Good morning everyone. I'm struck by how remarkably quiet this morning has been here. This joyous, outrageously sunny and warm day, how remarkably quiet we all were in creating the space that's really the subject of what I'm going to talk about today. First, before I really launch in, let me invite everyone this time next week, we will be beginning our 25th spring practice period, which promises to be as warm and joyous as this summer day is. So I really want to encourage everyone who's considering doing the practice period but hasn't yet signed up to join the party. And in part because we're going to be doing practice periods, we have this idea that that means that we're going to be practicing more than what we normally do.

[01:02]

We're signing up to come to the Zendo more often and committing to various activities. And that's partially true. Part of the time we'll be here more, but actually we'll be more aware of the way in which we practice in our lives all the time. And I'm aware that this talk is going to be its own thing. It's going to have its own life here. So when we come here, we have a lot of ceremonies and a lot of rituals that happen during practice period. And so I wanted to talk about...Kathryn, you can't hear me very well. Can you all hear in the back? OK, good. Sorry I didn't check in with you. Up, up, up. How's that? A little higher up? OK. Good.

[02:04]

Gives me a chance to start over. Always. Next breath. How's that? Does that work better? OK. Right on the edge of feeding back. Are we all right now? So I'm going to talk about that which we don't talk about. Can I reposition the microphone? Will that help you think? If you make the microphone a little lower and we turn the volume up a little more, that'll probably work better. All right. Let's do that. I can shift a little bit lower. Lower, right? Lower down here. All right, I'm still talking, still talking. Checking in, checking in. Are you there? Are you there? Yeah. OK. We've arrived. Good. So I'm going to talk about ritual.

[03:05]

I'm going to talk about that which we create together all the time. We have some idea about what ritual is. We think about it as a particular way of being in the forms. But other definitions include practice and function, tradition, the traditions that we have here. It's also a way of life. And that's where we'll put our attention today. It's a way of life and a mystery. The title of this talk is something like Practice Buddha Does the Dishes. So I think we often talk about how people come to practice out of a sense of suffering, something that is difficult for them, and so we come here to find some relief. That's partially true, but I actually think we couldn't come here, we wouldn't have the patience, the perseverance to be able to come and practice if we didn't actually really come looking for transformation.

[04:18]

So I think that's really what this practice is about. And a lot of how that happens is through how we are here together in the Zen Dojo with each other. When you first come here, when we first come here, we learn different ways of moving and being with each other in ritualistic forms. They take some learning and some adjustment. Initially they're an exercise, if you will, in mindfulness, that is pure paying attention. Where do I put my feet? When do I bow? What direction do I turn? We realize that they're also a way of relating to each other, of harmonizing with each other, of connecting with each other. With time, we also find that they reflect something of how we care for things. They might seem like rules, like don't put the kitchen knife down in the knife holder, put the knife up, blade up in the holder, because that keeps the knife sharp.

[05:30]

But actually, with time, we realize we're just relating to things with their essence, with what they are, with their being and taking care of them. And in doing that, we're actually taking care of our practice The kitchen is particularly a hotbed of having to pay attention. It's a favorite practice place of mine because if you're too caught in anything in particular, the cereal's burned and the coffee's overflowing in quick order. The forms and the way in which we conduct ourselves are also a way of knowing ourselves. There's a famous quote of Suzuki Roshi's that goes something like, When I see you outside on the street, I can't tell you apart. But when you're here, all dressed the same, sitting zazen, I know exactly who you are.

[06:31]

And with time, we realize we can tell each other. We can see each other exactly also. The first time I sat up here, the sashim director and everyone was facing the wall, and I was looking at everyone. I was amazed at how well I knew people. Some of you have had that experience. So we think of our rituals as what we do at the beginning of a lecture, or what we do when we have breakfast together in the Zenda, but the prime ritual that we practice is Zazen. Have you ever thought about Zazen as a ritual? We usually think about it first as a particular set of instructions that are outlined by Dogen in the Fukan Zazenki and a very early writing of the founder of this lineage and a particular way that we sit and cross our legs and hold our body and put our tongue and all of that is the particular practice of Zazen.

