beautiful late spring morning. Let me begin with a verse, an exchange, which is case 14 in the Koan collection, the Blue Cliff Record, the Chinese collection of Zen dialogues, Zen cases. So Zen Master Yunmin was once asked, what is the teaching of the Buddha's entire lifetime? Yunmin answered, an appropriate response. What is the teaching of the Buddha's entire lifetime? Yunmin answered, an appropriate response. So that's context. It'll make more sense, I think, as I go along.

[01:04]

But it also stands quite clearly by itself, responding to each situation, each person, in an appropriate way, whatever that means. So I just returned day before yesterday. I was about five days up in North Fork, California, which is in the foothills of the Sierras, not so far from Fresno. It is hot and dry and very beautiful there. And our Dharma sister and friend Mioan Grace Shearson and Yuzan Peter Shearson have a center up there called Empty Nest Zendo.

[02:07]

It's an empty nest because their kids are gone, which is a condition that Lori and I are also experiencing. And actually because we have an empty nest, or pretty much Emptiness. Actually, Alexander is home for the summer. Lori was able to go to the other Emptiness for a one-month training. This is the second year that Grace has organized sort of monastic and ministerial leadership training. a teacher training and she weaves it all together and there were a number of guest teachers this summer as there were last summer. They included Lou Richmond who is a disciple of Suzuki Roshi's, Angie Boissevain who some of you may know from the Bay Area, James Ford who teaches

[03:19]

in the Diamond Sangha tradition and Diane Martin of the Udumbara Zen Center in the Midwest who is also in our tradition and Ketagiri Roshi's tradition and myself. So I really enjoyed it and also I haven't seen Lori for three weeks and I was very happy that We got to spend time together and they didn't make her stay in her room. She could come to my room. So it wasn't that tough. And it was a small group, about 11 or 12 people from eight different teachers. And really, really good people who were having a good time together. And they were studying it's a really unique training because everybody is being trained in how to give dharma talks which is something that some of us who give dharma talks realize well we never had any training we're just sort of getting up here and winging it but actually for the group each person gives

[04:48]

which are then critiqued, and it's really helpful because you hear everybody and you learn what works, what doesn't. Also instruction about the ins and outs of practice discussion, how to meet people who are coming to you for guidance, looking at the forms and liturgies, and looking at also keeping in mind questions of systems of power and authority, what's appropriate, what's inappropriate and how to encounter the Dharma and how to help people encounter the Dharma as grown-ups, not as children.

[05:56]

I may see a lot of kids in this room but I don't see any children and there's ways in which in our various spiritual communities we can feel like we're being not treated as grown-ups. So this has been these questions of power have been problematic in our communities, problematic in our lives. And what I taught was I taught about vow and about ritual and the creation of ritual. What are the building blocks that we use to create ceremonies, rituals, not just for the sake of what is happening here in the Zendo, but also how do we create that in our outside lives and in other circumstances where that might be helpful.

[07:05]

So, how do we bring our practice into the world? as students and as teachers. So I've been thinking about students and teachers and that was the topic of discussion there and I thought I would just speculate a little with you about my thinking. One of the things that came clear, which I hadn't quite put together, was that we have something unique in this Zen tradition. We have a wonderful balance between community, sort of that pool of people

[08:09]

of equality within that in the sense that we learn from each other. In the context of community we are simultaneously, we're always students and at any moment we can be a teacher and we're all pointed, not single pointed. We're learning from the group and what we create is effective or ineffective depending upon the strength and the wisdom of the community and that's something that I feel like I've been looking for all my life. All my life I've been looking for, I have tried and you know dipped my toes in different communities and you know when I landed here about 30 years ago I felt, oh, well, this is it.

[09:12]

Looking around, there's very few faces in the room that were here at that moment 30 years ago, but a lot of us have been practicing a very long time together. And hopefully, we find ways to include newer people. And so the community is expanding. People go away, people pass away, but the dynamic of that is always alive. So that's one dimension. The other thing that we have that I think is really rare and important is we have an opportunity to meet with a teacher or teachers in a very direct and intimate way. There are very different forms for how we encounter the teacher.

