Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Particularly, I wanted to say good morning to all the children who are here. And I want to start today by talking just a little bit to you. I'm sorry I can't see you from behind my podium, so I'll peek around every once in a while. So this morning I wanted to talk about this statue, the person holding the staff and what looks like an egg in his left hand. And this statue is called Jizo in Japanese. And Jizo is very special, and that's why we have him here in this room. And he's special for quite a few reasons. He's very kind. He's pretty smart. He's nice looking, don't you think?

[01:05]

And also, most importantly, he made a promise many thousands of years ago. And he promised to take care of children. And also, he promised to take care of travelers. So I was thinking about travelers, and travelers are really basically children who've grown up but are still trying to find a place to call home. So my daughter was telling me recently that she's going to someday, maybe when she's older, live somewhere else. And I listened and I said, well, where are you going to live? And she said, Mill Valley. And she said, because I want to see you every day, but I'll probably go up my own house.

[02:08]

And I said, OK, I'm glad you'll be close by. But then I thought, well, maybe she won't live so close by. Some of you have grandparents, I bet, that don't live so close by, don't you? Yeah. So, that's the traveling part. Sometimes children and their parents have to travel a long way to see each other. And when you travel, sometimes kind of bad things can happen. I had two stories of my own from traveling I wanted to tell you. Two traveling stories. One time I was traveling in my car and I got out to take a picture in a very pretty spot out in the middle of really nowhere and I locked my keys in the trunk. Yeah, I did. And then another time I was traveling with a group of teenagers. I was the responsible party.

[03:09]

And I was tired and I fell asleep on the lawn in this little town where we were waiting for a bus. And the bus came and went and I was sound asleep. And all the kids were saying, why did you do that? So anyway, bad things happen when you travel sometimes. So that's why Jizo made this promise to take care of us. Another thing that happens when bad things happen is that sometimes you can get in a bad mood. Do you know what bad moods are? Some of you guys? Yeah. Yeah, for you, they come and go pretty fast, so... But for adults, they can go on for a long time. And it's kind of like going to jail. You're stuck. You're just stuck. So there are six kinds of bad moods that we know of in the universe, and I wanted to tell you and see if you recognize those bad moods.

[04:18]

The first one is the bad mood of being stuck up. My stuff is the best, and you can't have any. That's one bad mood. Another bad mood is of being jealous of the guy who's stuck up. You want his stuff. You want all of it. So that's the second bad mood. And the third one is that you're bored with stuff altogether. I don't care one way or the other. Are those familiar at all? Kind of, I'm bored, I want his toys, or these are mine, you can't have them. Yeah, I think those are familiar to the big people too. The next three of the six are kind of worse versions of the first three. The first one is being angry. I really want that stuff. I'm mad at you. I hate you. That's a very bad mood. And on the other side of that one is whining.

[05:22]

Please give me that stuff. That's a bad mood. And the worst one of all is called, I am so sad all I can do is cry. Yeah. So the thing about Jizo is that this staff he has, it doesn't quite show in this particular statue, but he usually has six rings on his staff. And those rings are keys to the bad moods. Each one of them opens one of those bad moods and lets you out. And this egg in his left hand is actually a wish-granting jewel. Like Aladdin's lamp. Do you remember Aladdin's lamp? You rub the lamp and who comes out of there? The genie. Big blue genie. Robin Williams. And he says, what do you want? And then you tell him and he gives you three wishes.

[06:25]

Now this jewel, unlike Aladdin's lamp, will give you all the wishes you want. It's unlimited wishes. And the kinds of wishes you can ask for, once Jizo opens the door of your bad mood with his keys, then you can wish for something that'll make you feel better, so that you'll come out of your bad mood. Like maybe you want a hug, or a turn on the slide, or maybe you want to be alone in your room for a while. Whatever makes you feel better. So you can make these wishes either out loud or in your own head, it doesn't matter, because Jizo will hear you. You know, just kind of like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. Because actually, Jizo is made from a drawing that someone was asked to draw a picture of happiness and kindness. And they drew a picture that looked like that, and someone else made a statue out of the picture. And the real Jizo with the staff and the jewel is actually inside your own body.

[07:33]

Right here, right next to your heart. So whenever you're in a bad mood, you can just put your own hands on your own heart and take some deep breaths. And after a while, I was just doing this upstairs, waiting to come down here to talk. After a while, I felt ever so much better. It's going to be okay. So I thought maybe today I would give this statue to you children as a gift. Is that okay with you? Yeah? Okay, so this is now for the kids' program. And I haven't checked with the staff yet, but I think it'll be okay. And we can keep taking care of it for you. We put flowers here and offer incense, and he has a friend, this nice lady down here called Tara. And anytime you come here, you can know that this statue is yours. Okay?

