Good morning. Happy Buddha's birthday. Happy birthday to all of us. And my name is Susan, I guess, Reverend Susan O'Connell. I'm a priest here at Zen Center. And I'm going to speak for a few minutes to the children. You can listen if you'd like. Do you know that it's Buddha's birthday? Do you know that? Yeah. Do you know the story? of how Buddha was born? Would you like, you know, tell me, what's the story? It's about Cinderella. It's about Cinderella. It's about Cinderella. It's kind of like that. You know that Buddha, actually Buddha did have a stepmother, but she was a good stepmother, not an evil stepmother. I'm going to tell you just really quickly the story, okay?

[01:04]

Because Buddha's birth was really kind of beautiful. So his mother, her name was Maya, queen. She was a queen. And she didn't have children for a really long time. She and her husband really wanted to have children, the king. And it wasn't happening. But one night, she had a dream. And she dreamed that there was a white elephant with six tusks over. Usually elephants just have two. This one had six white ivory tusks coming from his face. And he came from heaven and there was all kinds of beautiful songs around and flowers falling. And she dreamed that the elephant walked up to her with a pink lotus flower and then became one with her. Just she and the elephant were one. So she woke up. And she said, what was that dream? She told her husband and her friends, and they talked about it for a while. And they decided, all the wise men decided it was a pretty important dream.

[02:05]

And it probably meant that if she were going to have a child, that child was going to be really, really special, just like you. So it turns out the queen did become pregnant. And after 10 months, which you're... Mommies will tell you it was a really long time to be pregnant. She knew it was time to go to her mom and dad's house because that's what they used to do in the old days. They used to go back to their mom and dad's house to have their babies. So she started to walk because they didn't have cars and they didn't have planes. She walked and started walking to her mom and dad's house. And on the way, she saw a beautiful garden. It's called Lumbini. It still is there, I think. And she stopped because there was a tree that she just couldn't pass by. And as she reached up to hold on to a branch of the tree, she realized it was time the baby was going to happen. So she sat down and her attendants helped her.

[03:07]

And the Buddha was born. He was a beautiful little boy that she named Siddhartha. And she gave him his first bat in a little pond right there in the Lumbini Gardens. So that's what we're celebrating today. That's what we're celebrating is the day that that happened in this beautiful garden to the king and queen. It's sort of like the day of your birthday and everyone's really happy about that too. So do you know what it is that helps a baby Buddha grow? What's good for a baby Buddha? Do you know? Drinking milk. That's a good thing for a baby Buddha. Yeah. That's a really good thing. Well, I was trying to figure out how to help give you this experience of helping the baby Buddha grow up. And I had this idea and it didn't quite work because I thought I could go buy you some seeds, you know, little packages of seeds, and you could put them in the ground and you could find out what makes something grow.

[04:10]

But we went to the store this morning and didn't have any seeds. So I'm going to give you each a dollar. And I'm going to ask you, if you think you can do this, to go buy some seats. And then with your parents and your friends and your teachers, try to see what it takes to make something grow, okay? So you want to each come and get a dollar? That's for you. And your sister. Oh, you're welcome. And that's for you. That's it. Don't put it in your mouth. I have a new baby puppy, so don't put it in your mouth. So anyway, please enjoy. I know there are things for you to do today because we're going to bathe the baby Buddha with some sweet tea, and we're going to do all kinds of things. So please go and enjoy the day, and we'll see you in a little bit.

[05:15]

Okay? Thank you. So what I didn't tell them was that the Buddha's mother died within seven days after his birth. And I'm just watching now why I didn't tell them. It's because sometimes we're not ready to hear everything. This is part of our maturing, knowing when we're ready to hear everything. some more difficult things. So the Buddha's mother died and in stepped this wonderful stepmother, Maha Pajapati, who was the Buddha's mother's sister.

[06:27]

And a couple of days ago, I was told, actually less than a week ago, I was told that, we were reminded that this talk that I'd been asked to give it was on the Buddhist birthday celebration and I was working on another topic which actually is not such an upper so I thought maybe not so good to talk about the negative aspects of hope on Buddha's birthday so I was talking to Abbot Steve Stuckey on the farm from Tassajara and I said help you know I have to find another some juice for some other something because I've really been thinking a lot about hope And he said, well, when he had done the Buddha's birthday celebration at Tassajara, out of his mat during the celebration came a great kind of thank you to Maha Pajapati. And I thought, yes, yes, we all need help to grow up. We all need help to mature.

