We are here today to celebrate. Is this working? Hello, hello, [...] hello. Okay. So now we can celebrate. Today is a day to celebrate the birth and life of Buddha. Buddha's birthday is celebrated all over the world by all schools of Buddhism, not always on the exact same date. Today, actually this year, we picked a wonderful day.

[01:26]

We picked today. whether gods are with us. So this is a good day to celebrate Buddha's birthday. And this is our village story. This story that we enact connects us with Buddhists of all different schools, not just Zen Buddhists, but everyone who celebrates Buddhism celebrates the birth of Buddha. And we do this in order to honor and cherish, to show our honor and cherishing of the teachings and also to protect the teaching, to pass it down from generation and generation so that the story isn't lost. And we do it, excuse me, to express our joy and gratitude. But we can still ask,

[02:27]

who is this Buddha? Who is the Buddha who we're celebrating? Is the Buddha an Indian sage, a man of Indo-Aryan background, born, as some historians think, possibly about 2,500, 70 years ago? Is the Buddha a person, an Asian, a Western person, a white person, a black person. Does this matter? Is this important to us, what the Buddha looks like? Do we think that the Buddha has any marks at all, any physical characteristics? Is the Buddha a being? Is the Buddha a force or an energy? Is the Buddha separate from us? Are we Buddha? So I want to look at the role that Buddha plays in our practice, and what our beliefs are about Buddha, and why we celebrate this birth?

[03:36]

Do we hold up the Buddha in a way that excludes Buddha from those who don't consider themselves Buddhist? What is our faith and our trust? What is our relationship with Buddha? Recently I was at an interfaith gathering where ministers and practitioners of several different faiths gathered together to talk about their beliefs and practices. And before introducing the speakers for that day, who were a Quaker, a Christian of another denomination, and a Muslim, the moderator, I think very wisely and kindly, encouraged us all to pay careful attention to their words and to our own reactions to their words, to notice if there might be anything that we disagreed with, and if so, how it was for us, to try to notice our own turning away and how we might feel at that moment, to notice any uncomfortableness or even anger

[04:59]

that might come up and what triggered it. I thought this was a remarkably frank and open acknowledgement that we don't all agree about our beliefs, but a willingness to look at it. So much of the discussion that morning was about the place of prayer and meditation. in the lives of practitioners about its power and importance. And in general, it was quite heartwarming and encouraging to hear about their commitment and devotion and their efforts of finding the commonality of the world's great religions. I was impressed by the speaker's compassion, their charity, their love. their expression of doing good works for others, even though it seemed closely related to their relationship to God, a relationship that I don't share, but I appreciated their ideas and their commitment.

[06:17]

And then after a while, as the moderator had kind of predicted, I did notice a distancing. a turning away from one of the speakers, a feeling that I later recognized as a kind of fear coming up. And I think it was the fear, I think that this fear was about hearing what I felt was a statement and a belief in a God that's separate from us, a distant entity, a creator God, a savior of the world. a powerful being that the speaker had a relationship to, but maybe a kind of exclusive relationship that I didn't have access to. And it sounded to me like this was not just something that they believed in, but that they felt was true, the true understanding.

[07:23]

This was the point at which I started to turn away. And it struck me that this kind of belief, while often a powerful source of compassion and love and a source of good in the world, if held to too tightly by any of us, can lead to anger and hatred. and ultimately destruction and killing. When I think that my beliefs are actually true, when I think that, when I hold too tightly to my own understanding and think that it's the truth with a capital T, then there is the potential for killing. So a close friend and I have for some time now been engaged in a kind of little dance where every so often, unexpectedly, she'll say something and I'll immediately counter with, no.

[08:47]

That's not true. And then she'll look at me and say, that hurts. Something like that. We have many variations on this. And I've come to see this as a kind of microcosm of this problem. It's a little death, both for her and for me. So sometimes she may be right. Sometimes I may be right. That isn't the point. That's really not The question that interests me is what is the self that is born at that moment? What is the self that pops up when I say no? When I say that's not the truth, this is the truth. Is that the birth of Buddha at that moment? looks to me like what's the self that's born at that time is a very small, restricted, narrow, not so happy self, self that's dependent on being right, self dependent on validation.

