Well good morning everyone. It's been a challenging week here in Lake Wobegon and the title of my talk today is Things Fall Apart, which is a line from perhaps one of the quoted poems in English literature, a poem by William Butler Yeats. It's called The Second Coming and I'll say more about that later. It was written in 1919, in the aftermath of World War I and also in the midst of the pandemic, the flu pandemic that followed the war. And so I thought I would sing you a song if that's okay. Let's see how I do with this.

[01:07]

I don't know if I've ever sung this here. Oh, what just happened? I'm not sure I've ever sung this here, but I've sung it in other places. This is a song by Bob Dylan. It's called Everything is Broken, which is quite appropriate to the idea that things fall apart. Broken lines, broken strings, broken threads, broken springs, broken idols, broken heads, people sleeping in broken beds. No use jiving, no use joking.

[02:11]

Everything is broken. Everything is broken. Broken bottles, broken plates, broken switches and broken gates, broken dishes, broken hearts. The streets are filled with broken hearts. Broken words never meant to be spoken. Everything is broken. Seems like every time you stop and turn around, something else just hits the ground. Broken cutters, broken saws, broken buckles and broken laws, broken bodies, broken bones, broken voices, unbroken phones. Take a deep breath. You feel like you're joking. Everything is broken.

[03:17]

Every time you even go off someplace, things fall to pieces in my face. Broken hands and broken plows, broken treaties, broken vows, broken pipes, broken tools, people bending broken rules. Hound dog howling, bullfrog croaking. Everything is broken. Everything is broken. It's all cracked up. Everything is broken. Well, hopefully that sets some kind of tone.

[04:51]

And the thing that I like about this song is that Dylan offers lightness right in the middle of the wreckage, which is really a teaching for us all. Can we find that lightness? Can we stand up in the middle of all that's falling apart and sing? Or the equivalent of singing. Can we sit there in Zazen? Zazen is, I think you can think of Zazen as singing. Uh-huh. So there is so many personal challenges and societal challenges this week. We're all dealing with the circumstance of

[05:56]

kind of expecting things were going to return to a so-called normalcy. We were ready for that. I'm ready for it. After a year and a half, I'm sure all of you are. And it looked like that's where it was headed. I spoke to a friend who's a chaplain at San Francisco General Hospital, and they had no COVID cases in hospital as of three weeks ago. And now we have the unfolding of the Delta variant. And so now there's 35 people in that hospital, including some who've been vaccinated. And the BCC's soft opening, so to speak, which was, it was supposed to have begun last week.

[07:08]

And now we don't know. But what we do know, it's not opening. And we're going to have to take it. We're going to have to look month by month to see what the circumstances are now. And say the practice period that we were planning to have with Gary Artemis Shuso in the fall, beginning in October through mid-November, we're not going to do that now. Although we will have an aspects of practice, and you'll hear more about that in the next week. So everywhere that you go, people are asking, people are requiring us to be masked indoors in stores and restaurants. So what we thought was coming together after this great falling apart, is falling apart again.

[08:21]

There were personal challenges this week that I won't go into detail, but they were really hard, and they came up, they came up very quickly. And I think often many of us are facing multiple circumstances, multiple difficulties that any one of which would be enough to deal with. And the multiplicity of them falls on our shoulders, and it's very hard. And then we have our losses. Losses of loved ones, losses of society, losses in society, and our own, whatever personal challenges we experience, particularly as we age.

[09:28]

And so that's the falling apart side. Not everything, along with falling apart, you also have the fact that things come together. So I'm very happy to say that, you know, if you look around on this screen, you will see our son, Gimpo, Alex. He's here. He arrived yesterday from Japan, and we're very happy to have him home. He's quarantining in the Abbott's office for a week or so, and so he's here. That's something that comes together. Things fall apart, and they come

[10:34]

together. This poem that I was quoting as a title for the talk, Second Coming, as I said, was written by Yeats at the end of World War I and in the midst of the flu pandemic. It's also been borrowed as a title for a wonderful novel by Chinua Achebe about colonialism in Africa. He's an African writer, and in that case, what was falling apart was the colonial empires. And it's also the title of one of Pema Chodron's excellent books,

[11:36]

When Things Fall Apart. So the poem, I want to read you at least a part of this poem. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. I would say I would take issue with the line that the best lack all conviction,

[12:42]

but I can understand that in the aftermath of the slaughter of millions of young men senselessly in the war, a whole generation pretty much wiped out, you could see that it would be tremendously demoralizing. But I do feel that the best have their conviction, but it's also true that the worst are full of passionate intensity. So going back to the first two lines, turning and turning in the widening gyre, I'm not sure if you'd pronounce that gyre or gyre, does anyone know? Okay, gyre means spiral.

