like to make an offering. I think it's really important during these times to preserve our traditions as much as we can and the role of creating an altar in your home, wherever it is, just some way to touch back into practice to remind us So I'm going to go to my altar and make an offering and do some vows before we start. So what I'd like to do today, I'm going to be talking about faith and I want to share with you a chant or a recitation that we do sometimes here and it's one of my favorites and I associate it with faith.

[01:25]

And I'm hoping that Blake can share that so that you can chant with me. along with me. Heihei Koso Hotsu Ganman. We vow with all beings from this life on, throughout countless lives, to hear the true Dharma. That upon hearing it, no doubt will arise in us, nor will we lack in faith. That upon meeting it, we shall renounce worldly affairs, and maintain the Buddha Dharma, and that in doing so, the great earth and all living beings together will attain the Buddha way. Although our past evil karma has greatly accumulated, indeed being the cause and condition of obstacles in practicing the way, may all Buddhas and ancestors who have attained the way be compassionate to us and free us from karmic effects

[02:34]

allowing us to practice the way without hindrance. May they share with us their compassion, which fills the boundless universe with the virtue of their enlightenment and teachings. Buddhas and ancestors of old, where is we? We in the future shall be Buddhas and ancestors. Revering Buddhas and ancestors, we are one Buddha and one ancestor. Awakening Bodhi mind, we are one Bodhi mind. Because they extend their compassion to us freely, we are able to attain Buddhahood and let go of the attainment. Therefore, the Chan master, Lungyau said, those who in past lives were not enlightened will now be enlightened. This life saved the body, which is the fruit of many lives. Before Buddhas were enlightened, they were the same as we. enlightened people of today are exactly as those of old.

[03:38]

Quietly explore the farthest reaches of these causes and conditions, as this practice is the exact transmission of a verified Buddha. Confessing and repenting this way, one never fails to receive profound help from all Buddhists and ancestors. Revealing and disclosing our lack of faith and practice before the Buddha We melt away the root of transgressions by the power of our confession and repentance. This is the pure and simple color of true practice, of the true mind of faith, of the true body of faith. So when I realized a couple of weeks ago that I was on the schedule, I had kind of lost track of the schedule when I realized I was on the schedule. What came to me first was how do I, how do I, how do I meet this great not knowing?

[04:51]

How do I, how do I hold it all? All of it. the deaths, the floods, the locusts, and now the horror of more racial violence and racial discrimination. How do I hold that all? What is it for me? What's the heart of practice for me? And for me, it's faith. Sojin talks about the faith types and the doubt types, and I confess to you that I am a faith type. And so I thought I would talk about faith a few weeks ago, and then, Blake, would you just show that picture quickly? I came upon a couple weeks ago in the newspaper, in the New York Times when I was,

[05:54]

when I was looking at the Week in Review, a great headline, as you see in the Times, no one knows what's going to happen with a crystal ball. And in it was an article about how difficult it is for us in this time of not knowing. That's okay, Blake. It was funny, I laughed for a minute because I thought, we don't need a big headline and a full page advertisement in the Times that tells us we don't know what's gonna happen. We know we don't know what's going to happen, or that's part of our practice. And the way that we or I deal with it, is using vow, using chanting, using ritual.

[07:00]

And this chant that we just recited embodies ritual to me. It takes us to a place beyond our mundane self. It asks us to join with the ancestors, to join in something that's much bigger. And I found when I was thinking about having this talk, I usually have my sitting in another area. And I thought, if I'm gonna give a talk, I also want to have a little altar near me as part of the ritual of our talks, as part of a way to talk about the importance of our practice And our practice involves using ritual objects like objects on an altar, sitting, walking meditation, chanting.

[08:09]

All of these are part of what holds us in the practice. So this particular chant, I'm going to talk about this particular chant for the rest of my time. Sojin gave a talk a long, long time ago about this, and his translation of the Eihei Hotsu Koso, Hotsu Ganman, his translation of that is, all Dogon's practice of faith in the Dharma. Other translations are, Dogon's great faith vow. And for me, I guess, What I like is something like faith, the heart of Dogen's Zen practice. This vow comes from a Dogen fascicle, the eighth fascicle in the Shogogenzo called The Rippling of the Stream and the Contour of the Mountain.

