I vow to taste the truth of the Bhagavata's words. Good morning. Good morning. I'm happy to introduce this morning's speaker, Karen Sondheim. Karen has practiced at Berkeley Zen Center for, I think, about 30 years, more than 30 years. She started practicing with Sogen at the Dwight Wayne Berkley Zen Center before we moved here. She started when she was quite young, obviously. And she was head student two years ago in 2006. And I would just say, I know very few people who carry the practice so thoroughly in their manner, in their bearing, as Karen. And we all appreciate the kind of calmness and stability, centeredness that she carries and is truly a treasure of her son.

[01:09]

So I'm happy to hear her speak today. Thank you, Greg. We have a special event today in that today is Kidzendo and we have a group of our sangha children here which I'm very happy about and I'd just like to spend the beginning of the talk speaking with them. And today, this is the last lecture of 2007, and we're going to be closed. The Zenda will be closed for a couple weeks. And it's a time where we all can think and reflect about the end of the year and the new year. I'd like to ask the kids here, what do you think about the new year coming? Do you have any plans for changes or things that you want?

[02:11]

Because I want to say that we have a big event here on New Year's Eve where we create a big bonfire at midnight and I assume adults in the Sangha write down on a piece of paper resolutions and wishes, things we want to let go of. But I'm wondering, what do you think about the New Year? No. Have you ever stayed up till midnight? You have? Really? You did? Was that for a slumber party or what? I loved Kathy.

[03:17]

He kept me up all night. He kept you up all night. But you've never chosen to stay up all night. No. Okay. Well, what I'm going to talk about a little bit today is how we think about ourselves. Do you ever think about what you want next year? Or what you want now, for example? You're all being so quiet. I'm surprised you don't come to Zaz and sit for 40 minutes. Okay. Well. Do you celebrate the holidays? Which holidays do you celebrate? Christmas.

[04:18]

It's my birthday is on Monday This Monday? How old are you going to be? Six Six? So what do you like so much about Christmas? Do you get presents? Yeah Oh, I see What about you? Every day, every holiday Every one? No, not every holiday, but most of the big ones like Christmas Okay. And which one's your favorite? No school. Okay. Okay.

[05:22]

What about you? Which holiday is your favorite? And why do you like Christmas so much? And what are you hoping? Do you know what you're going to get this year? What would you like? Glitter. Times have changed. So is this body glitter? The kind you put on your... No, what kind of glitter is it? You put it on paper, uh-huh. Okay. What about you in the back?

[06:35]

Anything's what? Oh, okay. Well, I hope you all have a really, really great holiday. Okay? Okay, well, as I was saying,

[07:45]

So the Zen Do is going to be closed for formal practice after today, and we will reopen on January 2nd. This is a very important and often emotionally charged time of year. We have various holidays which bring out the joys of celebrating together, and yet for many of us it can be a difficult time, either with or without family, and sometimes we get reminded of some of the difficulties we've had in our lives which have not been resolved or which keep returning or recurring. And it's also the time of the most darkness and when the light begins to return, and in that time we can often see clearly the patterns of our behavior and we can reflect on our actions and relationships of the past year.

[09:01]

So as I was saying, Berkeley Zen Center has an annual sitting on New Year's Eve which begins around 8 o'clock and we sit Zazen until close to midnight and around 10 o'clock we start ringing the Densho bell 108 times and then we chant the Heart Sutra. After that we have a large bonfire in which we can write down on a piece of paper some kind of commitment for the New Year and it might be something we want to let go of, it might be some kind of a resolution. And another important event which takes place as the New Year starts is that some members of our Sangha will begin to sow arakasu and prepare to take precepts. And so for some of you who might be new, you probably can't see me well behind this huge piece here, but this is a rakasu here, and we sew this by hand, and it's made of five pieces of cloth, rags, and it represents the robe of the Buddha, originally the robe of a monk.

[10:15]

And since we're lay people, this is really the robe of a lay person. and it represents leaving home. And monks, when they make, monks give up a worldly life, but for us lay people, we don't outwardly renounce the things of the world, but inwardly, we practice mindfulness of our own greed, hate, and ignorance, so that we can act in accordance with our vows in the world. So some people here will begin the preparation to take vows, and some of the vows we take include not harming, a vow not to engage in false speech, the vow not to misuse sexuality or intoxicants. But vows are really not rules but a way of life. And many of us in this room have already taken vows.

