An unsurpassed, penetrating, and perfect karma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata, mid-summer morning here in Berkeley. The sun is out. So this morning, tomorrow actually, we're going to begin a week of ceremonies for Dharma transmission. And the priests who are receiving transmission are our good friends Carol Paul, whose Dharma name is

[01:08]

Shiken Seigetsu, Clear Intention, Serene Moon, and Hanamira, Kijin Seisho, Resolute Love, Clear Illumination. And they have been serving our sangha for many years, and really pouring their hearts into our practice. And so this will be... I'm going to speak about what I understand dharma transmission to be, at least in this context. But this is a... It's a recognition. It's an entrustment. It's the confirmation of a trust that's already been long established. Although, if I look around, I don't see either of them. here. They're afraid to show their face today, perhaps.

[02:14]

But you'll see them around. They'll be here doing a lot of bowing and chanting and also working on the transmission documents. I'm going to say a little about all these things as I go along and also leave time for you to ask questions. It's a somewhat bottomless subject, and I want you to have a sense of what's going on. I was thinking back 35 years. I think that's right. 35 years ago, I did a practice period at Tassahara. in the spring of 1988, and a lot of things happened in that practice period for me. That was also where I met Laurie, who was the current abbot, Tenshin Roshi's assistant.

[03:23]

And one of the things that happened was I loved the monastic practice at Tazahara, and There was a whole cohort of people kind of my age who had just received priest ordination from Tenshin Roshi pretty shortly before coming down to Tasa Hara for the practice period. And they were, a lot of them became my pals. And actually they became lifelong friends. And one of the things that I saw was their commitment to the Dharma was, I felt like my commitment to the Dharma was like theirs. And I began to think about whether I might want to become a priest.

[04:28]

And that was just, we had just had the year before the first priest ordinations here in Berkeley. There were three of them. One person left shortly after ordination, but the two that I really looked to were my elder sisters, Fran Tribe and Maile Scott. And they were also examples to me. I did see them as elders, much more mature. The people that I encountered as priests, I felt, were more contemporary, perhaps. And then every day, we chanted the Buddhas and ancestors. We chanted the whole temple lineage, which went from the seven Buddhas before Buddha to

[05:34]

Suzuki Roshi. We would do that at service every day. And it called up for me a feeling I wanted to be in that family. Which didn't mean that I wanted to reject my birth family. It's just like this is where I wanted to pledge myself as a path for life. And the other thing that went on in that practice period was five people received Dharma transmission. And one of them is actually sitting in this room right now. Zeng Yu, Paul Disco, was one of that group. So, I think Zeng Yu and Catherine Tanis and Ananda Dahlenberg, is that right, Paul?

[06:36]

I don't remember. They received transmission from Tension and Blanche Hartman and Norman Fisher received transmission from Sojin and there was a lot of activity. Owitsu Roshi was down to help with the ceremonies and so was Kobanchino Roshi and this just gave a a vitality to our practice period, even though we had no idea this was all done kind of out of the sight of the ordinary garden-variety Zen students. But all those people were in the Zendo every day, and we knew that something was churning along. And at that time, I will say, I had no... I felt that Dharma transmission was a very rarefied event in life, and I didn't... I had no notion of aspiring to that or anything.

[07:52]

I didn't know it was something you could aspire to. I didn't know how it worked. So... But that was... inspiring to me and I'll come back. The theme that I want to touch on is Dharma transmission, but also the whole of our practice as family practice. And I'll come back to some of the things that scholars write about it because particularly in the Zen tradition, If you look at the rituals, and I'll tell you a little about them, what you see is that they replicate relationships, just close and extended family relationships that to some degree may be rooted in

[09:01]

the Confucian traditions of East Asia. And so this question of family or lineage is very important. And I think what I would say is that I had an intuitive sense of this, but as I study it more and as I go through the various ordinations, I see more clearly how this is an expression of our practice. And it reinforces my feeling about our Sangha family. And to be so, to feel so blessed to have landed in this pretty functional family. Pretty functional. Certainly more functional than my birth family was. And maybe a lot of you feel that. So, I wanted to say something about the potential arc of practice that we have in our tradition.

[10:19]

When you feel really grounded and you feel at home in this practice, you can ask your teacher to receive lay ordination, zaikei tokodo, which really translates as home dwellers ordination. It is an ordination. And it's also, in Japan, more, it's not unusual that this is the ordination that you'd receive as part of your funeral, that you wouldn't necessarily have lay ordination and wear a rakasu like some people are wearing, or receive a Dharma name in the course of your life. But in order to be reborn in the Buddha lands, you're ordained at death.

