Good morning. I've never quite heard the sound that I'm hearing in here before. Are you hearing that kind of low? Yeah. So it's, it's the Dharma wind. It's really cool. I've never heard that in this room before. It's a brisk, late fall day. And this is our last Saturday of the practice year for us. And we will all reconvene on New Year's Eve, I hope as many of us are able. And then we just begin the next go round on January 2nd. So for me also, Three days ago, I had my 70th birthday, which I cannot believe.

[01:12]

I am now up there in the stratospheric heights of Sanaki male longevity. My grandfather, I looked up, I couldn't quite remember. I looked up on the web. So he died at 70. And I honestly didn't expect to make it this far, given the kind of loading of the genetic dice that comes in my family. But here I am. Thanks to medical science, and thanks to the Dharma, and thanks to all of you.

[02:15]

In your own way, Your identity action, your cooperation, co-operation, I feel has really kept me alive and kept me young and to some degree keeps me joyful. I really, Laurie was noting this a few minutes ago, there's so much going on here today. You know, so we had Sashin, which ended last week, which was a great cooperative effort. Jerry and Alexandra are plugging away at their work for Dharma Transmission as we gather here. They're in the community room. And We've had an incredible lineup of meals that people are offering to us as we go, as Sojan and I and Jerry and Alexandra and others are going through the work of the Dharma transmission and people just bringing us food and feeding us extravagantly every day.

[03:42]

And here we are, people showing up for work period, people showing up for Zazen, people showing up for lecture. And this is the work of our community. This is what I've been writing something for the newsletter sort of in advance of Martin Luther King Day, which is second weekend in January this year. And I keep returning, as the years go on, I keep returning to Dr. King's, his idea of beloved community. And beloved community is the community of people who are living together, who recognize our interconnection to each other. who recognize their own part in that interconnection, who don't always necessarily like each other, but at a really deep level, love each other.

[04:58]

Love each other because we are in this together. Love each other because Here we are practicing together, sitting next to each other as we do Zazen, working together as we work around the temple at our various jobs or at work period. And we learn to appreciate each other beyond like and dislike. And I would call that love. In the midst of all this, in... Yeah, it's out.

[06:03]

Yeah, but it's going to be intermittent. Right, it's working now, but it's... Are we on?

[07:09]

Is this working? Yes? Okay. Is it? Okay. There we go. Yes. Ah, so what I was saying was that in the midst of all this, from Sogen's lectures in Sashin, we were talking about birth and death. And I'm looking at Dogen's teaching on birth and death, Shoji, which just means birth and death, or life and death, depends on how you want to interpret it. It begins, because a Buddha is in birth and death, there is no birth and death. It's also said, because a Buddha is not in birth and death, a Buddha is not deluded by birth and death. Those who want to be free from birth and death should understand the meaning of these words.

[08:16]

If you search for a Buddha outside of birth and death, it will be like trying to go to the southern country of Yue with our spear heading towards the north. It's like going the wrong way around the world, right? Or like trying to see the Big Dipper while you are facing south. That's very hard. you will cause yourself to remain all the more in birth and death and lose the way of emancipation of freedom. So, if you search for a Buddha outside of birth and death means this is the nature of reality. The nature of this world that we live in, the Saha world, which means the Buddha world in which we have to endure things. Birth and death is what we have to endure.

[09:19]

And there is no Buddha outside of that. The Buddha lives right smack in the middle of that, and so do we. But it's also true that the Saha world You don't want to reduce it to the world in which things have to be endured. We can also think of it as the world in which we can enjoy ourselves. So I want to sing you a song and get you to sing with me that is on this topic. Give me the guitar. And can you distribute these? Thank you. So I'm going to sing this and another song later in the talk to close.

[10:22]

And it may not be enough. I made about 40 copies so you can share with your neighbor. This is a song by wonderful songwriter Jesse Winchester. Some of you may know of him. I've done it before, and I didn't look at my notes at all to see what I want to talk about. But the title of the song is Defying Gravity. And so that's an interesting, complex play on words. Gravity is not just a good idea, it's the law. And gravity, you know, sometimes people look at our Zen practice and, very serious, lots of gravity.

[11:31]

And at the same time, very light and free. And I think that the people who've inspired me in my practice over half a lifetime now have defied gravity. It's not that gravity is absent, it's that They know how to enjoy themselves. Sojin knows how to enjoy himself. Suzuki Roshi and Uitsu knew how to enjoy themselves. Those are the people that are my heroes that I look towards in all Buddhist traditions, not just in Buddhist traditions, in life. So I'll sing what I've sort of worked out as a chorus and then you can sing it with me the second, I'll sing it twice around.

