I vow to take the truth with us and not just words. Good morning. It's wonderful to be here at the Berkeley Zendo with so many good Dharma friends. I was here a couple of weeks ago for Akin Roshi's talk and he apologized for giving a written talk. Perhaps I should apologize for giving an unwritten talk. Someone asked me to say a few words about ordination and dharma transmission.

[01:02]

And I will do that, but actually I do have something written that I would like to read, which is a poem written by a fellow Kansan, the name of William Stafford. He's a poet who died last September. At that time I happened to be at a gathering at Spirit Rock. One of the people there read the poem, Michael Mead read the poem, and it struck me as a powerful statement. And that's the way he intended it. So he entitled it, A Ritual to Read to Each Other. If you don't know the kind of person I am, and I don't know the kind of person you are, a pattern that others made may prevail in the world, and following the wrong God home, we may miss our star.

[02:30]

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, A shrug that lets the fragile sequence break, sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dike. And as elephants parade, holding each elephant's tail. But if one wanders, the circus won't find the park. I call it cruel. and may be the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk. Though we could fool each other, we should consider

[03:34]

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep. The signals we give, yes or no or maybe, should be clear. The darkness around us is deep. I looked up ordination in the dictionary just recently, after having been ordained many years ago. And it was kind of interesting.

[04:39]

So I thought I'd share that with you. Of course, we all know ordination, a religious ceremony in which a person is admitted to the ministry of the church or priesthood. It means to invest with authority, to decree as part of the order of nature or the universe. So it can have a secular definition. Something is simply ordained to be. Looking, the root of the word comes from some sound like ard, And it refers to putting the strings, the threads, in order when you set up the loom to weave.

[05:47]

So it actually means to create order. And the The Latin root ordiri means to begin, to weave. And we also get the word primordial, from beginning to weave. And of course, We also get the word ordinary. So, for those who think ordination is something special, it's good to remember that it also has the same root as ordinary. Now, that's the Western language.

[07:02]

Sanskrit, Indo-European root, and the Latin root. Actually, our tradition, Soto Zen, coming from Japan, uses the term tokudo. We have tokudo for people who become ordained, as we say, as laypersons in Berkeley Zen Center, or San Francisco Zen Center, excuse me. And we have tokudo also for priest ordination. It's the same set of vows and intentions. Little different accoutrements. And this morning, as you were doing, many of you who are here now, were here for the Riyaka Pusats, the Bodhisattva ceremony, in which you chant and thereby take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha,

[08:29]

and state the vows that are the vows of ordination. The vows of tokudo. Tokudo means attaining the way. Or, more literally, it means attainment of going beyond. And when we chant the Heart Sutra, we finish the Heart Sutra with the phrase, gathe gathe pargate parasamgate bodhisvaha. And the gathe gathe is going beyond. Pargate, going completely beyond. So I think it's helpful that some people not only see what is true, which is fundamentally our practice, just simply to see what is true, but also to recognize it, to acknowledge it, and to express it.

[09:55]

As Stafford says in his poem, it's actually cruel to see the way things are and not recognize the fact or not actually say the way things are. So we have all clarified our intentions today, taking the full moon ceremony. I saw the full moon this morning actually setting as the sun was rising. So periodically we have this ritual to mark and clarify our intentions.

[11:00]

And it's particularly necessary, I think, because we're surrounded by a culture which actually teaches, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, teaches ignorance in various ways. We say that the roots of ignorance are greed, hate and delusion. And there are many reinforcing images in our mass media and in our relationships that actually teach hatred, and teach prejudice, and teach a kind of acquisitiveness, as if you can be satisfied if you just get all the right stuff.

[12:04]

So we have a very acquisitive culture. I think it would be healthier if we, rather than an acquisitive culture, we emphasized an inquisitive, a culture of questioning and investigation, or a wisdom culture. So I think that's what we're actually doing when we create these little zendos, or we meet and sit together and discuss the dharma. We're creating a way to somehow counterbalance or find a way to see through the acquisitive, greedy, violent and confusing society. that we find ourselves in. And we have a long tradition of doing this, and it's always been, well, not always, but often it's been a minority.