[10:22]

Sometimes we might encounter a teacher, whether it's Sojan, myself, or one of the senior students, or someone in a leadership position, in a practice position. We're living together. We're working together, we're practicing together, sitting right next to each other. We have the opportunity to have dokasan or practice discussion. What we have is an intimate and fluid relationship with a teacher or teachers. that also comes in the context of the community. And I think that there's ways in which that's really evolved. I think it's really evolved in Zen, even though the formal meetings of the teachers are very different.

[11:29]

I spoke with one woman who was from a Rinzai tradition and in Sesshin, in the Rinzai tradition that she was part of, they would see the teacher four times a day, which really cranks up the heat. You would be working on a koan, but whatever it is, think about what it might be like to present yourself to anyone four times a day, to sit down formally and have a deep and intimate exchange that theoretically calls for appropriate response. And you give your appropriate response, do the best you can do, and the teacher brings

[12:30]

rings her bell you're out until the next time it's very intimate in our style we actually spend time talking it's more discursive it's a bit more psychological so we have this personal connection if you talk with Sojan Roshi about his connection to Suzuki Roshi, very rarely did they have dokasan or practice discussion. They would have it sometimes during sashin, but they would sit down and have tea, or they would be together, or they would have just some exchange or some words with their teacher, but they lived with him. They lived with him in the city center, they lived with him at Tassajara.

[13:40]

They were side by side as some of us have had an opportunity with Sojan Roshi over a long period of time and some of us have had together. This model that we have is the model of face-to-face transmission. Or as my late Dharma sister Darlene Cohn says, body-to-body. We sit right next to each other. We're packed into this room. Our bodies are affecting each other. as we sit together and as we live together and as we practice together well I've been teaching here and in other places around but primarily being here for a long period of time and so in the course of that practice I'm sure that many of you know very well all of my

[15:04]

unenlightened habits and ways. You can't hide in a community like this. You can try, you can do it for a little while, but over the long run, nothing is hidden. The teacher is not hidden, the teacher is seen, each person is seen. And at the same time, just not to dwell on that, if we're paying attention we can also recognize each other's virtues and abilities. So when I came to Berkeley Zen Center my first teachers were people who had been here a while. I think when I arrived Soto Roshi was in Japan for a time completing his dharma transmission with Hoitsu Suzuki and so there were people that I saw who I modeled myself on or I if not modeled myself on felt like they represent, they had

[16:32]

they carried themselves in a way that I aspired to and I had not yet achieved and then Sojan returned and you know it's like oh this is who is this this is the teacher what does that mean what is the teacher and I had to sort of run through a repertoire of relationships that none of which really fit. This person was, he was not my father and he was not my psychotherapist. He was not my friend. He was something else that I hadn't encountered before.

[17:38]

A teacher as a kind of mirror, as a model. One thing Suzuki Roshi says, he says I think in my beginner's mind is that we imitate our teachers. That's the first That's like a first stage of our relationship. We try to move like them. Ed Brown was saying somewhere when he wrote the Tassajara bread book, the first edition, quite a long time ago, when he re-read it because he was they were going to republish it, he realized he wrote it in Suzuki Roshi English. He left out all the articles.

[18:42]

And, you know, we talk like them. We try to move like them. This is good. This is how we enter. And then, And this took me a couple of years. Okay, this is the teacher. And you put that being up on some kind of pedestal which is almost inevitable. Just as you put the beloved on a pedestal initially. And then gradually you find that the teacher and the beloved are not actually statues. They're people. It was a stunning thing for me to find out one day that I had done something that hurt Sojin's feelings.

[19:47]

I was like, he has feelings? You know, I'm not even sure. Initially, I think I was not clear. Should he have feelings or should he have transcended those feelings? Isn't that what a Buddha does? Well, no. You find out that the teacher is a person. And actually, this is exactly how one develops a respectful and true relationship to be respectful to that person in the way that they are returning their respect and intimacy to you. So to find out, for him to tell me that something I had done was painful to him,

[20:51]

was for him to take the risk of intimacy. And that was a really important stage in our contact, in building our relationship. And I learned a lot from that, and I learned a lot from that about how I want to conduct myself as a student and as a teacher. So Dogen talks about teacher a bit in fastical guidelines for studying the way. Is that what you're studying with Sojin now? No. OK. During practice period. What? During practice period. We did Gakudo Yujinshu? Anyway.