[12:36]

I live on a big blue ball, I never do dream I will fall. And even the day that I do, Well, I'll jump off and smile back at you. Try singing that. I live on a big blue ball. I never do dream I will fall. It's great. And even the days that I do, Well, I'll jump off and smile back at you. You know I don't even know where we are. They tell me we're circling a star.

[14:09]

Well, I'll take their word, I don't know. I'm dizzy, so maybe that's so. Said I live on a big blue ball I never do dream I will fall And even the days that I do I'll jump off and smile back at you Well, I'm riding a big blue ball. I never thought one day I'd fall. But even the high must lay low.

[15:15]

So when I do fall, I'll be glad to go. Yes, I live on a big blue ball I never do dream I will fall And even the day that I do I'll jump off and smile back at you. Yeah, when I do fall, I'll be glad to go. Thank you. That was beautiful. Jesse Winchester said he was interviewed about this song when he wrote it.

[16:21]

He wrote it in 1974. And they asked him about this and he said, yeah, I don't know. You know, it's like. When I do fall, I'll be glad to go. I'm not sure that maybe that guy was full of shit, you know. uh... did he really know but then when you see jesse winchester uh... in the last year of his life yet he had cancer and was combating it and was still performing and when he performed you could hear all this joy in his voice i'm seeing that so my I think I talked about this a few weeks ago. One of my oldest friends, his dharma name is Tanzan, lives in New York, outside of New York City.

[17:28]

We've been friends for 55 years, going back to ninth grade, to Mrs. Condon's English class in ninth grade. We were the, you know, it's like, you know how they put the bad kids in the back of the room, and then they might have a row of, they might have put the good kids in the front of the room? Well, there was one row of four good kids, and everybody else was in the back of the room. And I remember, I remember with Tonson or John, it's like, so when Miss Condon had her back to us and was facing the blackboard, We would race up in our desks and touch her desk and race back to her place before she could see us. So we've been friends for a long time. The other thing about him is he's a musical genius who never was recognized because he wasn't easy to get along with.

[18:34]

And the people who are successful in the music business, they're very gifted, and there are lots of gifted musicians. But the other thing about them is they're easy to work with. And if you're not easy to work with, well, we'll find somebody else who's really good who'll be easy to work with. And he wasn't. But he was a musician's musician. Everybody who knew him realized how completely brilliant he was. And we've been really close friends. And somewhere about 15 or 20 years ago, he came to a teaching that I did at Zen Mountain Monastery, Mount Tremper, Daido Luri's place. And that was his first time sitting zazen. And it was, I felt wonderful that he was there. I felt a little nervous because they're kind of tougher than we are.

[19:45]

You know, it's like, so if Raghav moved, I'm not going to do this because I got my microphone on, they would yell at him, don't move. from this, I would do it from my seat, at you, you know, it's like, so it's like, here you got this, my friend, Tanzan, who's 52 years old, you know, he never sat cross-legged. And they yelled at him from the front seat. And, you know, so he didn't move. But I said to myself, I'm out of here. I'm never coming back here. This is not, the spirit of Zen that I'm interested in. And so I connected him with one of my teachers I've spoken of, Shoto Harada. And it was a Japanese Zen teacher, Rinzai. I've been practicing with him for about 20 years, and they just made a really deep connection.

[20:52]

And I watched year by year as The gravity and anxiety and difficulty that my friend had, it lightened. He was defying gravity. And then about six months ago, he got this really bad diagnosis for a cancer that I've never heard of. Merkel cell carcinoma. Has anyone heard of that? Nobody in this room has heard of that. It kills you. It's a skin cancer that works under the skin and then it spreads. But it was very, very aggressive. And it was really a question as to how fast it was going to go because it was just

[21:55]

It was a kind of cancer where, like, every few days you could see the tumors getting larger. You know, that's fast. And so he had surgery and began a treatment, and I went back. I've been back there twice, and the first time was really, I think maybe I spoke about this, it was really, really moving, because Hirata Roshi called me and said, well, I'm coming to the United States, and I'd like to visit Tanzan. And I said, oh, that sounds fantastic, I couldn't believe that, because his place is in, well, he has a place in Japan, a Rinzai monastery, and then, a practice place on Whidbey Island. And so he was going to lead Sasheen and Whidbey. And I said, that's great.

[22:56]

He said, oh, but we need you, me, to drive us. So I said, oh, OK. And so I met him in San Francisco and him and his right hand person, Chisan, And we flew to New York and they met with Tanzan for like a four-hour dokusan in the hospital at Memorial Sloan Kettering, just after he had surgery. And he was pretty shaky. And they just came and they met with him for four hours. And then I drove them back out to Newark airport and they flew back across the country to, uh, to Whidbey and began sashim. And it's just like, this is what, this is so inspiring to me, but obviously they were inspired by him.

