our speaker today, the last Dharma Talk of the Year. Mary is a retired mediator and psychologist. She grew up in the Northwest and came to the Bay Area to attend school in 1967 and has been here ever since. She welcomed me to the BCC in 1993, received lay ordination from Sojamal Whitesmith in 2004, was head student or SHUSO, in 2017, sharing the attic seat, and received lay entrusted in 2023 from Huzan Allen-Sanaki. Gary Kilibby and Liz in Oakland. Please welcome Gary Durian. Thank you, Ross. You're welcome. Thanks to Greg and Linda and Natanto Eno for inviting me. How's the sound?

[01:39]

Can you move it closer to your mouth? How's that? Was that better? That was in the middle of my gratitude. Thank you. Deep gratitude to Hazan Roshi, beloved teacher. friend and older Dharma brother. And this was to be today. The abbot gives the last talk of the year. So need this to be a worthy offering. What a time we are in. And I went to look it up and realized that it had been a great comfort and housing for me these last weeks in this tender time.

[03:14]

When despair for the world comes over me and I wake in the night at the least sound of what my life and my children's lives will be. I go and lie down where the Woodrake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water and I feel the

[04:30]

a blind stars above me waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and I'm free. I call my Wendell Berry. A poem about taking refuge. We took refuge this morning in our Bodhisattva ceremony. We took refuge in Buddha Dharma Sangha. For me it's easy to imagine what it means to take refuge in Sangha. We have been so much doing that.

[05:33]

Lately. My fall began with the death of my niece who had been challenging cancer for eight years. And her name was chanted for years here in the well-being ceremony which was for all of us in the family. And we're taking refuge now. I mean I'm a little astonished at how many people are here in this flustery winter day. We take being together and certainly we took great refuge in our recent Sushim. And it's easy for me to think about how we take refuge in Dharma on a text this fall which I want to talk a bit about but it's been a great comfort to me to study.

[06:48]

And I see how that is in daily life as it's taking refuge in Sangha as a practice in daily life. So my question is, how do we take refuge in Buddha? What does that look like on a mini-created day-to-day basis? Ozan is fond of saying, Throw yourself into the house of Buddha, which delighted me to hear. And then I followed it with this thought like, how do I do that exactly? My literal mind is like, where's the door? Where's the house? What does that mean?

[07:55]

One thing that helped me about the poem is in taking refuge, part of taking refuge, come the line of not taxing one's life with forethought and grief. This business of anticipatory grief or anticipatory, certainly there's anticipatory fear There was an essay on Manuel circulated right after the first week. And the line that caught me was a line about how anticipatory fear feeds fear. There's something about that that is helping me relocate. in this moment, like pulling back on the catastrophic thinking and saying, okay, what's happening now?

[09:11]

How are we now? How am I now? The other takeaway, I guess, that I take from the poem is in phrase, for a time, for a time I rest in the very... that taking refuge is not a place to park oneself and stay. One needs to go back into the world. I will confess that part of my taking refuge is that I haven't read a newspaper in six weeks. I plan to continue that for the rest of the year. But I know that I will need to tune back in and that the practice that I have been working on, the edge that I have been working, is creating that inner stability.

[10:29]

the inner spirit that is not swayed by external circumstances. Ignoring but not having one's, not being yanked around inside. So I have a text which is It's surprising to me that I'm turning to. It's a text that I've had both an ambivalent and adverse reaction to in the past, but has sort of opened. Interestingly, as things like that happen in our practice, we go to another level. So the text is the Five Ranks, Samtran's Five Ranks. And the reason it has become alive to me is that Jerry's Song of the Jumira Samadhi is the teaching for our Sangha week at Tassahara and embedded in that is a reference and a discussion of the Five Ranks.

[11:53]

And in my preparation I... right up until the last minute studying the John Maris and then I thought, you know, maybe I could crack a book and see what the five ranks are about. I mean, my aversion is the idea of ranks, the stepping stone feeling of it, and I'm pleased to know that I'm in good company, don't think much of the five ranks either. But there is a way, and it comes right from Domtron, to read the Five Ranks not as a stepping stone of enlightenment, a progression, but as a series of descriptions of modes of experience, in each of which is enlightenment and realization. I'm going to give you the thumbnail, I'm not going to go deep into the scholarship of it, but just to say that Don Chon is of the 9th century.

