She's the teacher at Clearwater Zendo in Paleo, and she's practiced here for many years and also at all of the San Francisco Zen Centers. It's just nice to have her speaking to us today. Thank you. Good morning. I know most of you, I told Alan, it felt a little odd to be introduced. the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. You've heard that before, most of you. That's from a poem in Chinese called the Xin Xin Ming.

[01:23]

This wonderful a book, a commentary on it, Moosong translates it as, he translated it as, trust in mind. And the first character is something to do with a person standing up, so some kind of uprightness. sometimes it's translated as faith. And of course the second Shin is a different character and that's the one that we translate sometimes as mind, sometimes as heart, body-mind. Trust in mind as long as you understand that that mind includes the body. The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. It was written by Sun Tsan He was our third Chinese ancestor. He died in 606. The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences, and yet.

[02:33]

One of the things I love is usually the first time somebody hears that they start laughing. It's like, give me a break. What a great mirror, what a great dope slap from the universe to show us our sense of self, to show us our ego, to show us our clinging. I want to talk about this in light of another reality. I'm sorry if some of you know this person and this is the first you've heard of it, but a friend of mine, a friend of a number of ours here, Medillo Ceniceros, who practices at San Francisco Zen Center, he is dying pretty actively. It's not clear, whether it be a month or three months or something, but pretty soon. He's been ill for a long time, but he's dying now.

[03:47]

And I have a preference. I'd prefer that he not die. I'd much prefer that he not die. I'd prefer that he weren't ill. He's a wonderful man. He was born and raised in this country. His family is from Mexico. He's a priest. He was ordained by Sojin Roshi at City Center. quite a few years ago now. He's a great cook. When I was Tenzo, I used to ask him sometimes to make flour tortillas. He made really good flour tortillas, and I would go to the mission and buy corn ones. And sometimes he'd make a kind of mole, not the chocolate kind, but a pipián, a pumpkin seed mole.

[04:53]

And then we'd put it on tofu, make it kind of a tofu stew. He told a friend of mine, when she started at Zen Center, I guess she was at City Center, Linda Grodalushin, he told her she was helping him paint something, so he was kind of telling her the ways of this vast bureaucracy. He told her, well, what you do is, if somebody asks you to do something, You just smile and say yes and then do whatever you want. Which is often good advice in a vast bureaucracy.

[05:54]

The corollary is, it's easier to apologize than it is to get permission. That's standard wisdom there. The Delio's version is not exactly standard wisdom, but I think a lot of people follow it. So I prefer that my friend weren't dying. Much preferred. But the great way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart." Infinitely. He's not fooling around, he's telling us, don't have preferences. He's telling us to stop picking and choosing. There's another version which is a very loose translation by Stephen Mitchell.

[07:06]

It says, the Great Way is not difficult, only don't be attached to your preferences. But most people translate it, don't have them, don't do it. So how do we understand this? How do we practice with it given that, of course, we have preferences? What's it really, really about? I think it's not about not caring. It's not about getting stuck in emptiness. It's not about being somebody other than who you are. It is though, it is about

[08:21]

letting go of that constant judging. It is about letting go of that constant picking and choosing. We define a self, we make a self for ourselves by this constant, I like, I don't like, I like, I don't like. We do it subliminally, we don't even know we're doing it most of the time. But my friend Darlene Cohen says, If ever you spend ten minutes without picking and choosing, call me up even if it's in the middle of the night because you're enlightened. So, oh well. We make a self by this picking and choosing. We make a self by the words that we use to describe things. we name things, we name and label our experience constantly as we must. And we separate from this oneness that is and then we turn around and we label it and we say this is a lectern and that's Jim and so on.

[09:38]

And we have to do it but we don't have to fall in love with the process, which is what we also do, and out of that we construct a self. There's a two-bit word, we reify our self. We concretize our self, we make an object of our self. And that's what he's talking about, I think. Don't do it. Don't believe in it so much. It's necessary and as a matter of fact enlightenment I think is completely, completely accepting the necessity of constructing this self and the necessity of constructing other. I have to separate and call it a table so I don't bump into it. I have to do that, but I don't have to believe in it as something solid.

