I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. I'd like to introduce Ross Long, for those of you who don't know him. Ross has probably been a resident here at BAC longer than anybody else in history at BAC. He just made himself at home here. the way things work and who does what and where this thing goes and where that thing goes and anybody else. Thank you for your kind words, Ron.

[01:15]

Today I'm going to talk about kind of generational practice, cross-generational practice, and Ron is one of the ancestors here and lived here many years ago and certainly knew all the nooks and crannies then and as things change, nooks and crannies change, I've assumed some of the responsibility for caring for some of them. And actually Alan's been living here a little bit longer than me, but it's one big family. So, a very common practice here is looking at old Asian stories and koans and relating them to our life today here in America.

[02:31]

And I think about that from time to time and I now like to look at my life in a mirror, kind of like driving in a car and looking in the mirror and looking back. So looking current time and reflecting back on how some of my life experiences and things I've learned from more contemporary teachers reflect back to what's consistent with the old teaching that we call Zen. And I wanted to share with you three sayings from an old teacher of mine. One of them is, the apple does not fall far from the tree. Another one is, watch the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.

[03:38]

And the third, more implied than an actual saying is, use what's at hand. Those sayings are They weren't created by my grandmother, my maternal grandmother, but she used to say them a lot. And my father likes to quote them, his mother-in-law saying, she came over to America from the Ukraine in the early part of the 20th century along with a bunch of other Jews and oppressed people to find a new life in America, the land of opportunity. times in Russia were very hard for many people and I think she took in her baggage of belonging some of the history of that time.

[04:45]

And I didn't quite appreciate it growing up as a kid, but looking back now I can see how much of a product her children and grandchildren all were from what she experienced. Her name was Sophie Schleien, Sophie Babich Schleien. Sophie Babich was her maiden name and she married Sam Schleien. And they knew each other in the old country, but they were a bit young to get married and they got together in New York and became husband and wife. And they raised one child, my mother, Barbara Schlein. And with the relative wealth and comfort that we have and that I live in today, it's kind of hard to imagine what it was like way back when, living close to the bone.

[06:02]

But she worked hard and she died relatively comfortable. She ran a corset shop and a post-operative wear shop for women. And when I would go visit her on New Lots Avenue in Brooklyn in East New York, it was otherworldly, very different from the little town of Fredericksburg, Virginia where I grew up. People were out late at night, there were wide boulevards, lots of cars, activity and noise, a little bit of grime, a little bit of urban grime. But I was kind of captivated by this store. One of the things that she did to kind of keep her grandchild busy was that she made me a little train from the lids of very flat little boxes that these women's undergarments came in.

[07:09]

So she tied three little lids together with a string, a long string, and I pulled them around in the store and pretended I was pulling a subway car, which was very evocative of that area because the subways in that part of New York are above ground. And the screeching steel against steel sound and the rattling of the trains, I can still hear that. And where I grew up, you didn't hear sounds like that. You heard birds and things a little bit more natural. So she made use of what she had there. She didn't have to buy me a toy to keep me busy. Another thing I saw there for the first time was an act of vandalism. It was very hot in the summer times, which is usually when I was up there. And so the front and back door of her store were open to let a little draft in.

[08:13]

And I remember as a kid looking out the door one day and these two kids ran in, turned on, one of the kids turned on the sink and then ran back out. There's a sink by the wall there on the wall there. And I just went like that. I couldn't quite believe it. It was just a little mischievousness that kids can do. But compared to this day and age, it's pretty tame. But I was really quite surprised at that. And I don't remember my grandmother saying anything at the time when she discovered that. I was thinking about her suspicious nature, that she had come from a country where her people were oppressed and she came to this country which was filled with all kinds of people that were not her own people except in the ghetto of East New York.

[09:23]

But she was a little suspicious of other people. And she didn't really have the means to kind of move beyond her conditioning. So her daughter absorbed some of that suspiciousness and critical nature. The upside is that you don't get taken for granted too often. The downside, of course, is that you can be a little bit cold and not so open. My dad was a bit more the other extreme, and I've spoken about this before, that I kind of absorb both those styles of relating to people. So all those expressions, an apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and watch your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves, and use what's at hand, sound very quaint and kind of otherworldly.

