mostly studying the Golden Age of Zen, which means studying the Chinese ancestors and studying today. So I look forward to hearing what Kendra shares with us. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Is there feedback? Is this okay as it is? Could be a little louder. Could be a little bit louder. How's that now? Pretty good in the back? Yes? Good. It's a beautiful cold fall morning, and the sitting this morning to begin our one-day Sashin was really intimate. There was a small group of us, most of us who've practiced together a really long time, and there's a lovely family feel of the warm fabric of our practice together that I was really appreciating as I was sitting. The title of this talk is Something Like Family Ties, And somehow it felt very appropriate or it seemed to fit with what I'd been thinking about for this talk that on Thursday, a couple of days ago, I ended my work of 16 plus years at the community clinic where I've been a physician.

[01:45]

And at my request, there was a small gathering for my patients there. There were about 40 or 50 people who came. all elderly, mainly people of color. I walked in the room and one of them had brought his really wonderful keyboard and for two hours he played the most intimate and cozy music as we all hung out together and something ineffable, something ineffable was exchanged between us. Something about what had happened over those years together inside the room, most of it, inside the exam room, most of it. But it was really evident between all of us and between each of us. I think that's what we've been studying about this practice period. That's what it seems to me. So we've been making our own pilgrimage through the Tong Dynasty

[02:55]

Chinese ancestors, so that's about 700 to 950 AD, that's a long time ago. We've been climbing the Walking Blue Mountains. They've been carrying us along as we go. We've been walking on the bottom of the ocean floor, supported by our Zazen practice. and carried by that deep reality that we all share. Walking the Blue Mountains, the Blue Mountains walking us. Walking the bottom of the ancestral ocean floor, tracing our roots. Who are your ancestors? When you look in the mirror, do you see the old other face of a Chinese man? Do you see your mother's furrows and wavy hair? Your teenage eagerness and embarrassment?

[04:00]

What do you see when you look in the mirror? There's something even more fundamental than that. In this crowd of others that may be behind us when we look in the mirror, the both hidden and revealed ancestors, benefactors of our lives, Who's not there? Is there anyone who's missing really? When I did my Jutai here in 1999, it was my own ceremony I did with my own teacher, not in the usual BCC way. And one thing that I did was bow to my, I won't call them blood, but to my regular ancestors. And my Zen priest friend thought that that was really quite unusual that I would choose to do that. But don't they inform me too in this path that I've taken to arrive here.

[05:07]

So when we bow to our ancestors, to whom are we bowing? Who are they really? And what is our feel when we bow? What is it that we're doing when we do that? What is it that you do when you do that? There is a red line between us all. It goes like this, and it goes like this, and it goes like this, and [...] this. Between all of us. Can you see it? Do you feel it for yourself? That red line is on the Kichimiyaku papers. Those of you who've received lay ordination have a copy of them. There is that red line that connects all of us together.

[06:12]

It is our ancestral line, back through these old Chinese, mainly men, we've been studying. It is our precept line. It's the precept vein. It is the ground on which we stand in our practice. That's what we've been studying, how that becomes manifest. It is the relationship between us. That red line is always a circle. Have you noticed? It's never a straight line. It's never either up, directly up or down. It's in all directions between us. The red line is in circles. It's not hierarchical. Though one may build on the other, we see the teachers across community and on and on. The mandala of our practice is a circle.

[07:15]

It is a symbol of the universe. That symbol is of our search for unity within and outside of ourselves. That's what this practice is. We said last week that Guanshan had, Guishan had 97 circles that were his teaching devices. They're all different. They show us something about our relationship. And even though it may seem oftentimes, particularly to people when they start this Zazen practice, that it's a solitary practice. We spend our time quietly looking at walls. This is a practice that's intimately, completely about nothing but about relationship. This is a practice of intimacy. A basic teaching of Zen is that only a Buddha together with a Buddha realizes the way.

[08:20]

It's a fascicle in Dogon. Yo budzu, yo budzu. Only a Buddha together realizes a Buddha. That means none of us stand up on the ground by ourselves. All of us realize our awakening through everyone else and everything else. The Buddha said, I together awaken with all beings. When he said, I alone in the world honored one, he meant I'm not alone, actually. Everything's waking up with me, and if it didn't, I couldn't wake up either. We may think it's master and student in these stories that we've been listening to. We may think we come here and are teacher and disciple, or teacher and student. You may think it's my patience and me, It's you and me.

[09:24]

It's Wai Nam and you. It's Josue and Jake. It's Lim and Pong and Leslie. All of us are in relationship, awakening one another. The longest fascicle in Dogen's Shobo Genzo. Why do I talk about that? Dogen's the founder of the school. and he was informed by both the Rinzai and the Soto schools. He's the founder of this temple. In the longest fascicle of his masterpiece, the Shobo Genzo, is called Gyoji. Gyoji means continuous practice. And when you read this fascicle on its surface, it seems like the stories of a lot of old Indian and Chinese and a few Japanese men who practiced really hard, austere practices, and did heroic feats of diligence and commitment, the kinds of things that we don't do in our ordinary life.

