So good morning everyone. And happy new year. It's the first time I've spoken here in the new year. And I want to congratulate also my Dharma brother Peter on Dharma transmission and also Anne on non-Dharma transmission. Anne and Peter are twins. And since I have an identical twin sister, who often says, let me just at them for one week. But since I have an identical twin sister, I follow your adventures with great interest. And Peter and I, Peter was one of the people, Peter was Shuso or head monk when we were at Tassajara together 1982, and Peter was one of the people who helped me the most when, maybe 1983, I can't remember, yeah, sorry, I was ordained in 1982, and you were one of the people who helped me understand what it meant

[01:21]

to be a priest and how lay and priest practice might have different emphases after Sojin just said, I don't know. Following the example of Suzuki Roshi. So, thanks and congratulations. And also to Andrea, your sister, Dharma sister. So, Today, I would like to speak about what helps us maintain a sense of vitality and freshness in our practice after we've been practicing for a long time. And so that could be a long time in years, like in my case, 46 years, 41 of which have been spent at San Francisco Zen Center Or it could also just be the perceived eons when we're practicing with something that is difficult or boring for us.

[02:31]

So I think it's something that we need to understand because there's a moment that kind of feels like the golden years at the beginning of practice, and then it ends for a lot of people. And we have to understand how to keep that sense of freshness that a beginner has and understand what that means, not imposing it on our experience, but actually bringing it up in ourselves. So when we can keep a beginner's mind in practice, not hold on to it hard, but keep generating it again and again with every breath, that is called awakening. And so it's not the kind of awakening that's dramatic, which we call satori or go.

[03:36]

It's the kind of awakening that we call a correct relationship between relative, correct meaning upright or straightforward, well-maintained and actually verifiable relationship between conventional ways of seeing things like red lights and green lights and ultimate ways of seeing things like nothing is what we think. So when we, beginner's mind just happens to be the way that we can do that. And it's incredibly challenging to maintain freshness when things happen as they do in everybody's human life. So, how I want to speak about this is by

[04:38]

looking at what's important in the values of this place. So today I would like to speak about plum blossoms. So I don't know if you know this, and many people here do, but plum blossoms are an enduring symbol, particularly in East Asian countries and cultures of spring. spring that comes in the middle of winter, the first blossoms of spring. And because of that, plum blossoms symbolize vitality and freshness, endurance, because they come every year, no matter what, at least until climate change ends that, if it does. and also a sense of kind of elegance and pervasive fragrance that plum blossoms not have but are intrinsically.

[05:54]

And so if you picture a world that's covered in snow and what seems to be a bare and empty tree, One day, when it still looks like winter, a plum blossom opens, and many blossoms open in five petals each, and their fragrance pervades the whole garden. And that's why I want to talk about plum blossoms. because it's something, a plum blossom is something so evanescent, so short-lived, and yet so profound. And it also happens to be, this happens to be the old plum temple, the old plum center.

[06:57]

And there's probably a reason for that. And so by talking about plum blossoms, I also want to talk about Mel's teaching of me, just as Dogen talked about plum blossoms in his fascicle of the Shobogenzo Baika, or the plum flower, to talk about his relationship with his teacher, Rujing. So you may find the fragrance of the teacher-student relationship or echoes of your own practice with other people, with teachers and friends, in what I say. And so, are you the timekeeper? You are? Could you please tell me when there's 15 minutes to go so that we can speak about this? Okay, when will that be?

[07:59]

I better hurry then. Okay, the time is evanescent and fleeting. The fragrance will only last for so long. Okay. So another way in which I appreciate plum blossoms is that when you know that Mrs. Mitsu Suzuki, or Okasan, or Suzuki Sensei, as I called her, recently passed away. She would be 102 years old by our count on April 23rd, three years old in Japan. And as recently as December, she was having very kind of upbeat conversations with her kids. and family at the Matsuno home in Shizuoka, where she has been living since October of 1993.

