Good morning. This is interesting sitting up here. I'm used to sitting in the back on Sundays. Can you hear me okay back there? Let me know if you can't. So for some of us, giving these Sunday morning talks is part of our training. And this is my first Sunday talk. So it was suggested that I introduce myself. My name is Tai Gen. I began everyday Zazen sitting meditation practice nearly 20 years ago with a Japanese Soto Zen priest in New York City. And a few years later moved to San Francisco and continued my sitting at the San Francisco Zen Center. Ended up working for several years at the Tassajara Bakery in San Francisco, back when it was a very strong practice place.

[01:07]

And lived a few years at Tassajara Monastery, our monastery back up in the mountains near Carmel. I received priest ordination from Reb Anderson in 1986 and was shuso or head monk at Tassajara in 1990. One year ago this weekend, I returned from more than two years of practice and study in Japan. And this past year, after this past year, I've been enjoying working in the Green Gulch kitchen. The past several years or so also I've had the great good fortune of being able to take up as a practice working on translation of Chinese and Japanese, old Chinese and Japanese Zen texts. A number of somewhat long texts, but recently I've been working on a short text called The Gate of Sweet Dew.

[02:18]

And that's what I want to talk about today, The Gate of Sweet Dew. So in Japan, in many Zen temples and monasteries, the Gate of Suitu is chanted every day. It's called Kanromon in Japanese. At a couple of the monasteries I practiced at in Japan, the Gate of Suitu was chanted during evening service every day, along with the Dahi Shindorani, the Dharani of Great Compassion, which we chant here in evening service. And here in America, at Zen Center, we chant the Gate of Sweet Du, just one time a year, and that happens to be today. So at five o'clock this afternoon, in this Zen Do, there will be a Sagaki ceremony, which is when we chant this Gate of Sweet Du.

[03:23]

Sagaki means to give food to the hungry ghosts. So you're all invited to come at five o'clock to this ceremony. It's one of the most colorful and interesting ceremonies we do here. You are all invited to come and also we are going to invite various spirits to come. Some dark spirits, some friendly spirits, We're going to invite them to come and we're going to feed them and pacify them. So it's an unusual ceremony. Instead of the altar being back there as it usually is, it will be up here, reversed, because we let in to the meditation hall on this occasion energies and spirits that usually don't come in here. They might be intimidated if they had to come take food from the main altar. that we always bow to.

[04:26]

So early in the ceremony, we use various Buddhist noisemakers and create a ruckus to invite them in. And then we offer them food and chanting, along with incense and flowers and light. So there are two different kinds of spirits that will be invited tonight. So as the text says, we invite all our departed ancestors going back to ancient times, dwelling in mountains, rivers, and earth, as well as rough demonic spirits from the wilderness to come and gather here. So part of the ceremony is we read the names of departed loved ones, people who have passed away this year. and formerly, and departed teachers. So we read those names and invite them to come back and give them food to help them on their way. And also we invite these other strange, wild, demonic spirits.

[05:39]

These hungry spirits, these hungry ghosts. So we do this, we chant this one time a year and do this ceremony. and we happened to chant it on, do this on Halloween, which turns out to be extremely appropriate time to honor the weird and the unknown. I researched it a little bit, and Halloween actually derives from the Celtic New Year's Eve. So November 1st was Celtic New Year, and the night before was a ceremony to honor the Lord of Death. And on this occasion, the Lord of Death allowed the souls of the dead to return for one evening. And all the normal hearth fires of all the families were extinguished and there was a big bonfire lit to help welcome and pacify or dispel these spirits and souls of the dead.

[06:44]

So it's quite similar in many ways. In Japan, they chant the gate as we do every day to feed the congregants, but also they do this special Sagaki ceremony in August during the Obon Festival. This is a time of year in Japan when the priests, all the Buddhist priests, are very, very busy. They go around to all the homes of all their parishioners and go to the house altars and chant the gate of sweet dew and other chants for the benefit of the ancestors in those houses. And then in Kyoto, where I live, there are these big bonfires at the end of this period. It lasts about two weeks, but it's different times in different parts of Japan. So there's about a month of these spirits wandering around Japan. I'm invited back. And then to end it, there are these big bonfires in shapes of various Chinese characters lit up on the hills all around Kyoto.

[07:53]

It's quite a big festival. So I wanted to talk a little about the Japanese Buddhist attitude and understanding of these spirits that we invite in this ceremony. So traditionally in Buddhism, there are six realms that we can be born into. There's the heavenly realms, There are the realms of the titans or angry gods, ambitious gods. Then there's the realm of human beings, where we are. Then there's the animal realm, then the realm of hungry ghosts, and the realm of hell. So those are the six realms. And in medieval Japanese Buddhist art, there are these very graphic and vivid pictures of what happens in hell and various tortures fire and swords and various torturers torturing the creatures in hell.

[08:53]

Then the realm of hungry ghosts that we are particularly addressing today. The hungry ghosts are shown as having very, very narrow necks, like needles, and very big bellies. And they are always hungry. And when they try to eat anything, it turns to pus or blood in their mouth. It's a very sad fate. So actually, all these realms have in them Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, but it's said that the human realm is by far the most fortunate because it's the most easy in which to hear the Dharma, to hear the teaching, to enter awakening. So most of the time I was living in Japan, I was living on a hill in the eastern part of Kyoto in between two huge old Buddhist temples.

[10:03]

Each one had many sub-temples and a big pagoda and large cemeteries. And outside of my window I could look out on part of one of the cemeteries. And every weekend there'd be people coming to the cemetery, making offerings to their family graves. And there'd be priests reciting services for their family graves. And there were also, all the time, these big black crows that would help take care of the offerings later, and were very noisy and quite impressive. So Japanese people identify themselves as Buddhists based on, and identify with a Buddhist school and temple based on where their family burial place is. And they take this quite seriously still. So I really love the cemeteries there. There were old, different kinds of old stones and old memorials and many statues of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and some of them very old and faded.

