This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So, good morning, everyone, and welcome to San Francisco Zen Center. My name is Kyoshin Wendy Lewis, and... Today we are sitting a one-day sitting as part of the beginning of a practice session, a two-month practice session, where we're focusing on the Buddhist teaching of the six paramitas or perfections. And those are generosity, morality, tolerance or patience, energy, enthusiasm, meditation, and wisdom. So these six aspects of the spiritual path inform each other and intersect with each other and this deepens our experience and understanding of how they function so that as they move among each other we start to understand what they mean better.

[01:17]

So there's a straightforward approach like looking at each of them in our sort of conventional way and then there's a developmental one, which is what we're going to concentrate on. And both of those approaches also inform each other, as I'll talk about a little today. Because this morning I'm going to be talking about the first of the paramitas, which is generosity, dana. Also, today happens to be Holocaust Remembrance Day. And I think, you know, reflecting on that and on the state of the world now, in the past, what it might be in the future, and how we're part of that, you know, what's happening in our own bodies and hearts and minds is something that is worth considering as you're looking at these Buddhist teachings. So my sense of history is not so much that it repeats itself as that human nature doesn't change.

[02:22]

At the same time, we have these wonderful teachings that can develop some kind of transformation, which hopefully will be of benefit to ourselves and to others. Usually we hear about generosity when someone's asking us for something. You know, be generous. And so we're asked to give. And that is a very important form of generosity because our needs and other people's needs are basically endless and will never be met. So there's a necessity for this kind of generosity, giving, receiving. And there's another kind of generosity which is looking at what we want and we need and whether that's reasonable and thinking about generosity as not taking. That's another form of generosity. But our response, you know, to these requests that we make to ourselves, that are made to us, that we want to enact can go, you know, have all these different qualities to it.

[03:40]

We can give sort of altruistically, hoping that we are helping others. Sometimes it can be sort of self-congratatory, see what a wonderful person I am taking care of this. And then it can be dismissive, like, oh, they're asking me again, you know, or, you know, anything in all that whole range. And I think that as we meet circumstances and states of mind and situations that are at a slightly deeper level or a much deeper level, all of those kinds of responses can be involved. And so when we look at this idea of generosity in the sort of conventional way, that's also informing our deeper way. So the parameters of perfections address

[04:43]

and Dale Wright, who is the author of the text we're using, defines this as cultivation of character. Cultivating character presupposes conceiving of yourself as both free and responsible. Free to choose what you do and responsible for the outcome of those actions. It also implies the capacity... to cultivate desires that motivate your action, and the depth of character to take responsibility for the kind of person your desires will create. Buddhists maintain that the beneficiary of your practice of self-cultivation is not just you, but others around you, and that we have no choice but to begin the quest wherever we happen to be. So Wright offers an overview of each of the perfections from the traditional Buddhist view of them, and then from what he calls the contemporary perspective of a culture that is not historically Buddhist.

[05:56]

So how do we work with these teachings? Or in the sense of from a Western perspective, some people in this room and who study these are from Buddhist traditions, and so they'll be a different sort of perspective of them. But there's also modern culture. So even from a Buddhist tradition, you'd be looking at these in a different way. And as he is presenting each of these paramitas, Wright considers them as both philosophy and application. And he says, philosophy that is easy to read and simple to conceive is not really philosophy. So this is like, we're working. These are active working teachings.

[06:58]

And it turns out that the perfection of generosity is not actually about giving and receiving or bargaining. It's the preparation for the practice and understanding of the next five of the paramitas. So through giving and receiving, we have this experience of our attachment to what we think is deserving of our generosity and what we want, and we can see how our attachments work. And I think most of us have a pretty clear idea of how that works for each one of us. And I have this experience where, you know, whenever I have loaned people money or say given a sort of a valuable gift for some reason, I have to remember once it's given, I can't say what happens to it. It doesn't belong to me anymore. And so it's not just giving the thing, but giving the sort of thing as it will be used away.