[09:07]

That's her daughter's home. And Suzuki Sensei, after Suzuki Roshi passed away in December of 1971, Suzuki Sensei stayed with us for 22 more years. And every morning, you could hear, even after she stopped sitting in the zendo at 300 Page Street, you could hear her daily ritual and appreciate what she felt about Zen by the way she lived her life. So she would get up in the morning and she'd make a food and water offering to Suzuki Roshi on her little altar. And then she would ring three bells so you could hear that pure sound. And the way she rang the bell would resonate She didn't hit the bell, she rang the bell. So she had a relationship with the things around her that resonated, and you could hear that in how she rang the bell. And then she might wash her hair and go downstairs to the courtyard at 300 Page Street, where she would walk around the courtyard saying hello

[10:19]

to every bird and every flower that was new at that time, or even ones that she called them old friends. And so I asked her about this, and she said, those are my friends. But Suzuki Sensei kept the tea here. which every two weeks, there's a kind of symbol of seasonal change. And one of the symbols was plum blossoms. And when she received plum blossoms from people, she would put them out in the tea room to symbolize that two-week period of kind of not the middle of winter, and not the end of winter, but just past the middle of winter, there's two weeks in which plum blossoms come. and it had a special scroll and a special set of colors and forms in the tea room to express that moment with a specific aesthetic choice in the middle of the season, just as it was.

[11:30]

And Suzuki Sensei, through how she did this, would communicate wabi and sabi to us. So she would communicate in everyday shapes and forms what Suzuki Roshi was communicating to us in a priestly way with specific Buddhist teachings. So she gave us an appreciation of how to live our lives so that the values of Zen were expressed. She did this without being anything special, and I think without Suzuki Sensei's teachings. Suzuki Roshi's teaching might not have come alive in as many people as it did. That's why she stayed. And that's why I will remember her teaching every day until I'm gone. So, the beginning of tea ceremony, you say, o-ten-mai.

[12:37]

And this ten-mai is to bring your concentration to the front. And what you're bringing your concentration to is a relationship between us and the objective world that's very different from how we usually see it. And it's this relationship that plum blossoms so clearly express. So, um, In the fascicle of the Shobo Genzo, Shobo Genzo is the treasury of the true Dharma, and it's a collection of Dogen Zenji's talks. And Dogen Zenji was the founder of our school in Japan. And when Dogen Zenji was young, he had already been ordained by his cousin after he had a deep experience of impermanence when he was a kid. His mother died, he saw incense smoke and that brought up for him impermanence.

[13:43]

He decided to get ordained. But when he was in, some years later as an adult, he decided that he was going to study Zen. And so he sailed to China to meet Zen and was stuck in customs for a long time. So his boat got stuck in customs for two months after a very difficult journey. But when he got out of the boat, he looked all over China for two years for his teacher, and he didn't find him. And just when he was about to give up, he went back to one of the temples where he had already been, and this teacher who hadn't been there at that time was there. And this is the teacher whose poems are in the fascicle, Plum Blossoms. So, Dogen was enlightened, awakened to the nature of reality, when his teacher, who had been very strict in meditation,

[14:48]

was running around slapping monks on their shoulders with his slipper to wake them up. And so, the print is too small for me to actually read this, so I'm just going to have to tell you. So, Ruijing was going around saying, you must drop off body and mind. Basically, I think that it was something like, What is the use of single-minded, intense, bringing the concentration to the front, sleeping? Drop off body and mind. And Dogen Zenji responded, his whole body resounded like a hammer striking emptiness. And he ran to Rujing's room in the middle of the night, knocked on the panels and said, I've got something to tell you, or the equivalent of that.

[15:53]

And Ruijing said, please come in. They had a relationship in which Dogen was welcome to ask questions any hour of the day or night, no matter whether he was dressed formally or informally. He could come and ask a question. So he had this question, I've woken up, body and mind dropped off. And Ruijing questioned him, body and mind dropped off. And Dogen added, the dropped off body and mind. So the two sides of reality, body and mind drop off, and the dropped off body and mind. And so, can you hear this in one of Ruijing's poems about the plum blossoms, which are sprinkled like petals through this fascicle? Here it is. Tien Tung's first phrase of midwinter. Excuse me.

[16:55]

Tien Tung's first phrase of midwinter. Old plum tree bent and gnarled. All at once opens one blossom, two blossoms, three, four, five blossoms, uncountable blossoms. Not proud of purity, not proud of fragrance, spreading, becoming spring, blowing over grasses and trees, balding the head of a patch-robed monk, whirling, quickly changing into wild wind, stormy rain, falling, snow, all over the earth. The old plum tree is boundless. A hard cold rubs the nostrils. So to this, Dogen comments, well, what is this old plum tree? And he says a lot of things, but I liked this particular phrase for today.

