So it's a crisp late fall morning here in Berkeley. And I'm happy to be back in the Zendo with you. I think that most of you know that on my return from Korea a few weeks ago, I was diagnosed with COVID. And I think I had essentially a mild pace, but it was not fun. And I'm still experiencing some degree of fatigue that strikes me at different points of the day. And I'm really glad to say that the symptoms of respiratory congestion are fading. sort of day by day, but I wasn't looking forward to getting COVID.

[01:12]

On the other hand, sort of the gift or the opportunity of it has been to understand very directly what some people are experiencing, many people are experiencing. And, you know, to be grateful that my case appears to be mild, and others are not, and to be grateful for the several medical interventions that were available to me, available to us. I had the I don't know, who can keep count of this fourth or fifth injection booster, I think about two weeks before I went to Korea.

[02:16]

Evidently that did not provide immunity, but I think that it lessened the severity. And then I was able to get an antiviral treatment, you know, as soon as I, pretty much the next day after I was tested positive, so. Now, I'm back here in the center. Yeah. Sure, how's this? So before I launch into the substance of the talk today, I just want to remind everybody that we're a week away from our Rohatsu seshin, which is our seshin that celebrates the Buddha's awakening.

[03:28]

It's an annual seven-day seshin. That begins a week from Monday, I believe. And because of COVID precautions, we're still on a somewhat abbreviated schedule. But we are going to be sitting together for seven days and there's still time to sign up. You can sign up on the BCC website. You can talk to me or one of the senior students if you have questions about it. We're at last going to move into the, back into the territory of having an Oriyoki meal with an option for those who are not comfortable eating in the Zendo, but we're going to do it as carefully as possible.

[04:34]

It's just going to be one meal a day, but You know, it's taken us almost three years to get back to the practice that we've done for 50 years. So that's kind of an exciting prospect. So please do sign up, there's still space. So I wanna, today's, the subject of today's talk is what I'm calling the practice of ambiguity, which you could also call the practice of oneness. And I want to begin by kind of segueing from something that Luminous Heart presented last week. She presented, in the course of a wonderful talk,

[05:38]

haiku by Kobayashi Isa, one of the three or four great haiku poets in Japan. And he was a Jodo Shinshu practitioner and lived from about 1763 to 1828. Had a lot of There were a lot of losses in his life. And the poem that Luminous Heart read, and I'm going to read to you, was on the occasion of his young daughter's death. And so he wrote, this dewdrop world is a dewdrop world. And yet, and yet. This dewdrop world is a dewdrop world, and yet, and yet.

[06:49]

So this is really the condition, the circumstance of all of our life in small ways and in really large and painful ways. And it applies to our sorrows. It also applies to our joys. All of it is like a dewdrop in the sun. And when the sun's light and heat are applied to the dewdrop, it evaporates. And yet, This is really also, I think, the condition of our Mahayana and Zen tradition. I was speaking with the Theravada monk whose work I'm sure many of you have read over the years, Bhikkhu Bodhi.

[08:11]

who's contemporary of ours. And one thing Bhikkhu Bodhi pointed out, and you can see this when you read the early sutras, he said, there's really not much ambiguity in those sutras, that As you go through them, as you go through the lists of practices, what you see is that there's a designation of actions as wholesome or unwholesome. Occasionally, there's certain actions, thoughts, words, which are either wholesome nor unwholesome. But, and I asked him about this because my sense was there, I think this is a Mahayana or Zen sense, but my sense is that there are actions which are both wholesome and unwholesome.

[09:26]

And he said, well, not in that view, not in that view that comes from the early sutras. So what we have in the early sutras is a kind of binary or, and I don't want to use this in a pejorative sense, a dualistic frame for reality, for enlightenment and delusion. And the effort of practice in that tradition is to generate and to sustain what is wholesome and to reduce, eliminate, guard against what is unwholesome. So it's a very clear, it's a very clear both ethical and karmic, if you will, framework that

[10:37]

that tradition proceeds from. I think that the Mahayana and particularly the Zen tradition, what we learn to do is to embrace impunity, to embrace, you could say both sides, you could say all sides. I think our lead teacher Sojin Roshi spoke about reading the other side of the page. Might be, you might think of the other side of the page is not just the page that you turn.

