Well, I'd like to welcome a dear old friend, Peter Shearson, to our temple today. His Dharma name is Myoshin Kuzon, Wonderful Heart, Formless Mountain. Peter started practicing in 1964 with Joshu Suzuki Roshi. And then he came up to Berkeley and practiced in 67 and 68 with Sojin Roshi at BCC on Dwight Way. along with his wife, Grace Shearson. He and Grace were married by Suzuki Roshi at Zen Center in 1968. And after about ten years in Canada and five years in Boston, they returned to California and began practicing again here at PTC on Russell Street. And he was later ordained by Sojin Roshi. A little later, he and Grace practiced with Kyoto Fukushima, a Zen master of Tofukuji Monastery in Kyoto, and was ordained as a priest several years ago by Chikyudu Lou Richmond.

[01:05]

His home temple, along with his wife Grace, is the Abbess there, is Empty Nesnendo in North Fork, California, in the foothills of California. And he leads a small sitting group in Fresno, and supports the saga of Pleasant Valley State Prison. In his spare time, he writes and likes to play with his children. He and Grace have led a number of pilgrimages to Japan, to Rinzō-en and the temples associated with our practice here. And so he's very knowledgeable about Japanese culture and the way there. And when I think of Peter, I see him as a really great balance between the sincerity of forms in our practice and then a lightness and sense of humor

[02:07]

couching that form. He has a really great one-two punch. Thank you very much. Thanks. Good morning. I was thinking about what to talk about today, and I was thinking about the last time I gave a Saturday talk. It was some years ago. And I had fairly recently at that point been ordained as a lay teacher by Sojin, a green raksus person. And I came in and did my vows and gave the talk and afterwards I was out having tea with people and a young guy came up to me and said, that was awesome. I said, oh, thank you very much. He said, no, awesome. And, you know, not able to resist an opportunity for narcissistic supplies.

[03:18]

I said, so It was awesome. I saved myself so much for an unsurpassed, penetrating, and perfect day. So I thought about that I would be giving the talk today as a priest in a very different costume. I had a kesa, a juban, a kimono, and so on. And so I thought I would talk about what happened and how I changed clothes over years. Not so much just as an autobiographical talk, although there's some autobiography in it, obviously, but as a way to talk about some of what I understand about practice.

[04:20]

I'd like to start by talking about the vows that we're going to give at the end of the talk and specifically the second bodhisattva vow about Delusions which I think everybody knows delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them Some years ago. I was giving a talk at a session in Mexico this was with Norman Fisher who leads retreats down there and I Most of the people who were sitting were Mexicans, and so there was a translator for the talk, for all the talks. So I would say a few sentences, and then she would translate them into Spanish, which I really liked for several reasons, partly because really you only have to give sort of half a talk because you only get half the time. But I speak some Spanish. Translated what I said, and I when I whenever I use the word delusions She would translate it as affliction is And I thought that can't be that doesn't seem right Isn't there like the illusion in Spanish?

[05:40]

There's not actually that word. Maybe it exists now, but So I stopped I mean in the had a conversation with her in the middle of it and said Basically, are you sure is it? That's the right word. And it made a big impression on me because it sounds like afflictions. And for me, when I thought about that vow and thought about how we talk about delusions, I think I've always, or at least until that time, I'd held it as a kind of emotionally reasonably neutral feeling a delusion. It's an idea that doesn't match reality. It's a fantasy. It's a shimmer-up. But affliction is very different. If you look up affliction in the dictionary, there are words like disaster and catastrophe. Afflictions aren't so neutral, and they sound like

[06:43]

They're painful. And I thought to myself, and I said it to her at the time, you know, if I had to choose between a delusion and an affliction, I'm picking a delusion. But it made a big impression on me. And it gave me more of a feeling of urgency associated with that vow. That afflictions actually are Source of a great deal of suffering and there's some urgency in dealing with them And as I continue to think about it, I also began Sometimes in my own mind as I was saying this vow to say it as my delusions My delusions are inexhaustible. My afflictions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them so This is a little bit and this is just Priest ordination what it was for me This was something that was a big an important change for me.

[07:46]

I thought about my practice and Sometime later as Ross mentioned I started practicing on visits to Japan with a Rinzai teacher there at a large monastery Fukushima Roshi who sadly died in March of this year and He talked about conscious and unconscious delusions and how important it was for us to try to uncover and illuminate and liberate our unconscious delusions. We all of our tendencies. And hopefully we're working on them. But then there are the unconscious delusions that are really the cause of the big trouble. The stuff that actually our teachers, if they know us, they know about them, or some of them.