[18:04]

The old plum tree is within the human world and the heavenly world. The old plum tree manifests both human and heavenly worlds in its tree-ness. Thus, hundreds and thousands of blossoms are called both human and heavenly blossoms. Myriads and billions of blossoms are Buddha ancestor blossoms. In such a moment, all Buddhas have appeared in the world is shouted. The ancestor is in this land from the very beginning is shouted. So Dogen says this. There's more, there's about I don't know, six or seven poems, but I just want a space to say two more of them to get the mood. Here's another one. The first day of the year is auspicious. Myriad things are all new. In prostration, the great assembly reflects.

[19:09]

Plum blossoms open early spring. And then for how do we keep our practice fresh? Let's look at the end. This is us now. Raising an eyebrow, answer the question. See Buddha in person, do not deceive. Still, be worthy of offerings from the world. And then this is the line. Spring lies in plum twigs accompanied by snow. Cold. Spring lies in plum twigs accompanied by snow. Cold. Okay, so my question for you is, we have winters in our own life. Our own life has many winters. winters when life seems cold and bare, winters when life seems not lively, when it seems covered in something which makes us uncomfortable.

[20:23]

We have that as our life in many ways. Just like the word wadi, which originally means lacking things or being frustrated, in one's wishes, and has turned into a value of tea ceremony, of enjoyment between host and guest. Just like Sabi, which originally means to be alone or desolate, and has turned into a feeling of appreciation for the uniqueness of everything that is. What is our winter and how does it burst forth in the five petals of Zen? And that's my question. Is it 15 minutes? You're pretty close. Okay. So I wanted to leave time before I blab on too much.

[21:26]

for us to talk about what maintains vitality and freshness. How do we bring that up when we go into summer with every inhalation and go into winter with every exhalation? Yes, sir. The teacher-student relationship? What, the teacher running around hitting people with slippers didn't do it for you? Okay. Yeah, so the first time I ever met Sojin, he was giving a talk at San Francisco Zen Center.

[22:29]

I was 21 years old, something like that. You were more. Actually, I had been over here, actually not here, in the attic on Dwight Way, and we used to have potlucks, and I came to a potluck, so that's where we really met. So when he gave a lecture, I wasn't living yet. in San Francisco Center building at that time. I was living down the street and I would go to the Zendo to sit Zazen, but then as soon as Zazen was over, I would sneak out the back door because I didn't want to do anything else. And then I noticed that Tom Cleary was giving a class in Chinese and that was my language in college, and so I thought, oh, why don't I do that, so that's what got me upstairs. But what got me into the lecture was that we had already met, and during that lecture you said something like, if you're coming to what you think of as Buddhism to avoid your own religion,

[23:42]

Go back to your own religion. Figure out what your life is, and then come back, and maybe this will do you some good. So I thought, yeah, Peter. I just want to share a memory. At the former location of the Perkins Center, I resided there briefly, and I can remember in the wintertime, sitting in the dining room, having a cup of tea, and I would glance out the window, of snow. That's all I can see down there. And I think that noticing that and kind of picking it up and naming the zendo after that also expresses the relationship.

[24:45]

So a lot of Mel's teaching is indirect. And a lot of what I've learned from you has been in things like, you know, when we cooked soup, you know, or the garden, or the dog, you know, or the music. Sojin and Richard Levine and one more person, I can't remember who it was right now. Was it Fran? Oh, Fran and one more person played the music for my ex-husbands and my wedding. And so when I asked, I didn't expect them to say yes. And Sojin was the one who said yes. So that thing about very unemphasized but extremely important moments of connection

[25:45]

Like this, for instance. Guess who made this? How'd you guess? You've seen them, right? Do you want to pass it back? Just pass it around? Let them see it, too. So return it when you're done, okay? But yeah, so for people he gives Dharma transmission to, Sojin makes something with his hands. And so every time you do something, guess who comes to mind and in what way? So Sojin made this out of a soft wood which has a very soft touch. You know, so some of them are made out of hardwood, and they have a firmer touch. This is not unfirm, but it's soft to the hand, and the warmth comes up quickly when you hold it. And so a lot of times he'll make choices completely by gut, a sense of appropriateness, right?