[09:17]

So in my remarks, I'm going to talk about the vow itself, and then I'm going to also proceed to talk about, to talk about, to give you some excerpts from the fascicle. So first I wanted to kind of have a disclaimer. When I talk about faith in the Buddhist sense, this isn't faith in some particular thing. It's not faith in some particular person. Although we may have a teacher that we trust, although we may have people in our lives that we trust. This faith is different. It is not a noun, it's more like a verb. We faith our practice. The Pali word for faith is sada.

[10:24]

S-A-D-D-H-A and that means to place one's heart upon. So it means that we actively place our heart upon or offer one's heart or give over one's heart completely to our practice. So the chant starts with we vow with all beings. And this vow echoes Buddha's first words after his seven days of sitting on the eighth day, sitting under Bodhi tree, he announced, when the morning star appeared, I and the sentient beings of the earth simultaneously attained enlightenment. So this notion of awakening with all beings is really at the heart of our Mahayana

[11:26]

Zen practice. Many of the old stories that are referred to in the fascicle are stories of all the Buddhas before Buddha, the practitioners of old, all realized that their solitary practice, just as the Buddha realized that a solitary practice isn't enough that we can't settle until we bring other beings along with us. And that realization that the Buddha had, we have too when we practice. We practice in Sangha, we don't practice alone. We need each other, we need this Sangha, and we need all beings.

[12:29]

We are part of a universe of beings who are interconnected with each other. And the power of our sitting together and our concentrating together and opening up together, this is great power. Power that has a great influence. Dogen talks about, we have to get rid of our husk, of our mind husk, that our practice, when we practice together, results in our giving, letting go of our conceptual framework, letting go of the concretizing of any kind of practice. We get rid of that, and we recognize how it is. Ross emphasized last week a lot of small things that happen in his everyday life that are awakening moments for him.

[13:36]

It doesn't take a big awakening moment. It takes just sitting down and letting go, opening your eyes, your ears, all your senses, all your feelings, opening completely and letting go. And when that happens, You develop an intention, an intention. You develop bodhicitta, an aspiration to awaken. But we do it. Yes, we're one, and we're many, and we're not one and not two. We do that aspiration. That aspiration is not ours alone when we awaken and we begin to see. we begin to have experience of seeing and letting go. The chat goes on.

[14:38]

We vow with all beings from this life on throughout countless lives. And this is something that's really meaningful to me because one of the things I feel about following the practice and following the physical, even the physical practices that we do, the way we set up our altar. Whenever I am in a ceremony in the Zendo, I feel the presence of many. So we're including the countless beings that came before us, and this countless beings that will follow us, the beings that are suffering, the beings that are happy. All of it, we open to. And for me, one of the things we do when we have a ceremony like Jukai or a priest ceremony,

[15:50]

The first thing we do is call in the ancestors. We pay homage to the ancestors. We bring them into the ceremony. So the next line is we vow from this life on through our countless lives to hear the true Dharma. And this is really the heart of this fascicle, actually, because it is, you know, the name of it, the rippling of the spring, the contour of the mountain, is really about hearing the true Dharma, and instances of people who wake up and suddenly hear the Dharma. And by hearing, we don't mean hearing. We mean seeing, We mean touching, we mean feeling. Hearing is kind of a placeholder for perception, for that wide open perception, that free and wide open perception of really, really getting it, really, really feeling that opening.