[23:58]

It was a mutual coming together. Uh, and I'm happy to say that for the moment the chemo is actually holding the tumors at bay, but that will not happen. But I spoke to John about five days ago in the middle of Sashin. So I was thinking of him and, you know, he was defying gravity. He was light. and he was light without delusion. He was in the middle of this. He was being a Buddha in the middle of birth and death and recognizing that, well, this treatment is working now, but you know what? It's not gonna work.

[25:00]

He can't count on it, nor can any of us. count on anything working in the face of birth and death. It's, you know, while gravity may or may not be the law, birth and death seems to be the law until we're awakened and leave this wheel. But what Dogen was saying was, don't think about that. Wake up now. Be free now. Defy gravity now. At the same time, recognize gravity. It's there. My friend is ill. Our friend and Carol Paul's husband, Al Tribe, died in what looks like a blink of an eye.

[26:08]

That's gravity. He's now no longer subject to gravity, but we are, we're subject to gravity of our own lives and bodies. And we're subject to loss of those who go away that we love. And So I don't know, when I do fall, I'll be glad to go. Maybe. Maybe not. But I think that the fundamental point, and this was came up again and again in Sochin Roshi's Sashin Lectures. Suzuki Roshi talks about

[27:12]

Over and over again, he talks about composure. So I can't say whether I'll smile back at you or whether when I do fall, I'll be glad to go. It may be. If it's really painful, I'll be ready. I'll be exhausted and I'll be ready to go. I'll just let go. My friend, some of you know Tygen Layton, do you know him? He's a Zen priest and he's also an old friend of mine in the Zen community and from college, actually. And his mother moved from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Oakland to be with Tygen and his sister. And she was, I think, a real live wire. She was kind of one of the key people in her, in the home, the residential center that she lived in in Oakland.

[28:24]

She had some back injuries and some general illness, but her mind was really clear. And at 94, she just said, you know what? I'm done. Which was not so easy for Tygan and his sister. They argued with her, but they also let her make her own decisions. And so she just stopped eating and very gracefully, quietly faded away. I never met her. But I went to her memorial and the room was packed, you know, with mostly older people, some younger people, people that she had touched as a teacher, school teacher, librarian, people she had touched at the nursing home.

[29:28]

And I felt like maybe when she went, she was glad to go. And it felt like she was smiling back at us. That was what you saw in the photographs. And still, a parent misses their mother or their father. You're never too old to be a motherless child or a fatherless child. And I think that a lot of us in this room really know that. I know it. So composure, this is at the heart of our practice. When we sit and we face the wall, day by day, we are manifesting composure.

[30:35]

We're also cultivating it. We're learning it. We're taking it into our body. We are composing our body. or in the translation, which I'm sort of hung up on these last couple of years, a more accurate translation of mindfulness. We are remembering, putting all of our members back together. We're recollecting or recollecting all of the aspects of ourselves. And when we do that, we're whole. We're one piece. That's the nature of our practice is to find our wholeness, even where there are things that pull us in different directions. We recognize our wholeness and we recognize the fundamental wholeness of existence.

[31:43]

So, in that wholeness, we have sorrow and we have enjoyment. And I think I'd like to sing you one more song. I'll tell you a little about this song before I sing it. it's pretty upbeat and this comes from This comes from the Georgia Sea Islands, which is this chain of islands off the coast of the Carolinas in Georgia that were kind of liberated territory after the, in the Civil War.

[32:58]

And so African Americans gravitated to that area. And also they had, it had a kind of island culture and they had their own language, Gullah. People know of that? Yeah. And a very rich culture. And so somewhere in the early 60s, I got tuned into music from the Georgia Sea Islands and really love it. There's something joyous and liberating about it. And this comes from the singing of a woman named Bessie Jones, who I saw a few times. And there's a whole story to this song. And the story, the whole piece is called Kindling Wood and it talks about a young couple that fall in love and they don't have much, they work by cutting wood. But they're in love and they get married and there's a song

[34:02]

The protagonist sings, Kinlin Wood, well Kinlin Wood, I am selling Kinlin Wood to get a loan. So he sings that, that's his song as he goes around selling wood. And they're religious people and they're careful and they make kind of success of their marriage and of their lives and they accumulate a few things and their neighbors get jealous and feel like they must have sold their souls to the devil to get these things. They have a car. They have more chickens than they can eat at any given moment. It's like, how did they get that? And they say, no, it's just through hard work and faith.