[07:41]

We think of Zazen as a praxis of a certain kind, a way of being, a kind of, I won't say tool, because that's heretical, but I think when we first come to practice, we understand it as a kind of form or method that helps us settle and connect. But actually, Zazen is so much more than that. In fact, none of those things is really what Zazen is. It's a description, maybe, of how you do Zazen and some experience of it. Zazen is really a ritual enactment. It's a recognition that we are Buddha. Buddha sits down on the cushion. And when you sit Zazen, when body and mind open up and drop away, you recognize that Buddha's right there on the cushion. Buddha's always been there. You just haven't been aware of it. So when we sit Sazen, we sit Buddha's first, we sit Shakyamuni Buddha's first Sazen, we are just like he is waking up on the cushion.

[08:55]

And that is our embodiment, our ritual enactment of being Buddha ourselves. When Buddhism, was first written down and discussed by philosophers and scholars in India. The early schools put a lot of emphasis on the function of mind and understanding practice and what we do out of our minds. But Dogen actually turned that insight out. Instead of being a mind practice, he said it's a body. mind practice, not even a mind-body practice, but a body-mind practice. That's an experience I think those of us who've sat for any period of time also have had.

[09:57]

We sit. As we sit, the body settles. As the body settles, the mind also settles. So Buddhahood, your Buddhahood, is a physical transformation as much as it is a mental transformation. And you can see it in people. You can see it in how they carry themselves. You can see it in the lightness of how they are and the openness. I think it's one of the reasons Buddha's described as having 32 marks, you know, the perfect skin and the long ears and the perfect teeth. Really what that points to is not good dental records, but what it points to is a certain kind of appearance, a certain kind of carriage that a person has. Sojin's fond of saying that when his students have reached a certain level of, well, a certain kind of understanding, that he sees it in their walk or hears it in his voice.

[11:08]

And that's when he knows what's happened in their practice on the cushion. That, Dogen takes this understanding on it to, in a more expansive way, in one of his teachings in his primary text, the true treasury of the Dharma-I, the Shivo-Genso. in a fascicle called yo-butsu-igi. That's commonly translated as the conduct of dignified Buddha, the conduct or practice of dignified Buddha. But another translation is the dignified conduct of practiced Buddha. Practiced Buddha, by this translation or this understanding, is the fourth body of Buddha, the fourth manifestation of Buddha.

[12:10]

We usually talk about three of them, which I won't mention here. But the fourth manifestation of Buddha, or practice Buddha, is that unified activity, the practice that can't be defiled, that non-separation between what we do on the cushion and our awakening the awakening that's present whenever, throughout our practice, throughout our awareness and practice. That unified activity in which you can't separate practice from what else is happening. In one of Dogen's other writings, in the Genjo Koan, there's a phrase where he says, and I don't have the exact quote, so those of you who know it will fill in, Basically, our common way of being is to rush forward to all things, to interact with things around us, all as objects.

[13:14]

And Dogen says, actually, when you allow things to arise and manifest themselves, that's true practice. That's the Genjo Koan. Practice happens. Gyobutsu Ii, practice Buddha, is at another level. When I think about this line of the Genji Koan, I think about, okay, if I just allow things to come forward and be what they are, then I'm actually really able to meet them. But what practice Buddha points to is that we come forward. We manifest in the moment. We can't know who we are, what's happening, what's created. unless we open and allow everything else to come forward and we manifest with everything else. We create this talk together. I may be sitting up here with the words, but your energy, your presence, what's happening in the room, all of that's what comes together and something happens.

[14:28]

And that something that happens is practice Buddha, is the ritual enactment of Buddha's activity. So what about this dignified conduct? Now dignified is a word, if you look it up, I was trying to find what words can I find in the source that actually say what I want to say in this talk. And it took a little bit of digging because usually dignified means something like stately or aristocratic or some kind of barrens that's above the rest of the plain that we walk on. But it also means worthy, venerable, or ennobled. You know it when you see it, don't you? Yeah, you can see dignified conduct or that nobility in the humblest of people, in the simplest of circumstances, it has something to do with how they carry themselves.