[17:10]

And it can be stimulated by lots of different triggers. So it's not any one way. And so this fascicle talks about many of our ancestors who were walking along and heard a stream, or were sitting and they looked up and they saw a ray of light, and we know these many stories. But this is the kind of vow to with our ancestors wake up and hear the Dharma on and perceive the Dharma with our whole body mind. However, we don't really chase after enlightenment. We have an aspiration to awaken. There's no goal there because as we know, we can have enlightenment experience and suddenly that's a wonderful experience and then we go home

[18:13]

get angry about something, you know, that great letting go, that great, oh, now I get it. So we don't want to get attached to this, but yet this is our practice, is to wake up. So I wanted to read one of the little gathas that are included in this fascicle of Dogen's after one monk was just basically sitting and meditating in the forest. And he went to his teacher and he had tried, he had been practicing for a long time and his teacher may not have been, he wasn't able to have his understanding verified by his teacher. So he kind of gave up. And then one day he was walking on a path.

[19:16]

And this is what he says, the valley streams rippling is indeed the eloquent tongue of the Buddha. The mountain contour is none other than the body of the Buddha. With the coming of night, I heard the 84,000 songs, but with the rising of the sun, how am I, how am I ever to offer them to you? So he had this opening, how do you even share that? It's beyond sharing, it's beyond talking, and it changes the way you move forward. So the next line, of the vow is, upon hearing it, no doubt will arise in us, nor will we lack in faith.

[20:23]

Dogen believed deeply that our hearing experience is the ultimate reality of non-duality and the interconnectedness of the world, the internet, and particularly in this particular sutra where he's talking about in sentient beings that incredible interconnectedness and non-duality between us and that experience, us and the rippling stream. It can happen anywhere in this, and it can happen with sentient beings and experiences with sentient beings, and it can happen with non-sentient beings, but it is this experience of how it is. And I wanted to talk about that just a little bit. How it is is that we don't know.

[21:32]

We don't know. And yet, we sense intuitively our body changes. We let go of our conceptual thinking, something we feel. We put our heart on something and we feel that. We feel it with our body and our mind, in our body-mind. We have some intuitive knowing place. And that doesn't, And that knowing place knows that life is impermanent. That knowing place knows that everything is dependently coercive. That knowing place knows that in the world, in the universe,

[22:38]

there's totally dynamic change. And that place is where our faith takes us. Our faithing, our faithing through practice, our putting our heart completely into practice, gives us that place of peace and tranquility, that place in which knowing and not knowing are the same thing, are connected and totally interrelated. We have some sense of knowing, but we really don't know anything about what's going to happen in the next moment. And yet we can sit here and be with each other, and feel supported, and feel a sense of peace, and feel a sense of sharing attention with each other.

[23:51]

And there are barriers to our not knowing, our knowing and our not knowing, to our faithing, the practice, our own barriers, our own karma, our own, and in this, in most of our ceremonies, we have a kind of confession and repentance part of it where we chant all my ancient tangled karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, I now fully avow. And that That is something we do to purify ourselves. That's part of the practice of faith. The safety of being able to do that, the safety of actually being able to see our whole selves, not just the parts we prefer to see.

[24:56]

We're showing our whole selves and being okay with being fallible in the world. But the vow tells us that if we make a vow and if we repent with all beings, that we will then be free, that we will get rid of our husk, that we will get rid of our hindrances and be able to practice without effort, joyful effort, the joyful effort of practice. But we have to go through that acknowledgement of our karmic hindrances and some of our actions in the past, or some of our actions yesterday, or tomorrow, because we know they'll be there.

[25:59]

And so we are confessing and repenting once a month at BZC, at our bodhisattva ceremony, because we've always got something. And if we're not confessing and repenting for ourselves, we're confessing and repenting for all beings who are confessing and repenting with us simultaneously. So one of the things I want to just mention before I stop is that sometimes one of the barriers to our letting go, one of the barriers to our really being practice is fear. And right now, fear and anxiety are in the air. And I've had, I personally have had a number of experiences of almost feeling like the monk, like the person in the koan, in the Mumonkan,

[27:07]

on the hundred-foot pole, going into a place where there are a lot of people, maybe they're not all aware of distancing, turning on a television and looking at violence, looking at videos of police brutality, How can I let go and actually be all that? Because that's part of the two. Our practice includes everything. It has to. And once we try fighting that, then we are paralyzed by fear. And we're locked into ourselves. And we have a barrier to being with all beings, to opening with all beings. So I was very involved with that koan when I was getting ready for priest ordination and talked about it a lot with Sojin.

