Well, good morning everyone I've been reading the categories You have to say something and I More or less do it regularly every day but I a couple of months ago the beginning of August came to a chapter that stopped me in my tracks and I've been working with it as a kind of koan since. The name of the chapter is Medicine and Disease. Katagiri tells the story of Sudhana and Manjushri. Sudhana is an eager young Zen student of the Buddha. And Manjushri is a more experienced practitioner and he's taken Sudhana under his wing and sent Sudhana to meet with 40 or 50 wise people and then meets with him after this sojourn that he sent him on.

[01:16]

So this story is the story of this meeting with Manjushri who is Someone we chant to is a bodhisattva. You probably remember he's the bodhisattva of perfect wisdom. So one day, Manjushri ordered Sudhana to pick medicinal herbs. He said, if there is something that is not medicine, bring it to me. Sudhana searched all over, but there was nothing that was not medicine. So he went back to Manjushri. There is nothing that is not medicine. Manjushri said, gather something that is medicine. Sudhana then picked up a blade of grass and handed it to Manjushri. And Manjushri held it up and showed it to the assembly saying, this medicine can kill people and it can also bring people to life. So,

[02:22]

for many reasons. I'm sure you can imagine why this was significant at this moment in our lives together. It led me to the Blue Cliff Record, which is where Case 87 is, which is also recounting the same story. And I liked Sekide's translation. And the introduction goes, Uman said to his disciples, Medicine and sickness cure each other. All the earth is medicine. Where do you find yourself? And then Sekide's comment is, there is no ego. Where do you find your own true self? At the same time, all the earth is medicine and all the universe yourself. because they cure each other and become unified.

[03:25]

And because I like and am fond of Hakuin, I checked out his commentary and he immediately pulled the rug out from the very direction I was going in my thinking by saying, students past and present have mistakenly taken the statement that the whole earth is medicine to be medicine itself. One of those, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon kind of moments, right? And then he goes on to say, if the whole earth is medicine, where can you point to as being yourself? Everything is only medicine, right? Where medicine and illness quell each other, the whole universe is yourself. So all these commentaries, Katagiri, Phaklin, and Segida point actually to a discussion of emptiness, which is a fundamental concept in Buddhism, of course, and it's one that I have had no difficulty wrapping my mind around.

[04:42]

I used to, I confess, routinely confuse emptiness with nothingness, and so doing would routinely correct me, no, not nothingness. emptiness. And I understand that the Buddhist term for emptiness is the lack of independent existence or inherent existence or pointing to the interdependence of everything. But this is pretty heady. And it reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh's commentary on the Heart Sutra, which is about emptiness, of course. He said, oh, Avalokiteshvara, all five skandhas are empty. Of what exactly? Which is actually a great question. I understand that Buddhism is sometimes considered to be medicine for what ails us. And Buddha is likened to being a doctor.

[05:45]

So what is the illness? I'm thinking that it must be delusion and the delusion is the idea that we are separate from the universe and from one another. I'm currently in a study group which I'm very grateful for and which I, the form of which I recommend to everyone to be in a study group and it's led by Karen Sondheim. We are currently studying Nagarjuna, who is all about emptiness. It's a very hard text, and I would never consider tackling it if we weren't reading it together. It's taken us a year and a half to get halfway through Garfield's translation. And at some point, the question arises,

[06:49]

Why are we studying this very hard text? What's the point? And midway through, the point is given that emptiness is understood to be the remedy for suffering. Which is a pretty good reason to study emptiness. It is the medicine. But Hogwin says, don't take this statement as medicine. And I know that words are problematic pointers and concepts are problematic. I'm going to posit that one, at least I can't think my way into this concept. I haven't been able to wrap my mind around it. It feels like thinking about this is like, writing a letter with a hammer.

