Good morning. Good morning. Today, our speaker is Ross Blum, who's a longtime member and resident at the Berkley Den Center. And he's now one of our practice leaders. Thank you, Marty. Sojin Roshi, the abbot of our temple, is at Tassajara for three months for the traditional practice period, and he has asked the Tanto and the practice leaders to support the practice in his physical absence, but his spiritual presence pervades us, whether he is physically here or not. In his absence he asked that the practice leaders choose a favorite lecture that they offered the Sangha over the years here and transcribe it and then have it put in the newsletter.

[01:08]

I thought about some of the talks that I remembered. And I was thinking, well, which one would I like to transcribe? Or which would I like to share more? Which one really kind of struck me? Thinking about the time in my life when that lecture was offered and where I'm at now in my life and practice. Because no matter what's being said, it always comes back to this person. Present time. So the lecture I thought about was one of a poem by Ryokan, who is a Japanese monk, who lived around the time of the beginning of our country, the 1750s to the 1830s. So I asked our tape librarian if I could get that tape and transcribe it, and she said that it wasn't there. She said that it was in October of 1999 that it was presented here and that Maile Scott was the last person to check it out.

[02:16]

Maile was a long, long-term practitioner here who passed away about, well, shortly after she checked that tape out, actually, it turns out. So the tape is somewhere in Arcata or in between. So I thought, well, there's probably another talk I could give or transcribe. And I thought, well, I'll just do that talk again because my life has changed a little bit since then. So I'm going to talk about Rio Con. It won't be in the newsletter, but for you guys here, you get to hear this story. This is a really great book. It's called A New Zen Reader. It's not so new anymore. It's been out for a while. But it's a collection of teachings of the ancestors from China and Japan, both priests and laypeople, both men and women.

[03:22]

So it really speaks to our time and practice here in America. This is a poem that Ryokan wrote as a mature man, reflecting back a little bit on his life. As a boy, I left my father, ran off to other lands. Tried hard to become a tiger, didn't even make it to cat. If you ask what kind of man I am now, just the same old Ezo I've always been. That's a little play on words that his Dharma name when he was ordained had something to do with tiger.

[04:24]

At 17, he went to the local Soto temple and was ordained and became a monk. And so his name of Ezo was now changed to Ryokan. And a few years after he was ordained, he went to the south of China and studied with a very prominent Soto abbot there and received Dharma transmission, which was full authorization to teach Buddhism to students or to practice independently, as Sojo Roshi says, of Dharma transmitted students. he was there for about 10 years and he left the the monastery a year after his teacher died and you know when a teacher gives transmission to a student they have kind of in a sense completed their training and now they're sort of beginning anew as an

[05:41]

And the expressions of those heirs of the teacher vary considerably. Some of them have many students, some of them have very few. In the case of Ryokan and some other prominent teachers in our lineage or in our tradition, they didn't transmit the teaching formally to another student, but I'm sure they inspired many people. So that seems to be Ryokan's life. I don't know much about him. We don't have the histories of people like we have today and to sort of describe why a person is the way they are through the sort of Western psychology model that helps to explain our habits. But he seemed to be somewhat of a hermit and reclusive. And yet he was drawn to practice and practicing with people, so he did that. And then for 30 years, he basically lived in a hut, gathering food for himself and encountering an occasional person wandering in the mountains and talking with them about one thing or another.

[06:54]

And then when he got very old, he actually accepted the shelter of a person he knew in the local village because he couldn't really take care of himself independently anymore. So even though he was ordained as a priest and practiced as a monk, he had this sort of lay life. There's a nice description here I'd like to share with you. Besides reading and writing, Ryokan's daily activities were simple and few. He sat in Zazen, maintained his hut and household, foraged for wild foods, chatted with the occasional visitor, and went down the mountain to offer his begging bowl to nearby villages. These trips afforded him his social contact as well as most of his sustenance, and he plainly relished the opportunities they gave him to frolic with the children or quaff a cup of wine with farmers after work.