[10:44]

I have to kind of live in both worlds at the same time. Somehow, I guess it's the koan of our practice, the koan of our lives to live in this plain old everyday world of tables and friends and death and grief and loss, at the same time knowing in our bones from our practice that all of this is empty of own being, that there's nothing solid here, there's nothing separate here, there is no other, there's no self, there's no other, there's no subject, there's no object. And yet, I wish my friend weren't dying.

[11:53]

And yet, when I started talking about him, I'm near tears. But for me to really love him, I think, I have to completely let go of him. I have to let him die. In completely letting go of him, I can see then, I can know, not with my mind, because the mind is the usual mind, my brain events are always dualistic. Language is how the, not just what we say but how we think, we talk to ourselves in concepts and words usually.

[12:56]

That's always dualistic. Does this make sense? Should I explain that or is that? You have to choose a word as opposed to some other word you could have chosen. There's always some separation in labeling things. So if we know the not-to-ness, if we know the oneness of our experience, we know that experientially, not as a brain event, not through language at all. We express it through Zazen. And we have an experience of what Ron Nestor calls satisfaction with the breath. What I call enoughness. We can know it in our bodies in some sense, maybe intuitively, but as soon as we talk to ourselves about it, we're separated from it.

[14:02]

If I completely let go of a dealio, I can know the connection. And then I can respond to him without any idea of me responding to him. I can just go visit for a couple of hours and just take care of him. later in the poem it says, in this world of suchness there is neither self nor other than self. To come directly into harmony with this reality, just simply say when doubt arises, not to.

[15:06]

In this not to, nothing is separate, nothing excluded. Nothing excluded. You notice he doesn't say, sometimes in the poem he says, he talks about oneness, but here he doesn't say oneness, he says not two-ness, not two, because there's both one and two. We live in the two-ness, right? We live in the individuation of each of us and the knowing of the separate objects of our daily life and all the objects of our thoughts. That's where we mostly live in that two-ness, so it's useful for us to remind ourselves not two. But not to fall over into just one either. Sometimes we say, not one, not two.

[16:09]

In this world of suchness there is neither self nor other than Self. To come directly into harmony with this reality just simply say when doubt arises, not to. In this not to, nothing is separate, nothing excluded. My friend and teacher Leslie James at Tassajara says when something's difficult she reminds herself, what she says to herself is, this is the Dharma too, nothing excluded. And we like to think that the Dharma is just, I don't know, forgive me, good zazen, not that there is any such thing of course, but you know the Dharma is those times in zazen when there's just breathing, if not even I'm breathing,

[17:14]

And the period passes very quickly. That's the dharma, right? And then when you have a bad period of satsang, that's not the dharma. You know, when you've been thinking the whole time and obsessing about something and sometimes not even noticing that you're off on the train of thought or you keep noticing and you just keep coming back and coming back and coming back and it's like slogging through mud. That's not the Dharma. Well, it is. It is. Nothing excluded. Not self, not other than self. Not me, not a dealio. Nothing excluded that's got to include grieving for my friend. That's the Dharma too. Even though I know To some extent I know in my bones I know we're not separate.

[18:19]

I know there are no boundaries. There's just this suchness, is-ness, not to-ness. Idilio and I are not two, we're one. But we're two. We are two. I think he emphasizes saying to yourself not to because we tilt that way much more often than we tilt towards the oneness side. Tilting towards oneness I think of as getting caught in some kind of nihilistic idea of emptiness, making emptiness actually into a thing and then trying to live there. saying, for example, Adilio and I are just one and it's just life-lifing and there's no birth and there's no death.

[19:25]

It's just oneness, just nothing but change and flow and interconnection. Well, yeah, that's true. But he's my friend and he's dying. So sometimes it's called the Zen student sickness, to fall into this emptiness just allowing yourself to see the oneness and not noticing or allowing or including the two-ness. Sang Tsang isn't suggesting to us that we exclude the two-ness when he says, when doubt arises, say to yourself, not two. I think he means that as an antidote to our everyday sickness, the disease of the mind, which is this picking and choosing and separating and labeling and so on. That's much more the problem.

[20:26]

So how do I relate to my friend, how do I enjoy my friend for however long we have, which may be, you know, a substantial chunk of time actually. How do I do that with this mind of not-twoness while recognizing the twoness? I think it's by allowing myself to experience what I experience to be as present as I can for whatever the process is but without inserting my self-centeredness without inserting my ego, without acting from my ego.

