Dharma Talks @SBZC

Sunday, March 8, 2026

Good morning, good friends. It's good to be back with you all on this wonderful spring day. I hope you're all doing well.

Spring days are notably days of change, and that's the way it's been here with the weather and with the larger weather that's in our world — the very changeable spring this year. That's especially why, because there are so many changes, and some are momentous even. The word that's out there in the zeitgeist a lot is "unprecedented." I don't know about that so much, because it seems, taking even a cursory view at human history, everything has pretty much been precedented before. And what we come back to in our practice — and of course many other peoples that have practices also return to this — the basics and the fundamentals of human nature and of Buddha nature, however you want to term that, remain pretty much the same.

However, it's really great to be back together with you in our small boat sailing through all these changes. Sailing together through turbulent weathers, turbulent times. And sometimes the weather within each of us is turbulent for various reasons. And of course, the name of our small boat is Sangha.

I like to remember words. I'm a language-oriented person, a writer and a poet, so I like to remember where words came from, as maybe another insight into the wideness of their meanings. Sangha is from the Indo-European language roots meaning "as one," "together with," "in contact with." And that's what we are today — together, in contact with each other through different means, wonderful means. Though we know we're not one being in a very basic way through our six sense doors, we have a more subtle and powerful way of knowing that we all are one, inextricably interconnected together. And this is really the foundation of all human knowing and what Shakyamuni Buddha pointed to. We are often born knowing it, but we often forget. And that's one reason we gather and one reason we practice.

So my question to myself in this period — for myself and for everyone — is how we meet the moments we're living in now: as human beings, as Buddha nature beings, as Buddha Dharma Zen practitioners. How can we remember all of these many things that we are as humans, and the many connections we have with others, when these storms and changing conditions keep rolling in?

And I believe it helps — for sure it helps me — to recall that we probably wouldn't have survived. If you think about the little history of survival that we know of ourselves as just beings on this planet, I think we wouldn't have survived from the earliest single-celled animals and creatures unless we somehow knew this. It certainly looks like humans from prehistoric times who left the paintings and drawings in caves and on rocks knew about their connections to this greater matrix that we all live in — their connections with other animals of all sorts, other beings and creatures, and not only that but the earth itself, the sky, the elements. Those early human ancestors knew all of these things. They knew somehow this subtle and deep mystery of being all one, and have left those clues for us, left their understandings that we have later discovered.

That's hard to remember because of another quality we're born with: fear, which is both necessary for our survival and a cause of our delusion of separateness. And as we keep discovering — this morning and again and again, each of us in our practice — there's a way of sitting down patiently, quietly, where we remember. Perhaps not immediately and perhaps not continually. In fact I would say never continuously, depending on your time frames. And that's why the example of Shakyamuni Buddha is so wonderful and powerful, because he could remember this quality that we have of being all one and knowing that deeply and integrating that with all the other parts of us, such as fear.

So we sense this in our bodies. We can feel it in our heart-mind. We sense it as all being one together within ourselves, and we feel that when we're with other people. We feel how we can trust ourselves and how we can trust others, how we can help others even as we stumble along lurching from mistake to mistake, delusion to delusion.

So this simple way of zazen, shikantaza — just sitting, allowing the heart and mind and body to find the ease and joy of simply sitting — in Dogen's phrase, to meet all of this: to meet all of you, and to meet what I can see outside my windows, the birds in the birdbath, who are more numerous now that it's spring. To meet all of this and exclude nothing, including what I read in the newspaper or what I have seen unfolding before me in pictures and videos, the mystery of it all, even what we recoil from when our fear body flinches to see certain things, to know certain things.

So this practice brings us together, as I said, integrates us. And that allows us to meet the moments that unfold unceasingly as long as we're alive. And even to act without thinking — this practice encourages us, and by its repetition of coming to it again and again and again, to know without thinking how to act, how to be in this moment, how to meet this moment.

So we can act in accord with the first verse of the Dhammapada, the way of the Dharma. "In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible."

So we know this way, many ways, directly and indirectly and through our nature — to share, most fundamentally. We share language. We share our experiences. We share kindness and benevolence. We cooperate with one another. And we know this way through the teachings, perseverance, and kindness of Shakyamuni Buddha and all the Bodhisattvas and all of our ancestors and teachers that have shared the way with us. They have kept practicing with others and alone for millennia and now. And their words have touched innumerable beings, many of them not even known to history, not known to us.

I think of all the early Sanghas, whether lay Sanghas or monks and nuns who took robes and went out and begged and did not live lay lives — all of those names that are unknown to us. Many, many hundreds of thousands, I imagine.

So our nature — that's the part of our nature that helps us meet the moment. And Dogen Zenji has a lot to say about that in the Shobogenzo. I'd like to pick up on some of his offerings that have helped me in those moments when the house is shaking, the bombs are falling, when my friend fainted on the cushion — many of these moments, small or large in our lives, when the fear body arises or when the joy body arises, to meet the moment without thinking if action is necessary.

Sometimes we need to reflect. We need to think. We need to use all of our resources as human beings. And our practice also helps us discern which part of our being — which part of our body, our mind, our heart — is necessary and helpful in this moment, off the cushion and on the cushion.

So a few of these, which I'll just put out as little stone markers along the way, little water drops along the way that may well disappear. But we can go back to them.

Some of these are from an interesting part of the Shobogenzo. Dogen Zenji compiled what he calls his introduction to the 108 Gates of Dharma Illumination, which he says he compiled from an early sutra, the Bodhisattva Protector of Dharma Realization Sutra. These are the ones that I find really useful:

Not quarreling stops angry accusations. Letting go frees from unwholesome desires. Benevolence, kindness, great friendliness conditions good in all situations.

There are three forms of joy: the rejoicing that keeps the mind calm and at ease, a love of enjoyment that keeps the heart pure. When we have those moments of feeling that we are just really at ease — and especially this happens in interactions with others, often through kindness — that we are acting from a clear heart. Joy keeps the heart-mind from joyless matters. Dogen says, in other words, not dwelling on the negative, not always looking at the downside, doom-scrolling in whatever form that takes.

Being patient helps us realize the wisdom of Dharma — patience, an endless practice, just focusing on noticing, allowing that to be in our lives. Being mindful of our impulses before they become actions. We do not increase unwholesome habits, and we increase wholesome habits.

So many of these Dogen picked up from early Buddhism. He was quite a scholar and knew a lot about the Pali Canon in whatever form that came to him. I'm not that much of a scholar, and I haven't looked up all the sources of how Dogen discovered these kinds of reminders from Shakyamuni, but I know he weaves those throughout all of his talks in the Shobogenzo.

One of my favorites is the four integrative methods of the Bodhisattva. That is: kind speech — our gift for language, what we have to work with; embracing and sustaining right actions for every good and all beings; inclining the mind toward cooperation, as Dogen puts it in one of the integrative methods — toward cooperation, toward harmony; recognizing with mindfulness our thoughts, our impulses, our emotions; and giving everything as a gift. As Shantideva says, even your enemies are benefactors, because you are given the chance to practice forgiveness.

So in our vows, of course — another language, other ways to keep practicing and embodying these vows. The Bodhisattva vows, precepts positive and grave, are on-the-ground compassion when we embody and enact them in the everyday moments of our lives. Their language is very broad — wisdom, compassion — that can sound pretty conceptual. But that's also excellent for understanding the big picture and not getting too caught up in taking these practices as only "I must do these in order to become more realized, more Bodhisattva-like." We can go off the edge in so many ways. That's why this practice is also called the middle way.

So they're good, but sitting down and keeping on sitting down is how we come to feel them integrated in our whole body-mind. And that's when our sitting practice and realization shows up. And then when we get up and go out into another form of practice — off the cushion, out of the zendo, out of our regular at-home sitting place — how we find this helps us: how we speak with a friend whose actions are hurting themselves and others, what we can do to meet the harmful actions of those in power. And it helps us remember that joy has many forms and that we can attune to those forms. They help keep us in balance, especially in difficult times.

And spring is a wonderful time to tune into that aspect that Dogen points us to — to remember the three forms of joy, keeping the heart-mind from joyless matters, remembering joy, recalling benevolence, which is well-wishing for others and for oneself, and kindness to others and to oneself.

Dogen says, "Knowing another person's kindness is a gate of realizing Dharma. It keeps the wholesome roots from being abandoned. Repaying another person's kindness is a gate of realizing Dharma. It does not ignore the debt."

I think we are kind by nature. And we remember that we have countless benefactors, including all of our ancestors, and including those first single- and multi-celled organisms that we all come from. And as we go about our days, we feel how each kindness repays the debt that Dogen mentions. Our natural kindness is a seed. And though we open that seed early as infants, we nurture it and tend to it as adults, because we have many seeds. We also have the seeds of greed, hatred, and delusion. And that's what practice helps us see — this whole picture, the big picture of meeting all of us. When we can meet all of ourselves individually, then we can meet more of everyone and everything else.

Kindness is limitless — like gratitude, it's the other side of gratitude, if you will, or another aspect. And sometimes that seems overwhelming because there are so many people whom we see that we don't believe deserve kindness. And we should be clear that there is a big difference between recognizing immoral or unskillful behaviors and shutting our hearts against those who are enacting those behaviors. This is one thing I think wisdom and right action mean together. It's seeing clearly — not pitying, and not turning away from, but seeing what I can do, what each of us can do, in meeting these moments when these situations arise.

The people in our current administration are humans who suffer old age, sickness, death, loss, separation from what they love, and the constant flux of change, as we all feel. And they suffer from greed, ill will, and delusion in all of their forms, as each of us does to some extent. And so I feel that returning to these things that Dogen points out — sometimes even just for a period focusing on one or another, joy or kindness, benevolence — helps us meet the moments in our lives.

We never know what will come around the corner, what the next moment will be. That's what we're about, I think, here in this practice. So being attuned to kindness and benevolence in ourselves and toward others helps us to see what right actions we can take in our personal lives and in our larger communities. These opportunities are with us in every moment that we breathe.

So I'd like to close my remarks with two poems, and then I'm really interested in what you all have to say about meeting the moments in your lives, or meeting the moments in change, or whatever else you have to say.

The first is one of Dogen's spring waka poems:

Humble spring has come.
Since then, people gather young greens
growing in the ancient field.

And this one is by a contemporary American poet, Stuart Kestenbaum, and it's called "Joy":

The asters shake from stem to flower,
waiting for the monarchs to alight.
Every butterfly knows that the end is different from the beginning,
and that it is always part of a longer story,
in which we are always transformed.
When it's time to fly, you know how,
just as you know how to breathe,
just the way air knows how to find its way into your lungs,
the way geese know how to depart,
the way their wings know how to speak to the wind,
a partnership, a feather and glide,
lifting into the blue dream.

I thank you very much for your attention, and as I said, I'm delighted to be with you and to hear from you all. Thank you.

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Question: Thank you so much, Carolyn. So timely, your comments, given the change into the new season and given what's going on in the larger context of our lives. We'll open it up to some questions. Please raise your hand and I'll point you out so we're not colliding, and restate your name so Carolyn knows who's speaking.

Question: This is Bob. I like your poem on joy. Joy is so hard to come by these days and yet so necessary. My comment is from Buffy Sainte-Marie. She says, "Keep your nose to the joy trail." I'd like to hear your comment on that.

Carolyn Dille: That's great. I remember seeing Buffy Sainte-Marie — maybe you do too, Bob. That's one reason I always bring in poems. Dogen, of course, writes very poetic talks and writings in general. Dogen was really a poet-monk, I think. But the poets and the songwriters — which Buffy definitely was — they speak to that part that I mentioned at the beginning of the talk, that is the mysterious part that's harder to put into discursive language. But it goes into the heart and the whole body, really. You feel — I feel, and many people do — that poems and songs, even songs without music, or other forms of music, singing — the human voice is an instrument of music. So I feel that Buffy certainly contributed with that wonderful metaphor and image. Thanks for bringing that, Bob.

Question: Mark again. Last week was my father-in-law's 90th birthday and we were in Mammoth skiing — he still skis, for about an hour, though he did two hours one day. There were about eleven of us, family members and friends, all together. Spending time with him reminded me of impermanence and change. I had a chance to ask him how it feels to be 90, and his reply was, "Presence. I'm ever so present. I can't think about tomorrow or what I did yesterday, or whether I'll ever ski again. I'm just here right now." I just thought that was so remarkable, to have that present-moment awareness at his age. It was inspiring just to hear that. And it reminded me that, as you were saying about the changes — internal and external — the only thing we have is our present-moment awareness to help us through it. And joy is one of those tools that we can grab out of the toolbox. Thank you.

Carolyn Dille: Thank you, Mark, for sharing that story. That is very inspiring to me — who's closer to where your father-in-law is than to where you are. Skiing at 90 — yay! That's wonderful that you could share that with us, and to have it so close in your own family. That's a gift. And you sharing it with us is a gift also. Thank you.

Question: Carolyn, shout out, Dave here. I really appreciated your comments about the administration that our country is currently under politically, and the recognition that the people in that administration are suffering and going through the same things all of us are going through — old age, sickness, and eventually death. My question has to do with the recent news about one of the cabinet members losing her job — a person I associate with a lot of unkindness and harsh behavior toward others — and the piling on that's going on now about her alleged misdeeds and some personal matters. I find myself almost gravitating to read those stories and to be part of the piling on. I'm trying to understand what it is about us that goes after that, and sort of wants to see the enemy fall. Our practice, we hope, opens a broader view of other people in our lives. I'm struggling to understand why I get some gratification out of that and how we resist the urge. Thank you.

Carolyn Dille: Thank you for that really deep question. It's really a question about why we're called to practice. One thing is that the "why" is usually a good thing in practice terms to let go of trying to figure out — not that we can't, in a way, figure those things out.

What I would say to you, and what I say to myself, is that when I find myself gravitating toward unwholesome states of mind, as Dogen points out, I can find — not joy, but a kind of ease and happiness — in recognizing that I am aware of these. So each step along the way of being aware, you are recognizing that that is part of the whole picture. That is part of human nature too. And that is why Dogen kept practicing. Shakyamuni never stopped sitting. He never stopped practicing his whole life — sitting and walking. That's what he did. And mindfulness, being aware in any of the four body postures, which I recommend keeping aware of, because sometimes you can be aware in your body before you can be aware in your mind.

You're aware that this is human nature, and you're part of human nature. You are recognizing that they, in fact, aren't so different from you. And I want to be clear about my own feelings about the world we live in now too, because I have, like everyone, complicated feelings about — to use the most common, broadest term — social media. Things get amplified now in a way that they didn't when I was going through similar kinds of events in college in the late '60s and early '70s. There was plenty of amplification then too, but there are forces actually working to condition us now. I don't want to be naive about those, and I don't want to see practice as a way to even overcome all of those.

So I just try — that's one reason I love that particular spring waka by Dogen, when he says, "Humble spring has come." The season returns with humility. I want to keep close to not knowing all the answers. I want to keep present to the fact that the season just returns. Human nature just arises in the form of greed or hatred or "those people." And there are platforms for that now — incredible platforms for everybody to express their human nature. It's overwhelming often.

So that's where discernment comes in, about keeping aware of what people do so that you can make judgments about what you might want to do — actions you might want to take in a broader sense, in terms of politics or action in your community, whatever. And yet recognizing that the piling on is not kindness to oneself. We often tend toward judging ourselves as though we're not living up to a standard. But you're recognizing it, being aware. That's the basic key. Those awarenesses that come to us through sitting down — those are the ones that matter, whatever form they are, even of our mistakes and lapses.

There are many little gathas, or things like that, that I have seen and even written — I have a whole collection of poem-gathas about forgiveness of oneself and others — forgiving ourselves and others for our mistakes and lapses, our weaknesses and blindness. We don't know everything. I hope I'm not going on too long, but I'm really trying to address your question, which I think is such a deep one.

Question: Thank you for going on for a while. It was really helpful because it's very present for me, and I really appreciated your comments.

Carolyn Dille: I would just end by saying, Dave, you're not alone — misery loves company, right? There are many, many people in the same place.

Question: Are there other comments or questions for Carolyn this morning? That's the meaning of Sangha that Carolyn talked about — Sanskrit meaning "to stick together." It even sounds like it's sticky. But it has a downside. There's a tendency to pile on and be stuck in that place with what's going on. I think that's where Carolyn's comments on awareness pay off.

Question: I want to thank Bob for bringing up that today is International Women's Day, and use that as a kind of bridge to an experience I had yesterday in which I felt connected to all women, particularly mothers and grandmothers, who internationally are all dealing with the stress and concern about loss — because there are so many children and grandchildren being snatched, or now with the escalation of war, the threat of danger.

Yesterday my son brought my grandson out — he's three and a half — to be with us while my son got some work done out at Sedgwick, which is a university preserve, an 8,000-acre preserve in the San Ynez Valley. Sammy was with us all day. People came and went to see him, and there were some very poignant times of touching him and touching our hearts, and long-standing forgivenesses going on. And then when Ethan came back to get Sammy and they were driving away, I just felt such enormous depth to my son's kindness in those settings. And then this almost panic took me over — that they were going to drive over the pass, and what could happen. I just felt that connection with all the women who are standing in that same spot watching their loved ones leave, all over the planet.

So it was very helpful to have some balance with you today, Carolyn, and to feel your steadiness and your warmth, and to feel our sticky Sangha, so that we can all share these experiences together and find those moments of joy and sniff those out for a while. Thank you.

Carolyn Dille: Thank you. Yes, and thank you for the reminder again about International Women's Day. I noted it yesterday that it would be today, but then when I woke up this morning, it didn't come to mind.

Question: I think with that pause in the conversation, we may have exhausted our questions and comments, Carolyn. I want to thank you on behalf of everyone here at Santa Barbara Zen Center for joining us. It's so good to see you again, and thank you for brightening our lives and turning some lights on this morning. We appreciate it. Any parting comments or thoughts before we log off?

Carolyn Dille: I would just echo what you said. I thank the Santa Barbara Zen Center for being there and brightening my day, and I thank everyone who spoke, and I thank Tova, whose remarks about family and the mothers certainly brought up those feelings in my body, heart, and mind. Yes, there are many aspects to being human, including the poignancy of being alive and seeing that passing — but also seeing that we are still here and enjoying being together. Thank you.

Sunday, February 22, 2026

Big laptop belongs to Buddha. Yeah, it's a fancy little thing on top of it. We've got a button for it. Here, I'm going to angle it down. It's on? It's ready to go? Yeah, let's do it.

So yeah, we got a new laptop so that whoever does Sunday service, the Zoom folks can log in. There's instructions, there's a login, and you don't have to use your own equipment, which is nice. And then whatever else we need. It's nice to have a bigger screen to see our visiting folks. It would definitely be useful when we have a speaker that's virtual, and we'll continue to put it here. We might put a blanket over that. Hopefully the audio works. Do we have anybody else regularly? Not regularly. It varies. We usually don't have more than three or four. That's been a concern. Getting over the hill is hard. It is set up for the year. Each year we renew the meeting and the ID doesn't change, so you can log in and we just click in. Please join if you can't make it over.

So yeah, my name is Michael. I'm going to back up from this a little bit. How this came to be is that very recently there was a sesshin called Denkoryu, which is this celebration of Buddha's enlightenment. And it's one of four major sesshin that's done at the Jokoji Zen Center, which is up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Four of us here — practitioners here at the Santa Barbara Zen Center — attended: Anton, who's our board president, David, myself, and Aaron. When we came back, Eliza was very nice to offer up an idea, because we didn't have a speaker for a couple of weekends. She said, hey, maybe we can have a panel on sesshin. And I think we all said, that sounds great, let's do it. And then meanwhile, Anton emails me and says, hey, can I get your picture and a bio from you for the website so we make it official? And I was like, all right, what happened to the panel? I didn't know this was me. And then it just kind of morphed from there. I was like, okay, well, maybe I'll do a little bit of an origin story on sesshin, a little background on sesshin, and then we'll do the panel and talk about our own personal experience. So that's what I'm going to do, if you don't mind.

And in the meantime, I have to say that while all of this was happening, my wife was telling all my friends that I was away on a trip to a Zen center. They had no idea. Of course, we don't go screaming from the mountaintops that we're Buddhists, right? We're practicing. So then I get on a call with them and they're like, what is this retreat thing you're doing? So I explained to all of them what sesshin was. And what's even funnier is the photo I used for the website was one my dear friend Emily took. She's like, where's the photo credit? So it all came full circle. So if they're watching, hello, Emily — you get a little credit for the photo — and Casey and Matt and Jordan, my dear friends, who will do their own sesshin sometime soon. We all love getting out in nature. So, all right.

I started last night, actually. I went ahead and did a little calligraphy. That is not Geroux. I don't know if I was well taught, but I was taught by Geroux, so I gave it my best crack. So these are the two symbols that essentially mean sesshin. It's a very artsy version of it. It's much better done in actual writing. But the translation is: sesshin is a Japanese term, and the translation is "touching the heart-mind." And what sesshin essentially is — it always reminds me of the word "session" — it kind of is a big, long session of intensive Zen meditation. It's a cornerstone practice of Zen Buddhism.

So I'm going to talk about the origins and early development of it, the Chinese roots, the Japanese adaptation. It mirrors the story of Zen, from Chan to Zen, and just the history of it. Sesshin has been with Zen since very early on. I'll talk about the modern transformation, the modernization, how it came to the West. A little bit about Soto practice. I think I'll throw a little Rinzai in there as well as a comparison. The different roles in sesshin — I'm not going to get to those in depth. I have a lot of information here if you want to look at it afterward. I'll try to hit the bullet points, and then some case studies of people's contemporary experiences in sesshin. But I think mostly we want to hear from us about our recent experience.

Just real quick: I've only been to two week-long sesshin. I've been to one that was about three days long — more of a bridge version — and that was the first one I did. I'm glad I started there, because six or seven days of just sitting is quite a lot, and it's nice to warm up to that. If you're thinking about doing this, it's nice to start maybe with a weekender. But a full sesshin is typically a week long here in the West these days, and it's pretty intensive. You sit, you eat, you use the restroom, you walk around. That's about it. You're not on your phone. You're not reading. You're not even talking, typically. Noble silence doesn't mean people don't try to talk or aren't tempted, right? You're supposed to bow and take things aside and speak quietly, but even that is kind of a no-no.

So, just to go into the origins: sesshin emerged in the Japanese Zen monasteries during the medieval period. The origins of sesshin are difficult to pinpoint, but they say it grew out of the monastic training system when Zen was transmitted from China to Japan in the 12th or 13th century. Early Zen masters like Dogen, who is the founder of the Soto school, and Eisai — if I'm saying that wrong, correct me — who is the founder of Rinzai, they emphasized these intensive meditation periods as being essential for the way.

In the Chinese tradition of Chan, it goes back to the same monastic training system back in the early Tang and Song dynasties, roughly from the 7th to the 13th centuries. These Chinese Chan monasteries established long meditation periods called jingqi, meaning "intensive period." This was typically held during the winter months, which makes perfect sense. I immediately pictured this: all the agricultural work has ceased, it's maybe snowing or the weather's terrible, and what are they going to do but just sit? So they would devote themselves fully to practice during the winter months. They had developed these seasonal retreats very early on. They had summer and winter training periods that monastics called jiecha and jiedang, and that became the tradition.

When this was brought over to Japan around the 12th century — to both the Rinzai and Soto schools in the 1200s — it was adapted a bit to monastic culture in Japan. I'm bringing this up because we're a Soto lineage Japanese tradition here. So sesshin is actually a Japanese term, but it draws on all the Chinese concepts. Dogen was very influential in formalizing some structure. He had a manual called Eihei Shingi, which means "pure standards for the Zen community," and he had exact protocols for monastic life, including around these intensive meditation periods. But he emphasized the term byoji-dokkan, meaning "continuous practice penetrating all activities," which means sesshin wasn't separate from daily practice. It wasn't a thing you went off to do — it was just part of their practice, and it was an intensification of the ceaseless training that was already underway. So they perhaps didn't really think of it in a dualistic sense, which makes sense — that's what the teaching is, eliminating duality. Sesshin was just part of practice, but it was a tradition that came up seasonally.

There's quite a bit more on the different periods of development that took place in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s, leading up to the 20th century. The overall arc is that sesshin became more codified. It did become more of a thing that had rules and styles and emphases. I think it came along in the same wave as, for example, the formalization of Japanese tea ceremony — Jiro talked a bit about that at the recent sesshin we attended. A lot of the forms that got developed during those post-medieval years up into the 17th and 18th centuries all came together, and sesshin was no different. Roles for different participants became formalized, schedules became formalized, and so on. There were also efforts to make it relevant to modern life, which I think is still being done today. There are liberties taken, to some degree, to make it palatable for folks.

But it really did, early on in these transformations in the 1800s and 1900s, try to make sesshin more accessible to lay people — less a monastic tradition and more available to lay practitioners like me, which is nice, because I've had a great experience and I'm looking forward to doing another one.

There's mention of Harada Daun Sogaku, who lived from 1870 to around 1960, and he was particularly innovative and influential in bridging the Soto and Rinzai approaches and making sesshin more accessible to lay people. That influence later came to the West.

So I'll try to get through this so we can get to talking about our own experience. The most well-known sesshin is Rohatsu — a week-long retreat in early December that commemorates Buddha's enlightenment. A typical sesshin these days involves multiple days of intensive zazen. It's usually five to seven days. You could be sitting up to twelve hours a day, maybe a little less, maybe a little more. Historically and traditionally, you get minimal sleep and very simple meals. That's not always the case — I've gotten a good eight hours of sleep. But you may not sleep well. Maybe that's where the "minimal sleep" reputation comes in, because it's pretty intense. It can be rather hard on the mind and body. You're sitting a lot. You're sitting with yourself a lot, and your body is doing a lot of work. Your back, for instance — you want to be comfortable when you're sitting, but it's still just a lot of intensive sitting. I found it exhausting. So I slept really well. That was me, though. That's not everybody.

There's reduced conversation or complete silence, as I was saying earlier. And then there are different elements, like dokusan, which is a one-on-one sitting with a teacher. At our most recent retreat, it was really nice — we were kind of outnumbered by teachers. There were maybe five teachers, four of them there. There were a lot of teachers, and there were dokusan opportunities with almost every one of them, which was really cool. In the Soto tradition, dokusan is often just an opportunity for the teacher to ask about your practice and let it go from there. In the Rinzai tradition, a lot of koan work gets done during sesshin. They're very — you tell me if I'm wrong, because I know you have a Rinzai background — the sesshin can be very koan-intensive, where you're working with different prompts and koans. That's a big part of dokusan as well: receiving those koans or working through them.

In the Soto tradition, the focus is very much shikantaza, which means "just sitting." You're not dealing with a particular object. It's just like sitting here — just more of it. You're not dealing with koans or goal-seeking. Dogen taught that zazen itself is enlightenment and not a means to it. So it has this quality of just, you know, you're just sitting. And I think when people hear this from outside the practice, they're like, how do you just sit and look at a wall for hours a day for a week on end? I think that's a really short-sighted perception of what it is. It can be quite eye-opening. Just the process of that much sitting with yourself and nothing else — it's hard to put into words.

These sesshin emphasize sustained, wholehearted presence without much agenda. There will be dharma talks given each day. At ours, there was usually a dharma talk once a day, which is a little more talkative than some sesshin. But they can often be a lot more rigorous. Rohatsu in particular is especially rigorous. They really frown upon speaking.

I'm running about out of time here. So I'll go over some quick roles and elements of sesshin and then we can get to this panel.

The Ino is like the chant leader and helps make sure things are running well. The Tenzo — very important — is the head cook. They'll cook these meals for six days on end. We had a really awesome Tenzo. Very good. It's quite a job. And doing some research on it, they say great Tenzos are often remembered for decades, and that their Zen practice is in the kitchen. Everything they're doing is their zazen as they're preparing meals.

There are also Fukutens. I happened to be a Fukuten at the most recent one because the Tenzo needed help, and I came up with my own moniker: "Where were you, Fukuten, five minutes ago?" I was always late getting there to help. Yeah, that was between me and the Tenzo.

The Doan is the bell ringer. The Han is the wooden board struck on the side of the building to signal everyone. They use the Han to call everyone into the zendo traditionally, which gets very well used. For me, I'm not always looking at my watch — I just listen for the Han and know to go to the zendo. The Shika is like the guest manager. The Tanto is the head of practice.

And then mealtimes — this could be a whole other panel. We do mealtimes with oryoki. It's a ritualistic, mindful practice of eating with nested bowls. There are lots of forms, chants, and a kind of family-style eating. It's like a ballet at the table. I love oryoki. I'm trying to bring it into my own home and my wife's receptive for the weekends. It's quite an amazing experience. I like how it helps me slow down. I'm very thoughtful. I taste things more. So oryoki is a whole experience in and of itself within the sesshin.

I had some examples of stories from Philip Kapleau and Shunryu Suzuki and their experiences integrating sesshin into their practice. I think I'm going to pass over those. If you want to read them, I'll have this here afterward. But one I'll bring up is Suzuki's, which I kind of like: "You're all perfect just as you are. And you could use a little improvement." It's a paradox that captures the Soto spirit. Sesshin wasn't about gaining something you lack, but fully realizing what you already are. I think that sums it up really nicely. You're not there to gain anything, or to attain something, or to say you did it. What it does is put you in touch with yourself in a way that is hard to do with all the noise we have in our daily life.

And so a big question I always leave with — and I've gotten closer to this now with practice — is: how do I take this very contained experience, with no cars, no phone, no sounds, no honking horns or beeping backup alerts, no people and their dogs, how do I take what I've gotten out of that into my daily practice? And I'm still finding that there is opportunity in our daily lives to practice this kind of intensive zazen. But it is harder, because there are so many externalities and variables that take us away from it. Like needing to go to work. Or helping my son get dressed or something.

So I'll leave it at that and I want to stop talking. Maybe I'll just lead a little more by example. I'll just say, let's talk about our experience at this most recent sesshin, or any sesshin experience any of you have had. I think I said what it was like for me. It's a very good experience and I try to do it whenever I possibly can. It's a time commitment, for sure. But I want to start with Aaron. So why are you guys looking at me?

Aaron: Yeah, well, the original intent was to get some more voices in here. Sure. Well, first I want to thank you, because I learned a lot from what you put together. That's not something I had researched, and this happened very last minute for me — all of this was thrown together in under two weeks. So I just showed up and smiled every time I asked for more information. And someone just said, dear one, just come. So I really was thrown in, as they kept saying, in the deep end. Although I had had quite a bit of experience with other long forms of meditation in two other lineages in particular — one more from an Indian yoga tradition and another more on the Tibetan edge of Buddhism. So I'm definitely still processing.

It was interesting to notice today — and I hadn't really thought about this, but it didn't surprise me — that I got a bad head cold two days after I got back. Also didn't surprise me. So I wasn't practicing regularly in the morning like I normally do. I was just tired and wiped out. When I kind of came out of that, which was only a few days ago, I recognized just that human aspect of it — like, whoa, getting back into the practice was not like wrestling a bear, but it certainly might have been a little easier had I just continued that after I got home.

But today when I was practicing, one of the things I noticed — and I definitely attribute this to doing the sesshin — is that the structures we set up, everything from the bell to the bowing, all of the rituals that we use, as you practice those more and at times go into a deep dive with them, they take you and lock you into a space pretty fast. And the quality of my practice today — it may not be this way every time — but the quality of my practice today, I would notice: wow, there's a presence here that kind of echoes what my presence was there. So that is certainly a benefit.

It's funny that you bring up the oryoki and how much you loved it. I very much struggled with that. Had I been there for a month, I think my system would have adjusted, but I had a very different experience. I don't eat that way. I felt rushed the whole time. The food was delicious, but there were some foods that didn't agree with me. And at first no one was telling me little tips — like, maybe I could skip something. It was just, you have to eat everything in your bowl. And I was like, oh, this is really messing me up. I was eating at different times than I normally eat. So it really physically threw me off, if I'm honest. However, by the end of the sesshin, I noticed how my body was starting to regulate into the rhythms of it. And like you know, as practice is teaching me, there are adaptations we're making so that people living now, in this day and age, can practice in a way where you're not creating more suffering for yourself. But all of that happened toward the end of the week.

I want to be mindful about what I say about this experience because I'm still processing it. The practice isn't just the sitting, and everyone knows that, but I don't think you really know that until you get there. As I was engaging with it, you're in and out of practice all the time — which is really just asking: how present am I while I'm there? Which is how we are throughout our day. Could I walk down the path more mindfully on my way to the zendo? What am I thinking about in the shower? Could I just be present with the water? Am I breathing? The practice can really be taken anywhere. And just like in life, I was coming in and out of that practice all the time. Oh, I'm also rushing to the zendo. And then I would catch myself. Why are you rushing? There's no need to rush. But how that's been trained into me from the culture we're in.

So there were just lots of moments to work with that. And because you're practicing — as Michael mentioned — in community, in a tight-knit community, it was also helpful to learn from some of the teachers. One of the teachers pointed out that this practice came out of a monastic tradition. Even with the oryoki, I was talking to one of them about it and they said, you know, monks had to get through a meal really fast. So it wasn't built just upon how can we create this really mindful experience — it's also very practical, about moving people through and getting their bowls clean. That helped me relate with it in a different way.

But in this tight-knit community, you have the opportunity to be very present with yourself and with everyone else, and all that they embody as well. For me, it was an opportunity to watch my mind. And what I appreciated in myself — I'll admit this — I think it takes years of practice to get to a place where you're not going into shame or beating yourself up. It was just, oh, I'm watching my mind. Rather than labeling things and needing time to dissect and analyze them, I was just letting them be. Letting the energetics of my own experience simply move through — that's how I would put it. So it was an opportunity, and there's really no difference when you get down to it, to let myself be and let others be, and see what just emerges out of that space.

There's so much more I could say, I suppose, but I do want to allow other people to talk. And this is just unfolding very gradually.

One last thing I would say is: within our culture — and I've noticed this in other experiences I've had with these intense containers we move ourselves into together — the integration is, if not more important, then especially in our culture, something that needs support. Because in other cultures that these practices were designed within, you just kind of walk back into your tribe or into a culture that either acknowledges and respects that, or everyone around you tries to maintain a similar continuity. We're just thrown back out into this world where most of us are on our own. So I was really sitting with that question: how do I maintain, or just really stay connected with, what I experienced? Because from my own experience, it is very easy to just have it go off into the ethers.

I think there are ways for us to support its blossoming more fully. And what was really wonderful is I had an opportunity to talk with two female teachers there who are really thinking a lot about that too — how the relational space outside of that container is vital, and is part of the practice that perhaps doesn't get talked about or recognized as much. This is something I am sitting with right now in regards to my experience. Thank you.

Michael Daly: I always noticed they kind of warn you as you leave: you're in an alternative state of mind by the end of sesshin. Your wavelength is slow. And I've noticed each time I've driven away from there how slowly I'm driving, how foreign it feels. How crazy everybody else seems for the way they're driving. It takes — I wish it took longer in a way — but it doesn't take long for me to adjust. But while I'm adjusting back, I'm very aware of how slow I'm going and how things are moving differently. It's sort of a physical reminder of what I've just been through in a very internal way. I just found that interesting.

