Testing, one, two, three, testing, testing. Does it work? I had a lecture all planned for you this morning. And then as I got on the freeway to come here, there was an enormous traffic jam. There's road construction between San Francisco Zen Center and Berkeley Zen Center. For most of those miles, there's road construction, and my mind started going in quite other directions than I had planned. And then I arrived, and Peter welcomed me, and Greg welcomed me, and, are you going by? Oh, I'm sorry, Eric, why am I calling you Greg? Who is Greg? Huh? Greg Atasahara, I'm sorry, Eric. Eric and I had practiced at Tassajara.

[01:01]

I should know better. We even studied characters together. Maybe because you were ordained together. Yeah. Yeah, and you're so not alike. I mean, completely. Not at all the same person. Not even, maybe not even the same, you know, not even in years. And then I, Eric welcomed me and I put on my okesa and was looking around Mel's office because I had forgotten my kotsu, my stick. It was a very unplanned sort of arrival. And I saw a note on his desk You know, Mel is an inveterate keeper of notes.

[02:02]

I hope he doesn't listen to this tape. His office is full of little scraps of paper that have little notes to himself, like, call, Eric. And so he has, the desk was completely covered in little notes and bits and pieces of paper. And on one of them, among all the phone numbers he had written, What does it mean to do zazen for all beings?" I said, you know, call Bruce, call, you know, area code 707 blah blah blah. What does it mean to do zazen for the benefit of all beings? I thought, that's my sojoun, you know. What does it mean to do zazen for the benefit of all beings? And that question stopped the freeway madness, stopped the adrenaline, stopped the thought of the lecture that I had planned, and gave me a question which actually is a question that has come up for me many times in the past 33 years of sitting zazen.

[03:33]

What does it mean to do Zazen for all beings? And I realized that various people have been asking me this question this week. For instance, I was talking about some frustration on the phone with my twin sister. Because I'm the president of San Francisco Zen Center, it means that The projects that I do are all projects that have been thought of as impossible by someone else, not only impossible but politically nuanced and full of conflict or disgusting or aversive in some way. I wouldn't be getting that project if it didn't have that tone. And so I was talking about one of those projects with my twin sister.

[04:38]

I think it was something about presenting the vision and strategic plan to a group of people who were all hard-headed professionals and would maybe criticize me or something. She said something like, I thought you vowed to save all beings. I thought you vowed to live and be lived for the benefit of all beings. I guess that doesn't include people with a professional life. And I went, oh. And I was having a conversation with, I think, one of the priests at San Francisco Zen Center. Oh no, it wasn't. It was a tech person at San Francisco Zen Center yesterday morning. He saw a bus go by and it had a big billboard pasted on the side that said Starsky and Hutch. I said, oh, Starsky and Hutch, and he said, yes, it's a new movie.

[05:42]

And I said, oh. And then I said, I don't watch TV very much or see very many movies. And he said, oh, don't you have time? And then we started having a pretty good conversation about my prejudices about TV and movies that that I had for many years of practice. And then we found ourselves saying something like, does saving all beings mean living and being lived for the benefit of everyone who doesn't watch TV? And it was about, he said, you know, sometimes you need to know who Starsky and Hutch are to be able to have a conversation with somebody. I thought that's pretty good. That's pretty good. I mean, for my nephew, I certainly can't have a conversation about Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, but I can have a conversation about whether the Lakers won or whether they're the Pitts.

[06:59]

So how does one live and be lived for the benefit of all beings? the Dharma in a seamless way, not including some and disincluding others. So this has nothing to do with the lecture that I presented today, but it is a topic that actually moves me and that I think about quite a lot. Sometimes when I go into the Zen Do at San Francisco Zen Center, I'm struck by the difference between the Zen Do now and the Zen Do a few years ago. I used to practice with a disability that was more visible than it is now. So I couldn't actually sit on a cushion, I had to lie down. And at that time there was kind of a thing about my

[08:03]

being in the Zen Do at all. And there was a question about whether I was practicing because I'm getting a little teary even though this is a long time ago. There's a question about whether I was practicing because my practice didn't present itself in the same way as other people's practice. The other day I went into the Zen Do at San Francisco Zen Center, it was a one-day sitting, and there was a whole row of chairs. Actually, there were some chairs with backs, but there were some kind of plywood, pressed plywood, very attractive Swedish or Norwegian modern benches with support cushions on them. And I thought, isn't this interesting? Isn't this attractive? This presentation says welcome to a larger variety of people than the Zendo presentation that we had before.

