I see only a few people I know, so hello to people I know. My name is Lynn Zenke. I'm a priest and I live at San Francisco Zen Center, at City Center. And August is a Traditionally, a month that clergy go away on vacation, so the seminary students get to come and preach. So, you get a student, a seminary student to preach in August, and that's kind of part of it. It's like KPFA, for those of you who listened to it yesterday on the morning show, the kids took over the morning show, and that's kind of what it feels like. They were very excited and they got confused, so bear in mind that that may happen. And I kept thinking when I woke up this morning, well maybe I won't make it across the bridge, and I nearly didn't.

[01:12]

It was closed, or it was blocked off pretty heavily on my way over here, so I thought I shouldn't wish, be careful what I wish for. Also, it seems to lecture after the full moon ceremony, There's not much more to say. You just did it with your body and mind completely. I don't know that I can add a lot of information to what you all just did. Since Zen is more experience than words, even though there's a lot of words written about Zen, certainly, particularly in our culture, what you just did, the Full Moon Ceremony, the Bodhisattva Ceremony, is the history and purpose of Buddhism all put together, and everything's there for you. So, I apologize if this is a short lecture.

[02:18]

I was thinking on my way over here, even though generally I have an idea when I'm lecturing of a topic, It's always flavored by what's going on in my own life. It's not possible to do it any other way. And I realized the last several days I've been feeling a lot of grief, both for myself and for other people in my life. Injured relationships, people who have died. people who are going away. One thing about living at Page Street City Center in San Francisco is a lot of people come and go because it's an entering point into the Zen Center system for a lot of people. And so people come and go a lot, and they go to Tassajara, or they go to Green Gulch, or they stay a short time. So there's a lot of that. So I tend to experience a certain amount of grief. I was thinking about a story that probably one of my favorite stories of Buddha is a very powerful king thinking that he would find out, get information from Buddha.

[03:31]

Went to Buddha and asked him, who are my worst enemies? Who's going to do me the most harm? Thinking that he would get a scoop on his rivals. And Buddha said to him, well, your wife and your sons... Wait a minute, these people like me. And Buddha said, and they'll cause you the most suffering. The separation from them, the pain at their loss, and how they affect your life is the greatest suffering that you have will arise from the connection. It's not your political enemies. And there's no way to not have that pain and suffering. It's what life is, is everything arises and falls away. And we have this image that this form that we're in is constant.

[04:36]

And the big joke is it's not. And Zen is about experiencing that. So, I wanted to talk a little bit today about what is a Zen student. Trampa Rinpoche, who is the Tibetan, was the Tibetan monk and then later layperson who founded the Dharmadhatu throughout the United States. As I understand, his reincarnation has now appeared and so he's returned. I think Dharmasala in India, anyhow. He said at a lecture, at a public lecture to introduce people to what Tibetan Buddhism is, he said, don't step lightly on the spiritual path because once you're on it, you can't get off of it. And you may want to. So,

[05:40]

all of you are here this morning, I'm sorry to say you've already stepped on it. So that statement's not so helpful perhaps, but it may help to bear it in mind when things come up and it's difficult to practice. It's kind of one of those situations where you don't want to kill the messenger for the message that they're delivering. because often practice stirs you up messages that you don't want about yourself, about the world, about the nature of existence. So we often times have a tendency to kill the messenger, kill the practice, but it doesn't really go away. It's always will be at the back of your mind, kind of like a mosquito. You're already here, and what does that mean? What are you going to do? My experience at City Center is that everyone who walks through our door generally comes through because they have a lot of pain, both emotional, sometimes physical.

[06:54]

People that are completely happy in their lives generally don't come to sit cross-legged facing a wall for 40 minutes at a time. And I haven't met anybody like that, so... We're all looking for something. And all of us would probably define it in a different way. We're all individual in that sense. But what are we looking for? What does a Zen student do? And what does it mean to take on that? And I think that this is actually an American version of practice because in Japan people study Zen but they're not Zen students for a lifetime like most of us in this country have had the tendency to be. And it's something that's done for some people as a job. Their father had a temple and they go into it and so it's a job.

