Yatso Ryushin Andrea Thatch. Yatso Ryushin is her Dharma name. It means healing source, dragon heart. And I hope that we will have an opportunity to experience both of those. She's been practicing here for quite a while. And Andrea's a medical doctor. And she's a priest here at Berkeley Zen Center. and an avid student of Dogen Sanji. And she's one of our senior students here, and has been head student, head monk for a practice period. So we look forward to, I look forward to hearing what you're going to say. Thank you, Alan. Good morning, everyone. Is this volume a good volume for people in the back? Is this, I'm talking, can you hear me okay?

[01:07]

I get nods in the back so I think we're okay. I wanted to make a suggestion for this talk in particular. Normally when we listen to talks we do it out of our Zazen. So I think maybe this topic will be particularly a good topic to practice, just sitting and allowing the words to enter without connecting so much with your cognizing mind, but just to be with it. I'm going to share a number of quotes from teachers, and I'd say putting this together gave me a lot of joy. What they said was so beautiful, so I hope that you'll be able to access a little bit of that yourselves. So the title of this talk is something like, Anything is Possible, The True Nature of Repentance.

[02:08]

And I've been thinking a lot about both of those topics. about how they relate to each other, how our small lives become big, and how in accepting ourselves we find true freedom. We just got through doing a Bodhisattva, our monthly Bodhisattva ceremony here, which is a ceremony about repentance and vow and creating possibilities in our lives and the lives of others as we move out into the world. Not long ago, I was walking at one of my favorite places, which is Mountain View Cemetery, and I ran into a woman who was doing one of my favorite occupations there, which is reading the gravestones. She had been looking for a friend of hers who had died some time back, and he was buried up the hill in another part of the cemetery. She was still reading the gravestones. So we got into a conversation about him and she spoke about how much she admired his courage and his kindness.

[03:19]

He had been a Holocaust survivor. And as she talked about the atrocities, the unspeakable acts that he had borne witness to, there was something about how she did it that I recognized they were far outside of her experience. And naturally I said to her what I know to be true for myself, which is, I know that I'm capable of those things too. About a month ago Gil Fronsdale came here and gave a very lovely, direct, encouraging talk about the ordinary mind with which we reach in and touch and remove the barb that's in our heart. And it may be ordinary at some point, I don't know, but I do think it's a natural impulse to want to remove the barb that's in our hearts.

[04:22]

But I don't think it's always so easy. Sometimes we don't see it, or it might be painful to pull it out, or we don't want to because we don't know what our lives would be like without it. But with close attention and awareness, it may be difficult at first. It becomes more of a natural impulse. It's like when you first sit, retreat, or your first long period of Zazen, your first Sishin, that pain in the knee that won't go away, that always comes back, that's so agonizing, and you want to move and you're twisting and squirming. And eventually with time you find actually that if you're just with the tingling or the warmth or the ache or whatever it is that it dissolves and becomes something else. I think that's really true of everything. That the stories of outrage or jealousy or victimization that we have initially slowly turn back to ourselves and we find our response in our own life.

[05:33]

We find the loneliness or unworthiness or whatever they are, and we recognize how changing those themes, how changing the movie reel is that gets played in our mind, and we become less bothered by it. We realize that we're complex and unknowable, maybe unfathomable. It's not to psychoanalyze or figure out layers, but to meet the experience directly without complications, dropping the storyline. Slowly we see ourselves more and more clearly and drop into some fundamental core that we share with everyone. How do we do that? Well, in the Theravadan tradition and in the core of our tradition, there's fair mindfulness, fair attention. Being aware of the hindrances of the five commonly occurring themes that all of us have, usually one more than another, whether it's anger or aversion, anxiety or worry or flurry, doubt, stupor or desire.

[06:44]

Just being aware of those and bringing attention to them. The external manifestation is different, but maybe fear underlies them all. It doesn't matter. It's just being with what is. In the Satipatthana Foundations of Mindfulness on the Hindrances, the Buddha says, how does one live contemplating mental objects of the five hindrances? Herein, when anger is present, she knows there is anger in me. And when anger is not present, he knows that there is no anger in me. She knows how the arising of the non-arisen anger comes to be. He knows how the abandoning of the arisen anger comes to be. And she knows how the non-arising and the future of the abandoned anger comes to be. So there's a recognition of the feeling in the moment. There's a recognition of the impulse or the cause or the tendency.

