Weinberg and many of you know that I'm a new priest at Berkeley Zen Center, an old guy but a new priest, and I notice when I'm leading a ceremony or coming here to give a talk, I notice particularly as I come around the mat and the incense that there's a vibration going on. I've now gotten used to that. I think it's excitement. It's excitement in relation to the container that's holding it. Anyway, I noticed that after about the time I get out my bowing cloth put my forehead on the mat once or twice, the shaking feeling goes away.

[01:08]

It's not shaking anymore. The excitement's still there, but it's not pushing against a smallish container. That's what it feels like. So I just noticed that. We're always working with ourselves as containers, small or large. A few weeks ago, Steve Weintraub spoke here about Suzuki Roshi's statement People say that, I'm paraphrasing it, people say that practicing Zen is difficult. Remember that, those of you who are here? Practicing Zen, you may have noticed that it was difficult even if you weren't here.

[02:11]

Practicing Zen is difficult, however it's not difficult because it's hard to sit cross-legged It's difficult because it's hard to keep your mind and your practice pure. Interesting kind of statement, isn't it? I mean, he talked a lot about it, so I'm not going to... I sort of want to start where he left off today. We're having an especially hard time these days keeping our minds pure in this particular sense that Suzuki Roshi meant it. Many of you know Meili Scott. She's our elder Dharma sister and a beloved teacher of many people here. She left Berkeley a few years ago and went up to Arcata in Humboldt County and, joining with some people that she'd been practicing with for some time, founded a Zen group up there.

[03:28]

So she left about two years ago and she's been coming back and forth, meeting with her students and participating in activities here now and then, but basically concentrating her efforts up there. So mainly she lives up there. Well, Mei Li is at home now, most of you probably know, and she's quite weak physically. Her cancer has overtaken her body, and so she's, you could say, fading physically. She's no longer, as I understand it, no longer receiving nutrition. or antibiotics, and certainly she's very near the end of her life, at least as we've known her. Of course, her family, the people in Arcata and many of us here, are experiencing pain, surprise, anticipation of loss,

[04:44]

abandonment, even outrage. How could she do this? These are understandable human responses to the reality of impermanence and they deserve our compassion and attention. We've been kept advised of Meili's situation mainly through announcements posted on the bulletin board out here, courtyard. Earlier this week, she expressed her wish that we not try to visit her because of her weakness, her limited, the limited accommodations in Arcata and the pressures on her caregivers and so on. And she said, if you want to be with me, please practice Zazen.

[05:52]

So there it is, probably her last instruction to us. It's so simple and so elegant and so easy to miss this teaching. If you want to be with me, practice moment-to-moment awareness and lose the discursive thinking. Now it's not too surprising that someone in our tradition would say something like this, make such a recommendation. What else would you expect in a way? But these are not routine circumstances. This is an intimate message from her to people who want to see her, want to help her, want to comfort her.

[07:08]

who want to be comforted. As our teachers say, we would do well to investigate this. The Sufi poet Rumi says, Beyond wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase, each other, make no sense at all. Rumi is pointing toward the realm of reality, the world of radical interconnection among things and beings, which is not limited by convention, wrongdoing and right-doing, but it includes it.

[08:33]

I believe Meili is pointing us toward the same realm. She's up there in Arcata, in her home, in her body. She invites us to do the same. Be at home in the realm of reality where distances and separation are transcended. the midst of her suffering and our suffering she points at the heart of our practice and says, I'll meet you there. Some years ago I heard this story about Katagiri was a young priest from Japan who came to America and helped Suzuki Roshi, the founder with Mel, our own abbot of this place and of San Francisco Zen Center.

[09:45]

Katagiri came and helped in San Francisco and at Tassajara and then after a while he went to He came back to San Francisco many times to give lectures and to help out. He particularly helped out during a real crisis in leadership at San Francisco some years ago now. He was a traditional style teacher, but he liked to laugh a lot. He especially liked to laugh when we couldn't understand his lectures in English. Got a lot of pleasure out of that. We did too, actually. Jijuyuzamae is... Jijuyuzamae.

