Unsurpassed, penetrating in Earth Day Dharma, it is where we admit, even in a hundred thousand million couples, having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of love to talk to others' words. Hello everyone and BCC's in Zendo Sangha as well as the online Sangha. And welcome to the Saturday Dharma Talk. Today's speaker is Mary Duryea. Mary is a retired mediator and psychologist. She grew up in the Northwest and came to the Bay Area to attend school in 1967 and has been here ever since. She first walked through the gate at BCC in 1993, received lay ordination from Sergeant Mel Weitzman in 2004, was head student, or SHUSO, in 2017, and received lay entrustment in 2023 from Hoson Allen Sinaki, our current abbot.

[01:21]

She is married to Libby and lives in Oakland. Thank you for coming. Thank you very much, Ross. How's the sound? Okay. And out there? Good. Good. Thank you all for being here today. We have a motherful house. Welcome. Welcome to all of us, friends, including those who just walked in the door for the first time. Welcome to you. And to those people who feel still kind of new, know that to the people who just walked in the door, you're old timers. And to people who are returning to practice or to this Sangha, having been away for a while. And a special bow of gratitude to all those people who have been

[02:29]

maintaining the practice over the last month and a half and carrying on in the beautiful, steady way that we have been doing. And what a moment this is. The moment that we live in. Thinking about the people of the world who are living in war, whose suffering we read about and bear witness to with searing images. And all those reports eclipse the other great story of the great famine that is going on in the world, mainly in Africa and partly in the Middle East. and the confusing and sometimes terrifying way that our country is divided right now.

[03:39]

And the way that we are unbelievably revisiting that kind of Jim Crow racism and homophobia and transphobia and all kinds of othering in that way. We are well into Black History Month at a time when, unbelievably also, that history is attempting to be rewritten again, or unwritten, I guess I should say. And on top of all of that, what a wild ride we're having right here, the Sangha. Right here in our own midst, we're walking alongside our abbot Hozon. We're trying to stay where he is even when we actually don't know where he is.

[04:44]

We are in our 47th or 46th day of this journey with him. For those of you new here and The short story is that he landed back in the hospital after a surgery and then into intensive care where he's been for a month and a half, most of that time unconscious and has just been waking up in ways that we didn't know would happen. We still don't know what's going to happen. So how do we manage all of this? How do we, when this is our life, the intensity of this moment really creates a complimentary need for an intensity of practice, I think.

[05:49]

I can hear Sojun say in my mind's ear, this has always been thus. And at the time, I found that strangely reassuring. I don't know if I feel that way. He was probably quoting his teacher, Suzuki Roshi, who said, there will always be war, but we must always work to oppose it. He also said, and I think it's worth reading the whole thing, you may foolishly try to ignore karma, but this will never work. And if you fight it too much, you will invite destruction that is worse than war. We are actually creating war through our everyday activities. You talk about peace in some angry mood when actually you are creating war with that angry mood. And then he yells, ah!

[06:52]

That is war. We should know. We should open our Dharma eyes and together we should help each other forever. That's a great admonition, I think. What can we rely on? This is a question I brought initially to practice here. What can I rely on? What can we rely on? In a Shosan ceremony, several decades ago, the Shosan ceremony is a dharma question and answer in which everyone in the room has an opportunity to ask the abbot a question. And the abbot doesn't answer so much as response. So in this Shosan ceremony, the abbot in the abbot's chair was Sojin Mel Weitzman.

[07:55]

And my question was, why? when I look up at the night sky and see how vast the universe is and feel how small I am, why does that feel relieving and not terrifying? And he said, because you are cooperating with the universe. And I had no idea what that meant. I liked it. It had a kind of intuitive resonance, and it sort of matched the feeling I feel when I'm out in the wilderness. Because how you survive in wilderness is by cooperating with it. I think I've only, and I don't even know if I'm close to it now, but I've only recently had some kind of hunch about what that might mean. But that is my other question.

