On Friday night, about two in the morning, I woke up, as I often do, and from the bathroom window, which actually has the best view in my house, some of you may know that, I could see a brilliant, almost full moon that was drifting in and out of the clouds that were over the bay. It was quite astonishingly beautiful. So how can I live up to this moon's standard of ease and naturalness? This is the pure light that's reflected from a moon like this. I actually have another version of the same question.

[01:02]

I was coming home from work a few weeks ago. Some of you may know I work at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and it's working in an office in front of a computer and you're on the phone all the time and running around doing errands and It's not as restful as an organization called the Buddhist Peace Fellowship should maybe be. So I was pretty tired as usual. I ran into Vicki Austin, who some of you may know, she's spoken here. She's a priest at San Francisco Zen Center and she is the abbot's assistant, Mel's assistant there, and she was over here to work with him. So I ran into her as she was coming out of Mel's office and I was coming home. We exchanged the usual pleasantries and she asked how my day had gone.

[02:08]

And I started to respond with this whole litany of telephone calls I had made, the letters I had written, the people I had talked to, the money I worried about not having to meet this expense or that expense. And she interrupted me and said, well, after all that work, is the world a better place And that stopped me cold. And I just had to stop and think for a minute. And I guess the best I could do was to concede that it might be a better place. And as far as I could tell, it was certainly no worse for me having done that work. Which is, maybe that's okay. But I think that's a really good question to consider.

[03:13]

It's a good question for me to consider and other people might like to consider such a question as they go through their day, sort of taking stock of one's thoughts and one's words and one's actions. For the things that I've done, does this make things better in the world? or worse, and I don't mean on a grand scale, I mean on a very intimate level. For some reason, thinking about this, sort of in the mood of, the kind of lightening mood of this election week for me anyway, I keep thinking of Bill Clinton's the question, you know, his statement, well, we can do better. And I'm not exactly sure what he means by that, but it sort of fell along the same line to me.

[04:20]

But actually, sometimes it's really hard to know the effects of our actions, our are karma, which means literally, karma means literally cause and effect, whether this is ancient twisted karma as we just spoke to or freshly minted karma coming up just this moment. It's very hard to know the effect of these. Sometimes the effects are very subtle and reaching directions that you might not consider. In the same way, it's hard to know the effect of Arzazan. Arzazan has effects beyond the walls of this room and beyond the grounds outside the gate. And that's actually what we've been exploring this morning, just now, when we did the Bodhisattva ceremony.

[05:26]

A ceremony where we take stock of our actions, not just our actions, our thoughts and our words and our actions, because in the karmic sense, all of those have an effect, and if you think about it, it makes sense. Certainly your actions have an effect and your words have an effect, and unless you are a master of repression, your thoughts are going to manifest themselves somehow in your actions and in your words as well. So all these things have an effect. I'd like to talk a little about the Bodhisattva ceremony and then we can talk about it amongst ourselves. The ceremony itself goes back to the very earliest days of Buddhism and at that time the itinerant monks who had taken on the robes as disciples of Buddha, mostly they spent

[06:42]

They spent most of the year being itinerant, wandering around from village to village in mostly North India. And then during the rainy season, when they needed some shelter, they would gather together and that's when they would come together as Sangha, as community and practice as a community of monks. And that rainy season would last about three months, maybe a little more. And twice a month during this rainy season, at the time of the new moon and the full moon, the monks would publicly repent any wrongdoing, any breaking of the many precepts, the minor and major precepts that they had. And actually, if you went down the block, you know there's a most of you know there's a Thai temple down the block and at the time of full moon and new moon

[07:45]

they would have a very similar ceremony, similar to what we do here and much more similar I think to what was done hundreds and hundreds of years ago by monks in the early days of Buddhism. It's called Upasada ceremony. The monks recite the Patimoksha, they have 227 precepts, and they formally confess and repent their karma, much as we do here. And their precepts are not, their major precepts are not so dissimilar. The major precepts are do not kill, do not steal. For a monk, do not... indulgent sexuality, for a lay person, do not misuse sexuality, don't use harsh or unjust speech, and don't use intoxicants.

