Good morning. Is it loud enough? Yes? Good? Okay. Well, it's nice to see you all here this morning. Beautiful, sunny, fall morning here in Northern California. And this is the We're having our one-day sitting today to close aspects of practice, which is a four-week practice period that we've been having at Berkley Zen Center. I know a lot of you have been participating in it, and some of you come other days. Some of you come Saturday. For the last four weeks, we've been, for the most part, studying, lecturing and studying and talking about chapters from Suzuki Roshi's book, Not Always So. And I'm going to continue that today. We've certainly not finished with this book.

[01:11]

One is never finished with this book. One is never finished with the teachings. One is never finished with practice. So I was reflecting on the title of listening to these lectures. The classes and lectures have been really good. And each one of them, in the voice of one of the senior students who's been leading this, and the voice of Sojin Roshi, who lectured last week. When you hear Suzuki Roshi through one of our own intimate voices, we realize what a subtle practice it is, what a subtle teaching that you could boil down to not always so. Not always so is the principle that everything changes, whereas

[02:19]

in the fascicle of Dogen, he quotes the ancestor Nagarjuna saying, the mind that fully sees into the uncertain world of birth and death is the mind of enlightenment, is the thought of enlightenment. And this is, you know, this is a sort of not always so in more verbiage. But then I was thinking about Nagarjuna who always posits these kind of logical deconstructions. So you'd have not always so, you'd also have always so, never so, not never so, not always so can also be reduced to two words, sometimes so.

[03:22]

Which is it? Which is it in front of us right now? Where is this essence of mind that looks into, fully looks into the uncertain nature of life and death? This is a question for all of us. Some of us are young. Some of us are older. And the lecture that I would like to talk on today is entitled, Be Kind With Yourself. And it's a wonderful principle. From time to time, somebody during one of the lectures will ask Sojin Roshi, why don't you ever talk about love? Which my, what I've seen is this really ticks him off.

[04:32]

Because we're talking about love all the time. We're talking about kindness all the time. And the reason, part of the reason that we can't see it, part of the reason that we think sometimes, oh, this is a practice here is hard, people are mean, or it's too, you know, too cold, too many rules, whatever. This is an attitude that we have towards ourself. If we think that what we're not speaking of here is love all the time, it's because we have difficulty sometimes loving ourselves. If we think that what's being spoken here

[05:37]

is not kind, or what's being practiced here is not warm and kind, it's because of, for me, when I feel that way, and I do feel that way from time to time, it's because of some shortcoming that I have in perceiving what's right in front of me. So I want to talk about this lecture, but I feel like I need to take a little side road first. And I do feel that this is in the spirit of being kind to myself, being kind to ourselves, being kind to our world. Sojourn Roshi mentioned this last week, and I got a number of notices this week, and I've been thinking about it a lot. This is November 14th to 21st, has been designated as Stanley Tukey Williams Teach-In Week.

[06:46]

Do people know about Tukey Williams? Tukey Williams is an African-American man who is on death row. He's been there for 21 years. He is presently scheduled. He has an execution date, which falls on my birthday. It's really weird. December 13th, but I don't take it personally. But it's also, if it happens, it's not going to be a fun day for any of us. Anyway, he was the founder of the Crips in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. He was convicted of murder in the course of two robberies that he was accused of participating in in the late seventies uh... and he's been on death row ever since uh... he's run through most of his appeals although there is a new there's a new uh... writ that's been presented to the california supreme court he was not a good guy in his youth

[08:07]

And for that, he has apologized. I wanted to read you something that he wrote. Well, let me just say, he spent the last 15 or 20 years teaching young people not to participate in gang activities. to acknowledge how destructive of life these activities are, how wrong, how against the principles that he now believes in. So, perhaps there's a case to be made, we just practiced the Bodhisattva ceremony, a case to be made for repentance and renewal. or a case to be made for redemption, a case to be made for the turning of a being from the harshness and cruelty that he embodied to something kinder.

