I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's word. Thank you, Karen.

[01:07]

I don't know where you found that, but... I see, I see. Well, I'm honored to be here. And in this situation especially, this is wonderful. It's been many, many years since I've been in this Zen Do. And it was wonderful to start with. The first time I came was when a group of women, mostly based here, I guess Blanche Hartman created the trip, but Grace and May Lee were a big part of it also, and we met here for the first time, getting ready to go to Japan and do a one-month retreat. So I know it from way back then, that was 16, 17 years ago now. So many things happen and so many things change.

[02:12]

Karen asked me to talk about living the Dharma, everyday life in the Dharma. It's what everybody wants to talk about, always. It's the whole, it's the subject of our life. How do we live this life? not only with integrity, with moral uprightness, but with a complete connection. One of the hardest things is our sense of separation. In the history of women, we live a kind of exile, often, in culture. there's such a sense of separation. And the effort it takes to overcome that some say it's good for us, but it's also hard for us.

[03:23]

And yet, of course, we are just each only ourself. We're completely alone. Kodo Sawaki said, we can't even share a fart with anybody else. Not even. Not even with your best friend or your most passionate lover. That's how alone we are. And yet the other side of it, of course, is that if we lose our sense of ourself, we lose our sense of everything else as well. Because really there's no difference. Lots of notes.

[04:33]

Everything we encounter is our life which sounds noble and romantic until we think of the really disgusting things that we encounter as well as the beautiful grass and flowers. How do we manage and not be overrun or be so isolated that we're out of touch with everything. Before we take the precepts, we take the three refuges. In Coben's translation of the refuges, he doesn't call it refuge. He calls it returning.

[05:45]

So it's not like there's some place out there that we get to go to and be safe. It's coming home. And although I think often, for women especially, it's so hard to completely trust ourself on the most, where we can really completely let it go, into trust. But it's what's required. I've been doing this practice, as Karen said, for many, many years, it seems like, and through many different morphings, starting out as a young mother.

[06:50]

That was a very romantic time. Our teacher lived around the corner from the Zendo and was available night and day because he didn't know any better. People would call up at two o'clock in the morning with some kind of domestic crisis Coban encouraged a lot of women, just as Mel encourages a lot of women. I think they're rare, at least in the teachers that I know, to not just encourage and sort of make it easy for them, but to make it hard for them also. They get a true challenge to live right up to it.

[07:51]

and not in the zendo so much. The zendo is for shedding all the presuppositions, all the stories, and then going out and empowered by having shed everything. But without the backing of a sangha, It's very impossible, really. Our sangha was made up mostly of poets, poets and musicians. So it was extremely dreamy. And then Coben, with everyone's help, decided that we would buy a place up in the Santa Cruz mountains that was inhabited by about 60 very angry people who were living, trying to live an alternative lifestyle that they called an anarchistic commune, which meant they stole from each other mostly.

[09:21]

You took my ladder. Well, you took my shovel. Kobin invited them all into the zendo. Please come in. Everyone can learn to sit. And that's when it first got hard for us. All of our romantic ideals about Zen kind of fell down. And it turned out that the ones who were willing to work to create a sitting place up there were mostly women. And that was a very new experience for me and a very wonderful one, to work together with women and be strong enough to stand up to wizard in his purple dome, geodesic domes all through the hillsides. Wizard was the most difficult, one of the most difficult ones. He'd play loud rock music in the middle of session. He bragged that he'd been in San Quentin.

[10:28]

And we not only learned to stand up to Wizard, but we learned to see through all of that. been studying with a little group of our floating Zendo people, studying the Tenzo Kyokun of Dogen, the instructions to the cook, and he talks about magnanimous mind. And magnanimous mind takes in all of it. It took in wizard and dee and sky horse a lot of really strange people, and made it work. We could see that it was possible because Kobin was there, tiny little soft Kobin with his very soft voice, but he was meeting each one without rancor, without fear,

[11:50]

We thought that was very cool, especially as women. Leave the house in the morning, put the kids on the bus so they could go to school and go up to Jikoji and sort of learn to be Amazons or something. It was amazing, but based on compassion thoroughly based on compassion Kobin was very clear as he led us through these strange places that saving all sentient beings doesn't mean that better us can look down on them and save them. He repeated, we neng, we save the sentient beings of my mind.

[12:55]

It's my mind that sees and says what it sees. In these days, especially when everything is so incredibly polarized it's the most important practice. A great way is without difficulty, just Don't cherish opinions. How do we attach and detach? How do we have opinions and be somebody and maintain our openness and our compassion and our vulnerability? It takes a whole lifetime of doing it and doing it, and we never get to the end.