[13:47]

And I think what he's speaking of is what seems to be the spiraling, the rising spiral of suffering. The falcon cannot hear the falconer, means the falcon is not able to hear the directive true voice to give them guidance. So this is a description of our modern society perhaps, and what appears to be

[14:54]

the widening spire of suffering, which is like entropy increasing moment by moment. But this is actually not the Buddhist view. The Buddhist view is more of a circle than a spiral. The circle includes everything, it includes suffering, it includes liberation. And can we find our spot right at the pivot point of that circle, recognizing that we are part of that circle, but we also stand in a place where we can see all of the

[16:00]

dimensions of it. We can see suffering and we can see liberation and our challenge is to is to sit in the middle of it, that's Sazen. So the next line says, things fall apart, the center cannot hold. So those are to me another way of expressing two of the three marks of existence. That things fall apart is the mark of impermanence. And this goes, we've talked about this and studied this, these three marks, impermanence,

[17:06]

non-self and suffering or impermanence, non-self and nirvana. It's all contingent upon our attitude towards, whether it's nirvana or dukkha, is contingent on our attitude towards impermanence and non-self. So that things fall apart is impermanence. And the Buddha's last words in the Parinirvana Sutta, he addressed the monks and lay people who were surrounding him as he was dying. He says, I exhort you, all compounded things are subject to vanish, practice with earnestness.

[18:08]

If you recognize that, that they will, that things fall apart, then place yourself at the middle of it, practice with earnestness. And so the second part of this line, the center cannot hold, is, it seems like in the poem, Yeats is bemoaning, is just, well, he's observing that things are falling apart, that there's a dissolution of society and that there's no moral center. There's nothing holding it together. But that's also the second mark of existence for us, that things have no self.

[19:16]

If you peel away layer by layer, fibrous layer by fibrous layer of bamboo, then when you get to the center, it's space, it's empty. There is no center. The center is created by the circle of fibrous, woody growth that creates the stalk. But there's nothing there. The center cannot hold because there is no center that we can get to. And this is what also we realize and experience in Sazen. We may look for a self and we may peel away layer after layer

[20:24]

of our habits, our experiences, our thoughts, feelings, and still we can't find the center. We can't confirm it. And at the same time, and that's a kind of relief, actually. The center cannot hold because there is not a center to hold. And can we sit there? Can we sit in that vast potential? That vast possibility. So in our practice, we always have choices. If you're sitting, when we're sitting in Sazen, we decide we're going to,

[21:31]

we have the intention to follow our breath and maintain our posture. That's a choice. And when thoughts come up, we are faced with a choice to follow them or not. Follow them or to return to our center, to that empty center. And all we have are causes and conditions. These elements coming together and falling apart, coming together and falling apart, and so on. And our lives and reality itself are just like that stalk of bamboo.

[22:33]

Somehow empty at the core and yet incredibly strong and flexible. You could say, in the face of this, in the face of things falling apart, that the one side is a kind of hopelessness, but not the hopelessness of despair. The hopelessness of wonder, the hopelessness of curiosity, of openness. What's going to happen next? And to watch that. So the condition of our Sazen is to accept the brokenness

[23:57]

and accept that things fall apart and accept that they come together. In her book, When Things Fall Apart, it's a quotation from, the subtitle is Heart Advice for Difficult Times. And Pema Chodron writes, to be fully alive, fully human and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no man's land, to experience each moment as new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. This dying, I would say, this is, there's the dying of little deaths and at the same time, there's the

[25:02]

moment where we are moving towards our end in this cycle of life. And the way we meet that, I like to think, is how we've been trained to meet each moment. And the way we train to meet each moment, the way what we've been fortunate to get is some direct training in meeting ourselves day by day in the Zendo, or now, day by day in this peculiar reality of facing the screen and facing ourselves and facing our friends. I think about two, number of

[26:14]

anecdotes that I've mentioned, multiply because they, they're so meaningful to me, they're really important in my life. The first is a line from Dogen's Genjo Koan, which says, when Dharma fills your body and mind, you realize that something is missing. You keep looking for the wholeness of anything that we encounter and the wholeness, the reliable, rock-like truth that we can hide behind. And if the reality is as the Buddha taught, impermanence and non-self, then something is missing.