[10:42]

But actually, these aren't stories about dead men. They're alive people. They're alive sitting here in this room today. They're alive in their inspiration, in the way in which their activity has turned the Dharma wheel, the Sambhogahaya. The Sambhogaya is what is our everyday activity that we do with ourselves. That's the story of these men. That's the activity of their practice that continues forward to this very day. It's what informs you when you come to the Zen Dojo. It is the winds of which propel our sails today. So these stories of self-effacing perseverance and dedication to the practice of many of our Dharma relatives is really us. It's an inspiration for us. They're written to tell us not that that's something they did, but that that practice continues on today, that that practice is what we do today.

[11:52]

In the opening paragraphs of Gyoji, Dogen says, from the ceaseless practice of all the Buddhism patriarchs, our own ceaseless practice emerges, and we can attain the great way. From our own ceaseless practice, the ceaseless practice of all the Buddhas emerges, and the Buddhas attain the great way. The Buddhas attain the great way out of our own practice. From our own ceaseless practice, the sun, moon, and stars move, and the great earth and vast space, the right body and mind, and the four great elements, and the five sthandas exist. They all exist out of our ancestor's ceaseless practice. Ceaseless practice is not in the places worldly people seek, yet they all must return to it. It's the world in which we live, whether we want to be there or not. Through the ceaseless practice of all the Buddhas of the past, present, and future, all the Buddhas of the past, present, and future emerge.

[13:02]

So in the Sendoh, we feel great ancestors, Dolly, and Rebecca, and Maylee, and Fran, and Doug Reiner, and Karen Dakotas, and Richard Hafley, and a myriad of other people who come and go, who've been gone for years and return, and it feels as if they've always been here practicing with us Does it not feel like in some way that the great ancestors of the Tang Dynasty have always been here practicing with us? It does to me. So we read these stories and they The pilgrimage that we've been on seems like it's rather a strange and faraway land, ancient China.

[14:10]

It's hard to imagine what that was like. The stories are important to place to a certain extent so that we understand where they came from. I actually, as I've been thinking about this more, I think it's less relevant than what I thought originally. have not studied this well enough to have a scholarly interpretation or even a very learned interpretation. But much is made or much could be said about how China in this era was fairly literary. There were well-educated people. There was a strong foundation of Confucianism. There was a lot of dealing with ideas and hierarchy and rebellion against that. And so Zen was in part a reaction to words and wanting to dismantle our ideas and concepts. That's the part that's relevant.

[15:13]

Maybe to understand the reason that we say the golden age of Zen was golden is not that it was a long time ago, but that there was a kind of moment of vitality of reaction to the status quo in China, a kind of freedom that was coming forth out of the wars that were going on there, and the discord that allowed a certain kind of freedom and revolt that was going on, and a new way, a challenging way to get outside the usual concepts. You might say that there was a golden age of Zen in San Francisco in the 1960s, too, and that there were very similar, I won't say similar, but you can see that the foundational forces were not unlike for other forces that would allow a kind of creativity, a thinking outside the box, a willingness to do it differently, to not be bound by the status quo.

[16:25]

And so the stories that we have of Suzuki Roshi and of the great of Kobun Chino and Katagiri Roshi of that time and the vibrancy of that time is born out of the same openness, a same kind of openness that maybe we're struggling to find again in our culture right now. But that was the aliveness of the Tang Dynasty. And that was the openness that the stories that we are reading came out of. Now, I also don't know enough to do this justice, but let's explode the myth a little bit about who these people were. We read their stories and we think they were great actualized masters who had hordes of students following them because they were like the Pied Piper of the Dharma or something. And maybe there's a little bit of that that was true. But just know that everything is myth, right?

[17:28]

We don't know exactly what happened way back then. And the stories that come to us, the stories that we have in the most detail, are probably the most embellished. Just like when we read the Pali Canon, the original word of the Buddha. We know that those stories, how do we know what the details of those stories were? Someone who had a profound affinity for the practice and understood, and an inkling of what those people were actually like, what those teachers were actually like, what the flavor of those teachers was actually like, brought us these stories, and have taken the stories out of their own lives and presented them to us. And if you read carefully, you'll see that Generation after generation of teachers have done that. When you read Dogen, you'll see that he takes the same story and he'll present what seven or eight different teachers have said about it, and then he'll give it his own twist.

