this morning. Steve is a long-time resident of Green Gulch in Tazawha, but mostly Green Gulch, and is part of our close family as he received Dharma transmission from Sojin, and he is the founder and the teacher of the Dharma Eye Sendok. in San Rafael. So, thank you. Steve has been with us a number of times. Thank you, Dharma Sister. Good morning. Actually, I'd like to begin with a little moment of silence for the two policemen who were killed in the Capitol building yesterday, and for the wounding and injury and upset that causes various people.

[01:16]

There were other people who were wounded. So I'd like you to just close your eyes and take a moment, take three breaths, And as you exhale, send your healing blessing. And I'd like you to take another three breaths. Consider anyone else you know who is wounded or dying at the present. And then let's do three more breaths for the children, any children who are hungry or

[02:29]

neglected or abused. So thank you. Given the situation we're in, I wanted to keep my talk today pretty simple and talk about what you already know, or at least are beginning to know, which is sitting Zazen, Zendo, that's one thing, and walking out the door. and facing everything else.

[03:33]

That's the second thing. So I'll try to keep my talk just to those two things. The first part, sitting in the zendo, I think you're all very fortunate here to have this place. It's a wonderful, beautiful, right now, a kind of cozy room. And it's a room dedicated to zazen, a room dedicated to awareness, and it's a room dedicated to supporting your inner practice. So how do you get actually to your inner practice?

[04:41]

I mean, you come to your zendo and you sit down, right? Now, some days you may not come here, so you have a zendo someplace else. Maybe you have a corner of your bedroom. I'm kind of very, very, very lucky actually to have a zendo in my backyard in San Rafael, which we converted an old garage with the help of some friends into a place to sit. But not everyone can come to a formally constituted zendo every day, so you find some place. One of my students I know sits in the bathroom. She has three teenage children. It's the only place where she can get some peace and quiet. So she has her little little place in the bathroom, a little shelf with her candle and incense. She can lock the door. Yeah.

[05:49]

But then when you're there, when you take the seat, you sit down, how do you actually enter Zazen? I like to offer you the image of jumping off a cliff. Maybe some of you have had the experience of climbing up on a rock, on a river or a lake, and you kind of feel like, hmm, I don't know what it's going to be like to enter that water. And it's a little scary. You're right at the edge. And you say, here goes nothing, yabba-dabba-doo. So when you sit down and you take that first breath and you exhale completely, you might try, yabba-dabba-doo.

[06:57]

Here goes nothing. Completely clearing your mind. so that you can enter the water. And again and again. It's not just something you do once, you know. Because you find, oh, there's something you didn't clear out. Something comes up. Oh, you have to pay attention to that. Oh, I wanted to offer a statement of homage to my teacher, Sogen Weizmann Roshi. One time we were studying together and I asked him, I don't remember exactly what we were reading, but we were studying something in Dogen, and I asked him a question something like this, everything being equal, wouldn't you

[08:07]

when confronted with right and wrong, wouldn't you favor what's right?" And he said, our practice is upright, no leaning. So that's even clearing out These notions of right and wrong is part of that, and I hear Bill does nothing. This conversation goes back a ways, and I wanted to read a little bit from an encounter of young men and Kao Shan. Diving into the water here, and the water is diving into me. Yun Men was probably in his thirties doing a pilgrimage, going around.

[09:21]

This was in China in the ninth century, going around from place to place and visiting zendos like this, spending a little time asking some questions and seeing if he could learn something. Kaoshan was the disciple of Dongshan. And so Kaoshan and Dongshan together were the founders in China of this particular lineage, which we call Soto Zen. The kao became so, and the dung became to in Japanese. But you can go back to Chinese, and so it's the Kaodung school. So you can be very proud to have stumbled into the barn here and be participating with the cow dung school.

[10:26]

So cow dung was talking and he said, no, cow shan, excuse me, cow shan was talking and he said, because the dung was already dead at that time. People everywhere all just adopt set patterns. Why don't you, he's telling everyone in his group, why don't you tell them a turning phrase in order to make them get rid of their doubts and confusions? And so a young man asked, why is it that one does not know of the existence of that which is most immediate." And Kaushan responded, just because it is the most immediate. And Yun Man followed up and asked, and how can one become truly intimate with it?

[11:34]

And Kaushan said, by not turning towards it. And Yun Men persisted and said, but can one know the most immediate if one does not face it? And Kamsa said, it's then that one knows it best. And Yun Men consented, exactly, exactly. So, That may have gone by a little quickly for some of you. The first question, why is it that one does not know the existence of what is most immediate, has to do with the practice of cultivating what we sometimes call the big mind.