[08:36]

So please come again. And right now you can go. What are you working on? In the meditation instructions that are given by 13th century Zen master, Korean Zen master named Chunhyo, he says, we should not fear the arising of thought.

[10:03]

We should fear being slow to notice. So it occurred to me as I was preparing this talk that some of you might imagine that because I'm wearing these robes and have spent a great number of hours of my adult life sitting here in this meditation hall, that I would know something about meditation by now. But fortunately for you, you would be wrong. I really don't know so much about meditation or about Buddhism either, for that matter, even though I've read a lot, I've heard a lot, and I've even said a lot. But I think it's because the reason I come into this room day after day and year after year has a lot more intimacy and is a lot more personal and therefore

[11:09]

compelling to me than anything anyone could ever say. I come in this room to gaze into the well of existence, to stop and look and feel and taste and touch and listen to my own life. So what I've come to know something about after all this time is myself. And to study the Buddha way is to study the self. And yet what it is that I've come to know is very hard to talk about. It's not without speech, it's just that the speech is not yet correct. That's a line from the Hokyo Zamai, the Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi that we chant here in the morning.

[12:16]

So that's the pickle that I'm in whenever I attempt to talk about meditation. And I really want to share my practice to offer to you what was given to me freely. with my heart as a gift. It's just that the speech is not yet correct. Jizo here is a representative of this thousand-year-old lineage of grateful practitioners extending the wish-granting jewel in hopes that it will be received But it's kind of like email, you push the send button but you really don't know if anything happens or not. There are no squeals of delight from the other end of the line like when you use the telephone.

[13:24]

But that kind of talk is really from the realm of human longing. In the true teaching there is nothing to send, Nothing to receive, nothing to wish for. You've already got it. This jewel that we long for is sitting right there in your pocket next to the Kleenex. You alone know the brightness of the moon in the night sky. So I'm sitting here just for one purpose, and that is to encourage you to continue your own excavations of your life, of yourself, until you find your happiness, your jewel, embedded in the seams of your pocket, where it's been all along.

[14:37]

The Buddha's enlightened insight begins with the knowledge of who and what we really are, the location for kindness, compassion, wisdom, generosity. And as the Buddha gazed into the well of his existence, he saw his own face reflected back at him, and he smiled. So from now on, until it's time for us all to go to muffins, I thought I would just talk about how it is to be me, through how it is to be me thinks. So I wanted to acknowledge something that seems quite obvious at the moment, that I was only imagining earlier,

[15:44]

And that is that I appear to be sitting in front of what appears to be a lot of other people. Right? Seems like that to you too, huh? Okay, that's one. And I also noticed that there is a feeling in me of vulnerability or even low-grade fear. You know, Mick and I were talking, kind of laughing nervously, he's going to give the talk next week, about the use of the podium as a kind of deflecting shield, you know, just in case you can duck down there. So the other conviction that I notice is a feeling that I have never been here before.

[16:55]

Kind of like ocean travel without a boat. And I have another conviction that this is something we all have in common. We have never been here in this place, in this way, before. That a life is always fresh and new. So this is what I think of as a familiar feeling. The familiar feeling of being just this person, right now, with no other possibility. In the Japanese tea ceremony, which I have been exploring for many years, there's a conscious appreciation of never having been here before that's built into each and every occasion. Something that Zen teacher Richard Baker used to call the non-repeating universe.

[18:03]

When you slide into the tea room, you're invited on each visit to remember that these people and this day and this assortment of utensils and you are unique. It's never happened before, ever. And soon, it will pass. Now you see it, now you don't. You know, it's the commonplace impermanence that marks our everyday life. It is so commonplace that we have practically ceased to notice. I looked up this word common, so common, and it has a lot of associations, community, communicate, communicable, commonplace, common sense, common knowledge, common stock, communion, commiserate.

[19:27]

And it was interesting to me, I loved looking in the back to these ancient words, you know, the Indo-European lists of where words came from, what they sounded like long, long ago. And the word common comes from two words, old, old words. One is KOM, K-O-M, meaning with, and the other is MEI, M-E-I, meaning to go or to change, to move. The old tribe breaking up. And together they refer to the movement of goods and services and information throughout a society based in customs and laws. So both email and impermanence are things that we all have in common, or what the Dalai Lama calls flashes of lightning in the night sky.

