I bow to face the truth of that which I have heard. Good morning everybody. Good morning. Am I wired properly? Yes. Okay. Well, it's nice to be here. Nice place. I like it here. Do you? It's nice. And this is, I'm very excited because this is the first time in ten years that I'm coming to the Buddha's birthday kind of like you, like a visitor. So I haven't been here and I'm just popping in today. So I'm not involved in a pageant and I can hardly wait to see what's going to happen. Usually I know, but already there's some improvements.

[01:02]

These big screens behind me are quite impressive, very enjoyable. I've been in the mountains at Tassajara, a leading practice period, and it just ended the other day. And after ten years we've been getting our Buddha's birthday scene down, you know. So I actually have a Buddha's birthday lecture which I whip out every year and I give the And I figured it out, you know, over the years what to say. And some of you have been here before and know that lecture and others are probably new, but this year I'm not going to give my Buddha's birthday lecture. And I guess you told everybody, Jordan, you told everybody about what to do so I don't

[02:07]

have to talk about that, right? Everybody knows the plan. I told them a little bit about what to do. Okay. But feel free. Okay. Anyway, you know, Buddha's birthday is also Hanamatsuri, a flower festival celebrating spring and flowers and children, besides also celebrating Buddha, which could be that Buddha is the same as spring and flowers and children. So today my talk is about spring. And apologies to anybody who's here from the Tassajara practice period because I gave this same talk on the last day of the seven-day session at the practice period. I think Robert is around. Maybe Robert's the only one. So it's spring. And spring is a very powerful thing.

[03:11]

The human world is compelling and seems to us to be so self-contained. But I think that in truth we are only figments of the earth's imagination. We are the earth's dream. And one day the earth will wake up and we'll all be gone. But in the meantime, the earth is sleeping majestically. And it's spring. And everything is coming to life. The new leaves on the maple trees droop gently like parachutes. This you could see at Tassajara. The new leaves were just like parachutes. The wildflowers are coming out.

[04:14]

Indian paintbrush, blue-eyed grass, wild iris, larkspur. Blue jays and quail are around again. And the juncos are getting more lively. Buds are swelling everywhere. And the grasses are starting to grow really fast. Ceanothus is in bloom. Blue clouds in all the mountains. The earth goes traveling, turns around, and spring comes back. And no matter how smart we get or how much we suffer, this is always true. Spring is the time of flowers. And flowers are fresh reminders of the tenderness of our mind and of all things. Spring is the beginning.

[05:20]

It always starts now. Things are born, arise anew, are washed clean and refreshed, and it's always a surprise. And it always makes us smile when we look. And I think that all smiles on the faces of people are really always instances of the arrival of spring. The new life comes in spring. Spring is the time for people to fall in love. Just beneath the desire they feel for one another is springtime's insignia. Dante saw Beatrice and wrote, At that moment, I say, the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart,

[06:32]

began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook. And in trembling, it said these words, Here is a deity stronger than I, who, coming, shall rule over me. Spring reminds us of childhood. The childhood lived once long ago and lived again many, many times. Childhood is the dream time, the ocean time, a time full of terror and mystery, but also unspeakable joy, a time much, much larger than the waking life. In the waking life, chairs are for sitting and tables are for sitting at, but in the world of the child, chairs dance and tables have faces.

[07:38]

It's a fact, I think, that children do not belong to the same species as adults. This is true of human children, certainly, and true of all creatures. The young are too new to be from this place. They actually come from elsewhere. If you don't think this is true, just watch the baby quail cross the road. And pay attention and watch a fawn stumble. So children are among us, but they are not of us. And we often say of children, Oh, they're such angels. He's such an angel. She's such an angel.

[08:44]

And I think that we mean by this more than we know we mean. Children really are angels. They are the angels in the stories. Come to earth to remind us of something the rest of us have forgotten. When you touch a child's skin, or watch a child sleeping, hear a child laugh, or look into a child's eyes, also you will know that this is really so. Because children love this world. They love it completely. And they love it with their whole bodies. They want to touch it, taste it. They want to smell it. They want to hear its sounds. They are always reaching out toward it. As if they could grasp the whole of it,

[09:46]

and put it in their mouths, and eat it. And they are sure that this is really possible. So they keep on reaching. They love their own bodies, too. They hold their own fingers and toes with a deep curiosity. And they coo to hear the sound of their own voices. The child's world contains a limitless possibility. And life's paths from here multiply endlessly out. And in each moment of delight, all those paths are always present. And for a child, every moment is like a fan opening up, like the tail feathers of a peacock, like a branch in new leaf.