[11:10]

Some of these stones had been there literally 1,000 years. So I found it quite a peaceful place to walk around and a very peaceful feeling. So I'd walk around day and night and come and go to my house passing through these tombstones. And one of the pagodas, it was at the top of a hill, surrounded by many, many of these tombstones and had a great view of Kyoto. But Japanese people are afraid, not even only at night, during the day, unless they're going to make an offering, they don't usually walk in these cemeteries. They take these spirits quite seriously. So, in all the time that I walked around these cemeteries, I never myself saw a ghost. One of the things, though, I was doing in Japan also was teaching English, teaching college classes.

[12:11]

And that was kind of one of the things that was nice about that is you could do anything you wanted to as long as it was in English. So for some of the classes, I had them read these old Japanese ghost stories. There was a guy named Lafcadio Hearn who came from America to Japan at the end of the 19th century. He was kind of a weird guy. He was interested in strange things and he wrote a lot of stories in English about old Buddhist stories and old Japanese folklore and a lot of old ghost stories. And these were all Japanese stories and some that he heard about just from living in Japan. And I think actually the first, maybe one of my first contacts with Japanese Buddhism was through reading these strange old stories in high school. Anyway, I gave some of these stories to my classes to read, and I asked the students if they'd ever seen a ghost. So I'm not going to ask this audience if you've ever seen a ghost.

[13:19]

You might be embarrassed. But I'll ask you, how many of you have yourself seen a ghost or know somebody who has seen a ghost? Anybody? Oh. Quite impressive. Yeah, I talked to about a dozen people in Kyoto who had seen, who had themselves seen ghosts. Interestingly, most of them were women. Maybe women are more sensitive to this realm. But a couple of the stories were scary. One friend of mine actually had been attacked by a ghost and saw them regularly and she was quite afraid of them. Some of the stories were not so scary. There was one girl who talked about coming home from school when she was about seven or eight. And she saw her grandmother, who lived with her family, sitting on the roof of their house and waving at her and smiling.

[14:22]

And she waved back and smiled. And Japanese houses have these wonderful roofs. There's still many houses in Kyoto that are just one or two stories and beautiful roofs. Anyway, she was sitting up there on the roof. The granddaughter was surprised because the grandmother had been pretty sick and here she was up on the roof and she went in the house and found out that her grandmother had died earlier that morning. So, one of the things I feel from this whole event of Halloween, both Halloween and The Sagaki ceremony is this unknown realm. This is an occasion when we honor the unknown, the weird, all the strange realms that we don't usually like to think of. So part of this is that we don't know.

[15:26]

We just don't know what happens after people die. No matter how much I study Buddhist teachings, about this or how much they make sense to me. I don't know. I've heard that even the Dalai Lama, who's supposed to be the 14th incarnation, says he doesn't remember events of his previous lives. So we really don't know. And I feel like this not knowing is a very important part of our practice It's one of my favorite stories about this from old China. There was a monk who was traveling around and went to visit a teacher and stayed a little while and then was leaving and went to say goodbye and the teacher said to the monk, where are you going? And the monk said, I'm going around on pilgrimage. And the teacher said, what is the purpose of pilgrimage?

[16:33]

And the monk said, I don't know. And the teacher said, not knowing is nearest. Or you could say not knowing is most intimate. Not knowing is closest to reality. So our faculties are limited. I cannot see the wall behind me, and those of you sitting up front here can't see Manjushri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, sitting on the altar. Also, we can't see ultraviolet light, infrared light, and most of the time we can't see ghosts. So also our intellectual faculties are limited, our spiritual faculties are limited, there is this whole realm that we don't know.

[17:36]

So a big part of our practice is opening up to this not knowing, letting go of the knowledge or understanding or views that we have, letting go of those fixed views. It's okay to know things, but also we can't hold onto them, we can't grasp them. So going beyond what we already know is what is called learning. So we have to be able to let go of what we think we know, what we think the world is. of what we think death is, of what we think spirit realms are, of who we think we are. We have to be willing to face that. But this not knowing is not kind of blankness or just voidness or walking around like a zombie, even on Halloween.

[18:43]

So I like to think of this not knowing as kind of sense of wonder. So wonder means to wonder about, a sense of inquiry or curiosity about the world, about ourselves, about what's going on. But wonder also means to appreciate, to have a feeling of awe. So we all have some taste of that when we see a beautiful flower, when we look up and see the blueness of the sky or a beautiful sunset or a child smiling. Before I came over here, there was a hummingbird right outside my window, just fluttering so fast and going from blossom to blossom. Wonderful. And with this inquiry, with this wonder, and especially today, this wonder and inquiry into death and what has happened to the departed ones,

[19:50]

With this wonder about death, we can more deeply appreciate our own life. So our zazen practice, our meditation practice, is about opening us up to this wonder. It can give us a sense of appreciating just everyday stuff in our life. Give us the steadiness to face the unknown, to be willing to not know. to be willing to just try something, to be willing to hear something we never heard before, or see something we never saw before. So this sense of wonder and appreciation is, I feel, a big part of this gate of sweet dew. Sweet dew could also be translated as nectar or ambrosia. And it's said that this nectar refers to the nectar that is bestowed by the bodhisattva of compassion, Kanzayon.

