Morning. It's a kind of tropical winter morning here. It's a little warm out and steamy, so enjoy it. So later this afternoon in San Francisco, I'm giving the eulogy for my old friend, poet and activist Les Gottesman. We were friends for 55 years. I met him kind of in the poetry scene at Columbia University in 1965. We, our friendship survived psychedelic drugs and music and politics and political work and even a political collective that we had in San Francisco and continued down to the day of his death in October.

[01:25]

So in my eulogy, there's a paragraph, I'll read you a paragraph from it. Les is no longer how I remember him. Lean as a rail, striding quickly down Broadway, smoking unfiltered camels, words flowing fast and clear. Les was a hipster in Allen Ginsberg's sense of the word. There's a quotation. Burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night. Burning for the heavenly, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night. Actually, and this is still in this paragraph that I'm reading, actually as I read back through my old poems and memories and Wes's poems, it is clear that we were all passionate and burning in those days.

[02:40]

On fire with the joy of language, arrive, very arrive in a time of war, yearning for the transformation of American society and the coming revolution, which we're still waiting for. So, with our words and also with the music that I was playing, there was this fire. This burning for the ancient heavenly connection, which I suspect all of us know in various ways. And that was also about the time that I took up Zen practice. in the summer of 1968.

[03:42]

Actually, that summer was the summer after we, our little group of people, we all had occupied the president of the university's office at Columbia and other buildings, and I lived in that office with a hundred people or so for a week. It was a very simultaneously really exciting and really crowded. So, we came out here with the intention of practicing Zazen and we found the Berkley Zen Center on Dwight Way that summer. I think it was about a year old at that point, but the lovely Zendo in the attic had been built.

[04:51]

We sat there some days and we kind of alternated that with going to Sokoji, the first San Francisco Zen Center on Bush Street, San Francisco. And so, I was very taken with this zazen and I wrote a poem. that summer, which was titled Zazen. It was very kind of, I don't know, prophetic for me, I suppose. Here's some lines for it. I must sit, sit. The walls step back and lie down when I sit. The roof flies up and shines, a new star in the firmament. The kitchen is a festival of dancing knives. This all happens as I sit."

[05:54]

So you can feel the energy. You can hear it in those words. So I think that most of us when we come here, when we begin to sit zazen, most of us come with that kind of fire. Not all of us, and I'm not sure it's entirely prerequisite, but it really helps if you're gonna throw yourself into it. You can call it chi, or you can call it energy, But it's the quality of intensity that really helped me endure those long hours of pain, of restlessness, of bewilderment.

[07:02]

It's a great word, bewilderment. sort of being lost in the wilderness, you know, with sort of co-arising wonder and amazement and also some edge of fear, concern. But those first Sishines, you know, Sishines for like the first 10 years were marked by pain and restlessness and bewilderment. And really everything that we encountered, that I encountered was unexpected and new. being in his mind.

[08:04]

And this fire is also, it's the awakening of bodhicitta, of our Buddha mind. Chloe pointed me towards something that she's been reading in a book by Chökyam Trungpa called Blimpses of the Profound. And I think this applies to our practice of Zazen and also our just the practice of Zen in the larger sense. Trungpa writes, a lot of things haven't been answered in our life. And we're still searching for the questions. That questioning is Buddha nature. It is a state of potential. The more dissatisfaction, the more questions and more doubts there are, the healthier it is.

[09:16]

For we are no longer sucked into ego-oriented situations, but we are constantly woken up. And I think that was the spirit that I brought to practice in those first years. I came to practice because there was this fire that was burning in me. And I had no idea what it was about. And I didn't know how to encompass it or include it. And I had to do something. And it occurred to me, maybe I should practice it. You know, and I started, and as soon as I came here, I felt at home.

[10:20]

with somebody trying to sell you duct cleaning. But when I came and sat, all I knew was I had to do it. I didn't know where it was going. I didn't have a goal. It's just like, okay, this is what I'm doing. I see it, I really see it in my, our son, Alex, He left on Monday and he's taking the car to Japan. He's taking the plane. He always took the car. He never knew where the car was when he was home. Did Alex take the car? He's taking the airplane to Japan to go to a Zen monastery and lived there for a year and a half.