[15:35]

The line that came to my mind when I stumbled on that word is, let one do nothing that the wise would reprove. Doing nothing that the wise would reprove is noble activity. One translation of the three precepts, the three pure precepts, the main precepts we take in this practice to not do evil, to do all that's good and to live and be lived for the benefit of all beings. To not do evil is to embrace and sustain all forms and ceremonies, to embody ritual, to show up totally to what's happening, to receive everything, to be a part of everything that you that you do without, not just without separation, but you actually are made of the same cells. You're actually part of the same fabric in how you conduct it.

[16:37]

Now, I don't think I really may take that back for a second and say one way in which you can see that, dignify conduct, remember someone mentioning watching Sojin take out his orioke one time, and seeing in the way that he handled his orioke his love of his teacher. And I don't think I ever really understood what our practice was. I may even have been ordained at that point, until I was at another temple and I saw the teacher there pick up a bench and move it so that we could all sit down around it and have a meal together. And I saw in that what we do with our forms, that dignified conduct, that not separation from, that total selfless.

[17:41]

Now selfless is a difficult word in our culture, right, because the other side of Selfless is selfish, and we certainly don't want to be selfish. But if you can open to the word, selfless just means your ego isn't involved with it. Your mind isn't engaged trying to get something or do something in it. It's just a pure activity that's happening there, and there's no one doing it. Well, that's tricky, too, because, of course, you're the one who has to pick it up and move it to someplace else. But the no one is not someone who is trying to be anyone, create anything, do anything special, just taking care of what there is to be taken care of. That's the dignified conduct of practice Buddha. And when that kind of activity takes place, it's like looking down into Crater Lake.

[18:42]

Have you ever been to Crater Lake? almost a thousand feet deep, right? You stand at the shore and you look all the way down, and there's no obstruction. There's no impedance. That's why we say in our Zazen, it's unobstructed. We're unobstructed. And this kind of practice Buddha activity is completely unobstructed. So, A quality of ritual that I want to talk about, a quality of this activity, is the quality to transform. Ritual is an act of communion. Yes? Can you buy that? Communion is an act or an instance of sharing as in thoughts or feelings. We certainly do that here and now, all together, whatever you're thinking.

[19:46]

We do it when we sit Zazen. We know how affected we are by each other. The root of communion is in common, equally, or by all. Accord, harmony, a feeling of identity or mutuality. It's that mutuality that we feel here. And I know my very first time coming to the Zendo, I'd been sitting doing sitting somewhere else, and I was coming here because my teacher practiced here, and it was time to see what her practice was like. And the first time I came in and I bowed to my cushion, the people on either side bowed back, and I had this deep, visceral feeling of some existential yearning, really, that had been met. And it was that very act of communion that happen in the physical space. So that's something else about how we practice in ritual.

[20:50]

We practice in our bodies. We transform in our bodies. It's not in our head. The mistake of talking about this talk is that I'm using words to talk about something that's really a physical transformation and a physical expression. that there are no words for. You just, you know it when you feel it. You sense it in the way someone moves and how we are in this space together. Ritual has in it everything. It has spontaneity, fluidity, and flexibility. There's a standard joke among those of us who are doans and kokyos, the bell ringers and the chanters for the major ceremonies here, that you never know what Sojin is going to do. And we kind of joke, well, you know, is he going to remember? Does he forget? And I won't say that that's not a part of it, but I think it's really that he feels the ceremony.

[21:51]

He feels what's happening in the room and he responds to it. And he creates the possibility for us to do that with him. Ritual also has in it the ability to take disparate elements and bring them all into a transformative space and make something else completely different happen. And I was thinking about a movie many of you have seen called Departures. Many of you know Departures. It's a really beautiful film that basically focuses on how death can be transformed in the experience of how someone prepares the body in a way that's witnessed, ritualistically witnessed by the family. And how that totally creates the experience, totally transforms the experience of a loss and a death to an inclusion and a kind of life again.

