Good morning. I want to talk this morning about Sangha and self. This is following up on the talk last Monday evening from our guest speaker, Alan Sanaki. A few of you were there. He was talking about a blessed community and the tradition of Sangha, partly from the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but also just personally in terms of, well, all of us, our need and the benefits and the challenges of practicing and in community, in Sangha. So for those of you who were not here, I recommend listening to it when it's posted on our website soon.

[01:08]

I want to talk about this and Sangha, starting from a talk from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of our lineage, my teacher's teacher. This is from one of the collections of his teachings called Not Always So. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is maybe the most famous American Zen book, also another collection of his teachings. But in this one, This is from the talk that's called, Wherever I Go, I Meet Myself. It starts with a quote, As long as you are clinging to the idea of self and trying to improve your practice or find something out, trying to create an improved, better self, then your practice has gone astray. You have no time to reach the goal. So, Suzuki Roshi starts by talking about self and how we usually practice with self. But I want to get from this to talking about Sangha.

[02:15]

So, he says, most of us want to know what the self is. This is a big problem. I'm trying to understand why you have this problem. It seems to me that even though you try to understand who you are, it is an endless task and you will never see yourself. You say that to sit without thinking is difficult, but it will be even more difficult to try to think about yourself. To reach a conclusion is almost impossible. And if you continue trying, you become crazy and you won't know what to do with yourself. Your culture is based on ideas of self-improvement. So he was speaking to Americans in California in the 60s. And in many ways, we still have this culture of self-improvement. Maybe it's a different kind of context. But at any rate, he says your culture is based on ideas of self-improvement.

[03:18]

The idea of improvement is rather scientific. In the scientific sense, improvement means that instead of going to Japan by ship, now you can go by jumbo jet. So improvement is based on comparative value, which is also the basis of our society and our economy. I understand you are rejecting that idea of civilization, but you are not rejecting the idea of improvement. You still try to improve something. Perhaps most of you sit to improve your zazen. But Buddhists do not hold so strongly to the idea of improvement. So maybe this is not so much a problem for us as it was then, but maybe it's a subtler sense of improvement. In some basic way, we think if we practice, we'll get better at it. or if we practice, we'll get better at being ourselves, or something.

[04:19]

We have this deep, subtle idea of wanting to get better, of trying to improve, of progress. It's very deep. I don't know that it's, you know, I think there is an aspect of it that has to do with our culture, with, you know, the whole scientific project, which is good, you know. But there's something subtle about it that is not what Zen is about. When you practice zazen, he continues, trying to improve yourself, you may want to know yourself in a more psychological way. Psychology will tell you about certain aspects of yourself, but it will not tell you exactly who you are. It is just one of the many interpretations of your mind. If you go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, you will endlessly have new information about yourself. As long as you are going, you may feel some relief. You may feel released from the burden you carry.

[05:22]

But in Zen, we understand ourselves quite differently. So, of course, it's not that psychology cannot be helpful. and that kind of understanding and, you know, I say this with all due respect to psychologists in the room and the therapists in the room, that that can be a way of knowing the self and part of what may be helpful in practice. But Sukhdevoshi is talking about sasana and And actually, I understand that some of modern current psychology is not about just self-improvement. But at any rate, looking at this idea of self, that our self is nothing more than something we invest in, to paraphrase Dillon, and how that's different from what

[06:23]

Zazen is in our tradition, and then he goes into talking about our lineage from Soto Zen. But again, this idea of the self as something we are trying to Well, you know, it's subtle. Of course, we want to develop and open up and be more effective in terms of expressing Buddha through ourselves, but that's different from this idea of self-improvement in a certain way. So then Suzuki Roshi in this talk refers to, he calls him Tozan, or Dongshan, who we spoke about a lot last year. And he refers to, so he says, I'll call him Dongshan, the founder of the Chinese Soto Zen School said, don't try to see yourself objectively.

[07:33]

This is Suzuki Roshi's interpretation or translation. In other words, don't try to seek for information about yourself that is the objective truth. That's information. He says that the real you is quite different from any information you have. The real you is not that kind of thing. And then he quotes Dongshan further. I go my own way. Wherever I go, I meet myself. Dongshan rejects your effort to cling to information about yourself and says to go on alone using your own legs. How do we see ourself not based on some objective idea? We get caught up in some idea about ourself based on some objective truth, some, you know, categories, some numbers, you know, our social security number, our address, our, you know, we all have all kinds of identifications about ourselves.