[27:00]

And I could go on. Yes. We used to have a plum tree here. Yes. Where the lemon tree is now. Yes. It would blossom every year. It was quite amazing when the tree passed away. Yeah. But I wanted to ask you a question. I'm thinking about keeping zazen fresh. Yes. What's the difference between Zazen and life. Yes. Exactly. And keeping both fresh. Exactly. Is there any difference? Zazen is a simpler case. I'm sorry? Zazen is the simplest case. So if you're thinking, we can think about Zazen in many ways as music. We can think about it as science, as art, as

[28:04]

recovery, as requiting blessings, as extremely personal and beneficial time, there's so many ways we can think about it, right? But let's say we're thinking about it scientifically, we can say, okay, sitting and watching a wall is the simplest possible case. It will show you a lot about life without the complications of actually having to animate yourself answer people, pay something or whatever, you might think you have to do those things, but really if you give yourself a rain check for 40 minutes, most of those things can be delayed for 40 minutes, so it's simpler than the rest of our life, even though all of our delusions and issues come up. The very first time I sat Seshin, a seven-day period of concentrated meditation, Elaine was sitting on my right, David was sitting on my left, and Elaine had been doing yoga since she was 12, and David was just naturally flexible, and they were both sitting in full lotus.

[29:15]

So I got to my seat, it was kind of scary, oh no, I'm sitting Seshin, now what do I do? I look over, and then I look at Elaine's legs, And then I look over, and I look at David's legs, and then I go, like that. And then there was a sound, and then I went, and then the whole rest of this scene. I had to cope with my impulsive, aggressive, comparatively motivated, stupid, ignorant action of putting my legs into full lotus when my hips were not ready, so my knees took the brunt. That's an example of how the Zendo is the simplest possible situation, but we make it complicated. looking, looking, oh she's doing it, I should do it, he's doing it, you know, and to refresh our practice we have to be there for it, you know, so if I had picked up my leg and was actually there and noticed that my leg was part of my life instead of objectifying it as an object, I would have noticed it begin to hurt before I put it into that pose.

[30:43]

But no. You know, so there is no difference between zazen and life except zazen is ritualized for safety and to be evocative. The zendo is evocative of a mandala, right? So the zendo is designed, if you see the four corners of my zagu, my bowing cloth, and the four corners of the bowing mat under it, and you see that there's a teacher there and someone, you know, like a visiting teacher here and senior students usually in the corners, then you'll understand that this whole room is a mandala. There's an axis that ritual things happen in. There's something that's being emphasized or held up as a value in the center. And everything, people bow to the center. You usually say, well, I bow to my seat and bow away from the seat, but you're not.

[31:49]

When you bow to your seat, you're saying something with your body, like, as I sit down, I will wake up like the Buddha woke up when he sat down. And when you turn around, and you're not bowing away from anything. You're saying, as I sit down, I realize and avow that this is for the benefit of all beings. Thank you for being Buddha. Thank you for sitting with me. You know, so that is a mandala that we put ourselves in the middle of. So it's designed for safety. Yeah. So I've had so many answers to your question. Okay. And they've all kind of arisen and passed away. You want to sit up here? No. Oh. Please. Okay. comes forth and I see something something happens yes and I thought well no sometimes something happens and calls my concentration forth and then something else happens right but there seems to be a transaction whereby in some sense I become available and a connection moment happens yeah and it reminds me or it shows me or it calls me forth in some way yes kind of evidence is practiced

[33:10]

That's called the manifested awakening in you and the maintained awakening in you. So if you want to read about this from a Master, go to Suzuki Roshi's lectures on the Three Refuges. So refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha can happen in a single-bodied way. in a manifested way or in a maintained way. So I have a concentration which I bring to this situation is called manifested, so historically you have developed concentration, you can bring it in this form, and maintained means the world is constantly calling us to manifest concentration and compassion. Concentration leading to wisdom and compassion leading to identity action. The world is constantly calling on us to do this with everything that arises. That's called maintained.

[34:11]

Manifested and maintained happen. They flash out of an apparent nothingness. We usually say emptiness, but emptiness is not empty. Emptiness is full. It's full and it's united and harmonious. It's more than we can say. That's why we call it empty, because there aren't any words for it. So it's a mystery. And so all a plum blossom does is in the middle of winter, it goes, bloom! And we have to understand it, you know? So if we don't, we're like, I don't know if anybody remembers this song from the late 60s or early 70s. It went something like this. I can't remember the exact thing, but it was something like, you got all the words and you sung all the notes, but you never quite learned the song she sung.

