Good morning. Well, what a bunch of very well-behaved little people sitting right here. You're so quiet. I didn't even know you were here. My name's Sarah, and I have brought for you all today a story. Now, it's not just for the kids. It's for everybody. And today, in the kids program with Chelsea, you all are going to be hearing the story of the Buddha's enlightenment. And we're going to celebrate that here at Green Gulch by starting to sit a sashin starting tonight. So for seven days, sitting really, really quietly and being really happy that the Buddha gave us this practice.

[01:04]

Maybe we won't be really happy, but we will be sitting quietly. So I'm going to read you a story, and you all might notice this story is in some way connected to the story of the Buddha. You're going to hear later. You might think to yourself, as Chelsea's reading you the story of the Buddha, whoever's going to read it to you, I don't think this has anything to do with the story Sarah told earlier. It's from a book about Banjutsu Bunny. Do any of you know Banjutsu Bunny? Has anyone else heard of Banjutsu Bunny? No. Okay, well, my son's kindergarten teacher would say, this is a new friend. We get to make a new friend today. So Banjutsu Bunny is named Isabel, and she is really good at banjutsu, which is a discipline probably related to jujitsu.

[02:09]

Have you heard of that? Jujitsu, have you heard of like karate or taekwondo? Yeah, so these practices have many things in common. They're things you do with your body. They require discipline and concentration. and effort. These are all things we also practice in the Zen Duo. But we're usually not punching and kicking the way you do in those other disciplines. So this story is called Your Best Move. Bunjutsu class was over for the day. Before you go home, said teacher, I want each of you to show me your best way to stop a fight. Do your parents ever ask you to stop a fight? Maybe with your siblings or your friends. Sometimes you're fighting.

[03:11]

Maybe your parents have talked to you about a good way to stop a fight. I have a good one, said Betsy. Max, come and attack me. Max ran at Betsy. Wah! shouted Betsy. She flipped Max through the air. Can you see that? Really good, all the way over. My turn, said Max. Betsy, come and attack me. Betsy ran at Max. Yayee, shouted Max. He wrestled Betsy to the ground. I've got one, said Wendy. Kyle, attack. Kyle leapt at Wendy. shouted Wendy. She pulled his ears. You see that? It's twisting the bunny's ears. It looks like it really hurts. Watch this, said Kyle.

[04:15]

Wendy, attack! Hoobah, hoobah, shouted Kyle. He spun and sent Wendy flying. Now it's my turn, said Ben. Isabel, attack! Isabel grabbed Ben's shirt. He-ya! shouted Ben. He yanked her to the ground. Just yanked her little paw. But he got her all the way to the ground. When it was Isabel's turn, everyone backed up. They were all afraid to attack Bunjutsu Bunny. Be brave, my bunnies, said teacher. No one stepped forward. OK, said Betsy. I will attack Isabel. Betsy ran at Isabel. Isabel wrapped her arms around Betsy and gave her a hug. This is my favorite way to stop a fight, she said.

[05:18]

Here she is, hugging her friend Isabel. attacker, said Wendy. No, me, said Max. No, I will, said Kyle. I'm next, said Ben. Nothing is more powerful than the bunjitsu hug, said the teacher with a laugh. Bunjitsu hug. So maybe you can think of that next time you're fighting with somebody. You might see if you can find a hug anywhere. Maybe hug yourself and then maybe hug your friend or your mom or your dad or whoever's around. Okay. That's my story for you. Thank you very much. So I think Chelsea's going to take you outside and then maybe to the yurt.

[06:29]

hope you enjoy this rainy day at Greenville, which we have a lot of good mud. All the big people now, you're probably all going to stay where you are, but feel free to come up if you like. You can just huddle together in the big barn on a rainy day. As I said, my name is Sarah, and I do a number of things here at Green Gulch, and one of them is farming.

[07:56]

And so I've been particularly aware of the rain, you know, feeling the relief of the rain. I know many people probably also feel this. We just put the last of the cover crop in the fields. We put them to bed for the winter. We plant bell beans and oat grass and vetch to cover the soil and protect it from erosion and compaction from the winter rains and also then to turn in in the spring and feed the microorganisms that then feed the crops. And the best time to sow them is mid to late October, which is when the rains used to come. I mean, used to, it's all relative, but maybe for the last couple hundred years in California.