[11:20]

and yet we continually reflect on how we've lived these vows in the past year and how we deepen our commitment to these vows or precepts in the new year. So as every new year approaches I think about how to deepen my own practice and I ask myself several questions. Have I made enough effort? and have I made enough space in this busy life for Zazen practice? And in what I'm able to do, do I do it wholeheartedly? I also find it helpful to reflect on what is Zazen and why is it so important? Now, as some of you know, I have a very busy life and I have almost no free time. and I commute five days a week to my job in a city, in Castro, and I manage a branch of San Francisco Public Library.

[12:25]

So with a commute it's a 12-hour day, five days a week, and I also live with my partner, I have nephews that I'm very close to nearby, I take care of them. So my life is not monastic and it's not solitary. In fact, as a branch manager where I work, I have no office, I have no desk really that belongs to me and I have no privacy and I don't have any time to myself. I take public transportation. So my daily practice is really at work and it's interactive and my practice is really relating to people. So Zazen Even though zazen is solitary and it involves facing a wall, it's also about relationship. It's about the relationship we have with our own minds. So most of us struggle in zazen.

[13:41]

Usually we try to grab onto something, something pleasurable such as craving a calm state of mind or perhaps it's a seductive fantasy we're engaged in. or we begin to feel aversion towards something, the pain we may feel staying in a cross-legged position for a long time, or we have memories or thoughts that are aggravating or painful, or sometimes we just fall asleep, deadening our awareness. So our effort in zazen is to give up this grasping and this aversion or disliking, and we give up sleeping. So our vows, the precepts that we take, are giving up this grasping and aversion as our way of life. Buddha means the one who is awakened. So when we truly know our own minds, which we know through the practice of the bare attention of zazen, we're not driven by desire or hatred.

[14:54]

So a natural inclination develops to refrain from harming others, or speaking disparagingly about other people, or taking what is not given, or misusing sexuality or intoxicants. We have these precepts as guidelines, but actually it comes from our inner understanding and our continued effort to work with our minds, to know our minds. In Dzogchen we don't control our minds but we observe without any judgment. We can see when we're clinging to something and when we let it go returning to our breath over and over and over again. One member of our Sangha recently told me he's an aspiring vegan. He's been a vegetarian for decades, but in an effort not to harm animals, he's gone the next step to becoming vegan, which is actually a really hard thing to do.

[15:56]

I'm not a vegan myself, although I admire this. But that's one person's way, one person's practice of not harming. One particular difficulty I have is in letting go of my desire to do too many things, which leaves me without the physical and mental energy to be present in all of my activities. So in addition to this job, which I've described, I read a lot, I go to film festivals, I'm kind of a film addict, I'm a serious aunt, I'm committed to exercise and volunteer work and I study the Dharma with other people and it all sounds reasonable and good but when I look at it closely there's some real craving involved in the motivation for this. And I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm not able to give my full attention to all of these activities and sometimes there are bad feelings that result both on my part and on the part of someone else.

[17:05]

So I would like to work more closely with this craving. I have to learn to say no to some things for the benefit of myself and other people because I have a strong desire for social activities and consuming lots and lots of information. So as New Year's Eve approaches I find myself going over a list of regrets or involving myself in this lifelong habit that I have of creating New Year's resolutions So this year I'd like to be less preoccupied and more patient and more present with other people. But there's another aspect of New Year's resolutions that I'm a little wary of, which is it's easy to fall into this trap of self-improvement.

[18:26]

or thinking that I can acquire something for myself, such as that practice will lead to happiness or a permanent state which I can grasp onto, or the development of a self that perhaps I would like better than the one that I have. that there's a belief that perhaps there's some kind of permanent peace to achieve, or that this nervous, sometimes angry, preoccupied mind needs some fixing. a desire to be left with this kind of imaginary nothingness rather than rather than the difficult kinds of emotions that arise during the day.

[19:36]

This kind of seeking of bliss Every day here we chant the Heart Sutra and many of you know this one line that we chant over and over and over again which is that the line which says that emptiness is form. So I have to remind myself that there really is no entity called emptiness, that the emptinesses are just those things which we experience through our senses and our minds, our thoughts, though they may be annoying, our emotions which can be painful and about which we might feel ashamed at times, and the sensations in the body which can cause suffering. Last week we had our seven-day Rahatsu Sashin and it ended actually last Saturday and Sojin was reading from a book called Minding Mind which is about meditation practice and one line that stood out in my mind was, there's no Buddha outside of your own mind.

[20:56]

And the Japanese Zen master Hakuin back in the 17th century said that it's foolish to look outside of yourself for Buddha. He said, quote, it's like a person who wants to catch a fish. One has to look in the water for a fish because fish don't live apart from the water. A person wants to find Buddha. It can only be found in one's own mind because it is there and nowhere else. So I wanted to read the first verse of one of Hawkwind's poems. He wrote a poem called The Song of Meditation. All beings are from the very beginning Buddhas. It is like water and ice. Apart from water, no ice. Outside living beings, no Buddhas. So we had our seven days to Sheen, and every year I participate in this fully.