[09:13]

I'll just read you a little from his apology, one of his apologies. This is relatively recent. It's an apology to mothers who have lost children as a result of gang violence. Today, my apology humbly goes out to all of you grieving mothers who have lost a loved one to street violence. With humility, I express my deepest remorse to each of you for having helped to create this bloody and violent legacy. I will never again capitulate to wickedness, senseless violence, or any form of depravity. I beseech your collective forgiveness. Know that because of your suffering, I vow that as long as I have the fortitude, the breath, and my timeless faith, I will continue to work with you and others to reverse the cycle of madness."

[10:18]

I just felt it's important to speak about him here. It's important to study about him and I've tacked up on the main bulletin board, I've tacked up a packet of information about details about his case and his situation and some of what you can do and where you can go for more information and to consider If we want to consider, if we believe in the dharma and the possibility of transforming ourselves, in the possibility of controlling our afflictive emotions, if we are capable of it, he is capable of it. And if, to me, if our society chooses to execute Tukey Williams, to execute anyone, this is also a society that we participate in.

[11:34]

And that action, in some way, It affects us. It accrues to us. We probably should have a good discussion here about what we feel about capital punishment. This is not the moment for it. But right now, I just invite you to consider and look into his case. Consider whether there was a turning there and consider whether the action of society should be to hold him carefully, not just necessarily let him free, or to take his life, whether that's the appropriate thing. And if our society does that, and maybe this is

[12:36]

mixing things up perhaps too much. If our society chooses to do that, is that truly being kind to ourselves? And also, if our society chooses to do that, how can we yet be kind with ourselves? So that's a koan. Maybe that's a koan to start with. So I'd like to read from this chapter a bit and talk about it. I probably won't read the whole thing. I will skip around through it because our time is limited. So it just occurs to me, be kind with yourself. If we look at this principle of not always so, Be kind with yourself also means, it implies tacitly, be strict with yourself, but in a warm way.

[13:48]

You know, how do you take care of yourself in a warm way? He gets to this later, I think, in the fascicle, in the chapter. I think of it as a fascicle. It's like Dogen. It's rich. So he begins, I want you to have the actual feeling of true practice. Because even though I practiced zazen when I was very young, I didn't know exactly what it was. Sometimes I was very impressed by our practice at Eheji, the monastery where he studied, and at other monasteries. When I saw the great teachers or listened to their lectures, I was deeply moved. But it was difficult to understand those experiences. Well, I think that he's always trying to convey to us, Suzuki Roshi is always trying to convey to us what he takes to be the feeling of true practice, which we have to discover for ourselves. In a sense, I think his experience

[14:53]

I practiced when I was young. I didn't know exactly what it was. Some of us practiced when we weren't so young. Some of us are young. Some of us are middle-aged. Some of us are old. All of us started someplace. And when we started, we really didn't know what we were doing. And that was fine, because there's no other way to start. So, there's some, I think for us, there's some faith involved. And when we start practicing, You know, it's everything that we can do to sit still. Our legs hurt. We think we make progress if our legs hurt less. We think we make progress when our, you know, if we can count our breaths. And then we're capable of doing this, yet we see, well, this doesn't really feel like progress.

[16:03]

You know, my life is still as messy as it was. So we have to go into it with some faith. So Siddhartha Goswami says, our aim is to have complete experience or fulfilling in each moment of practice. What we teach is that enlightenment and practice are one. But my practice was what we call step ladders in. I understand this much now, and next year, I thought, I will understand a little bit more. That kind of practice doesn't make much sense. I could never be satisfied. If you try stepladder practice, maybe you too will realize that it's a mistake. Probably most of us have tried stepladder practice. Probably some of us, in our moments of backsliding, fall back into stepladder practice.

