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. I want to start by thanking my teachers, Linda Ruth Kutz and Ed Satterson, for their support, their teaching. for their guidance that brought me to this seat tonight. I particularly want to thank the tanto, Nancy Petron, for inviting me. Thank you, Nancy. It's always a privilege and a joy to say yes to you. As you can see, my face isn't on the screen yet. This is a giant jar of honey just harvested. from the rooftop hives at Zen Center. And before I talk tonight about being a bee, I want to put out a special thanks to another teacher of mine, Alan Hawkins, who was the beekeeper at Green Gulch Farm for many, many years.

[01:18]

I still correspond and speak with him. He taught me about beekeeping. He taught me about Buddhism. and he taught me about the joy of honey. Being like a bee, beekeeping to me is a kind of temple art, a physical act of devotion. And temple arts and their forms are a focus of my Buddhist practice. So tonight, I'd like to talk about three things during the evening. The first is the shared qualities that a honeybee and a bodhisattva both have. The second is personalities and lifespan of the hive and its residents as it relates to the sangha. And the third is enjoying the taste of honey. Naomi Shiavnai, in the introduction to her book, The Honeybee Book,

[02:28]

said this, where would we be without them? Where would we be without one another? So I think now, Matt, thank you very much. We can take away the honey jar for the moment. And let me just do one other thing here. Okay. So I'd like to tell you a little story about being a beekeeper and who I am. Perhaps that will help you understand what I'm talking about tonight and the relevancy of it to perhaps your own practice. I hope it will be an inspiration and that you'll have a different regard for honeybees and maybe for your Buddhist practice. I brought bees to... Page Street about 10 years ago as part of being the gardener there.

[03:35]

My intention was to create a sustainable environment at Page Street and in the gardens. Having studied with Hawkins at Green Gulch Farm, I could bring those skills to the rooftop at Zen Center with a gentle hand that he taught me. From the beginning, the bees humbled and inspired me. Why? Because of their wholehearted sense of cooperation. Because each one has a job. Opening the hive is like opening a universe. Why tonight? Why am I talking about being like a bee tonight? Because my hands have been sticky for almost two weeks with honey. Lately, I've spent a lot of time with the bees because it's this time of year that we collect any extra honey that they've made so that we can enjoy the taste.

[04:41]

It's been dazzling that sense of harmony that I see when I watch them and their diligence. This year, we broke all records. we harvested almost 300 pounds of honey. We call it Bee Zen, and for a donation, you can purchase it in our bookstore. Perhaps some of you have already tasted it. I hope so. So what does that mean, being like a bee? In 1971, Suzuki Roshi gave a talk in which he quoted the Dhammapada, and this is what he said. In the Dhammapada, it says, you may know the Buddha said, you should be like a bee collecting honey from flower to flower, flying from flower to flower, without destroying the flower, without disturbing the beauty of the flower.

[05:54]

And then he commented, that is Buddhist way of helping people. Watching and studying how a bee moves about, well, they touch each other and they explore and they pollinate. But they don't disturb. The flower that they visit creates its beauty just so the bee will come and visit. drawn by the beauty and the scent of nectar. Carefully, they collect. Carefully, they pollinate. What is pollinating but caring for the world? It assists all beings. The feeling of a bee crawling on my skin is like a soft creature. It's curious. It's exploring. And then looking into the hive, seeing the whole universe living together in harmony, involved and focused and humming.

[07:05]

But within all of this, a tremendous sense of order and the fragrance of nourishment. I said in the Simple, quiet gestures. Concern. Those are adjectives that describe on my list what a bodhisattva is and what a honeybee is. As well, honeybees and bodhisattvas have shared qualities.

[08:22]

For instance, a bodhisattva has a sense of generosity. How we see this in a honeybee is as a pollinator, a concern for their fellow bees and the health of the hive. Collective work. They work all together from a diet that comes from polydanic plants. Another quality is wholesomeness. I see this in the bees that are called nursing bees. These are the bees whose job it is to just take care of the new, brand new bees just coming out of their pods. Taking care of them, nurturing them, feeding them so that they can emerge into the life of the hive. Patience. The honeybee in the winter spends its time in a very tight ball in the center of the hive, keeping the queen warm for months on end.

