So I'd like to talk with you today about Ancestor Zen. Can you hear me okay in the back? So in some of the old classic Zen writings, they talk about two kinds of Zen, Ancestor Zen and Tathagata Zen. So we can see this as two sides of our practice, and we need both sides. Tathagata Zen is Buddha's Zen. So tathagata is another word for Buddha. It means, literally, to come and go in thusness or in suchness, to come and go in reality. So this kind of Zen, tathagata Zen, or we could say Buddha's Zen, is to see things just as they are, and to see the perfect balance of things just as it is.

[01:05]

That there is an order to the way things are. So this is Buddha's view of the world. And Buddha sees all beings as Buddha. And I think, for some of us, do zazen, we do sitting meditation because we get a taste of that some of the time. We get a taste of that things are the way they are and it's okay and that there is some sense to it and there is some order to it and it's okay. So in a sense, the Buddha doesn't do anything. Buddha doesn't need to do anything. Buddha just sits up on the altar and maybe smiles a little. You know, everything's the way it is. So by talking about these two kinds of practice, these two kinds of Zen, again, I'm not saying take one or the other.

[02:18]

These are two sides of our practice. But today I want to talk about Ancestor Zen. So Ancestor Zen has to do with manifesting this in the world. And it has to do with maintaining and upholding the teaching of how to do that, and the practice, and the spirit of awakening. So in Ancestors' End, it's not enough to just sit and enjoy the cosmic order, or to bliss out, or to feel nice and calm. We have to express our Zazen, express this sense of Buddha Zen in the world, and that's what the ancestors do.

[03:18]

And we have to do it with our whole life. And of course, how to do that is sometimes quite challenging and difficult. And it has a lot to do with just being committed to do that. So this ancestors that I'm talking about, if you read English books on Zen or on Buddhism, sometimes you'll see the word patriarch. So that's a translation of this word ancestor. That's a bad translation. This has nothing to do with the original character in Chinese, used in Chinese and Japanese. It has nothing, there's no gender implied at all. So it has nothing to do with patriarchy. Or it has no more to do with patriarchy than it does with matriarchy. So this is a little footnote here. It's just this tradition of keeping alive this tradition of how do we take care of our lives. Of course, in the history of Buddhism in Asia, this happened in China, and Buddhism was taking place in patriarchal societies, just as the last few thousand years in the West have been patriarchal societies.

[04:39]

But anyway, this word patriarch is a mistranslation. So what I'm talking about today is ancestors. And there's a little different attitude towards the ancestors in Asian cultures. They look back throughout all of Asian culture and literature and so forth. There's this thing about the ancient sages. Back in the old days, everything was better. The great ancient teachers and masters and yogis kings and emperors and philosophers, they were all wonderful and awakened and benevolent. There's this kind of image of things in the old days and the old ancestors as being really where it's at. It's very prevalent in Asian cultures. Well, maybe not anymore now that we have Sony and Panasonic. It's all changed, but in traditional Asian culture anyway. So it's a little different from our culture.

[05:39]

In the West, we have this idea of progress. And we have this idea of evolution, which is very much part of a lot of our culture. Things are getting better. We just learn how to do things better. And once we get on that information superhighway, we'll just be able to ride off into the sunset with happily ever after. We have that idea in our culture. in various ways. And of course we also have the other idea, things are falling apart. Our school systems and our, just everything, the roads, everything is falling apart. So we also see that side too. I think we have both sides maybe in our culture mixed up in funny ways. So part of talking about ancestors then is about what is tradition? How do we use tradition? What is the meaning of tradition? So every morning in this hall, we chant the names of about 90 people from historical Buddha, Shakyamuni Buddha, who lived 2,500 years ago in India, up to Suzuki Roshi, who came to, was a Japanese priest who came to America and founded the Zen Center.

[07:01]

So we actually, it's something we chant every morning, this lineage of names. And of course we use all these traditional forms, these funny robes and black cushions and so forth. So there's a lot of what we do here. We take on some of the formalities of a tradition and we study traditional teachings from a lot of different sources. But part of the point of this tradition is that it's a living tradition. that it's an alive, dynamic tradition. So we've followed a lot of the Japanese forms, but we've also adapted a lot. So it may look like this Zen center is very formal, but compared to temples in Japan, it's not so much. And recently, we've tried this innovation of having a rotating abbotship. We've just changed, had a new abbot here and graduated a previous abbot.