[17:12]

But that's not the practice that was transmitted to us by the Buddhas and ancestors. The practice that Suzuki Roshi is talking about, his practice, now, is waking up right now. Dogen talks about practice enlightenment, that the act of sitting down is the expression of realization. This is in the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Ancestor. This is the kind of dialectical struggle within the Platform Sutra. From the very beginning, the Sixth Ancestor, again and again awakening to essence of mind that is just available in every moment, and then it's sort of counterposed in a

[18:18]

somewhat polemical way to stepladder practice, to gradual practice. I think it's a false distinction, actually, if you use the word gradual, because our lives change bit by bit. So that may be the gradual aspect of it. But each change is sudden, because each change involves waking up in the moment, involves letting go of some feeling or some thought that you have, letting go of the idea, this person is being mean to me, or this practice is too hard, or this practice is too easy. So then he gets to, I think this is the central sentence in this whole piece.

[19:24]

He says, if we do not have some warm, big satisfaction in our practice, that is not true practice. Even though you try to sit, trying to have the right posture and counting your breath, it may still be lifeless zazen because you're just following instructions. You're not kind enough with yourself. You think that if you follow the instructions given by some teacher, then you will have good zazen. Sometimes we think. So that's the part that the teacher is going to save us, and then it'll be okay. The other side is, I really don't like what this teacher is teaching, and I'm going to resist him tooth and nail, and that's my way, that's my truth. And sometimes we think, that will save us. Neither one.

[20:25]

It's not in any sense what he's talking about. My sense of what he's talking about is something that I think it took me years to really experience. I know that some of you experience it right away. Some of you have come to it. And some of you are doing what I did for all those years. I found Zazen hard. It hurt.

[21:29]

My mind was really busy. My legs did not want to cross or stay crossed. But I had some faith. The faith was, I had a sense there's actually no place else to go. There's no place else to go at the moment when I came to sit down. There's no place else to go in my life. I just couldn't think of any place else to go. I think if I could have thought of someplace else to go, I would have gone. And if you can, go right now. But I want to encourage this faith because I think it can save our life. The faith is actually being kind with yourself.

[22:31]

So I think it probably took me 10 years before I could sit upright comfortably and begin to, if I had read this 10 or 15 years ago, I think I would have found this essay perhaps troubling because I would look and look for this warm feeling and maybe not find it. Which is, I don't know, just to say that brings up grief in me, but it also brings up joy because through the through this place of, for me, being kind with myself was actually having to be a little strict with myself, or sometimes very strict with myself. So just to sit down again and again, endure various difficulties, and see over time that this warm feeling

[23:48]

arises. You read about it all the time. You read about it, I mean, all the koans are about these warm exchanges. You're admonished to keep a cool head and warm feet. There are all these, you know, images of warmth. Warm heart, warm belly, warm mind, warm speech. The only way you can find it is by sitting down and letting it in. It's right there. I think this is what Suzuki Roshi is saying over and over again in this. He's giving us images of where it's there. Now he's talking a little technically. If you are very kind with your breathing, one breath after another, you will have a refreshed, warm feeling in your zazen.

[24:50]

When you have a warm feeling for your body and your breath, then you can take care of your practice and you will be fully satisfied. When you are very kind with yourself, naturally you will feel like this. A mother will take care of her child even though she may have no idea how to make her baby happy. This is a way of putting, of sort of rephrasing the metta sutta, just as a mother watches over and protects her only child. then so with a boundless mind, who once suffused love over the entire world, above, below, and all around without limit." That's where that line goes. But that a mother will take care of her child even though she may have no idea how to make her baby happy, this is interesting. At least new mothers and fathers are

[25:53]

Complete amateurs. There's no instruction book. You guys will find out. You know, but what you're also finding out, I'm talking to Marie here, we will soon see how she does this. And Greg too. You know, what we'll find, we find, what a mother finds is that there's actually even though the umbilical cord is cut, the father may clip it. There's a bond, there's a biological bond. It's got no wires. There's a connection between mother and child that is, you know, it's mammalian. You know, and there is research into how for all mammals, mothers and children are constantly realigning and affecting each other's physiological state.

