Our Guiding Teacher, Kaizan Doug Jacobson, began practicing Zen in 1974 with Dainin Katagiri Roshi in Minneapolis; he had Jukai in 1977. A householder, father, contractor, and civil/tunnel engineer, following his retirement, he became a full-time resident at Jikoji Zen Center* near Los Gatos. He received priest ordination in 2010 and Dharma transmission from Shoho Michael Newhall in 2015. He has led many sesshins, monthly zazenkais, periodic seasonal nature sesshins, and weekly dharma discussion groups. He also helps to maintain and develop infrastructure at Jikoji, getting his hands dirty as a form of Zen practice. In addition, he assists prisoners with Buddhist practice.

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Now I get to see what I look like normally to see these things. Good morning to you all. I hope you have a chilly day where you are. We have one up here. I'm in Oakland this morning. But it's been in the mid 40s and it feels good.

We last weekend finished Rohatsu. We had about 20 people overall that showed up. I wasn't able to find a tenzo, so we ended up with 11 tenzos. I didn't have a doan, but we ended up with about eight or nine doans. Many of you have been to our zendo. It's a big 40 by 25 foot space. It's like a raft. We were on a raft to nowhere. We departed together. We were all deck hands on the raft. I was the lead deck hand, but it was self-run by the schedule.

One requirement everybody adhered to, which I really appreciated was that they'd be heading to the zendo by the first roll down eight minutes before the bell. By the time I got there at seven minutes before the bell, there were already like a dozen pair of shoes outside the door and people quietly in their seats. It was quite remarkable to have that dedication from people who freely offered to help wherever they could on the voyage that we took. Though it seemed we went nowhere, over that seven days, we traveled about 11 million miles on this earth as it goes around our sun every year. We mutually supported each other.

It was just profound, especially with some guidance from our elder master, Jerold, who posted on the door of each building, on the mirrors in the bathrooms, persist, to persist with affectionate awareness. Those words carried, I think, each of us to a rich sesshin that commemorated Buddha's enlightenment, where he discovered after all his efforts that actually the way all the time had been right before him. And so in a way we were commemorating his discovery and practicing that for each of us to find our way to practice and carry on a meaningful life.

So for me, the sesshin is a way to express my gratitude for his discovery and my discovery, and also the discovery of the Bodhisattva vows. And I remember I'd never heard of it before. I think I was in Minneapolis and studying with Katagiri Roshi, and he brought up this Bodhisattva vow to save all beings before becoming a Buddha and not returning. And at that moment, it was like a pleasant surprise and an awesome responsibility to save all beings, if that's what it is. But I recently heard another way to approach that, to, I vow to see all beings. And that came from my dear friend Ben Myers.

I recall many months ago, Karma Lexied Zomo, who gave her a wonderful talk. And I remember asking her about, aren't we kind of Bodhisattvas helping each other along the way and helping others to do that? And she said, actually, there are very few real Bodhisattvas in the world today. That's what I remember her saying. So I feel like a beginning apprentice Bodhisattva and hope to be that many, many lifetimes.

And today, I want to investigate the part of the Bodhisattva vows. And my friend, Katagiri Roshi, and my friend Susan Tova has heard some of this. So I'm glad you're here again. So Bodhisattva is not really after their own enlightenment. They're here to help others along the way. And that's just fine with me because for me, some of the best delight in life is being helpful with a passion for me sometimes. And sometimes it's being too helpful, and that's really irritating to other people. So there's a balance even in that. So I'm working at that.

But what I wanted to do was one of the renderings of the Bodhisattva vows comes from the Zen Mountain Monastery in New York. And I want to take exception to part of it. And I hope you'll take exception to me in this question, my motives and what I'm saying too. According to the internet and their website, sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Desires are inexhaustible. I vow to put an end to them. The dharmas are boundless. I vow to master them. And I vow to take exception to it. I vow to make this way as unsurpassable. I vow to attain it.

So what I'm going to take exception to is desires are inexhaustible. I vow to put an end to them. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take exception to the negative desires. And the negative desires of greed and lust and sloth and irritation and arrogance and all those, I don't know if arrogance is a desire, but maybe it's a result of some negative desires. Yeah. They're not helpful. They hurt ourselves. They hurt others. But there are positive desires. And I do not want to end them. Though Tova mentioned that actually even those late in life disappear.

So the desires that come from seeing and taking a grandson on a walk. And as I'm walking ahead, he pauses for a long time and looking closely at the ground. Instead of calling to him to usher him, come on, let's go, Karuna. Let's keep going. I slowly walk over to him and see what he's looking at. And he points down to something I can hardly see. And he says, Grandpa, do you see that bug? It's smaller than a grain of rice. This little boy relishing how this tiny insect. And I want to see that again. I want to see people engage in their explorations and be able to appreciate what they are enjoying and questioning and studying. And most people would discount the bug, step on the bug, fumigate the bug. Call it a bug. But for this boy, that was his universe in that moment. And for me to see this boy in his universe. I want to see that again and again.