I really appreciate your share. And I'm sure you've done more than one sesshin, right? And you've done some too. I feel like for me there are echoes in each one I've done, but they've all proven to be different experiences for a lot of the reasons you mentioned. But why don't you go ahead, David?

David: Sure. I'll add a few thoughts. To your point about coming back to the real world — or whatever this is. We came back, our sesshin ended on Super Bowl Sunday. And so we were trying to bypass Santa Clara on the way back because the traffic was going to be — well, I think you stayed over. Michael and I left on that Sunday.

Michael Daly: No, I left Sunday too.

David: You did? But I took the PCH all the way down.

Michael Daly: I did too.

David: So we got home in time for the Super Bowl, and all of that. Interesting adjustment. It was.

A couple of things that I think will echo what Michael and Aaron said. One thing — and I'll try to give you a little visual of what this mountain retreat looks like. It's up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, up from Saratoga toward the ocean. So it's probably ten or fifteen miles up into the mountain range. It's on twelve wooded acres, and then it's surrounded by about fifteen thousand acres of undeveloped land. So it's very beautiful, very pastoral. Three very large buildings. There's kind of a community building where the kitchen and community room are, with some infrastructure underneath for washers, dryers, storage, and all the things they have going on there. Then there's a large zendo building where the zendo is — maybe three and a half or four times the size of this room. Bamboo floors. It looks out on green everywhere, and there's kind of a skylight overlooking the altar. There's a cast iron stove in there and heated floors, so it's very cozy when it's cool. And there's something primitive about a fire in a large room when you're with other people — very comforting.

The wake-up bell comes around at 5:30, and you're expected to be in the zendo at six. Really the day is prescribed until eight in the evening, with either sitting, time off, work sessions, or meals. There's yet another building where the residents live. That's basically the layout — three large buildings. You either share a dorm room, take a private room, or, as Michael did, camp. There are opportunities for that as well.

So six o'clock comes around and you're in the zendo. Their practice — based on their lineage — is that they face the wall when they meditate. Here at SBZC we face each other, and it's a little different experience, I have to say. So you're seated there, the sun hasn't come up, the curtains are still drawn, and there's candlelight. You're sitting facing the wall, and you see your own shadow — the silhouette of your own head and shoulders. Part of what took over a little bit of my meditation, because you're not closing your eyes, is: who is that? Who is that shadow you're looking at? Because that's your head, that's your outline. And even though we're not really focused on one thing, it does raise the question about what am I seeing here? Who is that? There's something at the heart of practice about it being just a dark, shadowed outline — that's all there is that you see. You're faced with yourself in some ways, the outline of yourself, as you're breathing.

And there are long sessions. You're sitting there in candlelight facing the wall, and you hear wild turkeys all over the property gobbling away, or scrub jays waking up and making a lot of noise, or you can hear a little bit of the highway above the property — people getting ready to go to work. Otherwise it's pretty quiet. Or you hear the fire, and people rustling.

For me, the first day or two — the first day in particular — the storm that's going on in my head about my life was just there. My legs hurt, my back hurts. What am I doing here? Who's that shadow in front of me? Did the person house-sitting remember not to let the cat out? She's an indoor cat. Oh, I didn't get my taxes organized. Just — worry, going on and on. Oh, they told me I should prop open the hood of my car because mice will get into your car up there and start eating the insulation. Just worry, just going on and on.

And I think what happens with me in sesshin, where you have a long day of sitting and several long days, is that storm blows itself out. You can't sustain it. Pretty soon you just get bored with your own stuff, basically. You keep coming back to all this stuff you're worried about and thinking too much about, and you just get exhausted from it and it just leaves. And then you can sort of get quieter, and really start engaging with: who is that shadow? What's going on here?

So that for me is one of the qualities of sesshin — all the busyness gets a chance to blow out, and you get tired, and then you're there with yourself. And you're there with other people too. We had fourteen people, I think, including priests. You really have a feeling of sangha. We meet every other week here and it's great, but you're basically 24/7 with the same group of people for a week, and you really sense that people are sharing the practice with you. You start to coordinate your behaviors, divide the labor, work together to make it all work. People are asked to take on roles like playing the Han or being Doan. There's some training provided. There's helping in the kitchen after meals. There's this kind of collaborative effort.

And then being okay with the pain in your legs — because that's all it is. It's just pain. It's not dictating your life. You just see it and adjust if you need to, but you just see it and don't obsess about it, don't push it away, don't cling to it. It's just there.

On the oryoki meals: we did have this ritualized style of eating where you get three bowls, about the size of the blue bowl on the altar, nested together. They're wrapped up in a particular way. You unwrap them ritualistically, take out your chopsticks and your little spoon and your little spatula, and they're supposed to be placed in a certain way. There's a person across from you, and there's a leader of the meal. The clapper goes off and the lids to the serving bowls come down. You put them to one end, then there's another clap and down come the bowls of food. You don't serve yourself — the person across from you takes your bowl, and non-verbally you indicate that you'd like some food, or wouldn't like any of that food. As they're serving you, you raise your hand to indicate you've had enough. And it's remarkable how quickly it goes, because you do feel a little bit rushed. But once you're on to it, you sort of know how to pace yourself.

What I found about it is that I ate so much less than I usually do, and I love food. But I had a small portion to begin with, and you don't take a ton because you want to eat everything you've been given. I found that I tasted it, I felt full. When the bowl came back around, I usually didn't take seconds, just because I tasted it, it tasted great, I was full — I just didn't need more. So I ate a lot less, and I think it made me mindful of what I was eating. I'd like to maintain that at home. Just take smaller portions. Really taste it before you pile more on. And oryoki makes you do that.

And then there's a lot to pay attention to — a lot of ritualistic things. As Michael used the word "ballet," I think it's very balletic, because you're working in harmony with other people at the table. But what it forces you to do is be in the moment and pay attention, because you're collaborating with other people to make the meal work. If you're wandering off in your thoughts and not handing the bowls in sequence, or wrapping your utensils properly, or pouring the hot water to clean them — it's detailed — it kind of messes everything up. So you're really paying attention, you're in the moment, you're watching what's going on around you, paying attention to the food and the taste and making this whole enterprise work. I like oryoki in that sense. It's attention, attention, attention. Mindfulness to what's going on in this moment, because you need to be.

I think my takeaway from almost all of the sesshin is that it forces you to be in the moment. You can't just woolgather. You've got to really pay attention to what's going on to make it work.

Last thing I'll say — and I've probably said too much — but after you've sat for a day or two, and Michael and I have talked about this before, and the storm inside your head starts to disappear a bit, there are occasional breakthroughs in your meditation. You'll be sitting facing the wall, deep in meditation, and you'll have a flashing insight about your life, or something about who you are relative to the sangha or other things going on in your life. They describe them in Zen teachings as kensho moments — these kind of breakthroughs where all of a sudden you just see yourself in a different way than you've ever seen yourself before. You sense the truth of your interconnection with everyone else. It's not this separate me, separate from you — we are absolutely connected at a very fundamental and profound way. They don't last, at least when I've had those flashes. But I think those things occur a little bit more often in sesshin just because you're working very hard and you're concentrated for long periods of time. So that's what I had to add.

Aaron: If you don't mind, I'd also just like to add a note about the people who live at and came in to support Jokoji. I arrived a few days earlier, and they were all so kind and so open and wonderful and accepting of my presence. I think all of us probably felt that too. It was a very unassuming group, even though they were embodying certain positions while they were there. That really added, for me, an element that I needed — which is to feel more relaxed within these rituals that I was learning. Because at times, of course, the mind — and I appreciated this in myself, it took years of practice to get here — I wasn't going into shame or beating myself up. I was just like, oh my gosh, I just spilled water all over the table, now we're going to have to slow this oryoki down. And later, the teachers came out and said, everybody's done it. It happens at every single sesshin. And I'm like — and this isn't a pat on the back, it was just a noticing — I didn't go into shame around that. I just kind of giggled and was like, I don't know what I'm doing, I'm going so fast.

But I wanted to reiterate my gratitude for everyone there. And to kind of ride on what David said around this: the opportunities simply to come into an awareness that you are afforded when you're in that kind of environment are really — I don't want to say precious, because I really do feel they're vital for everyone to have those opportunities. I was even thinking on the drive home about how can this be woven into the fabric of society again, so it's not just the few who get to go off and do this.

But yeah, I just want to add one more thing about how all of the people there who were holding space for this to happen were — including us — but I mean those who set it up. They were a really wonderful group of people.

Question: Can I give a... yeah, of course. So I've done a number of Rinzai Zen sesshin over the last — I hate to say this — fifty years. But it's slightly different, and basically the same. You're sitting long hours. With my Rinzai experience, you have interactions with the Roshi or Zen master probably three times a day, sometimes four. Depending on Rohatsu, you get another one after midnight. So there is an interaction and an impetus to your sitting, once you've quieted down enough to start actually manifesting whatever it is that the koan is that you're studying with them.

In the zendo, there are a number of different positions. One is called the jikijitsu, which is the practice leader. And then the other is the shoji. The jikijitsu is like a father figure. The shoji is like a mother figure — nurturing. If you're having some problems or you need something, you go to the shoji. And the jikijitsu is more about keeping people in line, that sort of thing. And we sit facing in, so it's not facing the wall — facing each other. And the kinhin: we walk in step with each other, which creates the cohesiveness of the group. And we walk at a normal pace. It's not the one breath, one step thing — you just walk. And that's actually really nice, because when you get in step and you're bringing your meditation into action, it's lovely and you feel continued support in that moment.

The hours are a little bit longer. We have to wake up at 3:45, in the zendo at 4, and sometimes it goes until 9:30 or 10 at night. So you're struggling not only with all the physical ills but also the exhaustion and just keeping yourself awake and present. And it's interesting — when you get that exhausted, just the energy to stay awake and stay upright somehow adds a dimension to the experience.

I've mainly done sesshin either in downtown LA, in the West Adams area, or at Mount Baldy, which is in the San Bernardino Mountains, and they're very different. The natural sounds in the mountains are wonderful, except there's a road that goes up and down, and early mornings you can hear people going down to work — sometimes motorcycles, or people coming up to do snow play. But in LA you've got just traffic, ice cream trucks, helicopters, people having a party down the street. The center in LA has a wall around it, though. And so when we do kinhin and everything, you do feel sheltered — like it's a little oasis of, I won't say tranquility, but contained energy in that area. So that's nice.

And the meals — yeah. You've got to get all these people fed and things cleaned up. Especially if you're sitting in the zendo, you don't want those to go on too long. So it's a pretty efficient way of feeding that many people and getting it all cleaned up and moving on to the next thing.

I highly recommend doing sesshin if you can. It is a commitment. I usually have this dual — or competing — thing of dread, because I know it's going to be hard. But then the excitement too, of actually having this time set aside. In a way it's like a vacation from the rest of your life — from all the other things that are pulling your attention. So it's nice to be able to work on yourself. And I really appreciate the oryoki meals and the chance to reflect on why we're taking this food and appreciating where it came from and using it for the betterment of all sentient beings. So that resonates really deeply.

Michael Daly: I have a bunch of logistical questions. So we have about five minutes left. You said wake-up is at 5:30 and you're on the mat at six. How long were the individual sitting periods, and how many sessions did you do? I sound a little more tame compared to what you're describing now, but — go ahead.

David: I think it was a 40-minute sit, 10-minute kinhin, 40-minute sit. That started at 6 in the morning. Following that, there was the service. And then another 40-minute sit, 10-minute kinhin, 40-minute sit, and then I think there's a break. That was typical for us. And then it kind of repeats itself. There's also the work period — samu — so you get to go clean an area or work in the garden, or there's something physical to get you out of just sitting all the time. But you're supposed to do it in silence and with the same quality of attention. So all together, maybe eight 40-minute sits or something like that over the course of the day.

Michael Daly: One of the afternoon sessions — at this particular sesshin, the theme had to do with commemorating Buddha's parinirvana, his final passing. And his last teachings had to do with the qualities of wise people. There was a priest who led us in a conversation around that each afternoon. So there was usually about an hour of conversation that the priest led. We'd be in a circle like this, and the priest had prepared some things. So that was different than just the sitting. There was that piece.

Who was there, if I can ask? So Tom Tolan, Kinko from Milwaukee. There was Ocean Jennings from Washington. Nenzen. And Golan Tetsuho — Chris — he was visiting. He's from Austria. And Michael Augustin, Augie. And Koshu was there. Oh, you named three of my shakuhachi students just now.

Michael Daly: I do want to mention, before we end, that for some of you who don't know — back, I've only been here ten years, but we used to do sesshin here in Santa Barbara. Up at Bacadero del Norte by Winchester Canyon, we used to rent that for the whole weekend and do sesshin in their clubhouse. And then we rented the Centennial House at UCSB for Rohatsu. We would do three days — never a full week. The last day was always all night. It was always Sensei and Ken and me and a few others, and then other people would join one or two of those. And one of those at UCSB on a Saturday afternoon — right outside — was a cheerleading camp. So that was difficult.

But anyhow, we have a history in this group of three-day sesshin, several times a year. The most recent oryoki was at the Natural History Museum. Yeah, at Mayhouse. But with Ko-ang passing away, we've lost a lot of that connection. And Joel had gotten us into the Centennial House at UCSB because he was a professor there. So those connections are gone. But we can start over and do whatever we want.

Aaron: I want to say one quick thing, because I actually was at Jokoji before Nenzen discovered it. My daughter lives up there — almost in the same canyon, but it takes about twenty-five minutes to get there on Highway 9. My first memory of Jokoji was watching Michael Newhall in the kitchen. I was a stranger. So that was an interesting first impression.

And just real quick — my oryoki partner across from me was Ben Connelly from Minneapolis. He had just written another book. We both had this horrible sneezing fit in the middle of oryoki. I have never had anything like that. My eyes and nose were just running. There was some Kleenex behind me that I tried to pass along because we were all doing that at the same time. That particular oryoki was a little hard for me too. I think what happened was it was the very beginning of COVID — it was the first weekend of the shutdown — and I think we both had symptoms.

Michael Daly: If I could mention one thing: a newcomer might ask, why are we driving five hours up to Jokoji? What's the connection there? Mount Baldy is closer. Even Tassajara is closer. We have a whole lot of places to go. I think the answer is: the connection with Nenzen, and then with Michael. So you could go to LA a lot more quickly than going up to Jokoji. But it's a different thing. It's just one option of many, is what I would say.

Question: I wanted to hear if anyone had a question. Are any of you familiar with these forms? I've been to a center in Harlem for a couple of weeks over the past year, but it wasn't really sesshin. I was a student there and was helping out and just sat three times a day. So I'm familiar with the terminology, and I've been learning piece by piece for a long period of time. But in one sense or another, I think I've been doing sesshin in various forms — walking through the woods for long periods of time, you can access something similar in those moments. And that idea of walking in the woods came up in one of our conversations today, about how you get to that place where you feel that sense of connection and peace. A lot of people mentioned being out in nature first.

Michael Daly: Yeah. And the wild turkeys. You don't get that in LA. These turkeys are showy. They do the whole full-display thing. It's pretty cool.

Question: I haven't participated in sesshin from the Zen lineage, but I have done a three-day program more from a Theravada lineage, I would say — so a lot around metta and ritualistic aspects of that. The reason I attended that, some time ago, is because my father is very focused on that lineage and would take me to retreats in the area where we grew up. So I have done a little bit, but nothing like sesshin. I know the terms, but have I seen them in action? No, I haven't. I look forward to it.

Michael Daly: A quick story. At Mount Baldy, my friend Ron Berger was sitting across from this old man for a whole week. At the end, he said, "Boy, that guy across from me — he was just miserable, he just had this scowl on his face the whole time." And people said, "You're so lucky. You were sitting across from Leonard Cohen the whole week." So when you're facing in, like you were across from Ben Connelly the whole week, you get these stories in your head about who this person is and what they're doing. And it has nothing to do with you.

Aaron: I also think, just to kind of cap this off: when you're called to do this, and where you're called to do it, you find your own way with that. There's some inner impulse that starts to grow in you and you just head off and do it and trust that feeling. You probably had that when you went to that center in Harlem. There's some aspect of what I would call the great mystery at play, where there's just an inner knowing drawing you toward it. I expected this practice because I had thought about it for a long time. And it just came together fast. All of a sudden I was in the right place at the right time, and I made the space. Nothing has to be forced. It shouldn't be something you do unless something really inside you is called to do it.

Question: And I'm not going to do another one because my back can't take it. The first 40 minutes I'm fine. The second 40 minutes, I last 35, and then my back starts hurting. The next one I last 30, then 25. By the eighth one...

Michael Daly: They do provide chairs at...

Question: No, they've given me all the options. Chairs are worse. So I just can't physically do it anymore. I just want to say, I never could figure out why the Japanese version is all sitting. Because I've done so many week-long yoga retreats, and you meditate in the morning, afternoon, and evening — but then you chant and you do breathing exercises and you do yoga. You move. And I think it has to be that in the temples, the monks are always cleaning the floors. They're doing physical activity. That's their yoga. I can't figure out why anybody would want to sit for twelve hours. But I've done it. Not again.

Michael Daly: Well, this was good. Thanks everyone for sharing, and all the sesshin talk. We'll go ahead and wrap it up, do the four vows, and then there's tea today, right? So we can continue the conversation. Announcements?

Eliza: Oh, yeah. Sorry. Well, let's stop the recording, and then we can do some announcements. Next Saturday, we're going to do some forest bathing. Please email me to let me know if you want to join.

Carolyn Hoshin Jikai Dille has been a dedicated student of Buddhist practices for over 35 years in the Soto Zen, Early Buddhist, Insight, and Tibetan traditions. She has studied intensively with several teachers in the United States and Asia and has taught in dharma communities since 1996. She carries dharma transmission from Angie Enji Boissevain and is a graduate of Spirit Rock’s CDL program. She is a poet, writer, and editor and has presented and facilitated Dharma and Art retreats and seminars for over 23 years for Insight Meditation Center and Insight Santa Cruz in California and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Massachusetts. She currently serves as a Guiding Teacher for the Floating Zendo online in San Jose.

Sunday, December 14, 2025

I forgot that part, sorry to interrupt you. Okay.

Anyway, here I am at Chapin Mill, and not in this particular house, but in the main building. That's where we hold sesshin, eight or more each year, and most seven days in length.

Anyway, it's over the course of the winter months that snow tends to accumulate on the rooftops here. And there can be as much as eight or more inches of hard packed snow. But when the sun comes out, the temperature rises and naturally the snow starts to melt. And the first thing you notice is the dripping water. And that dripping can go on for many days. But if you were to look at the rooftop, it doesn't look like anything has changed. It's still completely covered with snow. But then, all of a sudden, in one fell swoop, it all comes crashing down. Whish! Fump! And the roof is totally bare.

But in order for that to happen, the snow had to have been melting, little by little, continuously. That's not the only way that it comes falling off the roof. Sometimes it happens a lot more discreetly, not in some kind of dramatic event like that. Sometimes it just steadily melts, melts, little by little, evaporates. And then it's gone. Only to be covered by more snow at the next passing weather event. But one way or another, the roof ends up being completely exposed and invariably gets covered up again. It's an ongoing process of arising and disappearing.

And it's a metaphor for the way Zen practice works. Whatever your practice is, whether it's a breath practice, or a koan, or shikantaza, you need to work at it continuously through all conditions. And it's always changing. Sometimes you are lost in thought. Sometimes everything is clear. There isn't an end point. It doesn't work on a preferred timetable. Certainly not on yours or mine. No amount of planning or seeking results makes a difference.

Actually, clinging to any such thought, feeling, future expectation, or a past experience, no matter the content of it, it only fuels separation and creates tension in the body and mind. And it can be quite painful because when we do this to some degree or another, we're cutting ourselves off from life. We're opposing things as they are. We're not in the world. We're in thoughts.

As simple as practice itself might be, the simple returning your attention to it, it's not necessarily easy. Recently, a sangha member told me that she's been struggling with her reactions to the daily news cycle. And if you happen to read the news this morning, or really any morning, there's a lot to feel distressed about, isn't there? Mass shootings, acts of violence motivated by hatred, war, the effects of climate change and on and on. And on top of that, there's just the everyday difficulties that we face in life. Maybe you recently lost a loved one. Maybe you got laid off from your job. Maybe a relationship ended.

Anyway, this sangha member said she was feeling conflicted over doing zazen. She said it made her feel like she was turning away from suffering, rather than doing something about it. And she was also questioning the basic teaching that says practice is about becoming more one with life as it is, not how we want it to be, not rejecting or opposing anything, and also not grasping for it to be different. This didn't make any sense to her.

And this is a misunderstanding that a lot of people make. Looking outward at what's going on in the world, judging it as bad or good, depending on where you stand, and holding on to thoughts about it. In her case, she was drowning in anger and anxiety, hopelessness and dread. And a lot of us do this habitually. It's what brings us to practice. And without the persistent, continuous turning the mind to the present moment, to what's right here, to what you're experiencing directly, you don't stand much of a chance to free yourself from intrusive and toxic thoughts.

That said, the weather conditions are always changing. There's a saying here in Western New York that goes like this: if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes, it will change. This applies not just to the fluctuating weather patterns that we do experience here in the Great Lakes region, but also to the conditions of our mind. Everything passes. No thought, feeling or sensation is static, nor are we. We ourselves are flux. It's not something that's happening outside of us or around us or to us, it is us.

Sooner or later, one of us will die. The only uncertainty is the timing. So what we're doing in this practice is cultivating intimacy with our living and with our dying, with change. And it includes intimacy with suffering. Your suffering and my suffering. They're not two. So we're not turning away. We're turning towards. And when we do see things clearly as they are, this is what enables us to be in the world, to act in the world skillfully, and with compassion, without a trace of self-interest or self-partiality. It's really radical work that we're doing.

Now, some might say, well, none of this really matters. All beings are Buddha from the very beginning. Why does a Buddha need to work at becoming a Buddha? Why bother putting in the effort? And by effort, I am referring to zazen, this gentle directing and redirecting your attention to your practice, while sitting, while walking, in activity, over and over.

Well, we need only turn to the example of Shakyamuni Buddha, whose enlightenment was celebrated this past week on December 8th by Buddhists all around the world. The story of his enlightenment can come across as otherworldly, as a feat of mythical proportions. But actually, it cannot be reduced to myth or legend, nor can his experience be dismissed. His story is actually a very human story. It's our story. It's our aspiration to wake up, to uproot delusion, not just for ourselves, but for all sentient beings.

And each time that we sit down and do zazen, we are fulfilling that promise. Maybe I'm preaching to the choir here. Each moment we turn our attention back to our practice, we're fulfilling that promise. Zen Master Dogen said that practice, zazen, isn't a means to an end. Zazen itself is embodied enlightened awareness.

So if the story of the Buddha's awakening isn't enough, of course, there's countless other ancestors and practitioners and teachers we can turn to for inspiration, those who have walked this path and serve as a guiding light. And there's one such person that has a Santa Barbara connection. Her name is Flora Courtois. A few decades ago, she led the Santa Barbara sitting group, which was tied to the Zen Center of Los Angeles, the center that she helped found as a student of Maezumi Roshi.

And her story is recorded in a little book. The introduction is authored by Yasutani Roshi, who some of you may know has ties to the Rochester Zen Center. He was the teacher of Roshi Philip Kapleau, who founded our center in 1966. Anyway, in the introduction to this little book, Yasutani Roshi describes how he first met Flora in the late 1960s. And that was some 25 years after she had what he confirmed to be an enlightenment experience, which simply means that she experienced for herself what the Buddha had experienced. This one mind encompasses all.

This word, enlightenment, I don't like to use it. It's actually quite problematic, because it carries a lot of baggage for people, mental baggage. That's because there's a tendency to objectify it, to make it into a thing, a very special place that is far removed from the ground we sit and walk on. And along this line of thought, there's also this notion that, well, it's all beings without number, except for me. Self-doubt, self-judgment. Actually, the Buddha himself encountered self-doubt.

Anyway, in Yasutani Roshi's remarks about Flora's experience, he points out that each and every one of us is capable of having the experience that Flora did and the Buddha did. The thing that holds people back is inadequate faith and effort, inadequate faith and inadequate effort.

It brings to mind the three essentials of Zen: great faith, great doubt, and great determination, also sometimes called great effort. So faith, it's just faith in our true nature, the true nature that we equally share. It includes our true nature and everyone else's. The faith in the real possibility of waking up to it. And then doubt, not in the sense of self-doubt, but great doubt, the profound sense of delving into the great matter. The dis-ease of not knowing what this life is about. Who am I? What am I doing here? Ordinarily, we distract ourselves from these existential questions. But Zen practice invites us to dive right in, to get curious, and to wonder, what is this?

That leads us to determination, the effort to resolve, the commitment to resolve that profound doubt, which of course involves the effort of zazen. And also faith in the process of looking inward. Faith in the process itself, not in some imagined outcome. The poet Khalil Gibran said, "Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother."

As for Flora, although we don't have time to cover her story in full, and I'd love to have some time left over for discussion, I do want to share a couple of excerpts from the book. She starts off by describing her experience as a child, which demonstrates the kind of intimacy and wonder that we can cultivate through Zen. She begins:

"When and where does this story begin? It's difficult to say. Even now, I remember the feeling as a small child that all things about me, the people, the animals, trees and flowers, my dolls, my plate and spoon, all participated with me in one vivid reality. It was a family joke that I had to be spoken to several times to get my attention. So absorbed did I often become in listening and watching and playing. Often I felt in magic communion with other living things. Some of my earliest memories are of rescuing drowning insects from a small pond, of escorting small spiders from the house so they would not be killed, of lying on my stomach in a neighboring field, rapidly absorbed in the busy life of the tiny creatures under the giant blades of grass."

That's what we adults are trying to get back to. For most of us, once we arrive at adolescence, things change. Flora herself describes how she became overly self-conscious, struggled with self-esteem, and was fixated on comparing herself to her peers. But then, at the age of 16, she had a pivotal experience. She says she was having minor surgery that involved ether, which was at the time commonly used for general anesthesia. And at some point, she had what she described as a vision. She envisioned an authoritative voice telling her that all things will be resolved.

If you haven't read her book, by the way, I highly recommend it. But anyway, this voice was so convincing to her that it sparked her faith that there is something, something that is beyond ordinary consciousness. It just needs to be uncovered. And in the months and years that followed, she was consumed by doubt. Great doubt. She described it as a growing sense of doubt about reality itself.

But for those of us who live a relatively comfortable life, which Flora herself seemed to, as well, you might not feel that sense of great doubt or gravity in investigating the great matter. In fact, practice might feel more often than not, rather boring, actually, kind of blah. And yet here you are. You can trust that you would not be here at the sitting this morning if you didn't have faith and doubt.

The rest of Flora's story includes her intellectual pursuits, going down the rabbit hole of looking for answers outside herself in philosophy books, university professors, religious leaders, and other kinds of experts. Her story also involved a dark night. She grew depressed and withdrew socially. She stopped taking care of herself and ended up in the college infirmary.

But then one day when she was home from school during a break, this is what she says happened: "Alone in my room sitting quietly on the edge of my bed, gazing at a small desk, not thinking of anything at all. In a moment too short to measure, the universe turned on its axis and my search was over."

Just like that. Turned on its axis, not because she was trying to get somewhere or change something or make something happen. But in that moment she wasn't lost in thought nor was she going to battle with her thoughts. She was just sitting there, just sitting, just looking.

In the Dao De Jing, Lao Tzu said, "What is of all things most yielding can overwhelm that which is of all things most hard." At the time Flora didn't have a terminology to understand what she had experienced. She came to describe it as having open vision. But inevitably this wonderful experience she had faded and she found herself tangled up in thoughts all over again. She hadn't yet been exposed to Zen practice. So she didn't have a way of integrating her experience, her awareness into her daily life, which requires zazen, daily practice. Fortunately eventually she did find the path and practice became the foundation of her life.

In the closing words of her enlightenment story, this is what she says: "To be re-enlightened at every moment, forever requires eternal vigilance. How could it be otherwise? To continue to practice such awareness at every moment is implicit to the very nature of enlightenment. Thus practice is reality, reality is practice. This was the indispensable pillar that had been missing from my life. Now like a slowly rising tide, quietly, less dramatically, the timeless vision returns. The infinite possibilities for joyful awareness open at every moment. To this I now vow to give all my attention."

May each of us make this the same vow. This moment by moment, just giving our attention to this. To seeing what's here. To seeing what's needed. And just giving ourselves to it. Well I've said enough. So why don't I stop here and open it up to you all.

**Question:** Thank you Dhara, that was wonderful. All right, thank you for the talk. It felt personally I found it really timely and definitely resonated with me. So thank you for that. Maybe this is a simple question, but simple questions are good. You in your talk talked about how my suffering is your suffering. How an individual suffering is everyone's suffering. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what that means to you. And how do you see that?

**Dhara Kowal:** Yeah. You know, everyone's fighting a hard battle. Have you heard that saying before? Yeah. It's so easy for us when we're caught up in ourselves, in our own suffering, to forget or not notice the suffering of others. However, we come from different life circumstances. We experience different conditions. But at the root of it all, the one form of suffering that we distinctly share is the delusion of duality. And that's what this practice is about, uprooting it.

**Question:** I'm sorry. I'm over here. That may have answered my question, my kind of question, which came up in your talk a lot. It was around duality that we're so conditioned. So with your example at the very beginning of the snow falling off the roof, also juxtaposed with the ebb and flow of practice. I've found my own experience to have those open vision moments of seeing the world in a universal oneness way. It's fleeting because I get so caught up and I need to shovel this snow so I can get out of my house, you know, kind of thing. And I need to go to work so I can have the money to support the family to eat the food. Those day to day reality, reality. And it constantly confronts, you know, the more real reality, the oneness. And it does, I think you just answered the question that comes down to that delusion of duality.

**Dhara Kowal:** Yeah, not until we quiet the mind. Not until we allow thoughts to settle. Can we really experience what lies underneath thoughts? What lies underneath duality. And that's why practice does need to be regular, needs to be continuous. And it requires determination, discipline, effort.

**Question:** This is Allison. I might be a disembodied voice. I really appreciated how you connected faith and doubt and determination. It really feels like a gift for you to say that, to like not over index on one because sometimes you can get stuck in a silo. And that moment, so thank you for taking time to speak on those things. You mentioned right before you spoke on that you mentioned that Buddha had specifically self, some self doubt. I'm wondering if you might just expand on that.

**Dhara Kowal:** Yeah, it's in the Buddha's enlightenment story. You know, he's confronted with all these different things coming at him. And at one point, there's a voice telling him that he's not worthy. And self-doubt is, for my own experience and from working with students, it seems to be a major hindrance for a lot of people. Beating ourselves up. Comparing ourselves to others. And yeah, that's duality. It's also duality to feel an elevated sense of self, as in to be really prideful and pat yourself on the back. Some people have trouble with that. That's duality too.

So yeah, how fortunate are we to have a practice and a sangha to practice with and to have that mutual support in this vital work. And it's needed more than ever. And about this interconnection between faith and doubt, getting caught up in the self doubt, not the big doubt, but the self doubt, that's also part of the process. You know, just like it's just like getting caught up in any kind of thought. We have to work with it. It's the terrain of practice. And we gotta trust that.

**Question:** Thank you for your presentation this morning. So I was listening to you talk about Flora and her practice, her time in zazen was really important for her and that sitting group was kind of fundamental to her practice. And I missed Erin's question. So apologies if this is a duplicate, but how do you think about and keep practice in mind when you're not on the cushion when you're not here in sangha sitting quietly with other people. It's so conducive to equanimity and the opportunity to follow our breath, follow our thoughts. But when we get wrapped up in life off the cushion, how do you think about and keep your mind and your breath in the place where you think it needs to be?

**Dhara Kowal:** You know what's most important off the mat or off the chair, however you're sitting. What's most important is being one with whatever you're doing. So when you're driving a car, you're just driving. When you're washing your hands, just that. And it's in the simple activities where it's easier, right, and it's a real missed opportunity if we don't try to have that awareness when we're doing simple things. The routine things we do every day like brushing our teeth, making the bed, preparing food and so forth.

And it comes down to a micro second, right, that moment you turn the knob on the door. The moment you take a sip of tea. Every micro second, just show up for it. Now, when you're doing more intellectual stuff, maybe working on the computer, writing, reading, we can feel heady. That's just how it is. You don't have to make it different than what it is. Just be one with that.

You know, if you have a practice like concentrating on the breath or a koan, what I often recommend to people with concentration practices is to sort of put it down while you're in activity. Attention actually can feel split. Imagine cutting a carrot and pondering a koan at the same time or just focusing on your breath while you're doing it, right, you might cut your hand. So it's better just to be one with what you're doing in those moments. And somehow it all flows together. It's fine. Everything changes. Thank you.

**Question:** So I have something that's on the coattails of what Allison brought up that I was thinking about a lot too. Faith and doubt, when you said these siblings, so to speak, were two sides of the same coin, I think, how you look at it. And it's interesting because as I was feeling into that when you spoke to it because there was energy around it for me, I noticed that when I'm holding doubt, which is far more frequent than when I'm holding faith, that there's a weight to it. It seems so much more real to myself and it has this capacity to take me over in a way. It feels almost like it's in the room. And yet, when I touch into faith, it has this buoyancy to it and a lightness in terms of not only its weight, but also like literally like a light in the room. And yet, it simultaneously feels so elusive so that if the mind comes in at all for any moment, it's kind of, you know, doubt weighs a lot more, even being in it a long time. But it's fascinating. So I too appreciate you bringing that connection up because I haven't practiced or used it as a practice that when I'm in doubt, that faith is right there. It just kind of leaves the room. And when I'm in faith, it feels so much more fleeting than when I'm in doubt. So thank you for bringing that up because that's something different for me to work with and I just wanted to point that out and feel free to, you know, expand upon that if you wish to, but yeah, I really had not made that connection before.

**Dhara Kowal:** You could think of them as dance partners. Yeah. They're always together. Yeah. Thank you. Oh, thank you.

**Question:** Thank you very much for sharing that, how I engage in that. I see it as a calibration, a calibration practice. When I sit, it's an opportunity to settle. And in that settling, there is an opening to the moment, to this moment. And whatever unfolds within this moment becomes the ground to be. And this ground to be includes me and all of this, which is also me. Right now, my conversation, my communication with you. And then the other is on suffering. I've begun to make a distinction. Actually, this very moment listening to you, the distinction came between suffering and self-harm. That my understanding of suffering is when I'm engaged in the discipline, whether it's martial arts, dance, piano, zazen, it doesn't matter. That there is this period of awkwardness, disconnect, conflict, friction, that the continuation of that practice helps to resolve. And so that's what my understanding of suffering, embracing suffering. So when I'm sitting, back pain or whatever it is, mental distraction. It's re-engagement, so there's a friction, there's a conflict, that through the continuation of the practice, it begins to resolve. So anyway, that's what you're talking about.