[21:02]

She sometimes has a vase filled with this nectar, and she can pour that out on us. And it's said that this nectar saves beings from hell, so they can leave hell. This nectar is also technically refers to the nectar of nirvana. I went to a retreat that Thich Nhat Hanh did a few weeks ago, and one of the interesting things he said is that nirvana is a tool or a technique for gaining awareness of reality. So nirvana means extinction, and in early Buddhism there was this goal of getting out of this round of birth and death and these six realms to try and become free from them. And that was called nirvana. And this nirvana is a way of kind of starting to see what reality is.

[22:13]

But in reality, there is no complete extinction. So our energy, the spiritual direction of our lives continues. And all of you who are coming to the ceremony this evening and who have given names of loved ones who've left, you know that their spiritual direction, their energy, their being continues in some way. So in this ceremony, we don't only feed the spirits, we also ask them to feed others. It says, we sincerely wish for you to take advantage of these mantras and food to depart from suffering, be liberated, find birth in heaven and receive joy. With according intention, may you travel freely through the pure lands and the ten directions and arouse bodhi mind, the mind of awakening. practicing the Bodhi way, and in the future, definitely become a Buddha.

[23:16]

So the point of this is not just to put to rest these spirits, but to help them on their way to helping all other beings, so all beings may enter awakening. At the end of the Gate of Sweet Dew, we say, By means of this practice of the assembly's good roots, we repay the virtue of our parents' toil and trouble. May the living be blessed with joy and longevity without misery. May the dead part from suffering and be born into peaceful nurturing. So the point of this is not just to feed these hungry ghosts, but to actually help them to feed others, to get to the point where they can also feed others. So in the Gate of Sweet Dew, there are two kinds of offerings that are particularly mentioned.

[24:22]

There's food, and we actually have a bowl of rice and sometimes other food that we offer on the altar to the hungry ghosts. And there are also dharani, which we chant. So dharani is kind of like mantra. It's something we say. Some are short, some are longer. And they are kind of magical spells which we chant. Partly they have meaning and partly they're just sounds that have some positive effect. The word dharani also refers to memory. So these dharani we chant are tools to remind us of our intention and to increase our positive orientation. Kind of like the power of positive thinking. So in this gate of Sui Tu, there are 10 different Dharani that we chant.

[25:25]

Actually, one of them is for five different Buddhas, each one of which has a certain, has a particular Dharani with a certain power or effect. So you could say there are 14 different Dharanis. And so there, the one of them is the Dharani for summoning deceased spirits to the assembly. The Dharani for breaking open a passageway through the gates of hell is another. The Dharani for requesting Buddhas to supply and maintain food and drink. And the Dharani of the different Buddhas have the effect of pouring the Dharma into body and mind, granting pleasure, or opening wide all throats, satisfying the hungry ghosts with food and drink. So you may have heard that in Zen, Zen magic is just ordinary everyday stuff. And that's right. Just the ordinary everyday wonderful activities of working and sitting and eating and being together.

[26:36]

But because of that, we also bring Dharani, these magical spells into our everyday life. So here we chant the Dharani for removing hindrances every other morning, and the Dharani of great compassion, the Daishin Dharani, every evening. So part of Buddhist practice is to substitute positive habits for our conditioning. So we have various habits that prevent us from being fully here, to get in our way. These Dharanis are one of the Buddhist tools for dispelling these habits, these negative spells. We already have Dharanis floating through our heads all the time. We have definitions of ourself and of the world. I'm this kind of person or that kind of person. We all have these spells that are in our heads. Then there's all the popular songs, thousands of popular songs and lyrics and tunes that are floating through our heads.

[27:42]

Some of those may be very positive and encourage your practice, and then you can use them as Dharani, and some of them maybe not so. So these hungry ghosts are also in our own hearts. So one way of looking at these six different realms, they are realms that we can be born into, but also they're us. They're part of our experience. During the course of a month, we might experience most of those six realms, or maybe during the course of a week or even a day, we might all have some sense of hell, or hungry ghost, or animal realm, or heavenly realm, and human realm. And particularly in our society, in the consumer society, we're trained very early to be insatiable. all the television commercials, we need this and we need that, and what we have is not enough. So we've all received some training in being hungry ghosts.

[28:44]

I remember I saw a documentary several years ago about Mother Teresa. And the story is she was riding on a train in northern India, and as they say, something happened. And she decided to give her life to feeding the poorest of the poor. You probably all know that story. She went to Calcutta and started doing that, and taking care of all the people on the streets of Calcutta. And gradually, people heard about her, and other nuns came, and she founded an order of nuns, and they established centers in other cities in India. Then at some point, Mother Teresa established her order of nuns in Los Angeles and New York and San Francisco and other American cities. And some people got very upset. They said, what do you mean? America's not a third world country. Go to Calcutta where they're really the poorest. What are you doing here? And even more than that, of course, now we can go to

[30:02]

any inner city in America and see plenty of homeless people, plenty of hungry people. So I feel part of this feeding the hungry ghosts is to remember the people, the humans and hungry ghost people who are wandering the streets of San Francisco now and other cities. So I've heard that if Americans ate just 50% less meat that the savings in grain from the inefficient use of grain for feeding cattle, that that grain would be enough to feed all the world's hungry. But it's interesting, when Mother Teresa was asked about this, what are you doing here in America, she didn't mention the homeless people. She didn't talk about that. What Mother Teresa said was, I think Americans are starved for love. Americans are starved for kindness, starved for spiritual truth, starved for meaningfulness in their lives.

