Good morning. I think we have a full house. As some of you know, we just finished an eight-day retreat from right before last. So for me, in some ways, this morning is a kind of continuation of what we've been doing. One of the things that comes up in long retreats, as well as in our lives, is a lot of suffering in terms of the kind of response we have when we make a mistake or when we discover that we've gotten ourselves into something that doesn't fit. So that's what I'd like to talk about this morning. And maybe you'll understand why in a few minutes. I do think that this is an issue that raises itself in many of our lives.

[01:05]

I want to tell you about two things in particular. One is a story about something that happened to me some years ago when I was going through a series of initiations from my Zen teacher, from whom I received authorization to teach. And part of the series of initiations involves writing out what are called the lineage papers. Actually writing down the names of the Buddhas from the seven Buddhas before the historical Buddhist Shakyamuni through each of the generations. And this was one of a series of three papers. The papers are, I don't know, maybe six feet long and about maybe this wide. And of course the paper that you use is handmade, very special paper from Japan.

[02:11]

And there are only three pieces that you are given for these three sheets. It's not like you make a mistake and you throw it away and say, can I have another one? Anyway, on this one particular sheet, there's a kind of sample up on the wall. And at the top of the page it said Buddhas and Patriarchs. And then there's a list of all the names. And then you take a few drops of blood from your, you prick your finger and you put it in a little vial with the few drops of blood from your teacher's finger and you mix it with some red ink that you grind. And that makes what's called a bloodline. And you draw it through all the names. And then when you get to the bottom, you go back to the beginning. So you have this unbroken line that is made by this red ink that you grind.

[03:12]

And that has included, in this case, my, a few drops of my blood and a few drops of Katagiri Roshi's blood. And you do all of this, all the names in sumi ink. And you have to grind that, grind and grind and grind and grind. It takes a good hour if you're concentrated to get good ink that's dark and the right consistency and then you use a brush. Well, if you've grown up in a culture where sumi ink and brushes are your standard means of writing, that's one thing. But in the world I live in, that was not, those were not the utensils, the equipment with which I felt at ease. In fact, I was quite nervous. By the time I got through doing these papers, I was a little less nervous.

[04:14]

But you'll understand why in a minute. So I have this piece of paper that's very precious and I only have this one piece of paper. And this was the first of the three papers and it takes a very long day to do each one. You start at 5 or 5.30 in the morning and if you're lucky, you might be done by 9 or 10 in the evening, takes a long time. So big letters at the top of the page just like the sample that I'm looking at, Buddhas and patriarchs and I look at it and I didn't want to write that. I wanted to put Buddhas and ancestors. Now what do I do? Well, I learned what one does in such a situation

[05:15]

because of course there's no white out. Nor is there another piece of paper. So what I was instructed to do if I didn't like what I had brushed onto the page was to go get a razor blade and to cut out patriarchs. So there I have this beautiful piece of paper with this big rectangular hole. I then somehow beg a piece of paper slightly larger than the hole and I make some paste out of rice flour and water and put a patch on the back. And I then write patriarch, no, ancestors. But forever, the forever of that piece of paper, as long as I have that lineage paper,

[06:16]

it is a lineage paper with a patch. There's no getting around it. That's how it is. And I must say I'm very grateful for that patch. I learned a lot from it. I learned that it was possible to make a mistake and to then correct it in a way that included the original mistake, some sign, some evidence of the original mistake. But nevertheless, to do the paper the way I wanted to do it, the way I intended to do it, was a very important lesson for me. So that's story number one. Story number two is about a friend of mine who is Jewish and who was married in an orthodox marriage ceremony. And some years later, when she and her husband divorced, they went through a ceremony,

[07:24]

which is apparently done in orthodox Judaism, where you actually undo the ceremony. You actually wind it back out. You write that out and then you tear the vows that you've made to each other. And my friend told me that going through this unwinding ceremony was extremely painful, that she sobbed intensely during the entire ceremony, and that she was also deeply grateful for it because it allowed her to be friends with her ex-husband. She said there was something about their being able, after that, to stand on the ground that they stood on and have the relationship that they could have, having so consciously returned the promises and vows that they had made.

[08:31]

I'm actually thinking about figuring out how to do some version of that, because of course I do weddings periodically and not all of them have led to marriages that have lasted. I think it's a great practice. So the third little story I'd like to tell you about has to do with this retreat that we just finished. I am completely convinced of the description that comes from the Tibetan Buddhist stream of Buddhism that describes the meditation path as mind training, training the mind. And there's a way in which a long retreat is often described actually as putting a black snake in a bamboo tube.