[18:33]

He'll give it his own interpretation. Michael Wenger, who's a current teacher, has a book called 49 Fingers. which is his own current American koans. So you see this great teaching goes on. These stories are alive. They come out of our lives. They manifest out of our lives. So we've studied the five houses, which we've said is a kind of family style, more so than it is five separate streams. I think of them as streams that parallel and intercross and exchange waters and silt and stones. And truly, there are not different sources. They all began with Huemeng. And they have different places they lead, but they're fed out of the same waters, just different flavorings along the way.

[19:41]

Zen is not about making foolproof statements or standing on doctrine, as well we know, but it's about coming to grips with reality beyond our conceptual experience. Coming to grips with things as it is, right? So, even if you're sitting with yourself, so you can't sit with yourself to try to make a Buddha. If you do that, kill the Buddha. Right? So what is the sin? We divide the five houses by different names, but really all great teachers had women students and lay people. Who knows how many great women teachers there were that came out of each of these houses. Perhaps we will someday, but I think there's every reason to believe that there were many of them. and many great lay practitioners, just like there are here in this Zendo.

[20:48]

Many had a deep belief and emphasis on that spark or flame that we attribute to Guishan. That's the Buddha nature in each person, and that's a foundation, actually, of Mahayana Buddhism. It's not unique to one particular school. Some spoke to it directly, and some work the soil to nurture it and deconstruct the barriers to its full expression. We may say that the Linji school or Rinzai, there are shouts and hits, but frankly, a sharp word or harsh tones from a teacher can land with great force and inflict more pain than is offered by any piece of wood. They're offered, though, with true compassion and love. All of these are turning words, turning efforts, meant to transcend. Zhou Xu lived, spoke with simple words in his example, ordinary mind is the way, but isn't that the basic foundation of our practice, to just live our lives completely?

[22:01]

We say that Dao Wu did not try to explain anything, But can you see an explanation in the poetry of Hongxi? I don't think so. Dongxiang talked about his five ranks and how the real and apparent interact. But isn't that the most basic of emphases, about what is reality, how we bring together the worlds of the absolute and the relative in our daily life? Still, there is a feeling of gentleness, severity, directness, urgency, or great practice among the different teachers. And perhaps that's more of what sets them apart. But I'd say again, and understand I'm emphasizing one point of view here, it's not the whole of it. But I say again, you can find those different flavors right here in this endo.

[23:05]

among the senior students we have. You can see them across the Soto Zen teachers, all with these very similar, different flavors or emphases. So, who a teacher is, is not to plant a flag, a style, or a doctrine, but really is through one's whole commitment to the student's finding herself. In the Tang Dynasty, students were shared freely. They were sent from teacher to teacher, across stream to stream. There was no holding on to students or marrying oneself to one's doctrine. Dogen himself had teachers in both major lineages. And when he wrote his transmission papers, he included bloodlines from both of them. There are no closed doors. There may have been criticisms between teachers, but really, I think those were more pointing criticisms, trying to illuminate the places where people could get caught by this point of view or that point of view.

[24:23]

For example, Bai Hu, who taught koans in the same time of Hong Xiu, criticized silent illuminations and evil zen, he said. But really, it's because he saw the caveats of focusing on the quietude and generating peaceful states of mind as an outcome that one can become complacent in practice. Hongxi trusted him so much that when he died, he asked him to settle the affairs of his temple. And you see, teachers saw teachers. They saw the true root of what was being taught. Dogen, right and left, criticized the prayers and chants of the Shingon, you know, as not real practice, real practices sitting Zazen. But he hailed the founder of that school as having a practice as profound and deep as his own.

[25:29]

So you see what we're pointing to. Each knew the Dharma manifested out of his own understanding and how to offer that in a way that brought turning for the students. And that was really what was important. We've seen examples of teachers doing that over and over again in their own way. And I don't know about you, but after hearing these stories over many years, I hear them echo in my own mind in different ways as ordinary speech. I wanted to wind down, not quite at the end, but wind down by reading something by Hong Zhe, who was, if you didn't catch the earlier part of the course, he was a Song dynasty, so a little later, he was one of the teachers who

[26:32]

took the koans and wrote verses to help illuminate them. And his style of practice was zazen and poetry. His teaching was poetic. So, he says, the ancestral master's nostrils and patchwork monk's life pulse consists of holding firmly and releasing an activity so that we all discover our own freedom. So it is said that false thinking is stopped and stillness necessarily arises. Stillness arises and wisdom appears. Wisdom arises and stillness necessarily disappears into active functioning. Clear and distinct, this is the only authentic view. And I would posit whether it's a turning word silence, the sweeping quietly of the monk's hall revealing the master's ashes, a twisted nose or a cut cap, that they all arise in the same way by the stillness of conceptual thinking that allows us to find our freedom and propels us to activity.