**Dhara Kowal:** Yeah, it takes care of itself. You know, we just have one job, and that is to tend to our attention. That's all. The rest is not our business. It takes care of itself. Things sort themselves out.

**Question:** Sorry, I won't double-dipping on a comment. That's very reminiscent of I was in a phase where I was reading a lot of Thich Nhat Hanh, and I started to notice that no matter what the title of the book, that seemed to be his message, whether it was at work or in a relationship, whatever it was. I started to notice, like, well, you're just saying the same thing in every book, in a kind of a different way. So you're reminding me of that.

**Dhara Kowal:** That's one of the challenges of being a Zen teacher. You have to come up with as many ways as possible of saying the same thing. But it lands differently, doesn't it? Because you're not the same person you were yesterday or a second ago. Everything's constantly in flux. So it's kind of mysterious, the way it works. We can go through a period where we just don't get it. And then all of a sudden, we get it.

Anybody online, I know Anton, I think you're still there. Feel free to chime in.

**Question:** Yeah, I just want to maybe add a little bit on what Erin and Allison were trying to point at. Kind of like doubt and trust or belief or faith. What I'm thinking is that it's usually you start to recognize motions, internal motions of what mind is doing. It's kind of like more of the mind's job to kind of like compare, discern, introduce, you know, logic into things and recognize. And there's also this other motion, which is, I think your soul's or heart's motion, which is like to offer, to share. And I think they're always in this dance state. So the mind is kind of like, okay, this is not as good. What soul is like, okay, I'm here. Here I am. It's always this very beautiful dance, I think. And thank you for bringing this into this space, effort and doubt, which I think is also very connected to curiosity.

**Dhara Kowal:** Yeah, it's not we're not trying to figure things out. We're not trying to fix ourselves or others or the world. You know, this sense of doubt is wonder. That's exactly what it is. Curiosity, wonder. Not to get an answer. For its own sake, just to immerse ourselves in the mystery. In the question, what is this? Who am I? Just stay right there in that not knowing. Just like a child who literally doesn't know and sees everything for the first time. Well, go ahead. One more, Bill.

**Question:** Yeah, one last one with Bill here. We just read something on Bernie Glassman, who's connected. Is he connected with Rochester?

**Dhara Kowal:** No, he's not.

**Question:** I'm talking about suffering. The thing that's always intrigued me is his visit to Auschwitz, one of the camps. They sat there. They did their meditation there. If anything is going to cause doubt, it's sitting on the place where thousands of people needlessly were executed. And he doesn't just sit with feeling doubt. That's an explosive point. You seek it out. And when you think about all of our students, it's very intellectual, but to actually be sitting on the tracks, that's a different thing altogether. That's emphasizing suffering. I don't, do you have to agree?

**Dhara Kowal:** Yeah. I have visited Auschwitz and Birkenau a number of times. And I've sat there. Yeah, there's certainly when it's tangible, you know, in our face. Right in front of us. Right, it takes on a whole other level. But you don't have to seek out places like that. It's, I think it's valuable to expose yourself to it. But it all goes back to this, just doing this simple practice. Because whether you want it to or not, or whether you're trying or not, any amount of sitting you do is going to make you open. Wide open to suffering.

It might not be something as big as the Holocaust, but, you know, in the grocery store. You know, you're standing next to somebody waiting in line to check out. And just talking to somebody, a random stranger who's clearly having a bad day. And being there for them. There's so many opportunities for us to notice. What's happening? What's going on around us? And to be of service in the life that we're living.

You know, and as getting back to the Holocaust, while it's really important to learn from history, spending time thinking about it, wallowing in it, isn't really helpful right now. This moment. So you always want to bring it back to this.

Thank you. Thank you, Dhara. I'm going to do some homework here.

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Santa Barbara Zen Center. Great to see you all. It is my pleasure to introduce our speaker this morning via Zoom. You will be hearing from Charlie Korin Pokorny. Charlie was ordained as a priest by Reb Anderson in 1999 and received dharma transmission in 2018. He practiced as a resident at Tassajara and Green Gulch Farm and studied koans with Daniel Taranio. Charlie and his partner Sarah served as head priests at Stone Creek Zen Center from 2014 to 2022, and they are currently dharma teachers at Brooklyn Zen Center. Charlie also teaches courses through the Institute of Buddhist Studies at Berkeley. This morning, Charlie's title — and he can clarify this — is "Everyone Is a Light." So, Charlie, welcome. It's really great to have you with us.

Charlie Korin Pokorny: Thank you very much. Well, good morning to you — it's kind of afternoon here. Thank you very much for having me.

I want to start by bringing up some inquiries that I'm practicing with. These would include: What is the ground of my life? What is the ground of our life together with all beings? How do I care for this ground? Or we could also say, what is my center? What am I really here for? And how do I live from a sense of the shared miracle and dignity of being alive — and how this isn't actually an individual thing, this isn't something I can do by myself?

I'm not really looking for an idea with these inquiries, or philosophy, or answers, but something embodied, felt, intimate. And so there's this request bringing me to practice — to feel into this ground, and just for this ground to be expressed in my daily relations and my daily struggles and my moral commitments.

What's resourcing me to meet suffering — my own, others', collective suffering? What's sustaining me in meeting the pain and harm, the dehumanization and violence of this time, in a way that's informed by compassion and courage and clarity and fortitude? That's actually resilience.

So with these inquiries, I'd like to bring up a koan. This is a Zen story from a Zen teacher named Yunmen, who lived 864 to 949 in China. On a few occasions, he would address the assembly at the monastery where he taught and he would say: "Everyone has a light. When you look at it, you don't see it, and it's dark and dim. What is everybody's light?"

Maybe I'll just say that again: Everyone has a light. When you look at it, you don't see it, and it's dark and dim. What is everybody's light?

He's offering this affirmation — everyone has a light. Light is an image. I would say sometimes we also hear this concept in Buddha nature, or true nature, or original awakening. Sometimes we meet other expressions in Zen: your original face before you were born, or the treasure buried right beneath your feet, or true self, or unborn Buddha mind.

Suzuki Roshi — Shunryu Suzuki — brought the lineage of Soto Zen that's practiced through San Francisco Zen Center and the branching streams that come from it. He brought that lineage to California over 50 years ago. He talks about how your practice is not getting things to put in your basket. It's more like finding something in your sleeve — like finding a light, finding an invaluable jewel that's somehow already there. And this isn't something we can force. It's not really a result of doing or getting or figuring something out. It's not something we make. And we can't see it — we look for it, it's dark and dim. And yet it's like this source, this real resource of compassion, connection, freedom, wisdom, love, creativity.

So how to care for this light? How is it to be grounded in, to sit still in, to be resourced in the presence of — everyone has a light? And part of caring for this is inquiring. He also says, what is everybody's light? This was something he wanted people to ask — not just once, but as a lifetime inquiry.

The way we have it translated, and I think this reflects the Chinese: everyone has a light. But part of how I don't see it is it's not really something I have. It's not a thing at all. It's not really deep inside. It's not outside.

The Nirvana Sutra, a very important sutra for Buddha nature teaching in China — part of the context in which Yunmen offers his teaching — says all beings have Buddha nature. And Dogen, who founded Soto Zen in Japan, a 13th century teacher, took this teaching from the Nirvana Sutra — all beings have Buddha nature — and he turned it: all beings, whole being is Buddha nature. All beings, whole being is Buddha nature.

So it's not a something. It's also not fixed. If I try to see it, it's dark and dim. It's like an ungraspable wholeness, and we're in it together. In the sense of this light, you're whole. We are whole, and we can't become more or less whole. But I can doubt, or I can turn away from my wholeness. And I can also let go of doubt. Doubt can relax, and sitting upright and fully awake, I can relax totally into this wholeness.

A deep root of suffering — in some ways for Zen, the root of suffering is losing sense of my wholeness. Or, the other way this happens: getting involved in appearances of separation, isolation, disconnection. This is what grasping gives me. All my knowing — how things appear through knowing — is with some experience of separation. And so that's the root of suffering.

I can't really address the root of suffering within the branches of suffering. Through knowing and grasping, I can find all sorts of things I might fix or change about myself to relieve suffering. But those would be approaches based on elaborations of suffering, and they're just going to perpetuate suffering in this root sense. There are some kinds of problems that can be solved and fixed and changed. But the root, the ground — it's not the fixing kind. That changing mind can't address it. It won't help me there. I can't see it, it's dark and dim.

So what's an approach based on the light, based on wholeness? How am I resourced by this ungraspable wholeness — by a light I can't see?

Sometimes I feel like this is sort of a hard sell. There are so many wonderful and exciting things to grasp or to get or to consume. And Zen is over here saying, well, we have this liberating light, but it can't be grasped. It can't be apprehended.

And I can look at all these wonderful and exciting things I can grasp — are any of them a reliable resource for sustaining love and fulfillment and engagement? How do any of these things really resource me in what I'm really here for?

There are lots of things I might want. In Brooklyn, sometimes I have a desire for a bigger apartment. You might have a desire for a nicer home. Sometimes we might have desires for more wealth. I really like doughnuts — sometimes I would like an amazing doughnut. I've had pain in my back, so sometimes I'd like less pain. Or better health, good health. All these things are totally fine. It's fine that these things might make me happier for a little while. But they're not really the joy of the bodhisattva. They're not really the joy of practice. They're not the enjoyment of this light. And the joy of compassion lives in a kind of pain that I feel for people and beings I love when they suffer — and that's a pain — and the joy of connection, of relationship, of shared truth, and of this wholeness. All beings, whole being is Buddha nature.

Suzuki Roshi also taught: try not to see something in particular. Try not to achieve anything special. You already have everything in your own pure quality.

This one really speaks to me. Everyone has a light. Everyone is a light. When I really appreciate this, when I open to this, when it becomes the ground of my life, when my trust in this light grows and deepens — it's not that my suffering goes away. It's not that my pain and difficulty go away. They don't. They're actually part of the wholeness. It's only by completely embracing them that I can open to the wholeness. I can't open to the wholeness while only attending to segments or fragments of my life. But when I open to this wholeness, I'm resourced to meet my suffering and to open liberation with suffering.

And so freedom is not escapist. Sometimes when people talk to me about their meditation practice, they say, "This period of meditation was really good — I was just really calm, it was very pleasant, there was no pain, it was very easeful." And I'm like, well, that sounds like a nice vacation. And then someone comes and tells me, "My meditation was really bad. I just kept seeing over and over again that I'm getting caught in my thinking, and then this other thing came along, and I remembered I was angry about this thing." And I'm like, that sounds great. You're seeing all of that, and to start seeing that and including that in Zazen — that is our path.

So the freedom that we have in Zen is right here and includes everything right here. This is the practice of being fully present. It's not that I'm getting rid of a bunch of stuff I don't like and then being fully present. And it's also not a transactional thing — I'll be fully present, all the stuff I don't like will go away. It's completely embracing everything that's here, that's my life, that's this moment.

Suzuki Roshi emphasized no gaining idea. It's also a teaching in Dogen, but Suzuki Roshi really emphasized it — this is how I'm present. If this moment is for the sake of another moment, I'm not fully here. This moment is completely for the sake of this moment. I'm not practicing to get anywhere. You could also say this is trusting intimate presence. I'm not being present as a strategy. It's not part of a program, it's not a step, it's not a mediation — it is the whole thing. Intimate presence. A willingness, a fuller and fuller willingness, to be present and feel thoroughly.

So each of us, just as we are, is spiritually whole. And this wholeness is not in contradiction to whatever pain and suffering are here. Part of what I feel like we're doing in Zen is growing a kind of faith or trust in just being here, and wholeheartedly being this person.

In a sense, it's a simple thing to just tune into the breath, to just feel into the body. And in a sense, that's it. And to do this with more and more trust. If I'm tuning into my breath in a transactional way, or as part of a program, or if I'm feeling into my body in that way, I'm not fully trusting. I'm kind of using it — thinking, well, that can't be it, it's that and then it's that to get over there. But totally being here is total trust, just being present.

So tending to the breath, feeling into the body, being resourced by the light, by inherent wholeness, inherent belonging — unconditional belonging of this person in the universe — and including whatever parts of myself don't seem to fit, whatever things I don't like, whatever imperfections, whatever odd particularities, all completely embraced and included.

I also see this as a deep befriending. Whatever's here. I might have this intention — I just want to be present — and then I might have lots of resistance to what I'm finding. Befriend the resistance. Include the resistance. That is here, that is part of my wholeness.

One way of talking about being here completely is unconditional love — a love with no conditions, nothing needs to change to be here. How friendly can I be with whatever's hard right now? How am I fully here to be with the breath, completely with the breath, to be with the breath the way the breath is with the breath? To be with the body the way the body is with the body? To be with pain the way pain is with pain? To be your posture, to be your breathing.

So I'm relaxing into my body. I'm resting in the light. This isn't a knowing thing. I'm not being with my breath the way knowing regards my breath. I'm not being in the body the way knowing regards the body. I'm letting go of that knowing. I don't have to get rid of it — it just becomes part of the scenery. It's not the medium.

And right here I also want to bring up what I see as a different kind of agency or power. An immediate embodied intimacy has this agency. It's not necessarily the agency of controlling and managing something external to myself, which is sometimes what we mean when we think of agency. But there's an agency of being part of this moment. And sometimes when I feel disempowered, I'm caught by separation, caught by disconnection. I'm not in my body. And then things and events and people and certain actions can make me feel small and anxious and helpless. Growing intimate presence in my body, I can find agency and freedom right here. And when I'm intimate, nothing can make me feel small unless I give it that power. And when I'm intimate, no one can make me hate them unless I give them that power. So the light has a function in the world that I can't grasp — how it lives.

In February, my son Loka, who's 13 years old, got really bad pneumonia and other complications, and he was in the pediatric ICU for almost two weeks. It was pretty scary and uncomfortable for him. My partner Sarah basically accompanied him the whole time, and I would go over for a few hours almost every day. He loves video games. Normally we have fairly strict limits — two hours max on Saturday and Sunday. But in this situation, he's attached to all these tubes, he didn't even stand up for over a week, there's breathing apparatus — it was not a fun place to be. So it was like, go for it. Basically all he did for two weeks was rest and play video games.

I would visit, and I'd show up and I'd be really happy to see him and I'd want to talk — how are you doing, what's going on? But he'd just be like, "Oh, hi," and then back to video games. I might ask him a question and not even get a response. I'd be lucky if I got the "hi." I might try a few more times while I was there, but pretty much it was just video games — that seemed to be taking up all his attention. So I'd leave eventually.

One time, he was doing a little bit better — he just had more life in him, though he was losing weight and didn't look good. But that day he was doing better. He said — and then he turned to me and in all seriousness said — "It was great to see you, Dad." This is not the kind of thing he normally says. And it was striking, because I thought: I didn't even know you saw me. I don't know if he did see me until that moment, actually.

Another time, I touched his shoulders as I was about to leave. He took my arm in both of his hands and said, "Are you coming back tomorrow?" And I said, "Yeah, I'm coming back. I'll be here."

So in my head, in my thinking, in my knowing, I'm looking at agency and impact and communication in terms of what I could know — verbal communication, an interchange, I say this and you say that, okay, we've heard each other. But there's this other thing happening where just being there meant a lot to him. He was in this scary, uncomfortable situation, and video games gave him some comfort, and also just being there, accompanying him — it meant a lot to him, actually.

So what do we offer? Is it just in the stuff I manage? Is it just in what I do and say? Is it just in what I apprehend? There can be a lot of agency and power and communication and sharing just in how we show up — aside from anything I might do or say from knowing and thinking.

And this speaks to me of this light and how this light lives in the world. I might have a mindset to fix or solve or change my suffering, and it's basically reactive — it ends up perpetuating my suffering. So what's a liberative movement?

To me, everyone has a light — and this inquiry, what is your light? — this is about a liberative movement and a different ground or basis for my life. And trusting that intimacy with suffering is the liberative movement. Trying to get away from suffering is the reactive movement that actually ends up perpetuating it. So to face and feel rather than resist and deny — that's a kind of pivot of freedom.

There's something of immeasurable value right here in your life as it is in this moment, without changing anything. And it can't be given or taken away or granted or withheld. And it can be appreciated. And it's the resource for how I could thrive in meeting hard stuff. The hard stuff actually shows me the depth and the meaning and the strength of my vow and my love, and it can bring us together. I can't do this on my own.

And so the sangha dimension — the community dimension of our practice — and part of Zazen being what it is — part of our practice is asking for help. That can be literally asking for help, but also just in Zazen, asking for help. That gesture — not the response, and whether the response is what I expect or not — but the gesture of asking for help. That's this practice of everyone has a light.

We're not just random slivers or accidental fragments of the universe. Each of us is a light, a wholeness. And our light, our wholeness, reflects the wholeness of the universe. And each of our wholenesses reflects each of our wholenesses. Each of us is a light.

So I think there's time for anything you'd like to express — questions, or just welcome anything you'd like to bring up or share.

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Question: Thank you, Charlie, for this talk. I still remember you talking about radical friendliness, and I've noticed a couple of reflections on that in this current one. So is friendliness a liberative movement too, in your opinion? Does the act of being friendly correlate with this liberative movement? What do you think?

Charlie Korin Pokorny: Yeah. The way I want to talk about friendliness as a practice of Zazen — I see it as a liberative movement in my life. And I see it especially with the stuff I might have a hard time with, like fear, or anxiety, or grief, or anger. Actually, befriending is the liberative movement. And befriending, the way I'm talking about it, is becoming whole with these.

I'm not meaning befriending in a way that might be indulgent. When I befriend my anger, it's not that I'm just going to go and be angry. It's more like I have a friend, and one of my friends is anger, and I want to take care of my friend and walk with my friend through this life and help my friend find helpful ways to be expressed. Same with my fear, same with my anxiety. To feel these completely — that's this kind of friendliness.

And to not have that sneaky transactional acceptance, which is like: I'll accept this so it'll go away, I'll accept this so it won't be a problem anymore. That's not really friendly. That's not real friendliness. Real friendliness is like: I welcome you here forever.

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Question: Thank you for your talk today, Charlie. It was really wonderful to listen to you. In Zen I feel like a lot of the time we talk about letting go and letting everything be here that arises, and don't push anything away. But in real life — outside of coming here every two weeks — it's very difficult. We have deadlines to meet, some of us have work we have to wake up and go to, projects to finish. I'm just wondering how you kind of reconcile being able to let everything happen, but also in day-to-day life being able to go to the doctor, visit your son, go to life and to work, put food on the table, get all these things done — but at the same time just let everything happen. How do you not get too lazy? How do you not get too caught up in finishing tasks? I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that.

Charlie Korin Pokorny: Yeah. Practically speaking, there's a whole bunch of stuff we need to do, and it can be kind of agenda-driven. And it's more difficult to be fully present when I'm involved in an activity that's getting something done. And so that's part of the reason, I think, why we need Zazen. We need something where we can be totally unproductive. Actually, that's the whole point of this — a big part of what we're doing here is: I'm going to give up being productive and getting anything done. And I'm going to be devoted to that. This is the time I'm devoted to being present. And then there'll be the rest of my life, where I constantly need to get things done.

And to start feeling that — start feeling into what it's like to do something for the sake of getting it done. If I'm really, totally doing that — if I'm just trying to get through this activity to get to the place where it's done — I'm not appreciating the light, or my life, or what I'm doing.

And so, just start tuning into that. Start turning into: what do I really want? And actually, yes, I need to put dinner on the table and do the dishes and get over to the hospital — and every step and every dish and every thing I'm cooking, I can be present there. I am here. We are here together. I'm here with and relating to this dish, relating to this food, relating to walking around New York City. So yeah, every step of the way is this chance to be present.

It's hard. But I think we have this formal practice, dedicated time. And I would recommend developing a daily sitting practice if you haven't already. Sometimes people are too busy, and I say to people: just five or ten minutes, even a time where this is — I'm going to devote myself to presence. That helps us. And also just bringing our intention to: I want to be present.

A traditional contemplation in Zen is to remember we're not here forever. We're definitely going to die. And so if I'm living my life for the sake of another day, and eventually there are going to be no more days — when do I show up for my life? And also kind of the idea here is that it doesn't get better or worse. It might get more or less comfortable. But from the point of view of liberation and the light and practice, this is perfect. This is perfect to practice. Every day is a good day to practice. Every moment is a good moment to practice, to be here.

Does that speak to you?

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Question: Hi, Charlie. I have been recently working with and talking about finding my question — finding the organizing thing that keeps me practicing — even to the point of the question coming: why am I practicing? What is the practice doing? And watching that transactional impulse to get something out of it instead of just expressing this light.

So I want to hear you talk a little more about questions. You started your talk with so many great questions — each one was like a gem, like this could be my organizing question. And of course Yunmen came with a very good one: what is my light? And it does require some faith that the light is there, even if it's dim and dark. But the faith that it's there — then my question becomes, what do I do, what am I doing here?

There are just so many good questions. And I've been trying to encourage myself and people to find one that is not like a mantra, but is like a juicy investigation. I thought you brought up all these questions, and then the koan you brought up — which is the koan of our life — is a good question. So I just want to hear you talk a little bit about working with these questions, and sort of landing, or how you navigate that without getting too caught up in the response.

Charlie Korin Pokorny: I love inquiry. I love questions in practice. I feel a lot of inquiry in Dogen's writing and his writing about practice. I feel like he would ask all these questions that, for me, are practices — directing me into practice. He wasn't answering them. He doesn't want me to answer them. They're like tools. Here's where you dig. Just start digging. The inquiry is just like getting to work.

And I also feel like the question is actually Buddha nature expressing itself. And what brings me to practice is something doesn't feel right about this experience of separation and isolation, disconnection. Something doesn't feel right. That's Buddha nature — Buddha nature is saying that doesn't feel right. And then it's coming up against how this experience of separation has been woven into all my habits, all my thinking, all my values, all my reactions, all my reactivity, my views.

And so the inquiry is sort of coming up from the light, and it sort of wants me to appreciate the light rather than be caught, and to live the light, express the light. And these things are all kind of questions. And maybe they can have answers, but then the answer is just the answer of one moment, and it's still a question for the next moment — because there's no stopping. The light is going, it's like incessant activity, it's never static, it's never passive. And we aren't either. I think we could only be passive or static if we were separate, if we were things. But we're not things. We've never been things. We've always been a process.

Even if I think I'm doing nothing, every cell in my body is actually involved in all sorts of processes. All process.

So I love inquiry. I think it's great. And I kind of feel like answers are fine, but they're not places to hang out. Answers are beautiful when they arrive, and then they can just go on down the stream.

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Question: Hi, Charlie. I'm curious about koans and your study with koans — although I think you've answered my question a little bit. Would you mind commenting a little bit about koans with us?

Charlie Korin Pokorny: Koans are basically a story, or a quote, or something, or even just some poetry. And if some Zen authority calls it a koan, it's a koan. And once you call something a koan, you're kind of saying — I feel like when somebody calls something a koan, they've made it into an inquiry in a way. Or they're saying: you might think you understand this, but this is something to sit with. There's something here, like the light is here. And if you try to see it, it's dark and dim, but the light is here.

To call something a koan is to request a different kind of attention than a thinking, conceptual approach. Some koans are just walls if you try to think about them — just banging your head into a wall. And that's intentional. They're not for the thinking mind. And some actually are things you could think about, but even then, when we call it a koan, the invitation is: let go of thinking.

And koans became like the sutra of Zen — really the heart of Zen teaching. This goes back a thousand years. And over these past thousand years, in different cultural contexts — China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan — people have been picking up Zen koans and doing different things with them. So there are many different ways of working with koans.

For instance, the koan study I did with Daniel Taranio — this is a stream from the Diamond Sangha that also has basis in Japan and mostly Rinzai Zen — a way of working with koans that usually involves studying many koans, one at a time.

Another way of studying a koan is to study one koan for your whole life, which is also very common. You're basically cultivating doubt or a yearning to know, where you reject any resolution of the doubt. Anything that softens your question about this koan — basically you want all of your questions and all of your doubt about life to go into this doubt about this koan and not let it resolve until everything resolves. That's also a Rinzai approach and very important in Korean Zen.

Soto Zen, I'd say, is more informal. Koans are just like launching pads for inquiry and discourse, and you can do anything you want with a koan. You can play with it. It can be very open. And Dogen does really wild things with koans that no one ever did before. He's a really good example of that. I think you just start with a koan and see what happens, and see if the koan can be a way for the light to be turned and expressed and addressed.

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Question: I have a comment. I was thinking about Mu throughout your talk — I don't know how much that was intentional. I've been working with Mu for 55 or 60 years now, and I'm still doing it, and I'm waiting for the next question. It was Robert Aitken's practice and the Aitani's practice. And you just suddenly liberated me — it doesn't matter. I can live with Mu the rest of my life.

Charlie Korin Pokorny: Wow. It's done. Talk about ending on a high note.

Sunday, April 13, 2025

Welcome, Alan. You have the portal.

Thanks, Dave. Hi everybody, can you all hear me okay? Sounds okay, cool. I speak a little bit softly, so just put a hand up if you can't hear me.

Wonderful to be with you via the amazing causes and conditions of electrons and electricity and light and things, so I can be there on Zoom. Maybe I'm more present there than if I was there in person — who knows.

I've been to Santa Barbara — was there a couple of years ago for the first time and felt very at home there. I really appreciated it. I felt a real gentleness in the air and a sort of softness, probably helped by the weather. I remember the colors of some of the older buildings, and yeah, I have fond memories of being there.

My partner's first name is Barbara too, and it just — when I moved to California, which was about six and a half, seven years ago, it only struck me like three or four years in: oh my goodness, all of these city names like San Francisco and Santa Barbara and San Jose — these are all saints, and obviously Catholic saints. But I like to think, I hope these were wise ancestors, you know, maybe so. I want to learn more about Saint Barbara. I love that it's a female name, and yeah, I have some curiosity about that. It just struck me joining this morning — I wonder who Saint Barbara was.

I will say, whatever I share today, I like to think of it as really just encouragement for your own practice. I like the phrase "experience, strength, and hope," so I'll share a little bit of what's helped me on my journey, and I hope it's helpful for you. I have a particular interest in making practice accessible, and I'm really interested in language. I write — fiction and poetry — and I really love language. I think there's a lot of power in language, but we can also get really tied up in knots with language, and I think there's a lot of playfulness in language too. So that's kind of evident in the title of my talk.

I live in Oakland in the Bay Area, and I don't know if you've been here, but there are a lot of potholes in Oakland — kind of perennial potholes, occasionally they get paved. I grew up in Ireland in the eighties, and there were a lot of potholes in Dublin when I grew up, and not a lot of money to fill them. Things have changed and Ireland's become very polished, you know, for lots of reasons. I have a lot of nostalgia, and when I see a pothole I feel at home. I feel really at home when I see one — there's something about it I really like.

So I wanted to name that, and part of what I want to share today is I'll reflect on a couple of notions that are central, I think, to our practice — the concepts of practice and enlightenment, the idea of already being whole somehow. One of the things I really appreciate about our practice is its orientation to challenges or difficulties. When we do encounter a pothole — and it kind of feels right now like there are just lots of potholes in the world — there's a way in which, and I would actually say this: I think it's both a pothole and a portal, because there are potholes, yes, there are actual potholes, and there are difficulties. People pass. We encounter — this is part of our practice — an open-eyed seeing of difficulty and suffering, a term we might use. But what I find really generous and graceful about our practice is a way of being with that. So the pothole is also a portal. Those difficulties are also a way in and a way through.

I was talking to my teacher Tim one time, and I had this question for him: I feel this ache, I feel this longing in my heart sometimes. I feel this really real ache, and sometimes it feels like a hole — you know, maybe like a pothole, it feels like a hole. I asked him, does that go away? How do we work with that? And he didn't say anything. As he was sitting there in silence, it came to me — because he'd been saying to me continually, feel into your sensation and be with what's there — it struck me in that moment that the way to work with that is to really just be with it, and keep it company, and get really intimate with it, get really familiar with it. And not in a "there's a problem to be solved" way, not going to figure it out in my head, but rather in a more childlike, curious way — from a heart of compassion, from a heart of tenderness — just to be with that hole.

And what struck me — even in that moment, I did that. I just took a moment, I took a breath, I just let myself feel into that ache — and I noticed that it's really alive and it's really rich, and that somehow it's not a hole. I know this is sort of — I don't mean to over-egg the playing with words — but there is wholeness there. So that distinction between a hole and being whole. And then of course — I don't mean "of course," it just struck me in that moment — I'm sure we're all familiar with the figure of an ensō, the Zen circle. And I was like, oh my goodness, it is a hole, but it also contains everything, and it is also nothing, but not nothing in the negative sense — although there's lots of space in it, it's really full. It's really, really full of everything.

So I just really appreciate that our practice is such a grounded, gentle, embodied way of working with all of that — working with what it is to be human. I mentioned embodied because when I came to practice, so much of what I came with was: I'm going to figure this out. I love ideas and I love to read and I love intellectual pursuits, and I was going to crack this thing, because I'd lived a lot of my life that way. I now realize that as a sort of survival strategy, I had to come up into my head. Much of my practice journey has been the short but very long distance from here — you know, my neck — and then down below, into the rest of my body. So it's about being grounded in all of that.

What I appreciate about our particular way of practicing is we attune to our experience from a full body-heart-mind place of practice. And our practice is so simple — I mean, we sit down on a cushion or in a chair, maybe we lie down. Maybe when we lie down we fall asleep, we have a little nap. That's okay — I'm a big fan of napping. I don't know if you've ever heard of the book Rest Is Resistance — a lot of praise of napping in there. But there's a way in which we just pause and let ourselves be and be still, and just be with what's here as best we can.

I sometimes think about the word mindfulness. When I first encountered practice and first encountered Zen, I was reading some books about mindfulness, and I think like all of us I wanted to do this right. I wanted to be a good student and a good practitioner, and be mindful. And for me that looked like moving very slowly, doing it the right way, having a perfect posture. I really wanted to crack this, to just do it properly.

Lately, words like heartfulness or playfulness — other things that help us attune — feel truer to what this is, because really this is a very, very simple practice. It's really just bringing some gentleness, bringing some lightness to ourselves. And I think that's really one of the most important things — to bring some kindness to ourselves, and then to our experience, just pausing and making a bit of space for what's here.

I'm sharing that as some background to what I wanted to talk about today. This talk is a little bit circular and it'll be a little bit of a ramble, because I find when I share thoughts on practice it's always the same ideas, but I'm always trying to find fresh ways to express it.

Really, I guess, the anchoring idea is: we practice, and somehow in our tradition we're already enlightened. I like to say — I'm sure you've heard the Suzuki Roshi phrase — "You're perfect as you are and you could use a little improvement." We make effort, but we make effort from a place that trusts, or at least wants to believe, that we're already whole.

So I think of another set of words: the word whole and the word heal. They have the same etymology — whole, W-H-O-L-E, and the word heal. So somehow, rather than being broken and needing to be fixed, what if we're already radiant, whole beings? Yes, we have experienced difficulties, and there is some wounding, because that seems to be part of what it is to be human. Part of our journey in our practice is to allow healing to happen. It's my experience now — it was my belief, I wanted to believe it but I didn't for a while — and now it's my experience that healing actually wants to happen. Healing, unfolding, growing has its own energy that just wants to unfold. There's a way in which, when we can pause and just be with our experience, it seems to support that happening.

I'm brought to mind of a California poppy. I love the California poppy — it's new to me, because we have poppies in Ireland but they're not like the classic California poppy, they're sort of a pinky light red. They grow wild, and there's something about the metaphor of a flower or a plant — this idea of potential, and this unfolding, this very organic, natural growth that wants to happen.

So I guess what I'm playing with here are different metaphors or ways of attuning to our practice — less about "we're going to make something happen," and I know I felt that way — and more about attuning, or letting go, or settling in.

There's a phrase in one of Dōgen's fascicles — I think it's in Bendōwa — where he says, and I'll just read you some of these words: "It is never apart from this very place. What is the use of traveling around to practice?" It's never apart from this very place. It's right here. No need to go anywhere. It's beautiful to travel to practice, it's beautiful to visit centers and to encounter other practitioners, and I love the idea of pilgrimage — and yet, foundationally, it's never apart from this very place.

And then he says: "If there is a hair's breadth deviation, it is like the gap between heaven and earth. If the least like or dislike arises, the mind is lost in confusion."

I remember hearing that phrase — "if there is a hair's breadth deviation" — and I was looking this up yesterday. I wonder if anyone knows how wide a hair is. I certainly didn't. How many hairs would it take to create an inch? The internet told me — and I'm sure many of you are thinking, well, it depends on the hair, I've got fine hair or I've got thick hair — but there's a range of something like 140 to a thousand, and the sort of average is about 250 hairs. So it takes about 250 hairs to fill an inch. One two-hundred-fiftieth of an inch is the fineness of the gap between heaven and earth.

I remember when I first heard that phrase, I'll be honest: I was like, oh crap. If I miss it by that tiny, tiny amount — like I've missed it. That's so easy to miss. That's such a tiny, tiny thing. How can you pay attention to something that small? I'm just going to miss it all the time. Obviously. So kind of, what's the point? Let's just give up. I continued to practice, but I remember reading that phrase and really feeling discouraged by it.

And it struck me at some point in the last couple of years — I don't think he means it that way. The way I like to interpret that now is: the return. The return to just this. The return to a tender heart. The return to a memory of some kind person you've experienced in your life, or even some kind person you've never met but can evoke. The remembering to remember — the shift back to that — is tiny. You don't have to strive and strive and strive. It's just like, oh, there I go again. And it's just the subtlest little — I can just let go a little bit. It's just this micro, okay, it's right here. It's right here.

I experience that as a really gracious, generous, and kind way of orienting to our experience and to our practice — every moment, whenever we remember. Even when we're sitting on our cushion. I don't know about you, but I know a lot of my sitting on a cushion has been filled with: you suck at this. Like, you really — this is terrible zazen, your posture is really bad, your legs hurt. And then all sorts of other stuff.

And I love the gentleness of phrases like: when you sit in zazen, keep your front door and your back door open, and let your thoughts come and go — just don't serve them tea. Just let them come and go. Don't invite them in to hang around. Or the phrase — the title of the book by Uchiyama Roshi — Opening the Hand of Thought. When we're gripping onto things.

I like to do this guided meditation for folks where we imagine we're sitting on a beach by the ocean. On the out breath, the waves are coming ashore — you can see the beach now in Santa Barbara. The out breath, the waves come ashore. It's kind of interesting how our breath makes that wave-crashing sound if you listen to it closely. And then on the in breath, the waves are receding. I invite people to imagine a beach that feels safe and comfortable, you know, not too hot, not too cold, and just breathing with the waves.

At some point I like to mention: you might notice thoughts arising, and I like to frame those as birds in the sky on your beach. I don't know what it's like down there right now — I was in Dublin last year and I'd forgotten how many seagulls there were. Very large, loud seagulls. I remember staying in this house and just hearing them in the morning. So in this meditation, are there birds in the sky? And if there are birds in the sky, just imagine those as your thoughts. Whether there are lots of birds, a couple of birds, no birds — not one is better than another. It's just birds doing their thing.