[09:39]

We're the snake in this tube and we go bang, bang, bang, against all the restrictions and limitations. And you know, the fact is that by default we're all celibate for the duration of the retreat because there's no opportunity to do otherwise. But there's something different about saying at the beginning of the week, I vow to be celibate. I vow not to eat any meat. It's different to keep those practices by default versus taking them on as a vow. Because of course you take the vow at the beginning of the week and then you think all week long about that hamburger you would love to go get. Let me out of here. Go get that hamburger. So at the beginning of our retreat we took the precepts.

[10:41]

We took the three refuges, the three pure precepts, and the ten grave precepts. And we then took a version of the fast day vows that are traditionally taken on the new moon and the full moon. But we took them in the context that made sense for this retreat. So we made promises not to eat any meat, fish, or chicken. To be celibate. No intoxicants. No perfumes, ointments, jewelry, adornments. No entertainments. No sitting on high seats. You know, I'm a big deal. I'm up here on this seat that's higher than yours. Because in this situation, it's hard to do. And just at the close of the retreat, the end of our week,

[11:52]

then we each gave back all of the vows that we had taken for the week and that we would not intend to continue practicing. So, since Thursday evening, when we did that, I've been thinking about it actually quite a lot. I was struck by a sense of carefulness and of bringing attention to what we were doing and not doing that seemed so clear and supportive. Simple, but with some quality of holding ourselves in terms of the ground we're standing on. The guidelines and intentions that we have in our lives. And although I was convinced that this was a good thing to do,

[12:58]

I am struck by the experience of a group of us who had been practicing together all week, doing this together. And each of us, we went through the list, and each of us just said quietly, so that we could hear ourselves, I give back my vow to be celibate. I give back my vow not to eat any meat. I give back my vow to not have any ointments or perfumes or adornments. So there's this kind of murmuring as we went through the list, giving back these vows. So, I'm telling you these three stories as a way of having some kind of background for thinking together about what happens for each of us when we make a mistake

[14:04]

or find ourselves having agreed to do something, having signed up for something and realized, oops, this isn't such a good fit. I think I made a mistake. What keeps me from being able to acknowledge that out loud? Oh, what will they think? Whoever they happen to be. We had three people in the retreat who had not ever done a long retreat, and one person who was here, she was a kind of a teacher. She was a kind of an interloper from a Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Her teacher had suggested to her that she come to this retreat. So, she'd done retreats in her own tradition, but not at all like what we were doing. The idea of being silent for a week was mind-boggling to her.

[15:04]

So, there were these four people who had the experience almost continuously of being the new kid on the block and not knowing quite what are the rules here. Am I doing it right? Oops, I think I'm messing up. What comes up? I mean, we all have that situation come up in our daily lives where we do something and then we think, oh, I left my clock in the garden. And it's, of course, not making a mistake that is the difficulty. It is our response to making the mistake. One of my favorite teachings comes from a collection of sayings from the Zen forest that Tom Cleary has translated. A letter from the cook in one of the old cave monasteries in China

[16:09]

to the local pu-ba in whatever town was nearby in which the cook says it's only fools who feel terrible about making mistakes. It's the wise ones who understand that this is a source of teaching, of learning, of understanding. For a long time, I had a copy of this letter pinned to my refrigerator because it was certainly not the response that I was enjoying. For so many of us, we have such a fierce judge that just any little glitch or mishap or tiny mistake and we are in the soup. So what I want to invite you to think about is

[17:12]

what do you know about your own responses when you make a mistake? Not in general, but in particular. What is your response when you make a mistake that's visible, that someone else will notice? Is it different from a mistake that someone else doesn't see, kind of private mistake? Do you have some impulse to hide your errors? Do you worry about them and feel badly? I torture some of my students by telling them about a great teacher, Geshe Wangyao, who came to the United States a little bit before Suzuki Roshi did and settled in New Jersey. Some of his most serious disciples have become the great scholar translators

[18:20]

of many of the important texts in Tibetan Buddhism. He was a great teacher, a Mongolian, eccentric. He used to knit afghans. He was a great knitter. Particularly with his long-term students, he would periodically, but pretty often, accuse them of doing something that he absolutely knew for sure they couldn't possibly have done as a way of helping them see whatever shreds of self-clinging they still had in their mind stream, because it was just guaranteed to bring it up. You think you're so enlightened and evolved. Well, let's see. It's kind of, you know, stirring up the pot. I've always thought, wow, tough, but really helpful. Because, of course, if we look deeply enough,

[19:24]

the trouble comes from self-clinging, comes from whether we think we're great or, you know, the piece of shit around whom the world revolves. It's self-clinging. And that worrying about ourselves keeps us from enjoying whatever teaching may come when we make a mistake. It is in those very situations that we're on a kind of frontier, where we have a capacity to learn something that we didn't know before. I, for a long time, made mistakes that my teacher called the Afghanistan mistakes. You know, you look at a big map of the world, at least you used to look at a big map of the world, and it would say in big letters, Afghanistan. And I would spend weeks trying to find Afghanistan. But the letters were so big, I didn't see them.

