Good morning. Well, we've arrived at the moment I've been thinking of apprehensively for the previous week, where I have to sit up here and say something. Usually that's not a problem. And actually, I never know whether it's going to be a problem or it's not going to be a problem. Usually words come. But I've been trying to think about this talk for a week. And all I get is kind of a scattershot

[01:00]

picture of different things that don't hang together too well. Should I sing a song? Should I read a poem? Should I tell a story? Should I interpret or comment on a koan? Should I talk about the fact that this is Sachine? You know, in the last few talks, we've had several remarkable talks by some of our senior students, and they told great stories. A week or two ago, Susan told a story about jumping out of an airplane. That wasn't what it was about, but that was sort of the central image in the talk.

[02:07]

Mary Drey, a couple weeks before that, gave a talk about coming to a very difficult place on the river on a rafting trip and how things didn't go the way she had planned. And that was very evocative to me because actually, I was in the boat. And I tried to think, do I have stories like that? And, you know, in fact I do, but it's not what I tend to focus on. When I came to practice, I came to practice already with a kind of

[03:12]

aesthetic and a study of poetry that I was doing. And I think that the essence of that aesthetic was what's really amazing about the ordinary, not the life of no drama or the moment of no drama. And that's how I was, the poet that I studied with, a man named Kenneth Coke, that's how he taught us. And he taught us that as a kind of moment of vernacular poetry in English, but it resonated, already had established itself for me, I think by high school, when I was reading Chinese and Japanese poetry.

[04:16]

I had a taste, I evolved a taste for what was really ordinary. And that's actually what drew me to Zen practice around that same time. Let me give you an example of where that resides in an American poem. This is by One of my favorite poets, William Carlos Williams, who was a medical doctor and he lived in Patterson, New Jersey, and he wrote in an American vernacular voice, nothing grandiose about his diction. This is a poem called The World Contracted to a Recognizable Image.

[05:24]

At the small end of an illness, there was a picture, probably Japanese, which filled my eye. An idiotic picture, except it was all that I recognized. The wall lived for me in that picture. I clung to it as to a fly. That's it. So there's a moment of no drama that probably all of us have had some experience of. When you come out of the throws of illness and you're still feeling weak and you're laying in bed or you're sitting in a chair and you can't move that easily. Then you see something and that whatever it is, it's not necessarily poignant.

[06:37]

It's not necessarily moving, but in that moment it fills your eye and mind completely. So that's the kind of drama I'm talking about. And it's part of our training. This is something Susan spoke. Susan was speaking about training. That was really the heart of your talk, right? Yeah. So I'm going to get around to that. Just as I was up in, I don't force. the images or the ideas that come to my head in preparation for a talk or for many things. I try to give them space and some trust that whatever needs to arise will come up in time.

[07:44]

even if I'm sitting there as I was 15 minutes ago thinking, I don't know what the hell I'm going to talk about. So a story came to me because I sort of had this idea, well, I want to tell a story. And this is what came to me, I think about seven or eight years ago. I'm about to, in about 10 days, go to India where I go almost every year. teach at, in these Ambedkarite Buddhists, these ex-untouchable Buddhist communities, where I've been involved for the whole time I've been going there. It's really, it's a second home for me. And it's, you know, we meditate twice a day, and there's young people, and it's really alive. And then I'm going to have the pleasure at the end of the trip to catch up with Linda Hess,

[08:51]

in Madhya Pradesh in rural India and partake of a song workshop with these Kabir singers that she's been working with and who I've met a little. But anyway, I was thinking of India and I can't remember, I was passing through Calcutta where I had never been before. And I was alone. And I had booked a hotel, but I didn't know where it was because I didn't know where anything was in Calcutta. And at the airport, a lot of airports just like airports here, you can book a taxi and you pay for it and you tell them where you're going and they dispatch a driver with the address of your destination to take you to your destination.

[09:55]

It was a really long taxi drive from the airport into the city. And at a certain point, it was clear to me that the taxi driver had no idea where we were going. This was a problem because he didn't speak English either. We had no way to communicate. But it was clear because he kept trying to ask me questions, which I didn't know an answer to. And we were sort of wandering around a very crowded part of the city, and we got into – we were in a Muslim neighborhood, which is not so unusual because it's Bengal, which still has a large Muslim population. And finally, the driver just stopped. And he hailed a rickshaw driver, basically.

[11:06]

And in Calcutta, they had something I haven't seen anyplace else in present day India that guys, usually there'll be a motorized thing or guy will be riding a bicycle. This is a guy who was pulling like an ox cart on his shoulders. He had those two poles and he was pulling it through the street and it was a taxi. You rode up on these big seats way high above him and he hauled this thing through the streets and he didn't speak English either. But, so the taxi driver tried to get directions from him and I didn't know whether he succeeded or not, but he forced me out of the cab. And made me get, climb into this rickshaw.