[08:59]

And then they go on from there, and they have many, several hundred precepts that really outline the life that they are to live. but in our ceremony we don't distinguish between monks and lay people and in fact the Bodhisattva ceremony that we do here resembles a number of ceremonies that we do in this Soto Zen tradition. Weddings, If any of you have been to a Buddhist wedding or had one, our precept ceremonies where we take the 10 great precepts and the refuges and the three pure precepts and ordination, priest and lay ordinations are also precept ceremonies. But the difference I think in our Bodhisattva ceremony is that it begins with this act of repentance.

[10:01]

And here we say, all my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, that's through actions, words, and thoughts, I now fully avow. Sometimes I find I miss that part of the ceremony while I'm doing it, because it's right at the beginning. And sometimes I'm doing things like being the Doan or the Kokyo, or even we're all doing things like this, bowing. And by the time I wake up to the fact that I'm in the middle of the ceremony, I realize, oh, I missed the repentances. And so I wonder, well, even if I've said them, I've said them but if I wasn't conscious of it have I really repented? And what does it mean to repent? Does it mean any more than just to acknowledge what I may have done over this last period?

[11:11]

Does it mean I should feel guilty about it? Certainly my Jewish background would lead me to feel guilty about it, but it would lead me to feel guilty about anything. But repentance and renewal are the heart of this ceremony. Repentance, renewal, and also taking refuge. So right from the beginning, we take responsibility for our actions, and we also affirm that from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion. That greed, hate, and delusion, these three poisons in our life, in all of our lives, they're there. They're a fact of our life in this world and we acknowledge them as well. It would be nice if we didn't

[12:17]

have to contend with greed, hate and delusion. And it would be pointless to speculate on how it could be if life were not like that, but we do. It's just the fact of our existence. So from the beginning we take responsibility for all our actions. And we do this in this simple straightforward ceremony here. But actually last month I was at a Buddhist Peace Fellowship meeting which took place at the Vermont Zen Center, which is affiliated with the Rochester Zen Center, which was begun by Philip Kaplow Roshi. I'm sure many of you have read his books and actually several people here have practiced at Rochester or one of the affiliated groups. And what we did there at the time of the full moon, we had a very moving ceremony. It was Columbus Day weekend and after we had the vows and the refuges, each person repented the karma

[13:33]

their personal karma, what they feel and felt they had actually to take responsibility for in relation to Native American peoples. And the way they did that was an incense bowl was passed from person to person. And when each person had the bowl, they spoke some words. and then it was passed to the next person. And this was, it was extremely powerful and was one of the, for me, one of the more satisfying ways I could think of to acknowledge what is really, truly an ancient and twisted karma. But their usual practice in Vermont, and somebody from Rochester or one of those places can correct me, is a little different.

[14:36]

each member confesses a particular precept that they may have broken since the last ceremony was done, and then other members in the Sangha have an opportunity to speak about what they may have, interactions that they may have felt were problematic with the person who had just confessed. Is that right? Something like that? The first part seems right, but the interaction part, I don't know. They used to do that. Maybe they used to do that. It's so much more personal. Anyway, it seems like a very powerful thing to do and a powerful way of kind of clearing the air in the community, at least potentially.

[15:53]

And this is closer to the the original Theravadan practice of confession where it would be done publicly, even though they actually don't do it that way anymore. It might be interesting to try that sometime and see how it works. At the Dharma Rain Center in Oregon, they do something like that. I guess in acknowledgement that they're on the West Coast and in the New Age, they also include, each person includes an affirmation of something that they've done that they feel they have accomplished or they wanted to acknowledge that they feel good about for the previous month.

[16:53]

Anyway, it would be intriguing to try some of these sometime. So after our repentance, we then acknowledge our lineage, which goes back to the Buddhas before Buddhas, the prehistorical Buddhas in ages unimaginably past, and then we go through Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, Maitreya, the future Buddha, and then the Bodhisattvas, the three principal Bodhisattvas that we speak of, Manjushri, who is over there on the far side of the altar perched on a lion with a sword to cut through delusions. So Manjushri is the Bodhisattva of wisdom. and Pavlo Piteshvara, who is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, who is represented here.

