Good morning and almost Happy New Year. coming up so I want to talk today about numbers of things but in the context of vow we in our culture often make New Year's resolutions and this is related to the bodhisattva Buddhist practice of vow or commitment one of the paramitas one of the transcendent practices so Clarifying vow is an important aspect of our practice, clarifying what it is that we care about, what we can commit to. So I wanted to start with some comments from A. A. Dogen, the founder of Japanese Zen, 1200 to 1253.

[01:05]

And let's see, I want to start with one of his dharma hall discourses from his extensive record. He says, the family style of all Buddhas and ancestors is to first arouse the vow to save all living beings by removing suffering and providing joy. Only this family style is inexhaustibly bright and clear. In the lofty mountains, we see the moon for a long time. As clouds clear, we first recognize the sky. Cast loose down the precipice, the moonlight shares itself within the 10,000 forms. Even when climbing up the bird's path, taking good care of yourself is spiritual power. I'll read it again. The family style of all Buddhas and ancestors is to first arouse the vow to save all living beings by removing suffering and providing joy.

[02:05]

So that's one of the four bodhisattva vows we will chant at the end this morning. Only this family style is inexhaustibly bright and clear. In the lofty mountains, we see the moon for a long time. As clouds clear, we first recognize the sky. Cast loose down the precipice, the moonlight shares itself within the 10,000 forms, even when climbing up the bird's path, taking good care of yourself. spiritual power. So this expresses this Bodhisattva commitment, but also the rhythm of our Buddhist practice. So in the lofty mountains we see the moon for a long time, as clouds clear we first recognize the sky. So Michael, welcome home. Michael has literally done this going up to the mountains of Tassajara for the last six months and now coming back to Chicago. Dogen says, in the lofty mountains, we see the moon for a long time.

[03:07]

We see wholeness. So this applies whether you go to Tassajara for a while or just coming to sit on a Sunday morning or coming for an all-day sitting. In our practice, we have a chance to see the moon. And when our Zazen practice is sustained over time, we have a chance to do this for a long time. And clouds clear, and we recognize the sky, the openness. the wholeness and emptiness of all things. But then, cast loose down the precipice, this moonlight shares itself within the 10,000 forms. So when we come back from the mountains, or when we go out from our communion with wholeness into our busy lives, then how do we share the moonlight.

[04:08]

How do we share this awareness within all the different particular forms and all the particular situations of phenomena? So he adds, even when climbing up the birch path, taking good care of yourself is a spiritual power. So we take care of ourself, but we also take care of all beings. So in one of his first writings about the meaning of zazen, in Ben Doa, the Self-Fulfillment Samadhi section, Dogen proclaims that when one person sits in this upright posture, in this upright awareness of zazen, even for a short time, all of space awakens. It's a really radical, It's a kind of declaration of independence and interdependence that our sitting includes all of reality.

[05:10]

When we do this, when we express Buddha on our seats with our uprightness and our calming and our breath, all of space awakens. So I've been sitting with that for decades, and it's very deep. So for Dogen, clearly, and in our traditions, Zazen is not just a matter of, just purifying oneself, a personal awakening. We're deeply connected with all of space, Dogen says, all of reality, the whole sky. So we never sit alone. It's wonderful to come and sit together with all of you on a Sunday morning or whenever. Even when we're sitting at home though, seemingly alone, all beings are there. Everybody you've ever known is part of what's happening on your seat.

[06:14]

So this radical interconnectedness and this expression of Zazen in our lives, in our world, is a central part of our practice. I want to share one of Dogen's New Year's talks. He starts by quoting a poem by Hongzhe, who wrote the cases and the verse comments in the Book of Serenity I've been talking about. and the practice discussions in Cultivating the Empty Field, I translated, so he was a century before Dogen. So in one of Hongzhe's dharma hall discourses, he said this poem, in New Year's morning zazen, the myriad things are natural. Mind after mind is beyond dichotomies. Buddha after Buddha manifests presently.

[07:16]

The moon on the river is completely pure and white. The mind of the son of She is satisfied on his fishing boat. Dogen says, study this. So there's a reference there. The son of She was the lay name of Xuansha, one of the great classical Chan masters. And he had said, when asked that, he and the Chuan Sha and Shakyamuni had studied with the son of She. So that's like saying Buddha and Taigen studied with Dan Layton. We study with our karmic, we study Buddha with our karmic situation, with our, that which brought us to practice all of the stuff of our own lives. And yet, it's not separate from all beings. Dogen, after quoting this from Hongzhe, comments himself, after a pause, he said, his own poem, sort of based on this, from Hongzhe, he said, this great auspicious New Year's morning, I enjoy zazen.

