Mark, can you turn off the lights? The light is really wonderful in here today. I was going to say the birds. I'm a mixed mind about the jet planes. Can you hear me in the back? Good. It's a little soft. Let's see. John, do you know how to turn it up? That big knob that's got the little piece of tape. Yeah, just a little bit, I think. Can you hear me any better now? Is that better? Okay, good. What? To turn on the monitor. It is on. The light's on. The light's on. Okay. All right, any other electronic apparatus that needs to be attended to?

[01:03]

So this evening, at about six, we're going to have a priest ordination here, and you are all invited. It's going to be ordination for Greg Fain. Some of you may not recognize Greg. He's been away for a while, and also he has He has hair for the first time in a long time. So look now because you're not going to see it again." And Eric Green, who's back there. Identify yourself. So that'll be at 6 o'clock. And I thought that today I would talk a bit about ordination. very little about the history, but also more about what it means in our tradition and what it means in our lives.

[02:28]

And I hope leave some time for questions and discussion, because it's not an ordinary everyday event here. And we're not always sure what it means. Even those of us who have had different kinds of ordination are not always sure what it means. Sojin, when he was ordained by Suzuki Roshi, which I think was in 1968, so after the ordination, he went to Suzuki Roshi and said, well, what should I do now? And Suzuki Roshi said, I don't know. And that was not disingenuous, you know, I think that was a real response and we're all in a way ordained in this world.

[03:32]

We come into this world and we have to figure out what to make of our lives. There's very little that's assigned to us. Some things seem to be assigned by virtue of our background or our ethnicity or things like that, but still, we have to make our own lives. So this is just another expression of that same human process that everybody has to meet. So it's a joyous day when people take these kinds of vows. The history of ordination, it used to be very simple back in the Buddha's time. I mean, nobody ordained the Buddha.

[04:33]

He became a monk simply by shaving off his hair and beard and taking off his princely clothes and wearing the robe of a mendicant, of a wandering homeless monk. But there was no particular order of monks that he was in. When he became enlightened and began to draw people who wanted to follow the path that he had discovered, he started to create an order. But it was still pretty simple. It was just a bunch of people practicing together. And if you wanted to join the order, originally he would just say something like, come Bhikkhu or Bhikkhuni, you know, just come, monk.

[05:44]

You'd kind of join the wandering crowd for part of the year and the rest of the year you would wander on your own. That you were homeless, you cut off ties to family and to any of the ordinary endeavors of life. And you put yourself in a position of receiving the offerings of people and the offerings of the world. And then what you did initially was, as the Buddha did, you shaved off your hair and beard as a mark of renunciation and put on a saffron robe. And that was it. And that worked really well for a number of years. almost everybody, might be everyone that the Buddha ordained directly became an arhant, became a being who in relatively short order, although there were some exceptions, finished

[07:10]

set aside all defilements and was seen as having finished with life on this plane and would not return. So Arhat was seen as sort of one step short of complete full enlightenment, waiting only to sort of pass away from this life to accomplish that. But then the arhants themselves started doing ordinations and pretty soon the bar was a little bit lower. and they needed to have some rules. We've been talking about this in the precept class and what developed over the period of Buddha's life was about somewhere 225, it varies depending upon the lineage now, a whole bunch of rules for monks and nuns' way of life.

[08:28]

And those were not given in one fell swoop. There were some basic key precepts about not killing, not stealing, not intoxicating oneself, not lying, not misusing sexuality, and then there were whole series of very particular rules and each one of those rules evolved from something that someone had done because they weren't perfectly enlightened and so there's some very particular and kind of odd rules. Because somebody would do something and one of the other monks would say, well, you know, Bhikkhu so-and-so, I saw him doing such-and-such. And Buddha would say, well, don't do that. And that would become a Vinaya rule. And so they accumulated over time.

[09:34]

You can imagine, people are very inventive at what they can do. And when he died, Ananda was with him and they had a conversation and he said, well, after I'm gone, just keep the major rules and don't keep the minor rules. There's no need to keep the minor ones. Then they had the first council not so long after Buddha's death. And they brought in Ananda and said, well, what did the Buddha say? And he said, well, he said, keep the major rules and let the minor ones go. And they said, well, which are the minor ones? And Ananda said, oh, I forgot to ask. So they said, OK, we're going to keep them all. And they did. And so that was the essence of ordination, of monk or nun's ordination, full ordination, that continues to this day.