[17:56]

And then this is balanced in a way by Samantabhadra who we don't hear that much about and we don't have represented on the altar. It's actually hard to find a representation of Samantabhadra. I think that Rebecca tried during her Buddhist images class and she couldn't find very many good ones. But I think typically Samantabhadra is depicted as seated on a white six tusked elephant and the elephant represents sort of overcoming the pull of our six senses and Samantabhadra we refer to in the meal chant as the shining practice practice is of our direct experience of say the absolute or of the unity of the merging of difference and unity and this is something that we only get in our zazen and so in a sense I could see

[19:18]

wisdom and compassion that the practice reaches in both directions. So we acknowledge Samantabhadra, Manjushri, Avalokiteshvara and then we skip through the procession of ancestors which if we did it would lead right up to Suzuki Roshi and his son And we acknowledge all those. Then we offer the four bodhisattva vows, which we'll do also at the end of this talk. And we take refuge in the three jewels of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And each one of these jewels is complete in itself. And it's also dependent on, it would be incomplete without the other elements.

[20:25]

So Buddha, the Buddha jewel represents the absolute, this unconditioned nature of all being that we know very intimately and that we can't ever really put in ordinary words. And it's interesting, we have an image of the Buddha on the altar but actually for the first many hundreds of years or four or five hundred years there were no images of the Buddha. The Buddha would be represented by a flower or by a symbol and it wasn't until somewhat later that That image to me is not a personification, but it still represents something absolute in oneself, something that you touch each time you sit down on your cushion.

[21:33]

Each time you sit down and each time the question comes up, well what am I doing sitting down on my cushion? That is the taste of the unconditioned. The Dharma jewel, Dharma has several meanings. It means teaching or the laws of Buddhism, the things that we can read in the sutras. It also refers to a very precisely classified system of body and mind experiences, very very carefully defined so that you can identify them as each feeling. I mean, it would be like a feeling or particular consciousness, a sensation or emotion. And as those arise, you can put a Dharma name on it.

[22:39]

And it also represents each moment of our lives. each moment of our lives is a Dharma that includes everyone else. As we're sitting here, it includes our Zazen, it includes everyone's Zazen, and it includes the whole world in all directions and in all times. So in that sense, it leads back around to the jewel of the Buddha in the sense that it includes everything. And the Sangha jewel is manifest in just our sitting together right now and every day that we sit together, that we work together, that we eat together. And just not to negate that each of us has a suffering and a life that's individual.

[23:48]

but also each of us has a suffering that is in common. It's different in its expression, but in a sense it's the same in kind. And our own individual suffering should give rise to compassion and an understanding of other people's suffering. and a recognition of other people's sameness. And also a recognition of everyone's dream or aspiration towards liberation. Or perhaps towards the understanding that we actually all are liberated already. That's a rough one. I mean, that's what the words say, but it's often pretty hard to really feel that, you know, to accept that as we sit here, as we walk around, as we do our jobs, that we're already existing in complete freedom.

[25:11]

It's really hard, it's hard to understand that. So these three jewels give this, the refuge gives a light and a life to our practice and taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha is what enables us, it's kind of a foundation of, it's part of the foundation of faith that we might have and enables us actually to to repent our karma, because it gives us some foundation. And for us, that foundation is built on Zazen, but also the Zazen interacts and is built on the precepts. And it's a very interesting interaction, because one can imagine sitting here without any preceptual or moral or ethical basis for what we're doing.

[26:23]

It's possible to imagine that, but it's leaving out a really large part of our practice. Last month I was helping the new Wind Bell, San Francisco Zen Center's magazine just came out, and my wife, Lori, is the editor of the Wind Bell, and so I was helping her with one of the pieces in it, which I would recommend to you. Actually, I think we'll bring back some Wind Bells next week from San Francisco, and they'll be for sale here. There's a lecture by the other abbot, Rev. Anderson, about his personal journey through the precepts. And he reminded me that when we have lay ordination or priest ordination, we get this document I mean, the people who've had ordination have seen it. It's a list of names, and it goes from Shakyamuni Buddha at the top, through the Indian ancestors, and then the Chinese ancestors, and down to Japanese ancestors, down to Suzuki Roshi and Sojin Sensei, and then to oneself.