[31:09]

So we all have this hungry ghost within us, and tonight when we feed these hungry ghosts, we should also feed ourselves. Even here in Marin County, which is very affluent. Even here at Green Gulch, where we have wonderful food and beautiful hills to hike in and a nice meditation hall and good friends to be with, we all have this hungry ghost within us. So there's an old Buddhist story about heaven and hell. Probably a lot of you have heard it, but I'll mention it, say it again. So hell is this place where you go in and there's this big round table and on top of the table are platters and heaped on the platters are piles and piles of wonderful, delicious food, all the most delicious, nutritious food you can imagine. And sitting around this table in hell are these people and they all look miserable and starved and they're all sitting there

[32:20]

And strapped to their forearms are these four feet long forks and spoons. And no matter how they try, they can't get the food into their mouths. So that's hell. Heaven is a place where you go in and there's this big round table. And on the table are platters. And on the platters are wonderful, delicious food and nutritious food and all the best foods you can imagine. And sitting around this table in heaven are all these people who look very happy and well-fed. And strapped to their forearms are these four foot long spoons and forks, and they're feeding each other across the table. So tonight, when you give candy to the hungry children, remember your own inner child. And as we feed the hungry ghosts and spirits of the Sagaki ceremony today, let's all keep in mind how we can help feed each other and our own selves and find true satisfaction, appreciate the wonder we have already in our own lives.

[33:38]

So, happy Halloween. I think so. Anybody, if anybody has something to say, comment or question. Please. I have a question. I liked your story at the end. I hadn't heard it before about the Buddhist version of heaven and hell. But I have a hard time, I've been raised as a Christian, and I'm really tired of the concept of hell. I have a hard time with that word in relationship to Buddhism. Can you tell us? more about what that means beyond the story? Is it really such a realm? I don't know how to put this. Well, it's different from, yeah, that's a good point. You need to go to heaven or hell. Yeah, so it's very different from Christian heaven and hell. In Christian heaven or hell, after you die, you go to heaven or you go to hell, and that's it, right?

[34:47]

No, no, there's a third possibility. Or you go somewhere in between. I know, I was raised Catholic. You go to something that is called purgatory, and that's a possibility to go to heaven. Right. Right. Okay. So this is different. In Buddhism there's these six realms and when you're reborn, you're reborn into one of them and that doesn't mean that you stay there forever. In fact, it means that after a while you go into another one. In the same life? If you're reborn? Well, no. So there's different levels of this, right? There's, you know, in the same day any of us can experience any of these six realms. although we're grounded in human realm, hopefully. Most of you look like it. The way it works, though, the story is that you're reborn into one of these forms, and then at the end of that, then you may be reborn into the same form.

[35:51]

You may be reborn as an animal for millions of ages, but it's possible to shift. Now, it's true though, if you go to hell, it's hard to be reborn in heaven. I mean, it's not impossible, technically, but anyway, I don't know. The teaching is that you're reborn into one of these realms. I guess in hell, it's natural if you're being tortured, if somebody's cutting you up endlessly or whatever, it's probably natural to resist. think that the way to get out of hell is to just kind of be patient and take it and eventually, you know, anyway, or to help other beings in hell, you know, that would be kind of nice. The thing about heaven though, heaven is kind of sad. You go to heaven and it's very blissful and there are, you know, beautiful beings and beautiful jeweled trees and, you know, anything nice you could think of.

[36:52]

And those, when you're up there in the clouds and And heavenly beings live a long time. So this is all according to Indian Buddhist cosmology, right? But then eventually something very sad happens. A heavenly being looks in the mirror and sees a wrinkle and realizes they're starting to get old. And even though it might take a while, that's the beginning of the end. And eventually their wings fall off and they fall down to earth. When a heavenly being is going to die or starts to get sick, it's very sad because, you know, if you're in heaven you want to stay there, right? And they know that... So, it's most beneficial, it's said, to be born in our human realm, which is not always pleasant, but we have a chance to wake up. So anyway, it's very different from Christian heaven and hell. The character, the Chinese character, I don't know about the Indian word, but the Chinese character for heaven means, also means sky.

[37:59]

It also refers to the emperor. The character for hell in Japanese, Jigoku, means a prison under the earth, or an earth prison, literally. So they do have this idea of up and down, too. And I don't know if that comes from the same place the Christian idea comes from. But anyway, it's different. It's not like you go to one place and that's it. It's a round of births and rebirths. Can you talk a little bit about the melting of emotion? What do you mean? Oh, okay. Yeah, so during zazen, well, not just during zazen, but particularly this is talked about in relationship to meditation, that if you sit still for a while and watch what's happening, eventually, or maybe fairly soon, you will see that your mind is constantly

[39:21]

going over this and that and the other, and all these thoughts and emotions come up. And we say in our meditation that it's important not to try and get rid of those thoughts and emotions. So that's a common mistake, common problem, to think that you should get rid of thinking. But gradually, if you're just willing to sit there uprightly and face the scenery of your thoughts and emotions, it kind of their spaces and you can kind of recognize them and it loosens. But you're not trying to get rid of the thoughts and emotions. But it's possible to just be there with your breathing and not get stuck and not, you know, have some respite between thoughts and emotions. But thoughts and emotions aren't bad, you know. They're just, you know, that's like saying that the trees are bad or the table's bad My hand's bad. It's just all the same kind of scenery. But we get caught by our thoughts and emotions, don't we?