[28:25]

And as a result, I wrote this to Sojin. A monk asked Sojin, how do I proceed from the top of the 100 foot pole? Awash in fear, excitement, anticipation, holding on but with ever-loosening grip, trusting that in letting go I shed layers of karmic conditioning, like layers of cloth shed when the heat and light of the sun disperse the fog. A procession of ancestors beckoned me to follow, to take the next step, the awesome step into not knowing. So I wanna invite you to stay in this kind of space, this space of all of us together, practicing and being, all of us with all of it, with everything that that means.

[29:34]

What is faith? What is faith for you? So in that, I will open up for questions. Can we? Yes, just a couple of comments about the process we're gonna plunge into now. So we have about, let's see, I guess 15 minutes or so of time for this for questions. We want to hear from as many voices as possible. And please be brief with your question and ask no more than one follow-up question. And you can either ask a question by raising your virtual hand, by clicking on the hand symbol and the participants icon at the bottom of your screen. Or alternatively, feel free to

[30:42]

put a question in the chat box, which I'll be monitoring, and I'll pass it along to Jerry as best I can. And if Jerry calls on you, please unmute yourself by clicking on the microphone icon, and also lower your hand at the same time. That would be helpful to keep it flowing. So thank you, and I'll now We're now open up for questions for Jerry. There are three hands that I see. OK. 10. Thank you for your talk, Jerry. I think I am also a faith practitioner. And I am wondering, how do we share our faith with those who seem to have less connection with that during this time?

[31:50]

It's not, it's we share ourselves. We share ourselves and we share our perceptions. We ask questions. So we can share something that we are perceiving and how we deal with it. just like we share with a friend, you know? This is what's going on for me right now. And I've been trying to work with it this way, and it seems to work for me, or something like that, rather than a kind of proselytizing. You can also go for a walk, and as we did, and noticed how vibrant the flowers are, how vibrant, how intense the light is. helping people to be opening up to what's there, everything that's there.

[33:04]

Thank you. Thank you very much, Jay. I see Kabir. Kabir. I'm sorry, I had myself muted. Hi, Jerry, thank you for this beautiful talk, much needed. You mentioned something about that knowledge, that knowing place knows that in the world and the universe, there's a dynamic, I didn't get the last part. Working, dynamic working system, I said, I think that's a kind of a paraphrase of something Dogen says. Okay, thank you so much, thank you. How about Ed Herzog?

[34:10]

We haven't heard from him for a while. Hi Jerry, it's great to see you and thank you for your talk very, very much. I have a mixture of doubt and faith in me. I feel great faith in our practice. And my doubt comes up when I, maybe it's fear, but doubt also, when it comes to sentient beings, humans, and all the state of the world, and how we've treated our planet, and how we treat each other. And so it's hard to, sometimes for me, it's very difficult to have faith that humans can

[35:20]

be transformed or transform ourselves to the highest ideals of Buddha and enlightenment, and whether or not we're capable. I mean, I guess I feel like I'm capable of it, and maybe everybody is capable. That is the faith. But it's the reality around me really troubles me. I think, you know, we don't, we can't, faith is not something, as I said, faith is a process, kind of a process of faithing. And we know, if we open ourselves up widely, we know that at any moment, at any time, this whole host of things are happening. You know, good things are happening. Yes. People are doing good, generous things.

[36:27]

There's an awful lot of self-sacrifice going on. There's this big picture. And I think that's the important thing. As we hear about certain things that are bad, which the media loves to tell us about it, there are all sorts of things going on. And it's really making sure that we don't get caught kind of narrowing our consciousness, constricting ourselves into a little ball of, you know, anxiety or self-righteousness or anger, that is not, what we have faith in is that we have a practice that gives us ways of actually dealing with that. You know, whether we do a ritual act, or whether we feel that we have to take more action than, We can still be active in the world and try and do wholesome things or join wholesome efforts.