[07:59]

He gave himself the name Daigu, or Great Fool, in the spirit of his sort of playfulness. This is a short poem about a student of his. The student's name was Miwa Seicho, and this person was a lay student, and a term for lay student is koji, who died unexpectedly. Ah, my Keijo, studied Zen with me 20 years. You were the one who understood things I couldn't pass on to others. The founder of Soto Zen in Japan is Dogen Zenji, who went to China looking for a true teacher, was there for

[09:12]

about five years, and then came back and propagated his teacher's teaching. We have a depiction of Dogen here over my left shoulder. And this is a part of a longer poem of Ryokan paying homage to Dogen, who preceded him some hundreds of years. One evening, sitting by the lamp, my tears wouldn't stop, and soaked into the records of the ancient Buddha Ehe, or Ehe Dogen. In the morning, the old man next door came to my thatched hut. He asked me why the book was damp. I wanted to speak, but didn't, as I was deeply embarrassed, my mind deeply distressed. It was impossible to give an explanation. I dropped my head for a while, then found some words. Last night's rain leaked in and drenched my bookcase.

[10:20]

This story is indicative of a student's sincerity and being deeply touched by someone who preceded him many, many years earlier. And we've all had these experiences of being deeply touched by someone's words or music or the way they move or some expression. When I first read this, I didn't feel so close to the experience. My idea was that why was he embarrassed? Why couldn't he just cry and express his joy and his sadness and gratitude and all of that around? I don't know if it's a model that we think of as, like in America and especially in California, we can just express ourselves and whether we laugh or cry, we just kind of fully just do that and we don't really need to hold back our feelings when we have them.

[11:45]

But it may have been some custom or protocol in Japan at that time or amongst men, I really don't know. over the last few years as I've thought about this poem and have been sitting, I realized that we can trust the process of our lives and we can actually be who we are completely and we can laugh and we can cry and feel okay about that. And if there's a feeling of embarrassment in whatever expression that we are in at the moment, it's okay. It's perhaps an attachment of some idea of who we are, who we should be in this situation. But ultimately, it doesn't matter. Ultimately, I think to be truly free, we can just be who we are and just let the universe continue to take care of us and support us.

[12:59]

The poem that I lectured on back in 99 is this one I'm about to read, and it's the last poem in the last entry in this book that I was given as a gift, so it really kind of hit me as I was ending it. I tend to be a little sentimental, but I like to read into things, and that's okay. I won't apologize. But it felt like the reason that these two people, this couple, came into my life was to present me with this book, and I didn't realize that until I read this poem. All my life, too lazy to try to get ahead. I leave everything to the truth of heaven. In my sack, three measures of rice.

[14:12]

By the stove, one bundle of sticks. Why ask who's got satori or enlightenment? Who hasn't? What would I know about that dust, fame, and gain? Rainy nights here in my thatched hut, I stick out my two legs any old way I please. So I'm going to comment on the lines for a few minutes and then I'd like to hear your all thoughts on the poem or anything else that I've shared about Ryokan. The first line, all my life too lazy to try to get ahead.

[15:15]

I think of myself as pretty lazy. when I work and when I have to do something, I tend to get into it and I'm anything but lazy, at least according to my estimation of myself and my expression. But generally, I feel I'm a little lazy and it's somewhat my disposition. In the realm of practice, however, if you're lazy, you're not going to get it. So we have to assert ourselves and exert some effort, which is anything but lazy. And the catch, of course, is if we exert too much, we're not going to get it. So we have to balance or temper our practice by asserting ourself and sitting upright, putting up some effort and then relaxing in that, being lazy, if you will, but still attending to that to maintain that posture physically as well as emotionally when we have to

[16:22]

express ourselves with our ideas, what we want to say to someone. How do we assert ourselves or show ourselves with some thoughts, but not so much so that we kind of blow people away, but not kind of couch our words so much that people actually don't get the message. And this is also a person who received Dharma transmission from a teacher, so he was a bona fide Dharma teacher. He had enough maturity in his practice that his teacher entrusted him with the teaching. And that's, in a way, kind of getting ahead. That's like getting something. So I think he was aware of that, and I think we're all aware of that on some level, that we're here to get something, but if we stay attached to that, we're not going to get it. So we have to kind of really be aware and awake to our aspirations and what our attachments are, and seeing if we're being trapped by them.

[17:25]

I, for one, have been trapped by the idea of enlightenment and attainment and getting something. And it's taken a long time to burn most, but not all of that idea off. It's very sticky. I leave everything to the truth of heaven. In Zen culture, the sense of the earth being the relative world and the heavens being the sort of absolute world. And we're here on the ground, we're sitting and getting grounded and dealing with the world of dualities. And we have to see that there's more going on than just the world of dualities. And the truth of heaven is not in contrast to the relative truth in Earth, it's sort of the ultimate truth or the all-inclusivity of the heavens.