[40:28]

We take them very seriously, and we think that if we notice we're angry, we think we have to do something about it and express it and so forth. So we get caught. Yes? I'm interested in the whole notion that you brought up about being curious about, in relation to meditation, Could you talk a little bit more about relating that to meditation practice, being curious about and wonder? Hmm. Yeah, well, when we sit, we watch what's happening. So we hear sounds and we see the wall in front of us and we particularly pay attention to our posture and we watch our... pay attention to our breathing, our inhale and exhale as part of that, and then we start to see these thoughts and emotions that come up. So, again, the attitude is not to try and get rid of them, the attitude is to just watch and to actually, not kind of to watch in a dull way, but to actually be alert, you know, relaxed, you know, physically and mentally, you know, kind of soft and gentle, but to really

[41:41]

watch and appreciate whatever it is that's going on. So that includes our own weird monkey minds. Does the inquiry come in at that point? Well, the inquiry is kind of just watching. By inquiry, I don't mean like you're trying to do something. Our usual orientation to the world is trying to fix things, trying to solve problems, trying to change things, trying to make things better. Some of these Buddhist practices, I was mentioning the Dharani, you know, can be used as tools. So there are tools. But the basic orientation is not to try and do anything with it. So when I talked about inquiry, it's to look at it carefully, but not in a way of trying to analyze it, but to actually physically be with it, to stay with it, whatever it is, just to sit, just to stay with it. And watch it, you know, and see how it changes, because it will. Like tonight, we're inviting the spirits of dead people.

[42:49]

I don't understand why the spirit, any old spirit is invited too. I mean, isn't it all the while? I mean, like the bond ceremony in Japan, they only invite for the dead people. But what you said... No, it's not just for the dead people. Yeah. We don't, you know, kind of say the spirit will let it and the spirit we don't let it. That doesn't bother people? You're concerned about the spirits of the dead people getting hurt by the spirits of... Yeah, I understand that concern. So yeah, that's a good question. But, so, you know, I have to say again, I don't know, okay? But my response to that is that those spirits are out there anyway. We're inviting all of them. We're feeding all of them. We're pacifying all of them. So if there are spirits of dead people wandering around that cemetery, and there are also these wild spirits, they probably have seen each other already, or whatever, if they do that kind of thing.

[43:57]

I mean, so I'm just guessing here. But anyway, in the chant and in the obon ceremony, too, they, of course, focus on the ancestors and ancestor Respect for ancestors is very important in China and Japan. And in Japanese Buddhism, too. They go to the cemeteries because they really pay attention to everybody. I mean, all Buddhists have an altar in their home, which means basically all Japanese people, almost all of them, have an altar in their home, and there's a Buddha and there's some plaque with the names of ancestors. And this is, you know, just what Japanese Buddhists do. So in Japan, there's not so much people going and doing zazen or something like that. I mean, there are people who do that, but just the common, the people who are Buddhist in Japan, the way American people are Christian, one of the things they do is have this altar in their home.

[45:00]

and they may not pay much attention to it, but during that time of year, the priest comes and does some chant, but usually they also make offerings regularly. They don't have anything like they have in Hawaii, where they send in someone, if things are wrong, they send in someone to do the right thing. They do that in Japan, too, don't they? Well, partly these dharanis are used in that way. But I think the Japanese Buddhist attitude is Not necessarily that you can fix all those situations, but you make offerings and you say these chants. And the Chinese is the same? The Chinese is the same, yeah. The Chinese also have the same time of year in traditional China. Now, of course, most of mainland China doesn't follow this. It's New Year's. No, because Chinese New Year's is in February, isn't it?

[46:01]

Yeah, that's when they have their ceremonies. Well, I was reading, I don't know, but I've never been to China, but I was reading about modern Chinese Buddhism and apparently they do this ceremony, this Feeding the Hungry Ghost ceremony, also in August. I think I was in eighth grade when I Well, excuse me, I said when she was asked this question particularly, she referred to our spiritual hunger more, yeah. She told me something that she told me before.

[47:20]

I was really glad to hear it again. She told me how she goes into San Francisco and she goes to the homeless and she talks to them. And it was very stressful. It was very stressful to me to say no. And I realized I don't know how to say yes, and I haven't known what to say. But just talking to this woman, and I intend to go back and find out more how she's doing this, it's encouraging to me that there is something, that I can say to a person about what can I do. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up.

[48:28]

I don't get into downtown San Francisco anyway very much, but when I'm in that situation, I always just try and give something, a quarter or something. It's not much. There's this feeling that this problem is so huge that what can you do? But still, I think to do something, to just acknowledge the person there is really important. That's even more than giving money or food or clothing or you know, just to recognize there's a human being there. Maybe there's a, maybe it's in the form of a hungry ghost or whatever. And for some of them, the hell realm, you know. There's a young man, one of the children of one of our long-term residents who faced this problem and he packs a bag, packs a lunch for himself and some other back lunches and he goes into San Francisco and he gives them out. And he actually wrote about that in the Turning Wheel magazine a few months ago.

[49:31]

And the way he came to that was very interesting. There's also this thing about giving charity. Sometimes it's hard for some of us to receive. So how do you give in a way that honors the person? It's really hard. And just I'll mention an experience that I had not by way of, I hesitate to mention it because it might seem like I did something good, but to me it was something for me. I received an insurance settlement some years ago and suddenly I had this money which I hadn't expected, so I took $100 and put it into $5 bills and just walked down Market Street. and gave it out, and it was just wonderful. And it's a drop in the bucket. I mean, it could have been $1,000. It would have been a drop in the bucket. But anyway, it's just to go to somebody and just, in some cases, I just left $5 by the head of somebody lying in a doorway.