[35:06]

So this is the sort of core song of this. It's something I recorded about 35 years ago. You have the words. I've got the left hind leg of a rabbit. Things are coming my way. All I got to do is just reach out and grab it. Things are coming my way. Oh, me. me oh my i feel happy all the time i ain't got nothing to worry my mind because things are coming my way sing that one again i've got the left high leg of a rabbit things are coming my way

[36:12]

All I got to do is just reach out and grab it. Things are coming my way. Same one. Oh me, me oh my, I feel happy all the time. I ain't got nothing to worry my mind because things are coming my way. I've got the left hot leg of a rabbit, things are coming my way. All I got to do is just reach out and grab it. Things are coming my way. Oh me, how good I feel. A composition of an automobile. Well, I can eat chicken and I don't have to steal because things are coming my way. Sing that one again. I've got the left hind leg of a rabbit.

[37:16]

Things are coming my way. All I got to do is just reach out and grab it. Things are coming my way. Oh me, how good I feel. I come possession of an automobile Well, I can eat chicken and I don't have to steal Because things are coming my way Yes, things are coming my way Things are coming my way So I think I will stop there. And we have some time for comments, questions, thoughts, for this rambling talk. Sargent, do you have anything you would like to say?

[38:19]

You're welcome. If something, if some question occurs to you later, we'll check back. Yes, Charlie. Thank you. However, I would like you to sing it again because it's actually Ross's birthday and he is 61. So do it again. Him! Happy birthday, dear Ross.

[39:28]

Happy birthday to you. Okay. He was born in 1870. Oh, he's not here, right? 1770, yes. Yes. Yeah. Well, I was there. I was there for them. I mean, it was not formal dokusan, but it really was, they were encountering each other and you could see the lift from it, you know, uh, this is, you know, I'm trying to think about on the one hand, we have to live our own lives and also we have to find our own way.

[40:52]

And there's also something mysterious about the encouragement that we get from our teachers that's beyond our understanding. And in that moment, it's not something, there's not an inside or outside. It's like two people meeting. And, you know, I think that's what a teacher is able to do, learns to do. And also that's what a student learns to do. And so they're meeting. And actually,

[42:00]

Just in this moment, that's exactly what Jerry and Alexandra and Sojin are working on. It's not like they're working on a project. It's like they're acknowledging that they know how to meet each other that way. And I also think for myself, Without that, I would not... I have doubts about whether I would be here or alive. And I felt like that's what I was seeing with John. It's no guarantee of longevity. It's certainly no... There's no magical cure. But to allow oneself to see the possibility of defying gravity,

[43:05]

Thank you. Hi. Welcome back. She accepted something that was uncomfortable, but I don't think I understood it. And she was able to tell us that she loved us.

[44:13]

I guess it's hard to think more than it is, but for me, I don't understand what a craft is. It's not like, I don't expect to know until, well, the thing is, we're doing this every moment. You can talk about last moments, birth and death, but the point of what Shoji and what Dogen is talking about is that if we really look We are experiencing this moment by moment. And that's the place where we can investigate.

[45:15]

And that's the place where we can find freedom. And if we can find freedom there, there's probably statistically a better chance that we will actually face our final moments. with that composure. But there's no guarantee. You don't know. Yes. Okay. Yeah. It is the law. Can I respond to that?

[46:25]

I will respond to that. To me, I think that he's playing with the word, that gravity, you know, we can take. To me, my aspiration in life for many years, even before I came to Zen practice, was to take what I do seriously and not to take myself seriously. The force of gravity pulls us. That's the force. It's like the force of ego. It tends to pull us to seriousness and taking ourselves really seriously. And I think that's the play on the word to me that he's doing. See people from time to time who

[47:34]

It's not that they don't take what they do seriously, or even that they don't take themselves seriously, but they also have a lightness. That's all. It's a character, logical. Okay. Yeah, I'm not going to argue with that. Yeah. And you can't argue with that, right? I mean, that's the cycle. That's the cycle of life on this planet.

[48:38]

Judy? Well, I think that the gloss is on the word nothing. And when you find out what he means by that, please send us a message, OK? Let us know. Maybe one or two more, if there are. Yeah. I was very concerned about time. And then I walked into a room, it was completely white, white, and there were bloods, bloods, and he burst into laughter.

[50:16]

And we couldn't stop, it was outrageous. And we were just laughing and laughing, and it was just laughing at the ridiculousness of life, and the gravity of life, and the uncertainty, you never know, That's a really wonderful place to end this talk. Thank you.

[50:50]

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