[08:43]

Whatever people say, Suki Roshi continues, whatever people may say, you should go your own way, and at the same time, you should practice with people. This is another point. It means that to meet yourself is to practice with people. So this is a key point. This is why Sangha practice is so important. So Suzuki Roshi takes this teaching from Dongshan and points it to the importance of community, as Alham was talking about Monday. So I'm going to go back to the teaching that Suki Roshi is talking about. This is a story that I talked about a lot last year. So I'm going to read from the book I did on Dongshan, just this is it, Dongshan and the Practice of Suchness. This is the kind of starting point story of the Cao Dong or Soto school in China. in the 800s, so when Dongshan had finished study, or had studied for a while, we never finished, but when Dongshan had been studying for a while with his teacher Yunyan, and he was going to leave to visit other teachers, he asked Dongshan, he asked his teacher Yunyan, later on if I'm asked to describe your reality, or your teaching, your dharma, how should I respond, and after some pause,

[10:05]

Yun-Yan said, just this is it. And so the story goes that Dong-Shan was lost in thought and then Yun-Yan said, now you're in charge of this great matter, you must be most thorough going. So the story continues, Dong-Shan left and as he was walking along he was crossing a stream and he looked down and saw this reflection. and had some awakening. And then he wrote this poem that Suzuki Roshi is referring to in this talk. The poem goes, just don't seek from others or you'll be far estranged from self. So this is an important point in terms of the relationship of self and Sangha. Just don't seek from others, Dongshan said, or you'll be far estranged from self. Now I go on alone, but everywhere I meet it. It now is me, I now am not it.

[11:08]

one must understand in this way to merge with suchness. In the Song of the Jewel Marrow Samadhi that Dongshan wrote, and that we chant sometimes, it's paraphrased as, you are not it, it actually is you. But Suzuki Roshi takes this statement as, don't try to see yourself objectively. Just don't seek from others. Don't try to see yourself objectively. Don't try to see yourself as an object. And he says, Dongshan said, everywhere I meet it. So Suzuki Roshi says, whatever people may say, you should go your own way. So Dongshan had said, Tozan had said, I now go on alone, but everywhere I meet it.

[12:15]

So Suzuki Roshi says, whatever people may say, you should go your own way, and at the same time, you should practice with people. Suzuki Roshi said, it means that to meet yourself is to practice with people. So this is a key point and a subtle point. We practice together in community. It's the only way we can practice, actually. Of course, there are people who go off and practice by themselves. People come here for meditation instruction on Sunday morning sometimes, or people show up here after a while and they've been practicing on their own, sometimes for years. And that's fine, that's good. And all of you, I encourage to, in between times when you're at Ancient Dragon, to go home and practice on your own.

[13:22]

It's important to practice regularly, to practice. It's not every day, several times a week. This is how Zen works when we face ourselves, face the wall. regularly as part of the regular rhythm of our life. But it's not just seeing yourself. It's not just practicing separately. Tsukuroshi continues in this talk, when you see someone practicing sincerely, you see yourself. So we sit together. in this room or in other places, and as Sangha, we see ourself. If you are impressed by someone's practice, as Giroshi says, you may say, oh, she is doing very well. That she is neither she nor you. She is something more than that.

[14:26]

What is she? After thinking for a while, you may say, oh, she is there and I am here. But when you were struck by her practice, that her is neither you nor her. When you are struck by something, that is actually the real you. Tentatively, I say, quote unquote, you. But that you is the pure experience of our practice. That you that is inspired by, quote unquote, someone else's practice, that you is Sangha. That you is something that goes beyond this limited self that we imagine. As long as you are trying to improve yourself, you have a core idea of self, which is wrong practice, as Aki Roshi says. That's not the practice we mean. When you empty your mind, when you give up everything and just practice zazen with an open mind, then whatever you see, you meet yourself.

[15:37]

So sangha means the community of practitioners. But as Alan was talking about, sangha also means, in the Mahayana context, no limits, or maybe we, you know, work at extending the limits. Gary Snyder says our practice is zazen and sweeping the temple, and we can define the temple walls as widely as we want. So sangha, you know, Is Sangha North Center Chicago? Is Sangha just the borders of this, the walls of this room? Or is Sangha, you know, we have our Sangha down at Rockefeller Chapel too that Nyozan leads Wednesday afternoons. We have our, you know, so Chicago is our Sangha. But, you know, when we face the wall, there's a much wider Sangha.