I like to encourage people that if you find yourself stuck on a thought, imagine that you're cradling a bird in your hand. The bird has landed in your hand, you're kind of holding on to it a little bit. And just that very gentle micro-adjustment of relaxing your grasp and letting the bird fly away — or maybe the bird just sits there with you, sits there and breathes calmly in your hands.

Really, I feel like the heart of our practice is this very, very gentle, subtle, hair's breadth return. We can return and we can return. It's just a really subtle just-remembering.

I was at an event related to working with the body — I think it was based on somatic experiencing, or something informed by that — related to healing and working with the body. They did this practice, and you feel free to do it with me if you want. What they talked about were these micro-movements. The movement we were doing was just imagining painting an S in the air with your nose, with just the subtlest movement — like moving your nose up and to the left, and down and to the right, by the width of a hair. So there's something about how the shift here is really tiny, and that tiny shift is so significant.

I think about how when we sit on our cushion and we find some comfortable way of being, or we sit in our chair, and we do these very subtle things — like we hold our hands in this mudra, the cosmic mudra, which of course has this circle, or this hole that is also whole with a W, and somehow encompasses everything — and we just let our awareness rest there. And then when we drift away, which we will, the gentle return. We might notice our hands have become a little bit tense, and we can just seek to release the tension by a hundredth of a percent, which is the tiniest of rememberings.

I wanted to share that because — I speak for myself here — our practice, especially as Westerners, whether we grew up in a religious tradition or not, we were certainly schooled in ways of being in the world that involve all sorts of good things but a lot of focus on doing and achieving and making things happen. The channeling of energy in pursuit of something — this is really beautiful, in many ways. But when I came to this practice, I brought a lot of that achieving-and-doing energy. And then there are all of these forms, and so I wanted to do this perfectly, sit perfectly, get it all right.

What's really struck me over the years is — in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, in the preface, there's a phrase where Suzuki Roshi talks about beginner's mind. If you read it and go a bit further down the passage, what he effectively says is: the beginner's mind is the mind of compassion. So really the heart of our practice is this great compassion, this great gentleness, this great allowance for what's here — for ourselves, because we have to start with ourselves. But that's not to say we don't also have a very strong backbone. It's one of the things I love about the metaphor of our practice: to sit upright. I've heard it described as a soft front and a very strong, upright backbone. So we have agency and we can move and we can act and we can have a voice — but grounded in this knowing that really, what's truest about us is we're already whole. That's really more true about us than anything else. And when we forget, the returning is just this tiny little remembering — no more than the width of a hair. It's just like, oh, okay. It's right here. It's right here.

I'll just mention — there's a really interesting paper online, if you're curious about this kind of thing, on the phrase "practice-enlightenment." I was curious about the origins and etymology of those words. In Japanese, the phrase is shushō ittō, which translates something like: shu means practice, shō means realization as the fruition of practice, and ittō means oneness and equality. So the phrase means the oneness and equality of practice and realization — this idea that we're perfect as we are and we could use a little improvement.

I've been recently reading the memoir of Marsha Linehan — and many of you may have heard of her, she created Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and she actually trained as a Zen teacher as well. Her whole approach is about acceptance and change. The two parts of it are: can we accept, can we be with what's here — which we might call realization or enlightenment — and then there's this move to act, to change, to have agency, to support our own journey of awakening and healing. It's a real paradox. We are both of those things. And that's part of what I love about our tradition — yeah, it is both, and that's okay. To be human is to struggle, and is also to experience great joy. In our practice we're really working with both of those.

I'll just share a couple of other things as I see the time here. I grew up Catholic and was sort of steeped in prayer. Prayer to me was just a thing you would recite, and it had no meaning really — it felt a little bit lifeless, very dry. There was a lot of shame and guilt involved. I sometimes describe myself as a recovering Catholic.

In recent years I've come to really appreciate the essential mystical heart of all faith traditions — and even traditions, humanist traditions, that are not about faith. I'm really curious about the essential mystical roots of all of these traditions, that predate organized religion. I do trust and believe that it's a very human thing, and that these traditions have come out of this very human experience and need.

But I wanted to share that our practice — especially as we sit in silence, and we have lots of devotion in our practice, singing and chanting — sometimes times are tough. I don't know about you, but I sometimes feel the need for some help. We practice with each other, and we may have a teacher or a spiritual friend that we talk to, and that's really wonderful. But sometimes just during the day I feel like I kind of need to invoke something bigger than myself. And it's not going to be God — unless you interpret God as the universal energy of love and dynamism that permeates everything, in which case I could be down with that — but sometimes it feels like it needs to be a little bit more specific.

So I wanted to share, in the last couple of moments here, some things I've found helpful. When I practiced in the Tibetan tradition, we used to do a practice called White Tara practice. We would do this hour-long practice, and the first part was a guided meditation where we'd visualize the deity White Tara. White Tara is a manifestation of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of compassion, who appears in multiple forms — male, female, non-binary, all sorts of different forms. White Tara specifically is a figure of healing and compassion.

In that practice we would sit in the shrine room — a Tibetan center I used to practice at — we'd be sitting there chanting, and you could have your cup of tea and be drinking as you practiced. Every now and again the door would open and a dog would crawl into the shrine room and just kind of plop down on the floor. There were cats in the center too, and a cat would actually curl up next to the dog sometimes. One time, one of the dogs actually peed on the floor during practice, and there was just lots of room for all of that to happen. It was a very lighthearted, open space of practice.

We would recite the mantra of Tara. The mantra of Tara is: Oṃ Tāre Tuttāre Ture Svāhā. We would recite that mantra 108 times. The practice was you'd recite it out loud a couple of times, then soften and soften back to a whisper — the idea being you would whisper it no more loudly than so that the sound wouldn't pass the collar of your shirt. One of the things I wanted to name is that subtlety — starting aloud and then getting more and more subtle — to me is just another signal of this hair's breadth quality, this focus on subtlety, and not as a thing to go after but just this gentleness of a whisper.

Sometimes when things are tough — and when I say that I mean when I'm working with something I'm finding hard and I feel like I need extra help — I will turn to mantra. I will turn to the Tara mantra, and that's been very helpful, because I can imagine this figure. And even though I know somehow that this figure and I and we are all the same, and somehow each of us is the Buddha of compassion, it's helpful to just — I love the phrase "throw yourself into the house of the Buddha" — to just kind of throw myself at this White Tara figure and be like, I really need your help right now. Can I phone a friend? And just really inviting that in. That feels like a very human need, and something that is available to us.

I remember reading — I think it was Uchiyama Roshi, I think it's in Opening the Hand of Thought — talking about being in hospital and not being able to sit zazen and reciting the mantra, I think it was Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu — praise to Kanzeon, the Bodhisattva of compassion, or Kannon. Just wanted to offer that to you.

I've even at times found an old Catholic prayer, because I wanted something with words like "help me, I need your help, can I please get some help here." So I found one of those prayers and changed the words — for me it was Kannon — and changed the wording to add that in. That was a little extra level of support.

I also find great solace — and again I'm sharing this as support for your own practice — in music and poetry and the words of others who have reflected on these things. We recently went to see the singer Miché Meshé — she performed here in San Francisco. She's wonderful. If you're interested, there's a Tiny Desk concert of her performing some of these songs. There's one song called "Love," and I really see this as a prayer. I wanted to just share a couple of words from it. She says:

Well, when it dark, it hard, will you seek to solve yourself?
Me, I take the darkest corner, whistling to myself.

I love that phrase. It strikes me as such a great metaphor for ourselves in practice — take the darkest corner. We sit down, we face the wall, sometimes we're in the corner of a room. And "whistling to myself" is such a rich image, and sometimes when we're sitting there we can hear our breath whistling.

And then she says:

To live in love is to be uncertain.
To live in love is to bear the burden of so many who yearn to know my life matters.

Our lives matter. I feel that really resonates with our Bodhisattva vow — when some of us take vows to continue to practice and to help others. Marsha Linehan talks about her own mental health struggles, and she vowed: if I get out of hell, I'm going to go back in there and help everybody else get out of hell. And that's really what she has been doing.

And then the last words in this song that I'll share:

Love takes off the mask that we fear we can't live without.

Again, I feel in our practice just this very gentle returning and returning, and that hair's breadth remembering — very subtle letting go. We can let the mask, we can let the protection, we can let the barriers dissolve just a little bit. We have to take care of ourselves and some of those barriers are there for good reason, so we don't want to rip things out in a way that's not safe — but we can just allow, very, very gently, those things to settle.

There's lots more I could say, but I am aware of time. I had a whole poem I was going to read, but I want to make time for any questions and conversations. So I'll just say: my encouragement, if there's anything you take away from this, is to really channel the heart of this — which seems to be about being good to ourselves, being kind to ourselves, and then bringing that to others. And the move to remember that is a really subtle and small one.

Wonderful to be with you. Thank you very much.

---

Dave: Thank you, Alan. Really, really appreciate your sharing the dharma with us this morning. You've invited us to react and ask questions or make comments, so I'll be quiet and we'll just do that by raising hands. If somebody has something they want to say or a question, raise your hand and state your question.

Question: I agree with you about that hair's breadth — when I first heard about it too, it seemed, well — not hair's breadth, but — is that how it goes? It's the Xinxin Ming, isn't it? The Faith Mind Verse? But I love the way you gave us that analogy — just so close, and like a split second to come back. Just turn it around, you know, when we get off track, just subtly and softly. Thank you for that.

Alan Eustace: Thank you.

Question: I was taken with the phrase you mentioned from Beginner's Mind — I've not thought of it in this way before — that the beginner's mind is compassion. I'm not exactly sure how you said it. And I was noticing how my mind first went to: oh, that's so simple to apply with people. Really, when I'm standing there and the mind starts making assumptions, I just hop into beginner's mind, and so often when I do that I open up more and more to that person and realize: oh, I had no idea what was going on. I was making all these assumptions about why you were behaving this way. But what I hadn't taken in fully was: I don't really use that with myself. So I could be in that same kind of relationship with myself — taking notice, with all these assumptions I make about myself, all these judgments — stopping and applying that same path towards myself. And even saying that feels like a mountain to climb compared to offering it to someone else in the relational space. But I really appreciate you bringing that up. It's something fresh that came alive for me out of that statement. Thank you.

Alan Eustace: Thank you. What you just said there just struck me — I haven't thought of it that way before. I certainly know the experience of meeting somebody else and having all sorts of assumptions, but I actually haven't thought of it like — goodness, all the assumptions I make about myself. So thank you. That's fresh for me.

Question: Another thing I just want to mention is that when you're walking along the beach and the waves come in — for me, that's an inhale. I've got to say exhale. It just feels important. Why do you see it as an exhale when the wave comes in?

Alan Eustace: And I actually thought, well, this is a really fresh take. I'm breathing this way — this is a different experience, because my mind just kicked into what you're saying. It was like the exhale would be the water moving out, and so the water moving in would be the inhale. And so I had a very different experience breathing in that way. I appreciate it.

Question: I kind of had resistance when you said that — like, wait a minute. But these are the things with our assumptions, the way we think something is. And then you turned it around and I was like, oh, okay. I'll try it.

Alan Eustace: Yeah. I'll just share on that specific point — I was started out doing it that way too, and then at some point, because in that meditation it involves imagining being the ocean, and how whatever's happening on the surface with the waves, at the depths of the ocean there's always this stillness and this dynamism, and then somehow being and breathing as the ocean — but I can see both as beautiful practice.

Question: If you are the ocean, you can see how the ocean is breathing out when the waves come in, and then breathing in as they recede. What I find — I go down to the beach a couple of times a week and I play my flute, and the waves break about every seven seconds and my breath lasts about seven seconds. So I'm doing a duet with the ocean by breathing with it. And that's just another way of doing it. Thank you.

Alan Eustace: Thank you. I want to come and hear that.

Question: I'll jump in here. I just wanted to thank you for your talk, and also for bringing in permission to ask for help. So much of this practice is solitary and inward, and even though we can practice in a group, so much of what we're doing is gaining some mastery of ourselves, and sometimes that's not enough. I was reminded as you were talking of studying the Awakening of Faith — if you're not familiar with it, it's a very small text but very dense. The heart of it is tathāgatagarbha — Buddha-nature, the seed, the womb — and it goes into great depth about our practice going inward, the solitary. And then like the last couple of pages, it basically says, well, if that doesn't work, then pray to the Buddha. I mean, I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of details, but I found that so humorous and just light and compassionate — that there are, whether it's people or energies or Bodhisattvas or whatever speaks to you, the earth mother or whatever, that there are moments that we can surrender to something larger than ourselves and gain some support from that too. So thanks for that.

Alan Eustace: Thanks, Monica.

Question: So your title was "That's Not a Pothole, It's a Portal" — did I get that right? What really made my heart rejoice was when you talked about this thin hair and the subtleties of understanding each pothole as a possible portal — to maybe development, or maybe completeness, more wholeness than before, something like that. So it was really touching to see this bliss of the subtlety. English is not my maternal language so maybe I am not able to express exactly what I want to say, but I just want to give you back this feeling of rejoicement. Thank you.

Alan Eustace: You expressed it perfectly, beautifully. And I feel it. Thank you.

Question: I could resonate with so many things you said. One thing I could resonate with a lot, also on a personal level — with what I've been going through and experiencing recently — is when you brought up Catholicism. Growing up in a religious context like that, and coming to a point where maybe it's coming full circle, becoming whole again. That's what's been happening to me, and it's been happening because of what you also mentioned — seeing the mysticism, seeing the experience of the people who stand behind these organized religions and organizations. I feel that for me is a place of love and wholeness. My heart rejoices when I hear that from another person, from you today. It really brings it back to the common denominator, to what unites us, no matter what the name, what the shape. So thank you.

Alan Eustace: Thank you. If I could just say a couple of words on the last couple of things. One is language and maternal language — the writer Samuel Beckett decided to write in the French language because he felt bounded by what he could express in his own language. I love this idea of languaging in a way that is uniquely ours, and there's something really precious about that, whatever the tongue is.

And then what you just said about Catholicism — my grandfather passed away in 2004. I only learned then, when he was passing, that this very gregarious person, fond of a drink as we say in Ireland, was a real fan of Thérèse of Lisieux. And he would always correct people — he would say, "It's Lisieux," he was really specific about that. Just in the last couple of months I didn't look into this at all, but that name came up, and I became really interested in this mystical thread that unites all of these traditions, and how this woman had written all of these accounts of her experience of wholeness and connection. I feel that all of these riches are available to us when we can open ourselves to them. So that's really precious. Thank you for sharing.

Question: Well, thank you, because next time I get into a dark place, I'm going to head for the darkest corner. And my friend, the Persian poet Rumi, said: let darkness be your candle.

Alan Eustace: Yes. I feel that. Thank you.

Question: I'd just like to add — I appreciate your attention to language. Sometimes a word can be a portal or a pothole because of our likes and dislikes. I think being mindful of that in our lives means language can be an opening. We can do so much more. Thank you for your time.

Alan Eustace: Thank you. One of the things I love about Dōgen is the emphasis on the word as the thing, and the poetry and the playfulness of language. Thank you.

Dave: Alan, I'm wondering if we have time — if other people don't have questions — if we could hear the poem that you were going to read.

Alan Eustace: I'd be happy to share it. If folks want to hear it, if that's okay.

Dave: We have a lot of thumbs up on poetry in the room here.

Alan Eustace: Goodness. I had a few. I had one I'd written, but it's quite long and I don't think I'm going to share that right now. Can I share two short ones? Is that okay?

Dave: Yes, please.

Alan Eustace: Okay. I'm just sharing this — I wasn't going to share this, but this is by — I will say, I have a collection of poets I love, and I was going to share one by an Irish poet called Anne-Marie Fyfe, but I don't have one to hand that fits this moment. I gave a whole talk on one of her poems, so she's an amazing young Irish poet. But I'll share this — this is by Pádraig Ó Tuama, who is a poet. It's called "Do You Believe in God."

I share this just because of what we were just talking about. So this is what it's called — "Do You Believe in God":

I turn to you
not because I trust you or believe in you,
but because I need a direction for my need.
You, the space between me and death.
You, the hum at the heart of an atom.
You, nothing.
You, my favorite emptiness.
You, what I turned away from and will turn to.
You, my ache made manifest in address.
You, silent.
You, what my friends saw as they died.
You, contain what's not containable.
You, shape of my desire.

And I'll share one last one if that's okay. This is a short one by another Irish poet called John O'Donohue. I love his work because it's a lot about the body and the senses. It's called "A Blessing for the Senses":

May your body be blessed.
May you realize that your body is a faithful and beautiful friend of your soul.
And may you be peaceful and joyful and recognize that your senses are sacred thresholds.
May you realize that holiness is mindful gazing, feeling, hearing, and touching.
May your senses gather you and bring you home.
May your senses always enable you to celebrate the universe and the mystery and possibilities in your presence here.
May the Eros of the earth bless you.

Dave: Alan, I don't think there's more we can say except thank you. All we can say is the four vows. Shall we? We'll conclude with the four vows here, Alan.

Alan Eustace: Wonderful. Thank you again. Thank you all.

Sunday, April 27, 2025

Thank you. All right. Well, it is my pleasure. And Anton, thank you for helping us secure our speaker for today. I always appreciate your good work on that. Karen, I might butcher your last name — is it DeCotis? Perfect. It's my pleasure to introduce Karen DeCotis, who's going to be speaking with us this morning about working with koans. And given our practice, we tend to be very Shikantaza oriented, so this will really be something new for some of us — koan practice. Karen is a transmitted priest in Suzuki Roshi's Soto lineage. Her teacher is Sojun Mel Weitsman. She has practiced at San Francisco Zen Center, Berkeley Zen Center, and Bozeman Zen Center group, which is where I think she's logging in from. And she is currently the guiding teacher at the San Antonio Zen Center. Really looking forward to hearing from you this morning, Karen. Welcome. Deep bow.

Thank you so much. Thank you very much for this invitation. And thank you to Anton for befriending me at Tassajara last summer when it was crowded and so hot. We had a very nice connection. We got to sit next to each other on the floor, and he helped me as I struggled to get up off the floor. But it was fun to be there, and I'm really glad to know him and to get to be with all of you.

This is a great opportunity for Don't Know Mind, because I only met Anton for a short while and I don't know any of you, so I don't really know what I'm speaking into or who. Hopefully we will connect in some meaningful way through our practice.

I'm also Shikantaza oriented, so the fact that I am doing anything with koans — well, you're in good company if you're a beginner, so don't worry. I'll tell you about how it is I'm working with them these days. I'm actually in San Antonio right now, but I was in Bozeman for a long time. Actually, I'm at my sister's house outside of San Antonio, which is why the Wi-Fi is sometimes glitchy, so if we freeze we'll just breathe and wait till it unfreezes. But I think it's going good so far.

As I was saying, I barely know Anton, I don't know you. I loved the service this morning — it was so beautiful. It was different than what we do, but a lot of it was recognizable. It always occurs to me that as a Zen student, I like to bring up Katagiri Roshi's two books of essays, or talks that he gave. The first one that came out was Returning to Silence — that's what we do, right? We sit down, we return to silence. But his next book was titled You Have to Say Something. So that's what I feel like as a practitioner: we sit in silence, we get very intimate with ourselves, but then we must come forward. So that's what I'm doing today — into what I don't know. But again, I hope it's useful.

I would say that lately my practice has been about questions. About a month ago, when Charlie Percorini gave a talk, I attended because at that same trip to Tassajara I also got to know Charlie a little bit. He talked a lot about questions, and I brought a question about questions for him. For me, in our practice — what are we doing? What is our quest? Why would we take our Sunday morning and come to a place like this when we could be doing other things, drinking coffee, having croissants? Now, you may have done that before you came, but still, you're here now. So there's some necessity for us, some reason why we engage in what many people might call a very odd or silly or at least curious practice.

Many of you have probably heard Reb Anderson say — he's probably said it many times — he says, "I don't answer why questions." But that doesn't mean we don't ask why questions. So this "why do we practice, what are we doing" — it's just very big for me right now. And I've been practicing a long time. So it might feel a little unstable that someone who's practiced a long time is asking, "Why am I practicing?" And yet here we are.

When we practice, we confront things like, well, what is my goal, or what is my aim? Or even softening it a little, we might say, what's my intention? I'm not goal-oriented, but I have an intention. But all these are sneaky ways of asking, what am I going to get out of this? How's this going to help me? Will I feel better? Will I understand the world better? Will I suffer less? Will my family and friends suffer less? What will I get? And yet, even without responses or answers to these questions, we still show up.

Like yesterday at the San Antonio Zen Center — we have a similar size group on a Saturday morning — we didn't have a dharma talk, we had a work morning because the yards needed cleaning up. And people showed up. The person who assists me there said, "Well, usually for work mornings we get three or four people." We got ten people. We got a lot done, and it felt so good to be a sangha cleaning up together. So showing up is a big part of our practice.

With koans, we are working with questions. Those of you who are somewhat familiar with koans know that they are stories. I want to read a couple of things that experts have said about koans. The stories are both ancient — from the Buddha's time through Tang Dynasty China, through the Song Dynasty into Japan, and into today. Some of the koans in a collection of stories about women called The Hidden Lamp are very current, and they're very helpful stories for our practice.

One of the things they say about practicing with koans — and if you're brand new to this you can ask more questions when this talk is over, and if you are familiar with this, please enjoy the fact that we are reviewing part of our practice as if we were doing zazen instruction — the word "koan" is a Japanese form of the Chinese word gong'an, which means a public case or public announcement, like if you were in a court of law. And you're sort of saying, "This is about me. I'm on trial here." These encounters often took place in the dharma hall, often in front of people, in front of the sangha — like if one of you stood up and we had a question and answer exchange.

Heinrich Dumoulin writes: "A koan therefore presents a challenge and an invitation to take seriously what has been announced, to ponder it and respond to it."

Ruth Fuller Sasaki differed in her view from an earlier thought about koans being paradoxes or riddles that you have to solve. Koans aren't so much about that. You don't so much solve them as resolve them, or dissolve them, or just sit with them. She writes: "The koan is not a conundrum to be solved by a nimble wit, nor in my opinion is it ever a paradoxical statement except to those who view it from the outside. When the koan is resolved, it is realized to be a simple and clear statement of the consciousness which it has helped to awaken."

So we're talking about awakening, of course. And I came up with all the words I could think of for what awakening is — liberation from what, enlightenment about what, realization, freedom, actualization. We do talk about that somewhat in our Soto lineage. We talk about enlightenment, but we also talk about delusion, and we also talk about just practicing just this.

So when we have a good question in our practice, we can bring our heart and mind to it. You might be considering, well, what is my question? What is guiding my practice right now? Maybe you're working with a teacher and you have something between you that you're working on. Maybe a question per se is irrelevant. Your life is your koan. That's what Dogen Zenji wrote in Genjokoan. Our life is our koan.

Some of you may know the story of Mahapajapati — the Buddha's stepmother and aunt, who was the first woman to be admitted into the Buddha's community. But she had to fight for it, really. She had to have an intercessor. Ananda had to speak for her and really say to the Buddha, "The women want to practice," and the Buddha kept saying, "Don't set your heart on this." And yet Pajapati's heart was set on this. So in our practice, we want to find the place where our heart is set on this discovery, on this life.

To keep examining my purpose keeps my life fresh for me. And as I age, it's important to feel like my life is still fresh. If you're young you might not have to do that so intently, but as I age I find I need to keep revisiting what is my question, what is my aim, and it keeps my practice authentic.

I was thinking about Pope Francis passing and how much response there is from the world — how many people were at Saint Peter's Square yesterday, the thousands and thousands of people who really took to heart that Pope Francis has passed, that a leader, a spiritual guide for them, has passed. And how it is bringing forth their own faith and practice. We can't do this by ourselves. We need each other. We need teachers. We need guides. And we need a good question.

So working with koans — some of you may be familiar with the Rinzai approach, which is kind of a koan curriculum where there's a whole battery of koans and you work with them with your teacher, and you have to, quote unquote, pass them. You have to exhibit great realization about that koan before you get your next koan. My teacher Sojin Roshi used to say, "Don't ask for another problem. Don't try to solve your problem — you'll just get another one. Be happy with the problem you have." So he was very much about the idea that you really have one koan, and that's your life.

I had a friend who was in a Zen tradition — a different place — where she had to pass a koan. And in that school, as in many schools, the first koan you get — and many of you may know this book, The Gateless Barrier — the first koan is Mu. "Does a dog have the Buddha nature or not?" And Zhaozhou says, "Mu," which means something like "does not." She worked with Mu, as many people do, for years and years. She never passed it. And she left Zen practice. And I find that's a shame. What does passing that koan mean? Did she not do an appropriate dance for her teacher? I don't know about that. But for us, in our lineage, it's not so much about passing the koan. It's about entering the koan and letting it work on you, and letting it bring forth your way-seeking mind.

Norman Fischer, in his introduction to this collection of women's koans called The Hidden Lamp — which I highly recommend, it's a wonderful collection of stories with wonderful commentary — he talks about having two ways of approaching this kind of practice: the grasping way and the granting way. The grasping way is very stingy. It doesn't really give you anything. It's like, "Here's the story, you work it out, and you pass it." But the granting way is more what we're doing here.

I sort of stole this from the Zen teacher Joan Sutherland. She is a pioneer in a new way of working with koans in the West. She would have koan salons, and that's what I have now — a koan salon. I'm doing it with a group online from Bozeman, and I'm doing it with a San Antonio group. It's where we just get to know the characters in the stories, maybe their backstory a little bit, and we sit with it and we write poems about it or talk about it in small groups. We let it work on us.

Now, the grasping way — the way where you have to pass the koan — comes from the Rinzai tradition, which came from Linji, a giant of Zen whose lineage is still in existence today as the Rinzai school. They worked on passing koans and having this curriculum. I believe it died out for a while, and then a monk — Hakuin — some of you may know Hakuin Zenji. He's known for many things. He was a beautiful artist and calligrapher, and he did a lot in the Zen school. But he also sort of reintroduced this hardcore koan practice and the passing of koans.

You might remember his famous koan — especially if you watch The Simpsons. Many people have heard it: "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" But that's not the actual koan. The koan that Hakuin invented — and in fact he thought it was better than Mu, better than Zhaozhou's "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" — his koan was: "Two hands clap and they make a sound. What is the sound of one hand?" That was his koan. "Two hands clap and they make a sound. What is the sound of one hand?"

And so even though he brought back the more rigorous form of working with koans, I sort of fell in love with this koan — because I have to confess I only recently heard that that was the actual koan. I thought it was "What is the sound of one hand clapping," but it's not. It is, "What is the sound of one hand?" This is an invitation to us, right? What is the sound? What is your sound?

So in our koan salons, we take something like "Two hands clap and they make a sound. What is the sound of one hand?" and we sit with that and we talk about it. Maybe we talk a little bit more about Hakuin and how he came to this koan and what he was like. Or maybe we talk about how frustrating koans are. What good are they? Or maybe we write a poem about it. What is the sound of one hand? What is being asked here? How does this help my practice? What do you say? What sound do you bring forth? How do you bring forth Buddha nature?

Stephen Batchelor, in his book The Faith to Doubt — I just read it, it's right over there — his very first line has been a wonderful help to me. The line is: "The Buddha way is a living response to a living question." So you can read all the books you want, you can study the sutras, you can read the stories, you can learn all the different terms and the different teachings of the Buddha, and we should — but the Buddha way is a living response to a living question. So what is your koan, right? What is your practice? I love that so much.

And right now I'm going to share a quote by someone — his name is Barry Magid. He wrote a book on koans, about twenty-two of them, and the book is called Nothing Is Hidden. He's a psychoanalyst and a Zen teacher, and he writes wonderful commentaries on some of our most familiar koans. He writes:

"The question of why we practice evolves out of our initial desire to attain some goal, out of our secret practice of escaping some part of ourselves or some part of life as it is, into a desire to fully and compassionately express who we are. We must take our own sound into the world, a sound that goes forth from our realization, a sound that reverberates out across the gap of separation."

I thought that was pretty good. This is what we're doing — what is the sound of one hand? And when you chant — we chanted this morning from the Jewel Mirror Samadhi — that line "inquiry and response come up together" is perfect as a guiding post, a way station, for working with a koan.

So now a little bit about me. I'm going to share a koan with you that some of you probably know. It's one of the favorites, and it was given to me four different times — so clearly I have work to do on it. Twice it was given to me by my teacher. He might have forgotten he gave it to me the first time. The first time he gave it to me, we had a lovely email exchange — that's how we worked with it, back and forth — which gave me the opportunity to cheat and look up commentary by experts as a way to fluff up my emails back to him. But it was a very warm and wonderful exchange. The second time he gave it to me was when I was just struggling, and he loves this koan.

And then another time I was given it by someone whose name you chanted — Wendy Egyoku Nakao. It sounds like she's on a well-being list or something. Is that right? No? Just keeping her in our memory as our home guiding teacher, our leading teacher who passed away?

Question: So she's his teacher, I see. Well, thank you for that. It's always good to keep our parent and grandparent and great-grandparent ancestors alive.

Karen DeCotis: She gave it to me, but she kind of worked in the grasping way. I would go in and present this koan and she would ring me out before I could take a breath. She could just tell I was going to come up with something. I failed anyway.

But this is Nanchuan's "Ordinary Mind Is the Way," and you may have heard of it. It's lovely for me because of where I am with it now. So our great ancestors — Zhaozhou, or Joshu in Japanese, and his teacher Nanchuan, or Nansen in Japanese — I'll use their Chinese names here because they're from the Tang era in China.

I'm going to start over, because someone said to me once, "When you read a koan, just read it through the first time before you say anything." So I'm going to do that, and then I'll go back.

Zhaozhou asked Nanchuan, "What is the way?" Nanchuan said, "Ordinary mind is the way." Zhaozhou asked, "Should I try to direct myself toward it?" Nanchuan answered, "If you try to direct yourself toward it, you betray your practice." And Zhaozhou asked, "Well, how can I know the way if I don't direct myself?" And Nanchuan said, "The way is not subject to knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion, but not knowing is blankness. If you truly reach the genuine way, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can this be discussed at the level of affirmation and negation?" And with these words, Zhaozhou had sudden realization.

"What is the way?" "Ordinary mind is the way."

I think this koan is what inspired Norman Fischer to name his group Everyday Zen, because another translation is "everyday mind is the way" or "everyday life is the way." This is Case 19 of a collection called The Gateless Barrier. It's more in the insider tradition, but we love a lot of these koans. The practitioner Wumen put together these koans, and then he wrote comments and wrote verses to go with them. So koans often have structures to them. Different koan collections may have different commentators and different people writing poems and commenting on the poems. They get very wordy — for a silent tradition, we have a lot of big mouths. They just like to talk about stuff.

But anyway — "What is the way? Ordinary mind is the way." I used to focus on that part of it: ordinary mind, direct myself toward it, if I don't, how can I know? But more recently, Nanchuan's final words kind of got to me — that "the way is not subject to knowing or not knowing." That's not what we're talking about, knowing or not knowing. And then: "If you truly reach the genuine way, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space." That's the line that's been getting to me recently. It's vast and boundless. There's no particular location. There's no particular person. Nobody's right about what's going on — maybe nobody's wrong either. We're in a time of what seems like harm and confusion and reactivity. Who's right, who's wrong? That's not even the level we're talking about, according to Nanchuan.

So even though Zhaozhou has this great realization, Wumen says Nanchuan lost no time in showing the smashed tile and the melted ice, where no explanation is possible. So though Zhaozhou had realization, he could only confirm it after another thirty years of practice. This brings to mind Dogen's saying — continuous practice. We just keep practicing. Practice and realization go together.

I think I'm getting close to time. Is that right?

Question: If you have more to say, we have a bit more time. We usually end here about noon, so take as much time as you need, and then we'll have Q&A.

Karen DeCotis: Okay, great. So that is both encouraging and discouraging. Zhaozhou had realization, but he could only confirm it after another thirty years of practice. So if you are going to dedicate yourself to thirty years of practice, start with the realization you have right now. What do you understand about your own mind, and the way, and your good heart, and the world? Spend thirty years stabilizing that, refreshing that.

The verse that goes with this koan goes like this:

Spring comes with flowers, autumn with the moon,
Summer with breeze and winter with snow.
When idle concerns don't hang in your mind,
That is your best season.

That to me is so helpful. The season is what it is. Here in San Antonio, we're having a moment of spring, a moment of reprieve from 100-degree weather, which is right around the corner. "When idle concerns don't hang in your mind, that is your best season." How great is that? So simple. It's very touching to me.

Zhaozhou in this koan is young — he's only about eighteen or twenty years old. He went on to practice with Nanchuan for another thirty or forty years. Nanchuan dies. Then Zhaozhou starts teaching. Zhaozhou lived to 120, it is said, and he started teaching at age eighty. So we all have a little bit more time to refine what we're doing and start expressing ourselves.

But Zhaozhou has so much necessity in this exchange. He so wants to know how to practice. He really wants to know. So this level of necessity is something I feel is important to keep visiting and revisiting as Zen students. Do we have necessity? Or are we just getting, "Oh, this is what I do"? Is Zen a hobby? Is it on your to-do list? Or is it the way you live your life? I'm advocating for it being the way we live our life. That's what I'm here for.

And so I have two more things to bring forth. Just the story of Zhaozhou and Nanchuan has been given to me so many times that I feel very intimate with it — all the different commentaries I've read, what I've written about it, what I'm trying to say about it, what you may say about it back to me in a few minutes. It's like I'm giving it to the world. The world already has this koan, but I'm giving it to the world. That's how I'm relating to it now. I want everyone to realize the vast and boundless nature of our own minds.

What Dogen says in Genjokoan — in the famous section — is what comes up for me, because constantly we are being given zazen instruction. So I will read this, which may be familiar to many of you. It's part of the Genjokoan — "Actualizing the Fundamental Point":

"To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind and the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no trace continues endlessly."

So we are given again encouragement into the vast and boundless nature — if we can drop our identities, drop our conviction that we think we know who we are, and open to what is arising before us and respond, body and mind will drop away. That was apparently Dogen's great realization: he had an experience of body and mind dropping away when Rujing — when he was in China — Rujing said something like "drop body and mind," and apparently Dogen did, or it happened, and his mind opened up. And this is what he brought back to Japan. From that — ninety-five fascicles later, a million talks later — great Dogen. What would we do without him?

So we often focus on "to study the Buddha way is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self." Okay, good — I'll forget the self. But what does that mean? To forget the self is to be confirmed by the myriad things coming forward at you right now. You are me, because I'm coming at you. That's what you are — listening to me. I'm a head on a screen, a talking head. But actualized by this, your body and mind and my body and mind can drop away. And this realization can leave no trace, and it continues forever. This boundlessness that we are being invited into is not a place to remain, but it is a place to remember, because it brings forth compassion. When this boundlessness is who we are, how can anything other than compassion arise?