[37:29]

We're not passively accepting these things, but we can't get caught by them. Otherwise we lose our agency and we lose our ability to really function well in the world. We have to accept on some radical way, we have to accept that this is the world It's never been any different as Sogen has said to us many times. It's never been different. And it will be the same. But in that sameness is a lot of good. It's a lot of good. So Penelope had her hand up and if she still wants to say something. I lowered my hand, but I am happy to still ask the question. Thank you. This is a really moving talk for me.

[38:32]

And I particularly love the verbifying of faith that feels, I like that, that we are facing our practice is very strong for me. You spoke near the end about the barriers to faithing, and you alluded to fear. And then you alluded to some of the things that we've recently seen in the news that are quite almost beyond the pale of horrific. And I wonder if you could address a little bit the difference the difference between knowing that we are all one or that we have each of us has all this in us, these possibilities, et cetera. How do you actually work? Could you speak to how you work with your practice in faithing when you see a video such as the one that's just happened? How do you work with that? Well, that's interesting. This is actually very personal for me.

[39:35]

Because I think what I do is when I start to feel that intense hatred or that intense outrage, I actually enter a dialogue with myself. Like, I actually haven't yet got to this place with this policeman, but I will. It's kind of like what sort of conditioning, what sort of life produces somebody who can be a monster. What kind of, what are the causes and conditions? You know, it's how they have these dramatic things that people go to prison and they have some kind of transformation because they've had, most people who are abused have been abused. They didn't just arise as a racist. It was drummed into them by their parents or their community. So it's not that they would give them a pass. But it's a tragedy when that evil is done, the karmic effects of that evil.

[40:42]

I don't want to add to the evil and the hatred with my hatred. I want to just do something about it if I can, or put a picture of the guy who was killed on my altar and chant for that person. That's kind of the thing I do. Thank you. Thank you. Sandeep. Hi, Terri. Thank you for the talk. I just wanted to share what came up for me while Penelope was asking that question is I get really caught in the whole analyzing and trying to understand what brought an action to manifest. And I think for me, it's like, when do I draw the line of rationalizing away the behavior when I feel in my gut it's wrong? Am I just wasting energy trying to understand and trying to develop

[41:49]

Empathy? Sometimes it's worth doing that because it's a way that you learn about yourself. And we turn the light in and say, what's going on with this person? Here's what's going on out there. It may be unwholesome. It may be unwholesome out there. And I don't like that. And I may want to do something about that. There may be something I can do. But also it's always interesting to look back in ourselves and look at what it is, where our responses are coming from. And how much are we adding, as I said to Penelope, how much are we going to add on top of the hatred, our own hatred? That's just adding more hatred in the world. So that's kind of how I think about it.

[42:57]

If it's really getting me, I will do things to open my mind. Before I work on it, I try to create a spaciousness for myself. So that may mean I sit, or I go out in the garden and weed, or I read something that might help me, so that I can open up a little bit. not in a way that I'm beating myself up and not in a way that I'm spending a lot of time, as you say. And yet, sometimes the time is good because you're reflecting on your own practice. And that reflection is really important in all of this, in all of this that we face, obviously, looking in and feeling what we feel. Thank you. Thank you. Yoni? Hi, Geri. Thank you for your talk.

[43:59]

I am just curious to know what, because I've never heard this before, what you meant by Tao practice and what the difference between Tao practice and faith practice is. I said doubt. Doubt. That clears things up right away. Yeah, so doubt, I mean, doubt is kind of not letting go of, the doubt is not letting go of your ego, not letting go of your conceptual mind, not really, you know, kind of always coming up with more of a critique, you know, rather than acceptance of the practice. Not that there aren't critiques, of course, you know, there aren't things, but it's, It's not having that leading with that. If there's something that needs to be changed, we change, we try and change or not. So we actually start with a trusting mind, a faith mind.