[22:16]

And I've been doing this, I think, for 25 years. I may have missed one, possibly, but it's one of the few times when I can actually really participate. and I take vacation from work for this and I usually cook one day and this time I gave practice discussion for a day and a whole other day was spent planning the cooking. So it's an extremely important week for me, it's one of the most important weeks of the year in my life to be able to do this. And I've noticed that it's a really wonderful opportunity to watch the mind at work and to watch it very closely and usually what happens is that it takes a couple days to settle down and I find myself being having the usual thoughts and preoccupations and busyness and, you know, leftover conversations that I've had right before the Sashin started, so my mind is not very calm.

[23:29]

But as the days progress it usually changes and the mind becomes more concentrated. And I usually find some very deep stillness at some point during Sashin. And that makes me, I find real happiness in this. And I've come to look forward to Sashin for that. Now, this year, for some reason there was a lot going on, I can't really describe why, but my mind didn't settle down so well and I don't want to come up with reasons for that because the mind just does what it does. However, I found that I really had to accept that

[24:34]

I wasn't going to be able to control the thoughts and feelings that came up. And I experienced a lot of the critical mind, the angry mind, wanting mind, disappointed mind. And It's just part of practice. So I wanted to read just a line from a poem. Many of us in the past year have been studying a 6th century poem called the Xin Xin Ming, which translates into faith in mind, which is really faith in the realization of mind is really what it's about.

[25:38]

So I'm going to read just one verse. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind. When the deep meaning of things is not understood, the mind's essential peace is disturbed to no avail. So last month I returned from a three-week trip to Japan. There were about five of us from the Berkeley Zen Center who went and we met up with a couple other Zen groups from different parts of California and it was led by a Dharma teacher who actually began here named Grace Shearson who a number of you know. So we practiced in about four different temples in Japan. So the last temple we went to was in Kyoto, and it was called Tofukuji, and the teacher there is named Fukushima Roshi, and he actually used to teach in the United States.

[27:00]

He'd teach down, I think it was either UCLA, somewhere in Southern California, but his English was very good. But it turns out that he, a couple of years ago, came down with a very aggressive form of Parkinson's disease. So when we met with him, he really couldn't sit up on his own and he couldn't speak well at all. So actually he didn't speak in English, we had someone translate. And he, We were waiting in a room for him to come in, and then he had to be basically carried by two monks to be able to come in and speak with us. But he was very cheerful, and Grace was saying that she didn't expect him to live another year. In fact, she thought this trip might be the last time she ever saw him.

[28:03]

And meanwhile, all day, he's giving dokasan, meeting with his students. still, even though he can barely sit up and he can hardly talk. So he came in to meet with us and we asked him a lot of questions which he answered very clearly. And somebody asked him, well, what about your health problems? What is it like to have Parkinson's disease and to be so, I forget how the question went, but what is it like dealing with this condition of yours? And he said, this is my final koan. And then after that, when we were getting up to leave, he wanted

[29:04]

each of us to come up and shake hands with him, which is somewhat unusual in Japan. Generally, they bow, and it's a much more formal kind of culture, but he wanted us all to come and shake hands with him. So, we each went up, and there were 22 of us. We each went up to him, and I put my hand out, and he grabbed it with both hands like this, you know, and he was shaking. But he was smiling. And he was actually drooling a little bit because he couldn't control his mouth, but he was smiling. And he was so warm. And I don't remember what I said, but he did this with each person and gave them his full attention. So anyway, I think I'll end with a couple lines of that poem.

[30:13]

We were actually studying this poem while we were in Japan, which is why I wanted to bring it with me today. This is from the same poem by Hawkwind, The Song of Meditation. Taking as form the form of no form, going or returning, he is ever at home. Taking as thought the thought of no thought, singing and dancing, all is the voice of truth. Wide is the heaven of boundless samadhi, radiant the full moon of the fourfold wisdom. What remains to be sought? Nirvana is clear before him. This very place, the lotus paradise, this very body, the Buddha. So I don't know what time it is.

[31:21]

Does anyone know? Okay. Well, I just would like to open it up to any questions or discussion about anything that comes to mind. I was thinking because of... I'll just finish my statement. I've been thinking a lot about vow and effort lately. Thank you. But any question is fine. Peter? I'm wondering, does that mean that you are making a choice to say yes to something else? That's a very personal question, but I'll answer it very personally, which is, I really need to rest.

