you It seems like we're already like months of the year have gone by, but really only a week.

[01:19]

And it's atmospheric bomb. It's B-O-M-B, not B-A-L-M. And it hasn't quite arrived yet. But it certainly seems like it's impending. You can feel that heaviness in the air. So today we were going, today is the anniversary of Sojin Roshi's, second anniversary of Sojin Roshi's passing. And we had hoped, we had planned to enter a portion of his ashes his memorial stone in the garden back there but discretion being the better part of the weather we've decided to postpone that for for two weeks and so we're planning to do that on the 20th i want to talk a bit about him today first just

[02:33]

kind of a roundup of some of the many things that are happening here in the next few weeks, just to let you know, if you already know about this, but on Monday morning at 7.30, in the 7.30 Zazen period, which will be welcoming people in person as well as hybrid this week, we are going to have Entrustment ceremony for Mary Duryea, who's sitting right there. She's going to receive this entrustment as a lay teacher in recognition. And we'll also be presenting the most recent Chusso, Gary Artyom with his somewhat delayed Shuso Raksu, which is a great pleasure.

[03:44]

We've actually, we've had the Raksu for a while. We've been waiting for Gary to show up again. But here he is. So that's Monday morning. You're welcome to attend. It'll be a hybrid event. I am an upcoming class, which will begin next Thursday, and it'll be five Thursdays from 715 in the evening until 845. And. I'm calling an introduction to Zen and the. Going to. Utilize is by speaking about five. two little figures in our Zen and Soto Zen tradition, beginning with Bodhidharma, who is that kind of beildering-looking gentleman there in the corner, who is the Indian ancestor who came to China as the first ancestor of Zen, the 28th in the lineage since Shakyamuni Buddha.

[05:03]

And then the sixth ancestor, Uineg. And then Doshan, who is one of the two founders of Soto Zen. Dogen, who we study very frequently. Suzuki Roshi. So we'll have a week on each of them and we'll find some some stories about them, some of their primary teachings, and some discussion about how their teachings apply to us today. So that will be my class. You can sign up for that online. On Monday the 16th, we will be marking Martin Luther King Day, and Jerry Oliva and I will be leading

[06:04]

A day where we will study in the morning from about 8.30, I think. We'll have some Zazen and we'll study a teaching of Dr. King's called the World House and have some discussion about that. And then we invite people to join us and we're inviting our neighbors to sort of neighborhood cleanup in the area. You're welcome to join us for any of that. As I said, then on the 20, oh, oh, I missed their session on the 14th. On the 21st, we'll have the soldiers edges interment. And there's more going on. It's a really busy month. And Joe Buckner and I yesterday met with Charlie Wilson.

[07:11]

Charlie Wilson is a Zen student and he's used to practice here. And he's a sound engineer and he has created this incredible system called Engage Wisdom, digitizing lectures from all over the country, but he's begun here in the Bay Area. In the process of digitizing, he's redigitized all of Suzuki Roshi's lectures, which are now online. You can reach that center. He's digitizing all of Zen Center's lectures, which there's 11,000 of them. All of Rebbe Anderson's lectures, and he has just completed the digitization of all the material that we have given them, which amount 940 lectures over roughly 40 year period.

[08:13]

And this is, it's really amazing. We will post the link. It's also going to go up as a kind of mirror page on our website. So this is accessible. There are titles for every talk. You can search your, by person. There is an audio file that's been optimized so you can really hear everything clearly. It has one of those little gadgets that you can find on YouTube. So you can, if you want to listen to things quickly, you can speed it up, you can slow it down and it may change the pitch. And it's just, you can, you also, there's a lot of metadata. And what we're going to do is invite people, add and edit the metadata. And so we can kind of enrich in that archive. It's really mind boggling when you look at it.

[09:16]

So we'll have, there'll be an article about it in both in the community list. So stay tuned for that. So let's just take a breath for a moment. and change gears. As I said, Sojan Roshi two years ago today. And it had me thinking of a story that is in the record of Master Dongshan.

[10:22]

I'm sure familiar with it. And when he had established himself, on Mount Dom. He conducted a memorial ceremony and feast for his teacher, Yunyan. So while he was doing this, a monk asked, did you receive when you were at Yunyan's place?" And the master said, although I was there, I didn't receive any teaching. The monk said, well, since you didn't actually receive any teaching, you're conducting this memorial.