[12:12]

And then sort of threw my suitcase at my feet in the rickshaw. And the taxi driver speeds off and the rickshaw driver hauls the yoke onto his shoulders and starts pulling. And I'm sitting there on top and thinking, where the hell am I? You know, it's like, I don't know where I am. I don't know where I'm going. I am not comfortable being hauled around by a very thin human. And then I just thought, this is what's happening.

[13:13]

Am I in danger? No, I didn't feel in danger. Can I get off this at any moment? Yes. Do I have, am I desperate and poor? No, I've got money in my pocket. I've got rupees, I've got credit cards and nothing, nothing bad is going to happen here. If I'm uncomfortable, I'm uncomfortable. And somehow he, after about 15 minutes of wandering around seemingly in circles. I mean, it was in circles, actually. We kept wandering around the same block over and over again, and then the hotel appeared. So that's a really dramatic story, isn't it?

[14:22]

But that was my training, I think. I really felt at that moment that my training was to take stock of where I was, of what my circumstances were, and to recognize it was nothing to fear. And I think at the heart of our training, is this line from the Heart Sutra, without any hindrances, no fears arise. Is that what it is? Exist. And I was grateful for that.

[15:31]

So I wrote a poem last night. You may notice I'm not sitting cross-legged. I'm sitting on the edge of the tan. Things wear out. So I'm dealing with my knee. So I wrote this poem. 35 years waking before dawn. Now my legs are breaking down. My face is wrinkled and I understand very little. What kind of training is this? The great ship is anchored way out in the harbor. And I can hear the sirens calling me to their distant island. But I'm stuck here on the shore.

[16:46]

Maybe it's all for the best. That's it. 35 years waking before dawn and now my legs are breaking down. My face is wrinkled and I understand very little. What kind of training is this? The great ship is anchored way out in the harbor. I can hear the sirens calling me to their distant island, but I'm stuck here on the shore. Maybe it's all for the best. So here's where this word training that we use, it's really what they call, when I was in Japan, you know, they don't call what we're doing Buddhism as such.

[18:05]

Usually if it's referred to, it's referred to this Japanese word Shugyo. And Shugyo basically translates as deep mind body training. Any kind of Japanese discipline could use this word Shugyo, but it tends to apply to the the rigors of sort of monastic training in Japan. And it implies a kind of reaching for a deeper place in yourself. So this is what Dogen was speaking of, he speaks of it in Genjokan, when he says, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach.

[19:23]

So we train so that we can have a wider view, a deeper view. We do things over and over again. We do things that are hard. We do things without, as I was alluding, we do the same thing for 35 years without any clear objective in mind. But what happens is that we we build some capacity in ourselves. And this is a capacity that I feel the poet John Keats spoke of very clearly in a letter that he wrote in 1817. So he said, he was writing to a friend, he said, at once it struck me what quality went to form a man or person of achievement, especially in literature.

[20:46]

But I would say not just in literature, in every undertaking, in every human undertaking, this quality is negative capability. Have you ever heard of that? Some of you have. The English majors among you may have, right? Negative capability, he says, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. When a person is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason, you know, without clutching for the answer.

[21:49]

And I think that this, our training is to be able to embrace for lack of a better word, ambiguity. We embrace the fact that things are not any one way. And to live in that uncertainty. I mean, I really remember, I physically remember like, like, Williams describes that painting, looking at that painting at the wall, I can physically remember sitting high on top of this rickshaw and wondering, yes, in doubt and uncertainty, what the hell is going on? Where am I? And saying, OK,

[22:53]

Let's see where this goes. That is the heart of our practice. Let's see where this goes. Not on the one side, I'm hopeless. This is pointless. You know, get me out of here. That I'm sure is very familiar to everybody in this room has one potentiality for experience. And the other is, this is, oh, this is so blissful. I want to stay here forever. And then, of course, it dribbles down the drain. Ah, you can't stay. There's somebody, a teacher, friend of mine, Nelson Foster. People know him.

[23:57]

He's at Ring of Bone in Foothills of the Sierras. He's really a great person, a great teacher. I wrote something for Buddhist Peace Fellowship, you know, in one of these editorials that I write when I worked there. And I made the to the error of saying something like, something about staying in the present. And this upset him so much that he actually called me on the phone and berated me by saying, you can't stay anywhere. And boy, I really, I got it. That was really, that was a great teaching. And also, that's the other dimension of our, of our practice.