[32:27]

and I don't do it very well. You know, these rest periods in Sishin, they really mean rest. I've talked to Sojin about that. You know, in a rest period we're supposed to rest, but I find that very hard. So you understand. I don't think I'm listening very well. we all need to rest and some of us never do it. And some of us are driven, as I said, you know, my own cravings cause me to get overly committed to things and to say yes to too many things. And a lot of it is my own self-interest. It's not all altruistic about helping people. Often I think it is, but it's also my own desire. So I'm trying to really look at how I can give more of myself which I can only do if I choose a few things rather than too many.

[33:34]

So in some way what you're saying yes to and choosing fewer things is saying yes to the desire to do those things fully. Yes. Can I understand your question? Ross did you have a question? And I'm wondering how you, your desire to come sit and wake up and do all the work around the Hatsu annually, is that craving to do that, is really any different than the craving to have your life filled and informed by the various things that you do? Because you know, I don't perceive you as wasting time. The things that you engage in are actually really vital

[34:37]

So you're asking me how I differentiate? Well I think that's one of the koans though we work with which is that we have a desire for awakening yet it's the desire we need to watch our desires at the same time. We're letting go of desire but we're motivated by desire. So there's no answer to the question but I think that's why we practice, that's why I practice. Now I do go around having 25 books on my table and craving to read all of them and that's I don't know how productive that is, you know, it's not it's not frivolous but at the same time

[36:00]

I have the question why I think I need to have read everything. I'm a professional librarian. That's the answer. So it's a desire or a craving to read all these books and yet you know as well as everyone else here it's one book at a time. Yes. Or three. Actually, it works to the benefit of the library patrons, so it does benefit someone. Sue? Thank you for your talk, Karen. We took the refuges today. Well, what it means to me, personally, is a surrendering.

[37:05]

It's also an acknowledgment that of Buddha as the teacher, we take triple refuges. We acknowledge that our teacher as Buddha, the Dharma as the teaching, and we commit to the community. But Buddha really is our mind also. This way that I see the refugees sometimes is very restful.

[38:05]

I think that's a good thing. Come on. Say that again, is it replaced by? Well, I try my best to have a daily sitting practice. I think it's very important because that's where we can really watch... be with the mind without distraction.

[39:15]

In terms of what I personally do, I usually come here twice a week, that's about all I can really do given the time constraints, but I sit at home almost every day. I don't... I can't sit for a whole hour. You know, I usually sit for about half an hour. Helen? I'm struck by the... the story that you told at the very end about Fukushima and his practice. And I went on the same trip to Japan as you did the year before. So I met him the year before and he wasn't in that condition. But I would believe it of him because he struck me as a very deep master. And I wanted to connect that with what you were saying at the very beginning of your talk about the dark of this season and how we reflect on our past and it can bring up some very difficult emotions and our mind can be very difficult to deal with.

[40:21]

And what I find, you mentioned some different qualities that you've noticed in your mind and I noticed a mean, a real mean streak in my mind. And I wondered about suffering and happiness and how maybe I just don't really understand what happiness is. where the mind is calm and everything's good, and all the outer conditions of my life also match, but I expect my inner conditions to be the opposite. And yet, if that's never really going to happen, then our only chance for happiness is to embrace some idea of happiness that includes suffering or that is not separate from suffering. I don't know. I wonder what you think about that. Are you asking... Are you saying we... How can we practice if suffering doesn't go away? How can we ever be happy? Well I'm not sure we can be happy in the way we think we want to be happy.

[41:24]

I think we have an idea of what happy is. And probably that's just a concept that is something we want to grasp at. So I think and I think suffering doesn't completely go away. You know, there's a Japanese statement, and I can't clearly repeat it. It's something like, it takes millenniums for water to wash away a rock, but all the more to take away human suffering. Do you think Fukushima is suffering or not? I think he's gone beyond happiness and suffering. I think, you know, getting into that duality of happy versus suffering, I think that's the problem.

[42:29]

I don't know if that answers your question. Nancy? I can identify. Thank you for your talk. Do you ever have times when you feel restored? You know, you have an experience that's restorative and you can say, ah. You know, the times when I feel most restored is when I can completely pay attention to what I'm doing. So, when I can drop everything else no matter what it is, maybe it's just waiting on a patron at the library without thinking about everything else that's going on.

[43:34]

Or, you know, washing the dishes. And just washing the dishes. That's restorative. I think energy. I have those experiences sometimes, particularly if I'm back in the depths, I'll have a big restorative feeling later. But a tiredness. Well, it's five minutes after, so I think it's a good time to stop. So, thank you for your comments and ideas.

[44:31]

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