[13:16]

The Dharma practitioners in any of the so-called Buddhist cultures in India, Tibet, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, as Buddhism has moved, very seldom were even close to a majority point of view. I don't know why, but sometimes when Buddhism has become, for a time, a majority point of view. It seems to be somehow less rigorous. There's something about human nature. It's a little hard. We have some resistance to seeing things simply and directly as they are and recognizing that fact.

[14:25]

Recently, in the sitting group that meets at my house on Monday nights in Mill Valley, we were discussing Tung Shan's three score blows. This is case 15 from the Mumangkan. Dungshan came to study with Yun Men. By the way, for those of you who know the name Dungshan, this is not the Dungshan that is the ancestor of Soto Zen School. That's another Dungshan. When Dungshan came to study with Yun Men, the teacher asked him, where have you come from recently? Dungsan said, ìChadu.î Then Yunmen asked, ìWhere did you spend the summer?î Dungsan said, ìAt Baoshi Monastery in Hunan.î Then Yunmen said, ìWhen did you leave there?î Dungsan said,

[15:54]

August 25th. Yun Men said, I spare you three score blows. And Dong Shan didn't know what to say. But he thought about it all night and came back the next day. and met with Yunmin again and said, yesterday you said you forgave me three score blows. I do not know where I was at fault. Yunmin said, you rice bag, Jiangshi, Hunan, and still you go on this way. But this, Dungshan was enlightened. So think about it.

[17:05]

So we have ordained conversation, we have ordinary conversation. Sometimes we miss the opportunity to deepen our conversation. A young man is asking very ordinary questions. Where did you come from? Or is that an ordinary question? It could be the most profound question. Where did you come from? Or where are you coming from right now? We say, I don't know where he was coming from. Where are we coming from? As we go through our day doing what we need to do, where are we coming from? And what is our intention? moment by moment. Is the intention with which we conduct our daily activities the same intention that we chant the full moon ceremony?

[18:27]

So, Dungshan comes back and says, You forgave me three score blows. I don't know where I was at fault. I thought, I don't know all these places so well that are referred to here, so I thought I could express it. And he says, I don't know why I was at fault. The young man responds, you bagel head, do you really think you go about like this? Now at Tassajara? Now out in the world? Or now in the East Bay? Then over in Marin, is that what's going on? So how do we find the place where we truly are?

[19:41]

And then how do we express that? what our practice is about. And for me, taking up this robe, this wonderful brown robe, I can say this brown robe was given to me by Sojin Roshi at a little ceremony in the middle of the night at Tassajara. And this robe is part of a whole tradition and lineage of cutting up little pieces of fabric and sewing them together.

[20:52]

in an ordered way that follows a certain, because it follows a certain tradition, it carries a meaning. This robe was sewed by many friends. There are, I don't know how many stitches, thousands of little stitches. And many people help to sew this. And in doing so, they put their intention, their sincere heartfelt interest that somehow we find the correct path. And so I feel that this is so wonderful.

[22:15]

I feel so grateful. And I feel that the responsibility of this robe is, very hard to live up to. And it's really the same road. Let's see, you have your Raksu, Ross, various people. Meili, of course, can't put her okasa on with one hand. It's a two-handed deal. And the idea, although it seems to kind of cover a person up, the idea actually is that wearing the robe, you're completely exposed.

