When I was walking to the Zindo a few minutes ago, Larry and Eugene were standing on the porch getting a good sunspot to warm up, and it reminded me of Tassajara in the middle of the winter, just before a work meeting. The work meeting goes wherever the sun is. And sometimes you see people looking for a good spot to warm up. Anyway, Tassajara is over for me this year. And I'm glad to be back. It always feels good to come back and sit with everybody here. Two things that I want to talk about today, both of which are fairly major.

[01:05]

First, I just want to mention that on the 3rd, Sunday of the 3rd of January, I'm going to do a priest ordination for Malie Scott and Fran Tribe. And you're all invited to attend, and I hope you come. We're not going to have any scheduled events until New Year's Eve. So I want to, this is the last talk of the year. So I want to say something about that. Also about New Year's Eve, we have informal Zazen the rest of the week, the rest of the time until New Year's Eve where we start sitting Zazen around 8.30 or 9.00, can't remember what time, and we sit through midnight.

[02:18]

And then we have a little party after midnight. So if you want a good way to spend New Year's Eve, you're welcome to come and you can come and go. You don't have to start at the beginning, but just come on New Year's Eve whenever you can. And we usually sit, just around midnight, before midnight, you start hearing the firecrackers and the machine guns. and rifles, pistols. When you're sitting Zazen, you can hear all those things. They're not mysterious. They're just right there in the neighborhood. And then when it calms down a little bit, we get up, chant the Heart Sutra and get up and have a party. So please come.

[03:20]

It's a good way to spend New Year's Eve. to welcome in the new year actually, a good way. The other thing that I want to tell you is that last night we had a board meeting at Zen Center and they asked me to be a co-abbot of Zen Center with Tenshin Sensei. who also requested that. So there were various alternatives that could have been done, but they didn't. One was that I could have been SADO, which is a kind of advisor or sub-abbot to the abbot.

[04:23]

They didn't want that. They wanted me to be, have kind of equal, share the abbotship equally with Tenshin Sensei. And so I said, yes, this is for one year, for the year of 1988. And the way that we thought about it was that Tenshin Sensei would be abbot of Green Gulch. And since they need, they really would like me to work in the city. So I will be the abbot of Page Street. And then we'll share the abbotship of Tassajara. And it may look like I won't be here, but I will.

[05:26]

Actually, more than if I was going to Tassajara for the practice period. In January, we already know that I'll be doing the practice period at Green Gulch, in which I go two days a week. And it doesn't affect Berkeley so much. And that's from January 10th to February 25th. And after that, I'll start working at Page Street. So I really will only do one thing at a time besides what I'm doing here. I won't be scattered around doing a lot of different things. But this will be my practice. And I'll also be sharing that at Page Street. And then I really want to limit myself to doing only being in only two places at one time.

[06:37]

Although, you know, things will creep up and I'll be busy. But I really want to ask you to help me share this. And the way I see it is as a real opportunity for people to, for the Sangha to take care of itself, take responsibility, which you have been doing and which you do very well. When I They were very concerned about this Sangha, whether or not the Sangha would have difficulty. And they are quite willing to have people come over and help do things. And I said that the Sangha takes care of itself very well.

[07:43]

and that it would be really good to share with Zen Center and to have people come to work together with us, not just to work, not just to take over for us, but to work together with us. And I think that that's a real, could be a real opening up and kind of sharing of Dharma. So I see that as a real opportunity. And I really want to promote that. So I'm kind of looking forward to all that. And I think that it's a natural evolution. You can only stay doing one thing for so long, and then things change.

[08:48]

And you have to go somewhere, you know, you have to move and develop. So I think it's a natural consequence for me to do what I'm doing and a natural consequence for all of you to also move in this situation. So, I think it's stimulating, and it will stimulate our practice. And if Zen Center is stimulated, the effect is far-reaching. That's why I'm always very concerned about Zen Center, actually. In the past few years, or maybe the past 10 or 15 years, people have asked me why I was so concerned about Zen Center and why I stayed with Zen Center even though it was difficult and why this place wasn't enough.

