I think there's babies in the room. David, would you like to introduce your sister? You're looking to me to introduce Hazel Ruby Copthorn was born last Thursday, April 4. Five pounds, eight ounces, 18 inches. We left the hospital in less than 24 hours, which is what we wanted to do. And we're busy, but joining her. I'm pleased to bring her to introduce, proud to show her off. Thank you to Mark and Diana and David, and welcome. Hazel Ruby. Sort of changes the energy in here, doesn't it?

[01:04]

Well, it's kid's end, though. It's really kid's end, though. It's just coming in and seeing Singer made me remember when my daughter was big enough, was no bigger than you could hold in a hand. You know, now she's in college. This tends to happen. It's called growing up. Or something like it. I saw a t-shirt at the gym the other day. The t-shirt said, growing old is inevitable. Growing up is optional. So, I want to ask the kids a few questions. Do you see me as a grown-up? Yes.

[02:09]

Yes. But you know, I'm still wondering what I'm going to be when I grow up. When I was, let's see, Mira, how old are you? Nine. Nine. And David? Eight. Yeah, when I was about your age, I was very interested in medicine. I wanted to be a research scientist doctor. And my grandfather worked in a hospital. And I had a really good, I had this great microscope that I had inherited from my stepfather. Actually, I still have it. And I don't know what to do with it. It's very cool. So my grandfather got me all of these slides from the laboratory there. He had got slides of tissue samples and blood and all this stuff.

[03:13]

And I really liked looking at it in the microscope. And I was, at the time, probably the world's youngest expert on hematology. That was the study of the blood. I knew I actually knew a lot about it, you know, all of which I've forgotten. But I was fascinated by looking at these cells and thinking about all this stuff. And I said, oh, that's what I may do. That's what I'll do, I was pretty sure, when I go off. uh that lasted about two years uh and uh i'm still wondering so i'm you know uh i never i never dreamed did you ever want to be well i'm curious what would you like to be when you grow up do you know do you have any idea i want to be a photographer a photographer what kind of photography um I want to take photography of nature.

[04:15]

Photography of nature? Do you do that now? No, not really. Well, you could start. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Do you know what you want to do? No. Childcare. Do you have any ideas? Do you ever think about it? Do you have fantasies? Yeah, I have only two. One is basically helping animals and saving them. The other one is designing video games. Those are highly compatible. If you could teach the animals how to play the video games, then you could do both of them. Think how happy they would be. Leo, what do you think? I don't really know, but I think I'd like to make some trails out in the wild. Or maybe make some parks for the animals. Reserves parks for all we need.

[05:18]

That's cool. Do you guys spend a lot of time outdoors? Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Does anyone want to be a Zen priest? No. No. No. It's actually, it's pretty good. It's actually, it's kind of like being a fireman except No, thank you. Never. Absolutely never. Yes, no waste of youth. Well, that's good. Those are great ambitions. And what do you, Hattie, what do you imagine your sister to be? Um, I don't know, maybe a chef. The chef? You don't think she's going to make Asian food out of her? I think she's actually going to be a chef.

[06:20]

Do you cook at home? No. Why do you think she's going to be a chef? I don't know. She just drew a picture of a chef. Oh. OK. And do you have any ideas what you might? No. No. It's a little early, isn't it? And she's not capable of answering for herself yet. Not like the, you know what? The baby Buddha, when the baby Buddha was born, was a little precocious. He took ten steps in each direction. It's not usual. So anyway, this is very interesting. And if you have any ideas, maybe you can tell me after. If you have any ideas of what I should be when I grow up, I'm still open. OK? OK. All right. Well, thank you. to go back to follow him.

[08:10]

That's really something. It's just a complete miracle to me how this life blossoms forth and occurs to me. And to think also, to look around this room, every one of us was like that. At one point, we were all so cute. What happened? You're still cute, right? We're still like that. We're still like that. So I thought I would talk a little bit about growing up today and sort of speculate about it, what I think it means, what it means within the context of our practice. I was listening, did anyone hear much of the Sotomayor hearings?