So I've done a lot of koans here. This is the cliff notes of koan practice. I want to read one that I'll leave you with, and we can talk about it. I'm just introducing you to characters. Some of you may know them all really well. Some of you, they're brand new. You don't have to remember any of this. What we want to do is just experience each other together here this morning.

This is also from Tang Dynasty China. This is from the Layman Pang family — Layman Pang, Lady Pang, and their daughter Lingzhao. They also had a son, but he doesn't figure very much in the stories. Lingzhao, the daughter, does. And what I love is — someone gave me the sayings of Layman Pang, and there are pictures, drawings, in there. Layman Pang is like eight feet tall and his daughter Lingzhao is really petite, and they look funny together. They used to work together making baskets and selling them. They were apparently very rich, and they gave away all their riches to live an enlightened life as lay disciples of the Buddha.

But here's a wonderful story. Layman Pang was sitting in his thatch cottage one day studying the sutras. "Difficult, difficult, difficult," he suddenly exclaimed, "like trying to store ten bushels of sesame seed in the top of a tree." "Easy, easy, easy," his wife, Lady Pang, answered. "It's like touching your feet to the floor when you get out of bed." "Neither difficult nor easy," said their daughter Lingzhao. "It's like the teaching of the ancestors shining on the hundred grass tips."

So maybe I will stop there and we can have a little conversation. Thank you very much.

Question: Aaron, thank you so much. We're taking a deep breath as people get their questions or comments into form. Does anybody want to get us started with dialogue here? I'm happy to start, if you'll allow.

Karen DeCotis: Sure thing. I'm going to pin you so I can see you.

Question: Hi. I'm Delia, and this is actually my first time visiting the Santa Barbara Zen Center. I'm so excited, because gosh — listening to what you had to share, and also participating in the service, has been just so nourishing to me. And what you said resonates with me completely. I love that you gave us the more accurate version of the two hands clapping, because just earlier this week I was speaking with friends who were talking about burnout and how we can continue to help and show compassion. It's very real, because I've been there — I'm there often, I guess — but what always helps me is that I'm able to recognize, first of all, that we're all one. That has been natural to me since I was probably an elementary school kid. And it always worried me that there was conflict, because we're essentially fighting ourselves. But the two hands clapping, for me, suggests that it's in the connection that pure sensation and beauty transpires. This makes perfect sense to me, because that's applause, you know? It's beautiful, it's rejuvenating, all those positive things. But it can't happen unless both are participating. This hand can't do it and this hand can't do it — it's the same motion, but it's the coming together. And so I've been rattling around in my mind the metaphor of a social synapse. In a brain synapse, the cells connect — there's an empty space where neurotransmitters are released here and they're accepted over there — but any number of things can happen that will misalign that. Sometimes it's the wrong transmitter. Sometimes the receptors aren't open. And so whenever I'm in an interaction that has challenge, I try to say, "Okay, where is the alignment issue here?" Because when the channels and the communication are clear and pure, then the signal gets through. But we're imperfect, so that doesn't always happen. It's the importance of that gap, and the crossing of that gap to connect. So I really appreciated you sharing that koan, and the accurate version of it, because now I can share that with other people. Thank you.

Karen DeCotis: You're welcome, Delia. And to remember — both are true. We can't have two hands clapping without one hand, right? So both are there. I appreciate your response. Thank you very much.

Question: Of course. Thank you. And I'll come back to Santa Barbara Zen Center — it seems like a wonderful place.

Karen DeCotis: Yes, it's very welcoming. And thank you all for allowing me to be a part of this. You're most welcome, Delia, anytime.

Question: Michael? Karen, thank you so much. There were a couple of other Zen practitioners here with us over the last couple of months, and one of them — I was talking to him afterward — said, "Oh, I'm going to work with koans." I said, "I've heard of koans but I haven't heard of practicing with them. I don't even really know what they are, to be honest. What is that?" And he said he was going to write koans that whole afternoon. I asked him, "So are you coming up with these?" And I kind of understood what they were, basically. He said, "No, no, no. I'm not creating them. I'm working with them." And so I was really looking forward to this today, to maybe put some pieces together. My question is: what's your commentary on the writing component of working with koans, if there is any?

Karen DeCotis: Well, thank you — a wonderful question and a wonderful practice. Like I said, when I worked on "Ordinary Mind Is the Way" with my teacher, I was in LA at the time and he was in Berkeley, and we did it through writing. That may not be traditionally accepted as authentic meeting, but it was for me. We had a wonderful exchange because I knew him and we felt each other's warmth. And I had people writing last week — I'm going to try it again, because they were very timid about it. Writing, especially with a pencil or pen and paper instead of the computer — as Delia was pointing out about our brains — is a special relationship to the brain when we write. And so responding to a question or a koan through writing engages parts of the body, mind, and heart that maybe just sitting doesn't. So I think for me I'm working with them like they are stories, or dreams, or poems. Just: what is this telling me about my own practice?

When we work with koans as a group, it's so funny what happens. We're working with this book of women's stories, and people would respond really differently. It was very clear that their response came from who they were. Someone was mad that the woman bested Hakuin — in fact, she thought the girl was being snotty. And someone else was like, "No, he was being that way." You come from your own stuff when you work with these koans. And that's what they're for — for us to reveal ourselves to ourselves. So journaling and poetry and all that is a way to do that. One hundred percent — it's a good way to work on it.

The Rinzai masters are now shooting down lightning at me, but I'm dodging it. I'm dodging it.

Thanks, Michael. Good. So — go write about everyday mind. "Everyday ordinary mind is the way." What is that?

Question: Hi, my name is Erin. Thank you.

Karen DeCotis: Hi, Erin.

Question: Really inspiring to hear you talk about it in such a relaxed way. I had an interesting experience where I used to live — I was touching into koans, I don't know much about them, several years ago. Because I was friends with someone connected with another area of my work, and he's Native American. I was talking to him about koans because he was curious. And he looked at me, and we were also having a conversation about how the heart is a perceptive organ — that indigenous peoples come from that perceptive organ first, rather than the mind. And so he's kind of smiling at me when we were speaking. I really resonate with the power of that as well. Even scientifically, they can show that the energy and the intelligence given off by the heart field is stronger than the mind. We were having this little exchange — I was actually telling him about the Mu koan — and he smiled and said, "This all sounds so mind." He said, "Does anyone ever in this tradition you're talking about speak about how to perceive these things from the heart?" And I said... and he's not talking about the heart in a westernized, romanticized way. I didn't even say "love." It's this perceptive field. And I'm curious if you feel like there are ways that you come across where they're interrelating with the koan from a different space. Because whenever I approach them — and quite frankly, it made me just want to turn in the other direction — my mind just goes, "Oh yeah, right." And maybe that's the point. Maybe it's just like, what's the point of doing this? Right, right. As if life doesn't present enough frustrating things — we have to go looking for them in ancient texts that are indecipherable. It's not that I want to devalue them. It's more — has it ever been spoken about from a different way? It was very fascinating to hear him speak to it. And he wasn't denigrating it. He just kind of smiled and felt like, "This mind thing you guys are always toward everything with — have you ever tried moving at it from here?" And again, it wasn't about love. It was about perceiving it through the heart.

Karen DeCotis: You may know this, but the character for "mind" in Japanese and Chinese includes the heart. It's heart-mind, right? So to me, it does include love — because I think we don't know what love is, but maybe we know what it isn't. I think I'm approaching these stories from who I am. And when I look at some of the collections and some of the commentary, I just want to tear my hair out. It's awful. I read it and it's like the koan was hard enough — this commentary makes it worse. I don't know what they're talking about. They're referring to things I don't know about. They're using metaphor and poetry. But somehow, if I can relax and just let it wash over me instead of trying to understand it — like Nanchuan said, "The way is not subject to knowing and not knowing" — letting myself read these commentaries or these stories and be confused, be befuddled, think, "These people, what is their problem?" — just really being me with them. There's freedom in that. And that freedom, I think, is what your friend is getting at — this sort of open-hearted flow, instead of a solution, instead of solving, instead of getting it. Although we love to get it, don't we? When I'm with a koan and a few things fall into place — "Oh, that's what that means" — that's a wonderful feeling. I love that. But that's me loving being right, or me loving understanding something. That's fine. But is that liberation? What's liberation is me going, "Oh, this is what Karen does. She really likes understanding things." Yeah, I get it, Karen. You like to understand things. Good for you. Okay — now the next problem of life comes forward: the dog, or the family, or the taxes, or whatever. And then who am I? So, Erin, is that at all responding to what you're asking?

Question: Yeah. I think also — when I sat there with him, he said, "You know, let's sit here with Mu a minute." And what I thought was interesting: when I came up to perceive it from that place, one of the things I can remember that came up was just simply — and I don't know if this sounds odd — I just said out loud, "I choose love." And kind of everything just dissolved. Not because I was focusing on "oh, in my heart, I need to be in the love space" — just once I went into that space, it kind of moved, it directed itself in that direction. I don't know if that would have happened had I been perceiving it from a different space. But it's just moving the energy, directing the energy to a different space. That's all.

Karen DeCotis: Well, it is what happened, right? So something else could have happened, but this is what did happen. When we talk about bodhisattva action, bodhisattva vows — which are impossible, of course — I remember Reb Anderson finally saying, and he appears to be very much in his head, he's just very analytic, brilliant, he can talk about consciousness in all these amazing ways, and it's really helpful for some of us to get cerebral about these things because it organizes our thinking. For some people it calms them down if they can be more cerebral about it. For other people, it makes them crazy. But one time he just said, "Well, you know, this is just about love. I mean, that's all we're doing here. All this investigation into consciousness, all this wisdom, all this no-self, all this emptiness — it's just about love." And coming from him, it was almost heartbreaking. It was so beautiful because it was so real. He teared up one time in an interview when I was one-on-one with him. And I could see how all the work of the mind softened the heart. That's how it was for that kind of person. For another person, opening the heart may give us the courage to engage the mind and go, "Well, I'm not very intellectual, I don't understand it, but I'm going to give it a try." And that's why we need each other. We're going to do this together. You're not going off and solving koans all by yourself. And even if you are — nobody cares, right? That's a beautiful story.

Delia, I see you've raised your hand. Did you want to jump in?

Question: Yes. I just want to say that love is that connection — it's that openness and that connection. It's when you see and appreciate one another, or whatever it may be in your presence, and you take the time to connect and be open to it. I think that's what it's all about. And there's — yeah.

Karen DeCotis: Yeah. And it's not either/or. We all have both brain and heart. We can't just use one or the other. We're integrated, just like we're integrated into the broader wholeness. And so it's when we're able to empty our preconceptions — let our mind and body fall away — and have that pure connection, which to me is love, that we become part of this incredible numinous and luminous vastness that doesn't comprise concepts or anything. It's just the whole. And it's pretty spectacular.

I think that's why we practice, and it's important that we practice. One of the things we talked about this morning in my koan salon — we were working with a koan that had to do with identity, gender identity, female and male — and we talked about getting into that space, Delia, that you are describing: a place of love, a place of non-attachment, of openness. It's very wonderful and beautiful, and it's the truth. But there's also the relative truth of people identifying in certain ways, and it's important to them. They can't just let go of that, because there may be harm happening, there may be something they need to express in being who they are. So one of the koans of a social life, of a political life, is both having what you were just describing, Delia — being in this open, vast, boundless place where we can connect and dance and not be attached to our identities — and at the same time serving in these worlds where people who have certain identities are being harmed. And the people harming them are also being harmed by doing harm. So both sides are being harmed. Does that make sense?

Question: No, no, absolutely. And I think it's that grasping for identity. And believe me, I'm a woman of color — I know about identity and attacks and non-recognition and all that other stuff. And ultimately, just let us enjoy the tapestry of life, which is rich with colors and hues and textures. It's only when it doesn't get fully unfurled, or where there's fraying in threads or disconnection of the threads, that we aren't able to appreciate the fullness of humanity. But I agree — the appreciation for who each person is, and their lived experiences and their history, is critical. So I wasn't trying to imply that we blend.

Karen DeCotis: No, I know. Yeah, right. And that's on my mind because of this conversation this morning — the importance of realizing that we are living a koan all the time. And there are things that will not be resolved. And how do we live with that?

So I'll leave you with this koan, and then if there's one last question or whatever — I don't have the names handy, but a monk asked a teacher, "What is the teaching of a lifetime?" And the response was — I'm going to just stumble right through this. The student asked, "What is the teaching of a lifetime?" The master responds: "An appropriate response." Sounds like Reb Anderson — it's older than that, but that's the teaching in our school anyway. We talk about it a lot, to the point where a friend of mine called her coaching business "An Appropriate Response," because sometimes what looks like what we call compassion is not the appropriate response. Sometimes you need a sword, right? So — taking and giving life, as they say. Thank you.

Question: Karen, I'll just look to the room here and see if there's yet another comment or question.

Question: Just real quick. Hi. This is Bob. It was my honor to be the chanter today. I want to give a little background. Our head teacher, Gary Koan Jyoji Cabrode, learned and studied with Wendy Egyoku Nakao at ZCLA. And so he considered that our mothership. As you can see today in our service, we don't have a head priest because he passed away in October. And as far as I know, Wendy is still doing well, but I use her name when I say the third dedication — "May her life be lengthened" — it better be somebody alive. I mentioned Mel once for Joel, and then I found out Mel had already passed away. So you can't give somebody a lengthy life if they've already gone. That's all background. I have one quick comment. Today we did a service which was the Heart Sutra, followed by "Identity of Relative and Absolute," and then the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, and then the Shosaimyo Kichijo Darani. You know, even days we do the Heart Sutra in Japanese and then "Identity of Relative and Absolute," followed by the Enmei Jukku Kanon Gyo. So — how is your service different? You said it was a little bit different than what we do.

Karen DeCotis: If I were following what I learned at Berkeley and San Francisco, I would have a much longer service. And they do that too — they change things, like on Saturdays they do a lengthier service, and in the mornings they'll do the Heart Sutra and one other thing. In San Antonio, I'm the only priest and I'm new there, and so I'm following what the priest before me set up. I'm trying not to be too directive and start changing everything right away. So in the mornings we just do — we don't really do a full service. We do the "All My Ancient Twisted Karma" and taking refuge. In the afternoons we'll do a chant — one day it's the Heart Sutra, one day it's something else. And then on Saturdays, we do the Heart Sutra and the Enmei Jukku Kanon Gyo. But there's a lot we don't chant, and we don't chant the ancestors. What I loved about your chanting was how you did the Jewel Mirror Samadhi — the tones you gave it. We just do flat chanting, which is so boring by comparison, and that was beautiful to hear. I wonder if I can steal that. I wonder if I can really change things up. Anyway, it was lovely, and your chanting was lovely too. And I know Joel.

Question: I was just going to say, I could listen to you all day long. The sense of humor that comes through — that's what our priest, Gary Koan Jyoji Cabrode, got me into Zen with. The sense of humor. And you have that.

Karen DeCotis: Thank you so much. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you all very much for your kindness and your listening and your practice. And thank you, Anton, again.

Question: Thank you, Karen. Deep bow from everyone here. We're going to transition into our announcements and then take our room apart. So I'm going to stop recording, and you're welcome to stay and listen to us prattle on. And Delia, thank you for joining us.

Question: Yes, Delia. And Anton, great to see you.

Question: I think we can end with the four vows, page 41.

Sunday, May 11, 2025

All right, Taishin, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. I was looking for some place to hide as you were speaking. Unfortunately, I can't do that. So here I am. It's so wonderful to be here and see so many familiar faces. As Chodo says, I was there from about 2012 to 2018, and then I traveled away for a while. And new faces. It's great to see that the sangha is still alive and well through many different transitions that we've all experienced together. So thank you very much for having me, and thank you for the invitation this morning.

This morning I want to explore the meaning of the word, or the extension of the concept, or the embodied practice of acceptance. It's a big topic, and I'm offering these three descriptions in part to acknowledge that we're not going to cover all the ground today, nor am I even going to try. I also offer them because of the way in which they're related to one another. So sometimes the words we use — in this case, the word acceptance — serve as ways of referring to a collection of things, though I'm tempted to say ideas here. What is acceptance? Somebody might ask you. Well, you say, it's kind of like this. Or, let me actually tell you a story that I once heard about acceptance. And this author that I really admire, she describes acceptance in this way. We tend to reach here and there for this and that thing because it's challenging to sum up just what acceptance is in something that might fit on a bumper sticker, for example.

It's not impossible, however, and I'm confident that if we had enough time, we could accomplish it. And if I had my way, this would be in the form of a poem or a Zen-style, perplexity-inducing story. And we'd probably wrap up our time together with Nyo Suisan saying, close enough for jazz. Such efforts are worthwhile in their own right. I consider conceptual clarity a virtue. Arguably, though, they're more worthwhile for their influence on our actions — how we practice our acceptance in our day-to-day lives using this body, heart, mind.

Our relationships afford unending opportunities to practice acceptance, including our relationships with ourselves. And that's really what I'm going to be talking about today. When we do this, we add more to the loosely bound field, this conceptual space that we sometimes reach around in and that I mentioned a moment ago. Thich Nhat Hanh might call this watering the seeds planted in the rich soil of our heart-mind. In time those seeds sprout, and in time flowers bloom. And the appearance of new life in this field influences how we use the words that refer to the practices of our daily life. Actions, speech, and thoughts that we did not previously see as acceptance are now recognized as such. So we have our words shaping our ideas, shaping our actions, and our actions in turn shaping our ideas and shaping our words, how we use language with one another. And this happens because nothing is anything all by itself, and everything is anything owing to the totality of all conditions present at any one time. Call this the preamble to a story that I want to tell.

Our story features a young man. Young here means early thirties. He's ambitious and too sure of himself and his abilities. This young man is also nearing the end of his graduate studies at a well-respected university. There's a lot to tie off before early summer, and he feels overwhelmed. In addition to that, he's already really tired, exhausted — I think the preferred term these days is burnt out. So what does our young man do? He reaches out for support, and in a familiar place, but it's not at all a wholesome one: the liquor store. All varieties of beer and whiskey become the means by which he continues to push himself. His behavior, his ambition, is reckless. While our young man senses that this is unskillful, he persists. The reset, the rationalization at the time, is that this is only for a time. This is temporary, he tells himself, and when all this is done, this will be done too.

Things don't unfold that way, however. There is temporary relief when the young man does wrap up his graduate studies and moves to another well-respected university for his first faculty appointment. The new environment gives great life. He's energized. He's filled with optimism. But things change. Soon, the responsibilities of professional academic life become too much for our too ambitious, too confident — in a word, deluded — young man. The unskillful behavior resumes, and it's worse. He's under the influence in the mornings and on the job. He begins missing work, feigning sickness to his colleagues and students, though he is sick in another and more significant way.

The young man falls apart near the end of his three-year contract and resigns to hide his now self-destructive behavior. We're long past that period when it was just about temporary relief from stress. This is subsistence until non-existence. With some time away, however, stability returns. Somehow the young man finds employment at another well-respected university. Don't ask me quite how this happens, but it happens. He tells himself, I learned my lesson, and it'll be different this time. It's not. In fact, things are worse than before. He misses nearly half the first term of his appointment, due in large part to not one but two hospitalizations. The young man lasts one month into the second term before falling apart completely.

Several weeks later, he finds himself sitting with fifty other people in a large circle. He's at a treatment facility for severe substance abuse. By all measures, the young man knows that he has a problem, and he's had a problem for some time. He put himself into treatment. No one compelled him to do this. There was no intervention on the part of friends and family. He found the facility, booked his time there, set his affairs in order, went off — and yet he can't bring himself, when his turn comes in this large circle, to introduce himself in part by admitting or acknowledging or adopting the label, or putting himself underneath the concept — we could use any number of expressions here, and it really doesn't matter which one we pick, because precision is not what's important. Gesturing in a certain direction is. An alcoholic. The words just won't come out. He stutters and stammers and looks down in shame, kind of in disbelief that this is where he is. He knows, but he hasn't accepted this part of the reality of his life.

In time, something does shift, and the young man is able to accept himself as he is. And in doing this, he accomplishes a significant step on the road to recovery. His life continues, and it does so in a different direction.

I've told this story several times now, and each time it's a little different and it's for a different end. Once I used it to explore the awesome power of attachment, or craving, or thirst — from one point of view, the root of suffering. This story that I've just told you unfolds over a period of about four to five years, and there are multiple instances where it's clear to the young man that this is not going well. There's a great level of dysfunction, and yet he keeps moving in this particular direction because he's craving something. He's attached to something. He's thirsty for something. And I can tell you it's not just beer or whiskey.

In another setting, I offered it as evidence for the unrestricted possibility of transformation. In the brief introduction that Chodo offered, it was mentioned that when I lived in Santa Barbara I was a student of the late and much-loved Koan Gary Janka Sensei. Many of you know that koans sprouted and flowered in the White Plum lineage of Taizan Maezumi. And when I was there, I read a lot of Maezumi's transcribed talks. And from a talk titled "Live the Life of Impermanence," I still carry with me the following passage. Maezumi says: in a twenty-four-hour period alone, we are being born and dying six and a half billion times. It's so fast we can't notice it. Our life comes about through causations — direct and indirect causations — and appears as conditions that are constantly changing. Having this body-mind is always a result of many, many causes, all constantly changing. And when we really see this fact, right there, there's freedom.

That freedom, the condition of all life, necessarily helped facilitate the young man's turning. He's grateful and humbled, I assure you. But today, as I said at the outset of this talk, I want to use the story I've told to explore this something we call acceptance.

The young man in our story knew he had a problem, but there was a barrier that prevented him from sharing what he knew with other human beings. It's pretty easy, I find, to share our secrets with trees, with non-human animals — like the two cats that are sitting in front of me right now, really trying to get in my lap, which is great given how many layers of black fabric I'm wearing — the stars, and the moon. In twelve-step programs, personal inventories are shared with God and with another human being. And sometimes people ask, why do I need to share it with another human being? Isn't sharing it with God sufficient? And the response, in short, is that sharing with God is too easy. When we sit down and share face-to-face with another human being, we're sitting down and sharing face-to-face with ourselves. The other person serves as a mirror, showing us what's here in this body-heart-mind. And that, I find, is not at all easy.

Our young man knew he had a problem, but he hadn't accepted it. And that's a really curious condition. And what's more, in time he would be able to share his story with others — a sign, I say, that he had come to accept that which he knew about himself. And so I want to ask the questions: what changed, and how did it change?

The Buddha taught that the root cause of our suffering, from one point of view, is the identification of ourselves with a construction. This construction is formed from our beliefs and our desires, our judgments and our preferences, labels we adopt, and a certain subset of all the relationships that we stand in, which come together from likes and dislikes, proximity and time, and so much more. Even though I stand in relationship to all things, I'm going to pick out these ones — with my coworkers, these ones with my family, these ones with people in my community — because these are the ones I either like, and I'll push away the ones I don't like. All of this kind of comes together. And sometimes I call this construction that we form the great story we tell about our lives. Some parts of it we know really well and we like to tell other people. Other parts of it we know less well and maybe we don't want to share them with other people.

Others call this the constructed self, the small self. And in a chant that I can't remember the name of, it comes up as ego delusion — which I think is a great name for a band, by the way. It doesn't really matter what we call it, however. What does matter is that we identify with this story. We believe that it's who and what we are. And in some way we can't ever quite articulate, we believe that it's separate from everything else. There's the entire world out there, and there's my story over here, and somehow these two things are separate from one another.

And this is really important, because identification and separation encourage uncertainty, and uncertainty encourages fear — particularly in the form of anxiety. Do things out there, things that I judge separate from me, want to help me or hurt me? And how can I tell? Are they, collectively or individually, friend or foe? And how can I be sure? I don't know what they are, only that they're not me, but somehow other. This chain and its reactions — identification, separation, uncertainty, fear, anxiety — has several more links. And among them, a craving for protection. One way we can and do try to protect ourselves is by hiding, endeavoring to keep secret those things that we believe injurious to how others perceive, interpret, and understand the great story we tell about our lives.

And I'm going to stop my armchair analysis now and simply say that it's not wrong to think this way. It's not wrong. It's not unreasonable. It's not silly. It's not mistaken. It's not incorrect. It's not foolish or anything else of a similar sentiment.

When you sail out in a boat to the middle of the ocean where no land is in sight and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and it does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round nor square. Its features are infinite in variety. It is like a palace. It is like a jewel. It only looks circular as far as you can see at that time, and all things are like this. Although there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see as far as your eye of practice can reach.

Those are not my words. I wish they were. Those are Dogen Zenji's words from Shobogenzo Genjokoan. And there are some good words.

Whatever your story is today, or this week, or this month, or this year, please remember that it's only a story. It reads as it does because of where you are right now, and where you are right now is constantly changing, as Maezumi reminds us. But I feel like I'm digressing, so we're going to go back to our young man.

The story with which I opened this talk is part of the young man's great story about his life. He knows it. He identifies with it. And at the time, it's so dominant that he believes it's the whole of who he is. The young man dares not, however, accept it — for fear of how others will perceive him, and for how he must see himself. He believes that if he does this, he's going to be destroyed. Poof! It's going to vanish.

But as he sits and listens to those also in the circle with him at this treatment facility, who are sharing some and similar parts of the great stories about their lives, he observes that not happening to them. They don't just go poof and vanish into thin air. They continue on — laughing and crying, trying their level best, and recommitting when things go awry. They're still very much alive and well. So the young man takes a leap of faith. He tries the same himself, giving his story away through sharing it with those present. And behold, he too doesn't vanish. There's no poof here.

And it's simple to see why. The young man was, as all of us are always, more than the great story he told about his life. He reconnected with that whole, all-inclusive self when he accepted the part of it in which he repeatedly abused alcohol, contributing to great suffering for himself and others.

And how did that happen? He let go. He let go. In fitting Zen fashion, he accepted the reality of his life by letting go of the story he'd been telling about it. This letting go, by the way, doesn't negate the harm that arose from unskillful behavior. It doesn't minimize the suffering that was co-created by unwholesome actions. And furthermore, it's not an abdication of responsibility to try setting things straight through making amends. The story is still there. It's still important. But now, the story is in its proper place.

As I bring this talk to a close, I want to stay with this expression — proper place — and offer two teachings that gesture in its meaning's direction. The first is from Dogen's Shobogenzo Genjokoan, and some of you I know have heard it many, many times:

To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no trace continues endlessly.

That's pretty good. But we can also say it in this way: to study the Buddha way is to study the great story we tell about our life, in all its chapters and verse. Studying this great story is at the same time letting it go. Letting go of our great story is accepting the all-inclusive reality of our life as it is. When accepting our whole self, the chapters and verse as well as the chapters and verse of others reside here and there, none dominating. Buddha's boundless field. Grasping and pushing away cease, and the resulting rest continues endlessly.

But that's a lot of words. Maybe you want something a little bit shorter to carry around in your pocket from day to day. So I'll give you a second teaching, which is significantly shorter. Joan Didion opens her essay "The White Album" with the simple sentence: we tell ourselves stories in order to live. And I add: and we let go of our stories to keep on living.

Thank you very much.

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Chodo: Thank you so much, Taishin. A wonderful, thought-provoking presentation. And of course, no surprise, having studied with you. Your words are too kind, but I will accept them on this Mother's Day. All right. Well, we're going to take a deep breath and let people think about what they'd like to talk with you about. Our format will be: hands together, look at me, and I'll acknowledge you, and then you can voice your question or comment to Taishin. Anyone like to get us started? Just if you could state your name, because he may not know you.

Question: Great talk. Thank you. As you were summing up that last line, I was thinking of a sister of mine who has not studied Zen or anything, and is a bit of an alcoholic and this and that, but she's very functional — CEO of a company and everything. But one of her sayings — I don't know where she got it — is, "Oh, get over yourself." Get over yourself. I mean, I guess it's common parlance. I don't know.

Taishin Michael Augustin: That one is a great one too, to tell oneself when you're getting all bollocks — get over it, or get over yourself. It's a great one. Yeah, thank you for that.

Question: Hi, I'm Erin. Your talk was really wonderful. It was thought-provoking, as you said. Two things I really connected with. One was when you were speaking to identification and separation — they were such a feedback loop. When I identify with the story, it just in some way creates even more uncertainty, and then I go back to re-identify because of that fear. Oh, now I'm over here feeling separated — I think it's so deep in our bones, you know. Just sitting with that experience.

I also love that you quoted Joan Didion. It reminded me actually of a Native American woman writer. She said something that for a few years I've just been obsessed with — it's just been in my mind a lot. And right when you said that, something kind of clicked. She says, in a long essay, "A story is an energy, and our stories are our ancestors." And I've been almost in a koan relationship with that. It's in my home. Like, what does that mean? And I'm dancing with it. So that gave it another quick twist of the Rubik's Cube. And again, I just love your insight with Didion's comment — how we can look at the story — which makes sense to me because I also relate to the world a lot in terms of energy. It's just energies moving, and not attaching, especially with other people, to not get attached to their story. Like, what's the energy moving through? But then the other aspect of being shared and alive and having responsibility to who we are on this planet — a story of our family, a story of whatever it is that we're in relationship with — honoring those stories, because they do comprise who we are, part of who we are, in body. And I have come to see them differently. Whereas before, when I was younger, I was always struggling to let go of all of them. Somehow proving that I'd transcended them. So thank you for that too. Both of those are an impetus to go deeper into that something.

Taishin Michael Augustin: You're very welcome. And I'll offer one more side to the Rubik's Cube, one more color for your enjoyment or frustration. A teacher I worked with for a while said to me: our stories are like fossils of a life that's already moved on. And I hold that one close for precisely the reasons that you're offering — that they're important. They make up who and what we are, and we have an important relationship to them, and we still need to look at them because we can learn from them. But like fossils, they have a place where we can go and spend time with them. They don't need to be front and center all the time, like they sometimes can be. They don't need to be the lens you're looking through in your present life all the time. You can pull them off the shelf when you need to relate with them.

The other thing I feel inclined to say touches on this idea of a feedback loop that you mentioned. I was reminded of the Buddha under the Bodhi tree many, many years ago, and how Mara — supposedly Mara comes and says, what right do you have to awaken, Buddha, dude? It's like great doubt coming, right? The personification of great doubt. And what does the Buddha do? He touches his hand to the earth and calls the earth and all living beings to bear witness. It's this great leap, I think. He doesn't know what's going to happen, but it feels right to reconnect in that way and jump outside of this great doubt that we can get caught in — can I do this? I don't know. I need others to support me as I try to move outside of this little cage I've built for myself. Thank you.

Question: Alan. I have some chaotic thoughts, and maybe you can help put them together. Sure. Digestive systems of cows and people — we consume very different things, but I've heard that the final product is the same: glucose for energy, and then other things for bone and tissue. The digestive system is very different, but ends up with that final product. So relative to acceptance and the story, the thought that comes to mind is: are the stories that we tell ourselves, given that there are probably eight billion different stories on the earth today, leading to a similar product? What is that? Is there a final product that these eight billion different stories are leading to? And then the second question would be: is there an attitude relative to ourselves and others which will help produce that final positive product?

Taishin Michael Augustin: Those are two fantastic questions. So the first question is, is there some one end product that all these stories are leading to — similar to the food we take in and the food that cows take in, all producing the same end thing, just in different ways? The response that leapt immediately to mind was liberation. It's tempting to say this is the centerpiece of practice, but I dare not say anything is the centerpiece of practice. But an important part of practice for me is just that transformation of ignorance into wisdom, transformation of suffering into liberation. And what feels alive for me right now is that the stories are a kind of fertilizer that we use to water wholesome seeds in the heart-mind, and when they sprout and flower, there's an instance of awakening. That's what it's all working towards, in its own way and in its own time. For some people it might take a year or two. For others it may take multiple lifetimes. And in that case, I'm really glad that we might have multiple lifetimes, because I've got a lot of work to do, and it's not all going to get done today.

And what was the second question — are there attitudes that we can offer for others to help make a positive final product? Not knowing feels really important there. When I think about what has gotten me into trouble in my younger years — I'm an old man now — but in my younger years, it was thinking I knew everything. I didn't have a whole lot of humility or gratitude. Another thing that comes to mind is a willingness to just try things out and be surprised by what the results are. This willingness and not knowing seem to go hand in hand. And the third I might describe is rigorous honesty, which isn't pushy. It's not combative. It's not in your face. But an attitude of being transparent with others and with yourself about where you're at. And if you can do that, certainly you'll be okay, and you might be able to support other people who are in places where support is needed and welcome. Does that answer the question, or at least give something to work with?

Alan: Yeah, that's really good. I'll just have one brief comment. That binary attitude — right answer, wrong answer, score the touchdown good, get scored against bad — I experienced that same thing. I said, boy, when I was fifteen, I had an answer for everything, and life was kind of a burden. There was a little stress in being infinitely knowledgeable. Now it's better this way.

Taishin Michael Augustin: Yeah. The truth is not a thing.

Question: Hi, Taishin. It's Emi. Hi, Emi. Thank you for sitting with us and giving us your talk. There are so many things to comment on, and I love hearing everybody's thoughts as well. The idea of acceptance and validation is so important, I think. And it seems to resonate with me — this idea of getting close to our story, or who we think we are, and then backing up. And letting go. Because for a long time I was thinking, let go — let go of what? It would bother me. So the invitation to notice your story, and the whole idea of being validated by others — it's so important, because we could hide from ourselves. Imagine that. Anyway, thank you. See you soon.

Taishin Michael Augustin: Thank you. And yeah, I hope to be in California before too long, though it might be a little while still.

Question: Augie, if I could call you Augie. Sure. I used to call you that. Your last name, Augustin — you've got a Pope now. So your name takes on a different meaning. Congratulations on that. You didn't go to Villanova either. I want to say thank you. You're just as much of a rascal as I always remember. Some things don't change.

One thing that came to my mind: when you were in the doan team and playing the fish drum today — Josephine did her first drumming today, by the way. Congratulations. Well done. And you always looked at me, and we said we always threatened to go full speed like the Japanese temples. And we said, our sangha can't handle that. So we never did it.

Taishin Michael Augustin: I'm still threatening.

Question: A short story. During the pandemic, there was this old man, and he was drinking more than usual, because out of boredom most people drank more during the pandemic. Full disclosure: I go to my medical exam and you check the box — two drinks, two to five a week, one a day, ten a week, more than seventeen. And I just checked two to five, you know. And then the radical honesty. Oh my God. Dinner's not ready. I'll just have a little wine with cheese. Oh, a beer with dinner is nice. And afterwards, a whiskey would go good watching TV. I added them up — seventeen a week. And I just quit. Didn't need a twelve-step program. But sometimes confronting your honesty leads to something that says, I have to change. So thank you for your radical honesty and for this talk today.

Taishin Michael Augustin: Thank you, Nyo Suisan. I was so excited when I saw you in that seat, because I too remembered — we would look at each other and be like, is Koan gonna be ready for us to go full speed? I can imagine him saying slow down, because we never quite did it. And yeah, thanks for sharing that about your time during the pandemic. I think everyone caught on, but I'm the young man in the story. And yeah, that was a really tough time for me too. But it took a little bit longer for me to find my way through. I'm glad you didn't have to go through some of that stuff.