[16:43]

So I think part of studying the self is studying the so-called other. Dogen says, to study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by all things. Body and mind drop away and the original face is present. Here Suzuki Roshi says, when you empty your mind, when you give up everything and just practice Zazen with an open mind, then whatever you see, You meet yourself. That is you beyond she or he or me. As long as you are clinging to the idea of self and trying to improve your practice or discover something, trying to create an improved, better self, then your practice has gone astray. You have no time to reach the goal. So eventually you'll get tired out and you'll say, Zen is no good. I practiced Zen for 10 years, but I didn't gain anything. Some of you may feel something like that.

[17:45]

But if you just come here and sit with sincere students and find yourself among them and you continue in that way, that is our practice. You can have this kind of experience wherever you are. Sangha is not limited to Ancient Dragon Zen Gate. Sangha is All the people you know, the people you work with, family, even the people who, you know, you have trouble with. These others, these so-called others are how you see yourself. It's not about improving yourself, but they are the study of the self. So you can have, Suzuki Roshi says, you can have this kind of experience wherever you are. As Dongshan said, wherever I go, I meet myself. If he sees water, that is to see himself. So as he was walking across the stream, he saw himself in the water.

[18:49]

To see water is enough for him, even though he cannot see himself in the water, actually. So the way to understand yourself is not by understanding yourself objectively or gathering information from various sources. If people say you are crazy, OK, I'm crazy. If people say you're a bad student, maybe so. OK, I'm a bad student, but I'm trying pretty hard. That's enough. When you sit in that way, you accept yourself and accept everything together with yourself. When you're involved in various silly problems, you sit with the problems you have, of course. Whatever problem you have this week is part of your Zazen this morning. You can't help but be so. That is you at that time. When you try to get out of your problems, that is already wrong practice. You don't have to sit there trying to figure out how to solve your problem or fix your problem. That problem is you. Those other people are you.

[19:50]

If you cling to an idea you create, Zicure actually says, like a self or an objective reality, you'll be lost in the objective world that you create with your mind. You are creating things one after another, so there's no end. There may be various worlds you're creating, and to create and see many things is very interesting, but you should not be lost in your creations. So this self is something, this idea of self, this self that we think we you know, should get better at, is something we have created. And that's natural, that's part of, you know, that's how our minds work. It's not that you should get upset at yourself for having created a self, but don't believe everything you think. But there is a practice here. It's not the practice of improving the self. And I would say part of the practice of Sangha is studying the other.

[20:57]

Or, you know, maybe there's no other either, any more than there is a self. Or the other is totally part of the self, or involved with the self. But when we think there's another, we should, you know, Look and see what that is. So this is the value of this wide view of Sangha, to support all beings. One of our precepts is to benefit all beings. This inclusive sense of Sangha. When we face the wall, we're facing ourselves. We're facing a mirror. We're facing the whole world. We're facing a window that shows us all others. Looking at, you know, so interfaith work is a way of seeing what, who we are as sotos and people, if that's how we think, what we think we are. Seeing other traditions, seeing other kinds of people is how we see who we are.

[22:07]

Letting our sangha include other, so-called others, is how we see ourselves. And in our society now, you know, with the problems of separating ourselves from others, politicians, dividing us by blaming others, we then lose sight of ourselves. So song is about seeing others to see ourselves. not shutting out, not keeping certain kinds of people, people from certain races or certain ethnicities or certain religions out, but actually studying who we think of as others to learn about how we are connected and how we are a bigger self. To make Sangha as wide, as inclusive as possible, to really see ourself, we have to

[23:14]

do this Sangha practice. To study anybody we think of as other, we need to study. We need to see how that is part of our Sangha. Exactly the people we think of as other is the ones who are ourself. We are defined. Taigen is everything that is not Taigen. So that's how we know who we are. So Srigirisa said, not always so. So to see what is always so, we have to see what is not. To see who we are, we have to see who is so-called different or other. So community is elastic. We have to practice with insangha.

[24:17]

And there's lots of ways of practicing in Sangha, and there are lots of ways of developing Sangha. And it's not exactly that we're trying to improve Sangha anymore than we're trying to improve self. It's just that that's how we see ourself. That's how we see reality, by opening up Sangha, by including others so that they're not others. They're part of who we are. But of course, then we have to look at our ancient, twisted karma, both in terms of our personal karma and then the karma of our Sangha, the Sangha of our country, the Sangha of our world. So anybody that the Sangha of our country has excluded, then we need to study how they are part of ourselves.