[09:12]

Yeah, I was listening to it really intensely. Aside from, I'm not going to get into the politics of it, because there's something quite reprehensible about it, I think. But there was a wonderful exchange between Al Franken and Sonia Sotomayor, where He got into asking her why she had become a lawyer. And she said, well, when I was a child, we used to sit around the TV and watch Perry Mason. And he said, oh, I did that, too. And what was interesting was what inspired her. It was she inspired her to be a prosecutor. I think that's really strange. Hamilton Berger as your... But anyway, it did. Given the sort of the cast and character of her mind, she may have felt, I could be Perry Mason. You know, maybe. I think that's good. But you know, what we resonate with as a child, what we resonate with as an adult is very, to me it's quite mysterious and wonderful.

[10:37]

And how we are challenged to hold on to that wide open spirit, which is the spirit of beginner's mind. In beginner's mind there are many possibilities and then as our life goes down this railroad track, we often feel these possibilities are kind of shaved away by our responsibilities, by the particular situation we find ourselves in, by our jobs. And yet, at heart, I think we want that child to still be alive in us. I think that's really important to maintain some child-like quality.

[11:44]

So I was really, I was quite moved by that. And thinking about kids then, I was thinking about these two aspects of this question. what you want to do when you grow up and perhaps not quite the identical question of what you want to be when you grow up which is sort of how you view what does maturity mean to you or mean to me and how does it manifest in the world I think that these are both matters contained within the field of practice. I still don't know what I want to be. I actually often think that I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. It's not quite a joke.

[12:48]

And maybe that's not so much childlike as childish of me. But while I still wonder about this stuff and speculate, I seem to have settled into a variety of roles. I'm a father, and now I'm a father contemplating, in a few years, the departure of my children. One of them has already gone off, which is kind of amazing. to imagine. I'm a priest, I'm a musician, an activist, a writer, you know, and I live a life of multitasking. Actually, this is a really bad model for a Zen teacher for students. We're supposed to do one thing completely But that doesn't, I'm not sure that interferes with growing up.

[14:07]

I can't say for myself, and I'm not going to ask you whether you think I'm grown up or not. I'm slightly afraid of what the answers would be. But if I look at Sojin Roshi, who is now 80, and when you look at him, I think, when I look at him anyway, I can still see the boy there. And, you know, in contact with each of us as we're talking, you can still see this kernel of child who really wants to be open to the whole world and take it in. This is my sense of what it means to be alive. And from time to time you meet people, you know, and then you meet people where you have a really hard time seeing that within them, which is kind of sad.

[15:20]

It may be a shortcoming of one's own, of my vision or one's own vision, but sometimes life just kind of wrings the child out of the person. But I think that the practice that we're doing encourages its life. It encourages its life in the context of beginner's mind. And I will say that all of us have met in our days some people that we consider pretty awake what we're going to call them enlightened or realized or you know whatever the people who are really awake in the world and when I've had the opportunity of the people that I've met who I felt that there's no kind of strict evaluative standard for this but they all have this kind of lightness

[16:27]

and often humor and flexibility and joy. I'm thinking some of you'll get to meet, if you haven't met, a lot of you have met Oitsu Suzuki. He's got it, right? And really transmissive. the joy that he has is just kind of contagious, you catch it. And you can see the little boy in the man who's nearly 70 now, and they don't conflict with each other. I think there's a, what I see as maturity, and I've thought this for quite a while, is I try to be serious about the things that I do. I take them seriously and attentively.