[08:52]

If you have a partner, they know about them. But they feel have I think that it just it just feels it's the water we're swimming in it just feels like me that's me and actually we make up stories about them that they're not actually the problem you know I'm not entitled I just honor myself I'm not a victim I'm humble this isn't a cause of suffering actually it's a strength and so we protect them and defend them And they caused us a great deal of trouble and Fukushima Roshi's to talk about how important it was to catch them and to to Awaken to the signals that they are at work which brings me to this sort of subject of the transition I made from being a lay teacher to ordaining as a priest and

[09:58]

I think when I was here last time, on a Saturday, as a lay teacher, one of the things that I was absolutely certain about is that I would never, ever, ever ordain as a priest. It was out of the question. For many reasons. Some of them conscious, and some of them, as it turned out, unconscious. On the conscious side, there was I think a lot of conditioning. I was what they call a red diaper baby. My parents were ardent opponents of all things religious, and I took that up. But there was something about practice when I first encountered it as a very young man that appealed to me, something that I trusted. And so I began practicing. I think it was Zazen at the end of the day that I trusted. And I had no idea early in my practice life that Zen was a religion. never occurred to me.

[11:00]

It didn't dawn on me that the people who were leading these groups were priests and that we were doing ceremonies and they were conducting marriages. Somehow I managed to isolate that as marginal or not relevant. And in fact when I came to Berkeley, when I came back to Berkeley in I guess the early 80s, yeah the early 80s, when I began practicing here as my home temple at that time. I lived in the East Bay. I would come for morning Sazen, and then I would leave before service. I just didn't want to have anything to do with it. It sort of made my skin crawl. And I thought that was pretty good. That was a strength for me. That was part of who I was. So I found myself in a position in my practice because I felt completely committed to practice.

[12:05]

I had done lay ordination. I had a regular Zazen practice. I was working with Sojin as my teacher. And yet there was this aspect of practice that was uncomfortable for me, the sort of liturgical, formal side of practice. But then when I ordained as a lay teacher, I felt, okay, that's settled. I've got a place to stand in practice and to deepen my practice and to move forward. And as this whole lay teacher thing is developing, it ceases to feel as though lay people in this practice tradition are kind of second-class citizens. Now we get our own hierarchy. Anyway, I felt like I had pretty much settled the discomfort that I was experiencing. And then, one day, on a trip to Japan, which Ross referred to... Stan, you might have been on that particular trip.

[13:16]

We were at Eheji Monastery, Dogen's home temple, and doing the standard sort of visit to Eheji Monastery, which I always sort of felt was kind of a cross between Disneyland and the Vatican. They have a lot of visitors and they're very practiced and skillful at accommodating visitors and they have a program. You get there in the afternoon, you have dinner, we got to do Zazen because we knew we had connections. And then you get up very early in the morning And you go to service, to morning service, quite early. And then you exit through the gift shop. I don't mean to make a joke out of it. It's a stunning place. It's very moving to visit. It's very beautiful.

[14:18]

So there we were in the doing morning service, and they really do it beautifully. It's just, it's about the most beautiful piece of all-male choreography, I think, that you can see. It's really quite something. And it's the same at Soji-ji, at the other main Soto temple. And so there I was with our group, and a lot of Japanese visitors, you know, maybe there were a hundred visitors, who knows, a lot. And service was going on and I was watching and all of a sudden I felt this anger arising in my body and I could hear in my own mind, I could hear myself saying, this is ridiculous, this is stupid, this is superstitious, this is crap.

[15:21]

I didn't say it out loud and I don't think it was evident. to this service. And it was terribly upsetting to me. And I thought about it afterwards. I couldn't get it out of my mind. I thought I had resolved this issue that I had with the liturgy and with the priest practice and all this stuff. And I clearly hadn't. And I didn't know until that moment how thoroughly I hadn't. So I want to take a little detour. And I'll come back to this and talk about a wonderful old Zen story. Maybe you know it. I think it's pretty well known. It's a two-parter in which a young monk named Kyosho comes to the Zen master Gensha and says, Gensha says to him, what can I do for you?