[07:44]

There's a recognition of what extinguishes it and when it extinguishes. All of that by an ever-deepening ability to be aware and have stability. with the sensation as it arises. The same is true for all the sense desires, sloth, tupor, agitation, scruples and doubt. This is in summary what our Zen practice is about. Suzuki Roshi said that our practice of asceticism is not the sparseness of our dress or simplicity of our lives. It is our willingness to look at ourselves to not embellish, to make excuses, but to look directly at ourselves. We do that in Zazen. Zazen is opening the hand of thought, as Uchiyama Roshi says. We open up to the idea of what is, of who is, and we completely let go of the why is. Allowing thought, emotion to arise, it might be very powerful,

[08:49]

But we just take care of our Zazen, particularly we just take care of the outbreath. Don't know what there is, no storyline, just an opening, just curiosity. In Zazen we just sit and that just sit has an attitude of curiosity and investigation without actively doing so. You just sit and you aren't anyone. Katagiri Roshi says you swim in your Buddha nature. When we do this, we do this with the whole universe, and the whole universe supports us. When we let go, then anything is possible. Any one is possible. Just this moment materializes as no one in particular. And as we can bear our own suffering, we can open to the suffering of others. And so we begin to deepen our faith in our lives and have a deeper connection with others.

[09:50]

We look deeply and we see we're all like this. There's a story of Kisotagami, who is one of the early women ancestors whose names we chant, who goes to the Buddha in despair at the death of her child and begs the Buddha to help her resolve it. And he says to her, go to a house and find a mustard seed where there's been no trouble and no loss, and I will be able to hear you. And so she goes from door to door throughout every home in the town, and she finds that no one has not borne loss. And in that, she's found her salvation. When we're intimate with our own suffering, we can be intimate with the suffering of others. In my early years as a doctor, I worked primarily in an urgent care clinic and I did that in large part because I couldn't bear the difficulty other people had. So I got just little aliquots of it and then I could run away.

[10:53]

But over time, as I've had more stability and acceptance of my own life, I find that the container of being able to be present, even to those personality traits that are too close to mine to be have been comfortable all the time has gotten quite wide. It's not a burden, but because I have faith in my own life and have learned to have faith in my own resiliency, I have trust that people will find that for themselves too, and that I can be a presence to them in a way that helps them know that for themselves. That's the definition of compassion. It's to be willing to suffer with, not suffer for, but to suffer with them. And that naturally arises out of the connection that we have with people. In that is the gift of fearlessness. Fearlessness is one of the three main gifts of the Bodhisattva. And basically it doesn't mean that you don't feel worry,

[11:57]

or anxiety or fear, it means that you're willing to face up to your own life. And when you're willing to face up to your own life and bear it, then that's an encouragement for other people. You know the story that Thich Nhat Hanh tells about on the sinking ship where the pirates are invaded, if just one person, just one person is able to maintain their calm and their presence of mind, it's of help to everyone on that sinking ship. It's that very idea. So our experiences of places where our life has felt damaged or limited shifts. Not long ago, very recently, I was thinking about my own tendency to be mean-spirited, which is very much a part of my personality. And I was thinking about how much it actually is what my father was like, in the same kind of way. I don't think he meant to be mean, but he actually really was. And as I saw that, in a sense of spaciousness, because I really accept him and I understand where, kind of how he came to be, it became possible for me to have a wider container for myself.

[13:16]

Oh, it's just that. It's just that. I just learned that. It's not inherently me. That's just meanness. Now, don't confuse it. I'm not saying that being mean is okay. But I am saying, oh, it's just that. It's not me. It has the possibility, like the pain in the knee, just to open and drop away. And I saw that happen for myself, and I saw that happen for my father, too, even though he's been dead for 12 and 13 years, all there at once. So there's a deepening of appreciation for our life. We understand it. We turn it over and over like the precious jewel that it is, and we can really see its luminosity. We also see the interconnections to all things that co-created this moment, and we can embrace all of it. We have so trust arises, greater trust and greater faith in this.