Question: Just one more — to tag on about how bad habits can creep in. And this talk shines light on that. Except — look at the bad habit, like the alcoholic in the twelve-step, you know. We've all got our own programs privately, these different things. So they're all great reminders of being honest and looking at our behaviors and letting go — accept and then let go and change. Knowing that your body on the molecular level is constantly dying — that was a beautiful analogy too, you know, to realize that you're not trapped in the bad habit or the self that you think you've been, that you have that opportunity. The body's changing all the time. So go with it and refresh. So anyway, it was very applicable to that type of thing — bad habits, looking at them. Yeah.

Taishin Michael Augustin: Yeah, it's Josephine, right? Yeah, thank you. When I look back on that period of my life now, I am amazed at how slowly it started. It seemed perfectly innocent, in the way that many unskillful behaviors that grow to become really dominating in our lives do. And all of a sudden — when did it happen that I had such a dependency and such a challenge functioning without this particular substance? You can't really pinpoint it. That's how subtle the shifting was over a period of time. And then — I wish I could think of a way to help younger me, or those who are still struggling now, see that freedom that's always present. I was carrying around that quote for a long time before I really felt it. It was just kind of this intellectual idea — yeah, it's out there, it somehow relates to my life. But when the change started to happen, it was like, oh. And I could have done that a year ago, two years ago, if only I had been willing. And I say that without judgment, right? I just wasn't ready at the time to get the support that I needed. So thank you.

Chodo: Any last comment? We're coming up on the hour. So if we have another question, we have time. Otherwise, we'll call it.

Question: Hey, Lisa. Yes. Lisa, not a question. I'm delighted to be here. And I'll always remember — we were together, paired together for an exercise. I remember at UCSB, Koan was doing these exercises. It was just really lovely. And I'm very happy to see you again. Look forward to it in person.

Taishin Michael Augustin: Thank you, Elisa.

Chodo: Taishin, it feels like family having you with us. And what a wonderful presentation. I think I've learned a lot from teachers who are strong and certain in their presentations. I think I've learned more from teachers who are vulnerable and open-handed, and who talk to us about the liberating nature of that. So really, so grateful to you. Have a wonderful Mother's Day. Thank you for being with us.

Taishin Michael Augustin: Thanks, Chodo. And thank you, everyone. Hope to see you again soon.

Sunday, June 8, 2025

All right, and away we go. So just a quick small correction — I have to say okay to the bar that says it's being recorded. All right, cool. That helps.

So, small correction: my Dharma name is actually Daisho, just two syllables. And the only reason I get a little anxiety when people mess it up is because daiosho means something very different. I am not calling myself a great teacher. My full name is Myo Kan Daisho, and so myo shows up a lot and can mean wondrous or subtle. In this case, Jane didn't write it in English, so I'm going to go with "wondrous insight, great laugh" — sho could be joy or laugh. So yeah, I go by Daisho Chris Burnham, and I am not an ancestor.

So I've been a student of Peter and Jane Schneider since 2010. That's when I started practicing with them at Beginner's Mind Zen Center. And sort of from the get-go, I started hearing about Tassajara, and way earlier than any reasonable person should, I started thinking about ordination. But Peter was like, well, maybe give it some time. And enough time passed and I was still interested, and so Jane ordained me as a priest in 2023. Coming up on two years. It's wild.

All right. So there's some extra context here: Mark Fraser is also part of our sangha. He was one of our contingent to go to Tassajara for sangha week not too long ago, so he got a big helping of Zen forms recently. And that's what my talk is about. I just titled it, "What's So Great About Zen Forms?"

I think there's a decent chance that a lot of you have already noticed some of the things I want to talk about, so I just wanted to share some of my thoughts. But before I get too much into that, I wanted to say to all of you — the whole Santa Barbara Zen Sangha — thank you so much for inviting me to give a talk. I'm really honored and humbled by the opportunity. I also wanted to start off by thanking and acknowledging my teachers, Jane and Peter Schneider, who, as you heard, were the founders of Beginner's Mind Zen Center in Northridge, Los Angeles. And also, just to say, this talk is simply to encourage you in your practice. A special shout-out to Greg Fain, because he was my teacher for a while, and that's how he starts his talks. He said it was okay if I did it too.

So there are a lot of reasons why I think Zen forms are so great, and I'm going to try to succinctly discuss most or all of them. But every time I do a Zen form, it's like a new way to appreciate it. And that's one of the things I think is so great about them.

As I was saying, probably most of you are very familiar with Zen forms. We start learning about them with our very first visit to a Zen center. And just to make sure we're on the same page: when I say forms, I'm speaking of certain things we do and the way we do them. In the Navy, a salute would be like a Navy form — they call those customs and courtesies. The same sort of thing we do in Zen, we call forms, or so I've heard. It seems to be the going vocabulary word.

I think forms are a kind of underrated aspect of Zen practice, but they're actually a really big part of it. Examples would be how we hold our hands depending on what we're doing — if we're just walking, we might hold our hands in shashu, or when bowing, put our hands in gassho and lift them above our ears. Sometimes it's which foot we use when we enter a space, where do we bow, how do we bow, how do we offer incense, how do we move around the room — do we stay at right angles along the perimeter? Does that matter? It can vary from place to place. How we put on our robes, how we wear them, which robes you wear, and so on.

So one thing that I think makes forms so great is that they give shape to our activity and to the space and time that we're practicing in. In a very real way, I feel it's in no small part our practice through Zen forms that actually makes a room a zendo or a Buddha hall instead of a karate dojo or a yoga studio. A bundt cake is only a bundt cake, for instance, because the batter is poured into a bundt cake form for baking. Similarly, we collectively pour our activity into these forms while we are in these spaces, and thus we create a Zen temple.

Participating in the activity of a Zen temple is also pretty cool because of how old many of these forms are. When we offer incense, we are embodying the activity of countless monks who lived and practiced throughout the world over many hundreds of years. When we bow, it is as if we are connected to every Buddhist who has ever bowed. Our practice keeps these traditions alive and maintains a continuity all the way from our modern lives back to Shakyamuni himself.

In Zen, we place most emphasis on meditation, of course, but there's also plenty of textual study. And the forms are what give Zen its devotional aspect. At first glance, devotional practices might seem much less practical than zazen. Maybe they seem like little more than window dressing, or even mild superstition. A common question that comes up when folks are being introduced to Zen is: why do we bow? And really, when we're holding our hands a certain way, or when we bow and lift Buddha's feet above our heads, what are we actually doing? When we put our robe on top of our head for chanting the Okesa, what are we doing there? What's the point of any ritual?

Well, on top of everything else I've mentioned, devotional practices — forms — are the way we show respect to the spaces and the entire practice of Zen. Showing respect is a very good thing. To some extent, it conditions our attitude toward the spaces we use to practice and the practice itself, and this can help our motivation. If, whenever we go to the Zen center, we're focused and deferential and intentional, that conditions our attitude toward the space and toward the practice. I've noticed, at least for me, that has an effect on how I feel about doing it. It creates a place — physically and mentally — that I want to go to, especially when I've been out in the world, like at the grocery store. It's like, ah, I get some peace and some devotional activity for a little bit.

But also, showing respect is just the right thing to do. This practice is powerful and transformational, and it has been developed and passed down to us by many thousands who have gone before us and devoted their lives to transmitting the Dharma. The Noble Eightfold Path includes right action, and this respect definitely counts. In these and other ways, being reverent and showing respect is as beneficial to our spiritual growth as reflection and contemplation.

Now I'm getting to the points about forms that I think make them really great. Forms complement our sitting practice in two ways. First, we hold the forms; then the forms hold us. Depending on the temple, there could be a lot of forms or just a few. They might be practiced very rigorously or more relaxed, but in all cases they show us our minds as well as guide our minds to the present moment. When we are thinking about which foot to use, or listening to which bell is ringing and remembering to bow or not bow, or holding our hands in a certain mudra — we have to focus our attention on what we're doing in the present moment. If we mess up a form, maybe because we were daydreaming, our attention gets snapped back to the present moment. This exercise in intentional focus is a different way to do off the cushion what we are trying to do while on it: keep coming back to the present moment.

But then, when we have internalized the forms and know them well, they become more automatic. At that point, they offer us a container, so we can think less about what we are doing and just continue the effort of seated zazen even when we get off the cushion. We can let ourselves experience the present moment and enjoy that experience for what it is.

My last thought is just this: forms direct us toward and help hold us in the present moment — here, now, where our lives are. This is really nice for, among other reasons, the simple and important fact that we can't find any liberation or contentment anywhere besides here and now. Our intentional action, guided by the forms, shapes our momentary existence into something elegant, reverent, and peaceful. And this, in turn, makes the ground of our lives more fertile for cultivating awakening, practice-enlightenment, freedom, and joy.

Thank you very much for your kind attention, and please take very good care of yourselves.

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Facilitator: Thank you so much for that really helpful sharing with us this morning. I think before we open it up to questions and answers, it might be nice for you to get a sense of who's here, since we have a few new faces — or faces that aren't with us very often. So if it's okay with you, I'll have everyone in the room introduce themselves just by name, and then we'll open it up to questions and comments on your talk.

Daisho Chris Burnham: Yes, that would be great.

Facilitator: I'm going to try to be Steven Spielberg with this iPad here. Go ahead.

Juliana: Hi, I'm Juliana.

Dan: Dan.

Alan: Alan.

Elisa: Elisa. Hello.

Josephine: Josephine.

Brad: Brad.

Facilitator: I think that covers it — and I'm Dave. "Butcherer of names" is my Dharma name.

Daisho Chris Burnham: Well, you're in good company, so that's cool.

Facilitator: So take a deep breath and feel free to jump in with any questions or comments on Daisho's presentation this morning.

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Question: I'm a great believer in momentum. Hearing you talk about that connection — when we bow, we're connected with a tradition that goes back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, or lighting the incense — I hadn't thought in exactly these terms before, but when we engage in these forms in the temple, we put our body in a certain position, and then hopefully our mind comes along. So you're building momentum within yourself at that stage. And then couldn't there be a group momentum also? Others are dressed a certain way, you see them doing it. So ideally, are you trying to create an individual momentum, a group momentum, and then that connection to monks and practitioners who were doing these same traditions thousands of years ago? Is that a way that we can develop momentum to propel ourselves and get grounded in the now?

Daisho Chris Burnham: I would say absolutely yes. And I like what you pointed out about how — and I've heard this elaborated on through psychological studies, more in the hard sciences nowadays — showing the connection between what we call our mind and what we think of as just our body. I heard, and I'm not sure if this is really true or not, but I think I've tried it and seen it can be true, that making yourself smile — not sarcastically, but just trying to genuinely hold a smile — can actually have an influence. Just like how if I feel happy inside, the outside will smile, there can be a two-way street to that. So we put our body in the posture of a Buddha, and we're sort of helping guide our mind in that direction as well. I would definitely say that counts as momentum.

Then with the group aspect — it's like peer pressure, but in a good way. I have noticed that sitting in the zendo at Tassajara, I'm way more encouraged to sit still and not move at the slightest discomfort. When I'm alone, I'm much more prone to adjusting my posture if I feel a need. Whereas when I'm sitting with a group — not just at Tassajara, but at City Center or Beginner's Mind Zen Center or anywhere — the threshold for what qualifies as something worth moving to address is much higher. And that's definitely because I've got people to the right, people to the left, people behind me, all sitting still, and that encourages me.

I think that's part of what makes sangha the most precious of the Triple Treasures, or the Three Jewels — it's a hard thing to do what we're doing on our own. When we have other people doing it with us, that's a huge source of encouragement, a huge source of momentum. Every little bit helps. So definitely, thank you for your comment and question.

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Question: I'd like to contribute that when I think of forms, I contextualize it within choreography. Though I was never part of the military, I'm in awe of the precision forms they generate. And for a period of time I studied Tai Chi, and our teacher, Master Ni, would communicate that to practice these forms ten times is one thing, a hundred times much different, a thousand times much much different, ten thousand times much much much different. So the same forms being practiced over and over again generates something qualitatively within us. And when those forms are expressed within a group setting, what happens for me is that individual mind dissolves, and I am now participating in group mind — or group mindfulness — which is much, much different.

Daisho Chris Burnham: I concur. And it's funny, because both in Zen and in the Navy, I've noticed there's this sort of aversion based on some fear of losing individuality. When I told some friends I was going into the Navy, they were like, oh no, you're going to get brainwashed, yada yada. And I was also a little worried about that. Doing Zen practice, a similar fear came up — like, am I going to disappear, become a zombie or something? That hasn't come up for a while, but it definitely came up early on. And what a few teachers and my own experience have shown me is that it's impossible.

I think it's fair to say that as Zen students we are trying to loosen our attachment to our ideas of our small self — even, for me, this almost infatuated relationship I have with who I think I am. It's a natural thing, and in a sense a healthy thing, creating this kind of avatar to interact with the world as it arises seemingly separate from us. So when people say, "everything is one" — yes, but we still have these small selves, and their mere existence is not a hindrance to enlightenment. What can hinder practice, or our appreciation of what's also true, is the firm attachment to our stories about ourselves.

In Zen temples, as we do these practices with a lot of other people, and just in general as we sit zazen, that sort of naturally loosens up a little bit. But we never stop being individuals in the conventional sense — we just get a lot of help from the group participating in these activities together.

Same in the military, actually. It's funny, because how so not brainwashed everyone around me was — everyone had really big, strong personalities. There was a lot of resistance during boot camp to any kind of programming or whatever. And yet when it was time for graduation, we all stayed in line, we all did the thing at the same time. And it was like a really wonderful dance. I love the observation that it's like choreography.

For the military, the shedding of attachment to the individual self is for the greater good — you might have to jump on a grenade, in the most extreme case, or just go relieve the guy who's been on watch for five hours even though your bed feels comfortable. That's the practical aspect of forms as a way of training out our attachment to our individual small selves.

For Zen, it's a very similar thing but toward a different end. Realizing that our individual small selves are kind of a fiction is really helpful for understanding the rest of reality, for lack of a better word, because the conventional truth never stops being true — we just appreciate its limitations. There's so much more to everything. Anyway, I was told specifically to try not to lose the thread, so I'm going to stop there and ask the next person to say something.

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Question: Well, this will probably go off topic again. I'm guessing your day job is at Diablo Canyon — am I right? So thank you for your work producing carbon-free energy there. I think that's really important. But my question — or my feeling — is this: the environment is really important to me, and I came to Zen practice largely through its Daoist roots. When I was at Tassajara, just walking in the wilderness there impressed me much more than being in the zendo with the human forms. Nature — we can't match nature. It's just so magnificent in itself. And I've found that going on long backpacking trips has had a more profound effect on me than zazen. So the forms — I do them because I like to sit with Zen groups, and the formal meditation brings me closer to nature, but I always feel like I'm going through the motions, as if that's the price of admission for sitting with a group. I don't normally sit with this group, so don't hold my question against them.

Daisho Chris Burnham: Not at all. I haven't done a lot of long backpacking trips — I've never actually done any backpacking. But I certainly like to walk on trails, and I love sitting in nature. There's a particular rock at the top of Black Hill in Morro Bay, and every now and then I like to hike up to it. It's a very small hike — I'm almost embarrassed to call it a hike — but it's a short, delightful one. Going up there and sitting zazen on the rock is really nice. Being out in nature is really nice, and I get what you're saying: being in a room surrounded by people and things we've cut and shaped from wood or metal, or in a modern building with drywall and plaster and electricity — that's going to have a different feel than nature.

In those instances, one thought I have is that anywhere — not just holding a particular frame of mind at the grocery store or driving — but anywhere, what we can do is try to keep with us what we're cultivating in a zendo. Like in a karate dojo, we're practicing something we then take out into our lives. Similarly, there's formal Zen practice in a room with people, and that has very large value to it, and it doesn't need to be compared to other things, because it's all relevant.

I have had more interesting experiences outside of a zendo than inside of one. But I firmly believe that those experiences would not have come to fruition if it weren't for the hours and hours of sitting inside a zendo. So yeah, it's all part of the same team, all part of the same continuity.

In a way, I think one thing that makes zazen in a zendo valuable that being out in nature doesn't offer is that it's such a tight container. We really get down to the meat and potatoes of the training. And I 100% appreciate the notion of not going into zazen with a gaining idea, because that's counterproductive. But there is a reason why we're sitting and facing a wall for 30-minute chunks at a time, doing those chunks a lot over weeks and years and so on.

We can't train in nature the same way we train in a zendo. But out in nature is, I think, where we'll often see the fruits of that training. Getting to sit down on a rock at the top of Black Hill in Morro Bay and just appreciate it — that's not formal zazen training. I'm getting to use a zazen form in a natural setting and just enjoy the connection with nature. And I get to do that because of the time I've spent in a zendo.

That being said — I did a practice period at Tassajara back in 2019, and there was a week where every single day was just gray and rainy. It is what it is and has its own enjoyability. But then — I think it was the fifth day, and I think it might have been sesshin, I can't remember — one day had the most beautiful weather we'd had in a while. And I was a little bit bad. I decided to sign out of one of the periods of zazen. I signed out on the tanking pad — that's where, if you're sick and not going to be present, you put a note so they know why. My reason? I put "sun's out, monks out." And I went and sat zazen on a bench near the entry gate and just enjoyed looking at the ground and watching a squirrel out of the corner of my eye.

Is that good? Is it bad? Is it better? Is it worse? Honestly, I think my practice is better served if I just throw out all the comparing words and the impulse to compare, and instead look at that impulse and try to track it down rather than follow it. But yeah, I think it's all good. Thank you.

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Question: I first should start by saying I met Peter in 1973 in Kyoto, Japan. Peter helped me find a house to stay in and took care of me for the first few months I was out there. I didn't see much of them after that, but I kept hearing about them, so it goes back quite a while.

The second thing I was going to say is that because I was in Japan, I met the person who became my wife, who was Japanese, and she bows at everything. I realized that in Japanese culture it's also a cultural phenomenon — someone like my wife might say she's not religious, not a Buddhist, yet she bows at Buddhist shrines and bows at everything, including at the spot in the Central Valley where James Dean ran into a tree. When we first got to that area, I pointed out they'd put a kind of protective barrier around a tree — turns out it's not actually the tree he hit, but there's a little restaurant out there with a memorial to James Dean. I explained it to my wife, and then every time we drove that road going through the Central Valley, going 50 miles an hour, she would turn and bow. And she had no idea who James Dean was. Just a famous person.

There's a sensibility, I think, in Japanese culture that translates into Zen — not into Chinese Buddhism, which is different, neither one better than the other. There's something very Japanese about what we're doing. She bows on the telephone always. I pointed it out to her and she said, "Oh yeah, I guess so." It's just a natural expression of respect, not only for people, but for rocks and stones and nature — she'll bow to things out in the woods.

A final comment: in China, mountains become associated with Buddhist practice and pilgrimage, and the shape of the body is often represented as a mountain. The cycles of water and sun and wind are reflected through the forms of the body, and these create ritual patterns as well. On most sacred mountains in China, there are what are called meditation stones — like your place on Black Hill. They're beautiful big stones overlooking a valley, large enough for two or three people to sit on in zazen. They're scouted out and located — they weren't originally placed there, but they're pointed out, noted. So the Chinese also incorporate a lot of nature into their formal ritual practice. Nature becomes part of the ritual.

Daisho Chris Burnham: Thank you for sharing that. I could do well to try and be more like your wife — bowing simply as an expression of inner reverence, and nothing more. And I think that might be like the smile I mentioned earlier: bowing as a way to try to cultivate my mind, and then in other times, a mind that is currently experiencing reverence and respect will naturally pour out into a bow.

This connects to the earlier comment about Tai Chi — doing something ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. I'm not immune to my mind wandering or being on autopilot, not by a long shot. But when I'm tuned in — whether because the forms got me there or for some other reason — it's just really cool to watch how any given bow is its own thing. And in a way, I can answer the question of why am I bowing just by bowing and just by watching.

That's one of the things that got me thinking about forms enough to want to do a talk about them: noticing how each bow is different, no matter how many times I've bowed. Have you heard the expression, "It's like drinking water and knowing for yourself if it's warm or cold"? That, but as an experience of bowing — it wouldn't say it's an answer to the question "why do we bow," but it's a way to understand why we bow. I think that's different from coming up with an answer, though I'm not entirely sure why I'm seeing a difference there.

There's a difference between answering a koan and just appreciating it or responding to it. Every single bow ends up being its own koan, where our participation in it shows us something — something we might think is worth seeing, maybe something we were looking for. So thank you for your comments.

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Question: I just had an epiphany on this. When I forget to bow, I engage in a completely different relationship to the things and people around me than when I remember to bow. I was thinking about an interaction with a judge on a Medi-Cal matter. When I engaged with her, I forgot to bow — and so the quality of the experience was very, very different than had I been in that more humble relationship. Not bowing, I was defensive. Bowing — surrendering to the moment.

Daisho Chris Burnham: I definitely feel like I would have a different attitude toward a customer service representative if, as soon as they said, "Hi, I'm so-and-so, how can I help you?" I started by saying, "Hello, thank you so much for taking my call." I think I would approach that situation way differently.

At Tassajara, one of the practices is that as you're walking around, if two people are approaching each other, they'll stop at some point, bow, and then move on. A lot of people who come there for a retreat aren't students, so while the students are asked to follow that form and all the others, visitors who come simply to be there — not part of the student apprenticeship — may or may not. People like me and Mark and Danny, we're following the forms because that's what we're there for. We're practicing the forms. Some visitors who are familiar with Zen will kind of do it, but you can't always tell unless you've been there for a while which category someone is in.

So sometimes you stop and bow to someone and they just keep walking — they didn't even know that form existed. Sometimes it's even a student who's looking off to the side and if you don't catch their eye, you might bow and they might miss it. And then you're just like, okay. Or if you're walking perpendicular to someone.

My point is: even within this form, sometimes forgetting it or not being sure about it creates its own wonderful human moments that may or may not include a bow, but are nonetheless a great example of how the form can connect us to our lives in the present and to other people in the present with us. Those are really fun moments. Yeah, I think I'm going to try the thing with the customer service representative.

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Question: Daisho, Chodo here. I wanted to pick up on that idea of learning the forms — or maybe getting forms wrong when you're learning them — and the opportunity there. Because I don't know about other zendos, but in ours, if you're asked to join the doan team or become jisha or take on a role, we don't sit someone down and give them a full outline and train them. It's kind of like: here's roughly how you should do this — jump in. And it's such a great chance to not be the competent person we like to present ourselves as being. So I wanted to ask if you had that same experience of the joy of embracing being incompetent at something.

Daisho Chris Burnham: Oh, definitely, definitely. I love the feeling of it — like an intense, activated curiosity, just paying attention when someone gives me a little bit of instruction and then throws me into it.

When I try to get people to do doan jobs at Beginner's Mind Zen Center, I'll offer them some tools, but a lot of times I like to just get them to start in exactly that way, because when it happened to me, it was great.

At Sangha Week, this was only my second time at Tassajara since ordination, and they let me be doshi — the officiating priest — for the service on three different occasions. It was a short service they do in the afternoon, but still I was thinking: okay, just remember, step back here... And actually the third time I was pretty turned around in my head, which was weird, because I was very much in my head and yet also very connected to the present. Being in my head wasn't taking me out of the present. I wasn't even sure if I was supposed to do this or that at a certain point, and I thought, I'll just watch the doan, and when she moves the striker to hit the bell, that's when I'll back up and get ready to bow. And then: oh wait, is she waiting on me? Oh wait — no, here's the part I remembered. Yay. And then I finished and realized I had missed a part. But the whole time was just this delightful, delightful ignorance and incompetence.

That's why, look — beginner's mind is sometimes available to you and sometimes not, because you're like, no, I know what's going on here. And there's no sin in that. But then when you get to be a beginner in a completely direct way that you have no control over, that can be a wonderful experience. The way that kind of thing enriches the practice in general — just appreciating it is a wonderful, delightful thing. So yeah, I definitely concur with your observation.

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Facilitator: Other comments or questions this morning? Yes, Elisa.

Question: I guess my question has to do with releasing attachment to forms, because every Zen center has different forms no matter how much they try to do the same thing. And being open or fluid enough to go with whatever is happening rather than what you think the Zen center should be doing — a great example was when you were being doshi and forgot something. So how did people react to this new way of doing it?

Daisho Chris Burnham: As far as I could tell, everyone was just rolling with it. And Tassajara is good about that. As for moments of "they're doing it wrong" arising in my mind — I've gotten in a good habit of laughing at those. The thoughts that come up, I don't really have control over. But the reaction to them I have more of an opportunity to choose.

So here's an anecdote I love. Greg Fain was at Tassajara for a very long time, and my first summer there in 2011, I was still pretty new and learning the forms. The engawa is the porch that goes completely around all four sides of the zendo. You don't wear shoes there — you take them off as you step onto it, put them on the shoe shelf, and then go in the front door if the han or the densho is ringing, or the back door if it's not. You're not supposed to talk on the engawa. You're supposed to hold your hands in shashu. And you're actually not supposed to bow to each other there — the bowing while passing each other is not a form for the engawa.

So I'm walking on the engawa and Greg Fain is walking in the other direction. He's the head of practice — he's the tanto. He stops and bows. And so reflexively I also stop and bow. But then I'm confused — I thought we weren't supposed to bow on the engawa. I'm trying to learn things, I'm the new guy. So I said, "I thought we weren't supposed to bow here." And he said, "You're not supposed to talk either."

I really love that. I'm not sure if he was trying to trip me up or just messing with me for fun. But joy — these forms are not a cudgel to beat yourself or other people into conformity. Awakening — and I don't mean some crazy big enlightenment experience, I just mean being here, practice-enlightenment, that kind of thing — joy is a huge component of that. I don't think anything in Zen is being done right if it's robbing a person of joy. Pain and discomfort are a real thing I've seen in the zendo, so that's not a 100% universal statement. But I definitely think forms are there in large part to help us cultivate joy. And when I notice myself being attached to a form — that's a warning light. Like: hey, where is your mind? Good point. Yeah, thank you.

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Question: Hi, thank you for your talk. Zen practice is so refined in so many ways and so intense, and I've loved it ever since I was about 18 or 19. Yoga practice came to me at the same time, so I've brought both of them along throughout my life, and the contrast is just amazing. I'll go from Tassajara or somewhere to a yoga ashram, and you've got all the bhakti — and aside from the asana practice, through the body and the presence of the body, it's just a beautiful practice. The sun salutation, all that bowing and prostration. And then when you get to the devotional element and the joy of just losing yourself and going into it — coming from Zen, sometimes I'm just like, oh my god, all the color and everything. This contrast was sometimes causing me difficulty — I loved both of them, but how to resolve them? As I've matured over the years, they definitely fit, because they're aiming at the same thing ultimately. It's just kind of fun.

Daisho Chris Burnham: Yeah, Zen definitely gets a lot of shade for everything being in black or dark colors and a plain white wall and the visual austerity of it all. I think that serves a very important purpose, and I'm also glad there are plenty of other places to go that are more colorful. And yeah, it's all good. Everything's on the same team — they're all trying to go to the same place. No argument from me.

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Question: I lived in Japan for a year, and one of my students took me to a Buddhist center in Matsushima Bay, near Sendai. There's a beautiful temple there. I went in, and it was this classic space — just beautiful. The grounds were fantastic. There was a small plaque, in Japanese and English. I was almost 50 when I read it, and it said — I won't paraphrase it exactly, but it said the people who built this understood there was a technology engaged in eliciting a certain response from the viewer. And there I am at 50, and I said, oh — so they didn't build this place to have lunch there. And it was obvious it had no practical function, and yet I was getting a tremendous response from this structure. And I said, I'm 50 years old and I'm just realizing this.

Then I turned to the left, and there was a view to the outside, with trees. And it was a very similar kind of response. Both of them complemented one another. I think that's something we're just beginning to understand. And I imagine, particularly now with AI — when we don't have to wash the dishes anymore — we'll have time to start thinking: what is that response we're eliciting? How does it work? How can we elicit within human beings these dramatically positive responses? And hopefully as we understand this better, we won't drive through yellow arches for the experience. We'll actually use this pursuit to spark the best of human beings. In the future, just like being on the top of Black Hill — that's a magic spot, and I get a quite similar response there as I did at the temple in Matsushima. Hopefully we'll focus that and bring our positive energy as a culture, and learn how to elicit it and realize what a treasure it is, and instead of trying to commodify it, we'll use our new technology and deeper understanding to increase the positive human experience in existence.

Daisho Chris Burnham: Thank you. I hope AI never takes over washing dishes. Washing dishes is a great way to come into the present. I think there might be a future Dharma talk on washing dishes — I've definitely been thinking about that one.

Again, thank you so much for your time and for all the questions and comments. And thank you for carrying on the practice in your temple. I'm really glad I got to be a part of that today with you. Thank you.

Facilitator: Daisho, I'm going to stop the recording. You're welcome to stay with us — we usually close with the Four Vows and then do some announcements. Really, really great to spend time with you.

Daisho Chris Burnham: Happy to be here. I'll stick around for the Four Vows and then probably bounce at that point.

Facilitator: To the bounce house?

Daisho Chris Burnham: No — back to my sister's house to hang out with my niece and nephew and my brother-in-law.

Facilitator: Enjoy your time in Santa Barbara.

Daisho Chris Burnham: Thank you very much.

Sunday, October 12, 2025

Good morning, everybody. It's a day with the Dharma is a good day. I am in Berkeley, as you are probably aware, and we had a nice crisp—we have a sunny, beautiful, and a little bite in the air this morning waking up. I deduce that fall is here.

These days, where world events are at, it feels funny not to mention the world. So most of my talk is not focused on that, but I'm going to share one sentence from our founder, Shakyamuni Buddha, about what we're doing here. So he said, "I teach suffering and the end of suffering, period. I have nothing that does not tend toward peace." So that's what we're trying to carry forward in our imperfect way—to understand suffering and the end of suffering, and that everything we think or do or say is tending towards peace.

So as was mentioned, my talk is entitled "Attachment, Non-Attachment, and Secure Attachment." I mean, it seems unfortunate, but perhaps—I was just thinking during zazen—maybe it's auspiciously thought-provoking. Maybe it's not unfortunate. Maybe it's auspiciously thought-provoking that we've ended up with the most important and good thing from the perspective of Western psychology using the same word, "attachment," as what we see as the most problematic thing in Buddhist psychology.

So in order to resolve this, we might think, well, some amount of attachment is okay or is necessary, or maybe it's a different kind of attachment. And that's closer to the approach that I want to present this morning.

First off, the Buddha had an earth-shaking insight, and his earth-shaking insight was not that human beings love each other and, due to impermanence, we lose what we love and then we suffer. We suffer when the people we love, the people we're attached to, suffer or die. Now, there's some Buddhism in and around there because it's truth. It's a definite truth about our lives, and it's something we must keep coming to grips with throughout our whole life. It's not insignificant. And in that sense, it's a dharma, it's truth. And there's some things in Buddha's teaching that make it sound like maybe that is what he's saying. But still, that was not his central insight. And I am going to talk about his central insight.

But first, I wanted to start from the perspective of secure attachment and work my way over to Buddha's insight. So, it's understood these days that for babies and children to develop in a healthy psychological and emotional way, in order for them to feel safe and happy and able to freely express their gifts, they need to have secure attachment with one or more caregivers and have a sense that they can depend on them.

So, what supports this development of secure attachment? And I should say that what I'm going to describe is sort of my own way of talking about secure attachment, based on what I've read about it and also studied in my own experience and through conversations with others and observing other people's experience.

So, first, in order to create secure attachment, parents and caregivers need to be present. They need to be physically close and available a lot of the time—all the time at first, and then a lot of the time throughout a child's development. And they need to be emotionally present, tuned to the baby, their babies and children. So, first thing is being present, physically and emotionally.

Second, unconditional love. The message from the caregiver needs to be that you are loved just as you are. You don't need anything to win love. You don't need to do anything to win love. And love will not be given or withheld based on your behavior in order to control your behavior. There's some bottom line sense of being loved for who you are no matter what.

Third, caregivers need to actively care for babies and children, making sure they have what they need, including food, drink, stimulation, exercise, closeness, language, skilled age-appropriate development. So, parents and caregivers need to study and learn about their child's needs and put their children's needs first most of the time, except perhaps in the famous oxygen mask dropping down situation. Generally, we put our children's needs first. I have two children, by the way—they're 31 and 35.

So, there's probably more about developing secure attachment, but I want to keep it simple with just these three: presence, unconditional love, and active caring, being able to put your child's needs first. And it sounds kind of simple, but it's a tall order. On the one hand, it can be done well enough, and on the other hand, it's not easy for anyone, I don't think.

So, many of us grew up with some sense of deficit in terms of secure attachment. We may have insecure attachment, or we may have what they call avoidant attachment—and I forget the other types, but I'm familiar with those two from my own experience. My husband Alan and I were both avoidant attached. So, when things went wrong, we would sort of go to our corners, retreat to our corners, and then peer out and see if everything was okay, and then we would come out and we would be able to work things out by apology or talking something through or something.

So, our attachment style from childhood plays out in our current relationships. So, it's really helpful to have some sense of what your attachment style is. And each of us can probably recount or have some sense of where or why our parents fell short on one or more of these three things: presence, unconditional love, and active tending.

And so, what gets in the way of a parent being able to offer these three things? So, I'm proposing this morning that what gets in the way is exactly what we call attachment in Buddhism—attachment or self-clinging. And the main thing is not so much that self-clinging is like a morally wrong thing to do, but it's that our understanding of ourself and what we are is based on misperceptions and misconceptions.

It seems like ourself and others and things have this kind of inherent existence, some solid existence from within themselves, when actually, everything is just this huge complex unfolding of causes and conditions. Nothing stays, nothing lasts, there's no one changing core to anything. And this kind of causes us to be confused about what makes us happy, what will make us happy. We see all these things outside that look like they'll make us happy—like money, fame, success—that we need to acquire or achieve. And it's because we're confused about how the self exists. This inherent thing, the solid core, seems like something that could be satisfied or that needs to be shored up or fulfilled.

And our ideas about ourself are somewhat contradictory. We say "self," "ourself"—we mean the part that would continue no matter what, and sometimes we mean the part of us that's most vulnerable. And so sometimes it's the part that has continued since we were born, or even before we were born perhaps, and sometimes it's the part that could be destroyed by humiliation or shame or death.

So the point is that we're confused, mainly about ourselves and about other selves. Others look solid, and it looks like everything other people do is intentional and conscious. You know what I mean? It's so easy to judge and blame when we believe that selves are solid things. It's so easy to judge and blame ourselves, and it's easy to judge and blame others.

So this terribly confused idea of how we exist and how others exist causes us to attach or cling. We're attached to our identity. We're attached to our imagined idea of who we are. And it's largely because it's inaccurate and imaginary that our attachment is a problem. In fact, in Buddhism, it's the main problem.