[07:30]

And there she was, you know, Maha Pajapati. Let go of everything she was doing and devoted her life to bringing up the Buddha. So that's what I want to talk a little bit about today is how to ensure the Buddha in us and how to do that with others. So just thinking about the importance of maturing this Buddha. I wonder if Maha Pajapali Mu what an important task it was or if she just looked at him and looked in this darling baby's eyes and just saw a darling baby, a beautiful baby who needed what we all need. Nothing more, nothing less. A Buddha doesn't need more or less than we need. And what are those things that we need?

[08:32]

We need nurturing. We need the milk that the young Buddha told us a few minutes ago. We need understanding. We need discipline. We need examples of morality and selflessness. And we need a smiling face. I think maybe that's what we need most of all. The studies that have shown when babies look into the eyes of their mothers and mothers look into the eyes of their babies, mothers or fathers, whoever the caretaker is, that's love light. And it's completely necessary for the maturing of a being. So when you are in question about how you can help anyone at any time, I think a smile is a really good offering. In Buddhism, there are a lot of teachings about motherliness.

[09:42]

It comes in different forms. There's the form that I'm going to talk about in a minute called Grandmother Mine, which Ehe Dogen, who is the founder of this school of Buddhism, Soto Zen Buddhism in Japan, He had a very high regard for what he called Grandmother Mind, and I'll tell you a little story about that in a minute. And then we have something called the Heart Sutra. My teacher one time called it the Heartless Sutra. If you know it well, you maybe understand what I mean. There's a lot of emptying out in the Heart Sutra. No eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind. And it's a very compact teaching, the Hatsuta that we chant every day and that we're going to chant later if you go over to the Buddha's birthday celebration in the park. You'll get familiar with it just in that reading.

[10:45]

It's a study that could take all your life to actually penetrate. But in a book written about this sutra, a man named Len Hickson calls it the mother of the Buddhas. The Prajnaparamita Sutra is the mother of the Buddhas. In fact, across from me, behind some of you on the other side of the hall, is an icon to Mother of the Buddhas, to Prajnaparamita. There she sits at red table, bringing her motherliness and her feminine wisdom into the Buddha Hall. So... These are two, just two of the teachings about taking care in a motherly way of our practice and of the Buddha in all of us. So we can think in terms of how do we help others mature, but maybe best to start with ourselves.

[11:54]

How do we mature the Buddha in each of us? For me, the first step, and it was a step in my practice, was refuge. We need refuge. When we're little babies, when we're little beginning Buddhas, when we just see the groups of Buddha in us, we're very tender, and we need to be held. We need to be held in some way. We need to surrender. We need to take refuge in that Buddha nature. Because birth is difficult. If we've just been born as a baby Buddha, if we've just seen that baby Buddha in us, birth is as hard as death, you know, think about it. We don't remember it that well, but it's a difficult process, that birth process, and we're tender and we need holding.

[13:02]

when I first moved into, hi, come on in, come on in, no, okay. When I first moved into this building, I had this idea that I would come here for two months. It's been 13 years, but, and I was coming from a life They talk about that the Buddha was in Tushita Heaven before he was born, and that Maya, his mother, went to Tushita Heaven when she died, and later he went up and thanked her in some form, went and thanked his mother for his birth. My life was kind of like a Tushita Heaven. It was very exciting and very full, and I had no real understanding how much suffering there was actually in my life. I had learned to ice skate over it.

[14:08]

And I had also maybe equated happiness with excitement. So a lot of energy went into keeping that excitement level up and the new vistas and new things all the time, always distracted by something new. So... Right before I decided to move into Zoom Center, there was an 18-month period of time. It takes a lot to stop me. So I wish that you have a lower threshold for awareness than I had. But my mother died. And then I had a company that I was right... about ready to grow. I'd been working on it all my life and investors were coming in and about ready to take it to the next step.

[15:10]

And I had a problem with my business partner and I had to shut my company down, which my identity and what was that? Very painful. My son left home to go get married. So he, he left another loss. My father decided, um, She wanted to remarry over six months after my mother died. And when we were on the way to take my mother's ashes and put them in Vermont, it was six months after her actual death. And we were then going to go from Vermont to Palm Springs to attend my father's wedding. We're going from my mother's funeral to my father's wedding. I found out the day before that trip that I had breast cancer. So I came home and I said, I give up. I don't know what's next.