I want to see the red cliffs of Sedona and the vast red and the vastness of that deep gorge. And the incredible expanse of the Grand Canyon with the different colors of green and the blues of the sky up at seven or 9,000 feet, depending on what side of the canyon you're on. The incomprehensible amount of sediment that had to be deposited and the incomprehensible amounts of rainfall to carve it and the incomprehensible amount of surface area exposed on all those surfaces reflecting the sunlight and the moonlight at night.

Hearing desire. I want to hear the crashing of the waves on the beach. I want to hear the cry of a newborn baby and try and figure out what it's actually asking for. Is it wet diaper? Is it hunger? Is it joy? Is it pain? Is it hi, hello? Just the hearing desire. I want to hear it again and again. I don't want to put an end to that desire. I want to hear again and again Beethoven's string quartets and his last one with seven movements.

The smelling desire. I want to smell that fresh cup of coffee in the morning. You know, there's just, it does something, even that smell just wakes you right up. The smell of the skin of a newborn baby. The desire to smell my love. I don't have one right now, but I remember, you know, the smell in the nape of the neck or in the hair. And I'm here at Robert's house that has 140 rose plants with vast variety of roses, including this magnificent double delight. When I'd come here, sometimes there'd be 17 or 20 long stem roses and a vase in the room I was going to stay in and Robert would do that for other guests and people that were here. And I remember going through and smelling each rose and getting to the double delight and inhaling the scent of a double delight, holding it in and actually getting lightheaded, not from lack of oxygen, but something in that aroma of double delight is intoxicating. It's like, whoo!

Taste. You know, always the first sip of a Coca-Cola is just exquisite. And all the rest of the tastes are just, they don't cut it. The first lick on an ice cream cone. Or when you're really hungry, you know, the taste of your favorite Mexican dish or whatever you like. And as some of us who were at Paula, Ari's women in Zen rituals, even, I was really glad to hear this because when I eat alone, one of the things I really like about ending a meal is actually licking the plate clean. And she had us do that. And I thought, you know, it just exposes other parts of your tongue that you never, you actually get some of the best flavors of a meal in doing that. So I'm sorry to say that, but because it's considered very impolite. But it's actually one of the wonderful taste treats of existence.

Touching. The desire to touch the core of this existence. I want to use this body in so many ways. And I want to be a kid again and play baseball, not because I was any good at it, but because of the feeling of that rawhide baseball and the strings in your hand. There was a certain texture and feel to that. And a feel of tossing the ball and snapping the wrist and actually hitting the target, your brother's glove, my brother's glove. And he toss it right back, smack into my glove, and it would hit right in this part of the hand and it would sting. And that sting felt good. And the smell of the leather with the oil, just there is something exquisite about it.

The desire to make love, not just to have sex, but to engage in the duet of exchange that sweet love can be. The touch of the cold mist on a foggy day. And the touch of cold moist, loose soil with lots of organic material in it. And you can feel it in your fingernails. And even when pulling what we call weeds to feel that texture of that plant releasing itself from the ground, even though I am killing it, it's something we don't want. We're moving it along in its course of life to become compost, as it will eventually anyway.

The desire to conceive, the desire for consciousness, the desire to understand, to deeply understand our life, our lives, our planet, our universe. And once we've heard the word bodhicitta or enlightenment, our desire to explore what that really is about. And it sparks interest and curiosity, the desire to really get it, to understand thusness, whereas Katagiri Roshi would say, just this it is. The desire to persist to the end of a race or in solving an engineering problem, or the desire to make it to an appointment 500 miles away and be there on time. And this desire to deeply understand, to really understand. And as Bodhi Dharma said, to not know, to fundamentally know, we do not know, I do not know.

So it is really for these very selfish reasons why being fully enlightened has not been my goal. I don't want to be a Buddha for all these reasons. For me, this existence is too sweet, too rich, too precious, too much fun, though at times quite painful. And I want to live another thousand lives so that I can taste maple syrup on buttermilk pancakes with blueberries and bananas in them. I want to feel the agony and the epiphanies felt at the end of a long race or at the end of a long day's work or during a difficult sesshin and see the emerald green flash on a very clear day at sunset. I want to again and again make love and have children and be a child with insatiable curiosity, learning to ride a bike and explore this exquisite planet and solar system and universe. I want to work on the moon and help explore the incomprehensible parts of this universe.

I can go on and on, you know, taste hot chocolate and vanilla ice cream with a dash of chocolate sauce and smell roses and even the smell of hot asphalt being applied to rooftops or roadways. I want to feel the embrace of another. I want to feel the joy and gratitude that comes from the endless epiphanies that are experienced in this life. When we really get something, really taste something, really understand something, I want to feel the satisfaction of helping another to finish a project or helping others to realize a goal or dream of theirs. I want to feel enormous satisfaction of being part of a group collaboration on so many projects.

Let me tell you more. No, no, enough. Enough of my selfish desires. But basically I want to come back again and again to taste all aspects of this existence. I want really to taste the sucky aspects of greed, hate, sloth, indifference, envy, jealousy, things that are hurtful to others and myself, but it's part of it too. So, it's the beginning apprentice and the Bodhisattva path. That's where I'll leave it for now. Thank you.