[20:26]

And I've had a series of experiences in my life where I was supposed to look something up, and I couldn't find it. I remember one time I was supposed to figure out how to buy Japanese yen and have them sent to someone in Japan. This was somebody who was being supported by Zen Center, who was studying there. And I finally figured out that you go to Deakin Company. I could not find Deakin Company anywhere. You know, a few years later I looked in the phone book and realized they're everywhere. But I was so nervous and so frightened that I couldn't see what was right in front of me in the telephone book. It took me a long time to be able to understand

[21:31]

what led to that fear that was so blinding, and to be kindly about it. Because, of course, beating up on myself only increased my blindness. It didn't improve my eyesight at all. Not at all. So, you know, when a group of us come together like this to practice sitting and walking meditation, especially if you're new or not so experienced, or having some difficulty. Maybe you've been practicing for a while, but there's some glitch here. It's like, what am I doing? It just doesn't feel right. So often what I hear from people is a lot of self-criticism, a lot of self-judgment. A lot of comparing of oneself with one's neighbor.

[22:38]

Look at so-and-so who sits with such stillness and, you know, looks good. Don't be fooled. Looks good might be authentic, but then again might not be. And I think what happens for many people is a kind of failure to recognize that in the meditation room there are people at every point on the spectrum. That there is always this kind of aiming towards a kind of perfection. That is a possibility. But that even the most experienced and gifted and talented meditator is still on the path towards that perfection in practice. And that we can benefit from each other enormously. During our retreat I heard a little bit of grousing

[23:40]

from a couple of people about why do we always have to have these new people? Can't we just have old people who know their way around? And of course by the end of the week those same two people are telling me about how much they have learned from the people who are new. It's great. It's absolutely predictable too. Because of course you think, oh, well I'm an old person. Why do I have to have you asking me all these questions? Like, you know, where are the pots are kept? And there is teaching there. Oh, what happened to my open-heartedness? What happened to loving-kindness? I just want to meditate. Become enlightened. I don't care about anybody else. Sitting here in this place

[24:42]

that has the name of the place where the mind of bodhicitta arises. That is the place where the mind aspiring to enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. So ironic. I'm just going to do this. Meditating and get enlightened and fuck everybody else. So you get enlightened and then what? You're still suffering. You're still caught with self-centeredness and isolation. So I think one of the reasons we practice together is because we all are like, you know, the little grain of sand in the oyster, inside the oyster. We're like little sandpaper or irritation on each other that is so helpful. No, I mean that. I mean that not at all as being funny. People who practice alone

[25:43]

are lopsided. Tend to be quite lopsided. And people who practice with others get developed and stretched in exactly that aspect of the mind and that aspect of our nature that we tend to shy away from. Oh, I'm not good at that or I don't like to do that or that's not my preference. And so we get out of balance when we don't have that kind of stretching that happens when we practice with each other. When we bump into each other. Last year, someone came to the retreat who had a quite hard time and literally bumped into everybody. Getting up from sitting before we'd start to walk. She was always, you know, bumping into people. She ended up being an enormous help. Because of course, you know, somebody keeps bumping into you

[26:45]

and it's amazing what comes up in the mind. Lots of irritation and judgment and crankiness. Oh, look at what my mind is going to. Look at what my response is. We help each other a lot. You know, during the retreat we had a schedule. And we were going to eat dinner, lunch and dinner at a certain time. But of course then there is the length of time it takes for the meal to cook. Somebody got carried away with something or didn't know how to turn the oven on so it was turned, you know, the temperature was set but it wasn't turned on.