[08:58]

And they have been coming later and later, as you know. So we actually watered, we irrigated in all the seed because luckily last year was a wet year and we had enough water in the reservoirs. Some years that's not the case. But we didn't have enough pipe, and so we waited until the rains came to get the last field sown, and it's all in there and was watered in by this rain. So I feel very happy. The soil was very, very dry. And, you know, this awareness of what's happening all over the earth You know, and particularly for me, what stayed in my body, really, it's in my body now, this unease. The fires, the fires that now we've had for several years in a row.

[10:05]

So even though this rain has come, and when I was working on the stock, I didn't know if it was going to come or not, whether it would still be hot and dry. So I'm so grateful for the rain, and I'm still thinking about and including the fires, you know, and about the ways we have contributed to them, the ways I have contributed to them with my human greed, hate, and delusion, and how, you know, over the decades, Since we've become aware of the climate changing, we have not yet been able to address many or most of the structures and systems that create and maintain the conditions for these fires to be burning. I think it finally hit me this year, the third year of fires.

[11:12]

You know, this is not some exception. This is like... This is what's happening now. I can't ignore it. And I know many, many people have been on the front line for a lot longer and have not been able to ignore it. So taking my place, maybe taking our place in the world. So I've been asking myself as I take in the enormity of the situation, the scale of change that is necessary in order for us to stop these harmful patterns of separation, exploitation, and injustice that are literally fueling these fires. How is what we're doing here? How is the practice of the practice and transmission of zazen a vital response to a world that's on fire.

[12:14]

This is what I wanted to talk to you about today. Norman Fisher said in the talk he gave earlier this spring, he said, I used to feel like spiritual practice, Zen practice or any other form of spiritual practice that a person would take up is a really good thing for people who need it. And for people who don't need it, they can get along fine without it. I used to think like that. Now I really feel like to survive the many really terrible human problems that we have created, problems like sexism, racism, homophobia, toxic worldwide resentment, one group against another. and our unstinting efforts to make the world ever warmer. In this case, I think, we all need spiritual practice if we're going to turn this around, or if we're not going to turn it around to survive it with our hearts intact.

[13:24]

We all need spiritual practice. Specifically, we all need to be bodhisattvas. spiritual heroes who tirelessly make effort for the benefit of others. We all need to be radically unselfish people who are strong and resilient, wildly idealistic and realistic and effective in our action, who are motivated by a strong, positive love for all human beings and all creatures, and who hold in their hearts the possibility for a beautiful human future. So I really, when I heard this, I really appreciated Norman's clarity and his insistence here that spiritual practice to tending to life at the smallest, most intimate scale of our own human heart and mind is not an option

[14:32]

It's not an indulgence. It's not an extra thing to tend to when and if the world gets fixed. But rather it is a or the vital core of our response to the world and is itself a radical and beneficial response. Well, he maybe more succinctly wrote about 20 years ago and still rings true today, what we need is not more action. What we need is enlightened action. So I've been thinking about this, how our spiritual practice, our practice of zazen, which is sometimes referred to as the study of the self, which can, you know, in this dark room when we're all sitting facing the wall, seem to be, can appear to be quite self-focused and isolated from the world.

[15:42]

I don't know if you've ever thought that's what it looks like, but sometimes to me it's like, huh, it does look like that. So how is this and how it appears, as Norman says, a necessity for idealistic and realistic and effective action. Not just for the future, but in this very moment, in the present. And I realize I do believe, I believe it is a necessity. I do, I have deep faith in this, deep faith. And I have noticed for myself it is useful to ask this question again and again and to feel my way again and again into relationship with the lived experience of this faith and not some imagined version of it. Maybe you don't have this faith.

[16:47]

Maybe you don't have this faith yet. And I would say maybe all the more reason to sincerely take up this question with openness and sincerity and urgency and love. How is this medicine? How is this practice medicine? How is it the medicine we need? You know, so don't take my word for it. It's hard to borrow faith, you know. You can check it out for yourselves. And this maybe is perhaps especially timely as many of you go into Rahatsu Sashin, which begins this evening, you know, a time when you can study with particular focus the appearance and the lived experience of this dynamic between isolation or stillness and connection.

[17:49]

So this very issue, this very question is posed at the beginning of the Jata Sutta and is recited in this verse that goes, the inner tangle, the outer tangle. People are entangled in a tangle. Gautama, Buddha, I ask you this, how to untangle this tangle? Our spiritual lives, this so-called inner work, and our collective lives, so-called reality, and the work of the world, are they two? Are they one? People who think about large, complex things problems use a model called systems thinking. I imagine many of you are familiar with this.