[27:59]

So these stories, all these stories, are not reality. They're skillful means, a kind of medicine cabinet, although it's a little bit more than that, actually. Like in the practice of medicine, it's not just prescribing a drug. Looking back in that mirror, don't you see an old Chinese man? or an old New England woman, one maybe you didn't think was so smart when you met her, but now you realize you put on her pants one leg at a time, just like she did. And when I see a patient, sometimes I do say, don't be fooled today. Some, when I see the old habits arising, don't believe that story.

[29:16]

Stop right now. Tell me what matters the most to you. Where's the fire? And I'm speaking in the voices of the ancient masters. I know I'm healing because I'm using their old stories, and I'm seeing the patients with the same eyes that Namsan saw Josu, Seppo saw Yunnan, Seriko saw Daowu. And sometimes, maybe often, we see each other through these stories. We see each other with the ancients' eyes, And even when our mind is ordinary, somewhere at the bottom of the ocean floor, there is the extraordinarily ordinary, ordinary mind.

[30:19]

That is intimacy, that is love, that is the way of the ancestors, and that is our practice. So that's what I have to say, the last words. of aspects of practice. Before we see if anyone has something they want to add, any of the seniors or anyone else, I wanted to ask Hosan Sensei if he wanted to make any comments or additions. Just what occurs to me is that simultaneously there's this stillness that we reach and touch and settle in and that it's always active.

[31:36]

That the stillness, you know, it's a conundrum, the stillness is always moving. It never sits still and never stagnates. So we live with that. Anyone else, Jeff? Nothing to add. I don't know how you put anything on top of what you said. But so often I find myself so deeply threaded in your stories. And I was thinking about you this morning, and I was thinking about the ways in which we reflect each other and care for each other, and that this is extraordinary. Nothing on top, but certainly beside it. align threads in many, many ways, and stillness has to move into action, or else nothing's happened.

[32:44]

Something happens next. The thing that I find most compelling is that as I kind of walk through my life, and all of the koans that we're resolving at each moment, and all of the wisdom that exists right here, right now, it's the faces of people like you, Leslie, Jake, Soja, and all the people who I know here who will rise for me. And in that is all of the things that I understand. The words I sometimes get and I sometimes don't, but the stories of how we practice together, these are really alive. When I first came here and I was going through chemo and I was brand new and I had just sat with a surgeon and said, I want to come and drain my cancer cells. And he said, we don't do that. I was watching other people and seeing with my ears and hearing with my eyes that was the most educational.

[33:46]

I can't wait to continue to listen to you. I can't wait to find out how you continue to unfold inside of me. All of your gifts, the ones that I see and that I don't see, are compelling, I think. The first thing that you said, Jeff, thank you. And the first thing that you said is, I don't know how to put anything on top of that. But really, it's about, what about you? What about your manifestation of this? This is not here. This is here. This is there. It's between us. And it's manifest out of each of our lives. And it's true, we inspire each other. We see reality out of recognizing that our little piece isn't all of it. And that helps us know ourselves better. Judy?

[34:47]

Oh, James and Judy. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who was horrified by what happened in France yesterday. And I'm having a lot of trouble caring about the Tang Dynasty. I'm wondering if you integrate this with our practice. Please.

[35:52]

I hear you. All I know is that there's something, all I know, is that if I have any modicum of, we find any modicum of stability in our lives out of this practice, it's what allows us to turn towards what's happening in the world, to not turn away from it, to be willing to bear it and to find our way to respond to it. I don't know for any other person, but the first part I think is to take it all in completely.

[37:00]

Judy? Yeah, flowing from that stream, What really moves me in your talk particularly is your tone. And that's been very important because of still flowing from Paris last night and Beirut the day before and Baghdad. And streams that are also flowing right now. what kept coming as you were speaking was your use of the word, your intonation of this word, between us. And it reminded me when Suzuki Roshi used the word independency, that something happened for me when I heard you say between us for a group of people, your patient, and my grammar school rock mind went to, oh, that's an error.

[38:17]

It's supposed to be among us. And then you did the one-to-one between us, and I could hear the grammar school rock song going, oh yeah, right on, that's correct use of the word. So to me, in a way, what I'm very much with, and I don't know if it's a koan, is how do I take care of what's happening thousands of miles away that's here now, and how that is no different than how do I take care of what happened then, there, that's happening here now? And I wonder how do you do that? How do you take care of that space-time flow? It's a work in progress for me, really. As you were talking, Judy, what came to my mind was the title of the book about little Suzuki Roshi quotes, To Polish One Corner of the World.

[39:27]

I think for me, the work is continually not being overwhelmed by the vastness of suffering and deep confusion and delusion there is in the world, and turn towards what's the What can I do? What's here before me? How can I respond right here to what's before me? Not in a way that fixes it, but in a way that really sees what's happening and offers myself to it. Is it time? It's time. Thank you all very much.

[40:16]

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