[22:55]

So we take all of our senses in this physical transformation. We experience it with our ears and our eyes and touch. We experience it with our nose. There's a very beautiful book by a woman named Paula Arai who did as her PhD and subsequent work an investigation of Japanese women's rituals. And I want to borrow just a little bit from that. And just because it moved me so much when I ran across it, and I want to share with you some of the elements of the experience of what we do here in a more overt way. She calls ritual Yudo, which means the way of healing. Do, you know, is a Japanese word for an art or a practice or a particular way of life. And Yu is a word for healing, so it's the way of healing.

[24:02]

And it has different elements, some of which I'll touch on. Not all of them, but just a few of them here. So there is that, which we've been saying a lot about, that feeling of connection that we have with each other. That visceral, somatic feeling of inner being we have when we sit together and saw Zen day after day, or when we're quietly connected in this space. like we are right now. There's a phrase by the famous psychologist Winnicott that says, there is no baby. Do you know what that means? There is no baby, meaning baby doesn't exist separate from mother. There's that intimacy. There's a kind of intimacy in which there's no one or no other, but together there's mother and baby. But you can't see baby without mother.

[25:05]

There's just no way. This inner being has to do also with the intimacy of how we respond and take care of things. My ritual these mornings has been quite different. I'm not here quite so much in the morning these days. And a good piece of that is that I have a different ritual I partake in. I have a dog who's almost 20 now. And in the morning time, when the alarm goes off, and I've situated my body, I lumber, I listen, and I listen to hear if she's still breathing. I listen to hear how she sounds. And I move to her and I feel her. I feel where she is, if she's in pain, if she's asleep. And because I need to get up and get my day going in some way, some mornings I need to come here.

[26:08]

I'll gently feel where I can touch her and wake her. Does she need to be massaged? Are her shoulders stiff? Is her leg spasming? And so we have this connection with each other, this ritual we do every morning. And she tells me when it's time to help her up. And when it's time to feed her, often she doesn't like to eat in the morning, and so I see, does she want the spoon? Sometimes she'll take the food on the spoon, and sometimes I scoop it up in my hands and hold it for her. But you see, I'm not doing this really for her. We're doing this together, and there's just this kind of dance, this kind of responsiveness, this kind of, it's time, you know, it's that time of day, the sun comes up, the birds start singing, it's time to do this, and we create it together.

[27:11]

Someone watching me feed her one of these mornings commented, she said, that's such an intimate thing you're doing there, and I really appreciated that someone saw this glob of don't leave my hands, and this old mutt looking at it now, and could appreciate its beauty. Beauty. Beauty. That's also a part of healing. When we are intimate with things, with others, with our life in this way, there's naturally a beauty that arises out of it. even in a handful of floppy dog food. Nurturing also changes the energy that we experience in our lives. When we're in a hurry and we're acting on things, whether we're acting on traffic, whether we're acting on the thing we're trying to fix, partially doing the dishes, there's often a kind of pressure or anxiety.

[28:21]

Notice it in your heart rate, notice it in the tension in your body. There's a kind of low-level stress or pressure that goes on in so much of what we do in our lives. But when you come and connect, when you harmonize with what's happening around you, both the activity that's happening around you and also those that you're with, animate and inanimate, You settle into a proper place. You settle into a kind of ease of the naturalness. You're not trying to force anything. There's a harmony. She calls this, Paula arrives, I've forgotten the word she uses for the people, the women she interviewed. They call this nurturing the self. Nurturing the self, to be in the space of of calmness is a nurturing way to be.

[29:24]

And gratitude arrives naturally in it. And joy. A joy with what's around you. Actually a gratitude for whatever it is that comes your way because you're open to accepting it and responding with it. You're not resisting it that's outside of yourself. It said that when you attend to the outer forms, you're far outside the way. So I think maybe I've already said something of how that is. When you attend to the outer forms, you're far outside the way. You know, we have an idea that there's a certain way to do things here, and we have to do them precisely and correctly to be kind of part of how things are here, to really belong to really be participating. But it's said when you attend just to the otter farms, you're far outside the wedding.