[13:08]

He's building on Sekito Kisen, who wrote the Sandokai, and his name, Don Chon's name is Tozanayokai. After him comes Hongshun, a couple hundred years, and then comes Sogen. So that's the string of ancestors. So other descriptions of it are that there are five perspectives of an indivisible reality. thought about it, he taught it. And his teaching got captured by Charlie McCorney in a very scholarly summary, so very easy book that you can read.

[14:18]

There's also online, many of the surgeons talked about it, but it's interesting to note that in our courtyard, that circle that has hexagrams in it, those are the hexagrams of the five modes or the five ranks. And it was on that circle that the table was set where I was unsigned the contract to be Abbott three years ago, four years ago. So when we say perspectives on on the one reality, it is a play of what the relationship is between what we call the relative and the absolute. This wonderful book calls it the contingent and the essential.

[15:22]

We call it form an emptiness. I mean, you can... Each one of those dialectics are problematic, including that it's a dialectic, because the emptiness includes everything, so it includes the relative, so it's not like there's this over here and that over there. The first two modes are called the inclusive modes, meaning about the relationship between the two. And the first one is the relative within the absolute or the contingent within the essential or form within emptiness. The second one is the opposite, is absolute within the relative and so forth.

[16:26]

The way I've been picturing that and keeping that in mind as a practice is that this form, all of these forms come into this form, this Zendo form. Then we sit Zaza and someone slips into Sri Gantaza and then other people follow and then what's happening in the room? That's form inside of emptiness. Just playing with the idea. And then when we go out on the porch and the world looks new. It looks luminous and there's a green you've never seen before in a leaf. You're seeing emptiness in multiple forms. You're seeing emptiness embedded in form.

[17:42]

The second, two, third, and fourth are called the exclusive modes. Meaning there's an attempt, which is not actually possible, it's kind of a thought experiment, just emptiness, the experience of just emptiness, and then the experience of just being in the world, just being in the marketplace, and then nitty-gritty anymore. All of these contain both, so it is a bit of, you know, it's asking for a bit of imagination, but that's why. the closest I can get to feeling into that what mode three is, which is the pure experience of emptiness.

[18:46]

And let me stop here and say that embedded in this teaching is also An idea that it's impossible to talk about. You know, there's the line in the general mirror of Samadhi that says, is anything said or not? Because words fail. So as soon as I tried to approach describing this, my words will not come up to the experience that I had. And that I think is true. So these are points that come up to words as pointers. of not possible to actually represent in words. But it's also the only thing we have. So I, a year or two ago, drove to the Humboldt Redwoods to go camping with my daughter and family.

[20:00]

And these days I go well-armored. I had a camper truck. My 40-year-old self would be very distinctful of that, but it is what it is, you know. And I was happy. And so I'm a better man of metal and form. And I arrive on the Avenue of the Giants at night and find the campsite. and the minute I was in that area permeated whatever armor that was, you could feel the presence. I got out of the vehicle at the campsite completely silent. You couldn't see individual trees, which is why we think of emptiness as darkness, which is the illumination of those boundaries.

[21:13]

And there was, which is that line in the poem, I come into the presence of still water. It's like that. There's a word I picked up in an article I read in a literary magazine. I don't know how to pronounce it. It's S-I-L-A. It's an Inuit word. And depending on the context, it means state of mind, sky, weather, breath,

[22:29]

consciousness, universe. You want to hear that again? Standard mind, weather, sky, consciousness and universe. I mean, it is my feeling that that's what we're trying to capture when we say emptiness. I'd be interested in what you think too. So, mode four is where I linger.

[23:33]

Vodafor is in the marketplace entering the world without a thought about emptiness and working on enlightenment path through the work, through the work on Kama. So The metaphor that came leaping to mind is a river metaphor. So some of you know that one of the things that I have done for a long time is water rivers and flat water rivers in many states. One of the things that you do when you come to a rapid, which is a pay attention moment in a river, particularly a big rapid, and rapids are categorized by the rank, they are ranked.