[10:25]

I think they're applicable for living today. So the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. I imagine my grandmother would use that term and people of her generation use that term to describe children that are kind of like their parents. In the business world, one can look at, say, a boss and their protege and not straying too far away from the roots and the teaching of what was tried to be impressed upon someone inheriting a business. And again, because where my grandmother grew up, there was a sense of Jews and I think some Italians also, it was kind of an enclave there that was pretty close-knit, and so you got to see parents and children pretty closely.

[11:42]

It's a different time now, and kids move away pretty quickly and there's a lot more mobility. So what was left out of this apple not falling far from the tree, what was left out from that metaphor of how children take on, or how people take on a personality that's similar to their parents or teachers, is the possibility for change. and the surprise that we feel when someone who acts a particular way acts suddenly out of character, either intentionally or not. And Zen literature is peppered with all sorts of stories of teachers acting unconventionally.

[12:45]

to kind of rock the student's sense of reality and conventionality and sort of stayedness to something that's new and maybe even enlightening. So what if we take that apple that falls pretty near the tree and pick it up and throw it to another orchard? What grows there? Well, our zendo is like that. The zendo is another orchard for us. We get to examine ourself and how we perpetuate our conditioning. And yet at any given moment, something entirely new can unfold and grow. were still apples, and each one tastes a little different, but has potential for change.

[13:58]

So the form that we carry is pretty apparent. But when we examine the cause and conditions that are truly ourselves, we see how there's nothing that's fixed. It's constantly changing and there's all these confluences coming together that moment by moment are expressed in a particular form called Ross or John. And this flowing expression is completely empty of a self. So if you cut an apple in half and you see the five seeds there, you can pretty much guess there's another tree is latent in those seeds.

[15:14]

But we don't know how it will grow until we cultivate it, which is what we do here in our Zazen practice. There's an old story about an ox in a cart and, you know, as the ox trudges forward, so do the two wheels follow the path that the ox is making and follows it. That's the story of our karma. Whichever direction we go, there's certain seeds are sown and the resulting karma is entirely us and everybody and everything else. And so goes our life, and so goes the lives of others. When I was composing my note for this talk, when I wrote down the lives of others, I suddenly thought about that movie that maybe some of you saw.

[16:24]

Raise a hand if you saw that. Okay, very good. The Lives of Others is a movie about this, before the wall came down, about this East German Stasi agent. And communism was still very much in place and he was in charge of spying on the locals. And one of the people that he was spying on happened to be an artist, a dramatic playwright, I believe. And as he listened to this artist and his friends talking about their life, he felt and experienced deeply something quite transformative. It was a life so different than his own. he couldn't quite reconcile it. He had this sort of dilemma of maintaining the status quo of being an agent and spying on people and finding incriminating evidence to put them away.

[17:32]

And then when you see his life portrayed on the screen, which was very conventional and pretty empty in a not so transcendent way, you could see that he was at a particular point in his life that he had to make a decision. It was a really great film. So he got a glimpse into a life other than his own that he saw some freedom and creativity in. And that apple in that orchard that he had happened to get a glimpse of was really something that he wanted to bite into, to carry the metaphor a little further. So, please see that movie if you haven't.

[18:40]

It's quite good. It's a great teaching. And fundamentally it takes a lot of courage to go beyond our conditioning. It's very easy to be a crate of apples or a crate of oranges and just go along together with your brothers and sisters to the market and get purchased and sliced up and eaten by esters. But it takes a lot to move beyond that. So while the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, there's always potential for some new growth. So how do we take care of pennies in order to get dollars?

[19:48]

There's a reason why there are stereotypes. Jews can be penny pinchers. And there's a downside of that, of being kind of greedy and tight and not getting the whole picture. But there's an upside of that, which is, as my grandmother learned, by saving and taking care of things, she was able to make a life for herself and her family and passed it on to another generation. However, I think the circumstances of her life were such that she couldn't really reward herself and the hard work that she undertook, so she didn't spare too many extravagances on herself.

[21:10]

And my mother kind of lived a schizophrenic life where she would go back to East New York, which was this kind of ghetto-ish sort of community where she lived and worked in her mother's store. And then she went to college at NYU in the village and got this whole other world of New York City. And desperately what kind of grabbed her, she really enjoyed that and to this day she still has kind of that bearing of a city girl. So of course if you don't have so much you can't think about dollars, you're just taking care of the small things in life. And while there's a kind of a linear progression of saving, there's something broader that teaching can help us with.