[11:27]

And he answered, why should I turn my back on him? Now, Dongshan had an earlier teacher, who was also a very well-known master in the recorded lineage, Nanchuan. And so the monk persists in his questioning and says, if you began by meeting Nanchuan, why do you now conduct a feast? says, it is not my former master's virtue or Buddha Dharma that I esteem, only that he did not make exhaustive explanations for me, replied the master. This is a very persistent monk. He says, well, since you're conducting this memorial feast for the former master,

[12:37]

Do you agree with him or not? And Dung San said, and I don't agree with half. And the monk said, well, why don't you completely agree? The master said, if I agreed completely, then I would be ungrateful to my former master. I've always identified with this story. Sojan Roshi did not give exhaustive explanations. He just said what he thought, he did his practice, and he demonstrated his practice to us. And

[13:38]

Often I agreed and sometimes I didn't. My agreements and disagreements are my agreements and disagreements. And yours are yours with Sojin or with any teacher. And still, since he has died, pretty regularly he appears in my dreams. I don't know if any of you are having those experiences or similar experiences with other figures. I don't take this as a some kind of ghostly visitation, but as a reminder that work that I'm doing with him, both on my understanding of the teachings and on our relationship to complexity and intimacy, which extended more than 35 years.

[15:11]

So I actually had a dream at Madama Thursday, Thursday night, which was kind of in the lead up to the ceremony that we were going to do today. So that was not so surprising. So as we were setting up for the ceremony in my dream, the Zendo was full of mostly unfamiliar people, people I didn't recognize. Many of them didn't seem to know what to do, or what was going on, or where they were, or how to take care of the forms. And that's also been a recurring dream to me. I'm not exactly sure, but what that means, but it's interesting.

[16:16]

It's, it's, well, I'll get to it. I think I have some sense of it. But sitting in the Zenka, there was Sojan Roshi. He was sitting in his seat here and in his robes and looking very lively. And I wondered, what's going on here? Wait, aren't we doing the memorial service for him? What's he doing here? And I remember also in the dream, like for this ceremony and I had to put it on my ropes and I got completely tangled up in my robes. It's like, And it was taking, you know, the ceremony was supposed to go on and it was taking me like 45 minutes to put on my robes.

[17:19]

So I suppose there's, I suppose that was to some degree of anxiety here. But the realm of our situation as it has evolved, as it has evolved in the course of the pandemic and in the course of the surgeons, illness. So much is new and is unfamiliar to us. And the many patterns of practice that had largely unchanged for many years they've been significantly altered. We've had to let them go, we've had to reform them, and possible we're, and wherever it's appropriate, we are making an effort to reestablish these forms in the practice.

[18:38]

But in some ways, We can't have to go backwards. We actually have to go forwards and incorporate, include whatever has changed into the heart of our practice. We've been in the middle of this pandemic now for three years. And along with just the force of isolation and the health risks, just inevitably over three, some of us anyway, are getting older. And that's just an inevitable reality. And so different people are showing up in the Zendo.

[19:42]

Many of you look around, there's a whole bunch of you that are new since the pandemic began, which is great. And there are people who used to be regulars who we don't see all the time, or we don't see in the Zendo as we see them online, but the circumstances have changed and they always have been changing. And several of the related teachings that I carry with me from Sojin, first of all, and I've talked about, I think, both of these in the past. He did give me, wasn't an explanation, it was an admonishment in which he said, you should let things fall apart.

[20:59]

And that teaching was an antidote to my anxious effort to hold things together, both for myself and also to want others to hold it together because I didn't feel comfortable when when things got messy, it didn't feel safe to me. But I really took it to heart when he said you should let things fall apart. And that was more than 35 years ago. And it's a koan because then you're faced with the question, What do you allow to fall apart? And what do you make some effort to hold together?

[22:08]

And along with that teaching, I really remember a time in the Zendo, when I think somebody asked him, how did he feel about the way things were going? And he said, you know, things are going great, but in a moment they could just go . And that seemed like a philosophical statement, like a statement about impermanence. Of course, this is a Buddhist truth. But it was several years before the pandemic. And everything went... And when that happened, what Sojan Roshi did was he kind of just stepped back.

