Good morning. So today, you might wonder about these peculiarly, peculiarly dressed people, beings that are in the zendo. Take a look around. Look all the way in the back. Pay no attention to her. So today we're going to celebrate our Tsujiki ceremony. Sojin Roshi is going to conduct the ceremony after my brief talk. And I'd like to start you off. So this is the ceremony of feeding the hungry ghosts. You can think of them as all those who are suffering in the various worlds, and you can think of the hungry ghosts as oneself in the moments that we are hungry ghosts.

[01:08]

And I'm going to sing you a song. You all have lyrics, right? That was written directly about this. You can sing along with me. Calling out to hungry hearts Everywhere through endless time You who wander, you who thirst I offer you this bode mine Calling out to hungry spirits Everywhere through endless time, Calling out to hungry hearts, All the lost and left behind.

[02:15]

Gather round and share this meal, Your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine. Calling out to hungry hearts. We're no different. We all thirst. We understand there's no place to stay. Calling out to hungry spirits. Everywhere through endless time, Calling out to hungry souls, Who are left behind. Gather round and share this meal.

[03:17]

Your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine. Your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine. Good work. So, um, This Tsujiki, I'll just explain it a little bit so that we can go into our ceremony, which is the heart of what we're doing. Tsujiki is one of the ceremonies of the Obon Festival, which takes place in Japan usually in the summer. Around this time, the idea is that all of the souls or spirits of our ancestors return to their home. And so in Japan at this time, people visit their ancestors' graves and take care of them and bring flowers and food offerings and pray for their settledness and peace.

[04:27]

And sujiki means the offering of food. So this song that we sang is based on a text called the Gate of Sweet Dew, or the Kanroman. And in the Kanroman, which we will be reciting, it says, giving rise to Bodhi mind. Bodhi mind is our enlightened mind, the mind that we actually already are manifesting moment by moment, but we forget about it. We don't notice that it's there. We think we're in our everyday lives. But Bodhi Mind is the mind that moves us through our day and through our lives, and it moves us in kindness and compassion to others, although we can forget it. So giving rise to Bodhi Mind, bringing it forward, recognizing that it's there,

[05:29]

we respectfully hold one bowl of pure food. So Sogen Roshi will offer food, and then all of us will offer flowers. And then we offer this to all the hungry ghosts in all directions. And then we say to the hungry ghosts, we hope that you, hungry ghosts, will pass it on. to all the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas and the sentient beings through every realm. So in other words, they're given the food and they give a portion of that back to everybody to feed all of us. So this is, this ceremony, Obon, in certain ways resembles a, the Day of the Dead in the Catholic tradition or Halloween, which is why we usually we observe it. We've been observing it at the time of Halloween, which is why we're doing it this time of year, not in the middle of the summer.

[06:38]

And it represents Halloween itself is an older pre-Christian observance that really just acknowledges the change between the season of light and the season of oncoming dark. It's the kind of the threshold when we're partly in the light, partly in the dark, and when the line between this world and other world is easy to cross back and forth. So the story that Obon derives from is a story of the Buddhist disciple Moggayana. Moggayana was a Buddhist monk. one of the Buddha's original arhats, one of the enlightened beings, and he was known as the foremost in supernatural powers and clairvoyance.

[07:53]

If you read the early sutras, you'll see that all the Buddha's early disciples were foremost in one thing or another. They were foremost in meditation. They were foremost in wisdom. They were foremost in golf. They were foremost in skateboarding and shopping. So everyone had their particular specialization, as do each of us. But Mogollana saw, he had a vision because he had supernatural powers, of his mother suffering in a world in which she could neither eat or drink, and she was hanging upside down, which would make it difficult to eat or drink, I would think. And this is because she had not been kind in her life.

[08:54]

And so, of course, if your mother were hanging upside down somewhere, what would you want to do? Thank you, Charlie. Yeah, I'm glad to hear you express that sentiment. So you'd want to break it down. So the Buddha encouraged him to go to this realm where his mother and other beings were suffering, and to feed them and free them. And so that's what he did. He asked her to go down to this Buddhist hell and release them. Part of the problem when he went down there was when he got to the gate, this is all mythical, right? You know what a myth is? Any of you children know what a myth is?

[09:59]

Hazel, what is it? It's like stories that you don't really know is true but it might not. That's great, yes, that's exactly right. So maybe it's true, maybe it isn't true, but there's always, in a myth, there's always something that's true, even though it might not be exactly true. So when Mogollan went down to release her, he got to the gate and he broke the lock. What do you think happened when he broke the lock? Anyone have any idea? Charlie? Um, when he broke the lock, the doors were open, so everybody got out. It was a big jailbreak. And so they're floating around in our world. And so this is why we do this ceremony to say, you know, it's like, we want you to be at peace. And so we're going to feed you and set your mind at peace.

[11:05]

Uh, and so that's, uh, that's the, the, the heart of this ceremony in a traditional sense. In a personal sense, I got this from something that my Dharma sister, Vicky Austin, wrote, and she was remembering our late teacher, Kobinchino Roshi, who was one of the priests who came from Japan to help Suzuki Roshi. Sojin Roshi was very close with Kobinchino. He has passed away since. And Kobinchino Roshi said he thought it would be helpful for us Americans to have a deeper ceremony or deeper relationship with the negative aspects of our life. And that he felt that the tzatziki ceremony would help us to deal with negative things, with the negative parts of ourselves, and for it to be a kind of reminding ceremony that expands

[12:25]

our awareness of the darkness and sort of the unfinished places, the difficulties that we have within us. Um, and, but then he said the negative is just another side of the positive and our awareness is already round and pure. So if we can expand our practice of compassion in space and time, we can be of benefit to everyone in our lives. And so as we feed the hungry ghosts, which are no different than ourselves, we are putting ourself at ease and putting all beings at ease. So I want to sing one verse of the song again, but just take a couple of questions, and then we can go into ceremony.

[13:37]

That's all I have to say today. Any thoughts or questions? Laurie? Does that mean that these ghosts were in there until Buddhism, and then Yeah, well, as I think it's like what Hazel was saying, don't think about it too closely. You know, don't get too literal. Other questions? Yes. My understanding of the hungry ghosts is that they're next or so tiny. Yes, I didn't describe them. They can't take in spiritual nourishment. Right. So you'll, yeah. In such a situation, how do we relate to them and Well, I think that once they approach the table, and you'll see there's a sign on the table as you make the offering which says pretas. Pretas are hungry ghosts.

[14:37]

So hungry ghosts are usually described as beings with tiny sort of pencil-thick necks and throats, really long. really thin and distended bellies, you know, they're insatiable. And of course, the problem is they can't get much food down those necks. But when they approach the table, when they hover around the table and we feed them, mysteriously, they turn into what would be recognizable as ordinary people with ordinary necks as we do. So I just made that up, but you can think about that. Anyone else? Sojin Roshi. Thank you.

[16:11]

Calling out to hungry hearts Everywhere through endless time You who wander, you who thirst I offer you this bode mine Calling out to hungry spirits everywhere through endless time. Calling out to hungry hearts, all the lost and left behind. Gather round and share this meal. Your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine. Your joy and your sorrow, I make it mine.

[17:15]

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