[11:38]

And which is, that in itself is amazing. It's probably a whole other talk. But I feel like he can't articulate why it is exactly that he's doing this. And I never pressed him, but it's like, he has to do it. That's, that's this fire. So, the fire that I'm speaking of is energizing, it's purifying, it's catalytic. In the mystery of alchemy, fire is the element necessary to do the work of transformation. Nothing happens without fire. And the fire, it's interesting to note, first of all, it has a location in your body.

[12:44]

It traditionally is seen in alchemical terms as located in your solar plexus, a.k.a. your hara. You know, it's what we call the fire in the belly. And we all know this fire. But the other thing is that fire has an emotional quality to it in this context, in the context of alchemy. And that quality, fire is linked to desire. And we'll get to that desire bad, right? Maybe, maybe not. So I'm talking about the fire that's necessary for us to practice.

[13:51]

And as I said, it came out of looking at these early poems that I had written and that my friend Les and others of us had written, and seeing this, and at the same time, I guess raising the question, where is the fire now? And it doesn't burn the same way. So, of course, there's another side of fire in the Buddhist tradition. The root of the word nirvana means, in a number of ancient Indian languages, it carries a sense of a flame that's been extinguished or blown out.

[14:54]

And that's the analogy for liberation. The flame of desire, the flame of attachment, this has been extinguished. And it's a counterpoint to the fires of greed, hatred, delusion, lust, and so forth, which the Buddha clearly posed as images to awakening. There's a famous fire sutra, the Aditya Pariyaya Sutra. I don't know if people are familiar with that. Let me read you just a little bit of it, okay? Because all is burning, And what is the all that is burning? The eye is burning.

[15:57]

Forms are burning. Eye consciousness is burning. Eye contact is burning. The ear is burning. Sounds are burning. The nose is burning. Odors are burning. The tongue is burning. Flavors are burning. The body is burning. Tangibles are burning. The mind is burning. Ideas are burning. Mind consciousness is burning. Mind contact is burning. Whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither pleasant nor painful, that arises with mind contact, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, burning with the fire of hate, burning with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging, and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, and with despairs. So, it's interesting, you can think of this as sort of, this is what the heart suture took and turned inside out.

[17:09]

where it says the eye is burning, and forms are burning, the ear is burning, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind. No burning to concern yourself about. So this is where we sit. We sit in the middle of these different fires. And as long as we have a living body, we're kind of right in the middle of the fire. We're actually cooking along at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty warm. In too little fire, our temperature goes down, we're listless and we're not alive. too much fire you know we have this this physical condition that we have to be aware of called inflammation too much fire and we're inflamed and we're crazed so the practice of zen is to try to regulate our life

[18:38]

we raise them and we bring our energy up to where we can serve others and ourselves. If the fires are roaring, we have to turn down the heat so we don't burn others and ourselves. The idea is for a kind of complete combustion to burn cleanly and completely just enough to set the situation at hand. So as I get older, I have to watch my energy more carefully. My physical reserves feel limited in a new way. I tire more easily, certain joints ache, and I'm partial to

[19:43]

a nice nap in the afternoon. Something that never occurred to me until I was about 55. When I think about Sashin, or maybe a period of monastic practice, the question is not about whether I'll have pain in my legs, because actually Zazen is really, Zazen is a different thing now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It feels, when I sit down, I really noticed it this morning. It's like, it feels easy. And it feels so relaxing. Sitting here this morning, before service, it's like I kind of didn't want Ron to ring the bell. You know, I just was really happy just sitting. But looking at monastic practice or Sashin, the question now is not whether I'll have the pain in my legs, but about whether I'm going to make it through a long and tiring day, and then another, and another.