[27:45]

And then their line, there is a thin red line that connects each name that runs through them in a very, I mean, it's a very kind of, it's sort of like a flow chart, it looks like. It divides up into two and then into three, then comes back around. this line then connects from Mel through oneself, and then that line swings around again to the top to Shakyamuni Buddha, so it's circular. And in the text on that document, it says that it was revealed to Myozen Daisho, who is one of Dogen Zenji's two teachers, that, quote, the perceptual vein of bodhisattvas is the single great causal condition of the Zen gate.

[28:48]

So that means without these precepts, there is no Zen. And sometimes Well, it's easy to forget this because we don't talk about it so much. And in certain schools, it actually is traditional in Zen that the precepts are the last thing studied, that there's very little talk about them. And even though they may be recited at a ceremony like this, they're not discussed among people And particularly in the Rinzai school, they would be the final stage of your study. Just at the end, you would be studying precepts. And my feeling is that this maybe doesn't work for Westerners, like ourselves, that maybe we need certain kinds of moral guidance and need to be thinking about these things.

[29:58]

I don't know. I just, I personally feel that I would, I feel like if this were put off until the end of my study, you know, I mean, God knows when the end of my study is. I have no idea. These precepts, there are the pure precepts and then the prohibitory precepts. And the pure precepts are the way we read them actually. It is, I vow to refrain from all evil, I vow to do all that is good, and I vow to live and be lived for the benefit of all beings. Another way that that's often phrased is, I vow to save the many beings." And those are the Mahayana pure precepts. And the Theravadin pure precepts are the same, except the last line reads, I vow to purify my mind.

[31:06]

And it's kind of an interesting distinction, and maybe this is not the place or time to go into it, but these are the pure precepts that are sort of the positive side or the larger context for the prohibitory precepts, which we read as we vow not to kill, not to take what is not given, which means not to steal, not to misuse sexuality, I vow to refrain from false speech, not to sell the wine of delusion, which would be in its crass form not to use intoxicants or to dispense them. I vow not to slander, not to praise self at the expense of others, not to be avaricious or greedy, not to harbor ill will, and not to abuse the three treasures, Buddhadharma and Sangha.

[32:11]

With these vows, we complete this act of renewal. And then we begin again, fresh. Of course, we still have all of Even though we've acknowledged it, we still have to live with the effects of our own actions. And the act of acknowledging it doesn't necessarily get rid of it. It just means that we can accept the effects that come to us. we can recognize them as they arise. We also can recognize that we're quite fortunate. I feel extremely fortunate.

[33:18]

Sometimes I really try to think about what my life might be like if I hadn't somehow stumbled in this direction and what forces led me in this direction and it's really, it's this incredible mystery and sometimes it makes me, you know, I think back on my parents and my grandparents and before that and certainly I have I might have a lot of bones to pick with my parents, a lot of things that I wish they had done differently, but still, and God knows when I look back, I can see, well, they acted, that was their karma. They acted that way. Look at the kind of lives that they had with their parents.

[34:21]

Were they present? Were they absent? and go back. That's as far as I know. That's as far as I know the actual people involved. To whatever limited degree, I actually do know my parents and my grandparents. But beyond that, there's my grandparents, parents, generation before that, and I realize that any different link in that particular chain and I might not be sitting here facing the wall today, which is the incredibly sort of fortunate, encouraging side of the karma that that has come to me and that's come to all of us. However much my legs hurt, however much from moment to moment or period to period I might want to be running from the room or down the block eating Thai food as the smells and the music kind of drift up the block, it's incredibly fortunate.

[35:40]

to think of these people that I don't know, generations ago, living in a rural part of the Ukraine, down to me, this is one thread, down to me sitting here, and then up to my daughter sitting upstairs and I have no idea what what she will do with her life and I have no intention of making my spiritual practice or religious practice a a necessary concomitant to her life here. If she wants it, it's great. If she doesn't, that's okay. But that's one stream of karma that I'm grateful for.