[23:24]

You know? We were not coming to the Zendo, so for a little while he didn't come to the Zendo. He didn't come to online Dazen. I think, you know, he took the time to look at the broad territory and then figure out where he wanted to stand. And after a little while, he found how to teach in this pandemic age, and also how to teach in the face of his illness. And I think those of us who attended his, these kind of online evening sessions that he had pretty regularly for a time, saw how bright his Dharma light was, how clear a voice, the clear voice that he found,

[24:58]

after having let things fall, letting things fall apart so that if you fall apart actually, then you create space for them to come together again in a new way, in a creative way. And I think that that's, that's what I took to be, that's what I've taken to be the, of his teaching to me. you should let things fall apart. So how do we meet our own, the circumstances of our life? Some of us are at the, some of you are young and you probably feel invincibly strong and some of us are getting older and more raggedy around the edges and feel some decline in our physical and maybe mental abilities.

[26:20]

How do we meet changes which are inevitable? How do we meet the changes that we're seeing in our society? You know, we've come to an age of division that, again, is not what we would have imagined some years ago, you know? It felt like things were moving towards hopefully moving towards a more harmonious and where we were cutting through some of the delusions and the divisions that had really been harmful to many people and many communities in the past and that maybe we were going to move past it.

[27:30]

Evidently not. And so there still are crazy and deadly wars going on. There's violence, there's, you know, there's an epidemic of guns in the streets. all kinds of things, all kinds of really troubling things, virtual deadlock in our government. I see that there is now a new Speaker of the House after 15 ballots, and I don't have a lot of enthusiasm about him. And one worries what deals were made to pull that off.

[28:34]

But this is the world that we have. We can't turn our back on that. We can't turn our back on the actual conditions. Sojin couldn't turn his back on the pandemic and he couldn't turn his back on the course of his own illness. perhaps he could have said of his own teaching, of himself, well, I half agree with me and half don't. I think that's a really, that's a really good question for us all to consider, you know, we think. And then as we've talked about recently,

[29:35]

Again, as Sojin was teaching us, look at what you think and then try to read out of the page. Try to see it from another perspective or multiple perspectives. Do you agree with your teacher? Do you agree with yourself or not? And Tukshan said, I agree with F and don't agree with F. Even the saints,

[30:48]

are not saints. It's very important. I think one of the things that you see in the record of Dongshan was that throughout his record, he did not teach idealization. He taught seeing things as they are. I feel like that is like one of the principal teachings that we receive from our teacher. When I think about it, it seems that one could wonder whether he idealized Suzuki Roshi

[31:54]

And to an extent, perhaps he did, but he also was aware of Suzuki Roshi's shortcomings. And he welcomed and he developed, Sojan Roshi developed a really warm and intimate relationship with Suzuki Roshi's son, Owitsu. And it was wonderful to see them together. It was quite a few years since we've been, since they were together, but I have never seen Sojin more, more relaxed or more joyful than when Hoetsu was around. It was like, wow, this is a different person. You know, it was great.

[33:00]

And it opened doors in the way I understood him. It was really the childlike qualities that he had came forth. And Hoitsu, who was the son of Suzuki Roshi, who loved Suzuki Roshi deeply, was very particular about telling people not to idealize his father and to actually point out the greatness of his teaching and the shortcomings of his fathering. So we can agree for whatever portion and disagree half and we should be doing that.

[34:11]

That's also the meaning of not always so. So I don't have a lot more to say today. But I wanted to bring Sojin into the room. I hope I keep having these dreams where he shows up. And I just say, in these dreams, he's somewhat critical. And it's interesting because these are my dreams, right? I'm bringing forth this character in my psyche, but that's where he is.

[35:22]

And it's like, there's love, there's confusion, there's agreement. There's disagreement and our practice is to include the whole thing, the whole catastrophe. So I'm gonna stop there. Time for questions, discussions, comments, both in this room and, oh, are all those people in the community room? Wow. That's great. This is for Saturday. Thank you all for showing up. It's really, you know, our practice, our practice is really thriving. Even in the pandemic, and it could just go like that. But what's happened is, so I'm really grateful to everyone.

[36:27]

There's about 50 people online too. So let's open up to the questions. If you have a question in the community room, you have to just center yourself on the cameras. I can see the people here. And if you're in Zoom, please raise your digital hand if you can, or put something in the chat. And I will, Blake, are you sort of, Who's the facilitator for that? You are, okay, good. Thank you. So any other comments? Jerry. What came up for me in this, I agree with that, and I don't agree with that, was after I'd been practicing here for 10 years, I noticed there was a difference. Could you speak up a little bit, please? I noticed that there was a difference in, when I first came, he would, teach directly from Suzuki Roshi and he would read Suzuki Roshi's line and maybe expound on it.