[08:00]

It's not the same thing as those of us who have other jobs, and all of a sudden you find that your Zen practice is now your second part-time job, or your third part-time job, or all of a sudden it becomes your full-time job, and you're not sure what's happening. You get pulled to Tassajara, you get pulled into coming here every morning, six mornings a week. You come and sit a session, and your friends, what are you doing? And usually their take on meditation, people who don't practice meditation, is it's going to make you calm and serene. It doesn't, does it? It actually stirs everything up. And that's what it's supposed to do. However, it causes certain problems in our lives. It brings up conflicts that we never thought we would have. Partly, I think that's why I have a fondness for city practice.

[09:06]

Tassajara, the retreat, I hesitate to call it monastic because it's not celibate and it's not all men. It's a combination of couples and people. So it runs training periods during the fall and winter where it's closed to the public. It's very intense, it's very concentrated. You really learn to focus. But sitting practice is really interesting because you have to balance between your meditation practice and walking down the street and doing your job and being with your family, however that manifests itself. It's figuring out, do you give the panhandlers money or don't you? What's your volunteer work? What does sitting and looking at a wall do for the world? I mean, I think that that's an issue that all of us face. So I have a deep fondness for Siddhi practice in that I think it develops compassion.

[10:16]

And that's one hallmark of a Zen student, is compassion. The practice of looking at the world with compassion. The other component is equanimity, I think. How does sitting, zazen, allow you to go through the world, to deal with your own karma, to deal with the karma of the people that you run into? Learning to sit and work with your own body and mind and allow things to arise and fall away is basically Giving you the experience to have that when you're not sitting facing the wall Something else trumpet said was that you neither embrace no push away what arises, but you exist with it And I pretty much would say that that's a definition of nirvana

[11:28]

but it's also the definition of suffering. Being a Zen student is living within paradox. It's getting up at 5 a.m. and then working a full-time job. It's getting up at 5 a.m. and having a relationship with someone else who doesn't get up at 5 a.m. It's having kids wanting your attention. and you understanding what it means to give your full attention because you just finished orioke breakfast. It's funny after a seven day, during a seven day Sashin, how beautiful a bowl of rice can look. You know, you didn't really know what rice looked like until you had it served to you, brought to you and served to you in Sashin. At City Center, we have more residents.

[12:36]

The building was built by Julia Morgan, and it was built as a residential hotel for Jewish women in 1926. So it's like living in an old-style dorm, basically. There's communal bathrooms. There's nothing like trying to live with 35 other people and sharing a bathroom with seven other women and trying to get along. because we all really do it differently. And we have people in the building ranging in age from 24 to 81. We have a woman whose name is Helen Dunham. She's an artist. And she worked for a long time at the Jungian Institute. And 12 years ago she came to Zen Center once. And it's like I said, I caution you all, you've already stepped on the path. She didn't come back for 10 years. And now she's spending, her plan is to spend the rest of her life living as a resident there. It caught her.

[13:37]

And she has 81 years worth of karma to deal with. And she follows a schedule. There's a few slight adjustments that have been made for her age. But very few. She doesn't do night watch. She doesn't have to lock up the building and sleep downstairs. That's about the only concession that she's asked for. The rest of the thing, she follows a schedule. She sits and she does meal preps. And she said, if anyone had ever told me when I was 40 that this is how I would spend my life, the end of my life, I would have just laughed in their face. And she, her room is a We can see into each other's windows, and we've become kind of friends because both of us have insomnia, which is a real problem when you sit Zazen at five in the morning. So we see each other's lights on late at night, like at eleven or twelve.

[14:43]

Someone asked me, didn't the light coming into my room from hers bother me? And I said, I liked it because I knew someone else was up suffering with the design. But no, but more, I knew my connection with her. I mean, Helen and I are not only physically the antithesis of each other, but opinion, everything else, we paint, she paints, and oils and I paint in water-based. She paints realistic and I paint abstract. She doesn't like color and I love color. I mean, we're the antithesis of each other. And yet, we come together in our practice. I see the light on in her room and I feel a deep connection to her. I look at all of you sitting, straight postures, hands in the mudra, attention to your body, to your breath, And even though I don't know you, I do know you, because you're all familiar to me.

[15:50]

And Helen was... I was telling the story to Helen. The other thing Helen did, she swears she didn't, but she did, when she first moved in the building, sometimes on the holidays, we'll have a closed kitchen, so the kitchen staff can be off. And we order pizza, which is a great treat. I don't know why, but it's a great treat to us. And so she ordered pizza. She'd been in the building for about two weeks and she ordered pizza and it came and it was covered with sausage and pepperoni. Not that some of us don't eat meat, but in the building we don't cook meat. And we all ate it. It was gone. But... These are the things that connect us to each other, our relationship. This is what Zen is about. Being a Zen student is half of your time is spent alone, which actually comes from a smushing of two words all one.