[09:58]

It is enough, but my roots are in Zen Center and I think that what happens with Zen Center affects all of Buddhism, all of the Dharma. I don't say that Dharma would vanish, but I'm saying that it has a big effect, since it is one of the most prominent Buddhist practice places in the country. people look to Zen Center in some way for a kind of leadership and if that's not there, it really affects all of our practice. So when Zen Center is going well, then it stimulates practice with us and with others.

[11:00]

So I think, I hope it will be to our benefit. Also, it's very good for Tenshin Sensei and I to work together this way. If we can, I told him last night, if we can do this, anybody can do it. I mean, he and I used to be very antagonistic to each other. And in 1974, when we were at Tassajara together, it was pretty rough. And we sat down one day and decided that someday that we should practice together in a real close way and work it out. And lo and behold, So that's that.

[12:11]

And the other thing is this ordination, which I feel is quite wonderful. This is the first time that I'll have ordained people as priests who grew up in our Sangha. Meili started practicing in 1970, 71, and Fran started practicing in 1967. And ordaining people as priests, very unknown.

[13:16]

We don't have so much experience. Although we've had, there have been priests for being ordained in Zen Center for quite a long time, myself included. It hasn't always worked so well. In our lineage, there's not a lot of difference between priests and laypeople. And we have to really understand, try to understand and define not too much, but define to some extent what it means to be a priest. And in this country, in this time, and within the way we practice,

[14:29]

I think that there are three different things that a priest should be involved with. One is a kind of priest craft, which is how you take care of your, how you learn how to deal with your robes, and how you learn how to do the service, and how you learn how to do the visible things that priests do that kind of distinguish them, which is a kind of priest craft. What you know, how much you study, what kind of things that you learn that are necessary. And then there's the area of taking care of the Sangha and giving up self-centeredness in order to live a life of freedom.

[16:04]

and benefit to the people around you. Not just the people, but the realm around you, which includes not only people, but things. In other words, how you make an effort to live an enlightened life, which is not self-centered and is life of emptiness, which means that you take care of all things as yourself. That's an enlightened life, that you take care of all things as yourself. And then the third area is the area of not, you don't know what to do.

[17:06]

So the first area, you really know what to do. I mean, there's something definite to do. The second area is kind of your life of understanding what it is that you're doing and putting it into practice. And the third area is, I don't know what to do. And that area is very important and a little bit vague. But if you always know, you know, if our life is within a little box, you know, where you know the walls, you know how high it is, and you know how wide it is, and how deep it is, and that's pretty simple. But actually, When you take off the lid, it's a big, big box.

[18:14]

The box extends everywhere when you take off the lid. So, in the same way, there's this completely unknown factor, which is how you find out what to do. how you find out what to do. I don't know how to say it better than that, but there's something that you know what to do, very definite, and there's something where you have a field where you can really practice, and the other is you just don't know. And that's maybe the creative chaos in which you expand, making order within chaos, or creative ability.

[19:30]

So all three of these are really important. I remember when I was ordained, and I asked Suzuki Roshi, well, what do I do now? He said, I don't know. Then I went and asked Kadagiri Roshi, I said, what do you do as a priest? He says, I don't know. And I realized that I was handed this wonderful koan of I don't know what to do. which I took as, what should I do to always keep, what shall I do in front of me? How do I make this work? So it was quite wonderful because they gave me a lot of space to find out what to do. Not really telling me very much. So I really stayed close to home so that I would have some guidance.

[20:54]

Staying close to the wall, not wandering too far out in the middle of the field. And little by little, finding out what it really means to be a priest. And I'm still finding out I can tell you there's no end to finding that out. So in this spirit, I feel we can ordain people. I can ordain people. But I want to ordain people little by little. I don't want to ordain a lot of people. little by little, and see how that goes. Do you have any questions about anything that I talked about?