[14:23]

From meeting ourselves and accepting ourselves we no longer hide nor are we hidden. We can come to trust ourselves because we no longer fool ourselves and we have confidence that life won't fool us or others won't fool us so we can meet them more directly. This is what allows us to deepen our vow and to live by a vow but not karma. Karma means not allowing your conditioned self to be what pulls you around. Vow means responding to that deepest aspiration that you have, that yearning that you have for wholeness, that we all have. We need to wind up here. Not long ago, or I'd say about a year ago, what started me on this talk was about a year ago when I had something happen and I tapped into a place of rage I had no idea existed in myself. And out of that came moments of fear I had no idea existed in myself.

[15:31]

And after I spent about half an hour in those wildly strong places, creating karma. I stopped and I went in and I picked up the phone and I called my teacher and confessed. There's a story like that from the Jataka tales. It's the tale of King Suprabhasa and the elephant tamer. So this is one of Shakyamuni's lives before he became the Buddha, when he was a king named Suprabhasa. And one day he said to his elephant trainer, I'd like to ride the big white elephant. Bring it to me. And the trainer said, I'm so sorry, King, but he's run off. It's okay. He'll come back. He's well trained. And the king flew into a rage, outraged that the elephant wasn't there, berated and belittled his elephant tamer and fired him. The next day, the elephant tamer came to the king's door and knocked and said, would you like to ride the white elephant?

[16:37]

He came back. He was well trained. We've broken his wild and untamed ways. And the king was chagrined. He felt true remorse. He said, here I am a king holding power over others, and yet I fail to control what's closest. That was the origin of Shakyamuni's searching for the way. It's the same realization that gives us the energy to study and to practice more diligently. So in our Bodhisattva ceremony, we open the ceremony by chanting all my ancient tangled karma from beginningless greed, hate and delusion. Bow and repentance are the same side, it's a different side of same things. Vows are deepest aspiration. It's where that impulse to pull the barb out of the heart comes from. Repentance is the clarity by which we take action to do that.

[17:42]

Repentance means to make a change for the better as a result of remorse or contrition. It's the same remorse which is considered to be one of the wholesome mind states in the Buddhist psychology, the Abhidharma. What is this? In our Soto Zen practice, repentance has three aspects to it. The first is form. It's the way we normally think of repentance, to recognize that we've strayed from how we intend to act in the world in some way that's unwholesome or outside the spirit of the precepts. In our lineage, it's only when you've taken the precepts that you can truly repent, but we know that we can repent without having received the precepts. We make some statement or action completely in response to our misstep, a confession, an apology. We replace or repair what we've done. It's one aspect of what we do in the Bodhisattva ceremony.

[18:43]

It's what we're all familiar with when we make amends. Then there's the formless aspect of repentance. The formless aspect means to awaken to the total inner penetrating reality beyond the separation between self or other. It's the process that I'm talking about when I talk about how we work with our mind to have some experience, to access, to set conditions, to have some experience of that manifest. And it's what we do in our Zazen. Sojin says, Sojin Roshi says, that repentance is turning around and going the other way. Katagiri Roshi says that repentance is not a preliminary stage to enter Buddha's world or to become a good person, but it is to lead us to be present right in the middle of peace and harmony. It is the perfect openness of our hearts that allows us to hear the voice of the universe beyond the irritation of our consciousness.

[19:48]

Isn't that beautiful? Let me read that again. Repentance is the perfect openness of our hearts that allows us to hear the voice of the universe beyond the irritation of our own consciousness. Okamura Roshi says that it's like washing a cloth before you dye it a certain color. It's also an acknowledgment of our inherently limited view. It's a basic, formless definition of repentance. an acknowledgement of our inherently limited view. I'm going to quote Okamura here. Repentance means that although I think it's the best thing to do in a situation, I recognize it might be a mistake. It might even be harmful to others and to me. We don't know. We live only with the support of all beings, but recognize we may harm some.

[20:49]

Even when we live as well as we possibly can, we still need to repent. So this reflection and repentance of our own incompleteness is repentance. It's like the words from the Bodhisattva ceremony, from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind. When you really think about that, beginningless. body, speech, and mind, everything that we do, you realize that it's almost impossible not to make a mistake, not to cause some injury in some way. When we take a vow not to kill, for example, it's impossible because even to wash our bodies or to pull up a carrot from the ground to eat it is to take life. Okamura Roshi tells a story about when he was a young man in western Massachusetts, he was helping to build a Dharma Center. And that meant breaking ground and killing the earth and making construction and killing plants and insects and worms to do that.