[10:14]

So it's a fearful self, constantly in danger, in danger of being extinguished. extinguished by not being right. But it's staking its claim as if there were a possibility of actually sticking a pole in solid ground and hanging onto it. And this is who I am. This is me. I exist and should be honored. Even I exist forever, completely. So this self is the self that we get into a lot of trouble with. This kind of belief is the belief that we fight over. And even though we do this, this isn't really the way we want to live. This kind of life is a life of anxiety, hatred, fear, separation.

[11:22]

It's a life of isolation. It's a life of suffering. And I think that this is really a pivotal question in our life. Do we believe in, are we willing or wanting to believe in and hold on to this idea of the self as the I, as a limited, separate being? Or can we open to I as Buddha, a manifestation of all beings? There is a story, which you will see soon, enacted, that when the baby Buddha was born, he took seven steps and then raising one arm to the sky and extending one down to the earth, he proclaimed, I alone am the world honored one. This I alone includes heaven and earth.

[12:26]

and all beings. This I is not the I of I am right and you are wrong. It's the I that includes everyone and all beings, our interconnection. Usually our thinking is self-centered. It's this small I. We go round and round proving, reaffirming our own existence as a separate suffering self. Suzuki Roshi said, and I'm going to read a passage from him, I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color, something which exists before all forms and colors appear. This is a very important point. No matter what God or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea.

[13:37]

You strive for a perfect faith in order to save yourself, but it will take time to attain such a perfect faith. You will be involved in a dualistic practice. you will be involved in an idealistic practice. In constantly seeking to actualize your ideal, you will have no time for composure. But if you are always prepared for accepting everything we see as something appearing from nothing, knowing that there is some reason why a phenomenal existence of such and such form and color appears, then at that moment, you will have perfect composure. So it is absolutely necessary for everyone to believe in nothing. But I do not mean voidness. There is something, but that something is something which is always prepared for taking some particular form and it has some rules or theory or truth in its activity.

[14:47]

This is called Buddha nature or Buddha himself. When this existence is personified, we call it Buddha. When we understand it as the ultimate truth, we call it Dharma. And when we accept the truth and act as part of the Buddha or according to the theory, we call ourselves Sangha. I promise that you know that I wouldn't speak too long this morning. I think I have a few more minutes. So my understanding of this passage of what Suzuki Rishi was saying is that we have to believe that's that kind of the nature of being human. We have to believe, to have confidence, to trust.

[15:51]

This is our life activity. It's the positive dynamic working of our life energy. To not believe is to kind of shrivel up and die. But when we believe in some thing, some fixed thing, such as Buddha or God, when we define it, when we think we know what it is, when we identify with it and hold on to it, then also our life energy is blocked and it becomes negative and destructive. So when my friend says, this is the way it is, and I say, no, that's the way it is, we're not calling forth the Dharma together. I'm not being open to the truth. I'm not seeing Buddha being born. I'm not seeing my life and her life and all life as appearing from nothing.

[16:55]

Rather, there's a turning away a defensiveness, a protectiveness, and no room for composure. Buddha appears in the world in order to save us from this life of self-centered thinking, this life of suffering. This is a story of the interconnection, the interdependence, and mutual supportive activity of the universe, a story in which we are not separate from others and can give up the drain of constantly and futilely reaffirming our own existence. Suzuki Roshi said, we should begin with enlightenment and proceed to practice and then to thinking. If enlightenment comes first before thinking, before practice, your thinking and your practice will not be self-centered. By enlightenment, I mean believing in nothing, believing in something which has no form or color, which is ready to take form or color.

[18:04]

This enlightenment is the immutable truth. It is on this original truth that our activity, our thinking, and our practice should be based. So today we are celebrating the life of Shakyamuni Buddha, but there was no first appearance of Buddha. We say there were seven Buddhas before the historical Buddha, but these seven, there weren't even really seven. The seven represent innumerable Buddhas before Buddha, stretching back through beginningless time. All beings are Buddha. the universe in which we live is Buddha. And we have a story about a Buddha to remind us about this and to celebrate our own true nature.