[09:17]

And I can imagine that if I couldn't sit on a cushion, that seeing those benches would encourage me to come into the zendo and not seeing benches would discourage me from entering the zendo. And maybe this is all obvious. It's pretty obvious stuff. But just like Bird's Nest Roshi's comment of even a child of two can understand it, but an adult of 82 still has trouble practicing it, I think that these questions of presentation and inclusion and how do we practice seamlessly for and with all beings, we can understand the intellectual concept very early on, but how do we live it?

[10:21]

What does it mean to actually live that way? So, you know, I do think about these questions a lot. Maybe I will read some of what Suzuki Roshi had to say about full expression, which was my lecture topic for today, but which I'm not actually talking about. So Suzuki Roshi says, this is a different paragraph than I thought I would read, we are not the same. We are not the same. Each one of us is different. And each one of us has our own problems.

[11:24]

Fortunately, you have the support of others who are practicing with you. This is not an umbrella to provide shade to protect you, but a space where you can have real practice, a space where you can express yourself fully. You can open your eyes to appreciate the practice of others, and you will find that you are able to communicate without words. Our way is not to criticize others, but to know and appreciate them. If you continue practicing together and your mind is big enough to expose yourself and to accept others, naturally you will become good friends. To know your friend is to know something beyond yourself, beyond even your friend. So we often say, we often focus on the part of our practice that is beyond objective thinking.

[12:37]

we often focus on the part of our practice which is related to the absolute, related to emptiness, related to non-thinking, related to the single body of practice. But Suzuki Roshi is suggesting here that the way to know that is to appreciate difference and appreciate variety. And the thing that's the same is the appreciation. It's not that the way you appreciate every different thing is the same, it's that the quality of appreciation and acceptance itself is the same. Someone once asked, Katagiri Roshi, what is practice? Could you tell me something about the meaning of life? and the meaning of your practice.

[13:41]

This was after he had been practicing for a lifetime. And he said, be kind. So that's a very simple answer, but how many of us can be seamlessly kind or seamlessly appreciative? Kind and appreciative in a way that the other person or the other being will understand as kind and appreciative. In the same chapter Suzuki Roshi talks about how unfriendly Zen centers are. You know, in Zen centers everybody has their eyes down and they're all moving in formalized ways. and they don't necessarily come up to, people don't necessarily come up to other people and say, welcome, how are you? So glad to see you, and so on.

[14:43]

As a matter of fact, there's a story, one of Mel's favorite stories is a story about Yunyan, no, Fayan. When he started practicing, He and a companion walked several hundred miles to come to a Zen center and study with a famous teacher. And they got there and the teacher had cold water and was flinging it around the room and all the students were running away. And Phyan stayed. And the teacher said, fling, you know, go away, get out of here. What do you want? Why are you gone? He flung more water on Pha Yen and Pha Yen laughed. He said, I've walked hundreds of miles to be here. You think I'm going to be deterred by a little bit of cold water?

[15:45]

And the teacher laughed and invited him in. He later became that person's Dharma heir. but he was sorely tested. Have you ever heard Mel talk about this story? No? Well, this is a good one. Okay, this is one of his favorite models, and he's brought it up with me a lot. Okay, one day, Fayan continued to practice, and he was trained by his teacher, and eventually became the tenzo, the head cook of the monastery. And his teacher was known for his austere and bitter kind of style. You can read about this in the Ehe Shingi, the pure rules for the Zen temple, pure rules for the temple. And so one day the teacher was out and Fa Yan took the keys

[16:48]

to the storeroom and got some noodles and some oil and made a fantastic dinner for everybody. And all the monks were thrilled. It's like, finally, protein. Finally, something good. But the teacher came back and said, Phi, Phi, Pho, no, different story. The teacher came back and was extremely angry and upset. And Phi Yen said, I must confess, it was I. Please, give me the consequences. And the teacher said, Out! And Phi Yen left. And he had no way to support himself, so he was begging for his food.

[17:52]

And because it was rainy, he would go to an alcove, the entryway of a building, and beg for his food. And one day, the teacher was walking on the street with his attendant, and he said, that building belongs to the temple. Get out. And it was the building belonging to the temple that the guy had chosen, that Fa Yen had chosen. And he said, and furthermore, you know, you have to pay rent for having been in that space. I mean, he made it very hard. Fa Yen asked if he could see the teacher for Dōgasan even though he was banished. Dōgasan means alone meeting. It means the meeting in which there's just one, it's like two hands meet in one gassho. Buddha and Buddha meet and bring up Buddha. That's dokasan. And the teacher said, absolutely not.