[17:01]

So you're not really alone, but facing the wall. The other 50% of the time is how you interact with everybody. You know, when you live in closeness with each other like we do at City Center, you get it every day. But you get it here, too. This whole center is supported by the efforts of everyone here. So I was telling Helen about, so we look at each other's lights and it's sort of, we know that someone else is there. And she was, like I said, she was involved with the Young Institute, and she was at a lecture, and who sat next to her but was Marie-Louise von Franz. And Helen was just like, oh. And she started to put her coat on because she was cold, and Marie-Louise helped her put her coat on and then patted her on the shoulder and said, we are all huddled together here in the storm.

[18:09]

So she didn't know she was a Zen student, but she's a Zen student too. So being a Zen student is about compassion. Developing compassion. Not just for all beings, but for yourself. Of opening up that in yourself. Because you can't love another until you actually love yourself. It's not a self-indulgent love. It's the strength to look inside of yourself and see who you are. That's self-love. That doesn't mean everything's okay. It's looking at your warts. It's opening to that experience. Sitting Zazen and being a Zen student is learning to experience everything.

[19:11]

on the cellular level. Like I said, you've done the full moon ceremony. You have all of the teachings, all of the 2,500 years of teaching of Buddha in your body. It's all there. You don't need more words. You don't need more ideas. Most of us could do to get rid of some of our ideas. but it's on the cellular level. My favorite Suzuki Roshi story is one Jesuit priest asked Suzuki Roshi, he said, really, what is the difference between you and I? We're both priests, we're both really trying to help people wake up to be saved. Buddhism is also about salvation. He said, what's the difference? Now what's this guy mean?

[20:15]

This is a Zen joke. And Suzuki Roshi went on to explain that the Jesuit used his skin, or his exterior, to separate him from everyone. And Suzuki Roshi used his skin to connect him to everyone. So you learn to understand that you're not a barrier, but rather you're a connection. And that goes not just for people in here, but throughout. We study koans and Soto Zen more to help our practice. We don't quite pursue them in the same way that Rinzai do. This is from the Gateless Barrier.

[21:21]

It's a translation by Akinroshi. It's called Manjushri and the Young Woman in Samadhi. And the case goes, once Manjushri went to the place where many Buddhas had assembled with the World Honored One. When he arrived, all the Buddhas had returned to their original dwelling place. Only a young woman remained seated in samadhi near to the Buddha's seat. Manjushri addressed the Buddha and asked, How can a young woman get near the Buddha's seat when I cannot? The Buddha replied to Manjushri, Awaken this young woman from her samadhi and ask her yourself. Manjushri walked around the young woman three times, snapped his finger once, took her to the Brahma Heavens and exerted all of his supernatural powers, but he could not bring her up.

[22:22]

The World Honored One said, Even a hundred thousand Manjushris cannot awaken her. Down below, past twelve hundred million lands, innumerable as the sands of the Ganges, lived the Bodhisattva of Delusive Wisdom. He will be able to wake her up. Instantly the bodhisattva of delusive wisdom emerged from the earth and made vows before the world-honored one who gave him his imperial order Delusive wisdom stepped before the young woman snapped his fingers once and at this she came out of Samadhi The comment is old Chucky Mooney put on a disorderly comedy at this time no better than a child Manjushri is the teacher of the seven Buddhas. Why can't he bring the young woman out of Samadhi? Delusive wisdom is the Bodhisattva at the beginning level. How could he bring her out? If you can see this intimately, then in the flurry of karma and discrimination, you are a dragon of great Samadhi.

[23:27]

How could he bring her out? If you can see into this intimately, Then in the flurry of karma and discrimination you are a dragon of great samadhi. One can bring her out and the other cannot. Both of them are free. A god mask, a devil mask. The failure is an elegant performance. This koan is a good koan for a Zen student because it touches all those parts of a Zen student's life in city practice. We're all Buddha, we're all Manjushri, we're all the woman deep in Samadhi, and we're also the Bodhisattva of delusive wisdom. In the swirl of our karma and our discrimination is where our practice resides.