[25:02]

I think part of the practice is to be able to live in uncertainty. But the other part of our practice is to care for each other and love each other. He cared enough to call me and set me right because it occurred to him just that moment that he could and that I might be able to hear that. I am so grateful for that. Both sides are necessary for our practice. It's all well and good to be able to have the capacity to live in ambiguity, to live in uncertainty, which is the circumstance of our whole life.

[26:18]

And yet, to have the love, to care about the people that we are engaged with. And that's an interesting tension in our practice. So I talked about, I think during Sashi and I talked about Bodhicitta, which is the thought of enlightenment and what that means in our tradition is the Bodhisattva vow to awaken with all beings. We want to awaken with them, we want them to awaken and we want to awaken with them because we are motivated by love.

[27:25]

And so one side of our practice, as I said, I've been doing this practice as I sit at the start of each period, I say to myself, may I awaken that I can help others be awake. That is planting the seed or the thought of bodhicitta right at the beginning of a period of zazen so that I know on one hand where I'm coming from and let that flow through the sitting. Don't have to say it again. And then the other side of our sitting is you could talk about it, there's a teaching of the three doors of liberation.

[28:39]

And those three doors are emptiness, signlessness, which means no self, and aimlessness, Very interesting word. Apranijita in Sanskrit. But this aimlessness is the other side. On the one hand, we have the vow to awaken with or save all beings. On the other hand, we set aside all purposes and just allow things to be as they are. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, there's nothing to do, nothing to realize, no program, no agenda. Does a rose have to do something? No. The purpose of the rose is to be a rose.

[29:46]

Your purpose is to be yourself. You don't have to run somewhere to become someone else. This teaching of the Buddha allows us to enjoy ourselves, the blue sky and everything that is refreshing and healing in the present moment. There's no need to put anything in front of us and run after it. We already have everything we are looking for. Everything we want to become. So everything we want to become is already within us. But we have to remember, it's very easy. Each time you talk about, he says, this is everything that is refreshing and healing in the present moment. And there's a tendency to concretize that present moment.

[30:50]

But actually, as I was saying, you can't stay anywhere. So that present moment is a moment of constant motion. and we are constantly moving with those around us. So we have these two aspects of our practice, in fact, call for the development of negative capability. The aspect of bodhicitta, of practicing with the intention to awaken and help others awaken, and the aspect of apranahita, aimlessness, which is saying it's already right here. That's at the core of our practice. We live with that in our zazen. Our zazen is effortless effort.

[31:55]

There's an energy to it, there's a strength to it, and a flexibility. But we look for the place of balance where it's at ease, where we're at ease. And we look for that place, I think Sojin said this, I don't know, last week or the week after, he was talking about, quoting Suzuki Roshi, which where he said, everything is always falling in and out of balance. And I think Suzuki Roshi says, against the background of perfect balance. But we don't live in that background. We live falling in and out of balance. And it's difficult.

[33:04]

Our lives are sometimes full of joy, but there's a lot of difficulty living in this body and living in time. To sit, zazen, is to establish ourselves right in the middle of all of that. To find the ease right in the middle of the difficulty. Maybe there's no other shore to arrive at. You know, we look to, I said that, the great ship is anchored way out in the harbor.

[34:24]

We think we want to get on that ship and sail to some ultimate destination. And as we're standing on the shore, we can't figure out how we're going to get to the ship. We hear the sirens, you know, the sirens in Greek mythology, their calls are so enticing and we hear them on their island and we can't figure out how we're going to get there either. But I'm stuck here on the shore and maybe it's all for the best. There's nothing, maybe there's nothing lacking on this shore. Maybe we should all go dancing on the beach. Well, I'm going to stop there.

[35:33]

And if you have some thoughts or questions, I'm really open to them. As I said, I had no idea where this was going to go, but it's gone. Cheryl. Oh. No, actually, no, not at all. Legs are wearing out. It's just, I mean, that's literally a condition of my body right now. But it's not a condition of my mind. But there will be a time when my mind will wear out. And that will be OK, too. Stuck on the shore because here I am in my body and in time and if I think of it as something, someplace I want to escape to, I'm really missing something.

[36:41]

I must confess also, just to say, because I see Linda sitting here, I've been absorbing myself in the Indian saint, if you will, Kabir's poems for the last couple of weeks. And I think that's part of what's influencing this perspective and I really am grateful for it. Ross. Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I hadn't thought of it in those terms. I've always been sort of committed to my commitments.