[10:42]

It was transmitted through India and through Tibet and through China, but with the rise of Mahayana Buddhism and with the rise of the the model of the bodhisattva, the enlightening being who practices for the sake of all liberation. You know, we're going to chant those vows at the end of this talk. Beings are numberless, I vow to save them or to awaken with them. That's the bodhisattva vow. with the rise of the Bodhisattva ideal, Bodhisattva precepts were given in addition to the Vinaya rules and there were

[11:45]

In that system, there were three refuges. Oh, I'm sorry, just to go back, that was also part of the original ordination, was to take refuge. Take refuge in Buddha, take refuge in Dharma, which is the teaching of the truths, and take refuge in Sangha, which is a community of practitioners. So in China, they developed these Mahayana precepts. And again, there were major ones and then about 48 lesser ones. And that was transmitted to Japan. And without going into a whole lot of detail, what happened in that cultural transformation to Japan was that for the most part, The Vinaya rules were just, they just kind of, they didn't take them as part of the ordination. They had monks and nuns who were celibate, who were home leavers, who

[12:56]

kept the essential rules, but they developed their own, each sect and each temple had their own rules for life. And Dogen developed those for Eiheiji and a number of, there are a number of these things that are called Shingi, which are just, Shingi are just the rules for the monastery. But the essence of what they took were the Bodhisattva vows, which were about how to live in a way that saves all sentient beings. And with the exception of a very few small sects in Japan, they didn't take the full Vinaya rules. So it's rare to find you know, a full monk in the way that that's recognized in other South Asian traditions. Then in the Zen tradition, you know, Japanese Buddhism became, it had a very complex relationship to the state.

[14:15]

And for better and worse, in certain ways one could say mostly for worse, but that's from my perspective. A number of the sects became, a number of sects had armies and did battle with each other. They didn't have, I mean it's partly because they didn't have these Vinaya rules to say, you know, you can't do that. And they did it all, of course, in the name of enlightenment, you know, and higher principles. You know, where have we heard this before? And they developed their own kind of independent power base or bases. And with the Meiji era, which was an era where Japan was really looking to the West,

[15:19]

in a way to kind of undercut the political power of monasticism, they decreed that monks should marry with, I think, the understanding that if you tied a monk to a wife and family, and a place, their allegiances would tend to be in that direction rather than so much with their sect. And also their energies would be bound up with their family and not so much with making an army or conspiring against the state. So we have this very anomalous monastic rule where which really can't be found in almost any other Buddhist tradition, where we have people who take monks' vows, a monk's ordination, and then are like me, or Mel, you know, we have families.

[16:35]

So we're not monks. We are monks and we aren't monks. And how many times, I'm sure there's lots of you who have heard Mel give some variant of that talk, this talk, many times. It's kind of odd to be up here doing it. And the only reason I'm doing it is because he's at Tassajara until this afternoon. So we have this ordination. We have two kinds of ordination here. You see a lot of people wearing rock suits. That's a robe. constructed along the same principles as this rope, but smaller, and that represents, that's what's given when you receive the precepts and you enter the lineage, you have what's called zaikei tokudo, which is householders or home dwellers' ordination, where you receive the ten precepts and you still, you know, you live your life

[17:45]

and you go to work, and you just mix in with everybody. But with the precepts, as a kind of organizing principle for your life, something that really gives you strength and encouragement, something you can keep coming back to in order to find a perspective on your thoughts, your speech, your actions. And then we also have what we're going to mark today, what we call shukke tokudo. And here's where things start getting a little murky. Because shuke actually means home leaving. You know, it's for, it's the Japanese version of the traditional process that the Buddha took on when

[18:58]

when he ordained and when he ordained others. And so it's marked by taking on, by first of all shaving your head, and which is a, you know, that kind of tonsure is a mark of renunciation in most or many religious traditions. And so we shave the head And then the abbot does the final shaving to make sure that Well, first of all the abbot is Acting as Buddha, but also to make sure that the person having ordination is Really wants to do it, you know ready to do it. So everything is shaved You'll see this if you come your whole head is completely shaved smooth except for one little patch And that's kind of the last stage of this tonsure.

