Good morning, everyone, and happy Mother's Day, to those of you who have mothers or will be mothers or, anyway. We're in the middle of a practice commitment period, and Nyozan Ericshet is our shuso or head monk for this, and he'll be giving a talk this morning, so thank you, Nyozan. Good morning. I'm going to try to talk about mothers and Mother's Day by way of trying to talk about some other, some aspects of dharma, of Buddhism, and also specifically about, a little bit about mountains and rivers, maybe. We have in our branch of the Buddhist family, the Mahayana branch of which we're a part, this thing sometimes called the two truths, and it sounds a little technical, and I don't,

[01:09]

maybe it is, but what it is, on the one hand, is the truth that we learn, we start to appreciate through meditation, of non-duality, of dependent co-arising, of the fact that we can't find what we sometimes call a separate self, some self that has some kind of radical independence of anything, of anything else. So that's the one side, and that's the side of, for example, we do this chant, the harmony of difference and sameness, this is the side of sameness. On the other hand, we have this other truth, which is, here we are, you know, we're on Irving Park Road, we've come to sit, I woke up this morning and the desire for a cup of

[02:10]

coffee and breakfast was undeniable and really pressing, needed to be attended to. We have the side of self, or person, maybe person is a better word, of dharma position, and all our particularity. And in some ways, you know, there are lots of ways to talk about what practice is about, but one way to think about it, one way I think about it, is finding a way to honour both of these truths in our lives, entirely and completely, without sticking to either one. You know, so we go back and forth, but the project is to appreciate and express the full reality of that, with that confusion, that we, as human beings, we're in a particular time and place, with particular karmic histories, and we have to be responsible to that, and

[03:13]

we have to take care of our part of the world, take care of the people in our part of the world. All that kind of stuff. On the other hand, that's kind of, we have to recognise that that's kind of an illusion of sorts. I mean, in a few years, we'll all be dead and the universe will roll on. Anyway, I can tell already I'm going to get wandering around, but when we think about it, you know, where is the place we all first experience this, whether we have, you know, we can't talk about it or articulate it, but it's in the fact of motherhood, I think, where we can look at it that way. I mean, before we come into the world, you know, we're completely enveloped and nurtured

[04:16]

and produced by this other human being who is responsible for the blood, the oxygen that circulates in our blood, all the nutrition that we have. And there's this kind of, you can't talk about, you know, can you talk about mother and child being separate at that point or the child being separate? We're born and then we go through this sort of more immediate phase, you know, we're still largely true, we're at our mother's breast or some surrogate mother or, you know, a bottle or whatever it is, but being held and, you know, there's this undeniable separateness, but there's also undeniable total dependence, total involvement. And in some ways that relationship, you could even say that the relationship precedes us

[05:24]

as individuals. You know, it's not like as we're developing, we have our mother over here and we're over here and then there's somehow this like link made between us, the umbilicus, it's like, you know, the umbilicus is like, has to be there as sort of the condition for us to even arise as separate beings. So it's very primordial. So I want to look at this idea of motherhood a little bit. I want to look at it first, going back or going to the side of sameness, and then I want to come forward and talk about, you know, or acknowledge and honor those people who are our own mothers, you know, in this very, the side of particularity, the side of our Dharma position, side of personhood. And in doing so, and I'm going to be talking a little bit about, there's kind of a, you know, the biology of it, the actual biological link is kind of the metaphor I'm talking about.

[06:26]

And indeed, we all have biological mothers. But I certainly want to acknowledge here, even though I'm talking about this way that, you know, I want to acknowledge and honor the importance of the fact that, you know, many of us were not, you know, in fact, raised by our own mothers, but by other women. And, and others of us will be raising children, or are raising children who, in some sense, are not our own in quotes. So, you know, in addition to all this sort of biological thing, you know, also all the women who, you know, mashed our peas and wiped our bottoms and all that stuff. James Joyce has a line in Ulysses, talking about the umbilicus, he says, The cords of all link back, strand entwining cable of all flesh. And I really like that image, because it's like, you, it's like, you can sort of envision

[07:31]

this, this sort of actual line running back through the generations, ultimately, all the way back to the beginning of things. So that in some way, we, so that we're all tied together. And this is, and it's good, because it's very, this way in which we're all tied together, it's easy to think about it in an abstract way, but it's all quite literal. It's all quite literal. There's a version of the bodhisattva vows that I used to do in another temple, and there was like, all beings, one body, I vowed to liberate. And it's kind of that sense, there's, there's, there's this one bodiness to it. And that runs through our mothers, initially, and our mother's mother, and our mother's [...] mother's, if we, you know, I've noted this factoid here before, but I've heard that if we could sort of spatialize the generations a little bit, and I could hold the hand of my mother, and she could hold the hand of