[27:08]

That's what this is referring to. A mother will take care of her child even though she may have no idea how to make her baby happy. Similarly, when you take care of your posture and your breathing, there is a warm feeling in it. When you have a warm feeling in your practice, that is a good example of the great mercy of Buddha. Whether you are a priest or a layperson, this practice will extend to your everyday life. When you take the utmost care of what you do, then you feel good. Actually, when you take the utmost care of what you do, then everybody in your orbit feels good, and it reaches out. It's like the butterfly effect. It reaches out. Everyone in the universe feels good because there is that connection without wires, but with this way that we affect each other.

[28:14]

that's very deep and mysterious and we can't explain. So if you take care of your breath, if you take care of your environment, if you take care of someone that you don't know who's on death row in San Quentin, you take care of these things naturally, like Avalokitesvara adjusting her pillow in the middle of the night, but you also take care of these things intentionally. You take care of them because it's our vow, because this is at the center of our practice, and this is the vow of zazen. Suzuki Roshi goes on, he talks about, he said, Tozan Ryokai attained enlightenment many times. Once when he was crossing a river, he saw himself reflected in the water and composed a verse.

[29:21]

Don't try to figure out who you are. If you try to figure out who you are, what you understand will be far away from you. You will just have an image of yourself. So this is, some of us are familiar with this in slightly different form. And I think I won't read to you the other translations. This is a really nice translation. And this is the story of one of Master Tozan's enlightenment experiences. Don't try to figure out who you are. If you try to figure out who you are, what you understand will be far away from you. You will have just an image of yourself. And then Suzuki Roshi says, actually, you are in the river. You may say that it is just a shadow or a reflection of yourself, but if you look carefully with a warmhearted feeling, that is you.

[30:29]

You may think that you are very warm-hearted, but when you try to understand how warm, you cannot actually measure. That's true. I would suggest for many of us that what we think and rarely admit is that we also think we're cold-hearted. And we're afraid to go to the depths of that. We're afraid that it's unmeasurable. And it's not really such a big deal. Really, all it is is in that moment, you feel not quite connected. And then you make up a story about it. Oh, I'm cold.

[31:34]

I'm hard-hearted. Or if you feel connected to somebody, then you think, oh, I'm warm-hearted. These are useless stories. They don't help us. What we think about ourselves, this is where it says, don't try to figure out who you are. If you feel connected, that's intimacy right there. If you feel unconnected, that's also intimacy. You're intimately connected with what you're feeling. And if you can feel just that, then that's essence of mind, that's waking up. And hold it kindly, hold even the disconnection kindly in a warmhearted way. When you try to understand how warm, you cannot actually measure. Yet, when you see yourself with a warm feeling in the mirror, or in the water, that is actually you.

[32:39]

And whatever you do, you are there. When you do something with a warm-hearted feeling, Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, is there, and that is the true you. You don't have to wonder where Manjushri is or what he is doing. When you do things with your warm-hearted mind, that is actual practice. That's how to take care of things. That is how to communicate with people. When you do something with a warm-hearted feeling, Manjushri, the bodhisattva of wisdom, is there. You are embodying, bringing forth the Bodhisattva of wisdom. I can't see, which one is Manjushri? This one? This is Manjushri is over here. And then Avalokiteshvara and Samantabhadra, the Bodhisattva of practice.

[33:42]

We also have in the back, Prajnaparamita. who's the embodiment of wisdom. So what's interesting is we're a little nervous about Manjushri because he has a sword. And so we think, oh, masculine. But it's the sword that cuts apart that cuts away our delusions about ourself, our ideas about ourself. It's the sword that we use so that we don't try to figure out who we are or try to make up, we don't believe our story about who we are. and who we are, if when you cut that away, then we're this rather buxom woman in the back of the altar, right underneath Shakyamuni Buddha.