[18:55]

And so, Fayen was forced to pay back the teacher and the temple with the money that he earned from begging. And the next time the teacher went along there, he didn't stop Vaiyan, but he turned to the person that was with him and said, there's someone with the true heart and mind of the way. I mention this story because sometimes it seems like Zen centers have a cold, austere, forbidding aspect and that we have to fling ourselves repeatedly at practice in the Sangha before the arms open and we can come in. And this is historically part of the culture of Zen training. But it also means a very different thing, I think, in US culture than it has meant in other cultures.

[20:05]

It expresses something different. For instance, I first came to that austere and forbidding manner and aspect of Zen Center As the child of Holocaust survivors, I'm a first-generation American, so I came over in the womb. And so the family karma is one of rejection, much more than rejection. It's a karma of deep suffering based on, in Europe, based on racial issues. that Jews were seen at that time as an inferior race that was worthy of annihilation, worthy of being enslaved or killed.

[21:10]

And this is the family karma that I bring. So when I was first met at the door of Zen Center, San Francisco Zen Center, not Berkeley Zen Center so much because I was met here with a potluck, but San Francisco Zen Center where someone opened the door a crack and said, yes. My immediate response was fear. My immediate reaction was fear. And I carried that for years. actually. And I think that many people who come to Zen practice, we have such a variety of life conditions in the U.S. that it might not mean the same thing culturally for a Zen center to open the door a crack or throw cold water on someone that it does someplace else, even though I'm sure that in Fayan's culture it was equally shocking in certain ways.

[22:27]

I'm sure that Fayan or, you know, Ehe Dogen Daisho or somebody when they first showed up at the door expected a welcome. and didn't get it, and that was probably quite shocking to them, quite shocking to someone like Dogen Zenji, who came from a noble family and was used to having his way in everything, to show up at a temple and say, can I come in? And have it be strange and a little bit grim. But we don't know what the We don't exactly know either. There's something we don't know about the person who's coming to the door. And there's something the person at the door doesn't know about us. Like, I didn't know that the very person who opened the door a crack and looked so forbidding would actually be my Dharma brother.

[23:29]

I didn't know that. And these are called appearances, the appearance of difference. How do we practice across the appearance of difference? And move towards the appreciation of variety. You know, with the appreciation of variety, then if somebody opens the door a crack and growls something at us, we can understand that as something of the theatrical presentation of Zen. I was once speaking with Akin Roshi, I asked him for a book that he might recommend to help me understand how to teach. I think Mel was considering giving me Dharma transmission and I was of course extremely embarrassed that this was happening.

[24:33]

didn't think that I could express the Dharma, and didn't think that I was ever going to be able to express the Dharma. And that's actually true. No one can express the Dharma. The Dharma is beyond any one person's expression, but it is being expressed. And Akin Roshi said, read improv. What? Keith Johnstone wrote a book called Improv, and it's a great book. It gives exercises of giving and receiving offers, giving and receiving input. So one of the points that Improv makes is that in an exercise for improvisation, if you hand someone something, the person has to hand it back or work with it in some way.

[25:38]

For instance, you know, if one person pretends to throw something to you, you can pretend to catch it, you can pretend to drop it, you can pretend to throw it back, you can pretend that it's very big or suddenly turns into something else, But the thing that you have to do is receive it. If you don't receive it and suspend your disbelief, there isn't any improvisation. This is kind of obvious about improvisation, but is it obvious about expression? So when somebody comes up to us and says something or does something, Can we accept it? Mel gave me two instructions before Dharma transmission that I worked with for many years and since Dharma transmission I've given them to many other people.

[26:50]

In the first one I was complaining about my life and anyway he listened for a while and then he fell asleep and And I kept complaining, and, Mel, wake up, complain some more. And finally there was, he woke up and he just sat there and he kind of opened, made his eyes open. He kind of held his eyes open. And then we just sat together for a while. There was a silence and he said, Vicki, could you try to live your life in a way that's a little less horrible for you? And then, so the next Dogasan, we were talking about that, and I said, I don't think I can.