[07:50]

It's just not going to work. And the real question is, beyond that, how is this useful to us right now in this piling on moment that we are living in? Someone recently pointed me to a certain kind of experience. And I particularly notice that those are the kinds of experiences that are hard to describe in words. They are embodied. And when you try to describe them, words seem like a pale version of the original experience. So I need to, give you a little bit of background that there's more than just COVID is the reason and other things, you know, the issues that we're facing with people who are challenging cancer in our own sangha right now.

[09:02]

Those are good reasons for wanting to look at this. Go on. But I also have my own personal reasons. In 2019, after a life of relatively wonderful health actually, I received in succession three rather major diagnoses. The first one was a rare and rather mysterious and not well-researched immune system problem and I'm going to resist going down the immune system route because there's lots to think about and talk about in that whole realm. And my wife, Libby, also had a diagnosis that same year. The second diagnosis I got, I managed to pick up traveling and came home with bilateral pneumonia, which put me out of commission for a month and a half, two months.

[10:18]

And it has given me a deep appreciation for what it must be like to be symptomatically with COVID because it's, you know, the similar issues about breathing and so forth. So I was laid up, really seriously laid up for about two weeks, meaning that you have a fatigue that is unlike any other kind of fatigue. It means that moving from one room to another feels like a bigger challenge than you can manage. And after two weeks of that, I was pretty tired of the course that I was taking between my bed and my couch. And I, one day, went outside and sat in a chair in the backyard and just stared at the light and the leaves and the flowers growing and the teeming life around.

[11:22]

It was spring, so it was June. It was wonderful. The next day, I did the same thing for about 15 minutes, but kind of idly, I leaned down and pulled up a weave. And the next day, I went out and did the same thing and I pulled up you know, a patch of maybe eight by eight inches of weeding. And I kept doing that. It was something that pulled me. I wasn't, it wasn't planned. I didn't try, I didn't do it in order to accomplish something. Unlike how I lived the rest of my life. No effort was involved. I wasn't thinking about weeding. But, you know, a week into this or two weeks into that, I had actually managed to weed an entire flower bed. But it wasn't as if I had set out to weed and I wasn't weeding.

[12:26]

It was that weeding happened. I wasn't working the garden. It was more like, and this is a felt experience, this is the part where it gets hard to describe, the garden was working me. and it's this way that I found myself back to energy and healing by doing this. It's just a regular practice every day. I'm not telling this experience to say that it's in any way unusual. I think we all have some version of this experience, on the one hand. On the other hand, it's mysterious. in terms of how they occur is not even set out to have this kind of an experience. And probably the reason that this particular chapter hit my eyes the way it did at the particular time, which was at the beginning of August, is that I had just gotten my fourth diagnosis.

[13:36]

Oh, well, let me back up and say, so we rounded Olivia and I ran into 2019 and went there. Now in 2020, we'll be all better. We'll be back to normal. And you know how that worked out for all of us about that. So in the middle of COVID, at the beginning of August, I got my fourth diagnosis, which was just kind of a touch of cancer. And then, you know, you're rapidly in a shoot dealing with that. And so I had surgery at the beginning of September. And, you know, so we don't get caught up in the cancer story. All of the indications are positive that for full recovery, everything, it was caught early and dealt with well. And I'm in the middle of a very short, period of doing radiation.

[14:40]

And then that's really to prevent recurrence down the road. So that's where that is. But when I got the diagnosis, I had this kind of interesting reaction, which was I felt pretty calm, unusually calm. And I also had a sudden craving for bagels. And so I ordered them. I don't go to grocery stores because of my immune problem. And I got them. And I ate three bagels in two days, which is actually not the best idea. I don't actually recommend it. And it didn't satisfy the way that you would predict. I mean, you would predict that the craving wouldn't satisfy, right? And so it didn't. I also noticed that the other thing that happened, even though I felt calm, is that I suddenly stopped sitting.