[08:33]

her mother, and a contemporary chimpanzee, say, could hold the hand of her mother, and that one could hold her mother's hand, that before we got to Milwaukee, we'd come to somebody who was holding both hands, you know, we're cousins, you know, this is the truth that, you know, Darwin has taught us this. And, you know, we're recent, very close cousins, but the same principle extends way, way, way, way back. I mean, it's, I mean, it's like, we tend to think, well, you know, I come from an old family, or I come from a young family, and that is silly. We, we all come from the most ancient and honorable family of life on earth, you know, it goes, you know, our generations go back long before the Himalayas were produced by the crashing of India into Asia, all that stuff, it's, goes all the way back. And it's interesting that the word mother itself, I like to sort of play with words,

[09:38]

I think people know this, you know, the way that meanings get sedimented in the history of words and stuff, so I often, like, look up the roots of things. The word for mother comes from Indo-European root matr, matr, M-A-T-E-R, I don't know how it's pronounced. But that, you will not be surprised to learn, is also the, you know, these words are, these words are cousins in the same way that us and the chimps are, material. You know, there's this materiality to it. And I just, in passing, you know, I was thinking about this, and I remember these, I've read a couple of really interesting books in the last six months or so, and there was a TV series recently, too, some of you might have seen, this thing called Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, who's a USC paleontologist. Part of what this book does is, you know, it talks about the way that history of generations for, you know, through

[10:42]

evolution, are actually completely inscribed in our bodies. Now, it's all, in a sense, fully present. Now, we bear that entire history in our bodies, at this time, this place, as Taigen, as Libby, as Erich Schutt. I find it fascinating, and he's not, you know, he's, I don't think he's a Buddhist, but I think he, what he presents really works in my mind in a Buddhist context. There's another sense, another cousin word, matrix. Matrix is defined as a situation or a surrounding within which something else originates, develops, or is contained. And again, that's, there's a sense of, like, this total relatedness, but out of which, you know, we, you know, we, the dharmas, dharmas come together, phenomena

[11:47]

of which we are one. And so, going back even beyond sort of biological evolution, Shubin's got another more recent book called The Universe Within, The Deep History of the Human Body. And he talks about how not only, as in this book, is biological evolution present and inscribed in us, in our bodies, in this time and place, but so is the birth of the stars and the production of the elements, this fascinating stuff. And it opens up for me, you know, just in passing, we're reading Mountains and Rivers Sutra, and Dogen has these lines, he says, the blue mountains are not sentient, they are not insentient. We ourselves are not sentient, we are not insentient. And, you know, I've been kind of struggling with those lines for a while, but in this context it kind of makes sense that we see how all these things sort of, as we say, dependently co-arise, come into being together, and there are no sort

[12:56]

of abiding selves that can be apprehended or appropriated. And so, in some sense, it doesn't make sense to talk about qualities such as sentience and insentience as being something that adheres, you know, no, there aren't any owners in this situation. There are these qualities, there are these things, but, you know, I can't claim insentience, I can't claim sentience. It's just part of the sort of total mandala, maybe. Make one more sort of note on this side of things. You know, there's a Tibetan practice really connected to the idea of rebirth, reincarnation or whatever, that talks about, you know, it says, all beings at one time, because of this notion of cycling through samsara, all beings

[14:02]

at one time or another have been our mother. And, you know, I don't know about things like birth in the kind of sense they're thinking of it here, but I definitely appreciate that, I mean, the import of that recognition is that we have to teach, we have to relate to everything with respect and honor and care and tenderness. And that, I totally understand. And, you know, this other picture I just put out before you, you know, we can maybe think of not all beings have been our mother, but maybe that all beings are our mother, or even all being is our mother. This is this matrix out of which we have our conditioned and provisional existence. You know, again, just note in passing, Dogen says the mountains and rivers constantly express

[15:08]

the dharma. He writes in another fascicle or title of another fascicle, the insentient beings speak the dharma. So there's a sense that if we can open ourselves up to it, that the, everything can be a dharma teaching. The way we, the way we, the way we, you know, develop this appreciation for things as dharma teaching is through our practice. It's awesome, that's part of what's, the main part of what it's about. And this, you know, we also chant sometimes dharma gates are boundless, everything can be a dharma teaching kind of thing. So just sort of another little aside, you know, we chanted this sutra opening verse, so profound and unsurpassed, wondrous dharma is rarely met with. You know, if it's preached everywhere, if it's proclaimed by the mountains and rivers, if it's proclaimed by the fact of, you know,