[16:29]

What are you doing here? He said, well, I've come to learn about Zen. How can I enter Zen? And Densha says, can you hear the sound of the stream outside the building? He says, yeah. He says, enter there. So that's the first part. And this story, as I guess often happens, people overheard it, and it traveled around, and sometime later, Another student, it turns out, in the story, a lay student, Mr. On, was talking to, or Mr. Kyo, was talking to another Zen Master, Zen Master On, and said, I want to ask you about this story I heard about, between Kyosho and Gensho. And he recounts the story, and he says to Master On, what if, when

[17:32]

Master Gensha said, do you hear the sound of that stream? What if Kyosho had said, no, I don't hear it. I can't hear it. What would he have instructed him? And Master Han says, Mr. Kyo. He says, yeah, enter there. So I love this story. And I love it because, I mean, it's accessible. for one thing, from many perspectives. You know, on some level it's a... I think it's a teaching about being awake in this moment. It's a teaching about not having preferences for certain conditions and circumstances. Right now it's just fine. You want to practice? Practice right now, in this temple, in this living room. What I particularly like about it is that The first half of the story has that nice Zen aesthetic.

[18:35]

The cypress tree in the garden. The sound of the mountain stream. Let's practice there. The bamboo. And that's inviting. But the second part is a slightly different pointer. Ross. Practice there. And I sort of Entering there was what I realized I needed to do into that pit of anger when I had that experience at Eheji. I needed to enter practice right there. And I had, you know, one of the things I caught on to over time is that if I was on the lookout for my unconscious delusions being at work I could usually tell that if I had a disproportionately angry response to a situation, good clue. If I had an unusually intense and relentless craving for something, good clue.

[19:43]

And if my IQ took a precipitous drop in a situation also good you know if you ever had those situations where someone says something to you and you literally can't hear them like they say something what you hear is those are all good clues and this was a good this anger was a great clue for me so I decided to enter there And I knew it was going to be, as these things always are, difficult. Where I live, I've used this simile before, where I live in the foothills, it's very rural and there are no, if you want water, you dig a well. And one of the things that always astonishes my mostly urban friends is, they say, well, where do you dig a well?

[20:47]

I said, you get a water witch. Some guy, there may be female water witches, I happen to have met one in our area. Some guy comes out with a couple of brass rods or a couple of willow branches and starts walking around to find where the water is. And it's quite something. And they walk around and you tell them it needs to be within such and such a distance of the house. And then they say, here, drill here. And the confident ones will tell you how deep you're going to need to go. And some of them will even say, here's how much water this well is likely to produce. You're going to have to go 1,500 feet and it's going to produce 10 gallons a minute, more or less. It's very interesting because it's expensive to drill. It's expensive. They charge by the foot. And as you're drilling, as you're standing there watching, sort of running your calculator, they're watching the kinds of soil that come up.

[21:54]

And sometimes a little water will start to come up. And you want to say, that's deep enough. That seems fine. And they'll tell you. Don't stop. You need to go deeper. There's more. There's more deeper. I think that's nice for you to say, but at $25 a foot. It's a nail biter. And I think I felt like that about this difficulty that I had, that I was going to have to go deep, and that it was going to be expensive. Stuff was going to come up that was going to be uncomfortable. And indeed, it happened. It happened. Difficult things came up. And so, I've got about, I think, five more minutes for questions, but let me just talk up until 11.05, because I'd like to be able to take some questions. You tell me. So, the question is, what do you do?

[23:03]

I mean, the question for me was, what to do? And I think that one of the things that I learned, especially in doing koan practice with Fukushima Roshi, was that it was important to make, this was kind of a life koan for me, you know, inescapable for me to let this question, what is it? What is this? What's underneath this anger? What is underneath this alienation? What's at the bottom of this to make it inescapable? In the way that in Koan practice, the Koan becomes inescapable. You just have to take it on and let it noon and night. So I just kept turning to this delusion or this affliction or this difficulty with this mind of what is it?

[24:11]

What is this? What is this? And I did some sort of put myself in harm's way. I enrolled in spot which is, at the time, would only permit people who were either priests or training to be priests. It was a sort of first cycle of this three-year priest training seminary, and I sort of weaseled my way in, partly because they were using our place for most of the meetings, so I had some landlord influence, I guess. So I basically surrounded myself with 30 or 40 priests and priest trainings in our tradition to see what that felt like. And also because I thought there was important stuff to learn about leading the Sangha. And I began to talk to other teachers about, so what's this whole priest ordination thing?