[16:12]

I have to stop. And I gave everything away. I gave up my apartment on Russian Hill. I emptied everything out. I did keep 20 pairs of shoes, but that's another story. I put them in storage. I didn't bring them here with me to Zen Center. And I bought actually one black dress, a black sweater, but I kept the pink stuff in storage for some other time. And I moved in thinking I was going to stay for two months. And in transition, you know, I thought, well, what's next? What's next? And pretty soon after I moved in, one of the senior people here asked me to work with her in her area. And I said, oh, okay, yeah, I can do that while I'm waiting for this other thing that's going to go to New York. And it was so loving in that office. It was down this hallway. It was the old development offices. The people in there were so loving and the space was so loving that I finally, I rolled up in a ball one day on the floor of the office in fetal position and wept.

[17:22]

And wept and wept and wept until I couldn't cry anymore. People just walked around with me. It was fine, you know. It was fine to fall apart. And it was the place I was getting myself to. So some wisdom, some Buddha in me saw the wisdom of coming here to stop, to fall apart. to roll it up in a fetal position and be reborn in the loving arms of this practice and of this community, which includes all of you. It's not just the people who live here. It's the people who are this community. So I would say that from my experience, that step of taking refuge is extremely important, and it allowed the baby Buddha in me to grow up a little bit. I think the next step is study.

[18:32]

So Dogen, Ehe Dogen, who I mentioned a minute ago, says, the Buddha way is to study the self. He goes on to say many other things after that that I'm not going to try to unpack for you right now, but just that first step The Buddha way is to study the self. And if we keep thinking about these baby Buddhas growing up, children are asking, you know, why is the sky blue? Why did you do that, mommy? What does this mean? What's that sound? How can I? And that's the energy of our practice. What is that? When we sit still in Zazen, when we take refuge, which is another place to take refuge, is in zazen, is in sitting still and upright. It's not always calm, but it is a refuge. So we sit and it comes, you know, what's that thought?

[19:37]

Where did it come from? Where is it going? What's that pain? Is it going to last? It's gone already, but here it is again. And what was that? And is it continuity? Those are the questions. These are our Buddha mind questions that are allowed to arise in enough of an environment of stillness, of refuge. And so as these questions come up, we need help. We need our mothers and fathers and teachers and spiritual friends to meet us right where we are. I wrote down here, the Buddha lived in paradise, but maybe even the Buddha needed to be reminded of his vows. As we study, we can get rocky. It gets kind of tumultuous in there, in this study process. One of the things Suzuki Roshi said was, I don't know that you want to get enlightened, you might not like it.

[20:47]

It's kind of rocky and it just possesses us of many of our precious things, of our precious ideas, of our precious commodities even. So we need to be reminded of our vows during these times of great questioning and great discovery. And we need our friends and our mothers and our stepmothers to help us and our teachers. Another little story. My teacher, and I wanted, I'm sorry, I forgot, I was going to dedicate this talk to all of my mothers, all of my mothers in this room and in other rooms and born and to be born. And one of my mothers is my teacher, who sometimes is a mother teacher and sometimes is a father teacher. And those are two different feelings. At Tassajara, he did a practice period, which I attended, where he said he was going to tell each of us the thing or the things that he had not been willing to say to us before.

[21:59]

The anxiety level of the practice period increased greatly, right? What was that thing? What was, you know, my greatest fear of what he could say to me? Far worse than probably anything he could say was my self-doubt, my own knowledge of my failures and weaknesses. And so I went into the room and sat down, not knowing what was going to come. And he said, he says, I want you to know something. Then he said, I want you to know that I think that your seriousness is really, really funny. So, you know, this kind of serious, maybe teenage kind of part of our practice where we think we need to know something and then we think we know it and then we think we want to know it more and that kind of teenage energy can be kind of cute, right?

[23:07]

If you're not the one in the middle of it going through that. Hormonal change, you know. What is that hormonal change in terms of the Buddha growing up? What's being released in us? You know, the possibility of peace? Is that what's being released in us? The hormone of peace? So, Pema Chodron, who's a wonderful, wonderful teacher in the Trungpa lineage, has written many books. I often recommend them to people. They're very accessible. And she, one of them, called When Things Fall Apart. And she talks about this stage of sort of a study where we can get a little too hard, too harsh. She says, we may have gained some insight, some awareness of how the mind works, how life works. And it's very important for without clarity and sort of honestly looking at things, we don't progress.