It may seem like it's really hard to see through our attachments to self. It seems so real, so solid. But it's good to be reminded that we've already seen through some of our attachments from childhood, our misconceptions, over the course of just growing and maturing. You find out that things are empty, whatever it is. Maybe as you get older, you find out how empty being beautiful is, and then you are, you find out you get money and you find out how empty that is to be satisfying. So just by through natural maturity, we let go of some things by seeing that they're empty.

So we actually see emptiness, but we don't necessarily phrase it that way. We don't think of it as Buddhist emptiness, Buddha's emptiness.

So what I'm—so my thesis here this morning is that the thing that gets in the way of children developing what Western psychology calls secure attachment is the thing that prevents parents from being present, from bringing forth unconditional love, and from being able to tend to their children's needs ahead of their own, and that is our own deluded attachments to the confused idea of self and other.

The Buddha never said that parents should not love their children. In fact, he used maternal love as a model for how we should feel towards all living beings. In the Metta Sutta, which is one of the early Pali scriptures, he says, "Even as a mother at the risk of her life watches over and protects her only child, so with a boundless mind should one cherish all living things, suffusing love over the entire world."

I think for some of us having children was kind of a jump start to our bodhisattva vows. I was not so compassionate before, but I was very moved always through my early years of practice. I was moved and inspired by this passage in the Metta Sutta. But then when I had a baby I was like, "What? This feeling? This very feeling I'm having right now is what I'm supposed to spread and suffuse over the entire world for all living beings. How is that even possible?"

So let's say a parent is able to feel and express unconditional love for their child. Let's hope that at least that baseline is true. However, it's really still conditional because it's for that child, for your own children.

So for me, there's another set of turning points in parenting. When you have to—I believe, supported by many years of practice before my kids were born—you have to decide to let that unconditional love flow out to others. Maybe starting with other children like my kids' friends or their families, my kids' teachers, and then gradually the whole village that you have to engage to raise a family.

And if you don't make that turning, you might fall back on seeing your kid in competition with others and needing your kid to do better than others or get more than others. And suddenly we're fully back then in this confusion of self-clinging and making things that really aren't about us into being about us.

So it's easy to begin to see our kids as something that could maybe bring this ultimate satisfaction we're longing for. If we could just get them to be who we see they could be or we want them to be, to succeed in the way that we think success is. And that makes our love conditional. And that makes our focus be somewhat off-kilter from being fully present. It makes us unable to tune into and understand what our loved one needs.

So, secure attachment applies beyond childhood, really, to all our love relationships. We feel safe in relationships when there's open communication and we can rely on each other. So what I'm bringing up holds true for all our loving relationships—what helps us feel secure and open and close, what supports our secure attachment to each other.

Well, when the other person is present emotionally and physically, when they love us unconditionally, and they can connect and support us in practical ways. And how do we offer space and safety to others, to the loved ones in our lives? By being present for them, loving them unconditionally, and offering active support and connection.

So last night I had a dream about this tub. I guess it was about my talk. In my dream, my neighbor downstairs was thinking of moving. So, his name is Yoni and a few years ago, right in the middle of the pandemic, at the residency—I live at the Berkeley Zen Center, I'm a resident and there's nine residents here—and in the middle of the pandemic, we had a turnover of residents where we had all these younger people moving in. They're basically the same age as my kids.

And so they're kind of like surrogate children. Not surrogate children from childhood, but like surrogate adult children. My relationships with them are sort of an echo of my relationships with my adult children. And whether this has anything to do with it or not, my actual son, my biological son, did move out and moved to Oregon from Berkeley about a month ago.

In my dream, Yoni's thinking about moving out. And the question arises—and I can't remember whether it's in my mind that it arises or someone actually asks it in the dream—but like, so which is it? If I have a feeling of sadness about Yoni moving out, which is it? Is it secure attachment, consequence of secure attachment? Or is it clinging, attachment like in Buddhism?

So I don't exactly know the answer, but I think it's probably some of both. And it's probably more about what I do about it and how I frame it to myself. So if I frame it that I'm losing—and this is true of my relationship with my own son—if I frame it that I lost one of the people who supported me during these past two years, I feel lost or sad. There's no other word for it.

But if I think about, as I've learned to do as a parent—as I think you need to learn to do as a parent—I kind of live by carelessly. So if he's stepping into a new stage of his life, he's opening up into something new and exciting. I have that. I'm turning toward something new and exciting. So that's more the open-hearted way.

So I think both are true. I have a secure attachment, which is my unconditional love for him. And I also have some clinging. I have some self-involved... So I have, in my notes, I say, "End or go on." End here or go on. Because I have one more point to make. And I was going to look at the clock and see it's only 11:30. So I'm going to go ahead and make my other point. And hopefully we'll still have a little bit of time for questions and answers.

And this is a whole other spin. So I hope you're with me so far. So what about our relationship with our self? How do we feel towards our own self-clinging? How do we feel towards different experiences that we have that someone might consider, or that we might consider, self-clinging or bad or wrong or something? Can we—is there a way to have secure attachment with our self?

And so I think this is related to what Suzuki Roshi calls big mind or true self or Buddha nature. Big mind holds everything. Big mind relates to all of our small minds, all of our confusion, our attachments, and all of our confused ideas of our self.

So "self"—there's another word that can mean two opposite things. I've studied this Western psychological model you may or may not have heard of called Internal Family Systems. And their word for what we in Soto Zen, at least, or in Suzuki Roshi's way, call big mind or Buddha nature, they call "Self" with a capital S. And their word for what we might call self or small mind or attachments is "parts." We have all these parts.

And when the parts are not in relationship to capital-S Self or big mind, they are extremely confused and unhappy.

So how do we develop this secure attachment within ourselves? So I'm proposing the same three things: learning how to be present for ourselves. And that means moment by moment with the incredible flux of our lives—our physical experience, our emotional experience, how we think about things, and our spiritual experience. Which is basically zazen. Zazen is making a sincere effort to be fully present with ourselves. And ourselves in the sense of our so-called parts inside, you could say. And ourselves in the bigger sense of everything.

So then being present and then unconditional love towards ourselves. Big mind, what Dogen referred to as grandmotherly mind towards ourselves. Big mind towards our confusion.

How do you feel about—when I was talking about self-clinging and attachment, if you look at what came up for you about yourself, how do you feel towards that part of yourself? If we're in big mind, we feel unconditional love towards those parts of ourselves.

And then taking care of ourselves, acting on our own behalf—not on behalf of our limited, confused, delusional, static, anxious, controlling selves, parts, but our own true self. And we take care of our own true self, which is actually everything, everything that's happening moment by moment.

So that's what I prepared and I'd love to hear your thoughts about these ideas.

Thank you, Laurie. We're going to take a deep breath here and think about what you said. And then we'll turn the floor over to our folks for some dialogue with you. Thank you.

Question: Laurie, I'm Erin. Hi. I'm thinking about this in relationship to not exactly people right now, but to myself and place, because I've recently moved. And the move was a welcome move. But it's interesting. I think I've returned enough now because I've moved throughout my life to different places, probably more than most people. I'm relating with it differently this time, each time actually.

And being okay when I feel my resistance to the energies—that's how I would describe it, the bigger energies that arise. Really what it is is fear. Because when you start to feel yourself letting go of something that either you knew you were attached to or didn't, and particularly when you didn't know you were attached to—

So it's, wait a minute. And not judge them and know that it's just a process. That happens every time I leave a place because I personally—I think most people do, I was talking about this with someone earlier here in our group—I think everyone is permeated by place. I do. I intentionally develop intimate relationships, particularly with my natural surroundings and place.

And so I'm very aware when I leave my natural surroundings in particular, there'll be a grieving period, whatever I've become intimate with. So I'm just noticing how I have a different relationship with that. And then I don't avoid it as much. And then therefore go into resistive strategies in order to not feel. Just to come to the resistance of just—

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. And it's so—I mean, it reminds me of what we chanted, the "Merging of Difference and Unity"—had a different title the way we chanted it. The two sides are always going to be in a conversation with each other. That's why you don't want to leave that fear. That's the part, you know, you don't want to leave that out on its own. You want to always be in relationship to it. So your true self or big mind or whatever, you call it, always holding that close and being present with it and accepting like, of course you feel that way.

And humans, culturally we're much less place-based than humans have been for... We have a sense of place and home and all that. And also if your move is kind of an intuitive, "This is the next step for me," that's also coming more from the unconditioned side, that intuitive sense. And there's always going to be that this other side, the human side, which is always going to—you know, go for what's dangerous about this? Well, that's our first thought because of the negativity bias of our natural selection of human beings over thousands of years. What is dangerous about this?

So that's going to be natural. So it sounds like through—you've done it enough times that you have a maturity around what comes up, you know?

Question: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. You could help other people with that because you've learned a lot about it.

Laurie Senauke: Thank you.

Question: I'm also—I'm going to say something else also. Sorry, lost my train of thought. This noted, "Wherever you go, there you are," it's kind of a phrase I use a lot. Because I've noticed the same particular thought pattern, one in particular from childhood. When I uproot, which is a deep sense of aloneness in the world. I don't like to use this phrase that much just because I think it's been a bit overused, but in this case, it feels appropriate, which is to befriend that. Doesn't feel like this big scary monster when it—

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. Yeah. And that's getting back to—and I won't carry on about this, but the attachment style I developed as a child then and carry that forward. As well as, I think, you know, attachment styles aren't just clear-cut. They're integrated into a fabric of who we are that, on one hand, is a mystery, and on the other, we can parse apart sometimes and point to, I guess, more fractally.

I'm noticing that I'm getting—I should say I'm maturing in that relationship too, to when that rears its head like, "Oh, there you are. Yes, of course, you come with me everywhere I go."

Laurie Senauke: My husband used to say it resolves to a subtler level. Yeah, that's nice. It's always going to be with you. You're spiraling around this set of—you're not going to suddenly become a completely different kind of person. You're just feeling completely differently about everything. Like that's not in the cards, you know.

It's not a button that gets pushed.

Yeah. Yes, yeah.

Hi. I don't know what I'm going to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. Somehow an insight that just created two new words in my vocabulary is—one word in our language seems to encapsulate the clinging, and the word is "the boy, the girl." And here's the new words: the nounification of our existence, "self."

And so that when there is "the," then there is immediately "other." It's how we make objects so we can talk about things. And so the second new word is "verbification." Where I as self within and part of and indistinct from the flow of—and within that on an experiential level, as of late, I am only existing in this moment, which is itself passing.

So whether I'm clinging or detached, whether I'm fearful or joyful, it's part of the verbification now. Whether I'm silly or wise, and then a moment still calling that verbification. And because I don't—again, using this new word—verbify alone. And I am also within the fluid or non-fluid harmonization or disharmonization.

You're sillying or—you said, "I'm silly," or what—playful. You're sillying or playing, you know. The verb means you're doing it, not that it's a thing. It's a happening or something. It's more enjoyable being in a harmonious relationship—

Laurie Senauke: Yeah.

Question: The field.

Laurie Senauke: So harmonizing.

Question: Yeah, we're harmonizing. Internal and external are only conveniences. There's the field. And that which is engaging in the field. And it's pretty fluid.

Laurie Senauke: It's not even like the field is inside, too, as we know from zazen. Sometimes what's happening inside of us feels like "other," you know. But—

Question: I just had to say—

Laurie Senauke: Yeah.

Question: Thank you for awakening that.

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. I will not cling to what I just said. Thanks.

Thank you. Inside and outside are just—are not two. As we say, which is different from saying it's one. I like this. And we're not two. We're not saying we're one. But we're not two. And we're not more than two.

Question: Those—some of us empower. I think there are. What he had to say, and he said it anyway, I have nothing to say, and I'm going to say it anyway. What your talk triggered for me was not so much the Buddhist attitude toward, but the words. And what happens when we don't get that secure attachment.

My story is my daughter's 34 years old, special needs daughter that still lives with us.

Laurie Senauke: And I honor you for that work. Caregiving is really intense and indescribable work.

Question: Yeah. We're from China, and this is not a racial thing. This is what happened to infants and what happened there. We thought if we bring her over and we love her, that everything will work out, but she did not get that secure attachment in the orphanage. She got physical attachment. They fed her occasionally, but no one held these children. They had no secure attachment. They banged themselves against their crib walls. And when you skip—what we've learned is when you skip certain parts of your brain development, you can't go back.

And so there's gaps in there. And if you talk to her for an hour, you would think she's a lovely woman and perfectly fine. And the second hour, you'd have doubts. And by the third time you meet her, you say, "There's some problems here," because she had those gaps. And so we've adopted to those, but could you say anything more about when you miss these attachments?

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. I think that, well, I believe that there can be healing and not absolute, but that's part of what Western psychology is trying to do. And part of what Internal Family Systems is trying to do is to heal the missing attachment, the wounds, to heal the attachment wounds.

Certainly, I think you should know that what you've been doing for 34 years or 32 years or however long it's been has brought about healing for her. And it's not absolute and forever and complete, but just—we have to have faith, I think, that we can heal. And in relationship is how you heal. You redo it, you know. You redo it.

So my husband and I both had insecure, avoidant attachment because that's how we got through—we went away, and then we didn't come back, we just went away. But what we learned to do with each other is—well, we still went away, but we came back and worked things out, you know.

So sometimes you can't and sometimes—then I don't always go away, but I still—it's still an option, a default option in trouble, you know. But I've also got other tools that I've developed. And I honor you. I hope she continues to develop other tools and develop. We're all impaired. I mean, that's—it's okay to be impaired. It's not a problem to be impaired. Yeah, we're all impaired. So, just good work, good work.

We all live somewhere on the spectrum. That's why they call it a spectrum, right? I often say to myself, "Hint of—" I hope—hint of Asperger's, you know, if I look back on my childhood. So yeah, hint of Asperger's. They didn't have it, they didn't have the diagnosis then, but—

Thank you.

Question: Laurie, I'm Chodo Dave here. I'm a little off-screen. I'm not sure you can—I can hear you. I was thinking of your letting us know that your son has moved from Berkeley to Oregon and that one of the things you spoke about with secure attachment is physical presence, co-presence.

And I was wondering if you could just share with us how you're thinking about that and how you, or can you replace that physical closeness, that co-presence that you have with a different way of being present with him? Because I suspect that you are always going to be his mom, he's always going to be your son, that secure attachment. So it's kind of a practical question of how do you navigate that sort of no longer physically being present to see the person?

Laurie Senauke: Yeah, it's a good question. Well, they're not the verbals, all of that that comes with being physically present. Well, because—because he had relatively secure attachment, I think—not that we didn't make mistakes, but we're in pretty close contact. Fortunately, I try not to initiate too much, try again, because of—I don't want it to be my needs exactly, you know. We're not equals like if we were here, that would be different. He's always going to be my kid, and I'm going to be the mom until I'm feeble and he has to take care of me—hopefully not right away.

I mean, actually, both my kids really stepped forward to take care of me during the last two years. So we had a little role reversal there. And of course, we were all grieving, but I think that the secure attachment is much more—can be much more elastic if you have it there, if you've established it. Right? We established it, and now we can go far away and still a word or a text or a joke will bring us back, especially a joke—my son is very funny. Will bring us back together, and it feels like closeness, you know.

I do, I am—now that I'm—I wandered from my family, I grew up in Portland, Oregon, and I wandered to San Francisco. And now I very much understand why people didn't wander. Now that my daughter's going to have a baby, she's in Chicago, like, "Oh, now I understand why you had the family compound with the kids building another house for the kid in the back and staying close."

So I think it is kind of—it's not—what's the word? It might not be so good the way we've set things up as having this wanderlust or this something. We think about people who established this country and they came, they wandered. And we're just sort of, we still are wandering in a way. We keep wandering. It's in our DNA somehow.

So maybe some of us more than others. I think some people have established a home somewhere and the kids will keep staying generation after generation—that can happen too. But so I'm guessing I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth. On the one hand I'm saying with secure attachment, you can be far apart physically and still have a way to run the energy between you somehow. And on the other hand, closeness is good and being close, especially with the next generation coming along, which—when those babies need, they need to establish secure attachment. And I want my grandchild to have a secure attachment with their grandmother. Like, how am I going to do that, you know?

So, both are true, I guess, yeah.

Question: Thank you for that. It sounds like that money in the bank you have with him from—

Laurie Senauke: Right. Yeah.

Question: You can keep drawing on.

Laurie Senauke: Thank you, Laurie.

Thank you.

Question: Other comments. Just real quick, another word for secure attachment would be connection.

Laurie Senauke: Yeah.

Question: And then the other—he's going to Portland?

Laurie Senauke: He's going to Corvallis. He's in Corvallis.

Question: I was afraid for him.

Laurie Senauke: Oh, yeah. Poor Portland, my hometown. Yeah.

Question: It's funny. You should say that. I had a friend that just visited her best friend for a week in Portland. I said, "How was it?" because I'm reading about ICE. And she said, "We never saw them."

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. It's pretty localized. Yeah.

Question: It is. Reports make it sound like it's just all over, and she said, kind of the place where it's happening and it's a small—it's not overwhelming the city. It's just—you have to read the news with a little bit of a skeptical eye.

Laurie Senauke: Yeah. And the same is—I mean, and that cuts both ways too. Like I know in Berkeley, I don't see—I've friends of mine are doing various kinds of accompaniment and I don't see. But I found out that a woman who runs this store that I—that's on University Avenue. This sari store—she came from India and started this store that sells saris. And she was just deported back to India after being here 20 years, running this store for 20 years. So it hits me, but it's—even though I don't see—I don't see ICE agents, but it's still impacting us.

So, yeah. And, you know, look around where they were. Where's Berkeley on the list? How high is Berkeley on the list, right?

I think we have time for one more question here before we close. And so, Ian and Josephina, you haven't had a chance to speak. I don't know if you want to. The floor is open.

All right. Any parting comments from anyone?

All right, Laurie, we're—you can't see all of us in gassho bowing to you, but we are. And so grateful to you.

Laurie Senauke: Thank you so much for inviting me. It's been a pleasure being here. We'll close here with just a bell and the Four Vows. And then we do some internal announcements so you can stay with us as long as you would like.

Okay. Thank you, Laurie.

Thank you.

Sunday, November 9, 2025

# Mindfulness and Zen: Two Ways, Same Home
Julianna Raye
Santa Barbara Zen Center
November 9, 2025

All right, welcome everybody to our dharma talk today. I'm Michael. I want to introduce Julianna Raye, who's joined us today. I thank her for being here in person to do a dharma talk. I'll just do a brief introduction biography for Julianna and then I'll turn it over to her.

So Julianna is the designer of the Unified Mindfulness teacher training. She's devoted to deepening people's ability to practice and understand research-supported mindfulness and to empowering anyone to guide others in practice. She's been training individuals and groups in the Unified Mindfulness system for over two decades. I'll just do some brief things of her background. She has a bachelor's from Duke and she's CEO, lead curriculum designer and head trainer of Unified Mindfulness, dedicated to disseminating Shinzen Young's comprehensive mindfulness meditation system through the creation and presentation of educational programs and teacher training certificate programs. And I also found this very fascinating about Julianna. She has over 150 weeks of silent retreat training in both mindfulness and Shinzen traditions and has completed more than 20,000 hours of formal training.

And I still don't know a thing. She's still a beginner.

So Julianna, with that, again, thank you for being here and I'll turn it over to you.

Thanks so much. Elisa so graciously invited me here today because we know each other through the Zen track, but I came to that Zen track through the mindfulness track. And I've sort of straddled both worlds over the past couple of decades to three decades. So she thought I might be able to shed some light on the relationship between what we call mindfulness practice and Zen. My familiarity is with Rinzai Zen. So I'll be sticking to what I know.

But what I wanted to begin with is actually just to start at the start of how we get to know anything. How do we get to know anything? And it is typically by way of contrast. We typically start off saying, well, this is what I do. It's Zen and it looks like this and this is what they do. It's mindfulness and it looks like that. And so we set up a contrast in order to understand because how else can we discover anything except by way of the difference? How else can we come to know something except by way of perceiving that that something is other than us.

So I was very moved this morning when we were reciting, I think it was on page—I can't find it now—what we were reciting was illuminating the value of differences. And it's something that in this time is hard to find value in because we see how alienating differences can be. When we self-identify with a position, that's when the suffering starts. The suffering starts when we self-identify with a position. But inherently differences are what lead us to the discovery of oneness. It can only be, there can only ever be the journey of believing ourselves to be separate and discovering that that was mistaken.

So we need to embrace that it is of our nature to take that journey, at least at this time on this planet, that this is the journey we're all engaged in. The mistaken belief of our separateness and all the pain that causes, all the suffering that causes, and the extraordinary discovery of our non-separateness. And this journey is in every little moment because there are no moments. The idea of a moment itself is a constraint falsely applied for the purpose of navigating this world in this body, for this window of time, that this body is moving around in this world.

So even in this contrast that we set up between mindfulness and Zen, we can find both the habit of perceiving differences and also then the journey towards discovering non-separateness, even in this little habit that we do all the time of saying, I'm this way not that way. I believe this, you believe that. Every time we encounter those moments of difference, that represents an opportunity for us to traverse the impression of difference to find what is truly non-separate. And you could say that as practitioners, whether we're practicing in mindfulness or Zen, that is our job. That's our job because no one's going to do it for us. We're here to do that job.

So with that context in mind, I'm going to speak a little bit about mindfulness and Zen as I understand them from my limited perspective and connect some dots around those relationships. I teach a system called Unified Mindfulness, which, as mentioned, was developed by Shinzen Young. Shinzen was a translator for Sasaki Roshi, which is how Elisa and I know each other. And so he also straddled, in fact, not just those worlds, but all contemplative traditions. He was ordained as a Shingon monk in Japan. So he became interested in what unifies all approaches to meditation practice. And he spent about 40 years tinkering away and finding the connections between practices and landed on a way to understand any method of meditation in terms of the fact that it develops a set of attention skills.

So all meditation practices develop certain attention skills and he identified them as concentration, sensory clarity, equanimity. And then any meditation tradition is going to have a way to cultivate these skills. I can get into more detail about the skills, but I know we have only a short time for the talk. So I just want to give, I want to stick to this connection between mindfulness and Zen as I see it.

So with the understanding that if you're willing to go along with the idea that if you're in any tradition or even non-traditions, that we have these capacities, the ability to attend, the ability to focus on what we choose, the ability to discern, make clear discernment between this and that, and also the ability to detect subtleties in experience that may then yield the awareness of the sameness, the connectivity of experience, and this ability to allow experience to happen freely. These are abilities we can cultivate. We can call that equanimity, the ability to allow experience just to happen.

So if we say that, yes, meditation develops these capacities, then it's a matter of how. How does it do it, and what's the method? And we can say that all practices share in common an intention to practice, that we come, we arrive to this place, even if we just sit and do nothing, even if that's our method, we make a commitment to spend a window of time sitting and doing nothing, or sitting and focusing on the breath, or focusing on whatever it may be, slow walking, or fast walking, or chanting. So there's an intentionality, you could say, we can debate where that intentionality comes from, but we can say that a kind of signature of any practice we do is this conscious intention to show up to it in some way, and mindfulness and Zen share that in common.

One interesting contrast, I think, between the methods is an emphasis on an external setting that supports the internal journey, or an internal strategy that supports the journey. We can say, when you're asked, for instance, to do counting or focusing on your breath, that's an internal strategy that supports the development of your attention in these ways that I mentioned. There are other methods, but let's just say that's a method for an internal anchor, so that you can develop your capacity to focus on what you choose, your capacity to detect subtleties, or to discern distinctions between this and that, and your ability to allow experience just to happen.

There's also an external setting that can support your ability to develop your attention in those ways, and here we are, we've got our cushions, we have our rituals. One thing I really love about Zen, which I think generally distinguishes it from mindfulness, is the highly ritualized nature of the Zen practice, that everything we do, it's choreographed, and that choreography becomes a way to get out of the thinking mind, so that we can develop our attention. The rituals around Zen, which of course evolved in the monastic setting, they really serve us as an external anchor and as an external choreography in which to develop our practice.

And I would say that mindfulness, as it's understood in kind of modern American setting, doesn't have that ritualization. However, you could choose to with mindfulness ritualize your external world. What mindfulness tends to emphasize is the inner strategies, and what Unified Mindfulness has done, which maybe makes it distinct from other types of approaches to mindfulness, is to center itself around the commonalities between approaches, so to say, again, all techniques are developing concentration, clarity, and equanimity, and therefore it's less important what technique you do, and it's more important that you're intentionally developing these skills, because that skill development is what leads to over time with practice the clear realization of non-separateness, that we could say that that's in the sense that's the same journey home that we're all taking just through different methods.

So the way Unified Mindfulness has gone about that is to introduce a particular practice that emphasizes this skill development and shows you how your whole sensorium can be divided into three groups: what you see, what you hear, and what you feel. And so we introduce in Unified Mindfulness a technique that starts with that, See Hear Feel. See Hear Feel includes, it's basically just another parsing of the five senses, and it includes what you see in the world, what you see in your mind, what you hear in the world, what you hear in your mind, what you feel physically, what you feel emotionally, whether that is activated at any given moment, or restful at any given moment. And so you do a practice around that. It's a noting and labeling practice, which is drawn from Mahasi Sayadaw, from his noting methodology, which is this kind of punctuated focusing, repeated punctuated focusing, that lasts for several second window. And that's an internal practice you can do.

Labeling is basically identifying, is it See, or is it Hear, or is it Feel. So we start there to say, hey, your whole sensorium is a gateway to discover, ultimately to discover non-separateness. So that's the method, you could say, that Unified Mindfulness uses, in contrast to maybe the method that you would do when you do Zen practice, which varies from place to place, but involves generally you come and you sit, and maybe you're given some simple instruction about breath or counting, maybe not, maybe you're just sitting. So that's a contrast.

But another contrast, I guess I want to highlight is, in Unified Mindfulness, a person can come to the practice with any intent at all, in terms of their life goals. So they might come to the practice because they want to improve their tennis game, something as mundane as that, and we say, sure, let's teach you how to improve your tennis game by developing your attention, because if you can concentrate better, you're probably going to be better at tennis. If you have this discerning capacity, sensory clarity, probably going to be better at tennis. If you can let the self-critical thoughts come and go in your mind, probably going to be better at tennis. Great, let's let you start there as a point of entry to discovering how to develop these attention skills. It's your life, you determine what matters to you. Tennis is what matters to you, we're here to support you. And here's how you can do that.

So that allows people to get into it for whatever, it lowers the barrier of entry, you could say. So people can get into it just for the purpose of improving their tennis game, and if they want to, they can limit it to that. Typically, that's not how it unfolds. Typically a person makes discoveries as they're practicing, they have insights. Oh, huh, yeah, this can actually be applied in other settings, not just in tennis, this ability to concentrate, have clarity, have equanimity. And so they might then, once that seed is planted, it might take root.

So that's a way that you could say that mindfulness differs from Zen. It also leaves the ethics and values in the hands of the individual. It says, okay, you come to this practice with your own set of ethics and values, we're going to trust you to adhere to that. Maybe you're a Christian and you have that set of values, and that's what's important to you, we're going to trust you to adhere to that. So there's a lot of not getting into any territory which might represent a barrier of entry for the practitioner. That's sort of an ethos, you could say, of the Unified Mindfulness approach. And that is one way in which it is different. And that means also that maybe we sacrifice a certain kind of sacredness in doing that.

So people who show up to Zen practice, they might not realize what they're getting into, but you're going to be drawn, I would say, at least intuitively, to a kind of sacredness that Zen represents, and it's in right off out of the gate, the Gateless Gate, it's right there. You're hearing it, you're saying it, you're internalizing the depth of the practice right as you enter the doors. So that's, you could say, a contrast, how is it different.

And of course, there's beauty in these contrasts that we discover. We can see the value in lowering the barrier of entry. More people are going to get curious about it, more people are going to engage in it, and maybe they discover that the depth of it becomes meaningful to them at some point. Maybe they go through a life crisis and discover, hey, this practice was really there for me in my life crisis in a way I didn't anticipate.

So on the flip side, the beauty of entering into the sacredness, right at the start, is important, and to be someone who, right from the start says, yeah, let's go for the deep end of the pool right now.

So, I guess all this to say, that there are ways we can contrast how these practices exist in the world, how they represent an entry point for anyone who is interested in pursuing this kind of practice. And then we can say that there are these commonalities that any method you do, whether we call it mindfulness or Zen or whether we call it anything else, TM or whatever you want to call it, they are helping us develop our attention in particular ways because it is the disordered attention that is at the heart of our misunderstanding, our fundamental confusion about our nature.

The belief that we are separate comes from the relationship to the sensorium and to the confused signals, from the confused signals of this sensorium itself. So we have to work through the confused signaling and the misinterpretations and the alienated relationship to ourselves. We have to work through that to discover the truth that we were never separate. And so however we do that and however we come to it, it's so good that we've come. It's so good that we're here together, doing this practice.

And so I feel very grateful for being included in your group today, and honoring your friend who passed. And I feel very hopeful that we can come together and share this practice together, what it means to us, regardless of whatever seeming differences each individual may have, and that there is this rich opportunity for everyone who does this practice to center non-separateness, to center the connectivity. It's our responsibility, no matter what's going on in the world, not to get swept up in the stories of separateness, to know the truth.

Thank you everyone for your time.

Michael: Well we do, we do have some time, if you're open to discussion.

Julianna Raye: Yeah, absolutely.

Michael: Well we'll go to about 12, and thank you so much for your talk today. If anybody has anything you want to ask, say?

Question: I have to say that, I sat down with, hold on just a moment, I'm going to get my ears in. This helps me hear. Yeah, I want to say, I sat with Shinzen on several occasions, many, many decades back. Wonderful, very enjoyable experience.

My take is content describes context, and also context defines content, that we're sitting here, rather than in a bar, or whatever. So the greater context is what shapes us, and then as we grow mature, we initiate actions, activities to shape the context themselves, and that's called artistry. And if people are shaping that with a disturbed mind, as we see so often in politics, so many of the endeavors today, then that affects the content, which is why today, we're ten of us, rather than ten thousand of us, sitting. And so that is a question that is quite important to me right now, to see if that can be changed.

Julianna Raye: And the question being, how might we change the habits of mind that lead to the, in other words, how might we change that context? Is that what you're saying?

Question: Yeah, the paradigm itself, and the paradigm is everything from the chair, the book, the dress, everything that we as human beings create and talk. And so what I'm doing currently is challenging the entire historical trajectory that has gotten us into this contextual mess. And so much of what is happening today on YouTube is, you know, from a Zen perspective, it's all about our demise and how we approach it. And then the other is also about, oh, this is not me, this is all illusion. And neither speaks to, well, before enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood, carrying water. Meaning that, being in this, yeah, so we are materialized. And oh, this is not real, yeah, and that means it's such a frustrating encounter, whereas our addiction, what we're here, it won't inspire. It's limited, you know, collectively, which is the foundation for the expansion of hospitals. For example, for the teacher of mindfulness, we should be celebrating the deconstruction of a hospital.

So anyway, that's something I've been contemplating. Yeah, that's what I've been contemplating, that I've come to a solution that even my brothers and sisters here are not yet, and that is business.

Julianna Raye: Business?

Question: Yeah, what we do every day, focus. We come here after having focused 40 hours a week at whatever, and then we come here. Why don't we go there 40 hours a week to focus?

Julianna Raye: Yeah, yeah.

Question: And be acknowledged for it. So, so it's a whole flipping the script.

Julianna Raye: Yeah, it's, yeah, throwing out the old script.

Question: Yeah, yeah, but the hypnosis is so strong, and I'm quite involved.

Julianna Raye: Yeah, you were a catalyst. You were a catalyst, I just said.

Question: Oh, well, yeah.

Julianna Raye: I definitely relate to the flipping of the script, and I think that all we can really do is do our own work and then from that, that's where the change happens, including whatever wisdom bubbles up about the way it could have a ripple effect through the world.

Question: And suffering is also challenging the differences.

Julianna Raye: Suffering is?

Question: Suffering is.

Julianna Raye: Yeah, yeah, yeah, is what motivates the...

Question: Well, it also creates the heat and heat is what brings about insight.

Julianna Raye: Exactly, that's right. Yeah, there's this beautiful Thich Nhat Hanh statement about the garbage of our life, being the soil that produces the lotus.

Question: Similar, yeah.

Julianna Raye: Yes, that's the key, isn't it, to actually see the whole, everything.

Question: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Julianna Raye: Yeah, thanks for sharing that, and that wish that we could all overcome the ancestral habits that led to this point right now.

Question: Thank you for your presentation. We've been here to share this morning. A couple things came in mind for me that I wanted to ask as you were speaking. One, two-part question. One is, I think a lot of us involved in Zen practice get a little bit hooked at the beginning when we read, a little bit hooked on this approach when we read some of what is fundamental teachings about suffering, about grasping and impermanence, and those things that almost at face value, you just strike these truths. Then there's this method and sangha and people kind of leaning into that, trying to figure out how do I understand this fully. So I think my first question was, I think that's what draws a lot of us to Zen as a path. What do you think draws people to universal mindfulness as maybe another path within them? That was question one. And then I'll add question two, which is within our tradition, there's also the opportunity to embrace the precepts as a way of living and also the eightfold path as a way of sort of conducting their lives. Is there kind of an equivalent on the universal mindfulness side?

Julianna Raye: So one is kind of what draws you to it and then the other question is, when you're not on the cushion or in...

Question: Right, so what are the guidelines?

Julianna Raye: Yeah, exactly. Did they contrast or are they similar?

Question: Yes, yeah.

Julianna Raye: So in terms of what draws you to it, I would say broadly speaking, suffering and the wish to be relieved of suffering. However, the individual characterizes that. And it could be, my doctor told me I need to relax. And so I guess I'm going to try this mindfulness thing. Or, I know I have this condition, anxiety, or I'd like to have more joy in my life. I once had it, what happened to it. So I think generally speaking, however people articulate that to themselves is what draws them. And that's important. How an individual chooses to articulate it for themselves in the Unified Mindfulness approach. Excuse me. We like to meet people exactly. I think I've got a frog. Thanks.

We like to meet people exactly in their self-defined need. So if you say, I'm looking for more fulfillment in my life, or if you say, I need to relax, we're going to take that as a point of entry and actually interact around finding a strategy, a method, a practice that is specific to that expressed need or interest. So we sort of, it's centered around the person, the individual, their ideas about what they need as a place to start.

Question: Is it a therapeutic coaching model?

Julianna Raye: It's not therapeutic in the sense that we're not psychotherapists and we don't delve into a person's psychological history or anything like that. It's centered around the individual so that we can collaborate on a practice that's going to be meaningful for them. And that takes a kind of experimentation. So we might start by focusing on relaxation and discover that the person actually finds that agitating and they prefer a focus where their eyes are open and they're looking at nature.