[08:57]

What do we rely on and what does it mean to cooperate with the universe when this is our universe? Typically, the gate that we go through, the entry point we try to go through in practice is the study of the self. I've been reading Uchiyama, who is no longer alive, but as a contemporary, he was the abbot of anti-gene. And what I like about him, this is from opening the hand of thought, is that he uses plain language in a way that sort of bypasses our usual Buddhist jargon that ends up being words that, do I know what that means? Do I know what practice means? Do I know what emptiness is? words we use.

[09:58]

So here he is. We are as selves quite like that, like the flame of a candle. As wax melts near a lit wick and burns, it emits light near the tip of the candle and that appears as a more or less fixed shape. It is this seemingly unchanging shape that we refer to as flame. Although both body and mind are an unceasing flow, since they preserve what seems to be a constant form, we refer to them as I. Actually, there is no I existing as some substantial thing. There is only ceaseless flow. goes on, impermanence is ungraspable, but this never implies non-existence.

[11:08]

We live within the flow of impermanence, maintaining a temporary form similar to an eddy in the flow of a river. You can see why I like, which yeah, those of you who are not, I spent some time on rivers. Though the water is always flowing, the eddy, like the flame of a candle, arises out of various conditions, as a form that seems to be fixed, that there is a seemingly fixed form that is based on various conditions, that's interdependence. In the case of the flame, it is the interdependence of such things as wax, the temperature, and the air. In the case of the eddy, it is the volume and speed of the current, the topography, and so forth. that form the conditions of its existence. Not only are there such things as Eddie in flames, but indeed everything in the universe can be considered in a similar way.

[12:24]

This is, I think, a rather elegant way of talking about non-duality. but we also call emptiness, which I think is a hard word to wrap one's mind around. But what he's saying, I think, is that we, everything, everything that we can see around us is flow, is in a flow, dependent on causes and conditions, dependent on everything else, and interdependent. I think we can contribute to the flow. We put a paddle in the water. but we're not controlling the flow. Honshu says, follow the current and paddle along. We may paddle, but we are following. So Ujiyama is speaking about figuring out how to soften this idea of the hardened self, the hardened fixed self that we call I.

[13:29]

and see it as part of a flow, as ever-changing. And we touch this flow in Zazen. We call it Samadhi. In this flow, there is no separation between self and other. This is actually the world of true equality, where we don't put category, things in categories. We don't have boundaries around things. Especially meaningless categories like race, gender, age, ability, sexual preference, gender, It's a place beyond concepts.

[14:34]

I mean, one way of thinking about it is you can see a tree out there, and just the word tree is already drawing a boundary around the roots, the stem, the trunk, the branches, the leaves, and we call that the tree, right? But you could just as easily say the tree is the mycelium that it feeds off and communicates with. and the soil and the photosynthesis, which is part of the tree, is also, you could include light and carbon dioxide and water as the essential. So now where's the boundary? There are forests where it looks like there's all, you know, many, many trees, and it turns out it's all one organism. I... I'm particularly fond of these metaphors and also these discoveries in science that sort of speak to this interrelationship and so forth.

[15:43]

And one of them I particularly have been chewing on for a while comes from this book, Breath, that you may have read by James Nestor. And this sort of factoid stood out for me. He said, We have more non-DNA cells in our body than cells that are our own DNA. Did you know that? Some people did. So I had to look that up, naturally, and what the estimate is, is that in the average, typical adult human body, There are 30 trillion human cells which are stamped with the DNA. We made those cells. We could call that self if we wanted to, I suppose. And about 38 trillion bacteria, also known as our microbiome, right?