[50:32]

So I think to be creative about it, to see what can you do, sometimes maybe you have to say no. You've given five quarters away, you don't have any more in your pocket. That's what I do, actually. If I don't have any more change in my pocket, I say no. So sometimes maybe you have to say no. I don't know. There's no easy answer. But to think about it, to be aware of the hungry, and to see, well, what can I do? I think that's really good. Yeah? I may be opening a big can. I'm wondering if I'm bringing this up. OK, we'll try and eat some. I've been in a position of often very bad experience for me, realizing that there's a very large population of people out there that will willingly just sit there and take whatever people will give. And I've been in a position of being dragged down

[51:38]

that I need to do to take care of myself. And these people sit there with their hand out, happily accepting from other people. And when I'm really helping them by just putting things in their hands, maybe there's a better way to help them. And I certainly do believe that you possibly food, but money that maybe they're going to go out and buy alcohol with or buy things with. Absolutely. So I wasn't recommending just going out and giving away money. I just did that to see how it felt for me. Right. Yeah, it's a huge problem. We don't know what is actually helpful. I think there's a side of it that when you go to feed the hungry, you have to be with yourself. watch your own hunger, you have to see where you're really coming from, and you have to take care of yourself, you know, and maybe there are occasions when it's helpful to sacrifice yourself, but also how can you sustain your being so that you can give most, you know, to the world and to yourself, and also to honor the hungry ghost in yourself, to honor your own needs too as part of compassion.

[53:11]

Yeah, I think what you're saying is right. We need to just try different things, except maybe that there's not going to be a solution to the problem, in the usual way we think of solutions. It's not a matter of trying to solve something, it's a matter of being aware. Yeah? But granted, I know this process is not going to happen overnight, but I now feel like they are, like that spirit is clinging for life.

[54:24]

And you know, I don't, you know, I know that you're talking about feeding the spirits, but by the same token, if this one's supposed to go, it's sort of like what he's talking about. encouraging it to hang on by feeding it when it's supposed to go. Yeah, the point isn't to feed them so that they'll keep coming back for more. The point is to feed them, to give them what they need to accept where they're at and to move on. So it's not about just feeding them, it's about feeding them so that they will go on with their path. And, you know, sometimes there are spirits and hungry ghosts within us that, you know, it's just, they just hang on a long time and we don't know when they're finally going to be able to move on. And you just don't know. And what can you do? You can feed them and you can honor them and not let them consume you also.

[55:28]

And appreciate that they still, that they're they're still very much in the world in a certain way. And even when they move on, we don't have to forget them, you know. But I know you're talking about the part of them that's not letting go. And I think that's what these dharanis and that's what these ceremonies are designed for. And that's the Buddhist response is to make some ceremony to help them accept their own path. And in all of this stuff, you know, there's one level that's actually spirits of people who we knew and, you know, actual spirits out there, sort of. And then there's also the level of, which we might call psychological, which has to do with our mind, which is kind of a mirror of something out there. So it works in both levels. I don't know if that's very helpful. Yeah.

[56:33]

This is a slight confusion about spirits. Spirit to me and spirit being is like. Spirit is like without spirit. So my spirit gives life to the body. That's how I look at that. And also, there seems to be a lot of morbidness placed around dead bodies. ghosts and stuff like that. And I mean, their spirits are around us all the time. You don't have to be in a ceremony, excuse me, a cemetery to see that kind of spirit. And I'm just curious about that Buddhist perception of how we are ghosts, which I certainly can see in myself also. And also the funny thing is that I found, for me, I found heaven in my suffering, my hell, is where I found heaven.

[57:36]

So it's like, you know, there's a bit of both in just about everything. And, you know, it's just fascinating. Yeah, we're talking about this in terms of English words, you know, so spirits, you know, Ghosts... Spirit also means like a spirited horse, you know. So, vitality is spirit too, or spirits is something that you drink to, you know, get some intoxication. What's the difference between ghosts and spirits? Well, they're different, you know, there are various cosmologies. In the Buddhist, Japanese Buddhist one, you know, there are also spirits of inanimate objects. So, some kinds of ghosts in Japan are ghosts of teapots, ghosts of televisions. They also have spirits in that way too, and they have different names for the different kinds of spirits. And there are hungry ghost spirits, and in Indian Buddhist cosmology too, there are various different kinds of spirits.

[58:44]

And in the Buddhist sutras, not just hungry spirits or hellish spirits too, there are various heavenly beings who are kind of like spirits too, some of whom are associated with music and some of whom are associated with fragrance. So, you know, how you understand this, I think on some sense I take this sort of literally, on another sense it's, we're talking about energies or spirits in that sense too, both, you know. My mother died some years ago. And if I feel that she has,

[59:45]

How does that work? We're inviting spirits of people who have passed. If they're already something else, or someone else, what's the spirit that we're inviting back? Because their spirit's already moved on. I mean, are we only inviting the spirits that are still sort of wandering around, wondering where to now? Is there some difference between the essence of the person that continues through time and the spirit of the human form that is here? If we try and think about this, figure this out kind of too analytically, I think we'd get a big headache. No, I don't mean to... No, it's a good question you're asking. There are actually several questions in there, so a few responses I have.

[61:04]

One thing is, technically in Zen, we don't talk about reincarnation so much. Reincarnation is like, I'm here, and then after I die, I go into some other body, and there's some me that goes there. And actually, there's no me. I'm just some total of all of you. you know, my parents and my friends and everybody, and the whole universe, and the same is true of all of us, and we're all totally connected. So there's no, there's no essence or spirit of you that goes to another body. In Tibetan Buddhism, they seem to almost talk of belief in that. I mean, there are, there are the reincarnated lamas, you know, and so, but that's a, those are very rare beings, you know, these, but even there, it's not exactly like, you know, there was the 13th Dalai Lama and there was some, I don't know what, some little brain cell or something of his that entered the fort. No, it's not like that.