[21:02]

Mentally, I feel pretty sharp, at least for now. I think about these words from the Gospel of Matthew. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is, well, the flesh is weaker than it was. So returning to the fire, the question is, what fire do we need to practice? What fire do we need to practice Zazen? You know, as I said, in the early Buddhist tradition, It's about extinguishing, cooling those fires until they sort of fall away. But from the Mahayana perspective, I really resonate with Ginsberg's description, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

[22:14]

Maybe, in fact, it's even simpler. I was listening to, Ed has been doing some interviewing at Hertzog's, been doing some interviewing with Sojin, Roshi, and I sat in on the interview that they did about two weeks ago, and Sojin was recounting kind of his early, his early days of practice. And it was very clear that he had the fire, you know, that he just stopped doing, well, what he started doing was just throwing himself into Zen practice. And at one point, He asked Suzuki Roshi, and you can hear it in the transcripts, I think, from one of the lectures, one of the Q&As.

[23:26]

He said, he asked Suzuki Roshi, what is nirvana? And Suzuki Roshi answered, seeing one thing through to the end. That's really good. uh, seeing one thing through to the end. When he said that, uh, in this interview, I just, I found it definitely inspiring. And what Sojan said was that inspired him for his entire life. And we can see now, now that he's facing some real difficulty, He's still doing this one thing through completely. And it takes fire to do that. You know, you have to keep shoveling in the coal to keep that burning, to persist.

[24:34]

But I feel like that's the practice that was given us by Suzuki Roshi, by Sojin, by all of our Buddhas and ancestors. And that if we follow it, if we keep feeling that healthy fire, then we can We can see how we're already awake moment by moment. But we have to keep tending the fires. So I ask of myself, where is my fire right now? And it's still there. Sometimes I have to kind of pick through the embers and put some wood on so that it flares up, but it's there.

[25:52]

And I would ask the same thing of you. I would ask you this morning, where is your fire? regardless of what's happening in this world, regardless of impeachment, global warming, racism, the aging of our bodies and our own diminishment. Where is your fire? And we need to find it. So I think that's where I'm going to stop this morning. And if you want to answer that question, please do. Or if you have a question about the question, you can ask that too.

[26:55]

Yeah, Dan. And something that's come up for me is that when I look for my fire, I tend I think it's good to look around because so long as there are embers, anything can happen.

[28:11]

that you tend to do a metaphor or show a couple, or is it something that you turn towards that is a given? In other words, is this a choice? I think it's really a choice in terms of living. It's a choice. I mean, this is what we are constantly wrestling with. you know, in Zen practice is like, well, there's no choice. It's, it's just there. Right. But, uh, if you don't see it, then you can't work with it. Then you can't, you can't use it so that you might be helpful to yourself and others. Uh, And it can die through neglect or it can run wild. But its potential is there so long as you're alive.

[29:31]

I mean, I think it's one of the, you could say it's one of the markers when you encounter, when you're with somebody who's dying, it's like in that moment it appears that the flame has gone out. And how much do we actually take credit for? And how much is what is given in being alive? Alex, it sounds like he's following something. It's not something that he's stoked in some fire. When I look back at my own life, In the past, I see a kind of dogged persistence, a kind of tenacity that I identify with, that energy that you're talking about, that I'd like to see.

[30:40]

I'd like to feel something, you know, that is carbon-free. We've been given everything we need, I think. It's all there. This is also one of the great divisions in Japanese Buddhism, for example. The Zen school is seen as a self-power school, that you kind of have to shape it and direct it yourself. And some of the other devotional schools, like Jodo Shinshu, are seen as other power schools. And to me, it's like that's a completely false distinction. It's like, yes, we have been given a lot. Yes, we have to practice. This is why we practice. And I accept the mystery, you know, that You might have a bunch of narratives about it, but essentially, it's pretty strange, you know, because it's like way outside of what your background is perhaps, certainly is mine.

[32:03]

So, it has both those elements. I think this is kind of a subtext, which is It's finally stretching the metaphor too far. We depend on each other's fire. And at the risk of saying too much, we have had a fire burning in the middle of the sangha for 52 years.

[33:13]

And now I feel now the responsibility is ours. The responsibility is ours to bring fully and to communicate to those who come through this door what is necessary to be awake. It's very hard for me to talk about this, but I realize as we're talking, this is what's underneath it, and this is what is in my question to myself. I feel responsible to that, to what I've been given. And actually, I'm asking all of us to share that responsibility.