[25:12]

What is this about? So I basically immersed myself in this as a koan and as a series of activities. And as it turned out, it finally just resolved. You know, I think there's something mysterious. There's a great teaching, and I think it's a Tibetan teaching originally, although I've heard it attributed to Hanjur and various Zen teachers. But I think it's Tibetan. And the teaching is, all defilements are self-liberating in the great space of awareness. It's sort of a much more refined version of sunlight is the best disinfectant. And I think that's what happened for me, that I just kept turning it over and turning it over, and actually I did have a, maybe it's a great end note because it was kind of dramatic,

[26:22]

I was having a tea one day with Fukushin Roshi in Kyoto, just informal tea, not dokusan sort of tea, and he was asking me what I was up to in my life, in my practice life, and I was telling him, well, I'm in this priest training seminary, and everybody in it is a priest or becoming a priest except me. That's something I would never do. I'm in there for other reasons. And he said, Oh, but it's a good idea for you. And I had one of those moments where it was like he said, I looked at him and I said, What did you say? And he looked at me, he said, ordaining as a priest is a good idea for you. And it was as though all of the intention and effort and questioning that I'd been marshalling to try to penetrate this stuck place I was in just released.

[27:39]

It just, it released. And I remember walking out of, I have no recollection at all of anything we talked about after that. for the next 10 minutes. I remember walking out of the monastery grounds down this long, beautiful, through a beautiful bamboo grove as it turns out, and trying to reassemble all of my ideas and all of the little building blocks of this structure I had constructed in my life. It was sort of the feeling of It's like, where are my car keys? I feel like they're here somewhere. Where are they? And eventually I found them. I found all of the ideas I had been brought up with. I found all of the stuff that I had discovered along the way about why I was in such an antagonistic relationship with this aspect of practice.

[28:41]

And it wasn't as though that meeting left me in a place of saying, I am free to do whatever I need to do in my life. All of those ideas, all of those delusions, I see them now. I can see them now. And they don't own me anymore. They don't own me anymore. And then as it turned out, as you can see, I decided to ordain as a priest. And maybe the final comment I'll make is that because this was sort of conceptually a talk about clothing. One of the things that my current teacher, Lou Richmond, said when I asked him about what it meant to be a priest that really stuck with me was, you know, the mistake is to think that you become a priest from the outside in.

[29:47]

It's something you do from the inside out. Ordaining as a priest is something you do on the inside. Then you can worry later about the outside. So maybe that's a good place to stop. If you have questions or comments, I'll do my best. Is that OK? 12 minutes. Thank you, Peter. That was awesome. He's wearing jeans underneath. I'm not saying. Nice to see you too. Hi, Charlie. Hi, Peter. Thanks very much. What does it feel like to have this family business and you and Grace both working in the same field? Good. It's complicated, actually. It's extremely complicated. And I could give you a very, very long answer.

[30:50]

One of the interesting things for me has been dealing with gender and status issues, because Grace is senior to me in the business. right and it's very interesting over time that a lot of people it's not so much a problem anymore but people in this will come to practice and they want the man to be senior i mean i by want i i don't mean that it's necessary i think it's an unconscious delusion it's like there's something for people it's a little Not for everybody, but for some people it's a little dissonant about the fact that the woman is the senior person. And so it's been interesting to work with that, and for Grace and me to work with it. But it's rich, it's great. Is that enough of an answer?

[31:54]

Sure. Thank you. Sure. Hi, Sue. Hi, Peter. Thank you very much. Do you want to say anything about, did your feelings change towards those of us who are still with art? I don't think I have a different idea. Thank you for the question. I don't think I have a different idea about lay practice. I think that, and I don't have a different idea about the Green Rakasu for me, and I'm very grateful to have had that encouragement. I think part of why I haven't sort of, I mean, there's a lot more I could say about my decision to ordain as a priest. Part of it was that it occurred to me that all of the teachers who had helped me, Sasaki Roshi, Suzuki Roshi, Sojin Roshi, Fukushima Roshi,

[33:04]

they were all priests and I wanted among other things to honor that and it also I think I had the idea that I had a very narrow stereotype of what a priest was basically it was a prissy uptight person who thought they were better than I was and one of the things that was revealed to me as I explored my aversion was that actually I thought they had a So, that's kind of an answer. Is that alright? Hi Peter. Hi. Something you just said struck me. Do you now see the role of priests the same way you see yourself becoming a priest?