[24:11]

But she says, honesty about kindness makes us grim and mean. She says, sometimes we start to look like we're sucking on lemons. This is when we need motherly kindness, which is an aspect of mothering. Not all mothering looks the same. But this piece of it, this kindness, is really a necessary antidote when we're in a kind of a teenage stage of thinking we know something and trying hard to know more and grasping and gaining and identifying through the practice. This motherly kindness is sometimes called heart or gentleness for, Pema says, unlimited friendliness, having compassion and respect for what we see. So I was thinking about an example of this that wouldn't be sort of typical of what you would think of as kindly, gentle respect.

[25:21]

And it's something simple, but it occurred to me that that process when a child is learning to tie their shoes I had a child, and I can remember very clearly great impatience with wanting to get out the door and tying the shoe for him, tying the shoe for him. And these days, there's Velcro. So I would say it's important for us to learn to bear the pain of the struggle. and the suffering, both in watching the little baby Buddhas around us who we are helping and caring for, but even in ourselves. Don't try to get off the pain too quickly. Don't use Velcro. And don't let somebody else tie your shoes for you. I think when I was sitting upstairs it occurred to me, this is something I also feel very strongly about, so excuse me.

[26:27]

I actually think this is one of the great offerings of this style of practice of Zen. We don't tie your shoes for you. We don't offer Velcro here. So that's just the way it is, and that's good for some people, and it's not so good for others, and if it's good for you, please stay. I'd like to watch you tie your shoes, and I promise I'll just sit back for a while. And please do the same for me. Let me tie my shoes. And can we let insight arise out of the circumstances of our lives without trying to push it or control it? Can we let this wisdom arise? Can we encourage each other? To me, this is the respect part of kindness. respecting the Buddhas in each of us and trusting that this is a process that is so big and vast, it's not in our control.

[27:34]

And so what I wrote this morning, which I kind of liked, was if we wait until the child does it for themselves, we can stand to let this insight arise out of circumstances when everyone involved will learn more than how to tie their shoes. we will maybe learn that we're all being watched by loving eyes all the time. And then we'll see ourselves as these baby Buddhas reflected in those loving eyes. That's the gift that we can give each other. A moment on grandmotherly mind. So, Ehe Dogen says, an amazing teacher, an amazing philosopher, a very kind, kind teacher, had a couple of disciples who were his main attendants and disciples, and one of them, Tetsu Gitai, she left in charge of his center when he would travel.

[28:47]

He really trusted him to take care of everything. And I imagine when I think about this story that Ketsu probably thought he was going to receive the lineage, the ability to fulfill his teacher's teachings when his teacher was gone. And because he was kind of the prince, the prince at the center. And he was supposedly almost perfect. One of those people who it's hard to like. You know, the best tenzo, the best person, the tenzo being the head cook, which is a very important position for the monks and everyone else, you know, the most gracious person who invites guests in, the best zazen sitter, the straightest back, just, you know, meticulous about following the precepts.

[29:48]

But he had one weakness. And he didn't have, according to his teacher, he didn't have grandmotherly mind. So, just a little bit before Dogen's death, he turned to Gikai and he said, you understand all of Buddhism, but you cannot go beyond your abilities and your intelligence. You must have Robaishin, grandmotherly mind. the mind of great compassion. This compassion must help all of humanity. You should not only think of yourself. So, what a shock. Here's someone incredibly wise, lots of study, lots of practice. But that heart, that grandlily heart, had not arisen sufficiently in him for his teacher to...

[30:50]

feel like his teaching could be entrusted to this being carried on. So the teaching, in fact, was entrusted to the other student. And Tetsukikai waited and then later received that transmission from the student that Dogen had. I believe that's true. Is that true? Yes, from the student that Dogen had given his lineage to. What a teaching. powerful teaching, so it comes up all the time. And when you become the head cook, and we all, almost all of us get a chance to do that wonderful job while we live here, you get three little, at Gringotts it was three little wooden disks. I don't know what it is in this kitchen. What is it in this kitchen? Where is it? They don't have the separate ones. It says, granularly lined, kind mind, and joyful mind.