[14:00]

I got in a lot of... I got sick one time, and went to Kobin, and he said I was sick, and he looked at me and he said, just keep sitting zazen until your death day. I thought, oh! Right, of course, what else? It was a big relief. Ah, we know what to do. We're so fortunate, we know what to do. I don't know how we got here. It seems incredible to me, so often I mean, look, here we are. How did this happen? The more we realize how rare it is and the more we appreciate it, I think the more we're able to practice real practice, hard practice.

[15:21]

This is a gift to us. and it's the gift we have to give. Not in some kind of saving all sentient beings from a high place, but as we learn to be with everyone and everything. Learn how to protect ourselves and be strong, and learn to completely open To know how alone we are and how completely at one we are with everything. In the car, at work, sometimes people say to me, well, it's too easy, it's too simple.

[16:25]

But it is simple. It's ridiculously simple. But somehow, as human beings, we haven't quite found an easy way to ourself. The self of ourself. I teach the precepts a lot because it seems to me that they arise from our most profound and most honest and true place. If you could call yourself a place, then the precepts are what come from that place. They're not rules and regs that come from on high or from out there somewhere.

[17:31]

they're born with us or we're born with them and to just... I think they're our way of staying awake of staying alert to what's happening and what we're doing when we're doing it we can't keep the precepts They're all impossible to keep. As soon as we open our mouth, we're telling a lie. There's no way to really speak the truth, the whole truth. It's awful in a way. Especially sitting up here like this, it's terrible. And yet we try, knowing that it's impossible. Every time we wipe our brow, we're killing a whole village full of little beings that live in our brow hairs.

[18:43]

If we know that, it makes a difference in the kind of respect that we have for life. Respect is an interesting word because It's based on the Latin word spectare from which comes spectacle and inspect. Respect means to look again. Most often as we whiz through the world on our very busy schedules we don't take in very much. And so we often don't have much a sense of honor of the things that we see and handle and manage. It's just natural. A lot of what we do is automatic.

[19:48]

And so we pick up the cup and put it down and that's that. But if we look again, even at a cup We have to see something's there. Something's here. You can't say anymore. It's true of how we are with the earth and how we are with each other. Respect is what saves us or dumps us in the drink. That's the most that I learned at Jikoji was about respect, even for people who were so difficult and often crazed in some way.

[21:06]

actually deeply suffering. And that's the really important part. How much suffering? So that compassion, as we develop compassion, as we live our refuges, we become much more available to the suffering in the world. And that's a very sticky place because there's nothing very much that we can do about most of it. It can become a huge and terrifying and depressing idea how much there is and how little we can do.

[22:09]

But that kind of suffering is extra. In a way, it's just one more cheap idea. What we can do is what we can do, What we are is where we are. And whatever there is to tend to isn't Darfur for us in Berkeley or San Francisco or the Santa Cruz Mountains. If there's a little opening that shows somewhere that we can touch Darfur, we go for it and touch it. I married some people who are doctors, both very beautiful, very young people, who are doctors in Africa.

[23:18]

And one of them is a psychiatrist who is treating the traumatized women from Darfur. And I thought when I married them, oh, I touched a little piece of it, I helped a little piece of it. Just a little bit. And of course they're doing so much, but I don't think any of us are going to Darfur. Probably ever. One of Buddha's teachings is about being satisfied I think it means being satisfied with our limitations as well, and being honest with ourself about what we can do, how much we can do, and then doing it with joy, with grit,

[24:26]

Well, I said it all. But I'm very much open to questions and comments and we can have a nice talk. One of the things I noticed at a very young age was how much that society did not want me to feel alone. How important it was that if I was to have any connection with the people around me that I had to not channel that. It's been a long, long time without a chemical washroom.

[26:05]

It's so refreshing to see somebody. I will. I'll try that. It has something to do with what we do with the fear that arises at this difficult boundary between connection and aloneness. Yes. I don't even know how to put it in terms of a question. Yes, yes, the question of the fear that comes up between being alone and vulnerable and facing whatever there is to face, especially if it's somebody like Wizard.

[27:35]

What made me do it, I often think, is just how incredibly much, I call it a function of greed, actually. I had sheer greed about creating a practice place where Kobin's teaching could flourish. I thought that was the most important thing in the whole world. Not quite, because my family came first, but just barely. They knew it too, and that was a difficulty. It was hard, because I really had one foot in each place, in the family place, and in Chikoji. But I was so passionate about it that I was willing to risk everything, personally, as far as my life was concerned, and I was scared a lot of the time. I think fear is helpful.