[15:46]

And then when I noticed it, I started again. And then what I noticed is that I could barely sit still, that my reactions were not mental. They were embodied. They're visceral, physical. So I was delivered to the hospital on the day of the surgery on one of those dark, smoky days where it never got light, the beginning of September, and went in by myself, and was in the pre-op and got prepped, and then you wait, and in pre-op, it's a big room that has no walls. separated from people just by curtains. And so I was laying there listening, but without being able to hear words, just hearing the hum of the conversations around me.

[16:53]

And I realized that in the other bays, there were at least two very young children who were very upset, who were being comforted by their mothers, and obviously in Priya. And there was a woman next to me, and she was experiencing some distress. And it occurred to me that one way that I could spend my time would be by doing tonglen, which is a breathing practice. It's a Tibetan breathing practice, and the idea is that you prime yourself by aligning your heart with a bodhisattva of compassion, whichever image is relevant and meaningful to you might be Avalokiteshvara, could be Mahapajapati or Buddha himself. And you breathe in all of the energy and the feelings, the fear, the anxiety, whatever it is, into your heart and then

[18:05]

You breathe out well-being and compassion. And I never, I often, when I find myself waking up in the middle of the night and I'm afraid of, because I had a dream or I have a, you know, painful memory or something, I often do Tonglen. I find it is transformative. It is remarkably transformative. And is it something that I, that I do without effort. It's not like I walk around feeling like, oh, I have a bodhisattva heart. I have to align myself effortfully with that energy. But listening to all the good dialogue in the pre-op, and actually also, to tell you the truth, Riding what I felt like was a wave of well-being from the well-being ceremony that I've done the day before, from sangha members, from friends and family.

[19:13]

I felt so thoroughly supported. I began to notice that there was no effort to that timeline, that I didn't have to make it happen. or created, it was more a matter of I felt like the part of me that I identify as I was off to the side, like not central to the activity and that I was being breathed. If that's the right way of saying, I was not making it happen, it was happening. It was really more a matter that my activity was trying to figure out how to clear away the hindrances to it happening, my own cobwebs, my own interferences, and stay cooperative.

[20:17]

So I've been trying to figure out how to either name these kinds of experiences or point to the commonalities or something. How can we feel our way into this thing that we call emptiness? I mean, someone said to me, pointed out, like, sometimes we practice with effort, and then sometimes the practice does us. The garden worked me. The Tongwen worked me in the pre-op room. I mean, it reminds me of a, a turning moment in you know show some ceremony with sojourn where i said to him why is it that when i stare up at this night sky and see how vast it is i feel so insignificant and that is not terrifying that's relieving and he said because you're cooperating with the universe and i've

[21:28]

been chewing on that idea ever since like what does that mean to cooperate with the universe you know is it wholeheartedness is it letting go there is an element in there of realizing that we are really not in control um i mean the image that comes from the tonglen experience is that that we are sitting in the passenger seat and we have a toy steering wheel's suction cup to the dashboard. And we're busily turning the steering wheel and honking the horn, imagining that we're driving. But we're not. And that's not, I mean, this is something Pema has said, which always stuck with me. She said, this is not bad news. Garfield describes it as, you know, it's that image of stepping off a hundred-foot pole and falling, and that the falling is not a problem.

[22:46]

That's what we're doing. We're falling. The falling is only if you imagine that you're going to hit the ground. That's where the problem comes. But if there's no ground, then there's no problem with falling. Maybe it's all just more ordinary. What I was doing in the garden was what I would call doing nothing. But there is, you know, the problem with language. The word nothing is probably is really the wrong word. I think it comes closer to being and stepping away from doing. I mean, I imagine that the people who make good monastics are the people who have a penchant for just being.