[37:38]

And as he began, as the years went by, he talked about Suzuki. He began to teach his own teaching and the teachings changed even the way he looked at Suzuki Roshi's teaching, the way he interpreted Some of the stuff was different. So I said to him, I said, I said one day to him, he has really changed. You've given up Suzuki Roshi. And he just smiled. So. We have to find ourselves. I don't know, did you hear, did you hear what she was saying? Yes? Well, good. So, so. Jerry. While she was sitting here, after about 10 years, she recognized that Sojin's teachings, which had previously been very much centered on Suzuki Roshi, on reading and then interpreting, commenting, had changed.

[38:49]

And she spoke to Sojin and said that she noticed a change and basically He agreed. Basically, he was in the process of finding his voice, and we all should be in that process in our lives. So, thank you. Who else? Thank you, Hozan. With regard to half agree and half disagree, could you say a little bit about, if we're with a person called in-person, having agreements or disagreements and sorting out our stories. How does one work with that relative to, say, ruminating alone or being in a dream, so to speak, while sleeping and having these conversations? Do you feel it's more difficult in one way or another, letting things be and there's some magic that comes forward?

[39:53]

I think it's a practice. For me, it's a practice that when I'm in a circumstance where I'm in agreement with someone, you know, my training, I think my cultural training has been to argue. You know, that's a New York Jewish kind of cultural training. And I don't enjoy it. You know, I'm trained in it and I may do it unconsciously, but I know that it is not, it's not. Then what I have to do, the practice element is the practice of patience. It's like if there's a disagreement to step back,

[40:56]

And tell the person, you may say, I don't fully understand. Step back and really turn this over in my mind and continue when I have clarity about what I think, what might happen. disagreement goes away necessarily. But I think the stepping back is to actually step back from the habitual response and from the emotional reaction to allow for some clarity to emerge. Perhaps in a dream or just thinking while one is sitting alone in a room may have some of that stepping back quality. Yeah, I mean, in these dreams, you know, which are, some of them are full of, they're certainly, I appreciate them because I feel like, oh, there's internal work going on here that needs to be done.

[42:20]

And it's like, myself to do this work, which is, which I think is, I'm grateful for it, you know, instead of getting caught in the reaction. I'm gonna call somebody out there, Stephanie. Thank you, Hozan. I really enjoyed your talk today. I was thinking about how your life has changed over the last two years since Sojin's passing. Could you say more? You've been finding yourself? Because I see some changes going on in you. Well, I suppose it's true. One thing I find just on a...

[43:24]

I am very cognizant of evolving physical limitations that weren't there, which is difficult and learning and when to let things fall apart and when to go to the doctor, you know, you know, not just accept this and I feel, I try to be accountable and that's the primary. That's really like a central responsibility that it's, I've been given it and I've taken it on. And it means, you know, to keep asking myself, how do I provide, why, how am I stable in order to

[44:30]

be stable for you. And I think that allows for another spacious mind to emerge, I hope. That's maybe that's all I can say. Thank you, Charlie. Thank you so much, Hosan. This is certainly one of My favorite. Talks. Thank you. During wakefulness. Sojourn told you to let things fall apart. But did he have any advice in dreams? Your dreams? He didn't muck about. Except now. But let me think of it a second.

[45:34]

I feel like the message that I'm getting from the sojourn in my dream is, what am I doing? What are you doing? You know? pay attention to what you're doing. Then there's the, you know, not to over interpret, not to make this, I mean, it's hard because I'm making this about me, which is not the point, but it is the point of the dream. You know, on the one hand, and on the other hand, he's saying, I'm here. You know, so that there's an ambiguity to that message, which is very rich.

[46:39]

And I think that that's true of all the figures that we inhabit are great. It's like, this is real creativity, you know, and everybody does it. You know, you don't have to be a novelist or a poet. It's like you're doing it every night in your dreams. So thank you. Thank you. Karen. It's been known that Suzuki Roshi was not a great parent, as Kuitsu has said and has been written about. And I think Sojun was not a great parent either. Do you think one can be a great Zen teacher or a great parent? Yeah, I don't, I mean, It's clear to me that Suzuki Roshi and Sojin Roshi really loved their children.