[21:37]

Being present as possible without some idea of compassion or its near enemy, which is pity. Just responding, just responding. Without an idea of a dealio and me. There's in the commentary on the divine abodes, talking I think about compassion, there's a quote from the Buddha that's a koan for me, it's shocking. He quotes the Buddha as saying, you would not be my disciple if you were out in a boat with three other people, say, and a sea pirate came and said, I want one of you.

[22:45]

And if you step forward and said, take me, you are not my disciple. Doesn't it seem like the Bodhisattva would step forward and say, take me? So what is that? How do I take care of my friend without stepping forward and saying, I'm here to help? I think that's it. It's the, I'm here to help. Or it's the, take me. Just step forward. Just step forward. No language. no thought of stepping forward, you just step forward. That's Buddha's disciple, that's certainly Sangsang's disciple.

[23:48]

And stepping forward may include grieving, may include cleaning somebody up if they use a What do you call those things? So you pee into. Anyway, there's a... No, there's a little thing that men use that, anyway... Well, it's plastic, it's a jar. Is it still called a urinal? Anyway, it's not easy to pee into those and people dribble and you have to clean it up. Just clean it up. I've been thinking about this in terms of just do your karma. You know, each of us is the fruit of innumerable causes and conditions, innumerable karmic choices, volitional choices by who knows who.

[24:57]

Maybe there's a few, maybe many, many lifetimes that this nexus of energy stayed together, maybe not. I'm not, I don't know. There wasn't an I, but maybe there was some nexus of energy. But there were innumerable, I don't know what the plural is for next, next I or something. At any rate, I'm the result of innumerable choices. Was it all my ancient tangled karma? And each of us is, and each of us is a little different and sometimes a lot different. So my job is to express this set of karmic fruits moment after moment. So I relate to Adelio and my job is to express this set of karmic fruits with as much freedom and as little attachment as I possibly can.

[26:02]

I have a student who is 80, I don't know, 85 say. She lives in Napa and she's been a liberal democrat, progressive democrat, peace activist for years and she reads the paper every day and she gets really upset. And as we've been studying this Hsinchu and Ming both in Pleasant Hill and in for six, eight weeks now, something like that. And she says, well, what about, shouldn't I prefer peace to war? And I mean, in some sense, yes, but you know, greed, hate, and delusion are right in the center of our life. I don't know if they're going away. But her karmic fruit is to be a peace activist. So be a peace activist, wholeheartedly.

[27:07]

I'll be a Zen teacher, wholeheartedly. But without any expectation of results. What would that be like? So I take care of Idilio, relate to Idilio wholeheartedly. And I'll do Mary and he can do Idilio, and we'll both do it as wholeheartedly as we can, but without, to the extent possible, without any idea of doing Mary or doing Adelio. And then there's also the dance that's Mary and Adelio. We'll do all that stuff. And his wife, Lise, is also a friend of mine. So we'll all dance together. Reminding ourselves Actually, I just have to take care of this one. My job is to remind myself not to, not to, not to, not to. So we do this dance with what I think of as the mind of emptiness.

[28:16]

Not this emptiness as a thing or as in sickness, just the mind, the mind of not to-ness, this mind. Not this mind. And of course really the mind is like this. That's the reality. So this is oneness. I open my hand. It's this two-ness, this closed fist that's holding on. the mind of emptiness, the mind of no preferences, the mind of just do Sally and Ralph. What would that be like? Isn't that our practice? Isn't that our zazen? In this world of suchness there is neither self nor other than self.

[29:29]

to come directly into harmony with this reality, just simply say when doubt arises, not to. In this not to, nothing is separate, nothing excluded. So thank you. Do you have any comments or questions? Yeah. I mean, in some sense, we can't do anything else, but when I say karma, karma technically is volitional choice. We usually use the word karma actually refers to karmic fruits. In other words, the consequences of those choices. So I think that each of us is expressing moment after moment the results of innumerable choices.

[30:40]

And then we respond to those choices and we experience that as having some freedom, we can respond with that mind of emptiness, we can respond from a place of closeness, attachment to self, ego, being pulled around by the constant chatter in our minds, we have that choice, or at least we experience it as if we do, so we might as well act as if we do. Does that answer you? Yeah, to be yourself, to be willing to be yourself, wholeheartedly, but without any expectations. So that Janet Altman from Napa should continue to write letters to her congressman and do the things she does, but without any expectation that she's going to end war.