[11:38]

But it's like the other side that's the side of the page that's hidden within the page that you're reading. Or it's writing the other side of the page. But let's not take that too far. There's a translation, one of the Zen philosophical texts that we read a lot and study and refer to, return to, is in the work of our ancestor A. A. Dogen in the 13th century. And there's a work that he wrote called Genjo Koan, which is, you can see it as the philosophical pivot of his view of Zen practice. And in a translation, we have several translations, but one of the translations has a line that says, Gencho Kahn says, realization is the state of ambiguity itself.

[12:58]

But I think that strictly speaking, you could say this is ambiguity and we, but you could also call it oneness. That the state of realization is to view the wholeness, the oneness of reality, of Buddha nature, of suchness, and to recognize that each side that we are seeing at any given moment of perception contains its opposite, contains a myriad of other dimensions and aspects, and that all of them together make the whole.

[14:15]

And what we are trying to encompass is this whole. We naturally divide things We talk about wholesome, unwholesome, light, dark, action, stillness, thinking, non-thinking, health, illness, enlightenment, delusion, good, evil. At the same time, one of the other ancient poems that we recite and practice, which is called the Sandokai, that translates as the unity of sameness and difference, the unity being the wholeness.

[15:18]

We have to sit still for a time. to cultivate the capacity to understand the wholeness. I came across, as I was looking for some other things this week, I got hooked into reading from the pensées of Blaise Pascal, who was a, 17th century French mathematician and philosopher. Really deep, really wonderful stuff one says. And at one point he says, all of humanity's problems stems from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

[16:27]

So that's what we've been taught here, although actually we're not alone. As Sojin often played on the story, it's just like alone breaks down into all one. We're sitting here in this Zendo. alone, each of us is sitting, each of us has to make the effort, each of us is confronting the myriad causes and conditions that come up in our body, in our mind. And the form in which we do this is to be all one. We sit together and Nintendo is, you all can't see it out there in There's no plan, but the Zendo is pretty full today, which is really lovely. And there are very familiar faces and faces that are not entirely familiar to me.

[17:40]

But in this moment, in this room, we are all one. What are we doing? What are we doing here? I came across the teaching from last night, from the Rinzai Zen teacher, Shodo Harada Roshi, who's, he's been a teacher for me for, I don't know, almost 25 years. And so I'm on that male English, and he's also my son Genpo's primary teacher. And this was his teaching for the week, so I'm gonna just steal it. He says, we need to keep going nonstop, asking, what is it? What is it? What is it? We keep that question going to the point where it becomes what is seeing and what is being seen.

[18:53]

What is hearing? What is being heard? What is smelling? What is being smelled? All melted into one and merged completely to the point where you cannot even know whether it is you sitting in the zendo or it is the zendo that is sitting. And then you'll recognize that the life energy that fills your ears and fills your eyes and does the hearing, does the seeing, and you will know that its deepest root is not from your head, but from your experience. It's from our experience as we sit here. The blowing wind sounds and you become the wind sound.

[19:55]

The bell rings and you become its ringing. There's nothing beyond that. In any one instant, any of these may come forth from our ears as hearing. There's no division between inner and outer, between the world of myself, the act of hearing, and that which is being heard. This place. This place where there is no separation at all can only be spoken of as love. It's a wonderful place to arrive at in this teaching, that the place where we're sitting in our being, which are inseparable from each other, can only be spoken of as love.

[21:08]

And this is what arises freely in us. So for me, If I begin with this question of what is it? To turn it around, to read the other side of the page is to center on the expression, just this. What is it? Just this is it. So actually, what I would invite you to do, if it appeals to you, is to share a practice that I've evolved for myself.

[22:15]

So as I'm sitting zazen, Often, I will just let those two words rest on my breath. I breathe in on the word just silently and out on the word this. And I find that, you know, breathing in just silently Just sits really nice on the in-breath and this sits really nicely on the out-breath. Just try it for a moment at your own pace. Just this. As we're reading that, we hear a honking geese.