[17:32]

And yet I think that the notion of our understanding of dharma means that we don't take ourself very seriously. we carry ourself lightly. I mean, I think it's that when we have all these reasons for it, there's a kind of dharmic deconstruction of the self, which proves, if so facto, that the self cannot be precisely identified or pointed to, you know, and break it down into these different elements. But really, the manifestation of realization, I think, is just being light about oneself, which means being flexible. And I think that when I first came here, 25 years ago, and there were people that I looked up to

[18:40]

and I couldn't even name it what it was but they seemed I felt like I did feel like I didn't feel like a child I felt like uh stuck in the middle you know uh I was about 35 years old and uh I was you know it's like half of me was about was like about 70 and the people that I met 70 in a bad way people that I met here and actually there's one sitting right there Ron and others they they had that quality And those of you who know Ron and know people who've been around here a long time, they have that quality. They're very serious and attentive to what they do, and yet there's a kind of lightness.

[19:47]

And I saw this in Sojourn, but I saw it in wherever I went in the Zen world, I saw people like that. That was really encouraging. I wanted to be like that. I didn't particularly want to smell very zinny, which had a caricature of kind of this over seriousness and fierceness. It's this light quality that spoke to me. That, in an intuitive sense, seemed to me a really good standard, a really good model for maturity, for growing up. So I think there are a couple of elements that I see as creating this, that arise in our practice and arise in Vajrasattva. Suzuki Roshi talks a lot about composure.

[20:49]

And it's a very important word for him. And Sogen talks about also keeping your composure. Suzuki Roshi, in one of his lectures, he says, this is interesting, to attain enlightenment means to have this kind of complete composure in our life without any discrimination. Then he says, but at the same time, so without any discrimination, meaning we accept everything as it comes, without judging whether it's good, bad, right, wrong. And then in his typical way, he says, but at the same time, if we stick to this attitude of non-discrimination, that is also a kind of discrimination, you know.

[21:54]

So in other words, if we're caught in this place of not making distinctions, of not being able to evaluate, if we hold that, if we hold too tightly to that as a principle or as a measuring stick, then we are discriminating in a in a really hazardous way. So, at the same time, if we stick to this kind of attitude of non-discrimination, that's also a kind of discrimination, you know. So how we practice Dazen, how we attain this kind of complete composure, is the point. This is the point. This is what we're constantly working with as we sit. Sochin talked about this a couple weeks ago.

[22:57]

I forget whether it was on Monday or for a lecture. And I think it It was a very unique and personal kind of way of framing it. I talked to him very afterwards because I never heard it quite put this way. So we're always talking about the relative and the absolute, right? This is a big conundrum and it often comes up in lectures. This is also what we know as the two truths. the truth of the absolute of things, exactly as they are, and the truth of the relative, how they manifest in the world. But Sojourner Russia put it in a different way. Someone may remember the context. I thought this was really interesting. So this is his framing of two truths. The first truth is the truth of reality just as it is.

[23:57]

This is the realm of non-discrimination. And the second truth, or the other truth, we're not ranking these, right? The other truth is the truth of your feelings about reality. That's not a conventional way to frame that, but I thought it was really useful. That's the truth, that whatever comes up in the world, whatever comes up in our lives, whatever we experience, whatever we perceive, we have some feelings about it. And using feelings not in a technical way, just in a very broad way. We may like, dislike, we may feel drawn to it, we may feel repelled, we may think anywhere anywhere in between. There are all these elements, you know, like and dislikes sometimes are not so clear.

[25:02]

And maybe our feelings are not so clear. So the practice that we are cultivating as we sit is sitting in the middle of those two realities. which is something that is, on the one hand, almost inexpressible or inexpressible. On the other hand, it's what we're doing all the time. We're really trying to, we're making an effort to see things as they are. We make an effort to accept, you know, go back to the Sotomayor hearings, you know, to accept Things are as they are. There is a universe in which there is Sonia Sotomayor and Jeff Sessions. And that both of these are co-constructing reality.

[26:07]

And what we're hearing on the radio or watching on TV is just the arising of reality exactly as it is. And yet we also have some feelings about this. depending upon your conditioning. You may agree more with one side than another. And then, out of those feelings, in the world we have to do something, or we may choose not to, which is also doing something. So, I think as I've talked about before, I really like the koan of the first two, the title was returning to silence. That's going to the truth of the reality of things as they are. His second book was called, You Have to Say Something.