[34:26]

Basically, for the sake of the world. The world is obviously needs it. So, Jake. Thank you. What you just said. I think of it as a very interrelated thing going on with the fire. I see that surgeon, I know he has fed my fire. And in turn, I see sometimes it's my responsibility to put a stop to it and help someone else with their fire.

[35:29]

coming here, I found that the credibility he gave to my fire, the credibility he Ancestors, Sojin, Hodan, it's worth pursuing because look what's happened. So that's what I think. Welcome to the asylum. Phenelvea. Phenelvea, illuminous heart. The first one was this question of how do I or how do each of us put an end to this?

[37:05]

Yeah, I'm really willing to dare to burn, you know. It's risky, you know. It's not always, and even as Trump was saying, you know, it's not always fun, but it is a lot. Yes. I mean, it's really a very frightening image, because it means, like, when you go of everything being stable and static and predictable, and that's a really hard thing to do. It's a really scary thing to do. So to really enter into your metaphor, I think, is where, like, there's also that line, like, that to keep sitting with the element of fire is what we need.

[38:33]

50% risky way to be in the world. And I think that means that practices have saved your head from fire. It's a little different, but I think that what I found here, just when I came, when I walked in here, I felt at home. I was very lucky. Not everybody feels that. I think quite a number of people have felt it and it, you know, it remains home for some or for others they move away. But what that means to me is that we were we were finding, we were doing this exploration, finding this fire together, which is one of the things about community and Sangha, is actually that we don't do it alone, you know, we're sitting right next to each other.

[39:45]

And that's, I think that relates to sort of what Heiko was saying, you know, it's just, what a relief, you know. Maybe one or two more. Susan? Well, another aspect of the fire metaphor is in the fire sermon, he says, with what are all these things burning? Burning with the fire of greed, burning with the fire of passion, burning with the fire of delusion. So I'm just saying, also, that my understanding is that that fire, the fire sermon, is how Everything is impermanent, and we're kind of destroying ourselves. Like, really, we're burning up in a negative way. Just like the fires in California are burning us up, we're burning our cars by the heat, so it's... There's that side of the fire, also, which isn't the flame of the moon, and the flames are the love of the darkness.

[40:53]

Wow. I think that, you know... So... All of the metaphors and a lot of the teachings of early Buddhism are about cooling with the goal of extinguishing. And so that's kind of the orthodoxy on one side. I think in Mahayana, looking at Zen teachings, looking at, say, Trungpa and Tibetan teachings, they're looking at it in a multi-perspective vision, and so that's why I was trying to bring up both sides, yes. And it's not so simple, you know, that The fire of desire has positive aspects and negative aspects.

[42:06]

And we have to figure out how to work with that. If you suppress one side or the other, if you really repress it, push it down, try to extinguish it, there's something missing, I think. That's my feeling. Ben? I was hesitating to bring this up because I can't really remember so many lines from it, but because Susan brought up the two different fires, in TS Eliot's The Four Quartets, there's a little with flaming wings descending, and it's about sort of the Pentecostal fire that saves you from the fire of damnation. And it's really a beautiful few stanzas, and it ends with, our only choice is to be saved from fire with fire. And it strikes me as very zen sometimes when I read it. So I would just recommend, if anyone's interested, to look up that part of the poem.

[43:09]

It's really beautiful. Well, I think part three of the whole stanza is called the fire sermon. There's that, too. Although, when you read it, which I did the other day, there's no direct reference, but clearly he had this in mind. Gary, you're the last. For me, what happens to me is when I stop, and I stop seeing myself as separate, and I start seeing The fire just... I just go on and flame up. It's just self and other getting rid of the idea of self, or not getting rid of the idea of self. Letting go of self and seeing self as other, or other and self creates that flame. It's fuel to the extent that we don't have it.

[44:13]

I don't know what to make. Yeah. Right. Right. Well, thank you very much and enjoy the rest of the weekend.

[44:25]

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