[23:19]

And I think that that quality of being willing to expose ourselves is absolutely essential to a practice of finding what's true. And I think when we get together and we do a ceremony like the full moon ceremony, we're actually saying to each other, I'm pretty serious about my whole life and my conduct and I'm expressing my intention please help me, help me to understand it. We're actually saying that to each other, we're actually at the same time as we're making a statement, we're making a request. And as practitioners together, we have the opportunity then to

[24:34]

Give each other a little nudge as Yun Men gave to him, Shang. I spare you 60 blows. Sometimes we can ask each other as Dharma siblings What are you doing? How's it going? Where are you coming from? Or why did you do that? I don't understand how someone who's dedicated to the truth can do something so stupid. And we really need to be able to receive that and hear it from each other. If we do that, then the Sangha The community can actually be a matrix of enlightenment.

[25:41]

Together we weave the fabric which goes beyond. And this includes everything. This includes darkness as well as light. Stafford says, the darkness is deep. For a Zen student, the darkness is a treasure. When I lived at Green Gulch, I was in charge of composting. Composting. I think composting really should be really a basic part of everyone's educational curriculum. It's very important to understand how much nourishment there is in things rotting.

[26:50]

There's a whole transforming process in this soup of our being together. So Michael Mead, who told me about this poem, made many wonderful statements in his book, Man and the Waters of Life. And this quote talks about healing. But how do we find what needs to be healed? He says, in a sense, people have within them a room or chamber where a part of them is always lying incurably ill.

[28:00]

The illness comes from being separated from the beauty and full range of life the soul desires. The cure can be found in the place of greatest loss and fear, where all have lost their heads." He's actually referring to a story he told where there's a sick king and the prince has to go through a series of trials in order to bring back the cure to his sick father. And everyone else who's tried it before has lost their head. He himself, the prince, was forbidden to even go look for the cure because his elder brothers had been killed. And when he was forbidden to go look for the cure, he himself became sick.

[29:08]

And no No remedies. Anything that was tried was a failure. No remedies could be brought to him. And so he had to go to the place of the greatest danger in himself where he was most fearful in order to find the cure for himself and for his father. So Michael says, the cure can be found only in the place of greatest loss, where all have lost their heads. Unfortunately, all appeals to normalcy will only drive further away the beauty that is missing. So it doesn't work to say, oh, it's no big deal.

[30:10]

When there is a problem or an issue, we need to face it. It can be a simple matter. My daughter's friend parked her car at kind of an angle in the driveway, which blocked me from getting out with my car and blocked my wife from getting in with her car. little parking situation. And then they left. My daughter and her friend, they left the car there and I didn't know where they went. And they didn't tell me about it, but I just went out and, oh, here's this car. Where did this car come from? Who would be so inconsiderate? They have to just park their car here and block me from getting out and someone else from getting in.

[31:20]

When I raised this matter with my daughter, she got kind of upset. She said, what's the big deal? You weren't going to go out anyway, were you? And I didn't even know that she left it there. Whose fault is it? She didn't know. I had already left. So what's the big deal? So what's the big deal? If you're the person who's facing the unpleasant information, someone else is raising the issue for you. It's really not the best position from which to say, what's the big deal? When you're being criticized, the generous thing to do is to say, oh, OK, I understand.

[32:31]

I hear the problem. I'll take care of it. Then you allow the other person to be generous. I'm not sure my daughter understands this yet. But the question is, do I understand this? When someone raises an issue with me, how do I hear it? I was in Berkeley rep several weeks ago, and I suppose many of you also were able to see Anna Deavere Smith's presentation, Fires in the Mirror.

[33:47]

Anybody here see that? No? A couple people? Wonderful, wonderful presentation. She teaches theater at Stanford and she's working on a particular kind of theater in which she brings conversation verbatim to the stage. In this case, she went to Crown Heights, Brooklyn shortly after the incident in which The Lubavitch Hasidic rabbi's car went off into the sidewalk into a crowd of people and a seven-year-old boy was killed. And then there was quite a big brouhaha between the Jewish Hasidic community and the largely black community surrounding them.