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This is patience. And enthusiasm. Scout bees, another task, fly out into the everyday world, and look for a new habitat or a new pollen or nectar. And then when they come back to the hive, the way that they communicate this to everyone that's in the hive is by doing a wiggle dance. And there's YouTubes of these, wiggle dances. And it looks very exotic. And I don't really understand it. But the important part is all the bees in the hive do. And then they go to that site. Bodhisattva also has the quality of wisdom and ethical conduct. In the hive, this takes place when they have a decision to make about whether to replace a new queen.

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So every hive has one queen. And when the queen is damaged or dead, the hive knows this. And they immediately make special cells. where a new queen can be born, and they do this silently and carefully and with a great deal of wisdom. In fact, it's still not completely understood how they do this, how they communicate it, but it happens over and over and over again in a hive. Both honeybees and bodhisattvas have a meditative balance. We know what that means for a bodhisattva, but for a honeybee, it means a rhythm, a seasonal cycle, a sense of overcrowding, which leads to a swarm, or of solving an issue. Invasion, ill health, dead queen, winter approaching, whatever it is, they have a balance 12 months of the year in order to

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take good care of themselves. There's three more qualities I'd like to describe. Insight is one of them. Insight that is essential. And in the hive, the length of life, the health of the hive, the location of the pollen, where the honey is located, These are all essential decisions that are made that make the hive prosper and grow. A honeybee knows how to take care of the queen, which is, I think, a reflection of steadfast dedication, another quality. What does it mean to be devoted? Now, I'm not going to say that Abbot David is our queen bee. But we do have a sense of devotion to our teachers, to those that inspire us and carry us forward, that help us to prosper.

[13:01]

And in the hive, that has to do with incredible taking care of the queen. And lastly, what I feel is really one of the most important qualities of bodhisattva is skillful means. And for each of us, Skillful means resonates in a different way, right? Because of how you live, where you live, who you live with, and how you manage. But these, each one has a job, a special job, and they have, they know how to do it. In 1903, George Bernard Shaw, in Man and Superman, wrote, Go to the bee, thou poet, consider her ways, and be wise. I think that's a good summing up of these shared qualities. I also wanted to speak with you about the personalities and lifespan of the hive and residents.

[14:16]

The queen, workers, and drones, these are the residents that live in the hanisanga, as I call it. Now, this might be more information about bees than you'd like to hear, and I apologize to you if that's what you're thinking right now. But if you can, try to make the leap. Try to imagine what this means in relationship to our own practice. How is it that the bees live and the roles they take, How does that reflect on how we live in the Sangha, in our extended community, and how we practice? One of the things that leaps out for me as we make a trip around the hive, imagine we've opened up the hive, we're looking inside, and what we see are a lot of larvae. The beginning, the very center, You could say a bee's life starts in the center and eventually moves to the outside.

[15:21]

In fact, eventually moves to being outside of the hive. Perhaps that's how we live as well in relationship to Sangha. Sometimes I think that my residential practice, my studying in a monastic way, was me being in the center of the hive. Being surrounded. my sisters and brothers, my Dharma sister and brothers, with teachers abundant. And then eventually, I found my way to where I am now, a householder. Outside, not exactly, but on the edge. Certainly on the edge between monastic life and the everyday world. These larvae, which almost 1,000 of them are laid each day, are laid by the queen. And then, as I mentioned before, there are bees that particularly take care of those larvae and nourish them and feed them so that they become new bees.

[16:30]

No decision in the hive is made by an individual. It is always made by the general group. Some of us go to committee meetings and other kinds of places where we try to make decisions. Sometimes it's just at the work meeting. But in a hive, everyone weighs in on a decision. And they don't shift or swarm or make a major move unless everyone agrees. Kind of incredible, since there's sometimes 60,000 bees in a hive. And they have no attachment to their job. They just say yes. You need to be a nurse bee. You need to be a groomer. You need to be a scout bee. You need to be a guard. There are many different jobs that bees take up.