[45:00]

We're facing the practice rather than holding back. People have things they like. Some people don't like services. People come and sit in the back of the zendo for zazen and then they leave. They don't like the service. You know, that kind of thing. And then all of a sudden one day they stay. Hopefully. Okay. Heiko. Good morning. Thank you, Geri, for this talk. It's stimulating and brings this one question. You're a doctor. About the physical things that are going on. You spoke of the moment when we come to realize, oh, I don't know. And we decide to embrace the not knowing. Panic mode might go away. A lot of reactivity might go away. What physically do you feel or what changes in your way of seeing that allows you to see that's bodily felt?

[46:05]

Can you talk about that? Yeah, that's kind of different for everybody, you know. But I think that if we are truly in our body and mind, and what we're doing Zazen, we're sitting body-mind, body-mind practice, it's all included. Generally, we haven't, you know, physiologically, we have nerve, clusters of nerves in our heart area, And we have clusters of nerves in our gut area. And we have obviously our brain and the other sensory receptors. But most of us have patterns of reactivity. In other words, when we feel, I can tell, I look at what's happening to my body if I'm starting to cope with, What I feel is an unwholesome or reactive feeling.

[47:11]

I really go back into my body. I breathe and I look where the tightness is. And sometimes the tightness is my chest. Sometimes the tightness is my gut. And I actually stay with that for a little bit and kind of breathe into it. It stops me, the awareness of it stops me from continuing a process of reactivity. So I have, so some people just go back to their breath. A lot of people, we tell a lot of people to go back to their breath. Yes, that's true. But some of us start breathing hyperventilating with our anxiety. Sometimes that just taking a breath requires also your whole body, taking a breath with your whole body, having that breath go through your whole body, uh, into your abdomen and back. And, uh, and just in doing that, just in that embodying of the feeling, you can, you can learn about it.

[48:21]

Jerry, can I ask a question? We have time for one more question. Gary has his real hand up for a few minutes. So, Gary, you'll have the last question. Yeah, I couldn't figure out how to raise my electronic hand when you're co-host. Anyway, I'll look into that. Jerry, I wanted to ask how you fold in Buddha's encouragement to test all his teachings with faith, or just having kind of absolute faith in something. I mean, I feel like they kind of roll together. It's kind of an interplay between a test and then you accept, and a test and then you accept. and then your faith kind of grows. How do you see that?

[49:28]

I think it is a process. And I think, what is that cliche, you know, trust but verify. And I think that part of, very much in this fascicle, Dogen really talks about that. You can go through the motions of practice for a long time before, sometimes before you get things. But you have your faithing, your practice, and then when you get it in your body-mind, when you feel it in that place of knowing, not knowing, then you have that little verification, right? So every time you have a little moment, a little Ken Cho moment, something very simple, right? The taste of something, the smell of something, the look of something that just pierces right into your center.

[50:36]

Then you have that experience of what knowing not knowing is. You have that place of total acceptance. So you verify. Obviously, if that never happens for you, it's hard to have faith. Sometimes it takes a long time, or you have little glimpses. People have little glimpses. They all have little glimpses. They come into the Zendo for the first time, and they just sit there, and something's different. Most people say that. They sit there, and they're with everybody else, and there's something different, and that something different, that feeling of that, that's enough to start the process. they hear a word from somebody that just, boom, that word really pierces through all of the barriers that we put up, our husk of conceptual thinking. It pierces that. So that's what gets us started.

[51:38]

That's what gets us hooked to have a thought of enlightenment. And then we just keep doing it and these little things We fall, we're at risk of having another one of these other experiences, but we kind of get a way of knowing. This is, for me, very much body-mind practice, that you get it. And when you start, and you start referring back there to the getting it place, that becomes a go, it's easier to get there. You're never there all the time, you know. We're all fallible and we're always messing up, But knowing how to get in your body and your mind, knowing how to do something, do a little ritual, chant something, whatever it takes to get you back past those barriers into your true self.

[52:37]

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