[27:13]

So, you have to say something in response to the truth of your feelings about how things are. So this is the conundrum of practice. I sit in the middle of that all the time. I don't have this perfectly concentrated blissful tsa-zen, which I'm just sort of coursing in some transcendent realm. Sometimes my mind is very busy. Sometimes things just take shape there. It's a very interesting kind of activity to accept it as it is, and then also to be checking your posture, checking your breath.

[28:17]

to be readjusting all the time. So this is composure, I think, means finding your balance over and over again, finding your balance moment by moment. So I think this is, when we talk about growing up, we think about sort of the wide field of becoming mature, theoretically, but in the context of Zen, What does it mean to grow up moment by moment? Moment by moment to be born, to be a child no bigger than Hazel Ruby and to move through the life of that being in that moment until that being in that moment passed away and the next one comes forth. Right within that, we grow up. And the challenge is, do we accept it, or do we really not like it?

[29:26]

Some people don't like it. A lot of people are not going to be able to sit still, because it's too uncomfortable to encounter oneself. But it's what we do. So this composure is one thing, and it's linked to what we might call control, what you might call your ability to endure. And so there's this fairly famous to get his mind in the control chapter, Suzuki Roshi says, the best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. To encourage play.

[30:32]

To encourage the child. So to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in the wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him or her. To give them the space to wander and play. So it is with people. Talking about our social world but also talking about how we are, primarily talking about how we are with ourself. Can you give yourself generous and allow that playful spirit to arise in yourself. Can you allow that moment by moment as you breathe? So he says, so it is with people. First, let them do what they want. So in other words, don't create a lot of rules, but see what they want to do.

[31:36]

First, let them do what they want and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good. That's the worst policy. So, in other words, to be kind of clueless, to be inattentive to what you are doing, speaking about oneself, quite aside from the social dimension, that's the worst policy. The second worst, he says, is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them. Just to watch them without trying to control them. So here he's bringing up the non-discriminating side. And I think he's probably bringing it up because each of these teachings is a kind of medicine. And what he sees, particularly if we take up this somewhat formal practice of Zen, is we're always trying to control things.

[32:41]

We're trying to get them to take a certain form or a certain shape. So the first thing to do is just watch. And then he says, the same way works for yourself as well. If you want to obtain perfect calmness in your zazen, you should not be bothered by the various images you find in your mind. That means the really dark and scary ones. The ones that are blissful and we want never to end. We find them and they find us. They arise in our mind. So not to be bothered by them. Just to let them come and let them go. Then they will be under control, he says. So I think this is actually a Zazen instruction.

[33:43]

Let whatever arises in your mind come up. Let it have its natural life span. Let it go. And to be able to endure that, whether it's incredibly difficult or blissful, is to find this composure. To have that capacity simultaneously. To be mature, I think, means simultaneously to be able to play. to be mischievous, to give yourself this wide field, and at the same time to be able to watch and accept whatever comes up. You know, he doesn't get, in this passage, he doesn't get to the stage in which this field is to give your horse, your sheep or cow, a large spacious meadow. That meadow has a fence around it. It has some boundaries.

[34:47]

And to work with those boundaries is also what we're doing. We work within a form. We work within a shape of practice. We work within the myriad, sometimes very difficult forms of our life, our job, our family, our body, our thoughts, to accept how the question is how do we play how do we stay alive how do we stay childlike without being childish in other words not to fall back into a state where we're having you know a tantrum or we're caught or we've restimulated the the five-year-old boy in me that you know wonders where his father is and where his mother is uh that's frightened uh but to bring forth the child-like quality of which is being in his mind.