[21:57]

One time he was digging a well and made a big hole. One night it filled with water during a storm and the next morning he came out and found that a skunk had died in it. So here he is doing what he thinks has great helpful purpose to build a dharma center and with it he takes the life of an animal. We don't know. We can't know the effects of our actions we may intend doing. Katagiri Roshi says, and I'm going to read again because it's really beautiful, says that most people think of repentance as apologizing for something that we do wrong. But this kind of understanding is like stagnant water. We stay where we are in relation to our behavior and our karma and we get stuck. Repentance is not like this. It doesn't mean something to feel bad about or to apologize for.

[23:03]

To make repentance is to start anew. It's to turn around and go the other way, as Sojinroshi says. So what is this? We don't make repentance to Buddha or before a Buddha as something outside of ourself. This is dualistic and it's not the spirit of repentance. Buddha is me and Buddha is you. Repentance is to repent of yourself to Buddha directly, to your Buddha nature. to offer yourself, your karmic life to Buddha. All of it. Give it up to Buddha. To do this means eternal possibilities. Do you understand? To do this, to give up your karma, to give up and offer it up to Buddha. Let's go of all your ideas of who you are, what your life is and what other people's lives are. Just offer it up. Anything is possible. This is what's meant in the phrase, give yourself to yourself, which is, I think, a phrase from Dogen.

[24:08]

Give the small ideas, speeches, actions, up to who is your bigger self, and this is what creates possibility. So who is this person? What is this person? What, right now? What? Repentance is to see ourselves completely Clearly, and that we're made of exactly the same stuff as everyone else who's doing the very best they can, doing exactly this in their own way, in their own time, as best they can. Repentance is to understand that we're limited, that we can't completely see even our own selves and our own lives. It's like we're always living inside the mountain and trying to get an idea of what the mountain range looks like. It's impossible. You're in one part of the mountain, it looks one way. You're in another part of your life, it looks another way. You can't know. What else can you do but be humble?

[25:10]

In Dogen's Kei Sei Sanshiki, The Form of Mountains and the Sounded Valley Streams, he talks about repentance. He starts by saying it's most important to have a sincere heart. to counteract our laziness. And what he means by laziness is our tendency always to separate subject from object, me from you, so we see our lives and our welfare as outside of everyone and everything else. That's the basic delusion. That's our basic suffering, is to see ourselves and our lives outside everyone else and everything else. So, repentance means to become one with Buddha, to be one with our true self. He concludes that fascicle of the Shobo Genso, the Form of Mountains and Sounded Valley Streams, with a section that's often taken out and recited in Soto Zen liturgy.

[26:17]

They do it at San Francisco and they do it very commonly in Japan. It's called the Ehekosu Hatsu Gomong. It's also quite beautiful. extracted a couple of pieces I'd like you just to be with as I say them. Although our past evil karma has greatly accumulated, indeed being the cause and condition of obstacle in practicing the way, may all Buddhas and ancestors who have attained the Buddha way be compassionate to us and free us from karmic effects, allowing us to practice the way without hindrance. Quietly explore the farthest reaches of these causes and conditions as this practice is the exact transmission of the verified Buddha. Confessing and repenting in this way, one never fails to receive profound help from Buddhas and ancestors. That's from your own Buddha nature. That's not from someone up there or someone in history. That's your own light come shining forth.

[27:18]

By revealing and disclosing our lack of faith and practice before the Buddhas, we melt away the root of transgressions by the power of our confession and repentance. This is the pure and simple color of true practice of the true mind of faith, of the true body of faith. And so we've come naturally back to our vows. Vow sometimes is a charged word for people, so I just want to say that the original translation is from the Sanskrit pranidhana, which means a strong wish or aspiration. It's something we probably can all relate to. A prayer or an inflexible determination, which is what it takes to do this practice. And it is also that vow or inflexible determination or strong aspiration that is the impetus for us to want to reach in naturally and pull out the barb from our heart.