[38:08]

And yeah, so I lived in Woodstock, the summer of Woodstock. The festival was not in Woodstock, as you may know. It was like 40, 50 miles away. I was playing in a band And we knew about the festival. But we had a gig at this roadhouse in the Catskills and it was actually a biker bar. And they hired us. They had been hiring a blues rock band, but it was attracting too many bikers. So they wanted a sort of more folky band, and they hired us. And because everybody was Woodstock, nobody came to the gig. You know, and so the owner said, we want you to play blues rock.

[39:10]

So we actually created an entire new repertoire overnight and played that. But it didn't make any difference. Nobody was there. But. No, that was OK. We did it. Yeah, we played. Yeah. Yeah. That's what musicians do. It was a pretty dreary gig. I know, but that's how you started your talk. Right. Right. OK. Yes, Peter. I don't know if you're willing or can say anything more, but I was curious as to what it was like for you to receive this phone call from Nelson Foster. What was it like? Did it surprise you? Yeah, it surprised me. But we were on pretty good terms, but he had never called me before or since.

[40:11]

You know, I really it's it was kind of his. His affect was kind of shocking because he was so insistent, but He said it and I just immediately, I wasn't, I just immediately said, you're right. You're completely right. And I just accepted it. Sometimes it's important to have that capacity and you never know what's gonna happen. It happened like, okay, so last Saturday, After the program, I was carrying my bowls from the Zendo, and I knocked on Sojin's door to ask him a question. And I asked my question, and walking out, some of you have had this experience, oh, just one thing.

[41:26]

your wiping cloth should go over the ends of your bowls. I had a smaller wiping cloth. And there was one part of my mind said, really? And the other part of my mind said, OK, you're right. And that was it. He was done. I was done. I went upstairs and got a larger wiping cloth and replaced the one that I was slightly partial to. But it's like, yeah, just to say, OK. And it may be a second response. There might be some jolt. But to be able to reflect, to hold that discomfort and not go there, but try to see what's being said or what's being done and to learn, you know, to learn from connection.

[42:48]

So that was Nelson connecting, that was Sojin connecting and I can tell you about those things now. So you will never stay in the present moment. And you will never allow your orioke cloth to be shorter than your balls. Well, that's just an idea I have about myself.

[43:49]

I'm going to read you another poem that I didn't write. This one is by Cold Mountain, Hanshan. Human beings live in the dirt like bugs in a dirty bowl. All day long, crawling around and around, never getting over the edge. Even spiritual masters can't make it, racking their brains for schemes and plans. The months and years are running river. Then there's a day you wake up old. That's the poem. Linda. So that rose doesn't do harm to anybody.

[45:25]

So I don't find the analogy really very helpful. Like, I'm not a rose. And I do do harm. I think you have to live right in the middle of that conundrum. You have to. This is why the one side is aimless and the other side is bodhicitta. We live with that tension. So you can't fall into one side or the other. You have to recognize they're both there. Linda is perfect. And it's just like a rose and she needs some improvement.

[46:27]

You know, you, this is so when, when Ronnie said, uh, how do I know, you know, actually, I don't know. I don't know that I'm stuck on the shore. It's just, that's just my opinion of where I am now. or where I was when I wrote the poem. It's not a description of reality. And the thing is that if somebody connects with it and it opens a question or a door, like Rondi had a question, then the words serve their purpose beyond the actual meaning of the words. Does that make sense? Yeah, one more. Two more. I didn't see that, Dogen did that. You can only understand as far as your eye of practice reaches.

[47:33]

Yes. I heard a recording of Bernie Glassman recently where he's talking about bearing witness at Auschwitz retreat and he was saying that bearing witness isn't just sitting there my true names. So connecting to what I'm hearing Linda pointing to, and your interchange just now, is how do you practice with Well, the quote is, you can only understand as far as your eye of practice.

[49:11]

So that's an important thing. You actually, it's about doing something, not just receiving something. So it's only by doing something that we really begin to know what's going on. And by doing something, if I do something, it has, it's going to have an effect. or it's going to have an impact or an effect on another person. And part of the doing is also then seeing what happens and adjusting. This is part of our lives and part of our practice. That's the hard part for me because there can be excruciating pain with harm done that cannot be undone. That's true. That's true. And some people have to live with that. All of us have to live with it to some degree.

[50:12]

But some people have to live with very, very difficult things that they may have had responsibility for. And we really have to be open to that. We have to recognize that people live with those things and, ah, still see them as whole. One more, there was a hand back there and then I'll, that was the last one. Someone had a hand. Okay. Yeah, everything is. But it's, creating the capacity, this is the negative capability, creating the capacity that we can really include impermanence, that we can sit with it.

[51:15]

So, thank you very much.

[51:18]

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