[11:25]

So we don't wait that long. and say, you should be reborn, you could be reborn in the Buddha Land now. And so that's a ceremony that we have and we're going to our next lay ordination ceremony where people have sown their ratsu and studied the precepts. It's a precept ceremony. You receive the precept in a formal way. They are given to you correctly from a teacher who has also received them in a formal way. So that's one aspect of the practice. After a time, you may be invited to be the head student for a practice period. And that's perhaps when you begin

[12:27]

you begin to give Dharma talks, and you begin to have, you've manifested some potential to be able to guide people in the Dharma. And then, well, actually I skipped a skip. Before you're Shuso, if you're a lay person, you may be Shuso. If you have taken the path of becoming a priest, which means being really committed to the kind of liturgical and ministerial aspects of the practice, you would receive a priest ordination, novice priest ordination, before you became the head student. And I will say that This is something Sojin talked about over and over again and Suzuki Roshi talked about where the distinction between lay and priest is not so clear.

[13:37]

There are many people here who are lay people who practice with a commitment and a focus and a in service to the community in the way that one would think of as a priest practicing. So it's not so clear. And that's something we can talk about another time. But it's also a path that some people follow and some people stay with their lay practice. And if they stay with their lay practice as they mature, they would potentially receive what we call lay entrustment. which is an ordinate recognition. You could use either word, which is a ritual that I think Sojan and a few others at San Francisco Zen Centers created as a way of recognizing the depth and maturity of people.

[14:51]

This is a very unusual situation that we have here, to have You know, if you look around the room, there's so many people who've been practicing 15, 20, 25 years or more as lay people coming week by week, day by day, year by year, and coming and doing this challenging practice, sitting and facing the wall, facing themselves, and creating harmonious relations. This is, it's really wonderful. Whereas in Asia, there'll be often quite a distinction between ordained people and lay people, more of the lay responsibility, in a sense, was to take care of the

[15:56]

ordained people. Well, it's not so much actually, but it's also the ordained people's responsibility to take care of the lay people. And here we all take care of each other. And so lay entrustment is, it's the recognition and confirmation of a lay person's maturity And then we have dharma transmission for people who are on a priest path. And I think there was a lot of confusion. And it's still, the meaning of dharma transmission is not so clear. You know, when early on in San Francisco Zen Center, we had, you know, Suzuki Roshi was a teacher and in his last days, last period of his life, he gave Dharma transmission to Richard Baker.

[17:04]

And frankly, I think that a lot of people saw that as a kind of apotheosis, you know, a transmission of enlightenment or a confirmation of somebody's enlightenment. And was a long time before there were subsequent transitions in the transmissions in the San Francisco Zen Center family. Whereas, and it takes a long time, so I was, let's see, I was ordained as a priest for more than 10 years before I received Dharma transmission. Hannah in Hannah and Carol have been ordaining for a really long time. We see it as a recognition of maturity, whereas in Japan, it's seen actually as a stage of your training, a necessary stage of your training.

[18:13]

And so young men and women would receive Dharma transmission, and then they might go to do their their intensive monastic practice and then they would come back and take care of the temple and they would mature in the process of the monastic practice and in the process of taking care of the temple. Well here, dharma transmission is also a kind of confirmation of maturity. Again, looking at The Japanese tradition, we think of Dharma transmission as a very, we tend to think of it as a very high state or sort of an end state, but there's much more training beyond Dharma transmission, certainly in the formal Soto Zen tradition, and also as people know, for those who have lay entrustment and those who have Dharma transmission,

[19:23]

Our training continues. So I had Dharma Transmission in 1998. And then I continued to work and train with my teacher here until 2021. So that's another 23 years. And I'm still learning. I'm still a work in progress. And I think that's the way it was seen, that's kind of resonant with what we see in the Japanese practice. So... Contrary to other traditions that have evolved in the West,

[20:24]

there's this mysterious term, Roshi. And some places that's... In Soto, that's basically, it's a term of respect. You know, it means kind of respected old person who has some role. So you would have... When I was at Zuyoji in Japan, we had the Tenzo Roshi and the Ino Roshi, so the priests who were in those positions that you refer to them formally as Roshi, which just means, you know, deeply respected old guide. And so it's not something that's appropriate for a young person, and it's not something, it's not a title that's appended to your name when you receive drama transmission.