[27:55]

And I gave him an example of a situation which was insolvable, insoluble, where somebody just hated me and was disgusted by me, and nothing I could say or do would change that. And it had to do with projection and, you know, I was a priest and I looked like a priest and, you know, all this stuff. We'd talk, [...] talk. And I was talking about how impossible it was to speak to this person who had a fixed idea about me. Then there was a long silence and he said, Vicky, find the difficulty in the situation and stay with it so that a Dharma situation doesn't degenerate into an ordinary situation.

[29:01]

And so I stayed with it. Actually, those instructions, you know, ratcheting forward a few years, those instructions did work. They were quite helpful and have been helpful to a lot of people. So, this morning I actually was going to speak about presentation, the Dharma as presentation. How does that work with not seeing the world or yourself as an object? Because Peter revealed to me that in this community there's actually the possibility of having someone come and film or take pictures and have the community have to present itself in a certain way. And is that practice or is it not practice? And so I prepared a whole lecture about that which, sorry, I haven't gotten to it.

[30:06]

But good luck with that situation. You're welcome. We're facing something similar at San Francisco Zen Center and, you know, maybe we'll all you know, share our difficulties and our insights with each other, like a sangha does. So, thank you very much for listening and for your patient practice this morning. And do you have any questions? Yes? Could you expand on the phrase you said, well, that you said that melts, I guess. Yes, yes, what he said was, yes, okay.

[31:09]

The first thing that he asked me to do was find the difficulty in the situation. And the second thing that he asked me to do was to stay with it. And then the effect of that was that a Dharma situation wouldn't degenerate into an ordinary situation. So an ordinary situation, I wonder if you've ever heard the phrase, life is suffering. So an ordinary situation is one in which life appears as suffering. So it means that in an ordinary situation we're ruled by this and that, good and bad, self and others, right and wrong, up and down, rich and poor,

[32:12]

Jewish and non-Jewish, you know, Buddhist and theistic, you know, any of the dualities that exist in the world, we're ruled by them, we're their slave. And freedom is the ability to appreciate the conventional reality that there is up and down without being ruled by that. And so the key is, what is the difficulty? What is the sticking point? Dongshan spoke of three leakages, and you can check this out in the commentary to the Blue Cliff Record, Case 15. So it's in response to ìamong huanzhest yunmen,î what is it when it's not about the present mind and present emotions?

[33:14]

present reality. So in other words, what happens when we get lost, which means what happens moment after moment. And Yun Men responded, a topsy-turvy statement. I don't know whether what he had in mind was that it's always about the present mind and present emotions, so that question is topsy-turvy, or whether he meant just for you to think that there could be, you know, whenever you think that it's not about present life and present emotions, your statements become topsy-turvy. So I don't know which one Yunmin had in mind, and it doesn't matter, actually, because they're both good. But in the commentary, Dongshan talked about the three leakages. Tozan is his Japanese name. The first leakage is leakage of view. When you lose sight of how things actually is, as Suzuki Roshi said, things as it is, and you begin to think that up and down has the only validity, this and that has the only validity.

[34:31]

So it means you slip off of how things are. If you don't notice the suffering, of being caught there, then the fight and flight response starts coming up because you get involved in a positive or a negative or an idea. If you don't notice the suffering and separation of that, then pretty soon you start talking or acting in a dualistic way. Those are the three leakages. progression of karmic consciousness. So finding the difficulty means looking at what's behind what you're saying and doing. What is giving rise to your reactive mind? Where's the reaction? And staying with it means no more reaction.

[35:34]

Wait until you respond instead of react. Does that help? It's just a few lines in the commentary to Blue Cliff Record, Case 15. Blue Cliff Record, you can find it in the library here. Look at Case 15 and I think maybe a couple pages in the commentary you'll see Dongshan's that and the specific way of interpreting that actually comes out of my own practice. Particularly, I've been studying how to practice with Samatha. Samatha is equanimity, stability, meditative stability that gives rise to concentration and it's a particular

[36:42]

study of mine because of the nature of my own body and mind. So you haven't written a book yet? No, actually someone asked me to write a book but I haven't been able to. I've been involved with other things. And also the other thing was that I found that when I started putting things down it was almost as if there was a thing that I was doing or that I was studying, but there actually isn't. The question of how to respond rather than react is more of an apprenticeship skill than something one can study from a manual. Does that make sense? Well, this is Mel's teaching, actually. Haven't you heard him say, don't react, respond? Well, this is my first time here.

