Good morning. Well, Sojan Roshi sent his regrets. He was supposed to give this talk and lead the ceremony, but he's feeling under the weather this morning. So he called me and asked me if I would fill in, which I am happy to do. This is a ceremony that's very meaningful to me, a day that we observe in our Zen calendar. We observe a ceremony called Seijiki. And usually Seijiki is one of the ceremonies of a larger ceremony in Japanese tradition called Obon, which is celebrated, intensely celebrated on the 15th day of the 7th month in a lunar calendar, which we put it in the summer, and the way it's described around this time, the ancestors' souls

[01:12]

return to their beloved ones' homes. And so people visit their ancestors' graves and they clean up the gravesite and they pray for the peace and liberation of those who came before them. So it's very much like the Day of the Dead in the Catholic tradition. And so what we've taken, transposed it in our culture, is to do it around the time of Halloween. And Halloween, similarly, is a time when right in the space between the season of light and the season of dark, when things are turning, And that's a time when the line between this world that we think is real and the world of those who have gone on before us, which we wonder about, that line is very thin and we can cross it in both directions.

[02:37]

So for Oban, the story of Oban is that Oban is a word that comes from the Sanskrit word ulambana. And ulambana means hanging upside down, which is a not very great way to spend your time in eternity, right? Or even here. How many of you, when you go to bed at night, hang upside down to go to sleep? Ken does, of course. That's because Ken is actually a bat. Other than bats, very few beings hang upside down. So this ceremony in Asian cultures is designed to free those suffering beings.

[03:47]

And this ceremony that we do, Sajiki, which we're going to do here. So the altar is in the back there, and you'll all have a chance to offer something there. And we offer food, and we offer light, and we offer prayers, and we offer words. And we offer them for the sake that of all beings being free. But the story is that according to the legend, one of the Buddha's early disciples, Moggayana, Moggayana was, all the disciples had superpowers. So Moggayana was the foremost in clairvoyance. Do you know what clairvoyance means? Seeing into the future. But they all had superpowers.

[04:50]

Each one disciple was the foremost in wisdom, and one was the foremost in meditation, and one was the foremost in shopping, and one was the foremost in skateboarding, and one was the foremost in baseball, which the Dodgers could have used last night. Did anyone see the game? They won, yes. They won the longest game in postseason history, but I digress. But Mogollan had a vision, had a dream that he saw his mother And he had a difficult mother, which is very unlike any of you, whose mothers are all good and kind. Most of them are.

[05:53]

His mother was troubled and he had a vision of her hanging upside down. And he went to the Buddha and the Buddha said, well, you should go down there and set her free. And he said, okay, I'll do that. And so he went down to that realm to feed her and set her free. And when he did that, when he went down to this hell realm, this nasty place, in order to get in, he broke the locks. And so it was like, jailbreak. All the hungry spirits got out. And they were wandering around the world, you know, like attack of the zombies or something, you know, you just, they were sort of wandering all about.

[06:59]

And Moggianna thought, you know, I may have made a mistake. And so he developed this ceremony to feed them and set them at peace and find them and to resettle them in a more comfortable location so that they could be transformed and might ultimately become Buddhists. So this ceremony that we're gonna do is to satisfy and pacify these hungry ghosts so they can live where they need to be. And I think it's also important to recognize that we are hungry ghosts. Every one of us. Except her.

[08:00]

Every one of us has a kind of unfulfilled hunger. Something that we yearn for really deeply, and maybe it's a good thing and maybe not, but we feel unsatisfied, like there's this hole inside of us. We don't always live like that. But when certain circumstances come up, that's the being, the hungry ghost in us arises. And when that hungry ghost arises, we have to feed it and make it feel comfortable and put it at ease. And so that's the ceremony. that we're going to do. And I'd like to, I want to close with a song and then we'll do the ceremony.

[09:06]

But first, do you have any questions or any thoughts about this? The adults or the kids? Probably not. I bet he was wearing one of those kind of orange jumpsuits with the, you know, with the cloth over his right shoulder and shaved head. Yeah, more orange, I think. If you think that's a great costume, you know. Other questions or thoughts? Yes. Yes. Well, for me, I feel hungry ghosts, I feel I see them in three

[10:11]

sets of circumstances. First of all, I feel myself as a hungry ghost. You know, I feel when I'm unsatisfied, when I feel like there's something missing and I don't know what to do about it and it makes me crazy. So that's one aspect. The second aspect is when I see others who either tell me or show me that they are in a similar state of mind. And the reason that I can understand that I have some compassion and empathy for their state of mind is because I can see it in myself. So it's not, it's not something strange to me. And the third realm, Which is, the third realm is, I don't know, it's a realm of grief and determination.

[11:30]

It's, I think about, I really do think about my mother. And without going into details, she was a hungry ghost. and basically died that way. And so I think in ritual ways and in mental ways, what can I do to set her at ease? And in a way, one thing I can do that I feel like we've done is to raise our children in ways that I know would give her joy. So, this is just off the top of my head. That's a really good question. Yeah, Peter. Yeah. Yeah, maybe this will be a place to end.

[12:46]

So there's a Buddhist cosmology. So that's like, for your kids, it's like, there's a map of the universe. And there's a place that humans live. There's a place that animals live. There's a place that gods and goddesses live. There's a place that there are these fighting demons, you know, people who like to fight all the time. So they've got a land where they can battle it out and that gives them satisfaction. There's a realm of what's called the hell realm, where just people are in pain all the time. And the sixth realm, there's six realms. The sixth realm is the realm of the hungry ghost.

[13:48]

And the hungry ghost is usually depicted as a kind of demon. I don't know, is there one, is there a picture of the hungry ghost on the altar? No? Oh. I've got one, but I don't think I'm gonna have time to get it. Hungry Ghost, so it's depicted, it's sort of like, it looks a little like Gollum, you know? Kind of a demonic figure who's got a very big head and a huge swollen belly and a very thin, pencil-thin neck, so he can never get enough nutriment to satisfy him or her. So those are the realms. But those realms, to me, are just symbolic of the infinite forms of our life and our appetites and our hungers. So I want to do one more thing before we end, which is to get you to sing a song.

[14:55]

And we can pass these out and someone can give me the guitar. Just one second, let me just find, here it is. Okay, those things going around. This is a song that was made up by the wonderful Kirtan singer Krishna Das. And he made it up kind of in collaboration with Bernie Glassman.

[16:01]

Calling out to hungry hearts, You can sing everywhere through endless time, You who wander, you who thirst, I offer you this bode mine. Let's do that again. Calling out to hungry hearts, Everywhere through endless time. You who wander, you who thirst, I offer you this bode mine. Calling out to hungry spirits, Everywhere through endless time.

[17:24]

Calling out to hungry hearts, All the lost and left behind, gather round and share this meal. Your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine. Calling out to hungry hearts, we're no different in our way. We all wander, we all thirst We understand there's no place to stay Calling out to hungry spirits Everywhere through endless time Calling out to hungry hearts

[18:27]

All the lost and left behind. Gather round and share this meal. Your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine. Gather round and share this meal. Your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine. Thank you.

[19:01]

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