[28:23]

So we've talked about the form and the formless part of repentance. The third part is the formal part of repentance. That's when we are together. That's when we do ritual together to repent like we just did in the Bodhisattva ceremony. So when we have vowed and stayed our specific confession with others, we're enacting this deep feeling with others. And in ritual, we feel an intimacy of this aspiration. We feel it not in our heads, but in our whole body. And we become one with our aspiration. So when you bow, you just completely bow. You completely give yourself up. There, sometimes in one of our retreats here, we do a 10 minute session of bowing. We just bow and bow and bow. And when you do that, raising your hands up to lift the baby Buddha's feet, to lift your own Buddha nature up over and over again, you just become one with the activity and one with your intention.

[29:34]

So when we repent, we know who we are. This is humility. Humility means knowing our place in the world. That's true humility. Not the false kind, the enemy, the near enemy of arrogance, where you're self-effacing but don't really mean it. It's when you really recognize that you and everything else are horizontal, the same. We see our ignorance and we accept it and we see ourselves reflected in the face of Buddha. So horizontal doesn't mean low, it doesn't mean high, but it does not mean that it contains everything. So we stand up on delusion. What does it mean to stand up on delusion? We need delusion to actualize our enlightenment. It's our very ignorance. It's our very problem. It's our seeing that we're a part of everything in our humanity and working that through allows us to stand up, to rise back up and embrace our full life.

[30:42]

We need these things to stand up on our delusion to find enlightenment. From our ignorance we find freedom. So that sitting with days of anger and fear, it took me two weeks after that episode of sitting and digesting to really come to terms with what, to have space to hold all of it. The storyline behind it wasn't important, but the immensity of feeling that was there and how shared that is with everyone was very important. So it's not to turn away from the places that are damaged and inflict pain and create expensive karma. It's accepting myself and that accepting myself and bowing down and a deep knowing that in this life, in this person, anything is possible. Great evil and great compassion. This is human life.

[31:43]

This one is not better or worse than any other. Category says we must actualize Buddha's compassion, but I would say that we can't help but actualize Buddha's compassion that arises naturally, that it is indeed ordinary mind. And that when it arises, we see that we're already forgiven. Forgiven isn't something that we talk a lot about in Zen, but maybe because we are, so we don't have to. And seeing our karmic nature and offering it up, we end the cycle of the creation of karma. The Buddhas and ancestors receive it, receive us, and we give ourselves to ourselves so we can receive everything and everyone. We understand that all sentient beings, everyone, and everything should be allowed to live for what they are. From the beginning and end, their lives in the world are of value and wholeness.

[32:46]

Whatever is has some good reason why it exists, whether it's evil or whether it's good. And everything is entitled to live in this world beyond our judgment and evaluation. Everything is Buddha. So we understand beyond mistakes, no mistakes, good or bad, right or wrong, our work is just to meet and accept them. There's nothing to forgive. There is only clearly see and respond. Wisdom and compassion, vow and repentance, anything is possible. I'd like to end by telling a little story, reading a poem of Lou Hartman's. For those of you who don't know, Lou was a long, long, long time Zen student of Sojin Roshi's originally and practitioner at San Francisco Zen Center who died at the age of 95, earlier this year.

[33:48]

One of his poems is called Epitaph. He did not kill his mother. He did not kill himself. He did not go crazy. All in all, a successful life. Flange told me recently that when Lou was a very small boy, he had a great experience of, we'd call it an enlightenment experience, an enormous opening where he saw this sense of connection and no separation that really informed his life. But he was a boy. And his mother was cold and hard and difficult and didn't understand what was inside Lou. And one night, Lou found himself at her bedroom door with an axe in his hand. And he said, he woke up, he saw it and said to himself, what am I doing here?

[34:58]

And put it down. I did not, he did not kill his mother, he did not kill himself, he did not go crazy. All in all, we all can have a successful life. Thank you very much for listening. Before I open up the question if we have any time, I'd like to ask if Sojourn Roshi would add anything to the lecture. Walter? Who is it that's doing all this repenting? I think it's both our karmic selves that's doing it, but we're doing it along with and inseparably with our formless self, with our total self.