[20:01]

So you shave and you receive robes and bowls. And again, in the irony of, you know, I should have brought this down. I have a Theravada begging bowl, which is this, big old lacquered bowl, usually now it's metal, and it's big, you know, it's like, it can hold a lot of food. And it costs about $3 at most if you buy one in Thailand or Burma. And we receive these elegant lacquered bowls with a set of cloths. And they cost about $200. It cost a lot of money to become a mendicant in Japan. We don't even get the full mendicant outfit. There's a whole outfit that you have to have if you're going to beg.

[21:05]

And that cost about $1,000. So this is what it's come to. So you receive the robe and bowls, and then you take the refuges, and take the pure precepts, vow to refrain from evil, to do all good, and to save the many beings, and then the ten prohibitive, prohibitory precepts, although the way we've developed it here is we those ten precepts are framed in the prohibitory way and then also in the positive encouraging way. So something like, I vow not to kill but to cherish all life. I vow not to steal or not to take what is not given but what's the

[22:09]

But to honor the gift not yet given. So, we take these, we frame it with these both dimensions of the precept. And then, it's also true that Tokugo, the characters for Tokugo, are the same characters that mean, in same Chinese characters, it means emancipation from birth and death. So by implication, when we have ordination, whether it's lay ordination or priest ordination, it's entry into enlightened life, a life of liberation. So that's pretty encouraging. So Greg and Eric are going to do this, and then they're both going back to Tassajara, which is where, ideally, because they don't have families, they can get this really good training.

[23:32]

and really learn how to live with others day by day, to practice as priests day by day, and to mix with the community. And that's a pretty conventional way that at Zen Center they do it when you're ordained you go to Tassajara and because Greg and Eric don't have ties that, you know, except for us, that keep them here. We send them down there with the full expectation that then they're going to come back here and help us at some point. And Tassajar is a wonderful place to train and we're happy to have them go and do that. I'm also a little sad that I won't have the opportunity to train with them daily and figure out how to work together and how to be kind to each other, which is the essence of the training.

[24:40]

And you won't have the opportunity of having these new priests among you so you can ask daily, why is he a priest? What does that mean? He was, you know, look, they were both, this morning, they were both, had their hair and wear the rakhusus and their, you know, no robes and, you know, what was that that happened? Which is an excellent question for us. Really good question. You know, whether we are, you know, it's not necessary that all of us take ordination. We have a very strong lay path. in this community. And this is something that Suzuki Roshi gave us. And it was quite a number of years before he ordained anyone. And it was quite a number of years that Mel was practicing before he ordained anyone. So why, what's the purpose of it?

[25:42]

You know, in our, the way I see it, In our tradition, the ordination is, well, first of all, it's a way of just being able to ensure a kind of continuity in the practice that's based on this, there's a kind of transmission from your teacher, from teacher to disciple, and this is what the disciple really has to want to do. with her or his life. It's kind of a primary focus of practice. And they're willing to place themselves in a position of kind of mutual accountability. And this is not true in all ordinations. In a Theravada ordination, you do have a preceptor and you have an emotional and Dharmic connection to the person who gives you the precepts, who ordains you, but you don't necessarily relate to them in your life much.

[27:06]

You know, in other places, if one wants to ordain, one just can ordain. Here, as I'm sure Greg and Eric and many of us can testify, it's a long process. You know, you have to clarify your intention, then you're working with your teacher, and that relationship is very important. So it's a way of working with a teacher of being accountable to that person and also then of that person becoming accountable to you. That's one dimension of it. Another dimension that I see is that it's important for us to have a kind of parallel accountability with this community. And that's also something that is different in other ordained traditions.

[28:19]

You know, we witness that person, and we witness each person who wears a robe, whether it's priest or raksu, we witness their conduct, we witness how they work. you know, we work with them and they're accountable to us and we're accountable to each other. And I think at this particular point in time, I don't think Mel, maybe this is presumptuous speaking for him, but I think almost entirely he's interested in ordaining people who are connected to a particular sangha or community, certainly for this community.