[08:08]

So it's not my decision today. But it's, you know, it's interesting because, you know, a few times I've received repayment of a loan that I'd completely forgotten. And then on the other hand, I've given gifts and I've been sort of hurt if the person didn't like it or asked me for the receipt so they could return it, you know, that sort of thing. I'm like, oh, you know, I worked so, I thought so much about what you would like. And then I've received things that way too. Where, you know, what am I going to do, you know, with it? And, you know, so how do we negotiate feeling gratitude for the thought? And, you know, it's very interesting. And I think this dilemma where we see, you know, sort of what our intention is and how it's received positively, negatively, neutrally, whatever it may be, is... something that is happening all the time in our experience.

[09:11]

And I read this description of something that happens in the creative process. And I talked about this once before, so anyone who's heard it, you probably forgot. Sorry. It's called reaching in your creative process a cul-de-sac. And that's a place where you can't go any further. It's, you know, you're at a loss, stuck, and uncertain of what the best direction to take. So this is very useful when you're practicing with the teachings. And, you know, borrowing that image, I think I would say that Buddhist teachings allow us to pursue the thought of enlightenment and freedom and all those things. into eventual but nevertheless surprisingly fertile cul-de-sacs. So, you know, the cul-de-sac is the blind alley, dead end street, or basically any situation where you can't go ahead.

[10:24]

Movement is impossible. So I think... Thinking of that as a creative place, as a rich place, means that, you know, sometimes you feel like you're moving in the wrong direction, and then it turns out that you learn something about your relationships or, you know, your status or something, you know, something shifts and something is deepened in your understanding. And that is... Sometimes when it feels like you said the wrong thing, and then it turns out it actually turned differently. And then sometimes we reach out in what seems like the right direction. Oh, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, and we end up back where we started or even regress. But to see this as part of a creative process, that we're not kind of swinging right and wrong,

[11:28]

We're just, the creative process takes these little risks. And, you know, we move in one direction and then in another and take responsibility for these consequences that change us and the people around us and our relationships. And I think, you know, sometimes we can be sort of positively or negatively shocked by seeing how our assumptions work. You can just be like, oh, I thought this was going to be so easy. And then wham, you know, we see something we didn't know. Or, oh, I thought this was going to be so hard and everything's fine. So I think it's very helpful. And, of course, in all of this, it's helpful to maintain some sort of sense of humor or irony. So a lot of the teachings... generosity, morality, patience, they can make us feel sort of self-conscious and critical of ourselves, or we can feel sort of proud and, oh yeah, I'm wonderful and, you know, moral person, I do think, you know.

[12:45]

We take these stands, you know, as a self-protection. So keeping that little sense of We're all doing this kind of feeling. Because we make mistakes and missteps and blunders. And I think that these can be seen as, when you have that sort of sense of irony or humor, they can be seen as resources for revelation and for, you know, rather than failures or like... In Judaism and in some sort of interpretations of Christianity, the concept sin is actually understood as a mistake. And the 14th century abbess, Julian of Norwich, wrote this.

[13:50]

I did not see sin. So mercy means compassion, forgiveness, understanding. And these are all forms of generosity. in its cultivated and developed form. So our mistakes in the context of developing self-knowledge and self-understanding are about finding where we're caught by our self-regard and our lack of realization of the context of emptiness, which will be something that will come into our discussion later.

[14:56]

So this first paramita of generosity is about the interaction of between giving and receiving and not exchange or bargain, but about a foundation of non-attachment. So this developmental aspect of generosity is not about sort of abandoning the human condition because That's where accountability and bargaining is. That's how we manage our lives in many ways. And there isn't another place. You know, this is the world of greed and generosity, hate and love, and delusion and insight. And that's where we find, that's where we struggle to find our understanding and our cultivating our...