[16:50]

We actually need these guys. These are not just a good idea. They are essential to our health. The health of our microbiome informs the health of our skin, of our pulmonary function, of our heart function, and the functioning of our minds. These little guys can send chemical messages to our minds that form cravings about what they want to eat. So if you've ever tried to change your diet, like for example, take out sugar, you've got to coordinate with these guys. Because they will send you messages about what they want. And what you're doing is changing the culture in your body. So as I sort of chewed on this for a while, I realized it has encouraged me to stop telling my body what to do.

[17:54]

Like as if I'm in charge. Because It's not, I don't think it works like that. I think it's better almost to think of the thing that I usually think of as me or my mind as being a kind of personal assistant to this melange of parts of ourselves, which we participate in, that we're participating in life, that are part of us, that are, I don't know, So it doesn't stop there. It has rewritten or remodeled, I would say, our notion of the immune system. Because if you have more cells that are not your DNA, how do they know that they're... I mean, we had this thing like the immune system is protecting ours from foreign bodies, right? The non-self. So what is self and what is non-self under those circumstances?

[18:57]

Well, it turns out actually it's not just one immune system, it's a complex system. In one book I read called The Elegant Defense, he said that the immune system is the most complex communication system on the planet, bar none. And the T cells and the B cells all have different functions. They get trained. They're trainers, and they're generals, and they're warriors, and some are parked in a particular place waiting for things to get out of hand. And what's happening is that the immune system is keeping things in balance. It's not a battle between self and non-self. They're a peacekeeping mission, like bouncers at a party. when things get out of hand.

[19:59]

And he calls that, Matt Richtel I think is the author of the book, the festival of life that is our body. Back to Uchiyama now. This is a sentence that stopped me in my tracks. Buddhist teachings explain the self as life. I don't know why nobody ever told me that before. Buddhist teachings explain that self is life. And they explain the vivid world that self lives in as an interdependence. or the middle way.

[21:03]

Now, a lot of ink has been spilled on the middle way, but I guess one way that you could talk about it is that there is no independent substantial entity. There's no independent thing called Mary or the soul of Mary that is fixed. It is just flow, just life. And it is not, and he, which Yama calls that the universal self. It is the self that is connected and the same as the life in each person in this room. And we are ultimately and intimately connected. We share life. And that is the continuity. Someone, I heard this story must be third or fourth hand, someone brought their suffering about climate change to Blanche Hartman, who was someone who had started here at Berkeley Zen Center and ended up at some point being the abbot at San Francisco Zen Center.

[22:16]

And her response to that was, life always wins. And related to this, we celebrate our ancestors. We celebrate our ancestors here as family. And we think of ourselves as family, even though we are not, well, I don't know, some of those might be related by actual DNA and blood, but mostly probably not. I was listening to a podcast recently by Trevor Noah, who was interviewing Kerry Washington, who had just written a memoir called Thicker Than Water. It's about finding out that her father was not biologically her father, but he had raised her and she thought of him as her father.

[23:30]

It was a family secret and it turned out it was the result of a very early IVF procedure. She had known her father and her memoirs about that. And in the process of talking about it, Trevor Noah and his brilliance about doing research said, do you know the origins of the phrase blood is thicker than water? And she said no, even though that's part of the title of her book. She said he, and it looked like at least there's some good evidence for this, that it originally meant the opposite of what we think. We think of it as meaning that being related by blood is closer than being not related by blood. But he was positing that the original meant was the blood of the covenant of the vow is stronger than the water of the amniotic fluid. completely switches to that.

[24:35]

That chosen family and familial relationship is what counts. One of the things that Hozon did, started in 2020, and I think he finally finalized in 2022, was changing the echo that we do in service. And the echo is a celebration and an appreciation of ancestors generally. And we appreciate our ancestors. They are alive for us because they keep teaching us. And here's what we say. I'll just read the whole thing. May our practice be seen with the awakened eye of Buddha and may Buddha respond to our sincerity. We now dedicate our chanting to this temple's deceased members, relatives, and friends, to the Ohlone peoples and all the unceded lands, early inhabitants, to this world's actual benefactors, including those whose bodies and labors were taken against their will, and to all sentient beings in the realm of the true law, may they be completely enlightened.

