them make you suffer. And your job will be to maintain your composure even so, and just keep on going. Anyway, this is just my personal experience. It may be unique to me, and maybe nobody else has that, but you'll have to ask other Zen teachers if they share this.

[35:03]

I've talked to a lot of my colleagues who are trying to get better at what they do, get to be better Zen teachers, to try to understand where they make mistakes and to correct those mistakes. Maybe some of them will go to different trainings to get more psychologically astute and so on. I've learned a lot from... commiserating and hanging out with other Zen teachers, which I've done a lot of over the years. And I think that's something really, really important. And I try, of course, to learn from my own mistakes. But in the end, I think Zen teachers can no more learn than they can teach. Because each situation and each person is absolutely unique. And one's own response at that time to that person must be and will inevitably be unique.

[36:09]

And I always trust my own response. And I know sometimes it'll be wrong and I'm willing to be corrected. But in the end, I realize that I will never get it right. And I've seen that sometimes getting it wrong is actually better. Because in the end, it does turn out to be true that everything always turns out okay. When you really and truly trust the process of the practice more than you trust your own limited self, the limited sangha, or what happens in the short run, you realize that the magic of the practice is much, much stronger than you ever had imagined. It is not limited to what you or anyone says or does.

[37:15]

It is not limited to meditation or what takes place in meditation halls or on temple grounds. And I've seen it happen more than once, many times, that five, ten, twenty or more years, perhaps, after leaving your presence in place of practice, in a huff or not in a huff, students' lives miraculously turn around because of unexpected circumstances that Buddha somehow placed in the middle of their lives long after they left your temple. The perfect priest you thought you were ordaining turns out the need to fall apart, leave, and go through many ups and downs for decades and decades before she finally emerges as the Buddha you always knew she was. The wreck of a human being who was so disruptive and annoying and hopeless comes back to visit you decades later in the midst of a beautiful life inspired by love.

[38:31]

And the crazy mixed up young woman who seemed headed for certain doom returns with three lovely children grateful for the practice she seemed to have resisted mightily at the time. These are all real stories. Seeing this stuff happen over and over and over again you do come around finally to completely trusting the practice and trusting life, which helps you to trust yourself and the basic goodness of each and every person you practice with. That's the secret magic ingredient in Zen. The brilliant spark of human goodness in each and every person.

[39:36]

Practice awakens it, and once it's awakened, the rest will unfold eventually, one way or the other. You, the teacher, just have to be willing to be there and be surprised. So that's my speech about teachers of Zen. So we're lucky, around here we have lots of them. And they're all different. Have you noticed that? Just when you think Zen is supposed to look like that, here comes some other teacher along, and they're not doing it that way. For those of you who have been around for centuries, I think you already know what I'm talking about. For those of you new to the practice, trust it.

[40:44]

Trust it. The teachers may not be... I always used to joke about Zen Center, I used to say, well, we don't have any enlightened teachers, but the food is really good. So, thank you all for coming and listening. I just realized as I was putting on my oquesa today that this oquesa was Philip Whelan's oquesa. I actually didn't intentionally bring it because it was Philip Whelan's oquesa, but it is. Which is why I have a zagu that doesn't match. Because his stuff was burnt up in a fire and My friend who gave me this, who was keeping his stuff, couldn't find the matching zagu. Anyway, I mention that because this afternoon in the dining room I'm going to be giving a short mini-workshop where we'll have some fun talking about Philip and reading some of his poems.

[41:52]

That'll be a joyful thing, so anybody who wants to come, please come. Speaking about teachers of Zen who were not what you would expect, Philip was one. So, good luck with your practice. Thank you very much for coming and listening so sweetly. I appreciate it. Take care. 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, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:47]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.68