Good evening. Thank you for coming out this morning. This is our Tsujiki ceremony, feeding the hungry ghosts, and it's also the day of Halloween, so we have some interesting characters amongst us. Who is this? You're what? You're a rager. I'm kind of like Robin Hood but I don't have my weapons today because they would have been a nuisance. Your weapons would have been a nuisance? Do you think Robin Hood would have ever thought his weapons were a nuisance? I don't know. You've got to go back to Robin Hood school maybe. And this I would guess I would just take a guess. This is a serial killer. Can you stand up? Turn around so people can see you. Oh, I see. And who is this sitting next to John?

[01:24]

I have no idea. I don't feel comfortable with that. Spirit from the Highlands of Guatemala. And we have the Statue of Liberation. What's your book? Buddhism for dummies? A complete idiot's guide to Buddhism. I see. And we have a couple of people from the same gene pool back there. This is what I represent, the Ethics and Reconciliation Committee. Oh, you mean the Ear Committee. Yeah. Is there anyone else I'm not seeing? Oh, yes. Oh, there is a butterfly. Yo. Having having emerged from the cocoon. Well, this will be, I hope, a short talk. That's my intention. of announcements first, just to say, to recognize that for some of you who practiced with Mioan Grace Shearson here, or up at her place at Empty Nest Sendoh, she is having her Mountain Seat Ceremony today.

[02:45]

Tomorrow, tomorrow. Right, that's right. And some of us are going up there after this and that's a really wonderful occasion and also to encourage particularly people in practice in aspects of practice but anyone who's interested to sign up for the Seshin which we're having next Sunday beginning at five in the morning and it'll end with Catherine Cascade's Shuso ceremony so you're welcome to take part in that So, Sajiki. We here are in the habit of doing Sajiki, which means making a food offering to the hungry ghosts, to the spirits who are both wandering in this world and other worlds, and also ourselves, because sometimes

[03:49]

And so we do it at the time of Halloween. Halloween, I was looking, seems like it derives from a Celtic ritual, a Celtic ceremony at the time of the turning of the seasons. It was called Samhain. And it represented that time when light and dark turn. So it was a time when they saw there was a very thin veil between this world and other worlds so the spirits in other worlds mixed very freely with the spirits in this world and that seems uh... seems like uh... that might always be the case but maybe there's times in here when it's more true so I just wanted to say a little about Sinjiki and where it comes from uh... there was a legend one of the Buddha's disciples, Moggayana, had a dream.

[05:00]

Now, Moggayana was known as the foremost of the Buddha's students. He was foremost in clairvoyance. Do you know what clairvoyance means? Do you know what clairvoyance means? Someone say? Well, I agree. Seeing into the future. I think seeing into the future, yeah. And supernatural powers. The Buddha had all these disciples. All these disciples were really good. They were the foremost in wisdom, or the foremost in meditation, or the foremost in skateboarding, or the foremost in shopping, or the foremost in posting YouTube videos. There was a Buddhist disciple who was the foremost in any of those. But Mogayana had these special powers. And he dreamed about his mother, who had died not so long before.

[06:04]

And she was in another world where she couldn't drink and she couldn't eat. And he wondered what to do. And the Buddha said, well, maybe you should go there and try to help her. So I was curious, what would you guys do if your mother was in trouble? Go and help her? Would you? Would you go down to one of the scary places? But not Mira, because she forgot her weapons, right? You'd have to use your force of personality or your special powers. Do you have special powers? I guess. What are they? I don't know. Think for a second. This gentleman here, do you have special powers? He's got medics for you.

[07:04]

You have a weapon. Don't mess with the spoon. Don't mess with the spoon. Okay. So what would you do if your mother needed help and she was in one of these really scary places? You don't know? Would you go and find her? Especially, you know, it's interesting because she couldn't eat. So it would seem to me that you would be in a particularly good place to help her out. Don't you think? You have all these rations and supplies and boxes of cereal on you. You could probably feed... She was in the realm of the hungry ghosts. And you could probably feed the hungry ghosts. Do you guys know what the hungry ghosts are? The hungry ghosts are... They're usually pictured as weird looking figures who have very, very, very long thin necks.

[08:24]

and big bloated bellies. So they're hungry all the time. But their necks are so thin that no food can get down. So if you're stuck in this realm you suffer a lot. You try to eat food but it turns to fire. And when you try to drink liquid, mostly it turns to blood. That's the story anyway. Unless you're a bloodthirsty killer. Right. If you're a bloodthirsty killer, then you actually have arrived in the right place. But as we like to say, After several hundred years, you can see how is that working out for you.

[09:28]

Are you enjoying being a bloodthirsty killer? No. You are. That's for today. Let's see you try it for a month. Let's see you walk around. Actually, if you walk around Berkeley like this for a month, nobody might notice. or they might direct you to a shelter anyway he went down to this realm where the hungry ghosts lived and the Buddha said that what you should do is go get your mother and bring her to another world so he went down there and he broke the locks on this Gaki world. Gaki, G-A-K-I. That's the world of the hungry ghosts. And it happened that when he broke the locks on this world, it was kind of like a jailbreak.

[10:35]

All of a sudden, all of the hungry ghosts got loose. And they went wherever they wanted. So, we have this ceremony every year Because these hungry ghosts are kind of wandering around in our midst. And sometimes it's like invasion of the body snatchers. Sometimes you find that a hungry ghost has invaded your body. Have you ever felt like nothing you could do would satisfy you? Right. That's the feeling of being a hungry ghost. And all of us feel that way sometimes. So when hungry ghosts are close by or within us, then we have to know how to feed them so that they become free.

[11:35]

So they're free from that trap. Free from that kind of life. So that's why we do this ceremony. For the adults, I'd just say I found something that Vicky Austin wrote. She's telling about how they started doing Tsujiki at San Francisco Zen Center. And she said, at Zen Center, we started to do the ceremony at Kobinchino Roshi's suggestion. Kobinchino was one of our wonderful Japanese teachers. And actually, We miss him a lot. He died trying to save his children, actually. And he just gave his life away, just very freely. So he had suggested, he thought it would be helpful to have a deeper relationship with the negative aspects of our lives.

[12:46]

Chino Roshi said the Sagaki ceremony makes a statement about how to deal with negative things, negative happenings, negative parts of phenomena, for it is a kind of reminding ceremony, expanding your awareness of the darkness. Awareness is expanded to existence which is unknown, unseen, and unthinked. And then he says something very interesting. Negative is another positive side. So the things that are scary to us, the things that are hard for us, are also a kind of gift. They're just part of the world, and if we can accept them without being afraid of them, then we can find a place of comfort and safety in the world. As he said, negative is another positive side. Awareness is already round and pure.

[13:49]

we can expand our practice of compassion in space as well as time perhaps with this ceremony so that's what we're going to do I think Leslie will give you a full explanation but there's a place in the ceremony where you can make sounds calling forth the hungry ghosts and there's also a place where you can call the names of those who have deceased And it's good to hear those names, to think about them in just that moment. Bring them forth and set them at ease and feed them with your warm thoughts and set them free. And this is something that we do, like so much of what we do here, we do it together so that we can all help each other. So I think I will end there and we will do the ceremony. Thank you very much.

[14:51]

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