[47:40]

And that they did the best that they could. And this I think is part of the half agree and half don't agree. You know, I think that he fully accepted his students, except for the ones that he didn't. And that was, it was painful to see when there was somebody that one might feel, I can't say, you know, Every one of us is a creature of our time, right? And I know how I was raised.

[48:44]

And honestly, I can't say that my parents were great parents or were very good at parenting. But I know that they loved us. And I love them. And I learned from them You know, I think Lori and I, it's like, okay, so how do we wanna do this? And we were in a freer time, so we were able to function a little differently. And it was very emotional. There's something There's some kind of love that I received from him and from my parents that provided enough solidity to build on in terms of our relationship with our children.

[50:01]

So I don't answer your question, but Ah. We could talk about that. Yeah, I think there's enough love to go around. Yeah. Vera. Thank you for this. It was very helpful for me. I wish I had heard this talk 30 years ago, because I did not have the understanding that you could half agree and half disagree. I thought you had to at least be 80-20. But this 50-50s thing, I didn't know. So I feel like I've been a peripheral member of this Samba, because I guess I'm 50-50. So now I see that's OK. So thank you for that. Well, thank you. Thank you. And thank you for being here. I really feel. And that's, that's really wonderful.

[51:09]

I mean, I feel like I've seen you around from almost the beginning and there's something different happening, you know? Well, some of it's because of you. Yeah. Well, maybe. And in the community room, we'll take a couple more and we have to end. Preston, too. Yeah, I see Preston, too. Say hello, it looks like. Good morning. Morning. What you said about parents has left me kind of shaky. It wasn't about there being enough love to go around. It's like, wow, really touched me. What I wanted to ask you, though, is related to language, and I was getting a little stuck.

[52:20]

I'm just going to take a second. I'm still shaky. What do I do? Do I ask you right now about semantics or do I just sit here and cry? It's your choice. But if you don't want to do it now, we can find another time very shortly. Well, now I want to ask you the question. Okay. It has to do with maybe semantics. I was getting stuck on agreement and disagreement.

[53:24]

I hear agreement. I think about two different ways of hearing that. I agree with you. We both have the same idea about a particular thing. And then agreement. You and I have decided this is how we're going to move forward. We have this agreement. Is that clear, the two different? I hear what you're saying, yeah. Okay, and then the second one is disagreement. I disagree with you. We don't have the same position about such and such thing. Or we're having a conflict or something like that. So given this little grid I've put together in my head, do you have any guidance or wisdom? or just don't get stuck on it. I want to give you an example. Oh, that's always helpful. For example, this is hard for me to talk about.

[54:35]

Let me propose that I don't think Sojin Roshi and I had the same idea about, same ideas about what skillful would be like for the community. And, you know, he came from a time and a model where there was, in a Zen community, there was a really, it was a central, pivotal, who was the teacher or the abbot, whatever. And I come from a time when I was shaped by collective and collaborative models, right? Make sense so far? So what I've learned to do, even now, I'm still really thinking about what I learned from him or what I saw from him, that even though my training was such that I had a certain different model,

[56:14]

I also entertain the idea he might be right. His idea of leadership might be an appropriate model for a community like ours. I don't know that that's the case, but I really feel like agreeing, half agreeing, half disagreeing, allows me to raise the question, at least for me, in a creative way. Does that respond to your question? Well, what I'm hearing... Yeah, what I'm hearing is there is the first type of agreement and disagreement. And specifically, there wasn't the second type of disagreement. There wasn't conflict. We saw things different ways. Right. Which is not to say that there wasn't conflict. It did not eliminate all conflict, but...

[57:15]

again to go back to the point a question ago the conflict existed within the and so it was tempered by love by gratitude you know it's like everything that he gave me over so many years i'm grateful for that and i know that he was incredible gifts of everybody here who was giving to him. You know, there's this field of merit, this field of giving. And so even if there's conflict, it takes place within that. So, you know, I think this is, I'm sorry, Preston, we can talk. I think this is just to respect the time. This is a good place to end. So thank you all very much and let's have a good year and bring forth peace.

[58:24]

Beings are numberless. I vow to awaken with them. Delusions are inexhaustible.

[58:41]

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