[12:36]

What is most immediate? When you sit and you begin to watch your thoughts you may also wonder who's watching the thoughts. Who is the observer? And if you take a look to find the observer, of course you can't find the observer. The observer has moved or turned. And if you try to find the observer who moved while watching the observer, again, You can't find the observer. But in the course of this practice, actually, you are cultivating the observer. You're cultivating a big mind which you can't grasp. So Yun Men asks about this. He says, why is it that you can't actually get a hold of what's most immediate?

[13:55]

And Kao Shan says, because that's just the way it is, right? But then he asks about how do you then approach it? And Kaushant says, by not turning towards it. Now sometimes we say you have to face your thoughts. You have to face what's right in front of you. So sometimes you think you have to turn this way or that. You have to orient yourself this way to face what's in front of you. Or if something comes up over here, you have to turn towards it. If there's a thought creeping up in the back of your mind, how do you see it? If you feel your karma right on your back and you have a knot in your back or your shoulders tighten up, how do you get at it?

[15:00]

And Kaushant says, by not turning towards it. So then young man asks again, but can you know the most immediate if you do not face it? So, no longer having a face, no longer having a particular direction, particular orientation, That's what he's talking about. And Kaushant says, that's when you really know it. So you don't know your big mind by trying to get hold of it. But the secret of this practice is to stay with the present moment, observing and throwing yourself off the cliff into Zazen.

[16:07]

And after a while you realize that wherever you throw yourself, it's like old home. You no longer have a particular preference about where you want to land. You land where you land. And if you're not going anywhere, and you're feeling the pressure of the stress of not going anywhere, you become very close, very close to that pressure. You really just look into it without turning towards it. You feel it, you know, right back there. And just keep a little attention there, and a spirit of questioning, well, what is it?

[17:17]

What is it? So we call this practice of inner listening. Sounds come and go, thoughts arise and go. This is a kind of inner listening. Now, I was reading the local version of, the Buddhist version of Rolling Stone magazine, it's called Turning Wheel, right? And it's a wonderful edition that just came out, at least into my mailbox. There's a little article in there by Robert Aiken and he quotes, he actually talks about sitting Zazen and going out the door, but he quotes Buddha Dasa.

[18:26]

Actually, he paraphrases Buddhadasa. So he talks a little bit about focusing in on this inner listening. So if you have a problem, you really want to pay attention to it, right? So it doesn't get out of hand. So Buddhadasa says, if you have a problem, like rats in the kitchen, get a cat. You get a cat, the cat takes care of the problem. And Robert Akin says, If you nurture your inner pussycat, nurture your inner pussycat, she will monitor the rats, monitor the rat hole of greed, hate and ignorance and pounce if any of them appear. So part of our practice is setting up that awareness. Wherever a little greed or hatred, animosity, confusion rises up, your awareness, like a cat, just goes right over and pounces on it.

[19:40]

So it doesn't get to be a big problem, right? It's like the camel's nose. You know, sometimes a rat might run along and the cat pounces on it and finds out it's really a camel's nose, right? And the camel gets its nose under the edge of the tent Pretty soon you have a whole camel in the tent. So you've got to watch out. Sometimes the rat might be just the camel's nose. So we do this in the Zendo. We watch for the camel's nose. We watch for the little bit of irritation. Or we watch for the old annoyance that's still hanging on. And make peace with it. Stay with it until we make peace with it. And then we get up and go out the bathroom door and meet the teenagers.

[20:47]

Are there any teenagers here? Not today? Not ready for this yet. Probably know it already. I have two teenage, well no, excuse me, 21 year old daughters. And one will be 21 next month and one's been 21 for a while. Hannah and Robin, some of you know Hannah and Robin. So you go out the door with your inner listening, right? And all of a sudden, boom, there's somebody else. Looks like somebody else. I remember Joko Beck once, offered up the image of a rowboat.

[21:54]

It's kind of foggy, and you get in your little rowboat, and you row out. It's not too foggy, you can kind of see, and you're rowing along nicely. All of a sudden, out of the fog, here comes this other boat. And it won't turn, it just comes, crashes right into you. And you start shaking your fist and screaming at that... I don't know what terms you might use. S.O.B. asshole, you know, in the other rowboat. And then you find out there's nobody in the boat. It's an empty boat. So a lot of times the people that we meet or we run into, they're like that empty boat. But we don't see they're an empty boat. We see them as the problem. We see them as the one that got in our way.