[36:45]

I think I've said this before, another stream is from Suzuki Roshi. who have spent several people here have been to Suzuki Rushi's temple in Japan and to have been there and feel how totally distant it is from from our everyday experience here and even more distant from a You think about last century, you know, Suzuki Roshi's teachers in a pre-industrial part of Japan, and my relatives in a pre-industrial part of the Ukraine, that these two really very disparate threads meet there. It's quite astonishing. And that's something mysterious moved Suzuki Roshi to come here and share practice of zazen with us and to share these precepts with us.

[37:51]

It's quite astonishing. So each time we do this ceremony, I'm brought back to that. And I'm brought back to this picture, which I know I've talked about before, this picture that I saw in a photo album at Rinzowin, where the Sangha is sitting around in the courtyard with all of their bells around them. And it's the day that the Japanese military government was collecting all of the bells to melt them down for armaments. and they're all sitting around their bells and they do not look happy. But they were doing what they had to do. And in some, to come back to this question,

[38:55]

the original question of, well, for the work that I did today, given whatever effort I made, and it includes the effort of sitting here, is the world a better place? And on the one hand, those bells were melted down for bullets and shell casings. On another hand, Some people, some of us who were there for visiting Prince Owen and saw that picture, you know, could feel the suffering of the community at that moment. And somebody had taken a photograph of it. And so, because there was that photograph, because of just that little coincidence, and that act of documentation, that from across an ocean and across two different sides of a war one could feel a common suffering and one could feel a bond with

[40:10]

with these people who are having to give up something that was very precious to them. So there is also a sense in which their action of turning over these bells to weapons in a very long, in a sort of ineffable, long-range sense may have had an effect of making the world better. That's a kind of complexity that's worth our consideration, I think, as we take the precepts. The precepts are not so simple. They're not just rules. They're not the Ten Commandments. They're not just the rules to do this and not do that. But we should try to penetrate to the heart of them and see how even an action that may cross the letter of a precept or the letter of our intention, we can look for a way that that also drives, in some sense, might drive the spirit of it.

[41:27]

And that's some of the responsibility that I feel as I examine my own actions. So I can't say whether the world is a better place or not. And I can't say whether my actions have saved the many beings or are being lived for the benefit of all beings. Sometimes my actions seem quite selfish. And so the best I can do is to keep renewing this intention to practice for the benefit of all beings and keep that intention as sort of the ground of my Zazen practice. And maybe that's enough.

[42:31]

If there are comments or questions, I'd like to open it up. Can you say something about how our city, Zazen, benefits the world outside the gates? Well, I think it does it in a very simple way. There's, in a simple mechanistic way, you know, if in the course of sitting zazen, you settle the nature of your own being and find some peace, than when you go out of this room.

[43:42]

You'll hopefully interact with people and things in a peaceful way. And I think that has a real effect. I mean, I've had the good fortune to be around people who have been practicing for many years and some of them really do manage to create an air of peace around them. And that seems to me to be extremely helpful. Maybe somebody else has another answer to that. What I've found over the years sitting in Sashim's is that I've become more cooperative

[45:00]

You know, it's like when we do such things, we work together to make it happen, to create the atmosphere. We work together, we eat together, we sit together. And somehow it takes all of us interacting to make it work. And I've found that when I go outside the gates that there's a carryover of that. That's just one thing. Or if I'm going to a store and I find an article that's fallen on the floor, years pass, I would just pass it up and let somebody else take it. But now I pick it up and try to place it back on a shelf or wherever. I find little things like that. It's my responsibility as well to help, you know, to make the whatever, the environment or whatever. more pleasing or whatever. So that's the kind of thing that I find most blatant that I've become aware of. That and compassion. Sitting Zazen has really, really opened my heart and just become more compassionate for all beings.

[46:12]

Yes, sometimes You have to come by this compassion by the rough road. There may be nobody in this room who came to this room because they wanted to be here with somebody else that was already here. We didn't come here because our friends were here. We came here because we had to for one reason or another. We don't necessarily even have to all like each other. And in certain cases, at certain times, we don't. And you may not like the way somebody sits. You may not like the way somebody breathes. You may not like the way somebody serves you Camasio. There's no critique of anything that happened before.