[08:32]

So of course, any morning or evening we can enjoy zazen, but particularly to say this great, auspicious New Year's morning, I enjoy zazen. In accord with this occasion, offering congratulations is natural. So congratulations to all of you for being here. Congratulations to all of you for welcoming a new year. Mind after mind, Dogen continues, mind after mind, the spring faces laugh with delight. And New Year's in China and Japan is a little later than it is here. It's usually in February. We'll be celebrating Chinese New Year in February. Buddha after Buddha pulls the oxen around before our eyes, presenting an auspicious sign. Over a foot of snow covers the mountain. So we have a little bit of snow out there. Dogen was practicing, this was in, Well, I don't have the year.

[09:37]

Anyway, this was after he moved to Eheji, up in the north. So there was lots of snow. Anyway, he says, presenting an all suspicious sign over a foot of snow covers the mountain. Fishing for a person, fishing for his self on the fishing boat. So that's a reference to the son of She, who was a fisherman before he became a monk, before he became Xuanzang. So we are, And that's a lovely image for Zazen, fishing for a person, fishing for a self on the fishing boat. So you may not have thought of your Zazen seat as a boat before, but here we are, fishing for a person, fishing for some self, and maybe it's the large self that includes all beings, all of space awakening. So this is Dogen's comment on facing the new year, facing all the fish on his fishing boat.

[10:47]

And in our situation, facing this year, it's going to be, what, 2019? Yeah, I think so. according to some reckoning. We face some great existential crises. With climate breakdown, the scientists say we have 10 or 12 years to act to make some difference in how bad it's going to be. It's already, you know, we have fires in California floods in the Southeast and drought in the Midwest and farming is going to be affected anyway. We're in a difficult time. And, you know, maybe all times are difficult times.

[11:51]

10 or 15 years before Dogen was born, there were civil war and there were dead bodies in the streets of Kyoto where he was born. But the existential crises we face are pretty significant. And also the endless wars and the nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. And 60 percent of species have gone extinct since 1970. So there's a real trauma to our life now and our, even though we don't think of it all the time. It's hard to think of it all the time. We have a climate trauma and the future is more uncertain than ever. So this situation of the world is not separate from

[12:53]

are personal traumas and challenges. So of course, as we face the new year, we each have our own particular situations and difficulties and challenges. But they're not disconnected from, they're not separate from the situation of the world. And New Year's and New Year's vows is a chance to remind ourselves of that. So our awakening practices is to awaken from numbness. We tend to be numb to what is happening in the world and all the news. And sometimes we need to take a break from it. You know, there's that Pink Floyd song, Comfortably Numb. We can go to that place, but our practice is to wake up, to be aware, to face our own karma and our collective karma, the situation and difficulties of our world.

[14:12]

So I want to refer to A couple of great women teachers around now. First, Joanna Macy, who was one of my mentors and who was here a number of years ago. She started talking about despair and empowerment. And for her, that was in the context of what started with Hiroshima. and the context of nuclear weapons and nuclear waste. And so that's one of the challenges facing us now, is the endless wars, along with the climate breakdown. So I want to read a couple things from Joanna. And this is from a book that was published in 1991, but it applies perfectly to what we face this year. We are bombarded by signals of distress, ecological destruction, social breakdown, and uncontrolled nuclear proliferation.

[15:29]

Not surprisingly, we are feeling despair. Despair well merited by the machinery of mass death that we continue to create and serve. And so she's talking about not just numbness, but this underlying sense of despair, which, you know, maybe we can go through our days and take care of our daily business without thinking about that or even feeling it. We can become comfortably numb, but it's there. It's part of who we are. And so she says, the refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. So she says there's an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life when we retreat to this numbness. She says, despair cannot be banished by injections of optimism or sermons on positive thinking.

[16:38]

Like grief, it must be acknowledged and worked through. This means it must be named and validated as a healthy, normal human response to the situation we find ourselves in. So this is the empowerment within despair that Joanna worked on. Despair work is different from grief work in that it's related, but it's different in that its aim is not acceptance of loss. Indeed, the loss has not yet occurred and is hardly to be accepted. But it is similar in the dynamics unleashed by the willingness to acknowledge, feel, and express inner pain. Despair in this context is not a macabre certainty of doom or a pathological condition of depression and futility. It is not a nihilism denying meaning or efficacy to human effort. Rather, as it is being experienced by increasing numbers of people across a broad spectrum of society, despair is the loss of the assumption that our species will inevitably pull through.

[17:45]

We don't know. It's not certain that humanity will die out. It's up to us. We have collectively 10 or 12 years to try and get our governments and corporations and the powers that be to shift from fossil fuels to sustainable energy in terms of climate. Joanna has this quote from one of my favorite writers, Franz Kafka. This is a little thing called Validating Despair. He said, you can hold yourself back from the suffering of the world. This is something you are free to do. But perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering you might be able to avoid. We don't have to hold back from the suffering of the world and from our own suffering.