[18:40]

Popular imagery is like birds flying in the sky, that there's a heaven of emptiness and that the birds flying through are these sort of relative little flitters that are like in our mind. But the background and the base of the whole thing is this truth that life is suffering, there's a cause to the suffering, there's a way out of the suffering, and the way out or to deal with the suffering is an eightfold path, that things change Is that true? And the idea of leaving everything to the truth of heaven is a letting go process. Our life, this is an older man, a mature student of Zen talking, that in our life we're kind of going up the mountain and acquiring family, we're acquiring reputations, good or bad, an occupation, a vocation, and a life, if you will.

[19:43]

And then in the sense of practice and realization, well, after doing all that, well, what's left? Well, we're actually ultimately all left with that. When we die, we have a will and we leave everything away, even though we actually never really had anything. So, the idea of leaving everything to the truth is a real kind of radical letting go of things. In my sack, three measures of rice, and by the stove, one bundle of sticks. If you think that's not very much, then you're going to have a harder time with life, because we always want more. There's always another CD to buy. There's always another book to buy. It's infinite how many things that we can actually acquire. So our lives are infinitely more complex, involved, and tied into our society than Ryokan's life of being a hermit.

[20:46]

with a measure of rice, which is sort of the standard quantity that rice was measured out in Japan, or a bundle of sticks for firewood to keep his hut warm. So when I shared this poem the last time, I remember someone saying, that's not very much. And I thought about it afterwards, and I realized that, well, we all need different amounts We all need different amounts of food, we need different amounts of heat, we need different amounts of all sorts of things. And a little later on in the poem when he talks about whether people have satori or not or these sorts of things, it's like we tend to compare ourselves with other people. either physically, if we're in the room with them, or if we're practicing as a hermit. I mean, we have our mind that just brings people in our past with us, and we say, well, gee, I wish I could have worked out that relationship better, and this person sits more still than me, or, gee, they don't take so much food at Oreoki Meals, and I'm stuffing my face.

[21:54]

All these things that we do, and so it's For me, the measure of rice and a bundle of sticks is a reminder that, well, we don't need so much. I don't need so much. And besides being a little bit lazy, I'm also a little bit greedy. And I can feel that sort of greed or desire for things. And it's an ongoing practice. It's an ongoing practice. But not having too much is a good thing. Knowing how to be satisfied and not having too much are parts of the Bodhisattva path of the Buddhist teaching. So why asking who has enlightenment, who hasn't?

[22:59]

it's this is a reminder to sort of concentrate on your own practice you know when we sit we sit uh with the cosmic mudra thumbs pointed together and tilted slightly inward so this is bringing the attention kind of inward to our hara or breathing center and our eyes are cast down slightly so it brings the energy in inward. If we look around, which is important to do from time to time, then we're taking in the world and it's important to know our place in the world. But when we come back to Zazen and the spirit of the practice is an inward focus. A good question to ask when we do catch ourselves looking around is, What am I looking at? What am I so curious about? Is that person's thinking more still than me? That sort of thing.

[24:03]

So all the things that we do have, generally there's a reason why we do them. And this practice of investigation is to look at what is the motivation behind my desire for enlightenment and waking up, being a big, you know, hotshot dharma teacher. So what would I know about that dust, fame, and gain? Well, there's a sense of, you know, the I. Well, he would know, Ryokan would know about dust, fame, and gain, because he'd been in the world of institutionalized Buddhist practice for some years, and so invariably people come together, and there's people at the head of the class, so-called head of the class, in the back of the class, and we're all trying to find our way. But the I, as long as there's an I or a sense of separate self, knowing that's not what our practice is about, that there's something bigger where I and other disappear.

[25:14]

And it fundamentally comes down to something very horizontal that we're all just practicing and being together. and talking about enlightenment and practicing and the forms and all that are really easy ways of getting caught in, well, there must be a better way to do it or more enlightened way of doing it. But ultimately, whether we've been practicing 20 minutes or 20 years, it's all the same. We're just here trying to wake up, trying to see into the suffering of ourselves, the suffering that we're causing others, and to minimize that. rainy nights here in my thatched hut, I stick out my two legs any old way I please. There's a really beautiful sound of rain coming down on the roofs from time to time here in the Zendo, and I'm always comforted by that sound.