[31:53]

You just do it. Because that's who she is. And to the extent she can let go a little, then maybe she won't get quite so upset when she reads the paper. It doesn't mean that you don't do something, but with what mind you do it. Yes, I agree with you. I think, and I say innumerable, I mean innumerable causes and conditions. Maybe somebody made some choice in some sense

[32:59]

It's hard to talk about it without saying somebody or something, and then we receive it, and maybe this nexus made some decisions last lifetime, maybe that affect this same nexus, I don't know. But at any rate, there's a lot that we receive that the way we usually think of things we had nothing to do with. But right now, moment after moment, I do preferences, and I do pick and choose, and I do allow myself to be pulled around by my ego-based thinking. That happens, and so I think this is, as usual, they don't write these kinds of things that we use. This wasn't written in order to educate our brains or something. This is a practice aid. So he's telling us to live our lives with the mind of not to.

[34:19]

He's telling us to notice just how much we pick and choose and notice how much harm we do ourselves and others and to let it go. What about choosing to be free? Is that the same thing? I don't know what choosing to be free means actually. I just know what noticing means or something like that. Choosing to be free is just too big for me. Can you talk about it more? I think so, but to me those things happen by noticing. You just keep noticing how much grief you cause yourself by your, I don't, the word addiction got so trendy for a while, but your addiction to your own self-involvement and your own unwholesome habits.

[35:26]

And you keep noticing and noticing and noticing and finally you get tired of it. And you may not drop it completely, but you loosen your grip anyway. So I think it's an organic process. So I'm always a little taken aback. Somebody says, I am choosing to be a compassionate person. And I think, well, why don't you just notice? And then the compassion will arise, I think. I think we're kind of hardwired for that, because as you understand the connection, why would you hit yourself hammer with your own, hit your own thumb, you know. But anyway, I just think it's a pretty organic process. Yeah. That's true, we completely define ourselves by our preferences, deeply.

[36:36]

Thank you. Yes, but I don't know that I would, I think of helping often as not so great. Depends on where it comes from. When it's an organic response, it's real different from some idea of helping, which is often condescending. You know, Parsifal, he had to learn to get over himself. And then it arose naturally.

[39:08]

He saw this sick old guy and he said, oh, can I do anything to help? And notice he asked. He didn't assume that he knew what the guy needed. He asked. And sometimes somebody is crying and the appropriate response is to let them have the room to cry. And sometimes the appropriate response is to say, what's the matter? And sometimes the appropriate response is to take them in your arms. There's not one size fits all. Yes, I just, I'm, I have, the word is often misused, I guess, so that's why I have difficulty with it. I try to use being useful rather than being helpful. But yes, to what you're saying, yes. And I think it arises organically. when we can allow it. And sometimes we overdo it, we lean in that way, and sometimes we lean away because we're scared.

[40:17]

You know, we don't look homeless people in the eye. We give them or don't give them, but don't shun them. But we do that because we're kind of scared. So, if we can just stay present and allow this one to express itself, it will arise, I think. It is. It is. Anybody else? Yeah. It is more true for real human beings and I think that the Richard Clarke one, which is what Moosong uses and most of the others, are more helpful for human beings.

[41:33]

Because I think I said at the beginning, I think that that don't do it, don't have them, it shows us our ego, it shows us just how much we do do it. So I think it's useful to, it's like a wake-up call right in your face. That's how I think of it. Well, put your intention on not being pulled around by your preferences so much, and then see what happens. Anyway, it's just words. This is my preference. I like those things, yes. I like those words. We use the word save them at Clearwater. beings are numberless, I've got to save them because I just like, I like these words that are a little bit shocking.

[42:42]

And then it forces us to get in there and wrestle with them. So that's my preference. But we all have so much work to do in this room. It doesn't matter how you talk about it, just do it. And we do do it when we sit sasan. I think that's what sasan is, right? seeing the picking and choosing and letting it go, seeing it, letting it go over and over and over again. So, you can call it ... Yes. I think it's time to ... Alan, did you have something? But I see that the Dawaan is sitting there with the striker of practice. Peace.

[43:31]

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