[18:52]

It's kind of a way to take a holistic approach to and analyze and focus on a large system and the constituent parts and what the relationships are between them. And it's often illustrated with a model or a diagram of an iceberg? I mean, really, on a paper, it's a triangle. How many of you have seen this diagram? Wow, not so many. So imagine a triangle or a pyramid that is roughly shaped like an iceberg, right? So the very tippy top is the part that sticks out of the water. So when you say, oh, there's an iceberg, you see this little thing. So the part above the waters are referred to, refer to events. So these are everyday observable things that happen.

[19:57]

And the next layer of the triangle or the pyramid or the iceberg is, in the diagram, is labeled patterns. So this is just below the surface of the water. Patterns are trends over time. So our awareness of these takes a little more work. They're often just below the surface of consciousness. And often, kind of a clue that there might be a pattern here is if you notice that an event has kind of a large emotional valence, kind of like outsized to the... the event itself. Maybe you might think it's outsized or often this is because they're part of a pattern, right?

[20:57]

So the experience isn't just of that isolated event. It's actually kind of like the accumulation of a lot of events. So often we can feel this before we're consciously aware of There's a pattern if you haven't done that work. So the next layer down is structures. And structures are what influence patterns. They're the relationships between the parts. And examples of structures are like laws or policies or even social norms. And these are usually pretty far below the surface. They're often not unless you're practiced in this kind of thinking, readily apparent in any given event, as connected to any given event.

[22:01]

So it takes some work to see how they are supporting the unfolding of everyday events. And the bottom-most layer in this model the systems thinking model, or most of them, is called mental models or paradigms. And that is the assumptions, beliefs, and values that create and maintain the system structures. And for people not practiced in this kind of thinking, these can often take a lot of work to access. Many of these things are unconscious and defended in many ways by those in power and who benefit from the systems. Often that's ourselves.

[23:09]

Just to recap, the iceberg model illustrates the relative importance of all these layers in terms of influencing the system with the bottom layer being the largest, the foundation of the system. And so this is paradigms or mental models, and this is where most thinkers and activists tell us that you have the most leverage to change the system. I've been thinking, you know, the Buddha was a systems thinker, too. The Buddha offered a subtle but major addition, in my opinion, to this analysis, which is this relationship between the inner tangle and the outer tangle. So...

[24:11]

You know, I've been thinking like, oh, we could revise this model and the layer below paradigms, the base of the iceberg, we could label the self or delusion. So rather than studying events, patterns, structures, and paradigms out there, you know, the outer tangle, the Buddha, you know, changed the orientation. He told us to turn our attention inward to understand how the mind shapes reality. And I might add, you know, that his practice was yogic. It was an embodied practice, and it is. Zazen is an embodied practice. So, you know, maybe I like the kind of translation from Japanese to understand how, rather than how the mind shapes reality, it's the heart mind.

[25:28]

Right? How having a body and a mind together... create our confusion and delusion about the world. So just to be clear, the Buddha certainly taught outward restraint. You know, ethical conduct was a cornerstone of his teaching. And the Buddhas and ancestors of our Zen lineage passed down precepts, and also we are grounded in a great vow, the Bodhisattva vow, to live for the benefit of all beings. just as we all strive here to do. And part of the Buddha's special legacy, though, was instead of focusing on the outer tangle, to care for the outer tangle, you know, by quieting the mind and starting to see how this very distinction of inside and outside self and other is the root

[26:41]

of suffering, you know, it is the bottom of the pyramid. Keeps the system in place. Adrienne Marie Brown, an amazing activist, thinker, sci-fi scholar, amazing human being. far as I can tell, in her book Emergent Strategy, says, small is good, small is all. And what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system. What seems smaller than how we relate to our own bodies? our own heart minds.

[27:44]

Adrienne Marie Brown's teacher, Grace Leet Boggs, said, transform yourself to transform the world. And Marie Brown adds, this does not mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line. first place we can practice justice liberation and alignment with each other and the planet so this is an important instruction while not getting lost in the self to take up taking up right relationship with the self as an expression and as the foundation of right relationship with the whole world Suzuki Roshi gave a talk that was in Not Always So. It's called Express Yourself Fully.