[22:55]

And we see them as being the one who's unconscious. So yesterday, I had to work very hard with my practice of listening with my daughter, Hannah. And she's been very busy. She's working, and she has a boyfriend, and she's living in the cottage in the back of the house. We have the house, the cottage, and then the zendo. in the way in the back. She's living in the cottage and the problem is that the cottage, we set it up so that the kitchen in the cottage is also the Zendo kitchen. So that when we have Zendo events, every Monday night we make tea there. And we had a three day sitting a couple of weeks ago. So she had to clear out for three days. And I asked her to kind of move all of her stuff And so she moved her stuff out of the way, but she put some of her stuff over some chairs. And so I came in and I moved some of the stuff off the chairs and put it in the closet so that people could also use the chairs.

[24:02]

She thought, they don't have to use the chairs, they sit in the zendo. Very small thing. She was so angry she couldn't talk to me for about a week. So yesterday we had it out. And I just listened. And it was very hard for her to talk to me. You know, it's very hard when you're really angry at the person you love. It's very hard to actually let them know that you are really angry. And at the same time, you know they're not evil, really. So she had a lot of tears when she was talking to me.

[25:02]

But what I learned was that I had this idea that the cottage was a communal space, really. And she was very fortunate to have a chance to use it a good bit of the time. She had a different idea. She thought that the cottage was her space. And she, in her magnanimity, occasionally was allowing this Zen group to come in and use it. So she thought it was her private space. It was her kitchen. You know, her refrigerator. This is mine. Everything in this refrigerator is mine. To me, that was an incredible concept. I kind of reviewed my whole life. You know, I never had my own refrigerator.

[26:14]

I never had a refrigerator that was just mine, where I could look in and say, everything in here is mine. I always lived with somebody else, either my parents or a partner or lived in various communal situations. Lived at Green Gulch. No chance that that was my refrigerator at Tassajara or Green Gulch. So, it took a lot of listening for me to actually to get to this point. Had to sit there and let go of my ideas And this was someone who was quite close to me. So if you extrapolate from that, you realize that it's so much more difficult when you're not even close to the person that you're trying to listen to.

[27:28]

they may be from a whole different kind of world. Now it's true that actually my daughter is from a completely different kind of world than I am. Growing up, you know, coming of age in the 90s is different than coming of age in the 60s. I want to read a little poem called Singapore because it reveals in one particular situation this problem of listening. It's by Mary Oliver. So here it is. In Singapore, in the airport, A darkness was ripped from my eyes.

[28:34]

In the women's restroom, one compartment stood open. A woman knelt there, washing something in the white bowl. Disgust argued in my stomach, and I felt in my pocket for my ticket. A poem should always have birds in it. Kingfishers say with their bold eyes and gaudy wings, rivers are pleasant, and of course trees. A waterfall, or if that's not possible, a fountain rising and falling. A person wants to stand in a happy place in a poem. When the woman turned, I could not answer her face. Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together and neither could win.

[29:36]

She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this? Everybody needs a job. Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place in a poem, but first we must watch her. as she stares down at her labor, which is dull enough. She is washing the airport ashtrays, big as hubcaps, with a blue rag. Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing. She does not work slowly, nor quickly, but like a river Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird. I don't doubt for a moment that she loves her life, and I want her to rise up from the crest and the slop and fly down to the river.

[30:45]

This probably won't happen, but maybe it will. If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it? Of course it isn't. Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only the light that can shine out of a life. I mean the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth. The way her smile was only for my sake. I mean the way this poem is filled with trees and birds. So that's Mary Oliver. Now, some people say it's not fair to impose trees and birds and rivers. You know, that seeing things just as it is, seeing reality

[31:57]

Going out the zendo door and listening to what's in front of you or around you, you shouldn't add anything. But please look very carefully. What have you already added? right at the first glimpse in that poem where she says, disgust argued in her stomach and she reached for her ticket. Kind of an involuntary just checking to see if there's a way out of here. So yes, we have to pick our battles sometimes, we have to pick our fights. is the right time, the right occasion, but be as aware as you can of those choices you make.

[33:04]

So this has to do with the listening that goes on as you walk out of the zendo door and you encounter what's not so familiar. Even your own family, as I was just saying, may not be so familiar if you allow them to be who they are. So, I've been teaching a class on the precepts. And one precept, of course, is not dwelling on the faults of others. And it's amazing how much material we carry around having to do with the faults of others. I ask people to consider whether there's anyone they hadn't yet forgiven.