[25:50]

We can all claim all of these ancestors. We need to learn from all of these ancestors. We need their wisdom. We need our black ancestors and our Buddhist ancestors of Chinese and Japanese and Indian originations. And all the peoples and cultures have landed on these soils. We need them. We need them all. We learn from them all. It is truly a matter that we must lift every voice. We are in relationship with all of them. And this is interdependence.

[26:55]

Interdependence, I think, is relationship. And I think impermanence is flow. So what can we rely on? Come back to that. What does it mean to cooperate with the universe? Well, I'm going to try to leave time to hear your answers to these questions, but I'll posit some of my own. But I think it would be good to have a conversation about what we can all rely on. One thought that I've had is that accepting the inevitability of the flow is part of it. and our interdependence, our relationship, our relational qualities with one another.

[28:00]

Someone once asked Mel in a lecture, why don't we ever talk about love? And he sort of crankily said, we don't talk about anything else. And Judy Fleischman, in a talk, a few weeks ago talked about Hosen's teaching as relationship, as cooperation. And I think this means and includes not getting ahead of the flow, anchoring oneself in this moment, and pulling oneself back from the grief of projected loss, or anticipated loss, and pulling oneself back from the dreams and hopes of might come. Although it's not, I don't mean to say that it's going to be normal for us to project ourselves into some future catastrophe or some dream.

[29:11]

It's really not. Our minds work that way. It's about returning. It's about returning over and over to this moment. In my river running days, I like to say, row the water you're in. Now when you're in a boat, it's wild all around you and you're in a rather small. It's possible that the current that you can see on this side and on that side and in front is actually doing something different than the water that is actually underneath your boat. And the water beneath your boat is the only current that matters in that moment in terms of what your boat will do. Cooperating means, I think, respecting the power of that flow and not trying to stop it, divert it, change it. Cooperating with it.

[30:13]

I was once on a camping trip and river trip where some fellow said, I can put any boat, any place I want in any river, any time. And everybody looked at him and just went, what? and laugh because actually the current wins always. The current is always bigger than us, actually. And you can trust it. You can trust it to hold you up. You can float and figure out how to finesse your way through it. So I think our job is to collaborate.

[31:23]

In Suzuki's eyes, we should open our dharma eyes and together we should help each other forever. When I was with Hosanna in the hospital at one point, before he had completely awakened and he was fussing and jerking, I had the thought, which I gratefully did not say out loud, that I said, oh, Hoson, your practice is patience. And I thought later, you know, if somebody said that to me under those circumstances, I would have hit him if I could. And I went home and thought about it, and I thought, actually what I mean, really is cooperate with healing. Trust the flow, attune, align, and accord.

[32:30]

So that's my short answer. What's on your mind? And if you would say your name so the people at home can know. Hi, Mary. Thank you for your talk. My name is Ben Clausen. One time at Shosong with Sojin, I forget exactly what year. I asked maybe a similar question to one of yours that you shared. I was thinking a lot about sickness, old age, and death, and had a lot of grief around that.

[33:37]

And I asked Sojin, is there anything I can rely on? And he said, you say rely on for how long? And I realized that I meant forever. But what would that be? I don't know if I have anything better to say, but as I've thought about it over the few years, I think it matches what you're talking about with flow and current. It's like in that moment, anything that appears, you could rely on, but then in the next moment, maybe something else. So maybe everything and nothing at the same time. Thank you. Thank you for your talk. Hi, Mary.

[34:56]

Hi, Ross. When you were thinking about asking Hozan to be your practice as patients, and then you ended your talk with those elements that came together, it felt to me that those are the elements of patience, the result of patience that I think you were kind of wanting to access. My question is, the story of your finding that peace, looking at the universe, I never thought about this, I'm wondering what you think. That kind of represents the vastness, the spaciousness that we want for ourselves to feel that kind of We tend to shrink up, so we go out into nature, we do those sorts of things. And when I heard someone saying, we're all made of stardust, I thought, well, if that's true, then that vastness is in you and in me.