[21:30]

You kind of have to grow into it. And it's not so important. And it also, when we think of that term, it sort of implies enlightenment. But in our tradition, we begin with enlightenment. So, you know, we practice because we are already enlightened. And so what is there to gain? So I want to talk a little about what the ceremonies are, and then more about this family meeting, because I think this is really the heart of it. What's going to happen in the next week is a lot of bowing and chanting, a lot of honoring the ancestors, those that we know, those that we don't know.

[22:40]

We have added in, I'd say over the last decade, and the process of introspection, we honor the women ancestors. as well as the, frankly, constructed lineage of male ancestors that's been handed down to us in the Soto tradition. So we have women ancestors, we have male ancestors, and then also each of us has our own ancestors. All of them, in this process, we are honoring. And each of us can be doing and should be doing this every day, whether we do it in our hearts or we do it literally.

[23:41]

But what you'll see in the course of, if you're around in this next week, the deshi, the disciples, are going to go around early morning before zazen and do bows and make offerings to a cycle of altars around the property. And then at a certain point, they'll come in and do a bow and an offering to all the the official Soto lineage and the women ancestors. It's a lot of bowing. We're not going to ask Hannah and Carol Paul to do a full bow to each ancestor, but when you're younger, as I was when I received drama transmission, that's what you do.

[24:47]

In fact, usually this ceremony would extend over 21 days. And when they started doing it, because they did it in a seven-day period, they would do those bows three times a day. It's a lot of bowing. It's a very, it's a physical, it's a very physical process. And in the course of that they're also, people are doing their transmission documents they're working with a brush and ink on a silk cloth and doing various very complex documents that also each one of them lists all the ancestors and for those of us not used to working with brush and ink that's not so easy

[25:48]

It's pretty challenging. But it also builds the intensity of the process. When I did transmission with Mary Scott in Tassajara in the fall of 98, it was really, really hot. And right across the pathway from where we were our little scriptorium where we were writing, they were putting roofs on the buildings. And that was, it was just like, you know, pounding in our heads. And if you kept the wind, you wouldn't keep the windows closed, and if you kept the windows, to keep out some of the noise, but if you kept the windows closed, you were dripping with sweat. And it was just, it was a real physical ordeal. And it was quite wonderful. I was sitting there dripping and it's like, okay, I'm just doing this.

[26:56]

So the intensity of the practice is really wonderful. And it culminates in two ceremonies at the end of the week. The first one, then they take place on successive nights. The first one is called Denkai, which means transmission of the precepts. And it's where the Hanshi, the teacher, formally confers the precepts to the student in such a way that they can then transmit it to others. And it's a complex and beautiful ceremony. And then the following day, the ceremony is called Dembo, which means Transmission of the Dharma. And that gives you a place in the lineage. So on the documents, your name is at the bottom of the document, and then it goes back up to the head of the Buddha.

[28:10]

So these ceremonies take place It's supposed to take place at midnight, but we're too old, we're not going to wait up. I've got a band that I'm in, it's called the Midnight Ramblers, and we've come to the place where we think it should be the 9.30 Ramblers. Because after that, we want to go to sleep. So we'll begin at dark. But it takes place in a red room, which is traditionally what was done in China and done in Japan. And for this, Laurie and others have been working really hard to create a new red room for our temple, which we can use in the future. It's really beautiful. But what is that red room?

[29:12]

It's a womb. What's happening? One is born in this ceremony. So it's a birth. So this is what, something in it, there's an article by a wonderful scholar, William Bodiford, on transmission. And he said, Zen is, a powerful form of Buddhism because of Dharma transmission. It has ancestors whom it honors. It honors those ancestors by transmitting their legacy to proper descendants from generation to generation who will maintain and carry on the family traditions. In Zen, this process of transmitting a family legacy is given structural form through the ritual Dharma transmission.

[30:15]

And so this is, the family model is easier, is recognized when East Asian languages are being used because the same terminology is used to describe both earthly and spiritual family traditions. So there's various dimensions of the transmission. And I think I'm not going to go into all of these, but there's the ancestral dimension, which is kind of the replication of family traditions. There's a linguistic dimension, where the Dharma heirs receive new names, which reflect their connection to the family. ritual dimensions where the rituals confirm family relationships.