[08:04]

And this is part of our experimentation with how do we use the forms of the teachers and the teachings and the spiritual leaders and how do we make it more congruent with our own culture and our own society. So now we have term limits on our abbots. So we're working with the tradition, but in a dynamic way in terms of our own practice here and our own community and how we carry on this tradition. And this dynamic between things are getting better and things are falling apart is also, of course, part of our own lives. We have this idea of developing our practice and developing our careers and developing our relationships and becoming better people. more grossly getting more money and having bigger houses. But we have this idea of our lives developing.

[09:07]

And then after a certain age, we also have this awareness that we can't do all the things we used to be able to and things aren't working. So we have both of those in our own lives, so this works on both those levels. And also this thing about ancestors, For those of us who do this practice, we have this lineage, this specific, very specific lineage, one name after another of 90 people. But we also, as Americans, as members of whatever culture we're part of, we have our own ancestors, our own genetic ancestors from our whatever ethnic background we're from, and we also have our cultural ancestors, people in our culture who we look up to in some ways, who somehow have kept alive some tradition, who inspire us. So, at least we have them still today. And sometimes we kind of twist this into some kind of hero worship instead of appreciating them as human beings.

[10:11]

So... One of the great ancestors in our tradition is a man named Dogen, a Japanese monk who went to China and brought back this tradition from China to Japan in the 1200s. And we study his writings a lot. And one of the things we chant sometimes before lectures during Sashin and when the Abbot lectures, is called the Ehe Koso Hotsuganmon. It means Dogen's writing on arousing the vow, and he talks about his attitude towards the ancestors. He says, although our previous evil karma has greatly accumulated, our previous conditioning of bad habits, producing causes and conditions that obstruct the way May the Buddhas and ancestors who have attained the Buddha way be compassionate to us and liberate us from our karmic entanglements, allowing us to practice the way without hindrance. May the merit and virtue of their Dharma gate fill and refresh the inexhaustible Dharma realm so that they share with us their compassion."

[11:24]

So there's this real feeling of looking up to these ancestors or really respecting and venerating these ancestors. Then he says this thing, Buddhas and ancestors of old, whereas we, we in the future, shall be Buddhas and ancestors. Venerating Buddhas and ancestors, we are one with Buddhas and ancestors. Contemplating awakening mind, we are one with awakened mind. So there are these ancestors back there who we look back to in our own lives, also as well as in our society and culture. They're the people who've inspired us. But there's also this thing about these ancestors were the same as we. They were just people like us with problems and hang-ups and confusion and desires and anger and all of the things that human beings have. They were as we, and we in the future shall be Buddhas and ancestors. So this is an important part of this, that we are carrying on something and that actually doing this today here, all of us are carrying on some tradition.

[12:31]

So recently at Green Gulch we had a early Sunday morning class called Zen Action or Zen in Action. And we were talking about the relationship between Buddhist practice and social action or acting in society or how we function in the world. And we talked about it in lots of ways in terms of seeing what is our own personal, immediate, ultimate concern. What is really important to us and clarifying that and the importance of that. Being clear about our intention and also how do we see others, people who are different from us or who we imagine are different from us. How do we relate to them? How do we break down the barriers that separate us from others? And how do we take this experience that we get by doing Zen meditation, by coming to a place like this and practicing, whether it's for a morning or for a week-long sitting or for a two-month practice period or however long we come and do this, how do we take that out into just the way we are in the world and doing things to take care of our society?

[14:07]

So one of the great American Zen ancestors is Gary Snyder. He has this interesting thing that Zen practice comes down to two things, sitting, Zazen, sitting meditation, and sweeping the temple. And it's up to us to decide how large our temple is, what the boundaries of our temple is. So we do our best to take care of the world around us and we do what we can. So I kind of feel that's an instruction about Zen practice in terms of space, how we extend. Gary Snyder also said something that to me relates to time and how we do this in time. So he was talking about the need to act all of the problems of the world, you know, the problems with the environment and all the effects of the inequities in our society and in the world, that things are rather urgent, that things are rather desperate on some level, that things are really falling apart very quickly in our time, and that the need to act is urgent.

[15:23]

We need to act, we need to do something right now. But at the same time, he says, We also have to act as if we had all the time in the world. With great calm and deliberateness and steadiness and long-term commitment that actually that's what's effective. So in Zen we sometimes have these two sides of things that we have to hold together. So this question of time has been one I've been studying and thinking about for a while. How do we see time in our activity in the world, and how do we see time in our own lives? So most Zen teachers talk about just being the present.