[27:20]

And that, you know, you could finish that verse, I finish that verse as, when Dharma fills your body and mind, you realize that something's missing and that's actually fine. I'm glad it's missing. If it was complete, it would be all over. And we value things because they're missing. And this brings me to this second story, which is an anecdote about the great Theravada forest tradition monk, Achancha, who some of our, some of our wonderful Vipassana teachers had an opportunity to, to practice with. So this story says, one day, some people came to the master,

[28:27]

came to Achancha, and said, how can you be happy in a world of such impermanence where you cannot protect your loved ones from harm, illness, and death? Achancha held up a glass and he said, someone gave me this glass and I really like this glass. It holds my water admirably and it glistens in the sunlight. I touch it and it rings. One day, the wind may blow it off the shelf or my elbow may knock it from the table. I know this glass is already broken, so I enjoy it incredibly. Now it so happens that this week, among other more telling disasters,

[29:35]

that's exactly what happened to my favorite cup. I had this cup that I think that, that Kika put out a lot of stuff when she was leaving, you know, stuff to give away and I found it on the street. And I really liked this cup. It was a glass, it was a glass, Chinese glass teacup that had a screw on lid. And I liked it a lot because you could carry it around and not spill water. And I thought it was elegant. And I put it on the banister as I was ready to go upstairs and then I turned around to do something else. And when I turned around again to go up the stairs, I inadvertently knocked it off the banister. It fell on the floor and it shattered in a million pieces. There were shards of glass everywhere. And it was interesting. My response was,

[30:46]

oh, it's broken. That was bound to happen. And then I just got down very carefully and picked up and swept up the pieces, the shards of glass and it was gone. I may try to replace it with something like that. But I think somehow our practice allows us to encompass these losses. This is not a terrible loss. It's not like the loss of a parent or a loved one. But again, we practice on these little moments. And I think the last story, again, is one that I've told frequently

[31:58]

because I think that in the insecurity of my life and my growing up, consciously and unconsciously, I tried to hold things together. And I tried to get other people to hold things together. And that was the mind that I brought to Zen practice when I came in the 80s. And I hadn't figured out yet that despite my best efforts, things were not going to cooperate and just stay together no matter what I did. Some things would for a time and some things wouldn't. And particularly some people would and some people

[33:06]

wouldn't. They wouldn't do what I wanted or expected them to do. I don't know why you're like that. But so am I. And I think Sojin watched me for a long time. And like that story, he often liked to tell the story of a frog sitting on a rock, unmoving, just watching. And when a fly comes by, he would just go, and swallow the fly and then resume sitting. I think Sojin was sitting like that frog, paying attention to me, but not trying to control me.

[34:11]

And then one day, he pounced, kind of swallowing me whole. And he told me, I should let things fall apart. I think he told me to let things fall apart because they're gonna fall apart anyway. And we never know. Everything's going along very nicely. And then some weirdo virus shows up, and our whole world is thrown into confusion and danger. So I've been trying to practice letting things fall apart. And at the same time, recognizing that's only one side.

[35:17]

That makes it difficult. You know, if you're just going to stick to the principle of letting things fall apart, then you just shrug your shoulders. And you live with the philosophy of whatever. Whatever. But that's not sufficient either. As it says in the Juhlmur Samadhi, turning away and touching are both mistaken. So, there are things and there are moments when we have to, we make our effort to hold things together, we make our effort, we say something, we do something.

[36:22]

And there are times when we recognize that we just, we have to let this event take its course. But the challenge, again, the point of zazen, is to be upright in the midst of either side of that activity. Upright and letting go. You know, accepting that I carelessly knocked my favorite cup off of the banister and it was gone. You know, it was broken into thousands of pieces, it was not going to be glued together. And also, upright in the presence of

[37:26]

meeting people and meeting oneself in one's distress, not just saying whatever and walking away, but being able to engage and be present and not caught in one's anxiety. This is the balance beam that we have to do our zen gymnastics on. So, I think I'm going to stop there, and give you an opportunity to comment or ask questions. Oh, two things. One, I wanted to say, and I'll put this in the chat, I think there are still some spaces. I'm having a tea tomorrow at seven o'clock, which is just an open discussion with people.