So we tailor it, and the fact that it's centered around these attentional skills, concentration, clarity, equanimity, means that we can adjust to find a point of entry for the individual that the individual is going to be motivated to do. So that's the aim of it is to leave it open. We say these skills can be developed whatever you're choosing to focus on. Let's find something that you find inspiring and motivating and that you'll stick with. And so it's about the habit formation right out of the gate.

So yes, that's sort of like what draws folks is the suffering, I would say it's the same. However, we want to describe that. But we can call it life goals. Or we can call it suffering. And it's just a matter of what's the language that's appropriate for the paradigm. And so we might say, well, what are your goals? What are your aims? But understood, kind of implicit in that is I want to get from here to here because I'm not okay with how here is. So it kind of is woven into it. Just a different take on it.

And then relatedly, the guidelines, we do have guidelines where we try to keep them as broad and basic as possible. And that is a way that it's quite different from from Zen. We have, for instance, a definition of practice maturity. What does it look like to be a mature practitioner? And in that, we include that you adhere to ethical standards that are set out by your community, by your religion, your professional standards. So we sort of include like, you need to abide by these, but we're not going to tell you what they are. We're just going to tell you that's part of being a mature practitioner is to abide by these. And then we have basic ones that we consider globally are important, like not stealing, that kind of thing.

So that's how we navigate that. And that was very intentional on Shinzen's part because of this issue of barrier to entry. How do we essentially make sure that ethics and morality are a component of this training? They have to be. But how can we do that in a way that gives a person, kind of respects a person's personal, what's meaningful to that person? We leave their beliefs to them. And we leave that setting to them. And we trust that they have that. And if they don't, then we say, okay, you're out of alignment. And so that's kind of how we handle it. It's just a different way to get to the same thing. And the purpose is to keep the barrier of entry low.

Question: Yeah. Interesting. That in Zen, I believe we come with the assumption that the individual has worked through many of their life issues. And the very fact is that I cannot sit for an extended period of time if there is a physical, emotional, psychological disturbance.

Julianna Raye: Yeah. So I think that's a good point that, well, for example, in all of these stories about how you have to sit outside the temple without food or water for days at a time to even be let in. You have to be the kind of person who can weather the intensity of a monastic setting. And that tends to come through culturally in Zen. That if you're showing up, you're ready to dig in and do some hard work. Whereas it's a softer landing for mindfulness. You can, I think that one of the downsides of mindfulness culturally as it is now is that there's a lot of passivity in it. You kind of go on an app and you just listen to a guidance and that guidance may or may not align with your actual experience. So there may be disconnect.

And I think the passivity, it's like the minimum intentionality. And I think that's problematic. It takes a lot of intention to show up for Zen practice. And in mindfulness where, Unified Mindfulness is basically trying to solve that problem by being interactive and making it less passive. And saying, let's meet you in your interests and your needs because that will motivate you to do the training. So that's kind of the relationship there.

Question: Thank you for such an insightful and concise overview. One point of entry I might introduce here is Haiku. A friend of mine, Arturo, leads hikes in Carpinteria on the Bluffs for the Land Trust. And we stop within one hour hike. We stop five times. And he says, when we stop, just observe what you're seeing. And the first line of the Haiku is, what do you see? The second line is, what do you hear? And the third line is, how do you feel? And I just found out where he might have got that from.

Julianna Raye: That's great. I love it.

Question: And then people can share or they don't have to. And then we move on. And it's such a mindfulness practice without even telling people what they're doing.

Julianna Raye: It is beautiful. I love it. And what you're pointing to as well is something that I didn't mention that I want to highlight as a strength of Zen, which is the spontaneity. It is the expression. Rinzai is all about the koan practice and you're going in there to manifest the wisdom without the intellect. You're just going in there to just be it. And we call it bounce in Unified Mindfulness because basically Shinzen wanted to kind of classify all the world traditions and at least have a way to show their relationships, organize it in a way that helps you see these relationships. And Zen is all about the chopping wood, the engaging in the Haiku, the expression. I think that's a distinguishing kind of a signature of Zen as well. So thanks for bringing that.

Question: Thank you. I already said thank you, but I'll say thank you, because it was a great talk. And it got me thinking about a conversation I was having at the end of the sesshin last month with another Zen practitioner. He was the Eno. And we were talking on the last day. And he brought up a really interesting point that I didn't really have an answer for. And so I'm kind of curious what your answer to this might be. And he was sort of asking about or pointing out, I suppose, the danger in, danger, those are his words, the danger in spiritual, I think he termed as spiritual non-religious practitioners. And mindfulness came up as sort of an example. And we talked a little bit about, this has been happening for centuries, the line edges. And we don't like how they do it in a different way. And that sort of thing. But just sort of the seeing this slippery slope in that, not necessarily Zen is about mindfulness. But just about people doing and saying, acting in the name of something. But it's not all there. For example, like you said, you kind of trust people to leave the ethics and values on their side of the fence or whatever. But what if those are, they don't have a great ethics or values system. I had thought today about like, well, what if there's a whole profit schema to this, whereas the Zen traditions are rather donation driven. So I'm just curious, maybe your thoughts on that. It's a great question. The scope creep, I guess, if you will.

Julianna Raye: Yes, yes. Yeah, I mean, I think there are risks at every turn. And really, our minds center threat and danger. Our minds center threat and danger. That's the orientation for most people on this planet. There's something dangerous going on. So, and that is why we are stuck in suffering. That's why we're stuck in separateness because the mind centers danger and threat.

So our journey through this practice is to de-center. We could say a fundamental function of this practice is to de-center the mind that has fixated around danger and threat and to center connection, connectivity. So, just to start there, that it's interesting, you said it. He said dangerous. That was his word. Let's start there. Because to your point, that is the thread that goes all the way back to the lizard brain. So what happens if we don't center threat and danger in our thinking? What does the thinking look like? We can ask ourselves.

But that being said, there is a valid concern there as well about what does this practice look like without ethics? Boring is one word that comes to mind. I mean, who wants to show up and do this as a, it takes, in other words, it takes a lot of hard work and discipline for you to see any positive results from this practice. So we could consider like what's the kind of person that engages in a practice like this without having any ethics. They'd be committing to watching the paint dry. It's not typical that somebody, do you see what I'm saying? It's a little, so there's that. There's the sort of self-selection process about who would show up and do this kind of thing.

But, that being said, I guess philosophically, I would rather people, I see a place for all of it, I guess that's what I would say. And I would rather people have some point of entry than no point of entry. And then it's, is it the worst thing if a workplace offers mindfulness training? There's this sort of like, well, but then are they convincing their employees to just stick around and be mistreated, because they have this mindfulness practice that can get them to have equanimity with any terrible thing that we do to them. And, there can be this idea. It's a great, fearful story to tell.

In reality, I think of it, the flip side of it. What if somebody gets exposed to mindfulness in a terrible workplace setting and realizes, hey, I'm out of alignment here. I'm going. Thanks for the mindfulness. I'm really clear about what a mess this is. And I'm not going to take it anymore. So, I don't think we can anticipate what the outcomes are of somebody actually internalizing this practice. And I think that the road to internalizing it is quite rigorous. And so I feel like that in itself creates a kind of self-selection. And generally speaking, I trust people that they are, they know what's best for them. That's my philosophically the stance. So, I don't know if that...

Question: Definitely. Thank you for that. It was kind of funny, too, because I didn't really think of the duality of Zen and mindfulness until the concept of it got put in front of me. And I really think it's hilarious how the mindset, oh, like, difference, threat, like not what I'm doing. What is it? And I ultimately came back to a very similar place of like, if there's a, if this is a way somebody can help, they can relieve their own suffering, great. And who am I to be the one that says, well, that's not the right way.

Julianna Raye: That's it. That's it. And personally, I can only speak about my personal journey. I started out with mindfulness and would never have been able to do Rinzai training had it not been for the foundation and mindfulness. That was what saved me for all those very, very long days.

Question: Yeah. Yes, I agree with you there that mixing up some of the traditions can be very helpful. Zen sometimes wants you to just chew the Zen part and stick with it, because you don't want to be doing too much shopping around. But then again, crossing into different ones can be quite insightful, too. And one of the ones that I carried quite thoroughly from the early age is yoga. And you've seen what that has gone through in iterations, whether it being early in the 70s, it was very, you had to find a yoga class in the basement of the Unity Church. Now it's on every corner and it's all the sexy clothing and all that. And you could get really mad about that. But I thought, wow, I'm so glad that at least it's out there.

Julianna Raye: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Point of entry. And then people can find how much they want to go.

Question: Exactly. Yeah.

Julianna Raye: And I was really, so I took a trip to India for the first time. I've never been before and went to the, it was like a pilgrimage for me, went to ashrams and saw, I mean, they've done a really good job of monetizing. And the money goes towards good aims, good works. So yeah, this issue of monetization, I think there is the, there is the context of a certain specific culture, the culture of donations that is referenced. And yeah, I mean, I definitely understand the ambivalence about money in general and how that can color what happens when you monetize something? What's the effect of that? And it's, yeah.

Question: Well, monetizing is what do we value at all? Right. What do I want to empower?

Julianna Raye: Yes. Yeah. And what degree?

Question: That's it.

Julianna Raye: And it's, and it's cultural. And again, if we're thinking about reach, what's going to work in a western setting, what's going to work in an eastern setting, etc. So yeah, there's room for all of it, I think. And for people to just be drawn to what works for them.

Question: So, there is a saying, never go to India for the first time. Anybody who's been there knows what I mean. You can't prepare. I bring people for the first time. They're kind of lost, their eyes. You can't quite, they're just wanting to get back on the plane. But then they embrace it.

Julianna Raye: Yeah, I had a wonderful, but I was, I think being there for the purpose I was there helps to, I mean, I think if you're there, wanting to pay homage to these teachers, or to, or to other saints, that is very grounding in terms of, if you're there, you have an intention to why you're there, otherwise the chaos...

Michael: I just want to do a time check for us. We are at time, but if we have one last, any burning desires from anyone, this is your chance?

Question: Well, I said a quick thing to say, and then we can, because I wanted to ask you a bit more about the energy of sacredness. And how that comes about in organic ways through ritual, and then also how that comes about when we set intention. And I think from, for me personally, because I've been in the world of mindfulness, yoga, Buddhism, which is kind of the main avenues for me, and some other meditation techniques. But at the end of the day, what's drawing me into those spaces is the sacredness. So it took me time to figure that out and be okay with it, and to understand what brings that about. There's so many tentacles connected to what we call the sacred. So yeah, we should, sometimes I'll maybe email you or ask you more about how that's kind of met within the context of what you're doing.

Julianna Raye: I can answer you briefly now. So in Unified Mindfulness, again, Shinzen was really interested in creating a kind of classification system for across the field to say so that we could clearly see the relationships, both maybe what we could say is different about, but also maybe what's same. And he created this sort of happiness grid, which represents the ways in which people's, he organized essentially people's life goals into these five categories. And the categories are structured, their columns that have levels. And we could say that at the top level is the more surface way people think of their goals. For instance, they want to get rid of something that's not working in their life like they want to leave their job, or they want to have something like they want to get a new car, or something like that. So more kind of like, if I get that new car, I'll be in a better place in my life. That's what I want.

And then as you progress down the levels, it gets to the deeper levels that are about this practice. So the bottom two levels are more about this practice. So you go from, if I leave this job, I'll be happy, to, if I'm able to work with this discomfort skillfully, then I'll find relief in that, to the transcendence of, turns out this discomfort is actually non-separateness itself. And so that's how we handle a yearning for sacredness would be looked at through the lens of, okay, so this person's down at the bottom level here, that's what they're interested in. And we would treat it, it sounds kind of impersonal or lacking of sacredness. But then you would be coming to it with that intent, and you would meet teachers or guides in the setting of Unified Mindfulness who share that, and then you would be working together in that way, or you would be showing up to programs that emphasize that. And that's how we would do it. They have like that diversity there.

Question: Yeah, that's what I mean, that came naturally to me, but I would think some people don't even realize it's what they are reaching for.

Julianna Raye: Exactly. And, and then that would be something, it's so personal, and yet leads you to the universal.

Question: Yeah. So you're always walking that fine line with the sacred of, or I should say, I am, not getting too precious about it, and yet at the same time, it feels so precious.

Julianna Raye: Yes. Yes.

Question: So it's a strange tight rope.

Julianna Raye: Yes.

Question: You walk if you're very drawn to those spaces, and you can fall into many a trap, which I have in regards to like who shows up in those spaces.

Julianna Raye: Right. Yes. Yes. Yes. So yeah, I mean, in that sense, it is, it's a very individualized journey. And so how do you address an individualized journey? That was, that's the attempt that Unified Mindfulness is making. Say like wherever you are, that can be your point of entry. So let's empower the individual.

Question: Just a really quick, but on intent, what is, what is that core intent? And Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist many, many years ago described it beautifully. This little nerdy guy, the first caption is, well, if I were king, I would have armies and servants and castles, just keep going on. And then the last caption is, if I were king, boy, could I meet girls?

Julianna Raye: That's what I really can't tell. Most of us become musicians for that.

Question: Yeah. Before we go to the Four Noble Truths, you'll have to be cool.

Julianna Raye: Exactly.

Michael: Thanks. You read my mind. I think we're done. Oh, yeah, we can, that's right.

Chōbun Nenzen Pamela Brown was introduced to sitting meditation practice in 1976. Forty years later, she decided to sit down again and stay seated. In 2017, Pamela met Sensei Gary Koan Janka, who gave her the Bodhisattba Precepts. Koan Sensei later introduced Nenzen to Jikoji where she was priest ordained in Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi's lineage by Shoho Michael Newhall in 2020. She received dharma transmission from Jakko Eso Vanja Palmers at Felsentor, Switzerland in 2022. Nenzen serves as the Abiding Teacher at Jikoji.

Sunday, March 9, 2025

I've been asked to say a few words of introduction for our speaker today, Jo Ei. Well, first, he's my partner, but most importantly — could I grab one of those questions? A long-term practitioner of Zen at various locations in Northampton, then not a monastery, but this and all other kinds of places. Served as liturgy master for a group — Oxbow Zen Sangha in Northampton. And when we were here last time, he became curious about the history of Santa Barbara Zen and all the personalities and people involved. And that's all I have in terms of introduction. Thank you, Kenko.

Well, first of all, I'm impressed that no one missed the daylight saving time change. Or did anyone? We were going around last night, it's like, oh, so they do that here in California. Should we check? I said, no, we have smartphones. They're smart. They'll tell us. And it worked out.

So I can't top the introduction. When we got here, as Kenko said, I've done some research in the past about people that have been involved, people I got to know personally or found out about. But when we first got here, I decided to check the website too, to see what kind of updates were there. And to tell you the truth, I'm just totally impressed with the website. It just looks so great. And as I was looking at it, I saw a picture of me, Kenko, and Joel — I think that's how it's named. When we used to sit at the McVeigh House at the Museum of Natural History, and it was in one of these windows, and there was a seat that was just big enough for the three of us. And each of us had a book, whether it be the Doan book or the Eno book, and we're all exploring. You know, like, oh, this past — it just warmed my heart to realize that this too is our sangha, not just Oxbow-Huzan in Northampton or the Village Zendo in New York City. So yeah, that was really good to see.

But it was also interesting to see that, according to the website, 1973 is when Zen got established in Santa Barbara. And they don't mention that there were two people that came up from ZCLA, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to be talking about one of them, but I don't know who the other is.

One of the things I found interesting is I think I signed up to do this talk about seven weeks ago. And for me, it's been like working on a koan. You know, what is it I want to say? If you've done any koan practice — at least the way I'm doing them now in the Blue Cliff Record — you have what's called a case, and then there'll be commentary on the case, and then there's a verse, and there's commentary on the verse. And quite often in doing koans, usually one of the first things I do is, if I can, if it's not too long, I'll write it up again, because what I found is that by writing something out I retain more of it and you tend to embody it. And that's a lot of what our practice is about. And quite often I'll also read the whole thing over like once, twice, three times, and just sit with it and see what comes up.

And so some things finally did start coming up. I know when we were here in 2019, I gave a little bit of a talk about some of the stuff that we had discovered at that time, that some people knew about. But I guess it didn't continue on. You know, like, some cultures do have a verbal, oral tradition where things get passed on, stories are told, and whatnot. And so this story wasn't told at that time, that I was aware of.

So another interesting thing I found was that when I signed up it was about seven weeks ago, and then in doing some reading I learned that from the moment that the Buddha became enlightened, it was seven weeks before he started teaching. Not that I'm drawing an analogy — I would never do that. But at first, he just wanted to sit in the peace and understand what he had experienced. And according to the legend, it took some Brahma deities to convince him that there are people that could understand this. And so it took a while for him to figure out how to do this. And then seven weeks later, he gave his first teaching, The Turning of the Wheel.

So there are three people I want to tell you about that I feel have contributed greatly to this community over the years. Two of them I got to know personally, and one of them I didn't get to know. She was long gone before we even came here for the first time.

So what do I feel is important to tell you about these people? And I had to question that myself. What's so important about this? And the answer came to me in the dedications that we do for the Song of the Jewel Mirror and the Identity of Relative and Absolute. In the dedications for both of those, there is included the words: we also dedicate these merits to all the temples of the White Plum lineage, to the Zen Peacemaker Order, and to all ancestors of the extended sangha. And that's what really grabbed me — to all ancestors of the extended sangha. To me, this was the key: that these three people are ancestors of the sangha.

So the story starts with Kenko and I coming to California in 2012. And actually before that, he had done a lot of research on, you know, what is there for Zen groups out in Santa Barbara? And there were a couple that we had noticed that looked interesting. One had to get scratched off — I think it was the one we were most interested in at the time — because, from what I understand, you know, you have a lot of fires here, and there was a fire and that place got burned down. So then we found this group, and at the time it was held at the house of a Tony Johansson, not far from here on Ontare Drive. And Tony was a really dedicated person and a very interesting person. I only knew him for the six months we were here then.

But Tony used to live in the San Francisco area, and he and his first wife, Antoinette — they were known as Tony and Toni — used to drive Suzuki Roshi around to give talks that became the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. And I just found that amazing. It's like, oh, here's this such a direct connection to this San Francisco Zen Center teacher. So it really impressed me.

And actually, this is all documented. There's a book I have here — I don't know if any of you have seen it — Crooked Cucumber. So this is a book about Suzuki Roshi's life, and it's written by David Chadwick, who was ordained by Suzuki, I think in the 1960s. But Chadwick wrote the book, and he's continued — he also created a website where they've updated information from the book about different people that were part of that saga back at that time.

And there's one interesting story about Tony that I really like. His wife was contacted — his former wife, Antoinette — at one point, and she mentioned, and I didn't know this, I knew Tony had a rakusu, but I never knew his Dharma name. I don't think he used it at that time. So his wife and he both took jukai with Suzuki Roshi in 1973, I think it was. And Suzuki gave her the Dharma name Toin Jundo, which she was told meant something like essence of plum or peach blossom. And she couldn't quite remember what Tony's name was, but she knew it started with an R and had something to do with a Zen master. And I think Koan found out about this, because on the website Chadwick mentions Koan reaching out to him when memorial services would be done for Tony. And they figured out that Tony's name was Reiun — R-E-I-U-N.

And the legend is that Reiun was a Zen master, or became a Zen master. But before that, he went to the top of a mountain and decided he was going to stay there until he became enlightened. And he didn't become enlightened on the mountain. And finally, in his disappointment, he came down from the mountain. And as he was doing that, he passed through a peach orchard in blossom, and he became immediately enlightened.

So that's just such a wonderful story, because a teacher will give a student a name depending on various things — what they see with the student, or what they think they need to discover or learn, or whatnot. And so I was wondering, what does that say about Tony from Suzuki's perspective? Was it something like, your enlightenment is right here, you don't have to go up on the mountain? Or could it be something outside? I don't know. But I just found that really pretty amazing.

So Tony and Antoinette didn't stay together. They divorced. And I think around 1973, Tony, as a divorced father of young children, moved to Santa Barbara. I'm not exactly sure what he did for a living, because he was retired at the time, but he was really big into old-time music. He played in a lot of venues around here.

So I really can't say too much about him myself. Like I said, I only knew him for those six months. But I've noticed how he opened his home to us and to others, and the efforts he went through in creating the space in his home — it was a room probably about as big as from these zabutons back — that he would move furniture out of, he would clean the floor, and set up zabutons. And there was a little patio outside that room where quite often after the sitting we would gather for tea.

So instead of me trying to say what I thought about Tony, I figure I'd let someone that knew him a little bit longer speak. There was a friend, Larkin, who was a long-time friend of Tony's — he said 25 years. And Tony died 10 years ago last month, so it was February 4th, 2015. He said:

"On February 4th, my best buddy and musical companion of 25 years left us here on Earth, continued his whole journey to another place. Tony Johansson was a mentor to dozens, if not hundreds, of beginning musicians in the Santa Barbara area. He was voted a local hero two years ago. He began a jam session in his home some 30 years ago and opened the door to all the old-time music world. He was a Buddhist with a skeptical twist who was exceptionally good at keeping it real. No nonsense. Once I noticed, he took into his home those who needed a temporary place to stay. No questions asked. He had a sly smile and a generous heart."

I think it was our last sitting of that year, before we had to return to Massachusetts, that we had another tea gathering afterwards, and Tony had created a song for us that he played for everybody. It's called "The Laid-Back World." And I think we still have a recording of it somewhere.

So also on our first visit to Santa Barbara, we connected with Sensei Koan. I don't know how many of you have known him. I think he died late last year. October. So this was at the suggestion of then-Sensei Yukon Marko, who was a teacher at the Boundless Mind Zendo. They had not long before that moved to the Massachusetts area from the West Coast. And he was involved in the sangha that we belonged to at that time. So she found out that we were going to California and sent an email — I think it was a Facebook thing or something — saying you ought to connect with this guy, Sensei Koan.

And we did. We met him, we had coffee with him. He came to Tony's one time that I remember. But Tony had been running sittings at his house for a long time, and that was his space. And I think Sensei Koan recognized that and didn't try to interject himself, other than the one time I remember him being there. But within a couple of years, Tony's health deteriorated, and I think he asked Sensei Koan at that time to take over the group, which he did. And again, Tony died 10 years ago last month.

So we returned in 2019 for another six months when Kenko was on sabbatical at UCSB. And during one of the services at the McVeigh House, Sensei Koan decided he was going to have a memorial service. And the memorial service was for a woman by the name of Flora Courtois. And Sensei Koan described her as being a founder of ZCLA. And I was like, who? What? I've never heard of this person. Who is this? And this surprised me because ZCLA — we call it our grandmother temple. The Village Zendo is our mother temple, and then we have our own little sangha in Northampton. So I had to find out.

What I found is that Flora died 25 years ago, I think it was February 14th. And she had gotten involved with Maezumi Roshi before there was even a ZCLA. I mean, she was very instrumental in kind of like helping him in this different culture from Japan — teaching him English and a number of other things. But the most interesting thing about her is that she was recognized by one of Maezumi's teachers, Yasutani Roshi, as having had an enlightenment experience. And this is something that had happened to her starting back in the 1940s.

Now, Suzuki Roshi and the others didn't start coming here until the late 50s and early 60s. Matter of fact, if you've seen the interview of Sensei Koan that I remember seeing in the emails, he mentions how back around 1960 when he started practicing, there were only like five teachers in the United States.

So what happened, I guess, is that Flora was having these experiences but she didn't have any context for it. She didn't know anything about what was going on or why this was happening. And eventually she started to hear about this teacher in the LA area, and started sitting with him. And again, Yasutani was a teacher of Maezumi's. So she began to have contact with him. I guess she really liked him, so she asked to speak with him one day and explained to him what had transpired, what had happened. And it was Yasutani and Maezumi and Flora — and I guess Maezumi was translating for Yasutani what Flora had said. So it was a three-way exchange.

He asked Flora to write down what had happened for her. And she created a little book, and it's called An Enlightenment Experience. I don't have that book. I think Bill mentioned to me one time he had the book somewhere but couldn't find it.

In this version of The Hazy Moon of Enlightenment, which is written by Maezumi Roshi and Bernie Glassman — and this is the 2007 edition — I think the previous editions didn't include Flora's account. And it's a short thing, maybe 16 pages. But also Yasutani wrote a few pages about his experience with her.

And this is what he writes: "Although utterly unaware of what Buddhism or Zen was, Flora Courtois attained enlightenment by herself through her unrelenting struggle with the question, 'What is reality?' This is called having no teacher, or enlightenment by oneself. This is the same sort of awakening Shakyamuni Buddha attained when he saw the dawn star on December 8th, two and a half millennia ago."

At the time, Flora lived in Pacific Palisades. But shortly after that, I think in the early 1970s, she moved up to Santa Barbara and started having sittings — the way I understand it, twice a week in her house, a weekday and a weekend. And these went on almost to the day that she died. So again, she died 25 years ago this past February.

Basically all I know about her is what I've read in this book, what I've learned from people I interviewed back in 2019, and also what I found out from an interview done by two teachers from ZCLA shortly before Flora died. And it's really a fascinating read, and I think it would be a great thing to include in the archives of this place here. I have an electronic copy of it, along with a print copy.

But just her life and the amazing things that she accomplished. And again, as with Tony, I've never known her personally, or, you know, if I did, not enough to really comment on her. But I ran across a memorial for Flora by Roshi Joseph Bobrow. And Roshi Bobrow — I don't know if any of you remember — but when Sensei Koan was in the assisted living, we had the Zenkai there, and Roshi Bobrow was among the people that came to that as well.

So he writes: "Flora, I first met you in 1973 during your trip to Maui to visit my teacher, Robert Aitken, his wife Anne, and the community of the Maui Zendo where I lived and trained. You gave a crystalline talk on attention and Zen practice with no frills or jargon. You captured the heart of practice. I visited you in your home in Pacific Palisades and later Santa Barbara. You were also a psychologist and we had long talks on areas of common interest, such as ethics, psychological growth and Zen practice, and physiology and meditation practice. You were a student of consciousness, and your unceasing curiosity and depth took you into biofeedback and later into studying the brain and its relation to spiritual unfolding. You began a foundation for the scholarly study of mysticism and consciousness, supported many other related causes and groups, and were a founder of the Los Angeles Zen Center. You embodied beginner's mind, always open to new ideas, taking them in and thinking deeply about them, and adding your own often remarkably creative theories and insights. Your realization was deep and clear. You knew in your bones that our essential nature is embodied rather than talked about. You eschewed jargon and sectarianism and remained the truth seeker until the day you passed."

So I'm aware that the memorial service for Sensei Koan is going to be happening today, and I believe it will be recorded. So I hope you'll be able to see it sometime. Because I have my memories of Sensei Koan and I'll share one that was kind of a favorite. But I'm sure there are other people that could say a lot more — and there are probably people in this room that could say a lot about him too.

My favorite memory of him, or what I think said something about him, was when we came back in 2019 and he asked me to be his attendant for Jukai sesshin. He was getting unsteady at that time, and so Kenko and I had to assist him a little bit — he would lean on me as we would be making our entrance for the service. And I don't know if you're — how many are familiar with a priest's bowing cloth? The okesa has a gold trim on the outside, so it seems like this special, special thing. And he didn't feel steady enough to put the bowing cloth down and hold it back up, so he asked me to carry it over my arm as his attendant. And the first time I did that, it was like, whoa, what is this? And for me it was a big deal. And for him, it was just: this is what has to be. So that's pretty much my talk on this. I think what I want to do is just open it up if anyone has any questions about anything.

I know I talked about, if there was time, saying a little about liturgy, which is a lot to get into. I would have to make it kind of skeletal, I think.

Roger Jo Ei Stawasz: I'd just like to add that my rakusu was stained — but this is: Koan Sensei wrote this to me, October 9th, 2016. And he gave me the koan Mu, and I had seven years, because that's how long it took some people to get to it. So seven years came and went. And I don't know — I wish I could see him now and say, help me out.

It was always interesting to do interviews with him, because he always had that impish smile. And the sense of humor is what I remember from him.

Roger Jo Ei Stawasz: I'm glad you brought that up, because there was something else I've been thinking about since we came here. I used to Zoom in with the Boundless Mind Zendo in the morning. And with the three-hour time difference, that became impossible to do — I hadn't had enough coffee by that time. So I started doing the evening sittings. And in the evening sittings, they do the evening gatha. And I don't have it memorized, but basically, to some extent, you know — life is short, practice, years go by and we're gone.

And to me, this is an example of thinking back to 1973 when people first started gathering here. And it's not like a linear thing. I think during that period of time with Flora and Tony, there were probably simultaneously a couple of sittings and things that were happening, if not more. I know a number of years ago in Northampton, we had the professor of Asian studies at Smith College organize this thing. It was called Many Flavors of the Dharma, where Buddhist groups from the area got together. I was just stunned as to how many different groups there were — you know, small little personal zendos that people have, and things like that. So it was really something.

But the evening gatha is the thing that really kind of brought this together for me, along with the dedication — and now especially, now that Sensei Koan is gone, these people are basically, from my perspective, ancestors of this sangha.

Question: I'd like to say thank you for the talk and for bringing Sensei Koan into the room with us today, and Flora, who I'm really happy to hear about — the passage you read was really nice to hear. And Tony, of course. So thanks again.

Roger Jo Ei Stawasz: Thank you.

Question: Well, I feel really old because I sat with Flora in her house. She was just a wonderful person, even towards the end of her life. When I moved here in '86, eleven days later I had my first child, so I really couldn't do much Zen practice for a number of years, or at least organized practice. So I remember — I called up the number, because I had recently moved from Los Angeles. Anyway, I called the number, and it was Sensei Koan who answered, and this was back in '86, '87. And I just explained, you know, I was interested but couldn't come. And he said, well, you know, when you're able to come. And so yeah, we sat in Flora's living room. And if there were more people, she would just put zabutons wherever in the house so that we could sit. And she would give a little reading, and was just very unassuming, but present. It was just a treasure that I was able to do that.

And then we moved to Tony's house. And I couldn't believe how much work he did in preparing for each Sunday sitting. Not only preparing the room, but he would go out and rake the yard for the kinhin path. So we would all help put it back together, but with him doing the initial prep — quite an effort. And a story that I remember: Tony would say that in his travels with Suzuki Roshi, all these people were becoming priests. And so Suzuki Roshi said, "Well, Tony, do you want to be a priest?" And Tony thought about it and said, no. And then Suzuki Roshi said, "Oh, good." I really could understand that.

But Tony was amazingly dedicated. And his wife, Rachel — they were just wonderful, I would say godparents to this sangha. Meanwhile, Gary, Sensei Koan, moved to LA to study more intensively there at ZCLA. And then when he retired and came back to Santa Barbara, at that point Tony's health was declining, and so we moved to McVeigh House at the Museum of Natural History. And two of our sangha members then formally asked Sensei Koan to be our teacher at that point. That's when we got really organized — had the chant books done, really became more formally incorporated as a 501(c)(3), and just really brought a lot of life and organization to this group. And even ordained a couple of priests. We had a big ordination ceremony, several days long. It was very exciting seeing all that happen.

Question: Yeah, it's interesting — even today, there was a young man, I guess he's not so young, but he stopped by as we were setting up. Justin — he was part of the group at Tony's house. And then when he moved away, he got married, he donated some of these zabutons and things. So as it turns out, he's working here but living 250 miles away, so we haven't had a chance to sit together. But he did stop by. It's just amazing how, with your talk on the history and all the continuing threads — and we've got wonderful new faces, and it's just lovely to see how the sangha, you know, we're still here, still sitting. And it's lovely. So thank you so much.

Roger Jo Ei Stawasz: Thank you.

Question: I forgot to mention about Koan being the guiding teacher at that time, because before that the group didn't really have one.

Question: I'm sure I'm going to lay back — but not really. For me, it all began many years ago at Bonds, at the checkout counter, where in front of me was Sensei Koan. And I had known him around town, but we never really had a connection. And we connected. And he invited me to come and sit with the Santa Barbara Zen community. And I sat a few times at Tony's, and then was part of the transition to McVeigh, where, through his dharma teachings, he guided me in the practice of Zen. And we became friends over the years and would sit at the coffeehouse — Renaud's here in Santa Barbara — and we would talk about this, that, and the other.

And one of the conversations was about the transitioning, and we agreed that it would be a good thing to go through the transition bravely and with curiosity. And just a few months ago, I sat with Koan as he lay in his bed, holding his hand and chanting the Heart Sutra — in particular, "no ending of old age and death... no old age and death, and no ending of old age and death." And I remember chanting that continuously while holding his hand as I chanted the Heart Sutra as well. And I would also, while stroking his hand, say: remember to let go, be brave, and be curious. And also to mentor me in this moment, so that when it's my turn, I too will be surrendered, brave, and curious. And the realization that in that moment, billions and billions of sentient beings had transitioned before, and billions and billions will transition thereafter, and I will be one of those. With curiosity, I hope.

Question: I didn't know any of those people. I've been in Santa Barbara since '75, and I don't know — maybe there were some near misses. I was particularly intrigued by your story about enlightenment through peach blossoms. That really intrigued me. I just finished, in our winter practice period with the Jaco Zen Center, reading the Vimalakirti — it's not really a sutra, it's — I think it's titled "Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti," but I can't remember the full title. And in that book there's a full Buddha-field, a whole world where all of the bodhisattvas are enlightened by the perfume that emanates from some trees in their world. And that's all they have to do — sit under those trees and smell that perfume, and they gain enlightenment. I had never heard — I mean, that was a completely new concept to me. And now here it is again. My jasmine is blooming in the yard right now. I should spend more time standing there.

Roger Jo Ei Stawasz: Yeah.

Question: So who was it again — remind me — who was it that smelled the peach blossoms? Roses and orange blossoms do it for me. Who was it in your story? Was it Tony? Was it Reiun? Who was the Buddhist that — Tony's Dharma name was that same person?

Roger Jo Ei Stawasz: I think Reiun — R-E-I-U-N. He's supposedly a Zen master of the Tang dynasty. I don't know how far back that goes.

Question: Well, thank you for gathering this information about the history of the sangha. It's really nice to understand the archive and that sort of tradition over 50 years or more of this group. I didn't know if you'd had a chance to read any of Tony Johansson's poetry.

Roger Jo Ei Stawasz: I haven't seen it, no.

Question: Because I think it may have come out of his musicianship and writing songs, but he was a really talented, thoughtful poet. And I think, Elisa, I have a few. I think you may as well. I'd love to share those with you as you put this archive together.

Roger Jo Ei Stawasz: Yeah, actually, now that you mention it, there was one poem of his I ran across, but I felt it was better for this to hear from someone — and it was an interesting poem. Very, very reflective, very thoughtful about Zen and practice.

Question: Thank you. Thank you.

Roger Jo Ei Stawasz: So we end with the Four Vows. Page 41. At least three times in English, then Japanese, and then in English — whatever language you want.

Meido Barbara Anderson's Dharma talk titled "Leave No Trace" at SBZC on February 23, 2025. Meido is the Guiding Teacher at O-An Zendo, a Soto Zen temple in Central Pennsylvania, and received Transmission in the Kobun Chino Lineage.