[26:29]

At New Year's, the rain was coming down so hard that I think when Greg was trying to describe the tea ceremony that we were about to embark on, we could barely hear him. And it was just this intense, I like to think of it as sort of a Dharma rain, a rain of the teaching just coming down on our temple. And I also felt a lot of gratitude of being inside and dry. Knowing full well that all it is out there is just water. All it is is just water coming out of the sky, and why not just go outside and be in the water? We're mostly water anyway, right? But still, we'd like to be protected and feel comforted and warmth, the basic creature comforts of being human. And sticking his two legs out any old way he pleased or wanted is an expression of complete freedom that I don't know when he wrote this poem in his life, but it sounds like it was pretty far down the line.

[27:50]

And when I think about some of my most favorite times, comforting times in my life, it's often lying around in bed. not doing anything. I remember Soji Roshi once saying that when you go to bed, you let go of the world. That in the vertical position, you're taking on the world, and we have this life of interaction with people and things, and we mix it up, and sometimes it feels nice, and sometimes not so nice. And then when we lay down, we... There's a greater potential, of course, we still bring the world with us and we can ruminate about things and lose sleep over and all that, but generally speaking, when you lay down, more of your body, it seems like, it feels like, is going into the earth and is just letting go and letting the cares of the world go. And it really speaks to the importance of rest and taking care of ourselves.

[28:56]

which doesn't sound like what we're doing. We have to get up so early in the morning and we have to sit for many hours during retreats and all that, but fundamentally we do have to take care of ourselves. And sticking the two legs out any old way one pleases to me feels like There's freedom in movement. There's freedom in expression of feelings and talking with people, but it's not careless. There's still guidelines that we need to be aware of when we talk to people, with people, when we move our bodies. But it's, I think going to sleep or getting ready to go to sleep is a really great time to reflect on your day, to check out whether you maintain your intentions in practice and in life.

[30:08]

A lot of the distractions of our waking hours are going off in the midst of the evening. So you really have an opportunity just to sit there or lie there. I think it was Akinroshi who said when he goes to bed at night, he kind of exhales Joshu's Mu in his breathing and just getting his mind and body connected as he goes into sleep. This last poem, for me, is pretty inspiring and pretty up.

[31:14]

And there are poets who write about things that don't feel so up. their struggles and such, and so this is just one side of someone who practiced Buddhism many years ago and kind of coming through the other side and reflecting back on it. So it's an image. for us to aspire to or just think about when we're really kind of caught up in our delusions and our confusion about things, the fogginess and haziness of what's going on here, that there actually is some potential for release. We have about 10 minutes if there's anyone who'd like to question or share some thoughts about what I've said. Yes, hi.

[32:17]

Some time ago you were talking about sort of laziness or considering yourself as being lazy. And I was kind of putting that in quotes and sort of thinking, well, that's, it's like inside laziness is reflection and kind of be in touch, and all these different things, and it's so easy for us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I'm thinking like, in myself, being in that place where I'm getting drawn into the PhD, and being this and that, and all these different requirements, and thinking, yeah, but don't forget, lazy is good. Lazy is a great and essential balancing thing. Yeah. It's the other side of frantic as much as it's the other side of good, hard work. Yeah. I don't know what the actual, I mean, there's many renderings of a word and what the Japanese word was that they translated as lazy.

[33:27]

It may have been something that doesn't quite have the connotation of not bothering to do anything. But maybe it's a little bit more of a, sort of a restful place, a place of quietude and not actually doing anything. But in this culture in America, there's the work ethic thing, and then if you're not doing that, then people think you're just like lazy and never do well, possibly. But I think if you're really putting out the effort to do something, there's also the other side, which is equally important for, I think, a healthy mind and body. As you, to maintain a PhD track, I think you have to balance that out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tamar? Yeah, thank you for your talk. It was awesome. I was actually really taken by the poem you read about, you know, the tears and then that.

[34:30]

What I think interested me about that was that on the one hand he couldn't, he didn't express what he had experienced in the person he met, but that he chose to record it in quite a permanent way. So I guess I find that paradox really interesting. I have thoughts of a letter I have in a file, a copy of a letter that I wrote to someone where I couldn't express my feelings when we were real-time in front of each other. But writing it down was easier. I had never really done that before or since to that kind of degree of intention, but I think it speaks to the power of truth and actually really saying what's going on at some point in our life, saying what's really going on.

[35:49]

And sometimes we can't do that in front of people because we get self-conscious or embarrassed and that sort of thing. It's hard. Yeah, that's what I've been thinking about. Yeah. Linda? I want to talk about the same poem. Last night I went to see the movie Hotel Wanda. Thank you for saying that. I went to see the movie Hotel Delano last night, and that's in my mind, and I also wanted to respond to the same poem that Camara was talking about, where Bill Kahn is feeling something so deep about the teacher of this tradition, and that he cries all over the book.