[19:07]

The Buddha's life story, as it has been told and retold and passed down to us, is the life, is the story of an agrarian village society at a time of relative peace. Its values are not particularly different from ours, but its way of expressing them may be as it is the product of a very different landscape and way of life. The story is a condensation and expression of a life journey, a kind of technicolor version of life. Themes that are common to all of us, but painted in gorgeous, bright colors. It may not be so readily apparent how this story is also our story, but as you hear the story and watch the pageant, please consider your own version of this universal journey.

[20:09]

Please consider how this is really your life story, not just something that happened once a long time ago, but a story of how each of us is born and continually is born into this world. You may think, my life doesn't look like that. My life is not so beautiful, so special. Buddha had the best of everything, a perfect life. My life doesn't really look exactly like that. I've been deprived of various things. It's not the way I would have wanted it to be. It's not what my parents wanted for me. But given that, our life is what it is. And our practice is to see how our life, no matter what it is, is the life of Buddha. So last week, Steve Weintraub talked about Dogen Zenji's teaching that the entire earth is the gate of liberation.

[21:17]

I think we could also say... Our life, our ordinary, limited, not always satisfactory life, is the gate of liberation. Our life on the conventional level is conceivable. We can describe it. We can complain about it. We can tell its story, its history. But whether or not we like it, we don't actually need to get some other life. This very life is is not separate from the inconceivable life of Buddha. Our conceivable life and Buddha's inconceivable life are, as Steve said again, laminated together. When the baby Buddha says, I alone and the world honored one, this is an expression of the inconceivable dimension of our life. This is an eye that includes Shakyamuni Buddha, his friends, his parents, his disciples, you, me, the mountains, the ocean, the fields, and all life.

[22:32]

No beings are excluded from this eye. All are honored. All attain enlightenment. When we practice, we realize this I. We give up imagining a fantasy life. We give up trying to get some other, some better life. We stop blaming our circumstances or others or ourself and turn instead to investigating our life, feeling gratitude for it. So as you watch the pageant, please understand that it's really about you. It's about each of us. The Buddha was born after a beautiful white elephant, a stately majestic white elephant entered his mother in a dream.

[23:46]

This is a miraculous conception. As miraculous as each of us has had, somehow a sperm meets an egg and we are born. We don't know how it happens, how that particular event came to be. Once born, we are separated from our mother. We are nurtured, but there's also separation. We have a life of luxury, which means that everything is given The Buddha is usually depicted as a prince or the son of a royal family or the chief of a tribe. You may feel that your life was not exactly like that, that you weren't raised in a royal household. But somehow we do have shelter, food, clothing, care.

[24:49]

all gifts that come to us from the entire universe, whether we pay for these things, whether they're given to us, whether we work to earn them, still somehow they come to us through the entire universe, through the work of innumerable beings, through the resources of this planet. And yet, despite all these blessings, Like Shakyamuni Buddha did, at some point we noticed some suffering in our life as well as the possibility of turning toward liberation. For Gautama, this happened when he saw the four visions, a sick man, an old man, a corpse, and then an ascetic monk. And he became aware of the inherent difficulties and suffering of sickness, old age, And death. And then he saw someone else who was serene and composed in the face of this.

[25:56]

We often think that our problems are not significant, that they're small and petty rather than noble like the Buddhas. And again, as Steve said last week, we often want better problems. We want more glorious problems. We want to deal with the problems of life and death rather than some little annoyance that we just can't get away from. We want a more worthy adversary. But we have, you might say that we have the difficulties that we deserve or that we need perhaps. Each problem, each concern, each joy as well, and each action that we take, if we pay attention to it, if we honor it, if we take it up, if we give it space, is the opportunity to realize liberation, to realize the non-separation of our life with the life of Buddha.

[27:18]

Each moment of whatever life we have, whether we like it or not, is actually the opportunity to celebrate, to respect, and to rejoice in the life force of all, of all people of all faiths and beliefs. This is the life of Buddha. Is it time? It's time. Thank you very much.

[28:03]

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