[23:55]

We hear somebody's audio clicking in or off. We hear the trailing sound of an airplane. And all of this is who we are at this moment. So sometimes I think of zazen as, I think of kind of the alchemy of zazen. So alchemy, as you probably know, is the kind of ancient and mystical

[24:58]

study and practice of transformation. And it seems to have appeared in all around the world at roughly the same times. And, you know, sometimes what we're taught, at least what I was taught in school was that the purpose of alchemy was to figure out how to convert lead to gold. if you read more deeply in it, both in the Western traditions and in the Chinese traditions, among the goals really prominent was to arrive at a universal life that was free from illness and free from suffering. And in the course of that, there was the search for what was called the Alkahest, which is kind of a universal solvent, which would dissolve all compounded things and free up the energy of transformation.

[26:22]

In other words, it would unveil the oneness of reality. So, for us, let me suggest that the Alkaist is Zazen. That should be no surprise, we're always talking about it, but Zazen. In Zazen, all of our feelings are included and potentially transformed. Sometimes they're transformed, sometimes they're not. We include and accept whatever arises. When I sat down here this morning, when I came in the Zendo, actually, I came in during Kinhin, and I was walking Kinhin, and...

[27:26]

Notice that my back really hurt. And I just was thinking, oh, when is this going to be over? But I put my mind in, brought my zazen mind to just my steps. And I took my steps, and in time, Mark rang the bell and we walked around and I sat down and there was a new reality. So this is how we practice. This is how we actually bring forth this alchemical quality. And we apply it to all the circumstances of our life. That was a relatively easy one this morning.

[28:32]

Sometimes it really hard. And sometimes it really confusing and unclear. My effort is to keep turning towards this alchemical spirit of Zazen. The spirit of inquiry. And The spirit of what Harada Roshi was saying just as to what is it? So with your permission, I'd like to just recognize where we are in time and space and step into a further ambiguity as a dimension of an aspect of what I've been speaking about.

[29:45]

So Thursday was Thanksgiving. Friday was a peculiar day that has two valences. One valence is Black Friday, which is kind of the celebration of consumption, of purchase, consumption of the celebration of the the profit-driven excesses of our society. And it is an expanding national holiday as Native American Heritage Day, which is really in pretty sharp contradiction to Black Friday.

[31:01]

It's a holiday to recognize that we are living in lands that have been inhabited for thousands of years and that are still inhabited, that those peoples are still here. sort of parenthetically, I remember probably about 10 or 15 years ago, I taught a workshop in Alaska. And one of the presenters was a Lakota Sioux, writer and scholar, incredible person, who was Elizabeth Cook Lynn. And one of the workshops she did was she took out

[32:04]

a map of the United States, the territory of the United States. She took out a map from the 18th century that showed where the indigenous peoples were settled. And then she took out a contemporary map and sort of laid it over. And although the the dimensions and the scale of territory is different, she pointed out that most of those peoples are still living in the places that they were at that time. So the ancestors on that land are with us in spirit and actually with us in person. And so I can't do justice to the tangled and contradictory aspects of these two celebrations of Thanksgiving and of the Friday that follows.

[33:23]

I am truly grateful to be alive. I'm truly grateful to be here with all of you, that we have this practice, we have this way, zazen, of meeting the world that is or is potentially life-changing. And at the same time, I reckon with the ancestors who lived here and whose children and generations still live here. So there's a joy and warmth in my gratitude and there's grief.

[34:27]

There's grief for the lives that were lost, there's grief for the the cultures and lands that were stolen. And for the, for the process of myth-making, of historical myth-making that actually obscures the realities that were lived. So the practice of ambiguity or the practice of wholeness means

[35:34]

We practice with both dimensions of that life that we have. We are grateful. We have much to be grateful for. And there's much to recognize and grieve and investigate really deeply. We have a line in one of, again, in one of our poems that says, The meaning is not in the words, it responds to the inquiring impulse. So to really inquire, not to buy the surface of realities, of the surface reality that we see, not to buy that whole, not to buy the constructed histories, but to look at the history from the other side of the page, to read the other side of the page, to read what the history is, what history is as seen from the peoples who were less successful at promulgating something called history, and to listen to them as well.