[21:53]

I can't remember. That's right. So anyway, Dogen says you should seek a true teacher to practice Zen and study the way. So what is a true teacher? Not a perfected being, or not a perfect being, I think, but one who is devoted to the way, really devoted to the way, just as a true student is. So Dogen says, the disciple is like wood, and the teacher resembles a craftsman. Even if the wood is good, without a skilled craftsman, its extraordinary beauty is not revealed. So that ideally a teacher is always, we give the teacher permission to chip and chisel and shape us. And if the wood is bent, as some of us are, and this is the stick I was carrying today, placed in skilled hands, its splendid merits immediately appear.

[23:11]

So even this looks like, this is a crooked stick, and I've, I don't know how skilled my hands are, sanded it, and smoothed it, and oiled it, and it was just a stick lying in the ground, in a heap of sticks, and if you handle it in a certain way, you bring out its nature. This is, to have been here all these years, even though I'm still being whittled away, I feel like some of my abilities and qualities are evident to me where they weren't before and that's the work that we were able to do. The teacher brings out

[24:17]

What we're learning here, the root is Zazen, the root is Dogen's teaching and Suzuki Roshi's teaching. The root is, if you will, Dogen's idea of practice enlightenment, that we don't practice to become something. This This stick is exactly the same shape that I found it in. It was, you know, in a pile of scrap. But if you look, you can see something beautiful in it. And you realize, in context of practice of enlightenment, what Dogen was saying, we're already enlightened. We may not entirely realize it, but that is our nature.

[25:25]

And we sit because we're already enlightened. It's the natural thing to do. So to bring forth that enlightenment. As Suzuki Roshi said, when you are you, Zen is Zen. So the object of this practice, the object of all our relationships, including the relationship with the teacher, is to become ourself, whatever that means. It doesn't mean doing whatever we want. It means living by the vow to save sentient beings. It means recognizing both our strengths and our weaknesses and working with ourselves to bring forth what is beautiful even in the bent stick that I may be.

[26:46]

also says in a fascicle that's called Twining Vines. He says, teacher and disciple practice mutually. He said, teacher and disciple practice mutually is twining vines of Buddha ancestors. So this is how we wind ourselves around each other. until these vines are so entangled, so entwined that you can't really tell which is which. You can't untangle them. So as I think about what's important to me in these positions of teacher and student.

[27:56]

The positions are there. Each person has their position and their responsibilities. It's also true that sometimes one person is a teacher and the other is a student, and sometimes the roles are reversed. Sometimes both are students. Sometimes both are teachers. Sometimes there is no identity or role at all. There's just doing. And in our lives, we each have our positions and responsibilities. So in that context, in that relationship, I feel like the principle that I try to adhere to is one of mutual accountability and honesty.

[29:00]

Mutual accountability means that we develop trust over time and I am accountable to my teacher. he is accountable to me. And I feel the same way about people who might identify as students. We're not too quick to call someone a student, or I'm not, or to name the relationship. I feel like this is something also I learned from Sojin. People come here and they want to pin things down quickly, they want, you know, it's like, I want to name this relationship, I want to make sure, I hear I need a teacher, so will you be my teacher? And that happens. And I think that a good response is, let's not talk about this now, let's just meet, let's just encounter each other and see what happens.

[30:14]

see how a relationship evolves. But as it evolves, it has to evolve on the basis of honesty and mutual accountability. Suzuki Roshi talks about this in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. No, I'm sorry, not always so. So part of this accountability and honesty, it begins with yourself. He says, the way to extend your practice is to expose yourself as you are without trying to be someone else. When you are very honest with yourself and brave enough you can expose yourself fully. Whatever people may think, it's all right.

[31:20]

Just be yourself, at least for your teacher. That is actual practice, your actual life. So unless you trust your teacher, this is rather difficult. But if you find your teacher's spirit is the same as your spirit, then you will be brave enough to continue practicing in this way. And then he says, as some of us have experienced and will in the future, sometimes you have to argue with your teacher. That's okay. But you have to understand her and be ready to give up your argument. When you are wrong, when you find yourself foolishly sticking to one point of view, or when you are making some excuse, that's how to be honest with yourself. then you can give up. Okay, I surrender. I'm sorry. I think that, from my perspective, the teacher needs to be able to do exactly the same thing.