[16:16]

the completely ordinary, but completely unfathomable and mysterious instance of our own births, you know, why is it rarely met with? It's not, can't, you know, I mean, I understand, you know, there's sometimes talk about, you know, it's like, you know, endless kalpas or whatever, and you, you know, work up to a minute birth and, you know, so you, you know, only get one chance every eight billion years, whatever it's going to be, whatever. And I understand that picture, but I think that, I think there's another way of looking at it. And it's, it's, and that's that it's not that it's, the dharma is unavailable, but that somehow, because of our sense of separation, I mean, this is the problem, because of our sense of separation, we don't step forward to meet it. We're confused, we hide from it, we deny it. And, you know, continuing the sort of biological little metaphor going, it's interesting that the word navel,

[17:22]

belly buttons, you know, it's this kind of badge, this marker of this moment of both connection and separation from our mothers, you know, both as a, you know, the immediate person, but this whole, everything that supports that, that I was describing before, again, sort of playing with the original meanings of words or the root meanings of the words. It's interesting that navel, one of the senses of it is the hub of a wheel. It's, and so, and sometimes the umbilicus itself is talked about as sort of like the omphalos, like in Greek mythology. I don't know why I get into all this, but that is sort of like this axis of the world, this sort of thing that runs through, around which everything spins. You know, one of the things that spins and goes around and around and around is samsara. And one of the meanings

[18:28]

of samsara, or excuse me, one of the meanings of dukkha is this sense of friction between an axle and a hub. And I just find this so, you know, I just, I think it's completely accidental, but I find it fascinating because that's the thing. It's that, you know, we, you know, that's sort of the definition of our problem, our dukkha that we seek to overcome or accommodate in practice is that, you know, somehow we can't get that harmony of sameness and difference because we, you know, in the Buddha's sort of diagnostic sort of way of seeing it, we get too stuck on the side of, we get stuck on the side of personhood, position, individuality, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, the unsurpassed, profound, and wondrous

[19:29]

dharma is rarely met with. You know, so, but then the, you know, the, you know, the, the verse goes on, but now we can see and hear it except to maintain it. May I unfold the meaning of the dukkha to its truth. So how do we come to see and hear it? How do we, how do we sort of grease that wheel or smooth that wobbly hub? And that's our, that's what, you know, actually that's fundamentally what our zazen practice is about. That's one way to think about our zazen practice. So, Dogen somewhere says, in Mountain Rivers, as a matter of fact, he says, stepping backwards does not oppose, or stepping forward does not oppose stepping backward. So I've been stepping backward. I've been going to this big picture. Now I want to step forward to the side of, you know, here we are, you know, I'm not talking about this, this matrix or materiality. You know, I'd like to come back to, here we are

[20:33]

as people, with our own dharma positions, our own mothers, our own families, our own, all this sort of stuff. You know, in one view, you know, we talk about this sort of tree, you know, sometimes you see this, see evolution or whatever, it's like this tree, like branching out, and we sort of see it usually going the other way, like even in, you know, like in our lineage charts or whatever, it goes, you know, from this one thing to many separate things. And, you know, so for example, Homer, I remember this line from college, says the generations of men are like the generations of trees, or like the generations of leaves, you know, and there's a sense of, you know, just this little insignificant thing and drops off from, you know, that's that. But there's another way of looking at it, and that's, and I think an equally valid one, and that's to look at it as we can see all of this grand

[21:40]

development, history unfolding as, in some sense, coming here, coming to this moment, to this time, to this place, to this body. We have this line, now you have it, preserve it well. I mean, there's a sense, so in other words, we can take, you know, given that all of this is completely inscribed in our bodies and minds, you know, that's a responsibility. And how we take care of things, how we take care of ourselves, how we take care of the, you know, the mountains and rivers, the landscape, the world out of which we've come, how we take care of our families, how we take care of our mothers. In other words, we have a place and responsibility that is given to us as a gift, I think, by what? By everything,

[22:44]

by all beings, by all being. You know, and as I said, with that comes particular responsibilities and duties that's, you know, up to us to discover and unfold, you know, as we try to decide how to conduct ourselves as bodhisattvas effectively with our own history of billions of years, literally. You know, maybe kind of an overly cute way to talk about this is to say, you know, so, you know, in thinking about sort of this harmony difference, the same as finding that harmony, I think it's important to sort of think globally, literally, I mean, both in terms of our environment and then, like, in this big picture, but then act locally, like, okay, so what's called upon here in this moment? So, just last, you know, because it is Mother's Day, I'd like to, you know, just touch on the idea of these sort of particular