[28:48]

And in this talk, he says, the way to extend your practice to your everyday life, so the way to take your practice from this seemingly isolated expression of sitting zazen in the zendo, being quiet and still, out into the world, the world that's on fire, the way to extend your practice to your everyday life is to expose yourself as you are without trying to be someone else. When you're very honest with yourself and brave enough, you can express yourself fully. Yeah, so I've been thinking about this a lot. What does he mean, express yourself fully? I don't think it's our usual understanding. And in fact, he says in the talk, it is a big mistake to think that the best way to express yourself is to do whatever you want, acting however you please.

[29:56]

That is not expressing yourself. So the clue, to me, to this other meaning he seems to be saying is there, is when he says, expose yourself as you are. When you are very honest and brave, you can express yourself fully. So honest and brave. I'm going to tell you an embarrassing story about being a parent. maybe some of you who have had the experience of being a parent might relate to this and those of you who have not had that experience might also relate to this because in my experience this is not limited to interactions with children. So I was picking up

[31:07]

my son, Frank, from school. And I had just, you know, run from maybe working down on the farm up to make a snack for him, you know, and throw all of his dance things in a bag and kind of rush off, dragging his little brother with me. So, like, just a lot of steps to get there to pick him up on time. And he got in the car and he was really grumpy. It was like really unpleasant. He was just telling, he did not like what I brought him to eat. He did not want to eat. He never wanted to eat anything that I gave him. He did not want to go to dance class. Why was I making him do this? I was like a horrible mother. Furthermore, school is terrible, you know, just like the worst. And really let it, you know, just like fully, fully expressing himself, a full expression.

[32:09]

And yeah, so here's the embarrassing part. I was listening to him and I was thinking, wow, this is really painful. This is really hard to hear. And I don't think I thought it consciously, but I thought I do not want to be hearing this. That's what was going on for me. And I found myself I could see it, but it was like, as the words were coming out, in the exact same tone of voice he was using with me. Like, I don't like any of this. I want to let you know this is your fault. I tried to be real nice and use real nice words, but I let him know that how we speak to other people has an effect on them. And maybe he should work on thinking about other people. And it's fine for him to have a hard time.

[33:12]

It's OK to have a hard time. But to think about how we speak to others, especially when they're trying to do their best to support you, like your poor mother. Yeah, so it was very apparent to me that I was actually doing the exact same thing that I was telling him not to do. And then just a little bit later, I thought, oh, right, I'm having a hard day. You know, I'm feeling unhappy. You know, and I'm blaming someone else for this. You know? The inner tangle and the outer tangle. It was so clear. We were in the same tangle. And then I thought, oh, I'm the parent. I'm supposed to get us out of this, right?

[34:14]

I'm supposed to be the adult here. Yeah. So... on the smallest, most intimate scale of that interaction, this meeting, and of meeting just this person, you know, in that interaction of meeting me, I was, you know, unable in that moment to be present and spaciousness, spacious enough with this body and mind and what was arising. You know, tension, Disappointment, impatience, fear, the inner tangle. I was unable in that moment to care for the inner tangle. And therefore, I was unable to fully meet and connect with him and his difficulty.

[35:25]

and what was happening between us, the outer tangle. And when I was finally able to be present and practice tenderness with the thoughts and feelings that were arising in this body and mind, and to be brave and honest enough to be brave enough to see that, my own limitations, my own inner tangle, to be honest enough to see, oh, it's not just out there, it's in here. You know, this limited view. It's not just that limited view. I was able to find my way to a fuller expression of myself, which is concern for my son, a wish for mutual support, a wish for both of us to be free from suffering, connection and compassion, freedom with the inner tangle.

[36:56]

and the outer tangle. So this may seem like a really trivial, everyday example, and it is. But it is right there, right here, in this relationship with our own mind, our own heart, every day, and moment after moment. that the structures of suffering and division are sown and maintained. It's particularly obvious for me now that I have children and they repeat back to me the exact same. They repeat back to me my mistakes and I can see how my mistakes then have continued life. It's not just my mistake. So the Buddha teaches that this very structure of mind is inseparable from the world, from the horrifying events in the so-called outer world that ultimately expresses them, expresses the shape of our minds.