[16:28]

just being present right now and being mindful and a lot of our meditation practice and our practice in the temple or in meditation training center is about really being present right here, being here now. And some time ago, this Be Here Now became a great koan, a great puzzle for me, thanks to a woman named Joanna Macy, a friend of mine who has been concerned with nuclear waste management. And I've been working with her on a nuclear guardianship project, and she's been talking about the problems of how do we take care of nuclear waste that's going to be deadly for 50,000, 100,000 years. I mean, it's just inconceivable, the length of time. So she talks about deep time and being aware of deep time. And actually, through her efforts and those of others, the question of taking care of nuclear waste has gotten attention even by the policymakers.

[17:36]

This morning on the front page, there's an article about the problems with the plan to bury all the nuclear waste under the Nevada desert and just think that we've taken care of it that way. So it's actually entering the mainstream, this concern. But the part of it I want to talk about this morning has to do with how we see time and how we see this being present. So when Joanna was thinking about this, she talked to a group of meditators and asked them how they saw time. You know, there's this kind of slogan, be here now, you know, and a lot of the meditators kind of felt like, well, they wanted to get out of time. They wanted to escape time. Just be in the present and, you know, don't be concerned with the past. Don't be concerned with the future, even, you know, the immediate future, let alone, you know, centuries and so forth. So the question for me is how we can be fully present in our own time, in our own lives, without trying to run away from time.

[18:49]

Maybe in Tathagata Zen, maybe for Buddha, time doesn't matter. You can just sit up there on the altar and smile. But in Ancestor Zen, it's about taking care of the world outside the altar, outside the zendo, in the zendo too. keeping us alive. So, we want to be fully present in the present, as opposed to worrying about regretting the past, you know? We can, when you sit and meditate, you can realize that your mind spends a lot of time, your thoughts can get preoccupied with regrets over things that have happened. And we can get really bogged down by that. And we all do that. And then the other side is anxiety about the future. What am I going to do about such and such, and what's going to happen? And that's how we usually, one reaction to the future is, what's going to happen?

[19:59]

What am I going to do? So a lot of times we want to be in some other time, some other place. This isn't working. If only I could have changed what happened then, or if only I could find out what to do, you know, later on, that'll make it all work. So that's not being present, you know, but being, I don't think being present has to do with getting outside of time either. So Dogen has this writing called Being Time, where he talks about this, and it's, he talks about it in very intricate ways. but he talks about being as time, or being is time, that just to be here in our lives is time. And we actually are here in our lives in time, not escaping time, not in past or future, but right now. So that's also how he suggests practicing

[21:07]

being mindful and practicing and being present. So there's a writing that he has about, with instructions for the Tenzo, for the head cook of the temple. And he says, engage in this work with a vow to include 1,000 or 10,000 lives in one day or one time. This allows you to unite with virtuous karmic cause for 10 million lives. So we act mindfully. We take care of how we're chopping carrots, how we're sweeping the temple, how we're relating to our friends and family, how we're doing our job. We do this mindfully, including all time. It's not about escaping time. And it's very easy to get that confused, I think. It's very easy to feel like if I can just be mindful and be present, then I don't have to deal with the past or the future. So I think this teaching is about seeing the richness and the multi-dimensional aspect of our own time and experience.

[22:12]

That our whole life is included right now. That each thing we do includes everything in our life. Right now and past and future and all beings right now also. So it's difficult sometimes to acknowledge and face the past and future. But this is part of the job, to be here right now and to accept our own lives, whatever's happened in our own life and whatever's going to happen, and to be present with that and just face it. So it's possible to see the meaning of our life and the progression of our life and our own time in fresh ways.

[23:16]

You know, we get stuck in certain ways of seeing it. It's possible to open up to other ways of seeing time and other ways of seeing our life. We all have stories about ourselves and what our life has been and how we've gotten to this place here this morning. it's possible to tell the story in a different way, to actually change its meaning, to reframe our own stories. It's not that there's one right way to tell the story either. But if we can see the meaning of things that have happened and the meaning of things that we are anxious about that may happen, if we can see them in different ways, it gives us some kind of flexibility. So I think it's pretty usual to see ancestors and to see this kind of teaching and this kind of way of living in terms of the past.

[24:23]

You know, the ancestors are the people who've lived in the distant past. And maybe it's in the recent past and maybe they can inspire us and maybe we can try and continue something that we think is valuable. But I think this also has to do, this ancestors end, has to do with the future and future generations. And I think a lot of the old teachings have to do with that and how we take care of that. So a few months ago I went to an international conference in Kyoto, Japan about future generations with about 50 people or so from a couple dozen countries. And a lot of people all over the world are talking about how do we take care of future generations and concerned about how do we think about the future and how do we take care of our own lives and of this world that we're in now in a way that's, takes care, that honors, that remembers those people. So I just want to read a little bit of a paper I did for that conference.