[47:18]

But gradually, if you do this over and over again, that the compassion arises. It arises from just having to examine what bothers me here? Why should somebody's breathing bother me? Why should the way someone is holding a bowl or a tray bother me? Why is this really important? Does this really say something damning about another being? And again, as we practice, this is the genjo koan, the koan of everyday life. Sometimes I see the zendo as kind of a laboratory. that it's a very controlled and sometimes a pressure cooker kind of environment.

[48:21]

And as you learn about certain kinds of interactions and certain things that rise in yourself in this setting and learn how to let go of them, how not to be attached to them, then you can bit by bit extend that understanding and that practice into your everyday life. And it begins with your compassion and your understanding of yourself. There's the sangha aspect, the interrelational aspect, and then there's the sangha within you. There's your legs and your back and all the parts of your body and all the parts of your mind that may seem harmonious or disharmonious and Just have to accept them as they come and that way develop compassion for for oneself What's your Buddhist name?

[49:30]

My Buddhist name? Hozan Kushiki which means Dharma Mountain which is I don't think I can live up to that. But kushiki is even worse. Kushiki is formless form. It's like in the Japanese Heart Sutra. Shiki is form and ku is emptiness. And I think that the reason, Mel often gives one a Buddhist name, it's like the first name is sometimes like some characteristic, some ideal characteristic that he sees very deeply in the shit pile of your present being. And then the second name is like a problem that you have.

[50:40]

Something to work out. And I think what he was, I often try to puzzle this out. I think at the particular time that he gave me my name that that I was probably seen as kind of clinging to the form side of things. As, you know, really wanting things done just this way. You know, done, you know, do the form this way. You know, you ring the bell this way. You carry a tray this way. And so he wanted to knock me on the head with the emptiness side of that. At the same time, from time to time, dating back to about that period, he would be giving me advice, just let things fall apart, which is kind of a tough one for me.

[51:43]

I try, actually. I feel like I'm a lot better at it than I was. But it's still hard. I'd like things to go just so. Do you try to work it, do you do this piece of fellowship thing, wholeheartedly? Do I try? Yeah. I have to. Because there is no way to hold it together. I mean, just the phone calls and the mail, You know, each one tells this, you know, every day there's a half a dozen tales of suffering that come in one way or the other. I mean, every day I sit down and all I have to do is read the email, you know, the electronic mail on my computer for just the conferences. I don't know if you guys know how this works. There's conferences, you can read news about this area, news about this area, news about this area.

[52:47]

So if I read just the conferences on Southeast Asia where we have particular working things, I don't read the things on Cambodia. I don't read the things about Vietnam. I have to let it go. I have to let it fall apart. There's no way that any one being can take care of everything. And on a more mundane level, we haven't done the filing for like 14 months. This could be a pitch for volunteers. We haven't done the filing for a long time. So those are other things. So we just have to do, we have to do just what we have to do when we come in here to sit. Remember what our intention is. Remember where You know, for Buddhist peace fellowship, we have certain areas and certain kinds of work and certain people that we work with that we have made a commitment to.

[53:52]

And if one tries to do everything, one is not going to honor the commitment to the one thing that has been stated in intention. So, I can't think of any other way to do it. So I'm happy to, if somebody has a method, they can let me know. I really like the idea of confession being Catholic. And to take a next step and create an affirmation out of that confession It could be very wonderful to declare to one another what our practice is in this area. I could see it being very helpful.

[54:56]

Like if you know that I am practicing trying to watch my mouth. It makes it easier for me to practice that, knowing everyone else knows that. I mean it would be nice, it would be interesting to experiment with some of these things. I'm not talking about changing our ceremony so much as at some point it might be nice to have a group of people who are examining the precepts from the inside out rather than from the outside in. I think we can do that at some point. There's time for one more. to go back to what you were saying about how the day went with you. And I think the Zazen helps a great deal with that.

[56:04]

You sit here and practice seeing what comes up and noticing your feelings as you're sitting. and the practice of seeing what comes. Right.

[57:15]

It's hard to do that sometimes. Yeah. I think that's right. I think that's another kind of direct extension of just sitting here with our own suffering. Anyway, thank you very much.

[57:40]

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