[23:54]

Maybe they weren't. I got really enchanted with Uchiyama's translation of the Genjo Koan, the phrase, Dogen's phrase, Genjo Koan, which he describes as the ordinary moment becoming the ordinary moment within its infinite profundity and he explains it this way because our mind often wanders here and there in the past or in the future we lose sight of the present moment and therefore we need to practice letting go of thought and returning to the here and now the returning to the here and now is nothing special it is really ordinary thing because through this practice the present moment simply becomes the present moment however within this ordinary practice through which we become simply ordinary there is infinite profundity so i'm thinking that maybe the gate

[25:23]

is this moment, this ordinary profound moment. I mean it is a time of great piling on in our world, in our lives, in our sangha. In such moments can turn to the Heart Sutra, this Sutra of Emptiness, and the turning phrase in it is, with nothing to attain, a bodhisattva depends on prajna, paramita, and the mind is no hindrance. Without any hindrance, no fears exist. We celebrate with great joy Kika Susan Helain's ordination at three.

[26:30]

All are invited at this same link. She is, I think, if my reckoning is correct, I could be wrong, the 34th priest to be ordained by Sojourn. And it is the beginning of her new life. where this I guess it says in the ceremony where everything is changed except her deep desire to live in truth with all beings there's another word for this moment that keeps coming to me which is heartbreak Years ago, at a shuso ceremony, someone else's question was the turning moment for me.

[27:33]

It was Mary Mocene, and she asked, I am heartbroken. What shall I do? And Leslie Bartholick said, who was the shuso, let your heart break completely. you know we think we can't stand it it's silly that's the resistance the hindrance right our resistance to this source of suffering and yeah what we want to do is let this fire of grief take its course and burn through us letting the whole heartedness of whatever it is celebration joy heartbreak complete as when our hearts are broken they're also open and being open is a great gift i think it's when our practice works us without our effort

[28:48]

Poisson said last week, holding the celebration and grief at the same time. One does not interfere with the other. And I would add, maybe actually they allow, enhance one another. The ability to feel great joy depends on feeling great grief. I had the great fortune and luck to be traveling, be able to travel to Japan in 2006 with a handful of others and students from Berkeley Zen Center and from some centers around.

[30:01]

We were led by Grace and Peter Shearson. And one of the places we stayed was Rinso-in, which is Suzuki Roshi's home temple. We stayed there for several days and had the opportunity to cook and eat together. And as I think it's probably tradition, somebody at the end of dinner turned to Hoitsu, who is Suzuki Roshi's son and heir to the temple, to give a little talk around a homily. And he said, Something brief that has stuck with me seems relevant to our time. He said that he had been visiting a friend who was dying and who was afraid of dying and that he had told him something that was comforting to him.

[31:09]

He told him that we are all the droplets of water that leave the lip of a waterfall and we are falling and when we arrive we join the river again so I guess the idea is to trust the fall to trust the rejoining and trust the groundlessness of being in which we find these ordinary moments, these ordinary moments of infinite profundity. So, We have a few minutes and I'm happy to stay beyond 11.05 if the conversation is up for that.

[32:18]

I would love to hear from you and to hear where you find yourself. Thank you, Mary. Just to remind people, there's two ways you can ask questions. You can either raise your virtual hand at the bottom of the screen. And Mary will keep an eye on that and I will too. And then I'll keep an eye on the chat box too. And we like to hear, like to hear from as many new voices as possible. So if you don't usually ask a question, maybe you could ask one today. Love to hear from you. And just so we can hear from as many people as possible, try to limit yourself to one follow-up question versus ongoing dialogue with Mary, which maybe you can have later if you're so inclined. Thank you. I see friend Jeff Taylor. Please unmute yourself.

[33:22]

Hi, Mary. Thank you for a wonderful talk. You captured my attention early and you took me so many places and I'm so grateful. When you talked about the idea of seeing the world as medicine and therein, where do I see myself? Does that point to Where is medicine in self? How is self medicine? Because when you started talking about the Ginjo Koan, the thing that I was thinking about is myriad Dharma rush forth and self arises. And so when I think about seeing self in the world of medicine, I'm tempted to see myself as medicine and kind of spend time with that. Can you say something about that, please? This may be about my pay grade. The self is medicine. Well, which self do you mean? The right now self, this self, as it arises in this moment, this.