[22:07]

R.I.P.? R.I.P.? You'll still be avid here. Yeah. That was the thing about—see, sedo is a kind of a term which is someone who is already an abbot someplace can help the abbot, you know, or be a support for an abbot, you know. So, say in Japan, sometimes the abbot will have someone from a temple, an abbot from another temple, come and practice with him for a while to help him. So that's actually quite... Maybe at some point I'll do that.

[23:26]

If things stabilize, something might work out that way better. But people wanted to do it this way. So we'll see what happens. on a year-by-year basis for a while, or do they know... One year. One year. Next year, they'll have to figure it out all over again. Not figure it out all over again, but once you're moving, it's not so hard to know which way to turn. Right. But when you're way back here, then you have to figure the way you're thinking. But actually, this is the result of quite a number of years of difficulty. You know, and so it's not just sudden. It's, uh, I've kind of actually been expecting this, uh, for some time.

[24:32]

Uh, but, um, it all had to get worked out both, um, uh, emotionally with people and, uh, logistically and very, you know, is the culmination of maybe four or five years of difficulty and trying to find out which way to go. And big relief, you know. After the meeting last night, it was a big relief. Everybody finally went away from board meeting happy. I'm not going to give up the structure of my practice here. But I can see myself maybe once a month giving a talk at Zen Center and having someone give a talk here, which is not a bad idea.

[25:57]

It's good. And I can see spending time, after the Green Gulch practice period, I can see maybe spending a week at a time periodically at Payne Street. But it's a lot easier. And it's very close, you know. It's not like a faraway place. It's the closest place. It's 16 miles away. Big miles. Big miles. Big miles. In a way, I'd rather commute to Green Gulch. Because even though it's farther, at least you go.

[27:01]

At least you can move more than two or three miles an hour. So the worst part of it is the bridge. So the new year will hold all kinds of new things. And I just hope that we can all work together to make things work for everybody. That's my hope.

[28:01]

is that we can make things work for everybody. It seems that the The question of lay people and priests is really one of the cons that one is facing. That's right. Because in the past, there was a natural distinction that arose, just in terms of priests were the ones who maintained the practice or practiced intensively. And nowadays, lay people are precepts and together.

[29:07]

Yeah. Because in a way, all the things that you said also apply to lay people. Yeah. I think the difference is that, I mean, one difference, not the difference, but one big, not a big difference, but one which may not be a difference with everybody. But the way that Suzuki Roshi described the difference is that priest practice is a deeper commitment. It's not that lay practitioners are not deeply committed or are just as committed. But generally, to be ordained is a real commitment, a deeper commitment than you would need to be a lay person.

[30:23]

Which, as I said, is not to say that lay people are not just as committed. Not all laypeople are committed, but all priests should be committed in a certain way. Well, nothing's necessarily true, but I think that priests have a certain kind of commitment that As I said, in this country, practice of priests has not been around very long. So a lot of people who were ordained as priests, through circumstances, lost their commitment

[31:26]

But there's still a lot of priests who have very definite commitment to practice. And I think that is one of the distinctions of a priest is that, well, I would say, put it this way, that the things that you have done in your life and want to do, and the roads that you traveled and want to travel, that to become a priest means that you're not looking for any more roads to travel. In other words, once you are ordained as a priest, you don't want to become a lawyer or a doctor or something else. You no longer have other plans.

[32:29]

Even though you may be a housewife or a psychologist, this is acceptable. It depends on the rootedness of your practice. So a layperson may be very rooted in practice and feel that they want to take the commitment of being a priest. They wouldn't give up their family or their career, but being the priest would be very central to their life and inform all of their other activities. So, But I wouldn't think of ordaining somebody who wanted to be ordained and then wanted to do some other activity, to take on something new after that.

[33:43]

So it's a little bit there are, it's not completely, you know, cut and dried as to what the boundaries are. And I think we just have to find out. That's that unknown, the third spot, which is the unknown spot. It's like, what does it mean to do it? So when Fran and Meili are ordained, that's going to be their big koan, their big challenge.