[20:32]

So, of all the things that I have come to appreciate about tea and Zen and myself, one of them is that I know I will never come to understand them. I will never stand under them. There is nothing to stand under. An imaginary solidity. You know, this word understand we use to mean something like, we got it, you know? I got it. It's in my grasp. As I was saying that, I was thinking, you know, kind of like a 49er tight end, you know? I got it. Don't we wish? So as I think most of you already know through your listening and hearing of basic Buddhism, that I've got it is the cause of suffering.

[21:41]

The first noble truth is there is suffering. The second noble truth is it's caused by ignorant grasping. And what we're ignoring is non-separation from the jewel. It's there all along. It's always been there. We ignore non-separation. And what we grasp after is connection. So Jizo Bosatsu, Bodhisattva, is not grasping the wish-granting jewel, the liberated mind. He's extending it, you know, implying that he's about to give it away, to let go. You know, the same way you or I might hold a butterfly that's sitting on our finger.

[22:48]

So meditation, whether it's in this room or on the freeway or while you're doing dishes, is what we used to call in the 60s a happening. It's what's happening. You just pay gentle and careful attention to what's right before your very eyes or on the tip of your tongue. Last Sunday, about this time, I was involved in a happening of the tea ceremony in Japantown for the Cherry Blossom Festival. I was the first guest, and I was nervous then, too, come to think of it. The butterfly. The gist of the ceremony, the tea ceremony, is kind of like full-bodied awakening to the present moment through the arousal of the five senses.

[24:01]

Full-bodied awakening to the present moment through the arousal of the five senses. And when I thought of that line I thought, that would look okay on the back of a romantic novel, you know. And I was also remembering this image that I had or popped into my mind one time of what full-bodied awareness might look like. I was contemplating full-bodied awareness and the image I got was of a bright yellow rubber glove filled to bursting with water and bobbing along happily on the open ocean. That's what I do when I meditate. Think of things like that. So this ceremony, the tea ceremony, begins with a very subtle odor of precisely cultivated, harvested, and blended aromatic herbs.

[25:13]

And right after that there are the textures and the sites of bamboo, iron, and pottery craft. And each of them in turn shouts up from the well for my limited capacity to appreciate them. And at the same time, it's built into the ceremony, and by extension, life itself, that a guest does not linger at each of these wondrous objects. We don't sit there greedily or obscenely trying to take them in or hold on to them. In fact, the training involves being taught to simply bow and move on. When you enter the tea room, you take one look around.

[26:25]

You stand and you walk in a prescribed number of steps to what is the equivalent of the altar. You kneel and bow, deep bow. and then you read the scroll written by, usually a Zen master, some teaching of the Buddha. On either side of the scroll there are fresh cut flowers and a small incense container that has the incense that you've been smelling inside. Then you get up, again you walk, and this time you sit at the kettle which is bubbling hot water over a charcoal fire. And next to it is a cold water jar with a black lacquer lid. You admire these each in turn, again stand, and then go to where you'll be sitting to receive your tea. Pretty soon the hostess comes in and

[27:36]

She gives you a sweet, makes you a bowl of tea. You watch her do all these elegant gestures. And then you get your bowl of tea. What could be more wonderful? Now, I don't think it's a coincidence that about 30 or 35 minutes into this ceremony, my legs begin to scream. And at that point, unfortunately, the hostess is not quite finished. In fact, based on the custom of tea, I am expected to ask her if I can inspect the utensils that she's been using. which she very slowly cleans and passes over to me for me to look at.

[28:42]

And at this point in the ceremony I'm usually beginning to question my sanity. Whatever made me think that tea was something I really wanted to do, you know, it's been 20 years now and each time it's the same question, you know, what am I doing here? This is terrible. kind of like the first three days of sashim. So time begins to slow and pain becomes the one clear and persistent element of life. And yet I carefully and lovingly look at the scoop and the caddy and pass them on to the second guest. And then I ask the hostess, What is the name of this tea caddy? And what is the name of this scoop?" She answers, and then gracefully gets up slowly and leaves the room for the final bow.

[29:49]

At that point, I get to stand up and wait as best I can with as much poise as I'm able for my legs to again have some sensation in them. So this is why I find it hard to talk about practice. If you ask me what I think about tea or Zen, or parenting for that matter, I'll tell you that they are the greatest joys of my life. But it's pretty clear to me that that joy comes from intimacy with myself in my widest experience and dimension. where there is both wanting and not wanting, pleasure and pain, gratitude and ingratitude, laughter and humorlessness, and all of it tied together in a lovely afternoon with friends while Jizo jingles his keys.