[32:25]

It's not just that the student may be right or wrong, the teacher may be right or wrong. And here he goes into that. Oh, this is great. You and your teacher are aiming to have perfect communication. For a teacher, the important point is always to be ready to surrender to the disciple. When a teacher realizes he is wrong, he can say, oh, you're right, I'm wrong. If your teacher has that kind of spirit, you will be encouraged to admit your mistake as well, even when it's not so easy. If you continue this kind of practice, people may say, you're crazy, something is wrong with you, but it doesn't matter. This is a wonderful passage. It's page 9 in Not Always So. So I always keep in mind, something that, an expression that Lori came up with a few years ago.

[33:37]

She said, where my teacher is ahead of me, I will follow. Where they're not, don't follow. I think this is in line with, as Bob Dylan said, don't follow leaders, watch your parking I could have the whole lecture I could explicate. That could be a whole lecture. So don't follow authority blindly. It has to be on the basis of trust. I think a good way to work with a teacher, there's this process of what's called pecking and tapping. in Zen. So the metaphor is an ancient one.

[34:43]

When a chick is ready to emerge from the egg, the chick is tapping from the inside of the shell, and the mother hen is helping by pecking. In a commentary it points out, this has to be very carefully timed. If the mother hen pecks too soon, this does not have a good outcome. If the chick is tapping from the inside and the hen doesn't help, that also doesn't have a good outcome. So everything has to be just right, just in time. So what I suggest, in terms of pecking and tapping, I've tried to do this with my teacher to

[36:03]

ask, I might ask him what he thinks we should be working on at any given moment, what he sees that is unfinished in me that could use some improvement. At the same time, the teacher, and I try to do this might ask the student, what do you think you should be working on? And let's work on that together. This is pecking and tapping. What is a teacher?

[37:09]

What is a student? We have a lot of mature practitioners here. We have a lot of practice leaders. We have a head teacher. We have a vice abbot. We are all teaching each other. What we want is a room full, a community full of people who know who we are. We know each of us knows who we are so that we can benefit ourselves and all sentient beings. That's the point. Take it out from this laboratory of the zendo into the world and carry zazen forward into the world not uh here we're sitting that's the primary activity but zazen mind pervades everything that we do and yet it's impossible to encapsulate or uh

[38:32]

summarize what Zazen mind is. So we help ourselves to understand that by showing each other how we are carrying our Zazen forward. Showing our teachers, being teachers, always being students. At any moment, we have an opportunity to learn. So I think that's where I want to leave it and and have some time for conversation or questions. Just to say, this is a kind of speculative and dispersive talk, but if any of it was confusing or not useful, please throw it out. Yes? I'm Roberta, and thank you very much. I really enjoyed that. was concentrating on something that Sultan had talked about some time ago, a year maybe, in terms of the teacher also being the friend.

[39:40]

And I noted that you said when you first encountered Sultan, he was not this, he was not that, he was not your friend. But I remember this one talk Sultan gave in which he did stress that, and that not friend in the way that we typically usually refer to our friends, but this very special friend. And I had a discussion with Zildjian after a tea regarding that, and it made a huge difference for me, because it did open that door for intimacy, where I could share a vulnerable part of myself, and he was very open in his side. Right. I was meeting a friend in what are conventional senses. There's an exchange between Ananda and the Buddha where Ananda asks the Buddha, what do you think of friendship?

[40:46]

And the Buddha puts it back on Ananda and says, what do you think? And Ananda says, I think it's half the holy way. And the Buddha says, no, don't say that. friendship is the whole of the path. There's a word in Pali, kalyanamita, which is spiritual friend, and it's not spiritual in some holy way, but it's like really being there with and for each other. That level of friendship. Thank you. Thank you for your talk. Was the Buddha perfect? Was the Buddha perfect? I don't know.

[41:48]

I wasn't there. Why does it matter? It just came up for me. You were talking about the imperfection of of teachers, and it just came up for me. I'd say that probably Prince Siddhartha was not perfect, but that changed. We have this conundrum. The Buddha is referred to as perfect, at the same time as he was human. So, it's unavoidable. One may be perfect, but it's unavoidable. Doing things that are painful may be unavoidable. There's a whole discourse around the fact that he left his family.