[25:26]

Excuse me for reading this. But it has to do with the teachings of Ancestor Zen. So the Chinese master Sekito said, I humbly say to those who study the mystery, don't waste time. So this is something we chant in this hall many mornings, some mornings during the week in our morning service. It's the end of the merging and difference, merging of difference and unity. I humbly say to those who study the mystery, don't waste time. Also, the great master Zhou Shu, Zhaozhou, said to a monk, I use the hours of the day. You are used by the hours of the day. This not wasting time or using time's hours is not a matter of efficiency or productivity indices. Joshu used time by being fully present, by fully sensing the immediate intimacy of his present being with all other beings in space and time.

[26:29]

Not wasting time is to take care of the one who is not busy, the one who uprightly faces the present with steadiness, right in the midst of the whirling sands of time. So the Flower Ornament School of Buddhism gives a rich depiction of the multidimensional quality of time. And they talk about 10 times. So we're used to thinking of three times, past, present, and future. But there's this Buddhist teaching of 10 times. So there's the past, present, and future of the past. There's the past, present, and future of the present. And there's the past, present, and future of the future. And then finally, the combination of all these nine times is the tenth time. So the past of the present may also be the past of a future. The present of the future will be intimately connected to the future of our present, yet it's not necessarily predetermined or limited by our present future. We can reclaim the past in the present and thus change our past and present for the sake of the future.

[27:39]

So history is the changing process of defining the past for the present. We can rewrite the history of the future in the present as well as in the future. So in Dogen's Being Time, time does not only flow from past to present to future. Time moves in mysterious ways, passing dynamically between all ten times and beyond. Time is not some intractable external container we are caught in. Of course, there's also the clock time, and we have to be certain places at certain times. That's true too, but there are other ways of seeing time that are also true. We are time. When we fully express ourselves right now is time. We cannot help but fully express our deepest truth right now. We cannot avoid being time. When we realize that we are intellectually being time in this very body and mind, we can choose to be and act from our deepest and noblest intention.

[28:43]

We can choose to express our being of time in a way that connects with all beings here now, and also connects with all beings, all of our ancestors throughout the generations of past and future. We can intend to be a time that accepts the support and guidance of all beings of all times. So Dogen's way of seeing ancestors as resources for us and actually calling on the ancestors to help us and to inspire us and for us to remember what is most important for us. So we consider future generations in terms of how do we take care of the environment, how do we take care of the world, how do we take care of this Buddhist teaching that has been so helpful to many of us. And we think that future generations depend on us, but I think we also need the future generations. We need them.

[29:44]

It's part of the meaning of our lives. It's built into our biology that we are a species that propagates and that we look to the future as giving meaning to what we do now. And part of the sickness of our time is that there's all this fear because of all the nuclear problems and the environmental problems and so forth, that there won't be any future. And maybe that's always been there in a way, but it's kind of more intense now. But there's another way to see it. The future generations are out there looking at us right now, just as we can look back and think of Dogen or George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or whoever we look back to. In their time, in the future, they're looking at us. And so they're here right now. And maybe they're encouraging us, wishing us well, and we can feel that side of it too.

[30:48]

So there are lots of expressions of this in the Zen tradition. I'm going to read one of them from Rinzai, and this fits right in with what we do here because last month we had Arbor Day and we do this every year, we plant trees in this Green Gulch Valley. And there's a story that Dogen writes about, about the great teacher Rinzai in China, great teacher Linji is his Chinese name, was on Huangpu Mountain planting pine trees when his teacher Huangpu asked him, For what purpose do you plant so many pines deep in the remote mountains, so far away from anybody who might ever see them or appreciate them? Linji said, first, to make some scenery for the mountain gate. Second, to make a guidepost for later generations. So this tradition of planting trees, of thinking about, you know, we do this practice here at Green Gulch For the people who live here, it's keeping us alive, and we don't think about it so much, but we have this sense that green gulch is a resource that we want to continue for a long time.

[32:02]

Dogen says about this story, Linji was at Huangpos for 20 years, doing nothing but strenuously studying and exerting the way. Sometimes he planted pines. Sometimes he planted cedars. Isn't this the intimate discussion and intimate practice of the single mountain scenery in the 10,000 Ancient Ones Guidepost? In the world it is said that the wise and noble do not forget virtue, whereas petty people do not repay generosity. How much more must children in the house of the Buddha ancestors repay the deep kindness of the milk of the Dharma? What we call repaying this blessing is to plant pines and cedars and to be satisfied with our gruel and rice. Even for the sake of those from extremely distant ages, we return to plant trees in the remote mountains. If you yearn to be a bridge to the Buddha way, you must become familiar with this time of Benji's. So I think this is in our culture, too.