[22:34]

And that's being mindful. And not worrying so much about the relative value of the thing that's in front of us that's maybe small. or insignificant, somewhat prosaic. But as, again, the Zen literature tries to impress upon us, you know, by taking care of what's in front of you, the so-called larger world of enlightenment unfolds. And this was Suzuki Roshi's teaching as I understand it from the stories I've heard of just doing the everyday mundane activities of cleaning toilets and chopping carrots, preparing for a talk, drinking a glass of tea, a cup of tea. that by focusing on these pennies, these somewhat prosaic everyday occurrences, we're practicing in the midst of something much bigger.

[23:44]

And in a sense, the dollars have corrupted us. If you look at the market today, you can see where the focus is on dollars, which doesn't make much sense. And that's a problem. So we have the ordinary activity. And in practice, we can see that that can become extraordinary. Another way of saying that is extraordinary. And how do we get rid of the extra and just experience ordinariness? Many of the sidewalks and patio work around here is from recycled bricks.

[25:23]

And the doorstop on the patio bathroom door is a recycled drawer knob. So there are things around that we can make use of to give them another life. We don't have to go out and get something new. unless we really have to. Sometimes we can get stuck in just wanting to recycle and recycle and recycle when in fact it's time to toss it out and get something new. In the Mumon-Khan, there's a case number 10, entitled Seizei and the Poor. And the case simply reads, a monk Seizei eagerly asked Master Sozon, I am solitary and destitute.

[26:33]

I beg you, Master, please help me to become prosperous. Son said, Venerable Ze, Yes, master, replied Zay. San said, you have already drunk three cups of fine Hakka wine, and still you say that you have not yet moistened your lips? So there's kind of a double meaning in poor and destitute. there's the sort of mundane sense of poor and destitute, where in this day and age, a lot of people are subject to. And then there's the poor and destitute in the practice sense, where one doesn't really have anything. And when you don't have anything, then you're empty and you're ready to receive many things. And in our teaching, it's the Buddha Dharma.

[27:37]

As we sit and we empty out and become poor, we can become rich with the Dharma. And that's one reason why rich people have such a hard time. It's hard for rich people to become poor, but in a sense, easier for poor people to become rich. But nevertheless, rich or poor, as the Buddha said, really sticking to the Dharma is as rare as dirt sticking on your fingernail. It's quite difficult indeed. So Ron mentioned that those cookies for tea today were made by me, and I confess I made them. They're in the BCC cookbook, Sophie Schleien's Mandelbrot, my grandmother's cookie recipe.

[28:40]

However, it's been changed a little bit. Not only would she be surprised to see her Jewish grandson giving a talk at a Zen Buddhist temple in California, She would also wonder where the eggs went, because there were eggs in that recipe and I'm an aspiring vegan so I've left the eggs out. And she might also wonder where the chocolate chips and walnuts are, which have been replaced by pistachio nuts and dried cranberries. The red and green being somewhat evocative of Christmas and she might look askance at that particular color combination, but nevertheless That's what this grandson has made for you all to enjoy today. We have about 10 minutes or so if people have any comments or questions that they'd like to put forth for some further discussion on some things I brought up today.

[29:52]

Thank you for your attention. Sue? You were talking about the ox and the cart. Could you talk about that a little more? Well, as I understood the stories around that image, if you've ever been to a farm or a rural part of this country, there are these cartwheel tracks that are pretty set and it's kind of hard to get out of that rut. And the ox just kind of goes forward and the cart follows. And as a metaphor, I like to think of it as the ox of practice and the ox of enlightenment and being the

[30:56]

rider in the cart or the vehicle of practice following that to the end and staying on track. So the the other paths that we take and the deviations that I've taken in my life either physical by choice or emotional by choice or circumstance sometimes it's hard to find the ox. And when the ox appears, the sense of practice appears, or the inspiration and encouragement of others appears, then I can find my seat again in the cart and continue on. That's how I sense it. How about you? I don't know.