[62:05]

So, you know, the spirit of your grandmother, I mean, I think what I understand anyway, and I don't, first of all, again, I want to make this universal disclaimer, I don't know, okay? So all I'm talking about is my sense of it from studying Buddhism, what the teaching is about it, my sense of it from thinking about it and from some experience of just how I am and how, you know, the world is that I see. So, you know, I don't, I'm not, I don't know what happens in rebirth, but what my sense of it is, my understanding of it is that it's, you know, like you were saying, it's much more complicated than we can think of in terms of thinking of this becomes that and that becomes this. It's more like there's some energy, there's some spiritual direction, there's some intention that lives on in the world and takes form in some other being. It's more like that. And in Buddhism, they talk about it in terms of habits, actually. There are tendencies and kind of habitual ways of thinking and acting and kind of some orientation, some mental orientation that has some, that continues on in some other body.

[63:22]

But it's not like you know, your grandmother died and then she became some other person. Popularly in Buddhism and sometimes it's talked about in that way. But also, this is not something that happens between life and death. This is something that happens every moment, you know. There was somebody who was giving some talk over there in that other building and then there's somebody else here and, you know, we're just constantly changing, you know. It's really beyond how we can, any way we think about it, this is really, really the realm of the unknown. We don't, it's not something that is knowable in terms of the ways of knowing that we're used to thinking. So, you know, I do think there is some kind of rebirth. I think that your grandmother, you know, the energy of how she was in the world continues in some way. It continues also in your remembrance of her. So if I think of my grandmother, you know, there's all these feelings. She's very much alive in me, both of them.

[64:23]

But also, according to this teaching, there's some of that energy that was her continues somehow. So I don't know, this is very mysterious. One of the things I heard which helped me get beyond trying to make sense of it is a friend of mine's told me this, one of his teachers told him that, in your next life, you may not have the same past lives as you do in this life. Now that'll kind of send your idea about this a little bit. Try that, try that one for a while. That might help. Before we go on, I wanted to, there are people here who, before I forget, there are people here who need rides back to San Francisco. Is anybody going back to San Francisco who can offer a ride? Okay. So you can talk with this guy anyway.

[65:26]

Yeah. Thank you. Any other questions? Yeah. Yeah, there are ways in which we can feel each other. I'm also looking for a ride to Stanford. Yeah, well, talk to this fellow over here. Yeah. I hate to miss my neighbor, but we're looking for a ride to Berkeley after lunch.

[66:27]

Okay, good. Who else? We'd like to go. We need to go after lunch, right? Yeah. Anybody going to the East Bay after lunch? Anyone? Well, you know, wait a second. No, this is worth. So you can check down in the dining room, but also there's a place down here on the driveway for rides to the Manzanita, and there's a bus there, at least. So that's... There's a bus where? There's a bus... You can always get a bus to go to the city to take you to get a bar or two or wherever. There's always... So... Should we stand out on the driveway and hold the sign? Well, just notice, there's one place... Yeah, why don't you tell them? There's a bench. When we come down the hill, we'll start going down the hill. Near the carpool? Yeah. Two months in each. Two months in each. Yeah, Manzanita is a place where we have the carpool, where people can get picked up for carpooling.

[67:28]

So there's a sign for people who want to ride back to Manzanita, but also there's a bus stop near there. And if you stand there, people will stop. And if you have a car, please do stop if you see somebody standing there, because we're trying to do this carpool thing. You know, hopefully, you can find somebody who's going to the East Bay, but, you know, where it comes to where she can get to find it. So, uh, right, right, right. Yeah, I walked down this driveway a little past the main parking lot down there. Just go around the bench and there's a sign. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Sure. Yeah. Anybody else need a ride or offering arrest or doing right. Maybe you. Do you want to go before lunch or after? Okay, they're deciding. So yeah, the Sagake ceremony is at 5 o'clock and will be over close to 6 maybe.

[68:29]

After that one you're leaving? So around 3.34 there's a ride to San Francisco there, okay? So talk to each other. Okay, ride back to San Francisco between 1.30 and 2. Talk to this guy here, okay? Anybody else need a ride or offering a ride? Okay, anything else? PJ, did you? I was just gonna make a comment on this last question that came up. Something that, it certainly doesn't give me any answers, but it's something that just helps me put this all in perspective. is that what we're used to in our normal realm of thought is what's called linear time. can kind of fit together and flow together in some kind of interconnection.

[70:17]

And I have no answers except that. That just leaves me a little bit more open, a little bit more comfortable with that whole continuum of birth, life, and death. Yeah, right, good. Yeah, definitely, absolutely. According to the Buddhist teaching and according to the experience of the space of meditation, our usual historical time, and also all of time is like, you know, this clump. So Thich Nhat Hanh was talking about it in terms of historical dimension and ultimate dimension. There is this historical reality. I mean, there is this phenomenal world we have to take care of, that we have to deal with our karma in, in which, you know, there seems to be this sequence of past, present and future, and things happen and other things happen. that realm of reality definitely obtains, and we have to attend to it. And also, at the same time, all of time is... Actually, if I start talking about time, well, I can start blabbing a long time.

[71:26]

But in each time, there is past, present, and future. And also, of course, past is just a fiction. Past is what is no longer, so it doesn't really exist. Future doesn't exist, it's what is not yet, And present, it doesn't exist either, because by the time we even look at it, it's gone. So there's this way in which we are supposed to attend to what is present, but what is present is a fiction, and also what is present includes all those times. So there's a past, present, and future of the past. Think of any particular time you imagine you experienced in the past. There was a past to that, there was a future to that, and there was a present to that. and the same is true of right now and the same is true of the future. And then there's all of those times together. So yeah, time is this totally bendable thing. So when we start to think about the spirit of somebody who we remember having lived and where are they now and where are they going and who was that baby before?