[16:14]

and nurturing it. So Suzuki Roshi talked about this in a talk on bowing and that can be seen as a gesture of faith and humility which ends up being a gesture of freedom. And so I think it's very apropos. Each bow expresses one of the four Buddhist vows ending with Although Buddhism is unattainable, we vow to attain it. To think because it is possible we will do it is not Buddhism. Even though it is impossible, we have to do it because our true nature wants us to. But actually, whether or not it is possible is not the point. If it is our inmost desire to get rid of our self-centered ideas, we have to do it. And he goes on to say that this effort leads to calmness of mind, but it doesn't mean you should stop your activity.

[17:24]

He said real calmness should be found in activity itself. So, you know, this often seems impossible. And certainly most of us who know about Suzuki Roshi's life would probably not want to live it. And yet his teaching, you know, evokes our enthusiasm and our effort and our intention. And so Dale Wright describes, you know, enlightening beings and says Buddhism describes enlightening beings as being known by the depth of their self-understanding. A state in which hard barriers of separation between ourselves and others have been softened. And as I was working on this talk and thinking about, you know, what does it mean to make a mistake? What is it? I had this vision or image of... all of our mistakes kind of dancing together and being composed and also very kind to each other. Like, hello, yeah, I see you, I recognize you.

[18:27]

So the ultimate aim of the practice of generosity is compassion. And Wright says that this is something we learn how to feel. And it must include ourselves in order to be effective. And I see it as composed of, and he talks about this too, forgiveness, gratitude, and social love. So forgiveness is the dynamic of accountability. And Because of interdependence, we have to look at forgiveness as this form of generosity in which we won't be satisfied, really. It's not about that. And I think that Julian's description of sin being or a mistake being known only by the pain it causes.

[19:38]

This is our starting point. Okay. This happened. This was the result. How do we move into the future? And, you know, that means that sometimes when we've been hurt, we can't go to the other person and try to make it better or try to talk it through or try to reach some reconciliation. So how do we find our own freedom when we've been hurt? Or if we've hurt others, and we can't go to them and apologize, how is it that we find reconciliation? So this forgiveness and self-forgiveness, there's a book that I read many years ago and it comes back to me over and over again. It's called Forgiven and Forgiving by L. William

[20:40]

and he describes self-forgiveness. Self-forgiveness doesn't take the place of being forgiven by those we've wronged or of seeking reconciliation with them. Its role is to prepare us for the future. So someone once asked me, they felt like they had made a mistake in an interaction with someone who was of a different race from theirs, and they knew there was nothing they could do about it. They couldn't go to the person and try to figure it out. And I heard myself, found myself saying, well, remember it and remember your regret. So this remembering is a form of mindfulness. We see this moment of mistake or, you know, little frisson of, ew, things are wrong. And when we remember it, it informs us. the next time. And this means, you know, we shouldn't overly avoid making the mistakes of our daily life because they're moving into the future and we learn from them.

[21:53]

So what we're developing is this sense of awareness for the sake of change and friendliness and transformation. So our forgiveness of others is a form of forgiving ourselves, and forgiving ourselves is a form of forgiving others. We're sort of putting ourselves all in the same reality, even if we don't want to. And I think that this requires going through a lot of, often many, many years of fear and pain and anger, and maybe it will never stop. But Countryman says, The right thing to do in response to harm done to us is to feel the hurt, to get angry. It's the right place to begin because it's the honest place. Anger has its place but not forever. So we don't get out of the human condition or the human experience just by deciding to be generous and forgiving.

[23:03]

So we're our development is embedded in this reality. And again, Countryman says, you know, the path of forgiveness is an ongoing education of the emotions, which is also something I think we don't often sort of think about. I've also been through this a few times with people. I realized... at the beginning of my practice that I had not really expressed my anger very much in my life for one reason or another. Self-protection, whatever. Who knows? And I found it was coming up all over the place. And it wasn't very mature. Because the emotion hadn't been expressed, it hadn't had a chance to develop into a good way to express anger. You know, a clear way.