[10:48]

We think that life unfolds like a string along a path in one direction. But really life's a tangle. We think that we start as children and then we grow older. But really we return to be children again and again. And memory isn't a thought of a past that's behind us. Memory is a vivid experience now. And we relive our lives as children many, many times. And each time it's brand new and different. The past keeps changing behind us, like landscape we pass while hiking. So there isn't just one past for our lives. There are many pasts. And each past is now. Yesterday I was in an old age home,

[11:59]

seeing many people with white hair like snowmen. They say that very old people return completely to childhood, live almost entirely in childhood, and remember vividly years gone by as if they were actually present and new right now. They say the skin of very old people becomes soft, like the skin of a baby, and that their eyes have the sheen of childhood. Times open out, as it's taught in the Buddhist texts. Every moment arises, abides, decays, and passes away.

[13:03]

Every moment, moment after moment, has those four simultaneous divisions. And it really means that every moment is always a new moment. That every moment comes from nowhere and carries everything with it. And so the possibilities of springtime are always here. And we are always a baby, always open to surprise, and we are always reaching out to grasp the world, which we understand is not something other than we. Walt Whitman said, I contain multitudes. We are animals, streams, flowers, and warm sunshine. Everything else just falls away when we truly pay attention.

[14:10]

So Buddha is born in the springtime. And as the story goes, as you'll see, Buddha comes into the world without pain, stands up, points simultaneously to heaven and earth, like an angel who lives between heaven and earth, and says, I alone am the world-honored one. And he takes seven steps. If you look at the grasses, you see that the grasses in the springtime are exactly like this. They come up with tremendous strength. Absolutely nothing can stop them. They'll go through asphalt. And they, too, take seven steps

[15:16]

and proclaim, each and every blade, I alone am the world-honored one. And so that's why we love to sit down on the grass in the spring. The West is a mirror for the East, like reverse, you know. Christ is born in the dead of winter. We bring a green tree into the house and celebrate life. It's cold and dark, but we light a candle and have hope. And we give each other gifts to celebrate birth and beginnings. In the springtime, Christ dies

[16:19]

and comes back again with flowers, white lilies. We weep and are amazed. The beauty of the flowers and the gorgeousness of the child is sad because there is suffering in it. The spring is peaceful and solemn. The poet T.S. Eliot said famously, April is the cruelest month. So one thing about Buddha's birthday talks, they have to be short. So that's the end. Except I'll read you a poem. This poem I wrote on the seventh day of the session that recently ended our

[17:22]

90-day training period at Tassajara. The first two days of the session, during the break, it was so warm that I went swimming. But on the morning of the seventh day, it snowed. Glorious, beautiful, big snowflakes, such as I haven't seen in many, many years. I was in my cabin, and so I could see the snow falling and staying on the ground and on the rooftops and on the mountains and on the trees. Everybody else was in the zendo, so they couldn't see. But then it didn't last too long. So by the time they came out of the zendo, it was all gone. But I got to see this beautiful, beautiful snow. So I wrote a poem, and I'll close with that. The poem is called Unexpectedly Snowing in Springtime. Spring snow, so unlikely, but definite,

[18:31]

is falling everywhere, but always in the same place, like smoke in the sky or flowers, lovely thoughts gently tumbling to earth, lighter than feathers, but heavier than air, white, white, white, and white. World's the same as it ever was, but whiteness of snow's a breath shot through things, roofs covered with it, trees touched by it, mountains wearing it for a coat, nobly, and flowers bent humbly in it, bundled up in it like shawls. This is the snow of past days, returning to the present as a refugee,

[19:32]

looking for a passport or green card, looking everywhere at once, so desperate to arrive and be given safe passage, white and white, the color of leaves on the moon, color of light in deep space, of stars in the eyes of beholders, eyes white as snow. This snow can't escape its determination to slant downward, white in an unwhite world, to be white against the grain of whiteness, as if a page from a poem interleaved unconscionably into a book of medieval studies, making trouble, but lovely trouble, giving us all pause. So, I hope today we can all have pause

[20:38]

for a moment to enjoy each other in springtime. And Buddha's birthday. So, have a wonderful time. Thank you.

[20:51]

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