[37:45]

Oh, OK. So look at the treat that you're in for. Anyway, yeah, this is the Blue Cliff Record, Case 15. And also, you can look at a book called Walking Through Walls by Lama Lodro. Walls meaning what holds us in thrall, what holds us bound. And there's a little section there on about page, you know, like between pages 30 and 50, where he talks about shamatha practice, the practice of meditative stabilization. He makes the wonderful point that, you know, for most of Buddhism's history, it's been thought that you can't concentrate outside of a monastery. But if that were so, then Gandhi wouldn't have been concentrated. You know, Martin Luther King wouldn't have been concentrated, right? Mother Teresa wouldn't have been concentrated. Einstein couldn't have concentrated.

[38:47]

He would have just stayed a really bad student, the way he was when he was a kid. Okay, but wait a second, Lama Lodro makes that point that So all the things in a monastery are just really, really good things that you can have to practice concentration, but the only really necessary thing is to let go of unwholesome conceptions like jerk, creep, moron, et cetera, you know, all the things that you think while you're stuck in a traffic jam on the way to give a talk at Berkley Zen Center. And also neutral ones that generate the fight and flight response, like, oh my God, there's a gigantic truck coming to my left and it has its turn signals on, but I'm trapped between two other trucks in this lane. Okay, which is not unwholesome, but it is scary. So you have to learn how to let go of reactive states of being and sit with that.

[39:54]

And when you do that, then the world itself as it is and people in all their infinite variety become the content of your insight into how things are. Can you talk about what Peter referred to as not the program? Yes, well, briefly. Okay, but only if you tell me, you're the Dawan, so only if you tell me what time this lecture is supposed to be over and what time it is now. In about two minutes. Two minutes? Okay, I'll give you the fast version. Okay. Well, I won't keep going very long because chances are that people have appointments and other things they need to do during the day, but I'll tell you a little bit about it, which was I started practicing in 1971 and my family was shocked.

[40:57]

The reason I started practicing was because I was in a car accident and had a near-death experience that changed my mind about what was important. And so I had to practice. It wasn't like I had a choice. My life had already changed. But my family was shocked. People would say things to me like, because of you Hitler won, now it's six million and one, and before it was six million and now it's six million and one, and it was a big dramatic family fight and some people put on sackcloth and ashes and declared me dead and you know just all kinds of stuff like that. Okay, so my mother was in Australia and her friends were telling her that I was involved in a cult

[41:58]

And I don't know if you know, but culturally in 1977 there were these people called deprogrammers who used to kidnap kids who were sadly misguided, you know, objects of cult interest and giving away all their savings and stuff like that. And my mother took out a contract on me with one of these companies. But my twin sister called me and alerted me to that this was going on. So I have a lot of nerve in certain situations. So I called up my mother who wasn't actually speaking to me and said, please don't be scared, it's me. I heard that you were going to do this thing. Please don't do it, I'll come voluntarily. So I did. And it was a room in which there was kind of an important psychiatrist who could declare me mentally incompetent and have me committed, and he was asking me questions.

[43:13]

He was actually the head of the Jewish Education Council, the National Jewish Education Council, as well as a psychiatrist. And he was asking me questions about the tragedy of young Jewish youth leaving the religion and it was a very uncomfortable situation for me. I was 24 and not very socially savvy. And I had no idea how to deal with the situation. It gave me a lot of panic. But it lasted for hours and I was getting more and more scared because the room was locked and he was asking a lot of questions and so on. But then something changed in the conversation and I was able to connect with him. jumped up and unlocked the door and told my mother I was sane and invited her to come back and talk to him about letting go.

[44:22]

And so, that was, that's another, that'll be for another day. I can talk about that more another day. So, that's, but it was an example of the mysterious power of practicing with all beings, not just Buddhists and not just friendly beings. Oh no, maybe I will say something about it, because I think this is important. What happened was that at the time I was getting ready to receive the precepts, and the first three precepts are taking refuge in Buddha, which is awakeness, taking refuge in Dharma, which is the truth, and taking refuge in Sangha, which is community of all beings. And so there I was in the middle of fear, reacting, and I looked around and saw in the room a variety of things that obviously he had cared for with great love, Jewish ritual objects.

[45:42]

And I said to him, I've been, you know, all this time, I've been answering your questions. Would you answer one question for me?" And he did. He said, yes. And I said, was there a moment at which you really began to practice Judaism? And that was the question that opened him up and made him unlock the door. What is it to practice samsara with all beings? You know, what is it to practice samsara with all beings? Thank you.

[46:24]

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