[31:19]

So as I said, we're bowing once a teacher is honored in rituals as are the ancestral teachers going back 2,500 years. And there is a temporal dimension that long-term relationships are honored and confirmed and continued. So this is a rebirth. And as I've been studying about this, I feel like it's, in preparation for this talk, I feel like the family dimension of this has really come home to me. It kind of crystallizes why I'm so grateful to be here and to be with you in this family and to be with you in a context where we're doing, we're expressing our enlightenment, our enlightened nature, at the same time as we're working on it because we're, even the Buddha is only halfway there.

[32:44]

So we're we're polishing each other. And we have an opportunity to do things in a wholesome way that maybe we're not entirely, at least speaking for myself, we're not entirely wholesome in the context of the family that I grew up in. we have an opportunity to work on those aspects of ourselves that are incomplete, work on those aspects of ourselves that are wounded, and also to work with those aspects of ourselves that want to rejoice and celebrate and be awake and Feel the joy in life. You know, look out the windows and see the sun is shining and the trees are green.

[33:49]

And what a miracle that is that we are experiencing together. And that we're sitting in this beautiful room. And that every day we take care of this room. We polish the floors. We dust the cushions. We tend the altar. all in an effort to make this a place where we can feel our love and express our deepest heart's calling. And in that sense to me, as we deepen our relationship this practice, the transmission is wide and deep and is not confined to the color of a robe.

[35:04]

So I think I'm going to stop there and leave time for questions, comments that you might have. And I think Joe is going to pass the microphone, is that correct? And also out there in Zoom land if you have any questions or comments. If you have a comment, try to keep it brief. And if you have a question, see if you can get to the question pretty directly without having to articulate a long preface. that give us more of us a chance to talk. Thank you, Roshi. You mentioned the color of the robe. I was wondering if you could speak to any significance of the color of the brown robe versus saffron robes where you might see in other parts of the world.

[36:17]

Yeah. When you have transmission, before you have transmission, you wear black robe in art, in Zen. And after that, the color of the robe changes to basically a kind of blended color. So the saffron robe is a kind of blended color. In Japan, and also often in China, they'll wear something, I think the color is called Mokeron, and it's kind of a yellowish, it's sort of like the Hippari that Joe is wearing, it's kind of a yellowish brown. But brown is okay. I happen to, I like this. And we have people make brown, just because yellow or saffron is a little too bright for our color palette in here.

[37:27]

Brown fits pretty good. And then there are higher ecclesiastic ranks that are empowered to wear different color robes, but we don't care about that. We don't do that. Thank you very much for your talk. As you were talking about the different ways to receive ordination, I got clarity that I think sometimes people think the priest's path is a better path, and it's something about something external to themselves. But I wanted to say that my experience watching people make the discernment, and get your comment on it, people making the discernment about how to express their practice. It's very much an internal decision. It's very much an internal kind of response to one's draw to the practice.

[38:32]

And for some people, that's more ritualistic and ceremonial and complete bodily practice. And for other people, it's less that and more in the world. Even that's saying too much, but it's more an internal call than something about one's external practice and how one wants to spend one's time. I could say more, but I bet lots of people could comment. Yeah, I mean, I think that's right, and it's not... It's just not cut and dry. It's not clear at all. For me, that discernment also, the critical part, at least in my experience and in my way of thinking, has to do with your relationship, the relationship that you have with your teacher.

[39:43]

You know, when Somehow I got the idea. When the idea of becoming ordained arose, my feeling was, okay, I'm creating a relationship of a more immediate and intensive accountability to my teacher. and that there's a mutual kind of recognition. So particularly during the training part, and then theoretically, and I've talked to Sojin and I've talked to Bernie Glassman and others, they feel like, well, when you give Dharma transmissions, then the student is on their own, but not necessarily, not if you stay around. Agreed.

[40:47]

I just say, If you're going to, if one chooses to be priest ordained, that is a commitment to their teacher and accountability. But I think the actual decision or desire to be a priest comes from a different place. Right. Myself. Yeah, and I agree. And there's a part of me that thinks, I'm a priest? I'm a priest. Is this what it's come to? But I also really love my life. I don't think I would have stayed here for all these years if that hadn't been the path. I think some of us feel that being a priest is remedial work. Between 1988 and 98, for those 10 years, was there a sudden moment or transition that made you feel ready for Dharma transmission or was it more gradual?