[38:37]

And if you would like to join that, you can email me or you can email Hannah, and one of us will send you the link. Hannah's email is hmera at gmail.com. So, that's one. The other thing I'd just say is, welcome your comments, your questions. I really appreciate questions, and also really appreciate hearing from people that we haven't heard from in a while, but really the floor is open. And I'm going to let Mary Beth call on you, okay? Okay. So, if you have a question, please raise your digital hand in the participants box, or you can send me a message or a question in the chat box. And to start, I'll ask Andrea to unmute

[39:40]

and to ask a question. Good morning, Hosan. I'm really filled with a lot of emotion from your talk and the song and all of the wonderful analogies you put together from Things Fall Apart. But the bamboo, you talked about the bamboo being empty in the center. And I guess my question is, how can our Zazen practice help us be as flexible as bamboo and recognize that in the center of it all is nothing, and it's always changing with impermanence? Well, I think we start by building it on our posture and our breath. Our posture should always be, I think bamboo is a great model. You know, our posture is rooted in the soil,

[40:46]

rooted on the ground, and it's reaching up to the sky. So the important thing is that our posture be flexible. And so while we encourage people not to move in a large way, we're always moving and finally adjusting ourselves just as a tree or bamboo would adjust in the face of the wind. So we blow, but like a tree also, we return to the center. So this is a model. It's modeled in our posture. And then we use the posture as it's analogous to the activity of our mind. And so that's what I would say, just be a tall stalk of bamboo, just really flexible. And you have the sun that's helping you grow,

[41:54]

and you have the earth that has the nutrients. And that's what I would say. Thank you. Thank you. Mark Carpethorn, would you like to unmute yourself and ask a question? I had an association with a poem you read, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. But I felt, well, that's what we do at Berkeley Zen Center. We conduct ceremonies of innocence. And if they're drowned everywhere, I felt very pleased to share this community of people who want to float ceremonies of innocence. Thank you so much, Mark. I mean, I think it's a very bleak poem. But it was, you know, it was a very bleak moment in history. And I think the circular nature,

[43:00]

rather than the widening gyre, is that we are, we could see ourselves in the same kind of moment, our society. And I think the Buddhist teaching is that, and Sojourner Opportunity, it's always, it's like this. So the question is, yeah, I think that's great. I think we do ceremonies of innocence are exactly one way of speaking about what we do. It's beautiful. There's a question in the chat box from Peter Enyart. How do we help others deal with it when things fall apart? The expression that we use often in the chaplaincy training that

[44:06]

I help with at Upaya is coming alongside. One of our teachers, Kobinchino Roshi, spoke of, in a very parallel way, spoke of the activity of bodhisattva as just walking alongside someone. So it's really the practice of accompaniment. And that means, that might mean going to very dark places. But to maintain your ability to be present and upright. So this to me is, this is what we've come, again, in the chaplaincy training, we make a rough distinction between

[45:11]

empathy and compassion. And it may not be strictly accurate, depends on your understanding of the meaning of those words, but we have come to think of empathy as merging. So there always has to be an aspect of empathy. And compassion as meeting, as the bodhisattva does, you know, with her thousand hands and eyes and her, you know, her spiritual Swiss army knife, to find compassion means finding the right tool with which to meet somebody. But the first thing is just maybe just stay close and do nothing. But really be close, really be with them. There's also a comment from Susan Marvin in the chat box. She says,

[46:19]

thank you, Hozon, for the image of bamboo. From a gardening perspective, bamboo spreads easily. So one stalk multiplies, maybe like sangha practice. Once it starts spreading in a garden, it's almost impossible to contain. Right. So it might be too much of a good thing. You know, what would it be like if the whole world were Zen students? Maybe that's a scary thought. I don't know. Dan Jackson, you have a question. Would you like to unmute yourself and ask your question? Yes. Thank you, Hozon, for the talk. The side of practicing non-attachment when things fall apart, when you knock your glass off and it breaks. I think I understand that and I'm not always

[47:20]

able to do it. But the flip side, when things are coming together, what is the practice of non-attachment at those moments? Well, so yesterday we went through this big drama with Gempo's flights. The whole thing, there was a lot of confusion. The ticketing company screwed things up and we weren't sure that he was going to get on this flight. And we were really tracking it moment by moment for about 48 hours. And he had his anxiety, we had our anxiety. On each side, we kept settling ourselves and it worked out. And then he came out through the customs gate,

[48:27]

SFO, and there he was. And he looked a little different than when we had seen him a year and a half later. And I just thought, okay, I want to be with this moment. Whatever was happening is not the present moment. So can I just be present here with my son who has arrived? And doing that, it felt like complete normalcy. And I didn't think about it until you just asked. And now I'm reflecting and it feels deeply emotional to me. But in the happening, it feels very ordinary, but ordinary is not something reductive. Ordinary is