[35:15]

I can tell by the sadness in your eyes that you never quite learned the song. You know, so it's kind of like that. We have to learn the song. We have to learn it because we are it. Linda. Hi. When you were talking about the plum blossoms, I got it as a beautiful poetic way of communicating, and I also got it as a memory of times when some changes happened out of bleakness. Yes. But then when I thought about my actual present life, And I thought, what is winter? It's feeling very... It's feeling fear, pain, escape, get me out of here.

[36:25]

Where are the plum blossoms? How do you expect me to find a plum blossom there? It's really mean, isn't it? I'm not a good friend. I'm not a good friend to you. No, I expect you to do this, right? But I don't expect you to do this, because the plum blossoms grow in the middle of that. I'm talking, let's say, I understand the few, okay. It's not, plum blossoms don't bloom because we have a way of making them bloom. Plum blossoms bloom because we, We're willing to be in winter, understanding that winter is part of everything. It's like, okay, I was going out to lunch one day and I got a parking space right in front of the restaurant, which is in San Francisco, in the Mission.

[37:31]

A parking place in front of the restaurant. A miracle has occurred today. Okay. As I put a quarter into the parking meter, a wall from a construction site fell on my head and back, wiping out my language fluency, not only in English, but wiping out all the languages that I had ever studied, and my social ability to be with people, and my balance systems, and apparently my neck got broken at some point. Anyway, it was not a happy moment. And then 18 months into that recovery, I was walking across the street in an SUV, came really fast, and I tried to run, but I was still slow and stupid from the first accident, and I couldn't run fast enough. And it got me by the toe and flipped me, and the mirror went into my gut, and I was dragged on my face for a long time. So excuse me for saying this, but I just want to say that these things happen to real people.

[38:37]

Winter, instant winter, instant devastation. But what was so amazing was I opened my eyes in the hospital and didn't know where I was. And I thought, Zazen. So I started doing Zazen. And the nurses started coming by and talking to me. And I couldn't talk quickly or anything, but there was something about the room that became sacred. And anyway, there's been a long recovery process. I'm still in recovery. I'll probably be in recovery for the rest of my life, but that's not the source of my life. My life is independent, even though every moment might be part of recovery. and I might have to do things to establish myself every day in the middle of that despair.

[39:43]

Life is life, it won't be denied. And that kind of life which unites with everything including the elements and cells of my body to make peace and joy and harmony out of those difficult raw materials That's nature's doing, it's not my doing. It's a gift that's freely given by human life. Even though when I think about my human life, I think, human life? I didn't sign up for this when I signed up for human life. Forget it, I'm done. So my thinking goes something like that, but underneath, there's a different fragrance that includes and permeates those thoughts, if I let it. And I don't really have that much descriptive ability to say what it is, and that's why I chose plum blossoms. Thanks.

[40:51]

Yes? Emptiness inside the winter? Yeah. It's not really different. We're all made out of the same stuff. And we're all made out of solidity, fluidity, digestion and transformation, and space. Yeah, so it's not different. I'll be with you in a minute. And those elements aren't just like dead elements. They're properties of living and breathing that can be brought to consciousness by settling, the process of settling with a sense of compassionate concern.

[42:02]

we unite with how things more really are, truly are. And that's the emptiness of winter. The emptiness of winter is that it shatters our notions of usual life. And we can try to be with that truth in overly intense ways that end up hurting us and not helping us. or we can learn skills that have been developed for over 2,500 years by people who have woken up to, you know, we have a choice here. So I think, you know, the way I feel about it is get help now. So teachings are really helpful. Teachers and teachings are really helpful. And so that's how. One more. I realized, oh, there's confusion and disorder in my belongings.

[43:17]

And that isn't what I saw, really. What I saw was opportunities to make it nice. And so I went home and I found myself cleaning and doing all these things with an energy and a creativity that I hadn't known, even if I would say so. And my house changed. And it was plum blossom after plum blossom. You know, one sock, one book, everything going to its right place, or whatever it was. The sock and book can be plum blossoms, but also the energy of you is the energy of plum blossoms. The energy of us is the energy to burst forth into seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and being. So yeah, thank you so much for your attention. And Russ, if you could hold on to that for a second, that would be good. Catch up with me later. Okay. Yeah. Thank you, Sojin. Thank you, Liz, making this possible.

[44:21]

And thank you, everybody, for listening, and let's rock. the day, okay?

[44:33]

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