[10:49]

Right. Anyway, here's the story about him. I heard this story, I wasn't there, but it went something like this. This was back in the early days when he was organizing his group in Minnesota and I suppose being organized by then. So a group of people had gathered around him who were really interested in practicing Zazen and wanted to build a temple. That seems to be what happens to people who gather in groups and practice Zazen. The next thing they want to do is raise endless amounts of money and build buildings and so on. And anyway, that's the way it goes, seems to have for a long time and was the same here in Minnesota. So the students decided to arrange a gathering, an afternoon, reasonably informal gathering of students and various interested parties, potential supporters, important part of the pie, and of course, Kautogiri himself.

[12:15]

So the events unfolded this afternoon, a nice crowd of people showed up and tea was probably the main offering, tea and maybe a little cake, pretty simple. But people are telling stories about their plans, it's a very upbeat situation. And finally a student asks Kadagiri, if he would please say something to the people who were gathered. And so, you know, somebody goes, and he said, very soon all of you are going to die. you know, cups stopped in midair. So on this high energy, in this high energy optimistic situation, Kadagiri got right to the point.

[13:40]

We're all here to start a new Zen Center. and we're all going to die. This is all temporary. You can't separate these things. In fact, to build a Zen center, realistically, one that'll last for a while, you probably have to do it against the backdrop of we're all going to die and we'll be replaced and so on. what he was undertaking himself and with his students had to be based on reality. This was his teaching that day. Well, we know in retrospect that he was pretty successful, so even though it's an odd move on his part in a conventional sense, in the long term it was successful even in an outward way.

[14:44]

So this matter of dying really a Zen business. Here's another story. This is a story about Marpa. Tibetan scholar, monk, and one of his teachings about death. The main characters in this story are Marpa himself, Dug Mengma, his wife, his enlightened yogi wife, and their son Dharmadode, whose Marpa's main disciple and Dharma heir, an elderly couple from town, and Milarepa himself, the famous Tibetan yogi poet or song maker.

[16:06]

So Milarepa's guru, Marpa, was an enlightened master, and he was also a farmer and a family man. In the 10th century, he returned to Tibet from India, bringing with him the priceless instructions of the whispered oral lineage. Marpa's son Dharmadode was his main disciple, as I said, and once Dharmadode and Marpa, his dad, were in retreat in a castle that had been built by Milarepa and Marpa and Dharmadod, the young, attractive, energetic son and Dharma heir, they had forbidden his riding a horse during the period of the retreat that they were all attending.

[17:14]

But there was a celebration going on in a nearby town and Like many young men and women, he found a way out of the retreat and onto the back of his horse and rode into town and was having a great time at the celebration, dancing and I suppose drinking whatever it is Tibetans drink, that horrible beer I think. Anyway, he was having a good time and then it came time to leave and so he got back on his horse and left the party. And it turns out, not a complete surprise, that Milarepa was there at the party too. Cheery guy. And so he followed Dharmadode back to the castle, toward the castle. And he found him having been thrown from his horse into a rocky ravine with his skull crushed.

[18:24]

And so he made his way down to this boy and held him, wept. Some other followers somehow Marpas came along as well and they fashioned a litter to carry him back to the retreat place and his father sensed that something was up and he came out and met them and saw his son and wept openly. Doug Maima, not surprisingly either, hearing her husband's dirge, came out of the retreat house and having seen what had happened to her son, she cried out and fainted.

[19:31]

This enlightened yogi. Marpa sang a song to clarify the teachings for all the people present and to help transfer Dharmadode's consciousness to other planes. Then he cried out and wept, covering his head with his maroon robe. At that time, an elderly couple whose son had died approached Marpa and said, Lord and Master, when our son died, your eminence explained the Buddhist facts of life concerning the imminence of death. the universality of impermanence, the uncertainty of our lifespan, the ceaseless cycle of birth and death and rebirth, the interconnectedness of all things, and many edifying verses formerly unheard by these old ears.