[42:04]

You know, it's interesting. I'm happy that I can say that, you know, because I have my ambitions and my aspirations. And at the point at which, I think it was in 95, Sojin asked Meili and I to begin the process of transmission, I was not thinking about it at all. In fact, I was studying with, I was beginning to study with other teachers, and I just wanted to deepen my practice. And so it caught me really by surprise. And then we spent a couple of years studying different texts and the process. So, no, I wasn't actually thinking about it. It was still, it was not a very common thing at that point.

[43:12]

It's much more common now. There are many more people with Dharma transmission. So I was really surprised. But I will say, I think, you know, my understanding is that he invited us because this is how he saw the lineage of this temple continuing. And he felt that Meili and I could, would be solid and capable of doing that, even if we didn't, even if I didn't feel that at the moment. And so, you know, he did that, I think, to ensure the continuation of the practice.

[44:12]

And I think that's That's been the case with a lot of the transmissions that Sojin's done, that Tenjin Noji has done. You know, it's about, again, if you look at it in the family sense, it's about making sure that the family is taken care of. Thank you for this wonderful talk. How many bows will Carol and Hannah be doing each day? We're going to negotiate. I try to imagine their lives and the kind of work that the whole community must be needed to help with. I assume there's organization

[45:14]

tremendous organization for this. It's pretty organized, yeah. Laurie has been the teacher and she's been doing it, and Vicky Austin, who's kind of the resident San Francisco Zen Center expert on dormant transmission, is going to come and help. And people will help perhaps ring bells, but it's also, there's three people, so they can ring bells for each other doing these things, and I don't want them, you know, I don't want them to hurt themselves. So, you know, when we did it, it was like 140 bows. I could do 140 bows then. You know, when I had transmission, I was 50. I can't do it now. So if we're involved, if we come for the monthly bodhisattva ceremony, we get a sense of what they're doing a little bit with all those vows and chanting?

[46:24]

It's similar, yeah. I mean, it's a... That's part of what's done, actually. It's part of... The bodhisattva ceremony resembles the... Denkai precept transmission part of the ceremony. I mean, really, Bodhisattva ceremony is like, we've got kind of one major ceremony in this tradition. You get married, you do the precepts. You die, you do the precepts. You know, you have lay ordination, you do the precepts. You have transmission, you do the precepts. It's like precepts are at the heart of our practice. So, is a suggestion for new people to do abdominal strengthening exercises so they can do this? I guess.

[47:25]

I mean, I think the suggestion was just, yeah, you should stretch, you should build your body, and you can do that by doing boughs. I mean, in some traditions, in the Korean tradition, they do 108 boughs before they start the day. That's the first thing they do, and they do them fast. So we're lucky we don't have to do that. So it's definitely a body practice. It's a body practice. You may have noticed that, right? Thank you. We have a couple more minutes. Anyone out there in Zoom land? first came to Zen and to this temple I had faith in these brown robes and the exoteric explicit meaning of them that represented the realization of enlightenment the realization of no self and in my story I may have been misled a little bit by that faith or naive in that faith but I'd still say that is the explicit straightforward meaning

[48:46]

There's two dimensions of the transmission. There's the esoteric and the exoteric. The esoteric is kind of akin to what people may have done or hear about in the Tibetan tradition, empowerments. So you're empowered to do certain kinds of rituals. The exoteric is where I don't see that it's confined to people. I mean, what hopefully you see is that people wearing brown robe or any robe, including Rock Sue, are people of integrity. That should be the case. And if there's a lapse in that, one should be able to address that with the person and say what you see, and they should be able to respond, not react, respond, and make corrections in themselves.

[50:06]

So I think that's the exoteric. But yes, I think that the conferring of of the brown rope or the conferring of the green rock suit is to say this is a reliable, trustworthy person with a good character, which is not to say that others aren't. one more if there is. I see the striker's gone up. Well, if not, I hope that you'll just help cheer Carol and Hannah along in the course of this week. And they're going to give the talk next Saturday.

[51:12]

and so they'll get to say some of what the experience was for them. And that'll be, I think that'd be quite wonderful and unusual to have two people talking, but they've gone through this experience. To go through it, you're so lucky to have each other, you know. I just, I was so lucky to go through it with Maylee Scott, you know, it just was, just you're really just so aligned with each other, and that's a lifetime relationship. So, thank you very much, enjoy the day, and we'll see you here.

[52:02]

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