[28:40]

You know, it makes us strong if we don't get too shaky. Just let the adrenaline flow and then you find the right words. Sometimes it works better. Thank you. He said, instead of saying, I take refuge in Buddha, he says, return to Buddha. And he doesn't even say I. He does the Bodhisattva's vows in the same way, or teaches them, because in those vows, there is no I. So we throw it in because it doesn't make sense to us without a personal pronoun in there.

[29:45]

There has to be a personal pronoun for it to make sense to us, but the reality is that, I mean, the ultimate reality is that it's not needed. That the little pipsqueak I, it's just a kind of temporary understanding and we don't need it when we're expressing the whole thing in our feeble little pipsqueak way, you could say. Yes? how that works?

[30:46]

Moment by moment, situation by situation, and always mistake after mistake. I think we try so hard to perfect our life and make it really beautiful and pure. And the precepts are very helpful in seeing the reality of it that the purity and perfection of it is in the mess right smack in the middle of the mess. So the effort that we make in the precepts is not so much to be good, the way we were taught to be good as children, you know, little girl, be good, but to find our own goodness, to discover and rediscover what's in us that's good, what wants to do, and you can't even say what's good and right and proper and all of that, if something is living us,

[32:10]

Some, there's, it's powerful. So it's kind of, it's the process of working in the field of the precepts. Yes. There is a discernment that's happening in every moment. Yes. In that field of the precepts. Exactly. Yeah. And it's hard because sometimes, I just killed two mice the other night and I just feel terrible about it And I thought a long time about it, and it wasn't until they started gnawing on the innards of my house that I realized that it was them or me. I'd already... You know, those sort of things are very painful and messy and definitely breaking the precepts, and yet we do what we have to do. We also wipe our brows, we pull the carrots and eat them.

[33:13]

So it's more about acknowledging and offering our whole powerful loving kindness into the field of our life in the world. As we live, stumble along Yes. I read something recently by someone who wasn't a Buddhist, you know, it can be kind of refreshing sometimes. She had this model, her kind of word for enlightenment was your own North Star, so her teaching was kind of about how to find your own North Star, which is like your true nature. but somehow the energy to act comes with some kind of anger.

[34:50]

Yes. Anger is usually a sense of separation, trying to bridge the gap, a very awkward way of bridging the gap, but it's a powerful energy. It's hatred that is the poisonous one. Yes. Yes. Right, right. You have to be really, really careful with greed also. They're well known. When I'm possessed with anger, the big problem, as it seems to me, is that sense of, I'm so right.

[35:51]

I have a right, and they're wrong. I've been misled, and I'm right. Yes, and you're misunderstood, right? And we all want to be understood and we all want to be right. Alas. I watch people wrestling with this whole pre-election drama and how Zen students are struggling not to feel polarized. It's a wonderful practice situation, really. because you can either hate the bad guys and love the good guys and set up some kind of dynamic like that which really is useless or create some kind of new understanding about what's really going on. If you step back a little bit outside of that so that those emotions aren't so passionate

[37:03]

you begin to see it's very interesting, the whole thing. It's fascinating. And in future years someone's going to write about this and it'll be very interesting for our great-great-grandchildren to read about. But I think it helps the situation the more we're able to engage, because we need to decide and need to decide well, but not get so attached that we feel like we have to be right every time, because we're not. I think flexible mind is, tell me something new that will change my mind. It's hard, though. Hard to, One of the Tibetan practices is to roll it all up and take the blame.

[38:07]

That's really hard. Okay already. You think you're right. I think I'm right. I'll give it to you. It's a funny feeling. I just took it for granted in the beginning. I didn't know any different. And Coban's little sangha was in Los Altos at Haiku Zendo.

[39:18]

So we had no connection, I had no connection with San Francisco Zen Center in the first five or six years of practice. And by that time, I just took it all for granted that we were all doing it all together. And then I became more aware of the rest of the Zen world and began to see that it could be just as much of a challenge in Zen as the rest of the world that I was trying to live in. And I was one of the ones in the 60s who got together with a group of women and we met once a week. We didn't call it consciousness-raising, but it was the same thing. We just got together and encouraged each other to do what we really wanted to do.

[40:19]

We were all stuck at home. So we ended up going out and getting jobs and doing what we wanted to do. It was amazing. We were together for thirty years, this group of women. So there was so much of that going on that I didn't feel so much of a challenge until I was much farther along, until I was the director of Jikoji and had to deal with other sanghas and caretakers and getting the use permit, so all the bureaucrats in the county building, and all of those kinds of things. It's called up a whole nother side of practicing as a woman. You know, it still does. You know, I don't usually tell people what I do because it usually is kind of difficult for people who are not involved in Zen.