[24:43]

Most rivers are one to five, the cholera is one to ten. And always the rapid that comes to mind, when I think of a really big Lava falls in the Kauppahuna, which is the tent. It's a quarter mile long and it gorges up and goes through lava and it is a maelstrom of big water. And what you do, when you come to it, no matter how experienced the river guides are, you park your boat at the top and you do this thing called scouting. which means you walk down as far as you can go beside the river to look at what's happening and particularly looking at what the hazards are. You don't want to go there because you'll get stuck in a rock garden and nobody will wiggle the rest of you.

[25:45]

You don't want to go there because the boat will flip. You don't want to go there because the boat will wrap on a rock. So you look at the hazards as you go down. When you're at the bottom you say, and then walked back up and said, what do I have to do to get there? And then once you're at the top, there's several things to do. For me there was always something to do, which is to manage myself. Because now I have scared myself and I have to figure out how to calm myself down. And one of the things that I picked up randomly was in a dojo someplace that Eastern martial arts teaches you to throw your energy and Westerners tend to throw their energy into their arms and head and that causes you not to be able to think very well, be off balance and so I would do a tree pose where I do what I could to ground out

[26:56]

One time when we were standing at that point, and a lot of my bow paddlers turned to me and she said, so the path that you've just looked at is called Plan A. She turned to me and she said, this is a Plan B rabbit. And there's several important things about that. One is that when you're looking down on a river, it looks completely different than when you're looking at it. you know, level, and so you have to actually figure out how to transpose the view. So there's that, figuring out where you are. And the other thing is that the river is predictable and random at the same time. You can predict that there's going to be a wave in a particular place, but you can't predict whether it's going to break back on you. That's random. So no matter what you think is going to happen, The river may have other ideas about it.

[28:00]

And so once you're in that slot and you're moving and plan B happens, the river teaches you another lesson which is let go of my name. If you're all caught up with woulda, coulda, shoulda, the river will slap you with the next thing. By the time you are at the bottom, you may have managed your way through Plan A, B, C, and D, whatever. And if you're upright, well done. And in fact, if you're not upright and you get rescued, well done. And if you're at the bottom and you rescue someone else, well done. It is what it is. And actually, if you have to be rescued or have a really good story to tell. You know, let's tell stories about the plan A that worked. I mean, we have what I would call a plan B, C, D, sashimi.

[29:10]

And I regret that I was part of the hazards that created plan B for safety. But what happened, actually, I think was better. Because I think that the talk that was given, the day I was taught, was better than the talk then this talk would have been. I think it was more in tune with what was happening. And so she was just, like, just right. And there is a way in which what happens is just right. So the mode four, I guess, is where we figure out how to find the appropriate response in the world. Where we find our own

[30:27]

and the brokenness of the world in practice, in the mud, in the dusty road. These are metaphors for this practice. The fifth mode is mysterious and hard to describe and I'm probably not the right person to describe it. I have modest glimpses of it that I... But it is the complete unification, merging of the two so that one's appropriate action just emerges apparently, sinlessly, and without reference.

[31:36]

Godin calls it without a trace. So I've been thinking about this as ways that we traverse the world through these modes in time. We find Buddha in Shikantaza. We find Buddha in the luminosity of the world. We find Buddha in the still water, in the silence of the river. We find Buddha in our struggle to find the appropriate response. One of the reasons I think this was a opening and helpful one for me is that it felt integrating.

[32:43]

It felt like this was a way that I could understand experiences I'd had in the wilderness and not keep them separate from my Buddhist world. It was like that kind of dopamine hit pleasure that you get when you get the writing jigsaw. puzzle piece that fits in, and I'm like, ah! It's all there having me. Maybe this is why Sojourn could say, and I asked Sojourn in my mind, when would you think about these times? And I hear him say, it has always been us. And I never really found that comforting.

[33:44]

But I sort of do now. There is a timelessness. I mean, there is a refuge, actually, into a 2,500-year view perspective. rather than just the last few weeks. It isn't bad news. And using Greg's wonderful, we all have a poem, Would you memorize? Showing front, showing back. Showing front, showing back. Falling with both.

[34:47]

Nirvana, samsara. Nirvana, samsara. One reality. There are no doubts and no small number of big rabbits. We are in this tender moment of sitting vigil. We don't know what the new universe is. And I know that I want to hanging on to the feeling of refuge.