[31:51]

Those are the three minds of the Tenzo. Joyful mind and, excuse me, grandnotally mind and kind mind are the same. And then there's big mind. Big mind, grandnotally mind, joyful mind. Those are the minds of the cook, Tenzo. That's what you eat. That's the food you eat, those minds. So, I'm going to read you just a little bit about the heart, just a short paragraph about what Len Hickson says about the Heart Sutra, which I brought up as Prajnaparamita, the mother of the Buddhas. Just, I want you to hear it. We won't have time to really talk about it. And then I'm going to end with a story and a poem. So this is from the introduction to the Heart Sutra, the mother of the Buddhas. Actually, it's two paragraphs, but they're short. The Bodhisattva will always maintain a motherly mind consecrated to the constant protection, education, and maturing of conscious beings, inviting and guiding them along the path of all embracing love.

[33:03]

This mind never succumbs to fear, anxiety, or depression, and is never overwhelmed by the strange adventures of awareness in the three realms of relativity. mundane form, sublime form, and formlessness. To sustain this wonderful courage and compassion, the Bodhisattva drinks the mother's milk of transcendent insight from the Prajnaparamita Sutra. For Prajnaparamita is mother, creator, native ground, and tender wet nurse in omniscience for every past, present, and future Buddha. So... just a reminder that that's sitting there waiting for you to drink from, the Heart Sutra. And so I've been talking about compassionate mind and patience and respect. Some of the other qualities of this mind, of this motherly, grandmotherly, compassionate mind that grows Buddhist,

[34:09]

are listed in this wonderful book, another wonderful book I recommend, called The Power of Kindness by Piero Ferrucci. And he talks about honesty, warmth, forgiveness, trust, empathy, patience and respect, which are both elements of letting the child tie its own shoes, flexibility, mindfulness, humility, and then loyalty, gratitude, service, and joy. Just drink those in for a minute. That's a lot, but it's a beautiful jewel that's created by all those facets. Beautiful jewel. So here's a story that I think includes almost all of those qualities. This is I'm going to thank Reverend Linda Galleon for this story, and she told it on a Wednesday night talk, but it just, it hit me as a kind of kindness that maybe we don't always think of as kindness.

[35:21]

Once, there was a wonderful young woman who was an artist taking a class in painting, and there was a fairly large class of people, this was at university, and they had a model, live model there, and they were doing portraits, And they've been working on them for quite a while. I don't know if this is true, but it might have even been sort of the end of the semester and, you know, a very important piece that was going to be judged and allowed to give them the kind of grade they wanted. And so in this classroom, there was a teacher. And the teacher often would walk around with a brush and make little additions or adjustments to someone's work. In the middle of the room was one of the students who had created a portrait and was working really, really, you know, almost, you know, just sweating almost, really concentrating on this portrait.

[36:25]

And when the teacher walked around and looked at it, the portrait, he was still working, the student was still working on the top part of the portrait, on the face, trying to work the face, and he was really, he looked quite worried and stressed. And if you looked down the painting a little bit, there were these hands that he had painted. And the hands, and I'm just imagining they were in maybe something like this. What do you think? Something like this. They were perfect. They were so beautiful, and it's really hard to paint perfect hands. And the teacher looked at it, and the student knew that those hands had been painted perfectly and was trying desperately to... paint the top part of the portrait to be as perfect as these hands and was struggling, really struggling. So the teacher took the brush, dipped it in some red ink, walked over to the painting and put a giant X through the hands.

[37:27]

The student went screaming from the room, running, screaming. Ah! Ah! And came back a week later, about a week later, ready to start over again. So there was a teacher who taught this student in a kind of a scary way. And the student was just about ready to receive it. The teacher knows. That's the teacher's responsibility to know what the student is able to receive. And the student received it and came back. That's a kind of motherly kindness that grows baby Buddhas. I'm going to read one poem. It isn't about growing baby Buddhas.

[38:33]

I was looking for one and I came across this one and because of the day it is right now and where you may be going outside to the celebration, I wanted to offer this to you. It's called The Summer Day by Mary Oliver. Some of you may have heard this. Who made the world? Who made the swan and the black bear, and I would say, and the baby Buddhas? Who made the grasshopper? A grasshopper, I mean, the one that's flown herself out of the grass, the one who's eating sugar out of my hand, who's moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down, who's gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pair of forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

[39:36]

I do know how to pay attention. how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I've been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Go enjoy the birth of Buddha.

[40:14]

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