[41:23]

It just seems easier to relate without emphasizing it. But I know people who've had trouble, you know, who've had a lot of trouble, especially with men teachers who take advantage of their position. Some of those early ones from other countries would thought they died and gone to heaven when they got over here and saw that, you know, anything goes, it seemed like. And a number of women got involved in a lot of very unfortunate ways. But in Coban Sangha, there was a little bit of that. There was some of that. But I missed it. I just went home and was a housewife, so it was kind of easy for me, I think.

[42:28]

I was a big subject for me for a long time. I knew I couldn't leave home. I completely committed to my life at home and there was no way I was going to do that. And yet I knew that there was something about that that I needed to do. And it was a very painful puzzle for me for a long time. And then I realized that it's a state of mind. it doesn't have to be an outward gesture, it's a state of mind, like everything else.

[44:09]

And once I realized that, then, then Copen gave me this. So, and one thing led to another, so it seemed to unroll with that understanding. And then it was still difficult, it was still very difficult. Sometimes I had to choose. And it was always a mistake. You know, something got left. And yet I think our lives are always this way, especially if we raise children. We have the children, and the husband, and all those deep connections that we have that are so wonderful. and so real, and then the practice, which is so wonderful and so real. I, Koven called us gorillas. He said we were underground fighters bringing zazen to the world with our life.

[45:17]

And he would, you know, try to get people to marry each other and have babies. Hey, you'd like her, you know, why don't you ask her out? He did a lot of that in those early years, and I think he tried to get us to be realistic about practice. And that's what helped me, it helped me a lot. I made an altar in the house. I tried not to enforce what I was doing on anybody else in my house. But if they wanted to know, I was willing to share it with them. In the beginning, they didn't want to know anything. But little by little, it affected the family. They loved Coban. When they got to know Coban, they just loved him. And we went skiing with him a couple of times and had picnics.

[46:20]

And we did Zazen in a... youth hostel in my neighborhood where I lived with my children, and they would come down and peek in the windows and watch us sit. So, I feel like I did leave home at a certain point, even though I stayed home with my children and my husband. You have to understand what home means. That's a state of mind also. There's a book in Mel's office, I was looking at the bookshelves and all the Zen this, Zen that, Zen this, Zen that, women living Zen.

[47:27]

It's a wonderful book. But those women are all nuns. Aoyama Roshi's little nunnery in Nagoya. Women living Zen. How do we do it? How do we live Zen without shaving our heads living a very, very strict life at that little zendo, little temple. It's the state of mind. Yes? It struck me as you said that there is leaving home, that we leave home in order to come home.

[48:33]

We do. Yes. And there are several levels to that too. That's beautiful. Yeah. So we can really be there. Here. Thank you. How are we for time? standing up and kneeling.

[49:53]

I try to put it together, it mixes me up sometimes, the denouement gets mixed up in my mind, but I'll try to remember it right. One of the sixty people who lived at Jikoji in those early years was a very tall, very brawny, very angry man, a big gold hoop in one ear, and a real attitude. He was a Vietnam vet and had flown helicopters and undergone horrendous experiences, and he was just furious. A lot of the people at Chicoji had been thrown off a piece of land that they thought they'd been given forever.

[51:20]

And it was given to them by somebody who didn't actually own it. So when the owner came along, they just called the sheriff and bulldozed down all the houses and all these hippie runaway kids, Vietnam vets, this whole group of people moved into the property that we were in the process of buying. So that's how it all came about, that they were there, and they were all angry. And this guy was the angriest of them all, and he had everybody kind of scared. We were sitting Sashin, and the work leader came down as we were coming out of the Zendo, and caught Koban and said, is up in the parking lot, and he's taking out the engine, the perfectly good engine in the truck, and it's our truck, and he's going to unbolt that engine and take it.

[52:22]

And Koven said, don't worry, I'll take care of it. And he's just this little guy, and Ted said, oh no, he'll hurt you if you don't. And Koven opened up his robe and he said, don't worry, I've got a knife. And he had this big knife on his So he went up there in his robes, and there was a long pause at the Zendo as everybody waited for him to come back. There was complete silence for a long time. And then there was the sound of a car going up the hill, and then little Kobin came back. What happened? What happened? Oh, it was okay, he said. We've got the engine. I said, well, what did you do?

[53:23]

He said, I gave him my knife and told him that he would have to kill me to take the engine. He said he kept the knife and drove away. Yeah. It was a samurai kind of story. Amazing. Thank you. Well, maybe on that note. Thank you all.

[54:08]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