[42:56]

It's hard to get around. is you could also look at from our perspective, you know, there's also the question about the admission of women to the ranks of the ordained or to create full nuns and clearly he resisted that. Now from our sort of postmodern Perfect, in a sense, means to me he was able to change and grow. In that sense, it seems to me he was always doing that. Does perfect mean not having any resistances? This is a question. Let's not set standards for ourselves that

[44:00]

are completely out of sync with reality. But let's hold a standard of being able to grow and change. That's, I think, what I feel about perfection. Anyhow, it's an ongoing question. Yes? You say that this comes up over and over, that we should know ourselves, and as I understand it, that means to know that we aren't really ourselves, we're really like the universe, but does that also mean that we should also understand how this small self operates? Yes. Okay. Yes. It's good to be the universe, but who brushes your teeth? We're constantly, we're this dynamic and fluid, we have this dynamic and fluid existence that is simultaneously universal and vast and completely incomprehensible and very particular and

[45:23]

silly and cranky and stupid, you know, and maybe also loving and attentive and happy, very particular. And those things interpenetrate in a wonderful way. And the interpenetration itself, you can't get your mind around. So, yes, I think you've stated it. Your question included its answer. Thank you. Afsaneh. I wanted to ask you about the notion of mutual accountability. You said that and honesty are sort of the two components of trust in a relationship. For me. For you. Yes. So talk about accountability a little bit. When you really build a relationship, so I can talk about it in terms of my relationship with Sojourn, if you will.

[46:27]

I don't want to keep landing on that, not to make that special or make him special, but this is the agreement. This is what I feel like I signed on for when I became a priest. And what I signed on for, he didn't tell me to do this, but what I felt was important was not to make, say, large decisions or sudden moves without being in dialogue with him. And this went way back. I mean, just like when Lori and I fell in love, we went and we talked to our teachers about it. And at every step, you know, when she was going to move in here, when we were thinking about getting married, we talked to our teachers.

[47:31]

And so that basically, not so that they were telling us what to do or what not to do, but just so they knew what was going on with us. and I feel like in a lot of ways that's in over time has it works in the other direction as well where my teacher might also tell me what's going on with him or what he's thinking about etc and I feel This is talking with some of the teachers at SPOT. This is a value that we've really evolved together as peers. And I think it's really important in my relationship with you in this room. I'm not the founder of this place.

[48:33]

There's less verticality, if you will. Some of us have really grown up together or tried to grow up together in this context. And so we owe each other that kind or that quality of connection. Does that make sense? Yeah. Maybe one more. Yes, Kenyatta. You came home and just thought about community and accountability. how to make this work and talk. I want you to explain more about community accountability. Well, I think what I mean by community accountability is what we see by living here, practicing together, doing Seshin, working together. A Seshin is a... We've been doing this for so long.

[49:35]

It seems like it goes like clockwork, but actually it depends on everybody doing and knowing their part and also being able to step. Community kind of means also being able to step into a need when it arises. So, you know, if a person gets sick, another person steps forward. If a person is not seeing something, you might carefully point it out, or you might not. There's a lot to it. Yeah, go ahead. You said something about welcoming new, bringing new people in, how to do that as a community. I'm thinking about that part too, about the accountability of bringing new members in and out, to welcome that whole accountability part on community. It's tricky, you know, because The thing about community is there's a tendency, there's a centripetal energy, there's a tendency to circle around because we all know each other, and for somebody who is approaching, you know, to feel, oh, this is a closed circle.

[51:00]

We talk about this a lot. I don't know how good we are at it because I'm in the circle. But I think it's the responsibility of people who've been here and who are as part of the community to be open and welcoming to people who are coming so that they can actually find their way in. Don't do too much for them. There's a very fine balance. It's not like everybody comes in, we wrap their arms around them and say, oh, this is the greatest thing, welcome, we're so glad to have you, but actually let them just be human in connection so that the person can actually find their own way in. Does that make sense? That's a good place to end. I think I'm going to do a Q&A. I just sort of wanted to open this up because I've been thinking about it for the last week and so we'll continue.

[52:14]

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