[24:06]

So I think this education of our emotions is also part of developing this generosity about how emotions work and how we all work in this interdependent reality. So gratitude is a complementary to forgiveness. We see what we have, what we've been given, and what it means to have a human life. with its sufferings and its potentialities. And I grew up in a condition of kind of borderline poverty. And my joys, you know, were like being outdoors and having a library and things like that. But it wasn't just those things being available. It was that I could choose to enjoy them, that they were available to me and I could access them for that enjoyment. And there have been people who appeared in my life who have been very generous towards me.

[25:12]

When I graduated from high school, one of my counselors regretted that he hadn't helped me more to apply to different colleges. Because I come from this kind of borderline poverty, there's not this tradition of poverty. applying to colleges or people in my family who could help me, I didn't know what I was doing. I mean, I applied to a few and I was accepted, but I couldn't afford them. So that was kind of funny, too. Well, anyway, he made this huge effort and contacted some people at a college in San Francisco, and they offered me scholarships. And I went there, and these opportunities, I was able to go to study in Oxford for a year. And so my you know, this gratitude towards him, and not just for the opportunity, but that I could enjoy it. You know, I was given this opportunity that I could enjoy. And so what these acts of generosity create this gratitude, and then, of course, there's this feeling you want to offer that to others.

[26:21]

And I think that's what I have learned from many of the gestures of... generosity towards me, is what can I offer to others? What am I able to offer? And how can I convey the kind of love that comes from that kind of generosity and gratitude from that exchange? And so then, social love is a way to relate to our experience and potential for ourselves and the world. And Martha Nussbaum, who is a professor of law and ethics, examines this in a book called Political Emotions, Why Love Matters for Justice. Most people tend toward narrowness of sympathy. They can easily become immured in narcissistic projects and forget about the needs of those outside their narrow circle.

[27:25]

And, you know, I think this is very normal human behavior. It's not like we're being reprimanded or something. It's just like, awareness, awareness, you know. So I think, as in all types of generosity, some degree of renunciation is involved. And Nussbaum describes the possibility of imagining a circle of concern. We grieve for people we care about, not for total strangers. We fear damages that threaten ourselves and those we care about. If distant people and abstract principles are to get a grip on our emotions, therefore, these emotions must somehow position them within our circle of concern, creating a sense of our life in which these people and events matter as parts of us, our own flourishing. And this type of effort, again, you know, we start with generosity and then things kind of get deeper and deeper and we think, okay, how can I make this effort?

[28:37]

What does it ask of me? But also what does it sort of develop in me and an appreciation and that sort of thing. And so there's, you know, our sense of personal heroism can be there, enthusiasm. and also reluctance, resistance, anxieties, uncertainty, or just it's too much. But it's sort of bringing all of our emotions, our kind of reluctance and our enthusiasm together. It includes compassion, grief, fear, anger, hope, and the inhibiting of disgust and shame. and the spirit of a certain sort of comedy, taking amused delight in human idiosyncrasy. So I think it's helpful to remember, I think I've asked a lot of you today, that the paramitas actually elicit transformation and not sort of conventional ideas of doing things right or performance.

[29:47]

And yet, you know, this transformation is part of our flourishing and our happiness. So it's not so much dependent on, you know, things going well or going our way as it is about fulfilling our intentions to whatever degree we can. And in a way that's beneficial to both ourselves and others. So this foundation of seeing generosity as this wide view composed of compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, and social love is the foundation for examining the next five perfections. So, you know, for morality, this will be very clear because we have a tendency to look at morality as right and wrong, but when we start to look closer into it, it's this

[30:51]

moving thing that we can't quite grasp. And when we look at it that way, it changes us. Otherwise, we cling to some more defined idea of how things should be. And then as we move through this development of understanding the concept or in the context of emptiness, which, as I said, we'll talk about later. But that's what turns back from the final paramita wisdom and brightens and makes more, you know, this idea of our mistakes dancing together or something moving together like that. So thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive.

[31:55]

Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[32:09]

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