[72:31]

That's the wrong kind of understanding of time that we're bringing to. That time exists too. Time is really about putting yourself there. Time is about, you know, slapping your knee, eating your food, shaking your head. Time is about our activity. Time is about what are we doing right now, what is our intention right now, how are we helping all beings and ourselves and all the beings in us kind of wake up to that all time is right here. And then also at the same time taking care of just, you know, now it's ten after twelve, but yesterday, twenty-four hours ago, it was ten after eleven, and, you know, it's, you know, or was it ten after one? Did I get it backwards? Yes. Oh, right, it's ten after one, see? Somebody change that clock. Yeah, well, so, particularly, when we're talking about this unknown realm, we're talking about some intersection of this ultimate dimension and this historical dimension.

[73:40]

So we are in this historical dimension and we're in this ultimate dimension and our friends who've gone on and these weird spirits that we sense lurking out there, you know, they're in some other dimension which is not the ultimate dimension but it's not quite the historical dimension and we don't know how it all fits together. But yet we have to honour it. We have to honour this, the weirdness in ourselves. We have to honour, you know, these spirits that, this weirdness all around us, we have You know, all the people we know who died, you know, and where are they now? Well, we still remember them, so they're not gone. Yeah? I asked something you brought up earlier on the deck, which was sort of basically what is the point of Siddiq Zaza, and we asked him just to... I knew he'd give you some interesting answer. I didn't know quite what it would mean. What did he say this time? Every time he says the same thing, but it's different.

[74:41]

And so he said, what did he say? He said, to be fully alive. And I didn't want to bug him too much because some people wanted to talk to him. So we sort of went up and talked about that. I was thinking of, I don't think he really meant, first of all, he explained that he didn't mean, you do Zazen in order to be fully alive. And after Will and I were talking about this, I made a sort of conjecture I sort of wanted to put to you, which is basically, I don't think he meant just sitting in that particular, or in a zando, in the right posture, saying the right words. Would it really refer to living your life, or like washing the dishes, or whatever you're doing, in the right posture, and being fully present to that? I mean, you know, yeah, we do take a certain posture to learn about zazen and we do, you know, but basically it's, yeah, like you said, just sitting, just being uprightly facing what is in front of us, you know, facing your life, being fully alive, same thing.

[76:03]

There are lots of names for it. But, you know, we have a particular form that helps us to enter that space. Like an exercise. Well, it's not like an exercise, it's more like a celebration. You know, we sit saz and because we're fully alive. Oh boy, all right. Yeah. Thanks. If I may, I'd like to take on what he's saying is that because sitting is probably the easiest way to get ourselves centered, that it's therefore the easiest posture to practice being in that state here. And then to take that Yeah, right. Well, Jizo, the little statue, I had someone tell me in Japan they consider it real, which we don't here, and they said they always put a glass of water in front of Jizo to show that he's real.

[77:18]

Well, actually we offer water We don't offer water on our altars here, but in the cemeteries they offer water in front of all the stones. You offer water to all the... I think that's part of what we offer tonight. You offer water for the thirsty spirits. Have you seen that in Japan, where they put water in front of... Not just Jizo, any... Jizo too. Jizo is the... It shows it's a real god, not just a... Well, yeah, I mean, they put offerings in front of the memorial markers in the cemetery, and they put food, and they put incense, and they put flowers, and they put water. So Jizo is particularly relevant to this discussion, though. Jizo is one of the main bodhisattvas in Japanese Buddhism. And Jizo literally means earth womb or earth storehouse. And there's going to be a ceremony this afternoon that Yvonne Rand is doing in this room.

[78:20]

to Jizo for spirits of children who have died. So Jizo, popularly in Japan, is considered the guardian of children, particularly of children who have died, guardian of travelers. But the background of Jizo, Jizo appears, so Jizo means earth womb, and I actually think of Jizo as the earth mother, Bodhisattva, even though Jizo always appears as a monk with shaved head carrying a staff and a wish-fulfilling jewel. But Jizo particularly is the bodhisattva who goes to hell and saves beings from hell. Other bodhisattvas do that too, of course. But Jizo particularly is very close to us and is in all six realms. So this is the story about this bodhisattva. And there's a Chinese sutra, maybe it comes from India, about this. This is just one of the many bodhisattvas in Mahayana Buddhism, but it's He's very, very popular in Japan. You see these little stone Buddhas all over the place by the roadside and just all over the place in cities and in the countryside.

[79:28]

And they put these little red bibs on Jizo particularly, and that's kind of to honor the spirits of children who've died, but also now they just put these bibs on all Buddhas in Japan. But in this sutra about Jizo, they tell past life stories about Jizo, right? So I was saying before that they're not particular past lives, but also in this sutra there are a few stories told about past lives of Jizo, and in two of them he was a woman whose mother died and the daughter somehow knew that the mother was going to hell because of various, you know, activities. I think one of them maybe ate meat or something. Anyway, so this is in China and they were kind of strict, right? So in both these stories the daughter goes down to hell and because of the diligence and intensity and sincerity of her practice saves not only the mother but all the beings in hell.

[80:31]

And then the subsequent life becomes Jizo, Bodhisattva, the earth womb, Bodhisattva. So yeah, Jizo is very popular in Japan, along with Kannon, Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. Too much popular. Yeah? Can you say a little bit more about the legacy of the wish-fulfilling jewel? Well, this is just one of the instruments or utensils that appear sometimes in Buddhist iconography. And that's what it is. It's like the genius lamp or something. I don't know. I've never had one myself. But anyway, that's one of the things that Jizo often carries. So all the stuff we've been talking about today is this kind of shamanic side of Buddhism, right? So Jizo is the, there's this really neat word, psychopomp. Have any of you ever heard of that? It's a technical religious term for somebody who goes down to hell to save beings.

[81:37]

Psychopomp. P-O-M-P. Yeah, that's it. It's a technical term. So Jizo is a psychopomp. Jizo is a shaman who goes down and

[81:47]

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