[29:23]

He's quite reluctant, even though someone may have a really terrific mind and practice of the Dharma, if they're not practicing within the Sangha, then there's something incomplete. And so this is, I see it as a kind of ordination into the Sangha. Now sometimes people go away. You know, they go and train elsewhere, across the Sahara or elsewhere, but they're still in this family, you know, and when they come home, you know, it's the daughter or son returning, and we feel very connected to them. And so that's at least, I think, an attitude with which to go into this.

[30:24]

And then each person who is taking coordination has to wrangle with that question of, well, what do I do now? And no one will quite tell them. One has to figure it out, how to For the first year, you're trying to figure out how to wear your clothes. And if you're like me, it takes more than a year. And we're always working on it. But that's good. It gives you a very concrete issue to work with. We were talking the other day. Mel was talking and I had the same experience of somewhere in the first month or two, you get completely, you'll be taking off your robes or putting them on and you're lost.

[31:33]

You're buried in a pile of black cloth. So you really need help to get you out of it. And this is pretty interesting for somebody who's been practicing maybe 10 years or 12 years or more. You know, to feel like totally inept. To go back to the beginning. You know, it's easy to put on our clothes in the morning. We know what we do. We don't usually get lost putting our socks on. But you get lost in this pile of cloth. And you thought maybe you knew something about practice or knew something about the Dharma, and you're supposed to be a model sitting up right there. It's like, well, how do you do that when you're in this heap of black cloth and you need help? So this is, it takes a while. And it takes a while to learn how to move.

[32:34]

So in these ropes, this rope has full sleeves. It's got a lot of sleeves. And if you move quickly, you knock over something or you catch it on a banister. So these are superficial things, but they are part of the process of how we train ourselves to live our lives, how we train ourselves to move. And in that respect, it's not any different from the way each of us is ordained into our lives. When we move hastily, we make mistakes. When we're not careful and we're not paying attention, we need help. So it's just, it's kind of an analog for that. And we watch these people and how they learn to work with their lives, how they learn to work with their clothes and conduct themselves can be deeply encouraging.

[33:45]

And we can learn from that and when they make mistakes that's also encouraging because we see that even though it looks like they're special they're not you know they're just human each of us is just human we make mistakes and so it gives us an opportunity to work with compassion and that we do in our lives regardless of what clothing or what robe we're wearing. Each of us receives the precepts. You receive it for Jukkai and you receive it for priest ordination and we do it every month here during Bodhisattva ceremony. We live this preceptual life, this life of awareness

[34:50]

and connection and mutual accountability. And I think that that's what Suzuki Roshi transmitted here. And sometimes it looks like it gets lost in the midst of formalities and rituals, but that is the heart of what we're doing. to be able to practice that is just a rare opportunity and we're really fortunate because most places in the world that practice is kind of reserved for the monks and nuns, mostly the monks and then everybody else is sort of taking care of them, and that's the practice of devotion, which is wonderful.

[35:53]

But here, we all get to practice that way. We all get to practice in the way you've heard countless times here, that we're not, all of us are living like monks or priests in some way. All of us have to practice renunciation in our lives in order to create harmony for others. And that goes across the board, you know, and it includes the priests, the new ones and the old ones who, you know, who quite honestly don't live much like monks. But we are also trying to figure out how to manifest the Dharma, how to make that kind of touchstone for our lives.