[17:35]

And they usually do all of them in the course of their lifetime. A lifetime that is about six weeks. So, as I mentioned, there's three residents in this sangha, the queen, the workers, and the drones. The queen stays in the hive her entire life in the dark. She goes out once, once, and that's to mate with a drone, a male bee, from another hive. She has the characteristic of smelling different differently from all the other bees in the hive in fact she has 17 different fragrances and these scents are really important because the other bees carry this scent around and it tells all the bees in the hive that hey guess what the queen is okay she's fine sometimes I feel that way when I smell my robes and I

[18:49]

have the fragrance of scent and the scent of incense. And I also feel it sometimes when I go camping, too. But there's this sense of, oh, yes, that's what that is. That's what that means. And for the bees, scent is really, really important. The workers are kind of what we would call our... Our labor crew in the Sangha, they're kind of what makes everything work. There are thousands of workers in a hive, and these workers are all female. So, as I mentioned, life starts in the center and moves to the edge. In the beginning, they beg for food, just like a begging bowl. Then they begin to remove debris from the hive.

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Then they feed the older bees. That's their second job. Then they feed royal jelly to larva. Then they move on to feeding the queen and grooming her and taking care of her. After that, they move farther and farther away from the center. Now they're receiving loads of nectar from foragers. bees who go out to find the source. Then they're removing dead bees on the edge of the hive at the very entrance. Then they're producing wax to build up cells in the hive wherever it's needed. Then they're guards inspecting by smell anyone who comes in or goes out and whether they should be allowed. That's a dangerous job. And communication is really, really important in that task.

[20:57]

And lastly, in the fifth and sixth week of their life is old age when life ends. So the last members of this sangha are the drones. There are about 100 to 1,000 drones in a hive. And these are the male bees. Male because they came from unfertilized larva. A kind of sidebar on that, which I find fascinating, is that when the queen is laying the larva, she decides the gender of the larva. She decides whether we need more female bees or we need more male bees. And these drones, male bees, have a longer gestation period. They don't have a stinger. And they have large, big eyes. They look totally different from a worker bee.

[21:58]

And those eyes help them when they go out to mate with a queen from another hive. So their life, instead of 10 jobs, they have three jobs. Their orientation flight, where they mate with a queen. The second phase of their life is when they're sitting around in the hive and the hive is becoming, there are too many bees in the hive and they get eaten. And the third phase of a drone's life is at the end of the season when the drones are expelled from the hive to starve. It sounds a little brutal, but it's... It all fits in with this form and system in a hive and keeping the community intact and healthy. In our practice, we're born with the capacity to be bodhisattvas and Buddhas.

[23:01]

We make choices. In beekeeping, the hive makes choices. There's an inherent trust in the doctrine and the form. came across this poem while reading about bees and I share it with you because I think it's such a beautiful way to describe the life of bees and what they are. It's by Antonio Machado. Last night I dreamed, blessed illusion, that I had a beehive here in my heart. and that the golden bees were making white cones and sweet honey from my old failures. Last night, I dreamed, blessed illusion, that I had a beehive here in my heart, and that the golden bees were making white cones and sweet honey from my old failures.

[24:18]

So lastly, I'd like to talk a little bit about the taste of honey and enjoying honey. Here's some things I know about honey that I'd like to share. Honey is the only food that includes all the substances necessary to sustain life. It's the only food that can be eaten with a certain antioxidant to improve brain functioning. All this work that a honeybee does, the average worker bee produces about one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. One twelfth of a teaspoon. A honeybee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip. And a honey bee visits 1,500 flowers to gather a load of pollen.

[25:27]

Only worker bees sting, and only if they are threatened. And once they sting, they die. In this time of climate change, the bees are also deeply affected. We have bees on the rooftop at City Center because we wanted to provide a sanctuary for bees, a place where they'd be protected, there wouldn't be predators, that they would have a safe haven to live as they wanted to live, that they would have a warm, dry home to come home to, to frequent. Albert Einstein said, if the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years left to live.

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I don't quote that to frighten ourselves, but to appreciate that without pollinators, there are no plants. And without plants, well, you know how it goes. So even way back, way back when, Einstein had a sense of how important the bees are. Aspiring to be a bodhisattva, to be generous, wholesome, patient, enthusiastic, wise, with a meditative balance, insight and dedication. To use skillful means and pollinate the world without destroying the flower or the beauty of the flower. For as Suzuki Roshi quoted, you should be like a bee, collecting honey from flower to flower, flying from flower to flower,

[27:50]

without destroying the flower, without disturbing the beauty of the flower. That is the Buddhist way of helping people. That is my wish for you tonight. Thank you so much for listening. 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. 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.

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