[36:03]

What is a karmic self? The egoistic part of our behavior, the part that believes in me, that wants, that doesn't see its connection to others. Nina? I love the definition of laziness. Would you read that again? Let's see if I can find it, otherwise I'll have to paraphrase it for you. So laziness is our tendency to separate the subject from object, to see our lives and welfare as outside of everyone and everything around us. Did that have meaning for you? It's a very fresh definition and it's applicable to everything.

[37:10]

It's the wake-up call, isn't it? Oh, I'm not paying attention when I get caught up in me. Oh, I'm just not paying attention. Oh. I'm trying to connect the dots. There are a lot of them. But two I'm interested in are becoming one with Buddha. the exact manifestation of our own suffering. It seems to me like there's something intimate between those two. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Your questions are always very deep, so I'm not sure if I can connect them in the place that you're looking to. But I think becoming one with Buddha is a willingness to see a willingness to see both our suffering as being part of a human condition, that we're always incomplete, that we're always going to miss it somehow, that we're always going to mess up on some level somehow, and that we offer that to our larger self.

[38:28]

We offer that to our complete, perfect self, if you will. So we forgive ourselves. We know that is inherently part of what is always happening within ourselves. I guess I wanted to come from the other end. Please. Which is that in that moment of darkness, But being one with that is... I'm just wondering if what you're saying is being one there with that, completely one with that, is being one with the... I think that's exactly right. Could you repeat? Do you want me to repeat it? Yeah, yeah. I'll try.

[39:30]

come at it from the other end and to inquire whether when faced with your own particular manifestation of suffering in a sort of dark place, where there's no exit, to become one with that is becoming one with Buddha. I'm inquiring about that. That is none other than Buddha. that suffering is none other than Buddha? Alan? Well, this sort of follows on that question. It's easy sometimes to hear becoming one with Buddha as it has the danger of idealization.

[40:36]

And what I wonder is what you think, what was the Buddha's repentance? How did the Buddha repent? And what for? I'm just, you know, I don't know all the details of his life. But I have to think that repentance is constant because you know that even when you do your best to offer good medicine that sometimes it's not good medicine. Maybe you hesitate to get up and teach and you spend You're not happy with this, Alan. What's on your... I have no question about... I think that's right. And what I have concerns about is I find it absent completely in the literature.

[41:44]

Certainly in the early literature. You do not hear it. That's... There's a question in there for me. I'm just asking, you know, if you have a... Yeah, I just think it's... I have a feeling that it was inherent in what he did. I just think he would, with the kind of awareness of... I'm trying to say it without using jargon, but the way in which everything is totally dependent upon each other and his own lacking even being the Buddha, that he couldn't help but knowing that to have a sense of repentance in what he did. I think that's where true humility has its roots. Bob? Kind of responding to that, my sister told me she went to a meeting of Vipassana teachers, which was headed by Jack Kornfield.

[42:45]

And at that meeting, he asked everyone to repent for their teaching their students, and to apologize to their students. And everyone said, oh, that's very nice. And then Jack said, no, you don't understand. I'm serious. And I have this sense, it would have been nice if Buddha had apologized for leaving us with all this. I mean, it's wonderful, but it also requires an apology. I really agree. I know I'm getting... Oh, Sojin has to go. He has to say something. So I'll say what I have to say. Excuse me for being alive.

[43:50]

When Shaktimuni left home, he spent six years as an ascetic apologizing or, not apologizing, but scrutinizing And not letting anything go by that was false. That's repentance. It's not letting anything false go by. Recognizing everything that's false. And there were times when he would lay down and eat one grain of rice a day. And then he would lay down and let people pee on him. And he did all these aesthetic things. ascetic practices as a kind of, I don't know if you call it repentance, but re means to do something, right? Again. It's a kind of penitence, actually. So he spent six years doing that.

[44:52]

I think we have to recognize that. That's why he could beat the Buddha, because he realized what the essence of life is. through his repentance. Letting go of everything that's false. I think that's repentance. You just let go of everything that's false. That's what it means to turn. You're going the other way. Thank you, Sojin. Do we have time, Carol? There's tea outside. Thank you for forgiving all my mistakes. Please wash your mouth. Wash your ears. I'll wash my mouth.

[45:37]

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