[23:50]

women who've been so important to all of us. You know, it's true that in some way we're heirs to everything that's preceded us, and we're the child of, we're part of Buddha's noble family, we're part of the picture, the whole thing, but it's also true that, you know, as particular, as people with a dharma position, as, you know, on the side of personhood, we receive this gift, you know, I don't know where it comes from, but it's handed to us by particular beings in different ways over the course of our lifetime, and there's nothing

[24:51]

abstract or anonymous about that, and, you know, in the first instance, really, I think in a way, I mean, I don't mean to disparage or in any way minimize fathers, but I think in at least a different way, maybe sort of an asymmetrical way, it's our mothers that present that to us, you know, and sometimes that's, you know, as I said, sometimes they're our biological mothers, sometimes they're other mothers who have come in, you know, whose dharma position is to take care of us, or our position to take care of them, or whatever it is, you know, some of them are alive, some of them aren't, you know, some of them are, well, as we all are in the process of sort of evaporating, this is going on dramatically with my own mother now, but whatever the situation is, you know, our personal situation, it seems to me that we can take Mother's Day as an opportunity to sort of unfold the dharma, I

[25:53]

hope, a little bit, but also just to express, you know, the gratitude and wonder of what our mothers have helped bring us to, so that's my talk. Thank you very much, wonderful comments, responses, reflections, please feel free. I'd really like to say about, you know, our existence, and maybe I'm paraphrasing, but you know, as a gift to all beings, I've been recently watching Cosmos Redux, and finally

[26:55]

catching up with them on TV, or I watched them as they've been coming, but the last day I watched it, and he was saying that, you know, all the atoms in our body were, you know, generated, created in stars, so we're all the product of stardust, yeah, and you know, true causes and conditions, we're here, you know, today, not to minimize my mom's, but actually the whole thing, I love my mom, you know, but yeah, I think that was nice to put when you said that, you know, the gift of all beings, I liked that. You're welcome. Unfortunately, I don't have access to that kind of television, but you know, along those lines, you know, something else I almost worked into my talk is, you know, and I don't know the truth of it, but sometimes you hear about how, you know, because these same old molecules and atoms keep shifting around over immense years of time, you know,

[28:00]

you'll hear things like, well, most human beings, given that they have billions and millions of cells, you know, have molecules, and we're in Julius Caesar, or we're in Buddha, or we're in Hitler, I mean, we are really mixed up, we are really joined, we are not, you know, sometimes we talk about being connected, but it's deeper than that, it's not, it's like the umbilicus I was talking about, it's not like two things that are then linked, it's like, together, from before that, you know, anyway, okay, so. Well, thank you very much for a dazzling talk, zipping around the whole person, the inner fish, make a choice, but I was thinking, I've practiced with this mantra for, you know, years, that comes from Dogon, which some other person in the Chinese cult do, I think, but, and I've seen it more than once in the writings of Dogon, type of publican, you know, the

[29:01]

Gersh paper comes from this. The hyper-universe is a true human body. I don't know. Wow, you know, every time I read some of this Dogon stuff, I'm like, what is going on here? That this person, you know, in medieval Japan, running around in the mountains someplace, walking through the mountains, comes up with this stuff. It's beautiful. You know, there's so much about this interconnectedness of, you know, the entire universe is something you can never know. This darkness, you can never know, but there's a sense of like, how do we live with that? Yeah. I mean, we can never, you know, there's this notion that somebody talks about of ungraspability, you know, by its nature, it's way bigger than, you know, what we'll have, but we can get a sense of it and we can appreciate it when, when Dogon says, you know, the whole universe is a true human body.

[30:02]

It's like, you can almost feel it in your body, just go, yeah. You know, I like what you said about the parallel, your parallel self, because like, for me, it helps me to reflect on my life and, and, you know, put everything in perspective. Like, I like to write stories. And so you have that parallel self, you know. Would you, I don't know that term parallel. I didn't. I thought that that's what you. I don't know. Maybe I put it in slightly different words, but could you explain it so that I make sure I'm hearing you correctly? You were speaking about kind of like a parallel, you know, having a parallel where you can have, you know, put things in perspective and your thoughts are kind of funneling through these, this other, you know, character or, and it's coming through, you know, like in a poem. And I was like looking at the chance, you know, and it's, it kind of has like a flow to it, you know, whereas you have, you know, a certain, you know, idea and then you go