[35:59]

And so when we maybe have a difference of opinion, we kind of lose sight of that. So how do we return or remember that we're just the stardust? How do you get distracted, and how do you work with that distraction, that forgetfulness about whatever this thing is in front of me, in front of us? How do you do it? Well, breathing helps, but that's not so personal. The feeling of the rising and falling in breath, It's this quiet thing that we feel, that I feel if I'm out in the so-called nature or universe. And it's personal to me in a sense, but it's not personal to the other, because it's just breathing. But then we're breathing together, like we were doing in the hospital.

[36:59]

And that kind of quiets my mind and my being in feeling separate. Yeah. Well, absolutely. Being in the presence of awe about the universe and about life and about, I mean, the experience of awe feels, that feels... I think part of the feeling of looking up at the night sky was I'm so relieved I'm not in charge. And it's okay. It's okay not to be in charge. It's handled. Things are handled. And there's a kind of letting go.

[38:01]

Thank you. Thank you. In the back, John. I think that's one. We also have someone online when you're ready, Mary. Okay, good. Hi, Mary. I'm John. Responding to Ben's question, the five remembrances which are having us recount old age, sickness, and death ends with the only ground you can stand on is your own actions. So in spite of losing everything, you still

[39:11]

can act. Thank you. I'm gonna take this and then, is that Nathan? Hi, Mary. Hi, Nathan. Thank you for your talk. The sense of humility that I feel, you know, reflecting on what you're talking about, that our microbiome isn't just a good idea. I feel very grateful having that to reflect on. And I guess the question is, how do you carry that humility out into a world where it's not reflected?

[40:22]

Where, I don't know, I think about the hubris of the AI enterprise that we are hurtling towards without seemingly any recourse. And the the lack of humility, you know, that's reflected in that. And I wonder how can you meaningfully carry that sense of smallness, interconnectedness flow into that world? Well, the thing that comes immediately to mind is the feeling that arises in me when I hear a prognostication about Hozum.

[41:23]

And partly, it's informed from my having worked for many years in the family law court in LME County working with parents trying to put together schedules for their kids in the face of their conflict with one another. And I would be asked by an attorney or a judge or a parent, what is this plan gonna do to this child when he's this age? And I learned to say, I don't know. I once said that on the stand, on the witness stand, and the judge stopped the proceedings and said, have you ever heard a psychologist say that? It turns out actually psychologists are worse prognosticators than anybody else. Somebody studied that.

[42:27]

But coming back to the prognostication that we're dealing with right now, that's right in front of us, Hozon is already an outlier. If you look at it statistically, people who have been unconscious for as long as he was unconscious often do not wake up. And there was a lot of preparation going on about his not waking up and what to do and plans in that direction. And then, he started waking up. And we still don't know where that's going or how long it's gonna take or how much of him will wake up. And what's happened is that people are, you know, make a plan for this, we're gonna make a plan for this moment and we're gonna move him there in order for him to do that. And then it turns out that that plan gets upset in 24 hours because he starts doing the thing they were gonna train for and so he doesn't, You know, he's not eligible anymore to go there, so we have to think of something else.

[43:31]

So, we don't know. That's what I come back to over and over again. We don't, and feeling comfortable in saying we don't know. Learning to feel comfortable with not knowing is, we're getting in a whole advanced class on that. we can all graduate with big degrees after this, maybe. Anyway, that's the immediate application that I see. Thanks. I think Susan. Thank you, Mary, for your talk. My feeling is thinking mind has a lot to do with what you're talking about, and I wonder if you might say something about your experience of what happens to thinking mind or in retrospect what happened to thinking mind when you're in that place you were describing of awe or in the flow?