[34:56]

I remember going to an exhibition of Mongolian art once and I was surprised to learn that Manjushri embodied what was seen as the feminine principles, and Avalokiteshvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, which is the practice of action, in one way of looking at it, embodied the male principle of action. Which is male and which is female, I don't know. I don't really care. What he's saying here, which is wonderful, is that wisdom is warm. Wisdom isn't just this action of mind or this sword that cuts through. The sword that cuts through delusion is bringing warmth. It's like cutting through the barriers so that the warmth of wisdom can flood into our lives.

[36:03]

This is the warmth that he's talking about. This is the kindness to yourself. I'm going to skip down a little. So we put emphasis on warm heart, warm zazen. The warm feeling we have in our practice is, in other words, enlightenment or Buddha's mercy, Buddha's mind. So heart is a little tricky. For some reason, when this warm heart came up, I was thinking, well, where is the warmth in my zazen? It's actually not in my heart, or where is my heart? You know, it's like here? I mean, in Japanese and Chinese, you have this character shin for heart and mind. So where is your heart and where is your mind?

[37:09]

You know, here in the West, there's a split, right? It's like mind, heart. Heart, good. Mind, bad. Well, no, not so. But the warmth in zazen is here. It's in your hara, your belly, your tanden. And You know, the Japanese, for some reason I think of this, and I thought of this. I don't know if any of you have ever seen one of these, this shmata. This is a hara maki. You know, maki, you go to a sushi restaurant and they have a maki which is like wrapped in nori. You know what I mean? So this wraps your hara.

[38:10]

You put it on, it's like a tube. You put it on if you're cold, and it keeps your hara warm. This is like the greatest thing, especially if you're going to Tassahara, you should have one, or you're going to Japan. And it's like to keep in the warmth. And when you keep in the warmth in your hara, you could be wearing layers and layers of robes. You put on the haramaki, Oh, warm, you know, because you're holding this energy, you know, at the vital center of your body and you're allowing that natural energy to just kind of flow forth. So I just, I don't, maybe we could start a cottage industry making these things. I don't know. But it made me think, of exchange. I actually wasn't present for this. It was an exchange that Sojin had with someone during a show song.

[39:20]

This person was talking about, I think, from what I understood, the sort of tension, struggle between their mind and their heart. And it was actually, it's like, mind bad, heart good. And what I gather, it was very powerful. He said something like, and you can correct me, take your heart and throw it as far away from you as possible. Do you remember that? Was that it, Laura? Something like that? Throw your heart as far as you can throw it. Throw your heart as far as you can throw it. But then I think there was a follow-up saying that your true wisdom and your true heart, your true warmth is here. And when we sit in zazen, just to encourage everybody, lift yourself from there.

[40:28]

Lift yourself from your middle so that your hara has the space it needs to kind of churn along. So it's not compressed by your diaphragm or by the weight of your muscles, flesh. But take your heart and throw it as far from you as you can. There is a warmth. But if you try to put it here or here, wherever you try to put it, if you're distinguishing, when we hear heart in Suzuki Roshi's words, we also think of mind. It's like that new book by Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant. If I hear heart, I think mind. But if I hear belly, what do I think of? I can actually only think of belly.

[41:31]

So how to be kind with yourself is just to take care of this energy. To recognize that as long as you're alive, this life energy is in you and it's accessible. The purpose of our zazen is just so that we can feel this. It's not so that we can get through a certain number of breaths being counted or endure a certain number of minutes of sitting cross-legged. It's actually to be in contact with ourselves. And in contact with ourselves, then we're much, much more likely to be in contact with all of those who are around us. The point is, while inhaling and exhaling, to take care of the breath, just as a mother watches her baby.