[34:32]

Well, what Hakuin says is that that self merges with the universe and the universe is medicine. So where's the boundary between one and the other? I mean, one of the words that I've been trying on as a concept for emptiness is seamlessness. Tom could you and I think I'm spotlighted so that I can't then I mean I'm seeing a little tiny Jeff Taylor but it would be nice to see the people who are asking questions right thank you Judy Leishman

[35:47]

Hey Mary, thank you so much for just how you've included so much beauty and poignancy and spaciousness in your talk. It was really significant, all of those. I'm noticing in your surroundings, along with the candle, is you have these two beautiful mudras visible. So one's on your altar, right? And then the other is one of those beautiful cards. I think one of our year end, you know, and you spoke so much about the embodiment of all of these things, you know, from the, Priyap and all of that.

[36:50]

And I was just wondering, and also when you were moving from the couch to your bed to the garden, it just feels like there's a lot of motion in what you were describing. And I was just wondering, during this time, how you're finding mudra or positioning that kind of, I don't know, resonance with what you called falling, falling with, falling into. Well, I think, I don't know if this is exactly what you had in mind, but I do I think this period of time has been teaching me to pay attention to the way things are embodied as opposed to trying to think my way through.

[38:06]

I've spent my life, you know, being heady, if you will. But not completely. I mean, there's many activities that I've done in my life that have gotten me out of that. And one of them that comes to mind, actually, is that one of the ways that I've dealt with fear, you know, the situations I've placed myself in when I was being very fearful, is to imagine that all the energy in my body goes to my feet. a kind of groundedness. It's not exactly a mudra, but it has helped me. Somebody once said, you know, Westerners, when they get challenged and get ready, they throw all their energy into their head and their arms.

[39:10]

people who know Eastern martial arts know to throw all their energy into the ground and ground themselves. So, I don't know what to do with that about groundlessness. We would stop there and leave it alone. Thank you, Mary, for your being and for your talk today. I wonder if you could talk about how falling prepares us for joining the stream. And when you were talking about the falling, I was feeling that that was a Zazen experience, the falling. Could you talk about that or maybe cook that up for me? I think about it, I think of it as letting go.

[40:21]

Letting go of the idea that I'm in charge and in control. I often experience it as a kind of surrender, but I try not to use the word surrender because it gets confused with resignation and giving up as opposed to cooperating with the universe, aligning oneself with what is. And there is a great relief in it. Maybe you have the experience in a sashim when, you know, around about the, I don't know when it hits you, but usually for me it's about the third day, I finally stop fighting the schedule and realize that the schedule takes care of me if I just follow it. I will be taken care of by the schedule. And that's not the usual way that I live my life out in the world in terms of, you know, doing appointments and so forth.

[41:30]

It's a different experience. And surrender kind of comes close. And that to me is the idea of following this. I mean, certainly all this, This is about falling and rejoining. This is about working our fear of death, right? Ultimately. And actually that was one of the reasons that I came to practice, which is that I realized that that was an area that I need to work on. There's plenty of soil to till there. Thank you. I like the idea of the fear of death kind of as the fear of giving up and allowing ourselves to join, allowing myself to join.

[42:34]

Thank you for that. Yeah. Joel. Mary. That was a wonderful talk. Very, thank you. Very helpful. I had a really hard time. I just want to ask you, that was so wonderful, Sojin's response, you're cooperating. And that really struck a nerve with me for where I've been. And so if you could just expand on that expression, cooperating with what is. That would be wonderful. That was so beautiful. Thank you. I don't know if I can do any better than that. Well, it's always been easier for me to feel that cooperation when I'm in the wilderness or in the wild.