[31:04]

into another idea and, and so it has a certain, you know, flow to it. And so I was kind of like relating that to like, you know, writing a story and then you're learning a lesson, you get the deeper meaning, you know, as far as everything that's going through you, you know, living it out, you know, in your daily life, it can become overwhelming, but if you kind of like, you know, attach it or relate it to like a story, then there's more of a lesson learned, you know, for you. It's kind of, it's kind of like having a parallel self, you know, like learning a lesson, you know, if you write things out in a story or in a poem, and it bothers me when people say that poetry is not important. I mean, that's like saying that, you know, you know, my, the chants are not important or, you know, so it's... Yeah, I guess, I guess when somebody says, well, things like that, well, poetry is not important, you can just put in parentheses to them. Yes. Thank you. Just following up on that a little bit, this idea of the two truths that you mentioned

[32:07]

is, you know, a way of seeing this, that there's this ultimate reality of how we're all connected to chimpanzees and tree bark and everything, and then there's, here we are, each of us in our own seat, in our own situation, and they're totally intermeshed. I'm going to take my time. I'm going to let you say that, when you're talking about mothers and birthing, and the umbilical cord, where I remember when, when she had her embryo roommates, we had a dog that birthed puppies in the house, and we're watching that whole process, and how she, where it was the mother, birthed the puppy and then breaked the umbilical cord. And it's like, we have to be made separate, but then it, so we come back and return. And in that sense, that, you know, we have to be separate so we can return.

[33:09]

It's really interesting, because, yeah, that's right, I think. But it's funny, because it's somehow, I don't know how it is for other people, for me it's easier, and I think I was even talking kind of in these terms, to think of the, there's this tendency to prioritize the side of oneness or separateness in our thinking, or excuse me, the side of oneness or wholeness, as if, you know, this dynamic of, you know, difference and sameness, you know, sameness was somehow prior or more important. But I think it's important to keep in mind that the wholeness is as dependent on particularity as the obverse, and that's really hard to, I mean, so when I was saying, you know, what are our responsibilities, I really do mean it's ours, it's down to us, you know, now we have it, we got to do it. It's like, I'm sorry, I'm getting off to a tangent, but I think it's an important one

[34:13]

and it's not mentioned enough. Thank you. Your response just now made me, it's, there's something about whenever we, like if we make a certain point, then also looking at the other side, because there's something hidden behind it, like there's always a kind of, and I was having that, it's interesting just, you know, the kind of tribute to women making me think about men, and all that men also

[35:16]

do to help little ones survive. You know, as I agree, every one of us had our own particular experience of who were the beings who were around us, and who we are completely dependent on, or interdependent of, you know, but we were dependent. Anyway, yeah, and it's very, just another, you know, there is this, I don't know how this is your experience as a therapist, but I feel like right now there's a particular knowledge in the field of psychology about how deeply connected we are in the beginning, you know, how that really is, and we can't, I mean, this is an old idea in psychology,

[36:20]

but I feel like, I don't feel like it's becoming understood differently, that there really isn't a way you can even talk about a parent and a child, they're just like a unit. Yeah. While you were talking, I was thinking about the section of mountains and rivers where Dylan riffs off of the concept of, you know, when I first started practicing, there were mountains and rivers, and then as I was practicing for a while, there were no mountains. Mountains were not mountains, and rivers were not rivers, and then after a time, mountains became mountains, and rivers became rivers, and I think there's a sense in which, many senses, in which we're born, we are our mothers, and then the umbilical cord gets cut, there's a sense of identity that's grown, we are not our mothers, and then we come full circle,

[37:23]

and we see, for good or bad, I'm my mother. Right. You know. That's what our lives are, that's what our practice is, you know. Right. And, you know, we do that when the umbilical cord is cut, we do that when we hit adolescence, you know, I am not you, and, you know. You are not the bottom of me. If I put it at age, I'm not that, and no, shucks, I am, and wonderful, and, you know, I think this is the cycle that we go through over and over, and I don't know that it is just mothers, I think it's fathers, it's everybody. But yeah, we're always finding that sense that we're not, we are, we both are and are not. Yeah, thanks. You know, on Father's Day, somebody can give another talk. Because I was very aware of that. Dogen also says, you know, in Gendokon, when one side is illuminated, the other side is, how's it called? The other side is dark. The other side is dark, you know, and you were sort of alluding to that, when you bring

[38:27]

something into view, something else has got to be seen. And this is, again, you know, that same dynamics and difference. So in no way to mean to, you know, mothers and fathers may be different, but I don't mean to somehow indicate they're not part of this picture in just as deep, fascinating way. Well, thank you very, very much for a wonderful Mother's Day Dharma Talk, and celebrating the way in which we're each, in our own way, totally interconnected with everything. So it's lovely to know this.

[39:10]

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