[25:30]

So there are people in the Sangha who are now wanting to study, and there are people in our wider Tsukiroshi Sangha who are wanting to study, the song of race and how racism works and what whiteness is and all our ideas about race. This was part of this. How do we study? This is an example of this. How do we study? this wide view of self, which is Sangha. How do we practice it together? How do we struggle with it together? Not to find, not to improve ourself or even improve our Sangha, but to really just be fully engaged in facing this, just this.

[26:36]

So I've done interfaith work at various times quite a bit. organizing a Zen Catholic ongoing dialogue in the Bay Area before I moved here 10 and a half years ago, and done various interfaith kind of work. And I always found that I learned more about what it meant that I'm a Soto Zen priest by studying other traditions. So to learn who we are in terms of whatever identification we think we have, study what we think is other. This is part of Sangha work. learning what I am as a white male in this society. I need to study as a white heterosexual male. I need to learn about what it is to be LGBT. I need to learn about what it is to be female in this society.

[27:45]

This is how we learn about who we are and who we are as Sangha. So building community not as sangha improvement, but as just opening up community to reality, to just this, is something we can do, and something we can do joyfully, even when we have to struggle at it. But this is the practice of studying the self. So maybe that's as much as I need to say this morning. Does anybody have comments, responses, questions? Yes, Nilsson. But the compound in Japanese, I don't know how much, maybe they just gave it to you.

[29:36]

think of that in that view. And so then, you know, you get that picture, you know, of sort of alumnus, you know, you certainly, you know, you have, you can't ignore, or you die, or you can, that the differences don't exist, I mean, like women, And so, you know, we're called upon to always be investigating that.

[31:13]

And I think, you know, it's about, you know, it's always the Thank you. Other comments or responses or questions? Aisha? Along those lines, I was thinking about that in terms of, you know, Don't John saying just, I think this was Don't John saying just to say this, this is the mark. Is that Don't John? If we stick with just our small sum, we might ultimately wind up with just people who felt about a 90% or 95% overlap with our views, and then we would all be that 5% wrong.

[33:02]

But maybe if we keep widening the field, we'll never get 100% right. We'll never really get it right, but we can get closer. And we need those opposing. We need to help each other. It's not that we're trying to let other people correct us, or we're going to correct other people, but we all need that. Those very, very different views. Yeah, part of our tradition is to realize that we don't have all the answers and that's obvious in these times that nobody has all the answers and to listen compassion is sort of in our Buddhism Mahayana defined as listening so to listen we can learn and so we learn from each other not to get not to reach the perfect view but to

[34:15]

Be able to more fully respond. So, yeah, being open to others is helpful. Yes, Angie. This is a big part of my practice. It's very tricky business, it seems like. The majority of people who haven't been are not aware of this whole teaching. I'm coming from corporate America where I've been quantified and judged by metrics. I think a lot of people come out of that. to communicate with one another, get along with one another, and understand one another.

[35:39]

Yeah, people think they know who they are. Yeah. You know, recently, I got a job interview tonight. Yeah. Part of the gift of Zazen is the more we sit, the more we see complexities. So any, you know, there's lots of, we can, you know, I like stories. Zen is all about stories in a way, but, you know, these stories are just that and the fullness

[36:46]

of any period of zazen or of any moment or of any inhale and exhale goes beyond any description. How can we explain how wonderful it is to just sit here and take a breath? So any story you tell about it is just some limited description or explanation. But the more we are part of Sangha in the widest, in the deepest sense, where we are willing to be confused together, or not know together, or not hold on to some belief about who and what we are together, There's something wonderful about that. It doesn't mean we give up the stories completely.

[37:57]

We still have to go out and, you know, get a job or whatever. Say that to my son. Yeah, so how does that, what happens? Sangha is kind of the practice of what happens when we start to let go of layers of conditioning. Some of those layers we might want to, you know, hold on to, just as, you know, okay, well, I'll tell that story. But we can choose to, which sweaters we put on or not.

[39:04]

Yeah, so there's nothing really here, ultimately. But still, we have to take care of that. Sid. I don't understand. Yes, thank you.

[40:39]

All the levels can work together.

[40:44]

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