[35:03]

It's how to do this, given this situation. What does it mean to do that given this situation? And I feel that I can ordain them because they're so rooted in practice already. They have a good foundation. Suzuki Roshi also used to say, people would ask him to become, if they could be ordained, and he used to say that

[36:11]

Before becoming a priest, you should already have good life as a layperson. You should know how to practice as a layperson completely. So that you're not leaving something, you know, not escaping from one thing into another. But it's true that a lot of people end up as priests precisely that way. Precisely what way? Sort of because it was hard in life and they were, you know... But not in our lineage. Not in our lineage. Well, we all have a preference for something, right?

[37:19]

There are people who no longer want to deal with lay life, and they'd rather just practice as priests, because... Right, but... you know, there are many different styles of practice. And different teachers have different ideas of, you know, what constitutes practice. And it's true that, you know, traditionally, you know, a lot of monks, a lot of people became monks because in China, you know, life is hard, you know, they could eat three meals a day. And it degenerates into that. I mean, it's possible for monkhood to degenerate into that, into just getting off the streets and finding a refuge, which in itself is not too bad.

[38:25]

It's not, it shouldn't be the main purpose, but it does serve a purpose like that. Some people you keep around because they need to be there. They need to be taken care of. Some people need to be taken care of. But in our lineage, with Suzuki Roshi, my understanding, and I feel the same way, because of this closeness between lay and priest, practicing together, we don't escape into priesthood. It comes more with, after you've learned how to take responsibility in the world, then you can, and really fulfilled a lot of responsibility in the world, then you can take on, you're ready maybe to take on priesthood if that's, you know, something that you want to do.

[39:38]

But that's not the law either. That's just an attitude. It can be various things. Because a lot of the people that are priests, particular sangha, also are practicing as lay people. They have a job, they have a family, and they're not escaping from that. You know, we say priest practice is a leaving home. It's called leaving home practice. But the koan is, how do you leave home without leaving someplace? without going away. And it doesn't mean leaving by not taking responsibility.

[40:45]

It actually means taking more responsibility. without attachment. Taking responsibility completely without attachment. Sometimes people confuse attachment and responsibility. Responsibility is to take care of what needs to be taken care of, not to escape from what you need to take care of. But at the same time, to be attached to nothing. So attachment is

[42:05]

being attached either to grasping or aversion. This is the duality of our life. We become attached either to something we want or we become attached to something that we don't want. You may wonder about attachment to something that we don't want. But if you look at your legs in Zazen, When we sit Zazen, as an example, we want something nice to happen. And when we're feeling good, when our legs are feeling good, we like that. Naturally, we like it. But then when our legs start to hurt, we don't like it. That's called aversion.

[43:08]

So if they hurt too much, then we want them to feel good. That's called grasping. We want the nice state and we don't want the painful state. But as soon as we start to become attached to the good state, then the bad state appears naturally. And then we get attached to grasping the good state and we get attached to averting the bad state. So attachment goes both ways. We become attached both to what we like and we become attached to what we don't like. This is a life of attachment called suffering. Yes.

[44:10]

I was going to say that it seems like with priest practice there's a public dimension to it. It's different than lay practice. A lay person can have his or her practice as a central part of his life and yet he doesn't make that as a kind of public declaration with a uniform and with a title. Yeah, so it's a visible aspect. That's right. And people have some response to that. If a priest is named himself a priest and yet somehow isn't living up to it, there is some disappointment. Right. It doesn't seem that we have the same expectation of lay people. Yeah. The disappointment is there, but the expectation is is different. That's right. So there's actually more expectation because of the visibility and the intention.

[45:12]

Yeah, when one's made a public statement about the intention. Yeah, so it helps a person to practice with the robe, you know, because when you do something, you know, you always know, you know. Somehow it comes back to you. So it helps you to practice even though it gives you a problem. So being ordained gives you a big problem. And you have to be willing to do it to accept that problem. But it can be a very good problem. Okay, thank you.

[46:20]

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