[35:51]

And I know that that is a clinging, it's a reifying. But there will be a plant leaf, that's how you use it. And we will get fully immersed and wet in this tree. one another and ourselves, this is just one mode that we're in. No matter what we feel, there is another view of this reality. We can figure out, I'm counting on this act of trust, I'm counting on that it is possible not to be swayed,

[36:56]

and also pay attention. There will be grief. But there doesn't necessarily need to be an anticipation. We can meet things when they happen. no matter what is happening, that there is a backside. Thank you very much, Mary, for such a beautiful and touching talk.

[38:24]

That poem by Wendell Berry has been a good friend to me for a long time. I've referred to a lot. And I want to thank you for being kind of as the more star of your talk, really. Things will all work together as well, and I was touched by a lot of things that you said. I'm thinking of one line of that poem, the day blind stars weeping at us. My thought is that they're weeping at us when we can't see them too. It's like one of the things they take from that beautiful poem. Yes. Still there. Thank you. Thank you. Do you happen to know if Wendell Berry was a person? I don't think he was. He's a very interesting man, though. Very interesting. He's an ecologist, a farmer.

[39:33]

I think that's a really beautiful talk, and I was really compelled by your description of a lot of fog. I was at the edge of my seat. And I have a kind of literal-minded question about that. In discussion of Plan A, Plan B, and you said, you know, if you end up at the bottom and you're not upright, then somebody rescues you great, or you end up at the bottom and you rescue somebody else great. But what if you end up at the bottom and there's somebody else there? where somebody can't rescue you, and that's the end. And that's not so great, maybe. And because it seems, I mean, that happens in life, of course, but the fact that you choose to do this river run puts a different light on it to me.

[40:36]

I mean, the extreme danger of running a class 10 river. I don't know. I just wonder what you think about that. That's a good question. I was afraid. There was a river runner whose name is Stacey right at the moment. We all think of it later, but I always thought of him as a bodhisattva. He did environmental work. He was the person who chained himself to the tree to keep the Santa saucer with the blue water. And I was on a river with him where he was teaching us paddling and so forth. And he said, there's a phenomenon in a river where as water goes over a rock, as it's going downstream, it goes down and creates back and it creates what we call a recirculating hole.

[41:40]

And some of them will hold on to you. And so you have to learn how to figure out how to get out of it. And he said, if you find yourself there, be curious, you might not be there again. It was like, as you're falling off the cliff, plucking the strawberry on the way down, you know, it has that combination of The reason I was on the river is it was an extraordinary way to feel alive. And fortunately, I never faced the circumstance, although it's a circumstance that we anyway, here. We're facing it now.

[42:42]

So, that's One answer. This is not an answer, but it gives me a chance to tell another story about it, if you permit me. This last year, I've given up organizing trips and doing the rowing myself, so we did a charter. And on the charter was my granddaughter, who had a terrible time in high school. She just graduated. She barely graduated. She barely graduated, actually, the pandemic. I suppose we were. And I had to talk her into, I really arm wrestled her into this trip. I said, this will change your life. And we get to this rapid and we're with what I consider to be the best rower. And with us is Colleen. And the best rower kind of gets through all of the rough stuff and then comes up on this house size rock that has

[43:47]

a wave and water and usually you come up like this and you go like that and it happened to break. And so we didn't go like this, we went like this. It was the first and only time that I had flipped in a boat. And we all came up and the first thing I felt was somebody grabbed the back of my life jacket and all I could think of was this person was gonna climb up me and I barked like oh. And then I turned around and it was my granddaughter Sarah. And when we're all rescued and we're all up, she went like this. This is the best day of my life! And now she wants to be a river guide. She forgot about that. That's why. It saves, you know, people, their lives have been turned around by being involved in this. That's the risk of being alone, is that things happen.

[44:51]

Since you're back there, Ellen, and then come back to Preston. Thank you, Mary. And like you, I also like refuge in nature and in the records. But I wondered if you'd say a few words about how you find refuge at the corner of Martin Luther King and University of... Well, can I say how I find refuge driving into Africa instead? Well, um... I mean, it's similar. It is, there is a practice, I think it's a practice.