[34:53]

What was wonderful about her presentation was that she interviewed many people and presented about 25 different characters, all herself, just with a simple prop or no props, expressing themselves in their own words. And everyone's point of view was true. Everyone was sincere and honest as far as they could be in the way they expressed themselves. But few of them had the perspective to see that each of them had a point of view that was true. So how can it be that people who are

[36:01]

diametrically opposed, each have the truth, are each expressing the truth. This was a wonderful presentation. If she does it again sometime in the Bay Area, it's worth Well, it's worth the trip. It was worth driving. It's been in my mind a lot. So in many cases, there's no easy solution. We can't say, this side is right, that side is wrong. We have to hear. We have to hear the different voices. The Bodhisattva vow that we say, we vow to be awake with all beings. We vow to save all beings inside, the voices inside, the voices outside.

[37:10]

No one's excluded. One more time for William Stafford. If you don't know the kind of person I am, and I don't know the kind of person you are, a pattern that others made may prevail in the world, and following the wrong God home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break, sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dike. And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders, the circus won't find the park. I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs, but not recognize the fact.

[38:21]

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk. Though we could fool each other, we should consider lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep. The signals we give, yes, no, maybe, should be clear. The darkness around us is deep. So I think it's important that we recognize how we're connected so our circus doesn't get lost on the way to the park

[39:37]

Is that enough for us or should we have a couple of questions? We have time for a few questions and afterwards during tea and cookies we can carry on more informally. Does anyone have anything to say or a comment or a question? about inner dicing and business. Policy is so important. You'll be able to maintain materials

[40:56]

to get some identity and solidification of more members. And that's, I'm sure, you know, necessarily think of capitalism as being materialistic, in other words, deceiving the markets.

[42:37]

And then I heard a lot of Monaghan saying that, when he was in the CIA, Do you have a question? I was just wondering how it was possible. We know that many groups are based upon having an enemy, having a common enemy.

[44:29]

And certain individual people put a lot of their own identity, the investment of their identity into a particular group. And we know that that's something that we all tend to do, actually, at some level. The Buddhist way has always been to see through that kind of selfishness that takes sides against some other. Now, it doesn't mean that we ignore who we are. It means that we express our identity with some tentativeness. We say, OK, maybe I can be called a Buddhist.

[45:35]

But it's really not quite right even to say that I'm a Buddhist. So to be a Buddhist actually is to go beyond being a Buddhist and to let go of any particular kind of one-sidedness. Any other question or comment? Lots of hands. Yeah, do you have any tips for the situation of not recognizing what's happening? and thereby having to go into this very dark place where heads are lost. Do you have any tips for negotiating that process? It's good to recognize that it can be dangerous.

[46:43]

And so part of our practice is to create some sanctuary, some safety. And actually we do that when we sit. Simply sitting down and stopping and bringing your attention to your breath is fundamentally a kind of a stabilization practice at the beginning. And that creates some sanctuary. So I think we need to understand that as we proceed in some process of investigation, that we keep referring back periodically to a state of mind which has some stability. One more question now.

[47:46]

You can fight it out in the back. Who's... I said something in the beginning about... you see things as they are, but not the same anymore. I can't quite make it. I just understood. You said, you see things as they are, but not the same anymore. Uh-huh. I think that's what you said. I didn't understand. I didn't understand it. Oh, is it okay? The question was something about if you see things as they are but don't say anything, is that a problem? Yeah. That's what I heard you saying. And I was wondering what you meant by that. You need to be, if you see something, if you see people to just be quiet or Well, that's an interesting question.

[48:55]

Rick, the first thing we need to do is acknowledge for ourselves what we see. And as you sit, actually, and begin to inquire into the nature of your own mind and your mental processes and your bodily experiences, you begin to understand how much is going on that you don't even recognize already. So partly what we do is we simply acknowledge whatever it is we see. Now how you express it in a social context, of course, takes a lot of skill to judge what to say when and who to say it to. Then we'd have to get into specific cases, you know, what do we do in this case, what do we do in that case?

[49:56]

So there isn't any one simple motto that we can live by All these teachings have some function, some use, and they also have their limitations. Thank you for listening.

[50:35]

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