busy up there. Before I talk about what I've been thinking of, I'd just like to acknowledge that there are a fair number of newer people sitting session today, which I always find kind of inspiring and Really encouraging. And I noticed that for some people, oreokie breakfast was complicated and not so easy to figure out. I think Mel recently, in one of the recent sittings, did a whole, his whole lecture was was orioke instruction.

[01:11]

Is that right? Yes. I missed that one. So I'll spare you my version of that. But I'd like to suggest that as best you can find this place between attention to what's going on around you, to how you're being served, to how maybe the person across from you who might, might, might not know in greater detail how to be eating that way, how that person is doing it. So, on the one hand, you're holding this place of attention, and on the other hand, holding a place of, or letting go of, so that you can relax, so you have attention and relaxation, just relax. find the natural way to enjoy the meal and not worry too much about mistakes that you might be making.

[02:18]

So this is an interesting koan for us, how we hold this attention and also how we relax. Not unlike, I think, our approach to zazen, to hold our attention and to really relax into each moment, but not in a slack way, in an attentive way, in an accepting way, and with a spirit of deep inquiry. So try that. If you're new to orioke, try to eat that way. If you're old to orioke, Also, try to eat that way. Be relaxed. Be comfortable and enter the form without holding on to your idea of how it should be done for yourself, your idea of how it should be done for the person who's sitting next to you.

[03:28]

I think that's the spirit we'd like to convey. So I think that's about all that I want to say on that, although it's not entirely disconnected from the other things that I've been thinking about. OK? We've had, for the last week or so, a group of Zen pilgrims who have walked across America. Some of them, four of them, walked every step across America. They've been living in the community room. They'll be here for, I think, two more days. They've kind of made themselves scarce today. They've gone up to an Obon celebration in Sacramento where they were invited.

[04:33]

And I've been challenged by the example of what they've done, encouraged by it, and questioning about it. What is it? And asking that dangerous question for myself, why? Which, unfortunately, often gets in. Why often gets in before the maybe more useful question, which is how? But I've been thinking about them and talking with them, and I know that some of you have been talking with them, and it gives me, it kind of stokes up the fires, certain fires. or maybe all the fires. You know, it stokes up fires about the notion of engagement with society and with the world, but it also really stokes up fires about practice.

[05:46]

And Siddhantsa Zen, practicing, again, with the emphasis on how, rather than on why, and trying to allow peace, first of all my own peace, to emerge in midst of that. The tenets that they are talking about, particularly Anshan, who's a priest, has been talking about as the tenets of the this pretty new peacemaker order that has been begun by Tetzek and Glassman and others. They have reframed the precepts, and if you want to actually find out a little more about it, Rennie Glassman's new book, Bearing Witness,

[06:58]

kind of talks about it a bit, a lot actually, that's what it's about. But the reframing that they've been talking about most and that I find most compelling, although they don't talk about it as a reframing, but I hear it as that, is a reframing of the pure precepts, the way we get the pure precepts in the Mahayana or Zen tradition is avoid all evil, do all good, save the many beings. And the vows that they take, which just looking at it so structurally, I see to be reframing of these pure precepts are vow to penetrate the unknown, vow to bear witness, and vow to heal myself and others.

[08:16]

To penetrate the unknown, to bear witness, to heal myself and others. And I find this a really powerful reframing that just really seems to speak to my life in a tremendously useful way. And I think that it seems to me an attempt, when you vow to refrain from evil and do all good, already you have to cast yourself in a kind of realm of judgment and discrimination, which of course we can't avoid. We make judgments and discriminations all the time. But to penetrate the unknown and bear witness has at its core, it seems to me, a really non-dualistic way

[09:29]

of taking on the same questions. This is a week of difficult anniversaries, difficult anniversaries for all of us and for myself in particular. Today is the anniversary the 53rd anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, the second use of atomic weapons on a population, our government, in the age of many of our parents bombing Japan, killing many thousands of people outright and more in the years to unfold.

[10:38]

Yesterday would have been the 75th birthday. My mother's 75th birthday. She would have been 75 on the 8th. Also on the 8th of August 888, the 10th anniversary of the terrible repression of the democracy movement in Burma and how that's being marked in Burma. There's a heightened tension and I haven't I haven't checked my email today. I'm trying not to, because this is what we're doing today. So that's a very important demarcation for people in Burma.

[11:43]

On the 6th, a few days ago, was the anniversary of Hiroshima, the first use of nuclear weapons people of Japan. And I think we'll dedicate the service to all of the victims of that bombing. We can dedicate the noon service to that. And on the day before that is the anniversary of my mother's death, which was 22 years ago. And she died at the age of 53, not a whole lot older than I am now. And she died of the cumulative and immediate effects of drug addiction, which took place over a long period of time.

[12:59]

which we saw and hated, which we were victimized by and manipulated around, and yet we didn't really bear witness. And so the healing is very difficult. So this is a I'm sorry if I'm breaking you down, that's not the intention. Because I think that these kinds of, I'm just kind of raising these because they're happening this week because they're in my awareness this week, but those are just things that occurred, some of which occurred to me and my family, some of which occurred to all of us. And what we do with anniversaries, what we do with the suffering that's in our lives is of utmost importance and has everything to do, I think, with why we're here.