[35:51]

I think I'm going to stop there. There's more I could say, but I think I'll stop there. I'm going to take about five minutes for questions, then I'll finish. So, Ron. I was glad to hear you mention Sojin's report about reality and feelings about reality, because several years ago, during a shosan ceremony, I asked him, what's your feeling about the word emptiness? He said, I don't have a feeling about the word emptiness. It's just emptiness. I'm glad that I think that the, and I felt, I didn't really I felt something was lacking in his answer. So I'm glad that he shifted what he said, and we see it in this context that we see to be some different way of looking at that.

[36:59]

Yeah, I really appreciate it. It really struck me when I heard it. He's less human to talk about feelings than I am. But but it was it was very clear. And I, you know, and I sort of asked him further about it. I think that's a really interesting way of framing the two truths. It's useful. It's practical rather than just this kind of abstraction of relative and absolute, which kind of we get tangled up. So thank you. All the grown up There's a second one is there's this case in the book of serenity guys on closest nearest. Yes. Yeah. That not knowing that was the whole case.

[38:04]

But the punchline is not knowing his nearest part of the commentary goes on later in the comment in that case. One of the old teacher so-and-so said that when you're affirming something or being positive, just totally be positive, but don't settle down there. When you're being negative, just be negative, but don't settle down there. And I think that's kind of what Suzuki Roshi was saying about non-discrimination. Don't settle down there. Right. As soon as you settle down someplace, You know, you sort of stake out a claim on that place, a claim of self there, and of right, you know, of rightness, of righteousness. This childlike openness, can you talk a little about if you see, is there a connection between that and one's face before one's form?

[39:06]

No, I can't talk about that. Well, I can. The whole universe is playing. The whole universe is constantly unfolding in the realm of total interaction. If we remember that, it allows us to be free. And I think this goes to what As soon as we settle down and think that the universe is a particular set of cause and effect that is going continuously to unfold in one way, then we have eliminated this element when Suzuki Roshi says, best thing is to let them be mischievous. If we allow the universe, which you could see as your face before you were born, to play, and we recognize that we are the universe, then we're free to move that way.

[40:23]

Thank you. One more. I saw the film you were presenting to Berkeley, the Burma film. Yes. I was just wondering if that you know, horrendous situations that were shown, you know, that we know about. Do you actually regard them as mischievous play of the universe or something like that? Is that play? What is that? So what she's talking about is this film, Burma VJ, which is a quite amazing film about the uprising in Burma in September 2007. or any situation of very brutal suffering? Well, I think, you know, not to get too far out here, I think what was really amazing about that film was that they were playing. The people in the making, the making of the film was so much about playing with this actually really difficult reality in such a way that it draws you in.

[41:38]

So that's not justifying. There is nukle. I don't have any question about that. People do terrible things to each other. And that's a problem that will always be with us. So I don't have any answer to that. and I don't see things, I'm not, because I'm human, I'm not capable of seeing things from the standpoint of the universe. So I don't evaluate it from the standpoint of the universe, I just have to evaluate it, I have to evaluate it from the standpoint of my human awareness and consciousness, and so I hurt. Hurt is part of the reality of things. When you say that's what the universe is doing, the universe is at play, are you just... You're saying the universe is in play.

[42:49]

Is that a statement from the point of view of the universe? As close as I can get to it. Yeah. Because I can't really do that. And words do not suffice. And the moral questions... uh endure and they are uh they're very fierce and challenging to us uh but how can i be light in the middle of that that's actually partly what you see in that film you see some hint of it from watching the monks and i find that most of the guys the yeah and so they're yeah they're playing was reality so this is kind of inspiring even though it does not have a happy ending yet okay last one we really have to end.

[44:03]

I'm really reminded of something I read showing a blank on the writer that writes about Chaucer and he said that Play and prayer are actually very nearly the same stuff. And play isn't necessarily all light and cheerful. Kids play with their fears. They have their fears, conflict, aggression. It's a way of being with sometimes they're in trouble and stuck in a creative exploratory mind that lets the feelings flow, pleasant and pleasant, and help keep going. Thank you. That's a really good place to end.

[44:57]

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