[18:48]

We can feel what we can feel. We can feel our world and our own personal, including our own personal difficulties and challenges. Again, it's a continuum. But we are affected by what's happening in the world. I'm going to read that again. Validating despair. You can hold yourself back from the suffering of the world. This is something you are free to do. And of course, going through the mundane business of the world, this is what many people do. They get comfortably numb or they just, you know, look away from the suffering. But perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering you might be able to avoid. So our practice is to face the wall, to face ourselves, to face the world. And to me, this is a good New Year's resolution to continue to face the wall and face ourselves and face the world. So how do we feel what we feel?

[19:55]

The first noble truth is often translated as the truth of suffering or dissatisfaction. But I think it's a noble truth because we can do it. We cannot hold back from facing the sadness. One of my favorite Shuso questions, my first practice period at Tassajara, Richard Jaffe asked Leila Bakrash, what do we do about the sadness? And I don't remember what Leila said, but I remembered that question. We have the nobility and the dignity and the power to just face the sadness, to face the difficulties. It doesn't mean we don't also face the joys of our life and of the world. And those also are important and wonderful, but we can actually do this, this noble truth of being upright and settling and being present and calm and facing the difficulties we face in our own lives and in the world.

[21:09]

And part of this is about Sangha support. When we are willing to take refuge in Sangha, when we come together as community and do this together, whether we talk about it or not, but each of us on our cushion facing the wall with somebody next to us or near us, we can face our lives. And Sangha's not just this particular Ancient Dragon Zen Gate Sangha community, but also all the other communities in your life that support you to face yourself and the world. including sadness. And I think part of this is facing the complexity of our lives and of the world. We can not retreat into some simple answers, but actually be willing to look at the complexity of things.

[22:14]

So I want to say I very much applaud Donald Trump for withdrawing troops from Syria. Some of you may be upset that I say that. But also, I would say that it's not enough, of course. We need to also stop bombing and withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. And I don't say this as a denigration of the troops, but of actually supporting peace. So I grew up during the Vietnam War. which was a terrible, terrible thing. And the same thing is happening in Yemen now, or another version of that, with our bombing or giving bombs to the Saudis to cause famine and really genocide. So there are plenty of things to be concerned about in the world. There's 15,000 children still being detained near the border. That's just horrific.

[23:15]

And then there's the fossil fuel companies and the war merchants who, in my opinion, control our government and media for the most part. So how do we respond to that? This is a question to ask as we greet the new year. It's not a new question, because this has been going on for a while. So I want to also read something from Rebecca Solnit. who's also, she was a student of Blanche Hartman's, but she's known as an essayist and feminist and activist, and she was also here a few years ago speaking. This is from her newest book, Call Them by Their True Names. So she talks about naive cynicism, and I thought that was interesting. It's related to her talking about active hope, which I'll come back to. Some people pronounce with great certainty on future inevitabilities, present impossibilities, and past failures.

[24:28]

This mindset behind these statements is what I call naive cynicism. It bleeds the sense of possibility and maybe the sense of responsibility out of people. So just to say, well, there's nothing we can do and to retreat into that, it's a kind of numbness. Continuing Rebecca's writing, maybe it also says something about the tendency to oversimplify. If simplification means reducing things to their essentials, oversimplification tosses aside the essential as well. It is a relentless pursuit of certainty and clarity in a world that generally offers neither, a desire to shove nuances and complexities into clear-cut binaries. Naive cynicism concerns me because it flattens out the past and the future and reduces the motivation to participate in public life. So this is another way of being numb, to just say, well, there's nothing we can do.

[25:30]

It's hopeless. And in fact, there are lots and lots of examples of positive things that are happening in the world. Joanna talks about this in terms of all the many beings who are working for kindness and for awareness and awakening. There are lots of examples. I just got a post from an old colleague who lives in France about the Yellow Jacket movement, which is still happening. There are all these movements to try and support freedom and equality. So continuing with Rebecca. She talks about an article from a group of scientists outlining the impact of climate change over the next 10,000 years.

[26:33]

Their portrait is terrifying, but it is not despairing. Quote, this long-term view shows that the next few decades offer a brief window of opportunity to minimize large-scale and potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization." And Rebecca says, that's a sentence about catastrophe, but also about opportunity. We have an opportunity now, collectively. that we can each contribute to. Just finishing on Rebecca's naive cynicism, what is the alternative to naive cynicism? Cynicism, an active response to what arises, a recognition that we often don't know what is going to happen ahead of time, and an acceptance that whatever takes place will usually be a mixture of blessings and curses that will unfold over considerable time.