[27:47]

Slows the meal down a little bit. And of course if you're the person who's cooking that day and you didn't turn the oven on right and then, you know, there it is out in front of everybody. We eat, you know, an hour and a half late. Whose fault is it? There's something very public about these kinds of mistakes. People took turns being the timekeeper which means hitting the bell to mark the beginning and the end of sitting and hitting the mock talk at the end of walking and hitting different sound implements to indicate the end of work and the end of the rest period and when to wake up and all of that. You know, so some people would hit the bell like this. And then wonder why nobody was bowing. The period didn't end. Or would sort of, you know, space out and then we'd have, you know, 45 minutes of walking.

[28:49]

It was wonderful because the people that I had be the timekeepers are people who've been practicing for quite a while and just upped the ante because everything they did was happening out there on the grand marquee in front of everybody else. And there was this great opportunity and of course what people began to see was it was okay, we didn't have anywhere to go, so we eat it too. Is that terrible? We began to experience a kind of margin of generosity and began to realize that the want of generosity for most of us was in our own minds. Was not in the minds of those around us. And I have to know that about my mind if I'm going to do the practices

[29:53]

that will help me cultivate a kinder mind, a mind that begins slowly to be capable of noticing without judgment, awareness without judgment. So easy to say that. It's quite another thing to develop that kind of awareness. And yet when one does, what happens is we begin to cease to be afraid of what we have been afraid of. Of messing up. Of being found wanting somehow. I remember some years ago talking to the man who was the... Hi, come on in. There's some cushions over there. The man who founded the Trust for Public Land, a man named Huey Johnson,

[30:53]

who was for a while when Jerry Brown was governor, was the head of the Trust for Public Land. He was the head of the resources agency for the state of California. A very interesting person and completely a risk taker. He really loves living out there on the edge in terms of taking risks. And I remember one day having a conversation with him about it and it was clear to me that he had a kind of lively, engaged, enjoyment, appreciation, welcoming of making mistakes because it was inevitable. It just went with the territory. If you extend yourself, that's what will happen. If you extend yourself beyond what you absolutely know how to do and know what you're good at, you make mistakes. In the early years

[32:01]

of the San Francisco Zen Center's existence, there was quite a period of time when the Zen Center had a kind of anonymity. It wasn't an institution anybody knew about. Even for those of us within Zen Center, we hardly even thought of it as an institution for a long time. So we could try things. We could be quite experimental because the ante wasn't so high. At the point at which the Zen Center became an institution with a kind of reputation in the community and a kind of stature in the community, that margin for experimentation and error closed way down. I've thought about that recently because of some issues that are coming up for several people that I practice with. How useful it is to let ourselves have a certain kind of anonymity

[33:02]

in certain kinds of situations so that we're more willing to take certain kinds of risks around making mistakes. How much of our difficulty with making mistakes has to do with our fear about our reputation? What will people think of us? But you know, we have no control over what people will think of us anyway. You can be really good and really behave yourself and you still may be somebody that other people think is weird or crazy or, you know, whatever. One of the eight worldly concerns, fear of losing one's reputation. Paralyzing. Positively paralyzing. So I would invite you

[34:06]

to hang out with your mind stream with regard to what do you know and what can you come to discover about your particular responses to mistakes. It's very rich, very rich material, I think. The collection of lectures that we know as Beginner's Minds and Mind Beginner's Minds by Suzuki Roshi. In that term, Beginner's Mind, he's really talking about a term, a kind of focal point in Buddhist psychology that has to do with what we're aiming towards.

[35:07]

That is, cultivating the mind which sees each thing, comes to each moment as though for the first time. As a beginner. Not as an expert. Well, what are the characteristics of a beginner? A beginner doesn't know what he or she is doing. This is the first time I've ever been here. So there's a kind of wakeness and attention. How many of us expect that we should be perfect at everything we do? No margin for a learning curve. I don't know. Is it anti-American to be sponsoring this Beginner's Mind? I wonder. I'm not sure.

[36:09]

How do I be open to training and being taught and still keep that mind of freshness, of being in kindergarten, just learning to walk? What if we did walking meditation with the kind of attention that a baby has when they have just learned to stand and they're just taking their first steps? The babies I know get so thrilled with each step. Of course, you know, they fall over and they cry, but then they get up and want to try it again. It's a really far-out goal to cultivate the mind that sees, that experiences each moment,

[37:17]

each person, each being, each situation, as though for the first time. Let's go get ourselves a cup of tea or a glass of water, as though we've never done that before. And, of course, for some of you, you won't know where the cups or glasses are, so we'll just feel around, you know, the Braille method. So what I'd invite you to do is to come to the kitchen and get a cup of tea, if you'd like, and then bring whatever you have back,

[38:19]

and we can have some time to have a discussion. Okay?

[38:23]

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