[24:33]

No more, no less. You don't have to go away to practice. You don't have to stop your life to practice. You just have to practice. You have to open to it. That means to open to yourself. Dogen says, take that backward step that turns your light inward. And in that reflected light, you see the whole world. You can't, you have to be fearless in your fear. You have to pursue awakening with pure intention. A modern koan is the story of Harriet Tubman, who was the first woman general, the first black woman general in the Union Army.

[25:36]

She brought many slaves out. She was the greatest spy the Union Army had. And she suffered from epilepsy that was caused by a severe blow to her head when she was a child, a beating, when she was a slave. And she never knew when she would have a seizure and pass out for a day. And it never stopped her from the pursuit of what she thought was right. It never stopped her compassion. And she never was in a situation where she wasn't cared for when the epilepsy occurred. You have to take that step. That's what being a Zen student's about. You have to be fearless in your fear. You embrace it. And you look at it. All the teachings are contained in the full one ceremony that you just did.

[26:43]

All the teachings are registered in your body. There's nothing more that I can say, so I'll stop, and thank you very much. And open it to questions, that's how you do it here, isn't it? I get put on the hot seat right away, so I'd like to open it to questions, if people have My buddhist name It's also my business license name I took it Lin is my name and I just kept that and changed the spelling my dharma name is conscience Enki and conscience means generous heart and Zinky means the whole works It's a big name to live up to a very big name

[27:50]

So I work at it. Yes? You said a little bit about the Buddha of Delusive Wisdom. That's the, oh, I'm sorry. Would you like to know? The Buddha of Delusive Wisdom is, there's, Mahayanas are great at having numbers. Okay, of different things, and I think actually someone at Tassajara many years ago put together a book of lists, and I think it's in the Berkeley Library, so it has it by numbers, one, two, three. So there's twelve levels to the Bodhisattva. Delusive Wisdom is the first level, and it's what you are when you first come to practice. You're so eager, you throw yourself in it, and you still abide in your dualism to no end. But it's that enthusiasm for practice. that this is what I want to do. It's that, just like, jumping in and having absolutely no idea what you're getting yourself into.

[28:53]

And it's delusive in the sense that you still abide and you still believe in dualism. Or you still think in that way. But it's that enthusiasm. Yes? Well, this may sound so simplistic, but I want you to risk it. All the things, almost all the things I can think of that I've held on to in my life, and there are numerous, to feel safe, have basically fallen away. So it's a great time to practice. But it's also a time of, fear doesn't even say it. Terror says it a lot better. I'd love a little help with, thoughts on facing the fear. You said being fearless about your fear.

[29:55]

And I know that I'm tiptoeing toward that, but I'm still afraid of my fear. Do you have any thoughts on that? I'm such a novice about this. I have a lifetime of thoughts on it. At the risk of a simplistic answer, I first would say, For me, that's what's always worked in my life, because it was the place that I allowed the feeling of terror even to emerge, and it was the place where I met the terror, and it's the place where I've been able to move through the terror. But still, it's very difficult, and to understand, I think also to understand that it's difficult and to still do it, is not, because The problem with fear is it tends to immobilize you and make things concrete.

[30:56]

And actually, fear and terror are just like joy. They arise and fall away. When I get particularly seized by terror on occasion, I try to remember. It's like for people who have flashbacks or they have nightmares or they have very hellacious memories. They're also like your good memories. They start and they stop and it's important to remember that they will pass and that you will go through them. And even if a present situation is in your face and you're in danger, All you can do is to be right there at that moment. And that sounds simplistic, but it's very difficult to do. And I don't know any other way through it. Because turning away from it, there's a line in the Jeweled Mirror Samadhi that says, turning away and touching are both wrong. You have to just, you have to go through it.

[32:01]

And always remember that what arises passes away. Not only the good things, you know. You know, the good times are always over so quickly and the painful times seem like they last longer. But that's merely your perception of it. And it's hard in the grips of something that's totally terrifying to remember that this too will fall away and that all you can do is all you're doing right now. That's a very important thing to feel. It's not this, it's this. It's like when you bow in the full moon. Someone called the full moon ceremony xenorobics. There's a lot of bows in there. And at some point you can't think about anything but just bowing. That's why we bow. We don't bow because it's sacred, we bow because once you start doing it, things literally drop away. And you learn that, doing it over and over, you learn to take that into all situations. So that's it.

[33:05]

Thank you very much.

[33:27]

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