[14:24]

and why we sit zazen. What I would suggest is that the precepts of penetrating the unknown, of bearing witness, of healing myself and others, provide a wonderful way of holding this suffering and of holding it in the way we move through the world and also as we sit in Zazen. I don't really distinguish between the two of those. I don't see them as separate activities.

[15:28]

And I don't see one as more important than the other. I see this suffering, the suffering in the world and the suffering that's within ourselves, can be tools for how we transform ourselves and then how we transform the world. I have to talk about them as two things because language does that. Language tends to differentiate. I think it's built into the structure of the everyday structure of words, but the way our minds, our fundamental minds work, that separation doesn't have to be there, those distinctions don't have to be there.

[16:39]

When I think about penetrating the unknown in relation to some of the events that I've just discussed when I think about it in terms of my family and my mother's life I feel we were very scared and she was very scared about what pain was there and to be quite honest with you One of my deep regrets is I really, I don't understand it. Because I didn't want to. And it's not like, I mean, this was happening from when I was a child, but really, when she died, I was 28 years old. And even at 28 years old, I didn't want to know

[17:48]

There was not enough urgency in wanting to know to find out, to really ask, to really inquire. I have great regret about that, for that. And collectively, my brothers and sister and stepfather didn't. Tremendous pain. It was quite clear that she was in great pain for many years. But it's also true she caused us a lot of pain. She caused me a lot of pain. And rather than penetrate the unknown, I thought I ought to get out of here. in a physical sense I kind of did, and in an emotional sense I did.

[19:00]

And it's not a model that I recommend because there's unresolved grief that I have to live with. And so we weren't willing to penetrate the unknown, or I wasn't willing to penetrate the unknown. I wasn't willing to bear witness, which means really stay there, really see what the full dimensions of the pain of her suffering was. Well, first of all, the full dimensions of my own suffering. Basically, I just wanted to get away from it. I wasn't willing to stay present with it. And consequently, the healing, some things cannot be healed, some losses cannot be reclaimed,

[20:27]

And the healing and witness that I try to bear now, in this realm, it's a slow healing. And the pain will always be there. For now, that's okay. It's something unfinished. It's bearing witness to something unfinished. and bearing witness to my own inability, immaturity, whatever you want, my own human shortcoming. I'm not judging myself. It's a human shortcoming. I did the best I could. My brothers and sisters did the best they could. And one could say it wasn't good enough, but one could also say there was just an outcome.

[21:35]

This was not just our decision. My mother had her own life, her own decisions, her own choices to make, and she made them. How we might have interacted in a different way, I can't say. And I have to just accept that unknown. and I think that's what penetration means. In Genjo Koan, towards the beginning, I think Dogen is speaking to this notion of the unknown. He says, those who have great realization of delusion are Buddhas. Those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings. there are those who continue realization beyond realization, who are in delusion throughout delusion.

[22:42]

I was thinking about this this morning, and I think the way I always read it before, it's like, well yeah, I'm supposed to be, I'm supposed to have great realization about delusion, and then I can be a Buddha. But that's what he's urging us towards and encouraging. But also, myself anyway, I'm pretty sure I'm greatly deluded about realization. And I don't know what it is. I think I might want it. And that puts me squarely in the realm of sentient beings and what I realized this morning was that that's okay and that there's this interesting place of interpenetration of that actually our practice when we sit in zazen is to hold both these things at once

[24:02]

you know, is to hold being a Buddha and to hold being a sentient being and to marvel at the possibility of holding those things simultaneously. And we sit there and we watch, we sit there facing the wall and sometimes We see the unknown, but we don't penetrate it. It's like, why do my legs hurt? Why am I sleepy? Why do I wish the bell would ring? What am I doing here? These are just some of the thoughts. These are the simpler, simple characterizations of thoughts that we have. And that's being sort of my mind starts to smack up against unknowing, smack up against delusion, but not wanting to accept it.

[25:16]

And that's, you know, everybody in this room recognizes various pieces of that state of mind. And then there are times when you're just through it. You just coast through it. And you're just sitting. And you know, if you reflect on it, which you probably don't, that you still don't know why you're doing this. You still don't know why your legs might hurt. And yet, you're just doing this. You're just accepting the unknown. You're penetrating it and in those moments you're bearing witness to yourself. And I think this is where bearing witness has to begin. Bearing witness begins by putting oneself in a tight spot.

[26:24]

You know, this is a tight spot sitting cross-legged. you know, we didn't have to, you know, we could sort of sit back like this and, you know, space out. But actually, our practice is to put ourselves in a relatively tight spot, to sit cross-legged, to sit upright, to put an emphasis on your posture, to follow your breath. You know, it's not as easy as other things that you might do that to outsiders might look very much the same. We put ourselves in a tight spot by looking at ourselves and also by looking at, in our daily life, our relationships, by really looking at them, really looking at what's my reaction, you know, when I'm going head to head with somebody

[27:30]

Why did this happen? I can see my own wish to blame or put responsibility outside myself, but first, to look in, to bear witness to myself, to bear witness to my own clinging, my own desire, my own fear or whatever it is. or righteousness, however, to bear witness to that first. And if I don't do that, there's no way that I can have any kind of healing for myself or have a healing between us or between my group and this group, however you want to see it. So this healing is a kind of softening and opening.