[38:15]

So the stakes are high for how we care for our minds. love that Adrienne Marie Brown describes this relationship as a fractal. If any of this is interesting to you, you might check out her book, Emergent Strategy. I was really moved by it. I felt like my reading of it was informed by my practice, and her words really informed my practice. She writes, a fractal is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop. Wisdom and compassion. Wisdom and compassion. Wisdom and compassion. When we practice zazen with our deluded mind, not looking for some better mind or some nicer mind, but rather meeting this very mind in stillness and silence, we ourselves embody

[39:49]

what we long for in the world, generosity, love, and wisdom. I think this is our full expression. This is what Suzuki Roshi was talking about, expressing ourself fully moment after moment in zazen or any other time when we're actively and deliberately tending to our body, mind, and heart. And this is the small scale expression that resonates with and is inseparable from the larger scales of concern that so loudly call on all of us to respond with grounded and embodied generosity, love, and wisdom. Ultimately, in the Zen perspective there, in the absolute reality of this moment of life as it is, there is no distinction between inner and outer, small scale and large scale.

[41:02]

Can we diligently practice this? As Dogen said, to study the Buddha way is to study the self, and to study the self is to forget the self, and to forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. It's to be actualized by the whole world, everything except the self. So the elements of the iceberg that identify the different scales, events, patterns, structures, and paradigms, and even the self, you know, delusion, the layer we added, all the things we can see and understand with the conscious mind, and that are so important to see and understand with the conscious mind, are only part of the story. They are supported by and inseparable from the whole ocean of reality.

[42:09]

There's the iceberg. It's floating in the whole ocean of reality. And in fact, those things are nothing but just whole, inseparable ocean of reality. And to do our spiritual work is to ground ourselves Not just now, but now and now and now and now. In our hard-won faith that the world out there is not separate from us in here. That there is no self apart from the whole. Which is incidentally why we feel the pain. We're not separate. We're not separate. And we can feel and recognize and express generosity, love, and wisdom because, in fact, it is the true nature of reality that is the full expression of how things are, the relationship of everything.

[43:33]

It's non-duality. So when we understand this practice, refreshed and renewed moment after moment with our attention and diligence and concentration and effort. Based in our study and faith that this is so, then we can truly become bodhisattvas, the spiritual hero that Norman describes so vividly as committed to idealistic and realistic and effective action, action that isn't confused by scale, action that is grounded in the study of the self, action that is grounded in the careful tending here and now of this very person and this very mind. To the world, the world,

[44:44]

All of this events, patterns, structures, and paradigms needs our work to heal. Spiritual work is necessary. And whenever we allow ourselves to think that the work of dismantling these structures and paradigms is only outside or apart from ourselves, or that our inner work is not connected to them, that our own spiritual practice, this practice of zazen we're doing in here, is somehow separate. We're missing a vital opportunity. One of my practices is that whenever I notice that I'm identifying some problem outside of myself, at the moment that I notice this, I turn around.

[45:46]

I make sure that I am looking closely at this inner tangle. Turn the light inward to see what might be illuminated about the inner tangles connection to this outer tangle. What is my connection to this harmful structure I think of as being outside of me? And through this practice, when I can manage to do it, I touch my own deep opportunity and vow to heal that structure firstly by how I tend to my own mind. And in this way, I can express myself fully and embody this healing, this wisdom and compassion in the larger system.

[46:53]

And then I can do my work with others. Take up the work of the inner tangle and the outer tangle. In the story I read to the kids, you still remember it, banjutsu bunny. All the bunnies hear the instruction. Show me your best way to stop a fight. And they used their banjutsu skills, their fighting skills, which is how they were trained, right? They fought to end the fight. the inner tangle and the outer tangle, totally entangled and embodied in that fighting, the ear twisting, the flipping over.

[47:58]

How could they hope to end the fight with fighting? We've all seen this, right? This is our world. This is wars. This is like we just keep going. You know, I like to read the stories thinking about practice. So I think, what I see is Banjutsu Bunny turning the light inward. Right? She expressed her... Her full expression was her understanding of the relationship between the inner tangle and the outer tangle. Ending the fight inwardly... created the conditions for the fight to end outwardly in her embodied understanding, which transformed the situation. Immediately, to the delight and benefit of all the bunnies, they were so happy.

[49:09]

They all wanted their turn, right, to be loved and cared for. Everyone wants their turn to be loved and cared for. So may we all be supported to have the honesty and courage to turn the light inward and fully express ourselves, our Buddha nature, and embody the generosity, love, and wisdom inwardly and outwardly that is so urgent and that we all long to see in the world for the benefit of all the bunnies and all the beings. Thank you very much. May our intention equally exist.

[50:14]

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