Presence and Absence

As I have said on perhaps too many occasions, a lot of the ino job is sitting behind a desk, a fair chunk of it is sitting on a cushion, and let's not forget sitting in meetings, but there is also a surprising amount that consists of catching people for necessary communications, which often happens at meal times. This evening was spectacularly productive in that regard - between the end of evening service and getting back to my room just now, I had probably half-a-dozen conversations which took care of many outstanding matters, and I feel most positive as a result.
This afternoon's fukudo had warned me that they might be late, and I was able to use our standard back-up plan, which is to send the doan out to hit the han. I was happy to play the mokugyo for service, as it really helps to keep my hand in at that kind of thing, and to see how fast we can push the chant - much faster than I suspected was the answer tonight. It also helped that new tanto Rosalie, who has been coming regularly to afternoon zazen since she took over, was on hand to be doshi as the scheduled doshi also did not materialise.
Over dinner Dennis was asking about Young Urban Zen, and I realised I haven't written about it for a few weeks. I would say that it continues to go from strength to strength - and perhaps some of the regulars there who are also regulars here might add their opinions. We tried a new thing last week, since it was Labor Day, having an evening in Koshland Park across the street from here, playing whiffle-ball and kick-ball, which were both new entertainments to me, before repairing to a local cafe for refreshments and chatter. We had enough of the regulars to make it a fun evening, and of course it is always enjoyable seeing people you are getting to know in fresh contexts.
Last night I invited Michaela to come and join us. During the recent sesshin I had had the thought that it would be fun to have an 'Awesome People' series for YUZ, and Michaela was one of the first people I thought of. I got to know her at Tassajara a few years ago, and she was also involved in the Coming of Age program last year. More to the point she is the youngest priest at Zen Center, and I thought it would be valuable to have someone in the same age range as our YUZ people talking about how they came to practice and what it means in their life. From my perspective, Michaela completely fulfilled the brief, talking about impermanence and her love of New Orleans, and just by being completely herself; she also brought along a section of the Parinirvana Sutra to talk about, serendipitously enough, as we had been previously looking at the Four Noble Truths, Buddha's first teaching, and now we were getting his final words. As usual, the lively conversation continued after the meeting had bowed out, and that is also one of the fun parts for me - we covered Camus and string theory in a remarkably short space of time.
There have been a few light-hearted suggestions as to other groups we could set up: Mid-life Crisis Zen is a popular one right now, and Genine has proposed Old Rural Zen as the counterpoint, though wags would have it that Green Gulch already serves that function.

Back In The Day

Following last week's dip in the archives, this morning I happened to catch the tail end of a visit by two women who used to live here before it became the Zen Center - back when they were eighteen, they said, and they were now in their seventies. They seemed delighted to be able to see the place again, talked of how the director's office and the art lounge had both been lounges where they could receive gentlemen, and how the Buddha Hall was a large living room with a very small TV in it.
I couldn't find any pictures of that in the Zen Center archives, but here is another picture I had thought of using, and two others I hadn't really seen before.

The zendo as lounge

The stage on the west side of the zendo

A ceremony in the zendo - probably a jukai - with the stage behind Suzuki Roshi

As a little twist in the story, neither woman was actually Jewish - apparently in the latter days of the residence, since it was harder to find women who wanted to live there, the doors were opened more widely. As one of them remarked, it was a choice between this center and the Catholic one on Haight Street, only there you had to be back inside by 10pm, whereas here, if you gave them 75c, you could get a key to the front door...

Study Hall

With the Vuelta a Espana done and dusted (and it was great to have two English riders on the podium, tantalisingly close to winning at times), I can turn again to Torei's The Undying Lamp of Zen. Today I was mostly struck by a footnote by Thomas Cleary: "This refers to the three periods of teaching - genuine, imitation and terminal. A genuine teaching meets the needs of its time, an imitation mimics in hope it will work; a terminal teaching is a token. According to the Scripture of the Great Demise, the defining characteristic of the last age, or the terminal era, is when the teaching is sold in pieces like a commodity".
We are fond of joking here that when things are not done well, it is indicative that this is the age of decline - another term for the final period, 'the last time, the last epoch, the last five hundred years, at the time of the collapse of the good doctrine', in the more melodic words of the Diamond Sutra, but I was tempted to think that Cleary was having a little dig. I am also tempted to point to some flagrant examples of the teaching being sold in pieces like a commodity, and I expect most of you readers could do as much, but since we just renewed our vows with the Full Moon Ceremony this morning (shout out to Renee for being an extremely powerful kokyo), I should probably refrain. And as I think about it a little further, it could be said that these periods are like the concept of rebirth - not necessarily sequential, but all capable of manifesting at any moment. I think there is some Buddhism in America that meets the needs of this time, and there is some imitation dharma, and some counterfeit dharma as well. Hopefully, if you care about these things, you will be able to discern which is which.