[36:51]

when somebody comes to ask him about it, he's too embarrassed to say. Though it's perfectly reasonable to think of that as some kind of cultural or gender inhibition that made him not want to express that feeling, I had a different take on it, which is that if you feel something that It's so important, it seems so valuable and so deep that you may feel like if you say anything, you might betray it. And I also have this feeling that when I feel something deeply and I'm crying and I'm moved, like last night after that movie, that there's a self-centered thing that I want people to know how deeply moved I am because that shows what

[37:57]

deep person I am. And so last night, so I connected what I felt last night to what he felt then, which is, I was with two people and I just felt that I should keep quiet, you know, I shouldn't say anything, because whatever I'd say would be really, would falsify something. So I didn't say anything, so then I feel that It's possible that Ryokan didn't say anything because it was too deep to say something about. And when you read the line about the rain, he finally said, I found something at last that I could say. The rain fell and dampened the book. I didn't feel he was just like covering up his feelings, but it was expanding it beyond even our deep compassionate feelings can be self-centered.

[39:00]

Look at me. I'm compassionate. I'm crying for suffering. I'm crying for whatever. But he made it bigger by saying it was the rain. His own tears in the rain became one thing. Yeah, that's really great. Thank you for that. Yeah, it's all the same water. Yeah. I have similar feelings when I go to a movie that has that kind of stuff that strikes your heart. That's why I say it to the credits, because I need to kind of hang there, and it's a little bit too much to talk about it quite often. So thanks for sharing that perspective. I think that's really right on. Yeah, there is something about that.

[40:05]

But at the same time, you have to say something. So, as Suzuki Roshi said, Sojo Roshi's teacher, you know, making a mistake on purpose by talking about it is something that we do constantly. And ultimately, what I was thinking about with the poem that's being referenced more than my highlighted poem at the end was that it's a really deeply personal experience that is very, very difficult to share. I mean, it's like it's just so, so intimate that what can you say? my own personal practice in my life is that even though people can't believe that I have a sort of quiet side and I don't talk so much, because I do talk a fair amount, that much of my life was actually very quiet and introspective and not talking so much. And part of this sort of peeling away and opening up in practice is expressing myself more and talking more about feelings and sometimes falling flat on my face because I'm misunderstood and I hear about that.

[41:13]

And sometimes I get it and that feels good. So it's this ongoing thing of just, you know, where am I now? Who am I now? Ellen? He mentions that he couldn't talk to his friends about what had happened. So he never told us either. He just said he cried and it rang. So he didn't tell anybody. Yeah, that's another good point. I was just going to say that when you first, when you read that poem that we're all talking about, about the crying, I had heard it before and I really liked that poem. And I was laughing, actually. It struck me as funny at the time that you read it, just now, because he lied. you know, on the one hand. And I think maybe I can relate to his embarrassment.

[42:19]

I can relate to that feeling of embarrassment, sort of being caught and then not wanting to talk or expose yourself. And then the fact that you lied is kind of funny to me. And yet, at the same time, I thought, you know, but on the other hand, you didn't lie. Yeah, that's the wonderful world of commentaries. You know, there's like so many points of view. Like I was like crying as I was trying to get through that last line there, which I've never had that experience reading that line before, and you were having this experience of laughing. So it's just amazing the myriad responses we have to any one given thing. Maybe one more question? is the fact that even though everyone talks about Dogen, he's a great student, he came out at the time that Rio Kahn was writing, basically no one cared about Dogen, even in the Soto school.

[43:29]

So part of what may be going on is the fact that even if you told the person coming in that he was moved by Dogen, that would be like someone telling you they were moved reading People magazine. Even telling them what was going on didn't necessarily work in that situation. And in fact, we found a poem where he mentions Dogen are significant because no one else ever talks about Dogen at that time. Yeah, this is really great. It's like I get the headliner, my name's up in the thing there that I'm going to talk on Saturday, but the wealth of information and support and elucidation of all these points is what Sangha practice is about. It's not about one person, it's about all of us together just doing this. I really appreciate everybody's whether they spoke it or just thought about it in support of that, so thank you.

[44:30]

And this record, this Dogen's record that's being referenced was just translated, I think, for the first time in its entirety in English. We don't have it at the book table, it's a rather thick book that you could find at one of the larger bookstores around the Dogen record. So that's finally coming to light now many years later. Well, thank you again very much and have a good day. Beans are numberless.

[45:06]

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