[33:16]

A couple weeks ago was President's Day. And I happened to hear on NPR a discussion of some political scientists and historians, and they were talking about the presidency and what do people want from our president? What is it we expect and what is it we're looking for? And I guess most of us don't have much positive opinion of politicians these days. And what is it we really want? And somebody said, well, The interviewer said, do people really want someone like George Washington? Is that what they want? And one of the professors said, yeah, that's what they want. They want George Washington. Then somebody else said, well, part of it is that Washington and Lincoln and our forefathers, our American ancestors back in Washington's time, Jefferson and Adams and Madison, all those guys, he said, one of the things about them is they thought of posterity. They were really concerned about,

[34:17]

what will happen with the American government. So maybe this is what we look for in our politicians as well. So I seem to be reading a lot of things from the ancestors today. I'm going to flick more on you. This is from Tian Tong Hongzhe. a guy in the Soto Zen tradition, century before Dogen in China, from cultivating the empty field. He says, one contemplation of the 10,000 years is beginning not to dwell on surface appearances. So we get to the real meaning of our lives by not, and we get to, to the depths of our lives by being aware of this level of, he calls it 10,000 years, 10,000 is kind of an arbitrary number, it means lots of time.

[35:25]

Thus it is said that the mind ground contains every seed and the universal rain makes them all sprout. And he talks about the attitude of serving the ancestors, taking care of, keeping something alive for the ancestors. Those who produce descendants are called ancestors. Where the stream emerges is called the source. After beholding the source and recognizing the ancestors, before your awareness can disperse, be steadfast and do not follow birth and death or past conditioning. If you do not succumb, then all beings will show the whole picture. Wake up and in turn the ground, the roots, and the dust are clearly cast off. And then he says, still you must gather them together and bring them within to reach the time honored, return to the source and serve the ancestors.

[36:28]

Join together into unity, scrutinize yourself and go on. Then he says this other very interesting thing about ancestors and it's another way of thinking about ancestors. Fully appreciate the emptiness of all things, that all minds are free and all dusts evaporate in the original brilliance shining everywhere. Transforming according to circumstances, meet all beings as your ancestors. So that's kind of a twist on it, to see all beings as your ancestors. The Tibetans have this, this idea if you're walking down the street and you see someone, we've lived so many past lives that anybody you see was in some past life a parent or child of yours. So we can see all of us, all of us can see each other as ancestors too. I wanted to ask, how many people here are here for the first time?

[37:41]

A few people. Those of you who've been here before know that one of our Sunday traditions is we have a discussion period after lecture, and before that there's tea and muffins. I guess today it'll be in the dining room because of the possible rain. So I just wanted to close with a couple little stories about Another ancestor of ours called Cloud Gate, so it's appropriate for today. Yunmen in Chinese or Unmon in Japanese. He's particularly known for his very short, pithy ancestors. Pithy answers, excuse me. Maybe he had pithy ancestors too. He's not in our particular lineage, but this thing about this lineage of 90 names, a lot of these people studied with many other teachers at the time.

[38:46]

So it's not like just one person. It's like when you fully take on one lineage, you can learn from all lineages. Anyway, Yunmen is a great Zen ancestor. And he gave very short answers to questions. He's kind of like the Calvin Coolidge of Zen. Does everybody know who Calvin Coolidge is? I don't know if he was a particularly good president, but he was known for not talking much. He was called Silent Cow. I don't know if he thought about posterity, but I guess he did kind of sit there and do nothing and smile a little sometimes. There's one story that I like about him going to a fancy Washington dinner and some society lady, he had this great reputation for his short answers anyway. One society lady said to him, I made a bet that I could make you safe more than three words. He said, you lose. Anyway, Yunmen, or Cloud Gate, was kind of like that.

[39:56]

He would give short answers. And talking about the ancestors, one time a monk said to him, what is the teaching of a Buddha's whole lifetime? What is the teaching of an ancestor's whole lifetime? And Yunmen said, an appropriate statement. That's pretty good. And then another time, a monk said to Yunmin, what is it that goes beyond all the talking of Buddhas and ancestors? And he said, cake. So here at Green Gulch, we could say, what goes beyond all this talk of Buddhas and ancestors? And the answer is muffins. Thank you very much. May our intention.

[40:50]

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