The moon last night and the sun this morning - or mabe the other way round

Room Cleaning

At Tassajara, where everything is scheduled, as you will know if you have been following this for long enough, there is half an hour set aside for room cleaning. This half-hour is at the end of work on three-and-eight days, and is followed, after bath time, by nenju, which marks the end of the practice week. The idea is that your room is clean for you to enjoy on your personal day - the four-and-nine days. For someone like me, for whom cleaning my room is never at the top of my to-do list, it was nice to have time allocated to the task, and half an hour is long enough to get most things done, and short enough not to have it feel like a major undertaking.
Here in the city, as you also doubtless know, we don't have the luxury of a four-and-one schedule. After the regular five-day week, we have the Saturday morning program, and, in theory at least, a one-and-a-half day weekend. I have got into the habit, when I can, of cleaning my room at the end of the afternoon on Saturdays, and ideally, following that with a leisurely bath before dinner.
I know that the next two weekends I am going to be away, next weekend on the residents' retreat at Point Reyes, and then on the Buddhist Bike Pilgrimage, and in October I think I have maybe one free Saturday afternoon, so I was quite motivated to get some cleaning done today.
Actually I could have been occupied this afternoon, as Abbot Steve was receiving a new okesa from his teacher Sojun Mel Weitsman, but I wasn't required to be there, which was as well as I had made plans to meet a friend for ice cream. For once I was willing to brave the line at Bi-Rite for their salted caramel, and since it was not especially sunny the line was not interminable, after which we had fun watching archetypal San Francisco crowds milling around Dolores Park. I had to come back for a Full Moon Ceremony rehearsal, ahead of the thing itself on Monday morning, but that was scheduled to allow me the time to do all the dusting and vacuuming I needed before the amazing lasagne and tiramisu dinner we had to mark Kathryn's impending departure.

Reinventing The Wheel

I did manage to get a fair amount of reading done over the holiday weekend, and not of the study hall kind - a friend gave me Les Trois Mousquetaires a while ago, and I took the opportunity of last week's spaciousness to really immerse myself in that. I also read the recent New Yorker that featured a long profile of an English thinker called Derek Parfit "thought by many to be the most original moral philosopher in the English-speaking world", as the article dubs him.
The article starts with some philosophical questions about the nature of self - I am chagrined that I cannot link to this, as things being what they are these day, you have to subscribe to read the whole thing, and linking to the abstract is not worth the effort - and draws the conclusion that "the self, it seems, is not all or nothing but the sort of thing that there can be more or less of".
At which point I, as I suspect some of you might, rolled my eyes and wondered where the orginality lay.  The author continues, "Parfit's view resembles the Buddhist view of the self, a fact that was pointed out to him years ago by a professor of Oriental religions. Parfit was delighted by this discovery"; the tone of the article seemed to suggest that this was just validation of how brilliant he was to have thought of it, which led me to that uneasy feeling I often get reading about Western thinking that, to paraphrase the blunt words I heard someone use about another 'original thinker', here's another white guy thinking he is at the pinnacle of evolution.
For me, part of the consolation of philosophy, when it comes to Buddhist thought, is that people have been struggling with the same concepts of what it means to be human ever since there was enough leisure time to devote to thinking, and for the most part, the ideas that were first circulated about 2,500 years ago are still relevant and have not been improved upon (though I could charitably concede that Buddha always urged people to find this out for themselves).  Bernd gave a talk here last night on the self that ably covered much of the same ground, without any of the fanfare.
From reading the article it is clear that Derek Parfit has quite a distinctive mental framework, but I could only sigh again at the end when the author mentions that Parfit is currently grappling with ideas around time, and wonder if anyone has suggested that he save himself the trouble, and just read Dogen's 'Uji'.

Changes

It's easy to get the idea that nothing much changes around Zen Center, job rotations notwithstanding, but occasionally we get surprised. When I was dropped of at the corner of Page and Laguna after the drive back from Tassajara last Friday, I immediately noticed a difference, which brought to mind the picture from the archives, of the building brand new in 1922:

Fast forward forty-seven years, to the time when the building was bought by Zen Center, and some changes are visible:

I love this picture from the same time, of Suzuki Roshi standing on the corner, which I think Scott used in a recent mailing; it's partly to do with the cars, but also it really anchors Suzuki Roshi here, in a way that pictures of him in the Buddha Hall or dokusan room don't quite:

So now we are back to this unfenced look at the front, and with it, a view of something I had never before noticed - the cornerstone:

And before you ask, I haven't yet heard what the letters represent.

A New Boss

As usual, once we get back into the regular schedule, the ease of last week recedes into the past very quickly, and we get immersed in sitting and meetings again. This morning though, I added to my tally of irregular ceremonies, as we performed a tanto seating.
We might have done this yesterday, as that was when the switch officially happened after several months of anticipation, but the Abbot was only just back from his travels the night before, so we delayed a day so that everyone could attend.
I was happy to get the tsui-ching out again, more so as this ceremony involved two jundos: first I took Jordan around, and thanked him with a form of words that Paul had passed to me after kinhin, and then I took Rosalie around, showed her to the tanto seat and announced her as the new tanto. What with that, and Paul's thoughtful words to both of them, we ended up running longer than I had expected, but that is the kind of thing that only the work leader, the breakfast cook and the ino need to be concerned about.
So now I have a new boss, and I look forward to Rosalie flourishing in her new role.

I am also going to stick my neck out again and say that it looks like we might be having some fine weather ahead - last time I said that I was definitely premature, but I live in hope. This was the view on the roof after breakfast:

Where The Light Is

Back in the fog after a few lovely hot days at Tassajara. As always, just arriving there felt good, and then there were friends, stars, the bathhouse, sitting in the zendo, being in the creek, climbing mountains,  seeing lizards, sleeping deeply, reading in the sun, taking photographs and staring off into space - oh, and playing with rocks. If you want a little more detail on what it is like to be there at the moment, try reading Brad's account (and if you do that, read the previous post as well, along with the comments, for another angle on the question of 'Am I a monk?').
In the meantime, a quick selection from the thousand-odd photos I managed to snap in three days:

A swimming hole upcreek I had not really paid attention to before

 

 

Getting abstract at the bathhouse

Itasonten at the Gatehouse altar

Jizo close-up

Never really got a picture of the kaisando that I liked

Lantern and shadow

The path to the Narrows

Quiet moment before morning work meeting

Ren's prayer flags

At the new retreat center, taken through the window, complete with reflection

Taken out of the window of the town trip truck on the way in

Ren's prayer flags at the top of the Tony Trail

Scarlet Bugler on the Tony Trail

Looking over Tassajara from the Tony Trail

Work Meeting