[27:37]

Such an attitude bolstered by historical memory, by accounts of indirect consequences, unanticipated cataclysms and victories, cumulative effects, and long timelines." So there's a couple things in there that are very much related to Zen. First, the not knowing. We don't know. There's no certainty about what's going to happen in the coming year and years. So there's a koan I've referred to during the Rahatsa Sashin about not knowing being most intimate. So not knowing, beginner's mind, is a core aspect of our practice. to not know it all, to not have certainties nailed down, that we don't know how things will unfold. But the other thing she refers to is also an important part of Zen and bodhisattva awareness, which is this sense of long timelines.

[28:41]

So we're doing this practice that goes back 2,500 years to Shakyamuni Buddha and arguably long before. And in each generation, there were people like us who continued this practice and made it available so that now we can enjoy this practice of being aware, being awake, facing ourselves, facing the world. So if we only see things in terms of one small segment of time, we can easily feel discouraged. And Joanna's concerned about beings of the future, and to be aware of beings of the future is to be aware of our own possibilities of practice. So just a little bit from Rebecca's previous book of hers, Hope in the Dark, where she talks about active hope.

[29:56]

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. So there's a spaciousness and a possibility in the reality that we don't know the future. We don't know how this year will unfold. We can see the causes and conditions in our own lives and in the world, but how do we respond to that? She quotes George Orwell who said, who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past. And then Rebecca says, controlling the past begins by knowing it, the stories we tell about who we were and what we did shape what we can and will do. Despair is also often premature. It's a form of impatience as well as uncertainty.

[31:04]

So the practice of patience is that we don't know. and that there is possibility. And hope doesn't mean that we have some, you know, just some optimistic belief, but that we act on our best hopes. So this is very much related to the practice of Thou, that we can, at the juncture of the New Year, and in different calendars, the New Year begins at different times, but here we are, the end of December, with the new year coming and we can look and see what is our hope. This is hopes for our world and the difficulties we face and also in our own lives. So again, going back to the passage I read from Dogen, he says, even when climbing up the bird's path, that's the path of

[32:06]

The unknown, we can't see the traces of the birds as they fly. Taking good care of yourself is spiritual power. So consideration of the situation of our world is not separate from taking good care of ourselves. Doing our best to be present. Doing our best to settle, find our own deepest communion in our Zazen practice with wholeness, with possibility, and then see what is it that we each can do. And again, going back to Sangha, there are many people in the Sangha who are working very hard to do, in their own lives, to do positive things, to express kindness in the world, to share this moonlight of Zazen.

[33:07]

And by just being here, sitting together, silently, uprightly, we support each other. So please enjoy the support of Sangha this year. Please pay attention to what's happening in your life and in the world. Please enjoy your life. and the difficulties of the world. All these difficulties are opportunities for us to respond. So again, Happy New Year. We have a little bit of time if people have comments or responses or questions. Please feel free. Is there anybody here who loves their numbness so much that they don't want to give it up?

[34:15]

Good, yes, that's honest, yes. There are times when we need to take a break from focusing on the difficulties and enjoy all the things we have to enjoy. So it's important to take a break. But that doesn't mean settling into being comfortably numb. Yes, hi, how are you? Yeah, well, I think depression is related to despair, certainly. Depression often happens, sometimes it's just a matter of chemical imbalance, but it also has to do with this underlying

[35:27]

sense of despair that Joanna talks about that we don't want to face. So there's an eco-psychologist who now has been talking about climate trauma. And in some sense, we're all traumatized. And so there's a PTSD kind of effect from knowing on some level about the existential threat to the future of our species. And of course, that is maybe an unconscious, that can be an unconscious cause for depression. So yeah, they're related. People get depressed over their own situation in their own lives, but that's also related to everything. So yeah, to live in wokeness, to be present and aware is challenging, but it does, it can help us wake up from depression.

[36:33]

And sometimes, maybe sometimes it's good to be depressed. I sometimes think of it as deep rest. So, you know, it's okay to feel that. We should feel what we feel. but then also know that there are ways to respond and to be helpful. Lots and lots and lots of ways, and each of us has our own way to respond and be helpful and share the moonlight in the world. So thank you, Miriam, for the question. Other responses or comments, reflections? So maybe you have a right to feel some sense of despair given the situation of the world.

[37:52]

You also have a right to feel happy. Isn't that one of our inalienable rights in this country? Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So I would encourage you all to along with feeling the difficulties, to feel the joys of this world in the coming year. To really pay attention to the things that you enjoy. They might seem frivolous, but whatever brings you enjoyment and refreshment, whatever brings freshness to your life, is part of taking good care of yourself. and you should enjoy all the things that you have to enjoy. Because that will help you to respond to the difficulties. So, any last comments?

[38:56]

Okay, well thank you very much for listening.

[39:02]

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