[34:11]

If there's anyone you haven't forgiven for the injuries they've done to you, there's a sense in which you're still dwelling on their failure, on their faults. Most people have a hard time forgiving their parents, even if their parents were just wonderfully loving parents. And, of course, more difficult if their parents were abusing. Actually, sometimes I'm not sure if it's more difficult or not. It's hard to say what's more difficult. In any case, it's total, totally difficult and sometimes seemingly impossible. And so, I think the vow really should be, I vow to forgive everyone every time it comes up.

[35:20]

So then you can actually do this. It doesn't matter then. You don't have to turn this way or that. You can face anyone and Of course it begins with yourself. Can you forgive yourself? Have you forgiven yourself? Are there any questions? Yeah. What does it mean to you when you say forgive? I mean, I have a sense of that, what it means intuitively, but could you elaborate on that, please? I'm not sure it's the right word, you know, but it's the feeling that your love for the person completely overrides everything.

[36:46]

they may have done or they might do. And so it's really, really based on a feeling, a deep feeling of connection. And actually seeing the connection. Yeah? Yeah, got it. Well, would you, yes? Like, suppose somebody knows that I have been upset with them in the past. And suppose I don't see this person anymore. Is it important to let them know we forgive them? I think you have to look at each case. Sometimes it's kind of a big problem if you kind of appear out of the blue and forgive somebody.

[37:59]

You've then stirred up a whole big thing, you have to go back. It can get rather sticky. Sometimes you don't need to tell them at all. attitude that you're carrying. If you see them, it's fine. You may bring it up. Usually I don't. Usually I don't tell my father that I've forgiven him. I just tell him I love him. It's obvious. If I tell him I forgive him, he wants to know what for. Yes. Well, if someone has done things that are wrong to you because you've initially sort of overlooked that part of them and you forgive them, then how do you sort of defend yourself against their feelings about wanting to violate you?

[39:18]

I'm not sure. How do you defend yourself? Like if somebody wants to violate what's, when you say stop and they want to keep going and do something that's wrong for you and you forgive them, they keep doing it and you keep forgiving them, then how do you stop them from continuing the violation or the wrongdoing? You stop them. You know, by whatever means are appropriate. I mean, you tell them that you can tell them. You get out of there, you can get out of there. You get help if you need it. It's very important that we don't confuse forgiving someone with tolerating or condoning destructive action, or damaging action, or creating karma.

[40:25]

It doesn't mean that you tolerate or condone someone's action. So you have to find a way. In each case it's a little different. If it takes more power or more skill than you have, then you get a friend. Does that help? Still, I find the idea of forgiving certain people difficult. Oh yeah, yeah. It's difficult and it's a matter of seeing that the person is not just the terrible thing they've done. I think we're out of time. It's interesting that the questions are about the last couple of minutes of what I've been talking about. Would you join me in a song to end?

[41:26]

Sure. Which has to do with this, actually. It's an old spiritual. I'm going to lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside, down by the riverside, down by the riverside. I'm going to study war no more. And then we can add in a few other verses. I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield down by the riverside, down by the riverside, down by the riverside. I'm gonna lay down my sword and shield Down by the riverside, ain't gonna study war no more Gonna lay down my burden, ain't gonna study war no more Ain't gonna study war no more

[42:35]

I ain't gonna study war no more I ain't gonna study war no more Ain't gonna study war no more Gonna lay down my atom bomb Down by the riverside Down by the riverside Down by the riverside Gonna lay down my atom bomb Down by the riverside I ain't gonna study war no more I ain't gonna study war no more Ain't gonna study war no more Ain't gonna study war no more I ain't gonna study war no more Ain't gonna study war no more Ain't gonna study war no more I'm gonna lay down my consumerism Down by the riverside Down by the riverside Down by the riverside I'm gonna lay down my consumerism

[43:58]

Down by the riverside Don't study war no more I ain't gonna study war no more Ain't [...] gonna study war no more I ain't gonna study war no more I forgive my old nemesis Down by the riverside Down by the riverside Down by the riverside I forgive my old nemesis Down by the riverside, I don't study war no more. I ain't gonna study war no more.

[45:01]

I ain't gonna study war no more. I ain't gonna study war no more. I ain't gonna study war no more. Well, thanks for your help.

[45:17]

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