[28:50]

And to go back to what I was saying at the beginning, the action of healing is this relaxation, is this letting go, but the method is by attention. There's always this dynamic of attention, and this is the wonderful opportunity of our minds. And part of, I think, what you discover, what I discover by bearing witness, which is at the center of it, is that within me If I'm having an argument or conflict with somebody, as I really bear witness first to myself, I can feel some sense of what the other person is doing, what they're perceiving, how they might be perceiving me, how they exist within me.

[30:12]

You know, several years ago, I went, I guess it was three years ago, I went to the 50th commemoration of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And I had done a bunch of reading before on the political process and military process that led up to those bombings, which was pretty appalling. was filled with the various poisons that we acknowledge in ourselves, mostly with hatred and delusion, and I'm sure it was greed in there too. I can imagine different ways that that manifested. But at this meeting, this convocation in Las Vegas at the the nuclear test site, so person after person was saying that they completely could not understand the inhumanity of these actions.

[31:35]

And one thing I noticed was there were several hibaksha, which are survivors of the bombing, Interestingly, not one of them said that they couldn't understand it. It was people, Americans, who felt that they couldn't understand it, they couldn't accept it, and they rejected the actions that had led up to this. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt, and it was very uncomfortable, that I wasn't sure. I couldn't say that if I had been in the position with the various kinds of causes and conditions and understandings that the military leaders had had, or Truman had had, or

[32:47]

the pilots of that plane had had, that there's no way that I can say that I would have done something different. I'd like to think that maybe I would have had a voice that would have said something else or that maybe I would have tried to stop it, but I can't say. I don't know. And I felt in a way that I couldn't, I'm still sort of struggling to articulate, that as long as I could say I would never do that, I was kind of likely to do it. as long as I could, you know, felt the necessity of rejecting the people who had acted in this way, of rejecting that that capability was within me, then I was in danger of

[34:09]

replicating it if put in similar circumstances. And I just don't know. But I think it's important, really important to look at it. I read a book by a very famous psychiatrist about the making of the bomb. And it was interesting. It did a kind of very sketchy socio-psychoanalysis of the leaders. I felt through the whole reading, boy, this is off. It was analytical without any compassion, without any sense of what fix these people might have felt themselves in from when they were children to when they were leaders, and I'm not trying to let them off the hook.

[35:28]

I'm just saying that the complexity of it needs to be allowed for, that we need to accept that unknown and penetrate that unknown if we're really to bear witness and that we can't, you know, if we really bear witness, I wish that they had really been able to bear witness for themselves, I wish they had been able to think through what the incineration of those cities have been like. But they weren't able to do that. From our vantage point, we can do that. And that creates other unknown conditions for us. And it also creates the possibility of healing.

[36:31]

And that's, again, so intimately related to our process of zazen, to our work here. Everybody here knows, for each of us, the complexity of feelings that arise and that are different from period to period. To some degree, same old stuff. Boy, when does this stop? but also new things, new perceptions, new combinations and recombinations, and suffering in tremendous variety that we learn how to bear witness to. We learn how to be kind first to ourselves, soften to ourselves, understand our own humanness in that suffering, and then that's a tool with which we can approach other circumstances in our life.

[37:58]

And of course the other way it works is that the other circumstances in our life raise questions, soften us in ways that allow us to sit with ourselves. The circumstance of these horrendous bombings, the circumstance of my mother's death, I feel like those are things that led me, kind of, And then there's the kind of imponderable mystery and gift, which is also unknown, of the practice that was here. It was waiting in this room when I came here, and allowed the possibility of healing, and it was a gift.

[39:08]

The American government didn't create this room. My Russian ancestors didn't create this room. The unimaginable workings of our Buddhas and ancestors who worked through Suzuki Roshi, through a male, through the people who came here from the very beginning and supported the practice. They built this room so that myself and each of us could find some possibility of bearing witness and healing right here. So I think that's where I'll close. just thinking about this vow to penetrate the unknown, the vow to bear witness, the vow to heal myself and others, and to see how that is precisely the spirit with which we sit zazen every day and sit zazen in seshin.

[40:31]

It's precisely the spirit in which we go out in the world, or go here in the world, because this is the world. That's why we do, when we leave here, usually when you leave a zendo, you sort of turn towards the altar and you bow, and you walk out the door. When we leave, we do this little shashu bow at the door, because we're taking our zazen right out. We're not kind of demarking an ending to it. We're just going with it. So it's the spirit of Zazen. It's the spirit with which we encounter our friends, our families, our co-workers, our opponents. It's the spirit with which we ourselves are responsible for everything that happens here. in this nation and in this world.

[41:36]

This has been a kind of rambling talk, but I hope it puts some energy behind the rest of our sitting for the day. And I'm very happy to be here with you. very fortunate. Thank you very much.

[42:07]

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