[42:53]

If a baby smiles, the mother will smile. If a baby cries, its mother is worried. That kind of relationship, being one with your practice, is the point. I'm not talking about anything new, the same old thing. It's true. He just keeps talking about the same old thing in different ways in hopes that sooner or later we'll get it. And we will if we persist, actually. Well, I think I'm going to stop here and just leave a little time for questions. It's interesting, this goes, there's a little more about rules. And I think he talks about monastic rules, and he talks about controlling desires. And this is the side, you know, sort of as he's going deeply into this principle of being kind with yourself,

[43:59]

He's reminding us about the side that has to be a little strict with ourselves, or how we find our kindness to ourselves within the strictness of looking closely, of holding ourselves carefully. And this has been spoken of a lot in these lectures. And actually, Sojin Roshi's lecture last week talked about it a lot, how we deal with rules. So we've talked about that a bit. So just take a few minutes and leave time for questions and comments. Meryl. Helen, I really appreciate your attempt to bridge the difference or perceive difference between hara I think much more essential is the point of taking care of ourselves as if we're raising a child.

[45:35]

And that's a point that's been made by a lot of teachers. I just happened to read it again in the children. And this practice of seeing that you're growing your own child is the one that The problem there, of course, is always that we don't want to be a child or we don't want to have a child that we have to raise. We want to be independent and adult. But when I think of that, I remember this thing that one of my favorite authors, Jim Harrison, said when he gets angry with himself. This is like yelling at a four-year-old, saying, oh, you're such a four-year-old. Well, that's true. So anyway, that's what I think about this. These generate different kinds of energies, different kinds of wisdoms.

[46:36]

And I think that in our culture, which is incredibly self-punishing, that really much more to agree that Japanese culture does not have a shred of understanding about as a culture. And that our big practice is to generate sympathy for ourselves. Well, yeah, well, that's where I began, I believe, yeah. Okay, well, I don't want to get into it. I mean, I think we can talk about that. Where the locus of wisdom and compassion is, is not particularly important to me. The locus is in this whole six-foot meat body, you know, and whether it's here, here, or here, It's all those places. It's everywhere. It's in this tooth. You know, wherever it is, fine. But the principle of how we take care of the child that we are, the children that we encounter,

[47:46]

the child of the entire world as a child. That is the important point. I agree. We have no disagreement at all. And it's not easy. And we grieve for that child sometimes. And sometimes we laugh and play and dance with it. No, no, no. You choose me, I get happy, and then I forget. Oh, you mentioned about that maybe we will have a discussion somewhere about capital punishment. Oh, you are having one. The socially engaged donor group will be. And the one flavor I want to talk about socially engaged donor group, because I've been with for four years, it's been my main tether to Sangha, is it's a very special place.

[48:55]

As we sit with our bodies, as we sit with the Dharma, and we've got some fierce Dharma teachers in the group, and so it's not like going out and having all the energy. It's very hot and cool at the same time, so that's just what I wanted to mention. In December, Path of the Bodhisattva, there's actually three state-sanctioned, whatever we call those things, going on within a manner of one. Melody will be sharing her experiences as a Dharma practitioner, and if you've never heard her speak, she has hara. Yeah, well that's right. I knew about that and it slipped my mind. That's a place where we can come together and talk about, frankly, the madness of capital punishment.

[49:57]

We do it here because this is our home. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What should be obvious and what we actually think are not necessarily the same thing. This is why we take these precepts. We take the precepts that we recited, that we chanted, you know, we don't take them when we're, you know, we don't recite them because, oh, I've got this one down. And when you receive them in your robe or your rakasu, it's not, well, yeah, I'm cool with this. We can't keep these precepts. So how do we work with them?

[50:57]

I'm sure, I know that there are people in this room who have real questions about capital punishment, about whether they believe in it, don't believe in it, think it's appropriate in some circumstances. And what's important, actually, is to honor that process of investigation, is not say, you should all think this way or that way. So it's like, what does the precept bring forth? That's what I would say. And to detect in oneself, is there a killer in you? There is in me. And if I want to be kind with myself, then that's where I have to have a little strictness and control that. And that goes for all the precepts, I think. One more, perhaps.

[52:00]

It's getting late. or not. Thank you very much.

[52:12]

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