[37:05]

I think our practice calls for us to encompass and hold all these different sides. Gratitude, joy, and grief at the same time. That that's actually, that's wholeness. That is the wholeness of just this. And from that view of wholeness, perhaps we can craft a vision of how we want to live.

[38:12]

How do we want to live on this planet? How do we want to live with, not just with our sort of acknowledge sisters and brothers in this room, but in the wider society and the wider world. In our meal chants, there's a line that says, innumerable labors brought us this food. May we know how it comes to us. It's really important that we know how our food comes to us, how all the things that we have come to us. And sometimes they come from just unimaginable distances. One of the things that I've often wanted to do, I just propose it as a

[39:21]

as an intellectual exercise, not as a, not as something that I've ever done. But if all of us were to write this moment, take off all of our clothes and put them in a big pile in the middle of the room. And then maybe one of us could pull out each piece of clothes And read the label. Where does it come from? It comes from Bangladesh. It comes from China. It comes from Arizona. It comes from Mexico. It comes from Costa Rica. It comes from Myanmar. It comes from Sierra Leone. Our clothes come from all over the world. And, you know, it's carried in ships or in airplanes here.

[40:29]

To think of all that's involved in bringing these things that we take for granted to us. And to consider, for example, what do we pay? What do we pay for a shirt or a jacket? and then consider what are the people who made these things paid? So I think that the implication of knowing how our food and everything comes to us. To read the other side of the page is to consider How do I see and how do I give back whatever abundance I may have?

[41:34]

How can I share it with those who are not experiencing that abundance? Thich Nhat Hanh talks about, there's a piece that he wrote in one of his early books, which is kind of got exerted as mindfulness in action. And it's an instruction in mindfulness, and mindfulness The word in Pali and also in Sanskrit is sati or smirti.

[42:43]

What it translates as is remembering. So remember where things come from. Remember in some literal version of the word is to put all of our limbs back together, reassemble ourselves as whole. Of course, one of the Zen perspectives is, yes, we are whole no matter what and who we are, but we forget it. So to remember that, and then what Dik Nhat Hanh says is, he says it very directly, he says, with mindfulness, there must be action. Otherwise, what's the point of mindfulness?

[43:48]

The Zazen that we do here is not just some activity that we do in this sacred space. How can I live my life? How do I bring all that I encompass in this practice to my interactions with people, with people that I know, people that I don't know? So this is always the the thrust of our zazen. And it's why, as I said before, I think this is just a brilliant innovation of Sojin Roshi. You know, most zendos, when you leave the zendo, when you go to the door, you turn around and face the altar and bow to the altar.

[44:57]

We don't do that. Actually, We stand at the threshold for a moment and bow across the threshold and then take a step. We're continuing our practice through the door, down the path, into the street, and into our lives. That is the way you could say we practice with ambiguity, That is the way we bring forth the wholeness of our life. So I'm going to stop there. And perhaps you have some thoughts or questions. Happy to take them and I'll try to go back and forth between this room and people on screen. So people on screen, is somebody supposed to give them instruction or should I?

[46:02]

If you, you can raise your hand directly. I'll try to see that. And you can raise your digital hand and I can see that more directly. So thoughts, questions, comments? I see a hand there. Oh, EJI. Thank you so much. This is EJI. Thank you so much. Yes, that was such a powerful statement. The ambiguity that you talk about is so viscerally profound for me personally. Because I lived in the house with my great-great-grandmother who was enslaved. So I have a very visceral experience about what it's like to be, what it means to be African-American.

[47:04]

So we're like 365 days from now, are we going to be willing to hold that ambiguity that you're referring to and both also mourn, have a national day of mourning in addition to the juxtaposition of this so-called holiday and recognize what it really is? We're here a couple of days after that. But I think that, and I'm curious what you think. So this is a question. Is it possible for us to hold both of these together? We're sitting at this table of Thanksgiving and recognize it is also a day of mourning. So I'm curious about how we will evolve. You talk about the alchemical process. How do we alchemically convert this capitalistic Black Friday, this more specifically, Thanksgiving experience into what it really is.