[46:00]

This person, these other people like me, want not to be in pain. This person or these people around me, like me, want to be safe. That is actually what I try to do in practice. All of us are just trying to get home, or all of us are just trying to get where we need to be. Some way of expanding the personal agenda to include everyone around. And that helps me. Rest in an answer.

[47:03]

Mary, could you, um, remind me the line about that emotional tax of I come into the presence of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief I'm wondering what you think about might there be a sense in which fear of any variety is always or almost always anticipatory like are the things we're afraid of are they usually things that we're afraid will happen or might happen things that have not actually arrived here yet and

[48:13]

for when those things that we're afraid of when they do the fear is like replaced with the need to essentially respond so the fear of losing somebody or the fear of being criticized yeah i'm wondering if that sounds right to you and if fear does tend to be anticipatory, then what, what do I do with that? Well, a couple of things come to mind from my own experience. I have a tendency to do catastrophic thinking.

[49:21]

And that is the projecting oneself into a fully catastrophic circumstance, regardless of what the current circumstances are. So, pulling back from that, letting go of that actual visual, Imagery is an important part. The fear may still be there, but that's a different fear than that catastrophic projection. It is such a body reaction. It has also been helpful for me to know that the neurotransmitters that are involved in fear and anxiety are the same as the excitement and the differences in interpretation. So sometimes what I've done is take that visceral feeling and say, is this excitement or is this your, you know, play with that.

[50:36]

And the last It is long ago someone said, fear may be there but don't let it stop you. So coming into the room and preparing myself to give this talk, I felt anxiety. And when I was waiting in the community room, I started, well, I went through several things. One is, I'm going to take the house of Buddha. That's who this is about, that kind of feeling. And the other thing I thought, I imagined was, this anxiety, this is a part of myself that is trying to keep me safe, and it's oriented, and how can I take care of it?

[51:42]

How can I take care of her? How can I let her be and accompany me but not be driving the bus, so to speak? So sometimes I feel like I peel her hands off the steering wheel and sometimes it's easier. This time it was a bit easier because I don't know why. Do you remember how your anxiety transfigured as you sat down at your seat and began your talk? That presumes a transformation. It's still there. I can second that. Mary, we have two hands raised and there's a chat that says, Mark Dubia's river keeper. Say that again.

[52:44]

It says, Mark Dubious, a riverkeeper. Mark Dubious, a riverkeeper. Mark Dubious, a riverkeeper. Lynn put that on the chat. But whatever that means. We have a raised hand from the BGC community room and also a hand from Ken. So community room, go ahead. and get in the frame. I guess I just wanted to share my experience of anticipatory grief a little bit. When my mother had a long and difficult tale to her life,

[53:46]

tail end to her wife about five months. I had a lot of anticipatory grief and it was very difficult. It also was the way my system had of grappling with and processing this event. I'd never lost my mother before and I've never lost another mother. This is, it was a unique experience. I'm sure it would be different if I and will be different other losses as I perhaps grapple more with the great matter but I also feel like it's just I tend towards anxiety and I found that practicing with it I it's important not to manage those feelings away and also to ground myself and

[54:48]

give them space so that they are not driving the bus, not the only thing going on, not who I think I am. And also, they are a fact of my brain oftentimes. It's just gonna happen. So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. I'm so sorry, Katie. You're absolutely right. I mean, I apologize if I implied that somehow we should wash away the anticipatory grief and it shouldn't happen. I think it absolutely is part of life and part of knowing how one feels. So thank you.

[55:54]

Thank you. Hi, Mary. Kind of on the same theme, but when you were talking about catastrophizing, which usually we think we want to avoid that. But I think sometimes the opposite can be helpful. You can be in a kind of dicey situation, and sometimes I think, well, what is the worst thing that can happen out of this? And sometimes that can be strangely freeing. You know, you've rock bottom there, and for example, if you're in a difficult situation, but you're saying, well, I'm not going to die here. Or this is, I'm still going to blah, blah, blah. You know, you're sort of looking at things from the ground up.

[56:56]

And sometimes that can give you a refreshing perspective, like, oh, okay, now where do we go from here? Instead of sort of brushing it away. So it's just like a flip. It's not like one is better than the other.

[57:16]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_79.68