[49:35]

maybe the highest thing. Thank you. We do have a few minutes left if there's any other comments or questions. Oh, there's one. Joel, would you like to unmute yourself and ask your question? Yeah. Yes. Thank you, Hosan. Absolutely wonderful talk. I was thinking that the poem goes on and I think it ends, what rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. And that gives me, it's very

[50:45]

hard for me to deal with that. I'm very scared of what rough beast is being born in the middle of all this. And I can, you know, come up with all sorts of Buddhist things, which are all true, about the future being kind of the most non-existent of all the three times. But I wonder if you have some words about how to work with that, what rough beast is now being born. So, my interest is not in, my interest is in accepting that this poem is a moment of

[51:49]

perception and observation. But it is not the truth. It's a view. And I think it's put together as a view. It's not, he's not saying that Yeats is, you know, he's too fine a poet to say, this is the truth. I think he's saying, this is the moment as I am perceiving it and leaving us to reckon with it. It's also a wake up call. He's saying, please pay attention. And we could well imagine that the rough beast, it's our come around at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

[53:01]

And the question he's asking is, how do we meet our world? And so, in a sense, I see it as advocating hope and effort, not as an expression of despair. It's saying, in a sense, it's saying we might have good reason to despair. But because there is the possibility of poetry, because there is a possibility of music, because there is a possibility of expression, because there is a possibility of Zazen, there is some other potentiality here, even if the terms are very hard.

[54:16]

Thank you very much. Heko, would you like to ask a question? Thank you, Hozan-sensei. And for your discussion of the center, I was reminded of my own childhood growing up in Illinois. There was a city called Centerville. Centerville actually moved. It was meant to be the center of the U.S. population. So, depending on where humans in USA were moving or standing or living, the center changed. I would like to hear what you might say comparing that to the bamboo, where the center is always in the middle, and this bamboo dependent on the placement of humans. I'm not quite sure I understand your last sentence.

[55:21]

Comparing the center of the bamboo, which is always in the center of the peeled-back wood, the city called Centerville moved from Missouri to Illinois, and it was proceeding eastward because of the positions of every being, American being in this case. How is that rich or not? I find it rich, but I'd like to hear. Well, I think that geography is also always changing, whereas what the metaphor, the analog of bamboo is not about where the center of our society is, but

[56:24]

where my center is and where your center is. And from that perspective, as we know, from the perspective of our awareness, we are always the center of the whole world, each of us. The place that I go to in India, Nagpur, it turns out it's the geographic center of India by some measure. And there's actually, there's a whole, there's like five or six transcontinental highways that cross in Nagpur, and at the center is a mile zero. So that's very interesting, but I'm not sure how meaningful it is. It's somewhat arbitrary.

[57:28]

You know, the deluded people who thought that Centerville was going to be the center of the United States, well, speaks for itself. But you are the center of your world. And I am the center of my world. And when we, each of us explore that, we're going to fail to be able to identify where's the center of our center. And that's fine. Because it's our location, the center is always moves with you. But each of our locations is dependent upon the causes and conditions that are moving us around. Thank you. Maybe one more. I see one. Okay, Brian, would you like to unmute yourself and ask your

[58:32]

question? Good to see you again. So more of a comment than a question, but it seems like from one perspective, there is no center. Whether it's Centerville or the bamboo, or within ourselves, it's all kind of arbitrary. So not really a question, but like, it seems like that was one perspective. Yes, thank you. I heard an incredible program when we were driving to the airport yesterday, on the radio. I forget what show it was on. It was, you know, but it was about the discovery of zero. And I guess the original discovery was by an Indian mathematician, Brahmagupta, who was actually translating or interpolating from the Sanskrit word shunya, which is emptiness in

[59:45]

that language, and which we often talk about shunya or shunyata. And what he discovered was, it wasn't emptiness in terms of voidness, it was the emptiness that had the full potential of everything. And I think when we talk about the no center, we're really talking about potential. That there's no fixed center, that there's no fixed self, means that we have the potentiality to change. And that's a wonderful gift, I think. So the centerlessness provides the potential for us to embrace everything and everyone. Right. That's right. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I think I will, let's stop for today.

[60:57]

And we're really enjoying this one day sitting. And just come back next week, and the week after that, for more exciting adventures in Zen.

[61:15]

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