[30:29]

I'm thinking of the way the shuso ceremony is done in Japan. Now here we have a kind of, the shuso sits up here and he doesn't know what kinds of questions he's going to get. So it's the ritual is about a kind of relating that's quite spontaneous and wonderful. In Japan, all the questions are known ahead of time and all the answers are known ahead of time. So what the shuso has to do is come forward and meet that person with no outer forms. It's just purely him, in this case, and the person in front of him. One of the most beautiful, memorable examples of the practice of the forms that I saw here, that I've seen here, was one, I think it was a Rahatsa, although I'm not sure. It might have been a five day Sushin. It was a multi-day Sushin. We're all very quiet. The Zendo's packed.

[31:31]

There are people lined up and all the way out, and we're serving from outside the porch, which means the servers are doing their bows outside and they're all walking in, five or six of them, with big puffs. In this case, a polenta, first thing in the morning. I see smiles. Some of you remember this. It's actually kind of pressure to make this happen, to get everyone fed, coming in off the porch, and the zendo is filled, and there's a time sequence. One of the first people in the door trips And one of the pots of polenta goes all over the floor in the back. So no one can walk in easily without getting in and around the pot. And what happened, so it's totally outside of any other way that orioke is done in the morning. Some people stopped what they were doing, got mops, got towels, and scooped up the polenta. The other people went ahead and served everyone.

[32:33]

Things got divided up as they needed to, and the whole... So beautiful. It was so beautiful. It was so unscripted. So much of what we do, we want to get it right, and it's scripted. But it was so much a response and taking care of. It's like nothing went wrong at all. It just was what happened in that moment. That's how we practice the rituals here. And I'll say, so these rituals, this way of being is what we do in our everyday life. Yes? You have your own Ananda, the 20-year-old dog, that you take care of in your own way in your life. You do it in little ways. Maybe you're not even aware of it. I know a practice that I have at the clinic where I work. I find myself often in the room with people, and I'll reach out.

[33:35]

Don't tell them. But I'll often recheck their blood pressure, I have no need to do that. I'll take their pulse or listen to their heart, I have no need to do that on this visit. But I'm making the physical connection, I'm making the ritual enactment of healing with them. And it's kind of an overt way, it's an overt example in a certain way. It's so from the heart, it was so it was not conscious that this is what was I wasn't doing it because I'm a Zen student or I was preparing this talk. It's just a natural human kind of response to I'm in the room here and this is what's needed and this is what I do. So to finish with the story of Practice Buddha Does the Dishes, if you've ever eaten at my house you'll know that I'm infamous for being a terrible dishwasher. I really hate doing the dishes, and I don't have much time or patience for it.

[34:41]

I'm as fast in and out of getting the dishes done as I possibly can, and even when I think I'm doing a pretty good job of making sure I get both the front and back side of the spoon, let alone the handle, I often find the next day that I really haven't. was caught in one of those embarrassing moments of noticing this about my silverware one day, and I decided, okay, now I'm really going to do the dishes. And so one evening, it was kind of dusk out, it was one evening, and I had my dishes and I got a nice big bowl of hot water and put lots of soap, or just the right amount of soap in it, actually. And I took my time to do the dishes. Now let me go back and say many years ago I was new in practice and I was away on a 30 day silent retreat in England.

[35:48]

It's kind of scary to go for complete silence for 30 days that far away when you've only been practicing for a year or two. And I had just made circumstances in my life were such that I just made a huge decision that would mean that I would not have children and not have family. And it was really a very tender time. So when I did the dishes there, I did them with my whole heart and care like I was taking care of a family that I wasn't going to have. Real mindfulness and with a real intention of devotion. It was quite up here. When I was doing the dishes in my kitchen not long ago, I just had a pot of water. I just had hot water and soap and I was just doing the dishes. I wasn't thinking about it. I wasn't being devotional. I wasn't even really trying to get clean dishes so no one will notice how terrible I usually am at this.