[44:48]

What happens? Well, the most dramatic thing that happens, I think, is that all my voices stop. My yadda yadda yadda. You're doing it wrong. I mean, all of the chatter stops. Which is relieving. And I think So where does it go? Who knows? Maybe it doesn't go anywhere, it just stops doing what it usually does and makes some space. And part of that is, part of allowing that or letting go into that is learning to trust that what is needed will arise, which is

[46:00]

hard for the thinking mind to trust because you want it in writing. You want to be able to think it, right? And that whatever prajna comes in those moments kind of comes from a place you don't know. You can't figure it out, right? I mean, isn't that the definition of intuition? It's like, where did that come from? and calming the mind to say, you know, it's okay if something comes up that you didn't actually think yourself, you know, that you didn't figure out all by yourself. But that, I think that's a journey. Hi Mary, thank you for being here.

[47:14]

How does Zazen fit in with these alternating states you experience? It is the ground of it. I mean, the practice of it. I mean, how have you been in such shame and walked out and noticed that the world looked different? Brighter or more staggy in some way. Or have you, I mean, The thing about Zazen is that not all Zazen periods are the same, and sometimes they're busy and having a lot of thoughts in it. But still, there is a ground under that.

[48:18]

That is what we touch. That's the flow that we're talking about, I think. No. I'm not hearing you. You're not hearing you. Are you unmuted? Thanks for your talk. Can you hear me now? Now, yes. Yeah. Your talk was really very relevant to my recent experience. I'm trying to help a friend who's hospitalized in a facility in San Francisco. And so I'm in relationship to the health care system and specifically Kaiser.

[49:27]

And I'm not in awe of it. So I have lots and lots of chatter about what they should be doing. what is going to happen if they do what they say they're going to do. And yesterday, I had a meltdown, a really unusual meltdown, on the phone with a medical social worker while standing in a Japanese grocery store. I was in the grocery store. And I heard myself say, I felt that I was... I felt that I was being asked to do something that was really so unreasonable. And I heard myself say, I won't do it right there in the market. And the I in that sentence was exactly the I that you're talking about. And what I was doing was just sticking my paddle in the flow to try to stop it.

[50:32]

And so I guess so this morning I woke up and I scripted an apology to the social worker for being uncooperative. And I haven't even I haven't had a chance to make that apology. But I think that might allow the two of us to move forward a little bit. But my question is, there will be moments when the voice that is saying this is not acceptable just emerges. It's not always necessary to defer to the flow of the systems that we're embedded in. The systems that we're embedded in, the man-made ones, are not on our side in many ways.

[51:43]

They're not on the universe's side. They're not on the side of the person who we're trying to help. So, yeah, I think there's a question in there. I'm going to stop. boy, I so feel for you. I mean, from direct experience, I know that there is wisdom in saying this is not okay to things that are going on. There is wisdom in that. And I think It takes real skill and a lot of practice. And sometimes, and often, we don't get a right to be able to say, this is unacceptable and I will not accept it in a way that isn't creating the internal war that Suzuki Roshi was talking about, speaking it in anger, but figuring out how to say it in a way that

[52:59]

has the best chance of landing on doing no harm at the same time as being as adamant as you need to be about the circumstance, right? And that, boy, that's a life journey from my point of view. I mean, that's what we're endeavoring here, but it's hard. It's hard, and we make mistakes. We all make mistakes. And then we have to prepare. I'm pretty sure that that social worker has probably hurt worse than what you doled out. Thank you for your work with that person. I'm gonna cooperate with the clock. It's 11.15, so this is gonna be very quick.

[54:02]

Thank you. I love it when you talk about river dharma. It just occurs to me that when you were in the hospital room and you thought, oh Hosanna, you're practicing patients now, and then some voice arose and said, you don't need to say that. Maybe you were also speaking to yourself, because I feel that we have to practice patients every bit as much as we do. Thank you.

[54:43]

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