[43:44]

And I think, really, the thing that I've... That seems easy, actually. You know, you can... The reason I'm thinking that these are ordinary experiences is that you can lose oneself, or lose track of oneself in a positive way, looking at a sunset. Or... looking into the eyes of a new baby or, you know, name the activity, right? Figuring out how to do that in adversity is another level of figuring that out. Like, how do I cooperate with the universe when my body hurts, or when I can't breathe, or how do I relax?

[45:02]

I don't think relaxing tonight is exactly the right thing, but somehow not fight it. Yeah. Thank you. like it occurred to me as you were talking, how to recognize that right now I am not cooperating with what is. How do you bring yourself, know that you're not cooperating and bring yourself to that awareness and open up. Seems to be hard for me. That's mostly what we're doing most of the time, right? I mean, it is coming back to the present moment. It's Uchiyama saying, You know, through the present moment, becoming the present moment is infinite profundity. It is that, that's the gate. The gate is the present moment, it's bringing oneself back to the present moment. And it helps to embody it, like where am I, where are my feet, where's my gut, you know?

[46:08]

And to recall, remember oneself in that moment. Thank you very much, that's beautiful Excuse me very young head has his head has a question for you No, thank you Hi, Mary Thank you so much for your wonderful talk I Was particularly moved by Mary Mosene's question And in line with that, I've been struggling with, and this comes up every once in a while, but I've been struggling with feelings of abandonment. And I've tried letting it go, and I've tried sitting with it, but it hasn't worked. It still sits there.

[47:10]

I wonder if you have any thoughts about that. Well, abandonment is one of those big feelings, right? Right up there with shame. Yeah. And I think both of them have a fundamental premise of aloneness. and separateness. Yeah. Right. And I guess the question to ask in those moments is, is that really true? Are you really all? Is that true? Are you asking me if that's true? Yeah.

[48:15]

Well, intellectually, I suppose I would say no. But as you know, it doesn't feel that way. And so there's a go from my head to my body. It feels like a great journey. So... Well, you know what they say, about these big feelings is to take care of them, you know, befriend them, like you would a much younger version of yourself. Accompany it. And maybe as you accompany it, not all of you will be in it, that you'll find yourself, some part of you is the the accompanier, and the other part is the accompanied. Thank you.

[49:24]

Susan? Marvin? Good morning, Mary. Thank you so much for your wonderful talk. When you were telling that lovely story of laying in the hospital and hearing all those signs of suffering around you and you decided to practice tonglen, I think what you said was, and I breathed all of it into my heart, but as you told the story, what it felt like to me was that you breathed it into Buddha's heart. And I don't mean to make it up, like I'm not playing with semantics. It just sounded like the way you told the story really was evidence that you had let go for some lack of better word. You weren't sending it to Mary's heart, you were sending it to Buddha's heart.

[50:27]

And that that's what allowed that connection that you were describing so well. And I just wonder what you think about that, if that's... I think that's right. Silly. No, I don't think that's silly at all. It was definitely the feeling that I wasn't doing it. me, the I that I identify as myself, wasn't making something happen. It was happening to me as much as it's happening to, you know, it was, you know, I've had that experience in other ways when I was, It's hard to do it without the eye, but the activity was happening, right? And I wanted to turn to somebody and say, did you see that? Meaning, did you see that the activity was happening?

[51:30]

But I realized that any time you would ask that question, they would think you were asking, did you see me doing it? And there's no way of conveying that something else was happening, you know, from the outside. It's very, it's difficult to talk about it even dramatically, right? Right. But from a practice perspective, perhaps, I mean, what, just hearing you, what occurred to me more and more is that the practice of when we're guiding ourselves or nourishing ourselves or connecting with the world around us is to really, really practice not saying, my heart or my, but really put it in the hands of Buddha because your whole question was about emptiness and that you said something wonderful like it's about connection and that's really what connects us all is Buddha nature, right?

[52:31]

Right, right, right. That's nicely put. Well, nicely told by you. Thank you so much.

[52:41]

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