[31:13]

Would you like another bowl of tea?" The present moment is the only access channel that we have to what we casually call reality. And it's kind of hard to know what to do with the present moment. It's naked and free of strategies, propositions, alternatives, blame, improvements. Whatever you can think of, you won't find in the present moment. It's already gone, passed away, like each word that I'm saying after it's spoken. It's kind of unnerving. I was at this point in my thinking about my experience of impermanence, I remembered my mom who talks a lot.

[32:27]

And not so many years ago I asked her while we were driving somewhere if she would mind trying an experiment of, I tried to word it carefully, of being quiet for a few minutes. And I'm very grateful to say she said, sure, I'd be willing to do that. I said, great. So I said, how about five minutes? And I'll time you. So she agreed. And I'm driving along. And about three minutes later, she said, is it time? I said, no, not quite. It's close, though. And so we went on a while. And then I asked her after the five minutes how that was for her. And she said, you know, when it's quiet, I get kind of scared. I think there's something wrong. It was really helpful for me to know why my mom talks all the time.

[33:33]

When it's quiet, we get scared. Maybe something's wrong. So this quiet place right here and right now is precisely where Jizo takes us when he opens the door of our tiny imprisonments. And it's ironic that being released from prison doesn't always make us terribly happy. You're free. You're free. but my legs hurt and my child is ill and my hair is turning gray." I've heard a story about a ceremony in Japan where they release animals on a special day as a kind of celebration of animal liberation. And then after the crowds disperse, if you stick around, you'll see that the animals all come back and get into the crates again.

[34:44]

for the trip back to the farm. This seems deeply familiar to me. Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose. I liked that song when I was in my 20s. Janis Joplin, Wailing Away. This is the nihilistic version of freedom, freedom from things. But there's another understanding of freedom, which has to do with the freedom of things, just the way they are. Bright yellow gloves on the open ocean. In order to develop a taste for this kind of freedom, it's recommended by the teachers and guides that we engage fully our body and mind in awakening of the way.

[35:57]

And the method is very simple. It's called upright sitting. And all of you who've come for zazen instruction have heard all you really need to know about what to do. It really is very simple. It's a happening. So from the ever-encouraging Zen Master Dogen, in the Jījūyū-samādhi, Self-Fulfilling Samādhi, he says, the zazen of even one person at one moment imperceptibly accords with all things and fully resonates through all time. Thus, in the past, future, and present of the limitless universe, this zazen carries on the Buddha's teaching endlessly. Each moment of zazen is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization.

[37:11]

This is not only practice while sitting. It is like a hammer striking emptiness. Before and after, its exquisite peel permeates everywhere. So when the Prince Gautama, who was to become the Buddha, arrived at the bottom of his own well, deep in the forests of India 2,500 years ago, he reported on his findings there. And that report was unintelligible to human beings. It was, however, written down several hundred years later and recorded as the Avatamsaka Sutra or the Sutra of the Jewel Ornament or the Flower Ornament. So here's what he saw. He saw that the ground of the whole park was scattered with various jewels.

[38:19]

Just as the ocean is scattered with jewel islands, the earth studded with blue lapis lazuli and inlaid with all kinds of jewels. The earth was soft and pleasant to the touch and would give way and spring back as one walked on it. The grounds were covered with diamond lilies of pleasant texture and lovely scent. the sweet sounds of the calls of various birds were heard, and the park was graced with well-arrayed stands of heavenly-scented sandalwood trees." You know that place? Well, if you do, or if you have an experience of that place, it's suggested that you do the same thing that the Buddha did, and that is to get up and go for a long walk. to find some friends and to talk to them in common language. What's happening? How are you?

[39:21]

Through the intimacy of our friendships, through community, the awakened vision seems less like a fantasy and more like a collective dream of a garden where we all will be safe. and fed and healthy. A garden for all beings. And perhaps together, this vision can rekindle in us our commitment to one another and to the cessation of harm that our collective action is causing to this great and wonderful earth. Where does the Bodhisattva stand? She does not stand in form, perception, or in feeling, in will or consciousness, in any skanda whatsoever.

[40:31]

In Dharma's true nature alone she is standing. Then that is her practice of wisdom. the highest perfection. Change and no change, suffering and ease, the self and not-self, the lovely and the repulsive, just one suchness, in this emptiness they are. And so she takes not her stand on the fruit which she won, which is threefold, that of an arhat, that of a solitary Buddha, or that of a fully enlightened Buddha. The leader Shakyamuni Buddha himself was not stationed in the realm that is free from conditions, nirvana, nor in the things which are under conditions, this world, samsara, but freely wandered without a home,

[41:34]

And just so, without a support or a basis, a bodhisattva is standing. A position devoid of a basis has that position been called by the Buddha. Thank you very much.

[41:52]

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