[20:33]

you exhorted us to see that this very life, including parenting a fine son, was just like a dream and an illusion, and that we need not squander the rest of this ephemeral life in depression. We found great peace through your teachings. Yet now, you, the Lord Guru, Master of Illusion's Game, weep and wail like an ordinary person. For your son and Dharma heir, Dharmadode, the handsome, learned, beloved, and spiritually accomplished Dharmadode." What is the meaning of all this? Marpa says, it is true that life is like a dream, a mirage, and illusion. The death of a child is like a nightmare among dreams, like a super illusion among illusions.

[21:43]

Nothing is more painful than the death of a child. This intense grief is also unreal and illusory." And Lord Marpa wept openly. The next day, Marpa said, my conflicting emotions sometimes seem as if carved in stone. Yet even stone is nothing but clear light. Momentary appearances are all self-manifesting and self-liberating. This realization is the heart's sure release. It's a wonderful story, isn't it? This is a version that Lama Surya Das has retold for us.

[22:53]

And in it the highly realized Master Marpa verifies ordinary human experience and simultaneously verifies the absolute. It's like this. If you want to experience the Buddha's freedom, enter here. This breath, this sensation, this anguished feeling. Don't look somewhere else that you might prefer. Most Zen stories are about how to avoid the pitfalls of dualistic thinking and action. For example, of imagining that our ordinary feelings about a

[24:00]

the death of a child or the death of a teacher are somehow separate and apart from the ground in which we meet her now that she's alive and after she leaves. Thinking of those as separate. Sometimes in Zen we call this picking and choosing. And these lie at the root of suffering. To say it positively, these teachings are concerned about how to enter the non-dual realm of ease and satisfaction. In other words, how to keep your mind and practice pure. Master U Mon, who figures prominently in a lot of Zen stories, often is refining pure practice, helping us walk this razor edge, it seems like, between extremes, not falling into small views and foxy doubts.

[25:20]

In one lecture, U Mon quotes the third Zen patriarch, He says, the patriarch says, when mind does not arise, the myriad things have no fault. We might say, when the mind does not attach to things, they're okay. Letting go, things are really okay. Then he says, U Mon says of the third ancestor, that's all he understood. We might say, isn't that enough? Seems like enough. Apparently not. U Mon raises his staff.

[26:30]

And he says, is anything amiss in the whole universe? Just this, my wonderful staff. Given things just as they are, things are not so bad. Is there a problem? U Mon asks this over and over again. Is there a problem here? If there is, bring it up. Let's get it out and look at it. Well, during this time of impending loss, we may feel threatened or even overwhelmed by feelings of loss, grief, helplessness.

[27:45]

Meili's teaching, I think, is to ride those feeling waves. When you fall off your seat, your surfboard or your meditation seat, You feel around for it. It's right there with you. And you clamber back on and you ride. This is the pure practice of sitting, standing, walking, and reclining upright in the midst of sensations, thoughts, feelings, letting them come and go in their own time, not suppressing them, not enhancing them, not making an artificial self. Meili is inviting us to experience our lives fully, not to turn away from any of these feelings, but to hold our powerful emotions lightly

[29:02]

and to let go. This is how we can be with her. This is how you can be yourself. And this is how we can accept what must be accepted. This afternoon and tomorrow there will be sitting here in the Zendo, open sitting for those of you who may want to come here and practice and be with Mei Li in that way and if you want to come I hope you will. Thank you very much for your attention. And do you have any comments or questions? Yes. Yes.

[30:08]

Yes, I can. Out beyond wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase, each other, make no sense at all. Anyone else? Thank you very much. Beans are numberless.

[31:02]

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