[37:00]

So I think I'll stop there. There's a little time for questions and comments. And just to invite you to come this evening at six and just sort of bear witness What is the difference between priest and monk? Right. I knew somebody was going to ask that. Well, priest is a function and monk is a kind of way of life. So the ordination, there is no priest ordination. It's monk ordination. But in Japan, there are monks who live in the monastery, and then all of the priests have also had some monastic experience, but priest means they take care of a temple. And there are monks, we do, you know, there's a little group of people in Mill Valley,

[38:06]

you know, who are trying to, I think they're students of Rebs. Is that right? Yeah. And they are living, they're trying to live a monastic life, or as close to it as they can. But a priest, I think, sort of, It's not a great word, but it's the best one we have. It has other baggage, I think. It has baggage as kind of intermediary with God, which is not quite the case. But priests also do perform ritual functions that, for the most part, We don't have lay people doing and I think that this is a tension that is still You know, it's still it's a work in progress Yeah, so when you

[39:10]

When you have any kind of ordination, you receive a dharma name. What's yours? Kesankosho. Kesankosho, which means? Well... noble mountain, harmonious spirit. That's pretty good. So this is traditional in Japanese Buddhism anyway. You will receive on, when you have, when you receive the precepts, whether it's lay precepts or monks precepts you receive a name. Sometimes it's a two-character name and sometimes it's a four-character name. Usually here we have a four-character name and that's there are sort of rules for constructing these names which we're getting better at understanding.

[40:20]

My name, my official way name is Kushiki, well it's Hozan Kushiki, the Dharma Mountain, which is very nice, you know, and kind of understandable. And that's kind of a I think it's the Dharma name, is that right? And then you get your way name, which is your true name. And mine is Kushiki, which is like in the Heart Sutra, form and emptiness. So it's empty form, which is kind of a weird name. When the Japanese hear that name, they laugh. You know, because like, oh, you know, nobody's called that. But that's what I got. That's what's on my papers. And so this is important, the way Mel

[41:23]

gives us these names and I think it's pretty consistent within Zen centers. The first name is like a quality that's already manifest and visible. You can see that quality in the person. And the second name is what they need to be working on, what they need to bring forth and manifest. So you can get a new name Sometimes new names are given at ordination. That's not happening today that you know of, right? I'm certain that it isn't. Usually, particularly, you know, Greg and Eric both had their lay ordination with Soja. And so sometimes if you have lay ordination with one teacher and monk ordination with another, then the name, the new teacher might want to give you a new name because they see different qualities. But generally, we don't change them that much.

[42:29]

I just wanted to make a comment about how You do find out. I mean, nobody tells you. You get out and nobody really tells you what it is. And then as you go along, you kind of find out what exactly what the expectations are. Right. And there are certainly many moments when your teacher is a whole lot more directive than, I don't know. And I'm sure that almost anybody here can testify to that. Other questions, comments? This whole issue has always kind of baffled me because I've wondered if somebody gets ordained as a priest because they have a commitment and a goal to serve the Son. of realization.

[43:40]

I think that's a confusing point. Oh, well I can be real clear on that. It's the former and not the latter. That ordination does not signify realization or understanding. And this is a confusion, you know, because when you put these robes on, when other people see you, there's a natural objectification. And this is something that we have trouble with on both sides. So when you, you know, it's like when you wear the robe, when you put on, when you have priest ordination or monk's ordination, then it's like you really are starting over as a kind of beginner. You're not a teacher, and that may become your path. but it may not, and I do know that he is working with several people in this sangha who do not wear this robe, who are going to

[44:43]

have a more, well, we have two stages of recognition as a teacher. The first is when you are the shuso, the head student. And that's coming up. And Doug Greiner over there is going to be the head student for a practice period in May. And he's been practicing longer than any of us. Wouldn't you say? That's because I need to. Right. And so when you're a shuso or head student, then that's kind of recognition of your first kind of teacher. You begin to do teaching after that. And then a seojin is also working on a kind of another stage of recognition. And those do recognize understanding. And usually when you're ordained as a monk or a priest, then you're not shuso for another four or five years. of training. So it's really separate.

[45:45]

It's more like, well, wanting to live in a way in service to the Dharma, even though you may not get it so well, you have some intuitive sense about yourself, how you want to live. And Sojan has some intuitive sense. He wouldn't do it if he didn't think this person has qualities to develop. But sometimes they take a while to develop. Does that help? Yeah. So don't objectify. You know, and Don't presume that someone wearing a robe has a better understanding than someone not having a robe. And don't hold them, well, you can hold them to a higher standard because they made some choices that make them visible. Don't hold them to a lower standard, but treat them kindly.

[46:48]

And that's maybe that's a good place to stop. Thank you.

[46:54]

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