[36:49]

I was just really doing the dishes. The evening was dark. There's a beautiful garden outside my kitchen window. And that was there. The room was there. It was still. And the dishes were just being done. And I had a moment of understanding that sounds like every other Chinese poem you've ever read. But I had a moment of understanding that in the spring, the hummingbird broods her eggs And in autumn, the crimson leaves fall. Things are just in their own place. You show up. Things are just in their own place. So, that's kind of what I wanted to say today. And before I see what you want to say today,

[37:55]

I'll see what Sojourn wants to say. Thank you. Your talk, I don't have anything to add or subtract. I appreciate it. Thank you. So, what do you have to add or subtract? Walter, please. Ingrid, you, just early in your talk you used the word transformation. In all this, exactly, What is or who is transformed? I think we transform our lives. I think our lives transform. Does that have resonance to you? Does that mean anything to you? Our lives? Uh-huh. Your life, my life, my life has transformed. From what to what? from, I can say for myself, from one of a lot of fear and anxiety and pre-unappreciative of the experience of others to one that is much more open and I think more healing.

[39:22]

How about you? You've been practicing so many years. Nothing transforms. What happens? I don't know. Why do you come back? I don't know. Well, thank you for coming today. Judy, please. Thank you for a beautiful talk. I was just noticing your bowl of water. and caring for you and with you. I'm wondering, are you thirsty and focused on the talk and disconnectedness? Are you not thirsty, focused on? And I'm wondering, what's your relationship with that water right now?

[40:29]

Uh-huh. You got it exactly right. Please. You said something that was really beautiful, which I think was a mistake. You're rocking today. That's great. You said, anyone who knows how I wash the dishes knows that I'm infinite. I'm infamous for not doing them well. So, um, I thought that was one of the things I regret the most. And I remember Dogen saying something about a Zen master always makes mistakes. It's like it's one big mistake. Thank you. Linda. I loved it when you described the your morning ritual with Ananda.

[41:32]

The question is, and it's not connected with that, is there a difference between activities that is ritual and activities that is not ritual? I think so. What is it? Ritual includes everything. Ritual is when we we really open when we're really porous and we're including everything. There's a conscious willingness and openness to connection, which I don't know about you, but a lot of the time I ain't there. A common understanding of ritual is not that beautiful. It's more people say ritual is It's mechanical repetition of behavior, and it's a way to not be present.

[42:34]

So I just wondered if you just think, what you do with that way of looking at ritual. Yeah, I think ritual has a lot of different definitions, and it can be akin to habit, or just customs, kind of mindless customs is what we always go to Mother's for Christmas and we always have the same peas and ham and just the same thing that we always do, not necessarily ritual, but that might be, some people might call that their Christmas ritual. So there are kind of automatic habitual activities that we sometimes call our rituals. But the way I'm talking about it today is that in this larger, held in this larger space is a kind of of the words were mystery or communion. Peter? is why is it that we have to have self and other to have intimacy?

[44:07]

That's a beautiful question. We'll repeat it again. So Peter's question is why do we have to have self and other in order to have intimacy? And the paradox really is that clinging to or too much, using our Buddhist words, clinging or attachment, but you have too much of a set idea of what you're about and what you need, you can't have intimacy. I don't know that I, right in this moment, have a good answer for that. What are your thoughts about it? Dialogue with me for a minute. Something about, as you say, not being too fixated on an expectation or a willingness to let whatever's happening between self and other emerge, free from that.

[45:20]

Let it go free. Let it leap away from it or something. That's very helpful. It's said that it's impossible to practice in the Devo realms, right? They're too nice. They're too easy. There's no challenge. Maybe part of why we have to have a self and another is that it asks us really to look at ourselves, to face our human difficulties and be willing to be in the midst of them but not attached to them in order to really deeply connect with another person. Yeah. And I want to thank you because my whole kind of musing about ritual dates way back to a time in which you said something about, before I was ordained, you said something about, what do we do when we do service? We ask everyone to show up. Everyone shows up. And I've always remembered that and thought about it.

[46:22]

So thank you very much.

[46:23]

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