[48:07]

It's a recognition of the gifts and being thankful, but at the same time, recognizing and mourning this also, because we're spiritual people and this is what we are called to do. So that's my question. Doesn't sound much like a question, but thank you. Oh, it is a question. It's actually the motivating question for this talk. You know, I took quite a while to kind of lay the groundwork before I got to Thanksgiving and this and the ambiguities there. But this is a perception that is I feel like it's, it's taking root. I like to think it's taking root in this country. And the, you know, the effort that I'm that I make here is to is to share that. And exactly, it's a day of mourning.

[49:07]

And when we went over to some friend's house on Thursday night and had a really wonderful, warm time together. But before we ate, we actually shared both those sentiments. Both come up came up together and i i like to think that that's um a perspective that will grow deeper roots and we'll see we'll see if we survive long enough for it to actually have those roots so thank you it's good to see you thank you i i do want to say one thing yeah I would never feel comfortable going to anyone's Thanksgiving celebration. In fact, I would not go and I don't go if in fact, this historical reality and the truth was not both considered because I would feel as I'm sitting at a table and I would not feel authentic sitting at a table with Thanksgiving with anyone who would not both recognize both the ambiguity

[50:27]

that you're talking about. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, I agree with that. Anyone here? Sue. Thank you for your talk. I want to say that when you returned to the Zendo recently after your illness, it felt so deep for me to see you in here. I just want to say that. Thank you. When I look at just this and now include what you said about ambiguity, it seems like it's honoring that cherishing what's seen, what's experienced, but also holding it lightly. Like it's not, just this is not an answer.

[51:32]

Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. My consistent advice is that we should hold ourselves lightly with joy and with ease and not take ourselves all that seriously, but really take seriously what we do. Uh-huh. It's the action that's important, not the self or the ego. Thank you. Ed. Hi, Hozan. Would you please read the poem? Yes. At the beginning of your talk and who is the person that wrote it? It was written by Kobayashi Isa, usually known as Isa, I-S-S-A, on the occasion of his daughter's death.

[52:37]

And the poem is, this dewdrop world is a dewdrop world, and yet And yet... So that's the poem. And I think... I think I'm not going to say anything more about it. I think I'm not going to try to interpret it. You can figure it out yourself. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone here? Yes, Ross. What's the difference between ambiguity and confusion? That's a really good question. Really good question. I think

[53:51]

In ambiguity, we're clear about our unclarity. And in confusion, we don't understand that we're in the grip of that unclarity. That's just a thought. We have time for maybe one more on either side. That's Lori. I really like how you opened up this thing about the other side of the page, which was always, I don't know if I knew how to make use of it so much, but I was thinking, it's like, there's the people who are here, and then there's the people who aren't here. And that could be the people who we love who died, but it also could be the people who could have been here if things had gone differently, you know, and things like that. Like, it's just really, I really appreciate that you've opened that up as a practice.

[54:57]

It's a wonderful expression. I think in a sense it means to me that We don't just reckon with presences. We're also moved by absences. And that they're simultaneous, for some reason. Just this includes what's not here, not just what's here. Yeah, for some reason that's just, even as I say it, it's just really surprisingly powerful. So that's a good place to end. So thank you all. And I'll see some of you in Rohatsu and doubtless.

[56:03]

Oh, and we're open. The lectures are available. Even if you're not sitting, you can come online. All the lectures at 1015 each day are available during the week at Rohatsu. So will the Saturday lecture as well. So, and there are several ceremonies during that. There's, let me just say, there's the Suzuki Roshi, annual Suzuki Roshi Memorial, remembering the anniversary of his death. That's on the Monday, the first day of Sashin, I think. And on the Saturday, we're going to have Buddhist enlightenment ceremony, which is very joyous. We'll do it outside and we will rain flowers on each other. So thank you.

[57:02]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_93.36