[32:01]

I mean, I wondered if where you were in the cart and if the cart was filling with anything. Was what? I wondered if the cart was filling with anything. Oh, filling? Well, my cart is hauled around a lot. Yeah. But sometimes you'll pass a truck on the road and it doesn't have the backup, you know, it's kind of down. And I think that's a good way of driving. Not on the freeway though. I think something might fall off on the freeway. But, you know, it's making use of something and letting go of it. But we tend to keep things, we tend to haul things around. And even worse, we have storage spaces and we store our haulings.

[33:02]

Yeah. Blake, did you have your hand up? No. Nancy? A question came to mind to me when you were talking about taking care of the small and in the midst of the large. out of the little tasks I do. And I wondered really how that worked. And I know from being here for a while, I know it's kind of basic to our practice, but so often I'm scattered. And so I was kind of pitting what you said against the way I live my life often. And do I with my scatteredness, I'm also in the midst of the larger, right? And what kind of gain, you know, the pennies add up to cash, paper, but how is what you said parallel to...

[34:17]

I mean, that would be a gaining thing. It would be a gaining thing. Well, I always remember something Norman Fisher said, one of Mel's students, which was, you know, we practice in this sort of mundane world just doing these simple activities that we all can enumerate for ourselves, but peripherally there is this idea of enlightenment. There is this concept or image of something that we're practicing in the midst of. I think that focusing too much on one side or the other isn't so good, but I feel it's a faith-based thing and that I can't say how you know, making cookies, which is a fairly mundane activity, is an enlightening practice or an enlightenment activity. I can't say how that does it, but there's something about the mundane that gets you in touch with not scatteredness at all.

[35:27]

Yeah. Well, you have to be alive to do the mundane things. You have to be alive. You do have to be. Just that awareness. You know, if I'm real tired, I feel half-dead. Right, but you're also half-alive, you know. Yeah, you're half-alive. You have a half-life. Yeah, well ... Well, it is, and as Suzuki Roshi told Soji once, you know, sometimes just being alive is enough. And I've fallen back on that numerous times when I've been overwhelmed and not been able to carry on, you know? Just being alive is enough. Yeah. Sherry? Thank you for your talk, Bob. You're welcome. I was curious, you talked a little bit about the changes in your life, and I was just wondering

[36:28]

Despite my hard-headedness and my opinionatedness that I admit to and that other people have experienced, I do not feel that I am as much that way as I once was. I feel I have more compassion and understanding for other people's suffering and less self-absorbed. I can see my sticking places sometimes and I can laugh at them. And I never would have done that before had I saw my sticking places. And I make Mondo bread with cranberries and pistachios and not chocolate chips and walnuts.

[38:06]

Funny thing about the Mondo bread is a friend of mine who knows Yiddish says Mondo means almond. And she didn't taste almond in my cookies. and I said, well that's interesting, my grandmother never told me that. So it's kind of another teaching of not always so, that mandu bread might not necessarily have almond in it. Right next to Sherry? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's conventional wisdom there, most definitely. Yeah, I think back then you probably had to crack pistachio nuts by hand, and there were no such thing as dried cranberries. Robin, I think might be the last question. I found your talk very interesting, because like you, as you get older, you start to realize that all those things that your grandparents and parents said to you, the precious things that you thought were ridiculous, that were boring or whatever, oh, long, you know.

[39:14]

And as I get older, I think about those things. And you were talking about the Cezanne, was it Cezanne? As a saying, the more you get, the more you want. Yeah, it really does. Yeah, it's a really different bottom line. You know, the bottom line here in our practice is nothing, is nothingness.

[40:18]

And the bottom line at Pete's is something and it's very difficult to reconcile the two, to put out the effort that we all do in our various walks of life, the careers that we have, of coming from nothing and not being attached to something and some result. be it profit-based or be it notoriety-based, all the various things where we get caught. And I think one of the things that I've learned over the years of practice is not getting too caught by the results of what I want and being able to let go a little bit more, even though I feel some kind of sense of sadness or loss. as we all experience loss in our life, that nothing lasts. And it's hard to forget that.

[41:20]

It's hard to remember that. It's hard to forget that. It's hard to remember that. Yeah. Thank you. Well, it's a wonderful day and There are plenty of cookies, so life is good. Thank you. Beings are numberless.

[41:48]

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