[34:10]

You see it from the inside. Looking at the distinction between man and the lay priest, is there a better way to look at it? The question is, is there a better way to look at that, to look from the inside? I think that I'm increasingly convinced that the vows we take mean something all along the way. That lay ordination, taking those vows, means something. priorities and that priest ordination for me for I hope this gets out what you're saying is just about I've taken a different set of vows about taking responsibility for the lineage Then I had it's not a better set of vows. It's just different that I have taken responsibility in a certain way to

[35:17]

And that's not a vow I took when I did my original lay ordination. When I sewed my blue rakasu, that was a sort of, OK, I'm done shopping now. I'm buying. I'm in. But this is a different set of vows, and I think that's what it's about for me. Good morning, Pierre. Good morning. It's good to see you again. It's awesome to be here. I resonated with your talking about leaving before service, coming to Dazen and then leaving before service with that kind of feeling every day. And I also resonated with your talking about Deheji and how powerful seeing that service is and how elegant and precise and like nothing like it I've ever seen here, certainly. It's a whole other realm. I'm interested in how you feel about service now. How is it feeling to learn the forms and do the forms?

[36:23]

Well, first, let me say that it's very liberating, not just to see the practice at Eheji or Soji-ji, which Soji-ji is even sort of more amazing because it's different. It's a 1,000 tatami mat butoh. It's huge. but also having done Sashin in a Rinzai monastery, not with hundreds of monks, and having to do service with them every day, every day, every day. It's been very liberating for me, partly because if we think that we're going to match or perfectly imitate what they do, you know, it's their culture, it's their tradition. And so we can, in my, this is my take, we can kind of relax a little bit.

[37:24]

I don't mean be careless. I mean, find our own way that feels natural and suitable, you know, slowly but surely. And so I'm a little less, I mean, I should also say actually, you know, is not, you know, I'm sort of like someone who grew up never listening to music, and so I don't have a refined ear for ritual. I appreciate it now, and I know for some people it's a tremendous Dharma gig, right, and that needs to be done respectfully, but I've never been one to like freak out about whether I've folded my Sagu perfectly, right, so I feel sort of relaxed about it because I know we have to find our own way with it, and it ain't going to be what they do. Right? And also because I just accept that this is something I need to do, I've committed to do it, there's some enjoyment in it, but I feel kind of relaxed about it.

[38:28]

And humble. Because I'm not that good at it. Right along that same line. So how has the service evolved at Emptiness Zenda at this point? We don't chant in Japanese. occasionally for a really special deal or if there's some Japanese people that we will but we don't chant in Japanese and Grace has really been the one to define the flavor and I think she took her lead from Sojin who said Just do as much as is necessary That's all I was very excited years ago when people came and you know new sangha just a few people And so we had the discussion, you know, how much? And everybody said, we'd like to be able to do what is done in other practice places so that we're able to go and visit, and we'd like to learn how this is done.

[39:33]

We don't want to sidle in that part. But I'd say pretty simple, you know, service is just the Manta Sutra and the Heart Sutra, you know, some vows. It's simple. It's simple. But, you know, I always I don't wear a kimono and stuff, but I always wear robes in the zendo. And I do in Fresno, where I've started a little group, I always wear my robes. I asked my teacher, Lou, what should I do? He said, not too much, but don't neglect it. I would like to ask, in your prison practice, Do you see happening with the people in there, is it the same as everywhere? Or is there some difference in the way coming to practice affects prisoners?

[40:34]

I just got the time signal, so can I answer this question? Yeah. Well, it's a big question, you know, and part of my answer is I don't know. I mean, it's hard to know. But if anyone here is tempted to work with inmates around practice, I would encourage you to do it. It's unbelievably rewarding. And generally speaking, they're incredibly grateful. They are living under horrible conditions you know and they generally speaking they are very receptive and very grateful and both want a taste of bells and bowing and all of that I mean I always wear all my robes when I go to prison I don't want to give them a discount deal you know

[41:43]

And they want something that's really going to help them. They want something that'll help. You don't get prisoners saying, well, it's an interesting concept, but my yoga teacher said, and one of my therapists told me that something different. It's like, wait, say that again. Say that again. I want to write that down. So there's a kind of hunger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How it shows up. Once a month. there once a month, and there's another priest who goes once a month. But they're very grateful. It's a great thing to do. It's a wonderful thing to do. I feel like I get way more out of it than they do. It's very encouraging. More encouragement, I think, than they do. It's really wonderful.

[42:32]

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