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. It's nice to be here. I don't get over here very often. And what a great old building. It's a really nice building. And I could imagine, I was just quiet there and getting ready for the talk, and I could imagine, this used to be, this was in the days when, it was built in the days when people felt like if young women were gonna come to a city, they couldn't just come and find somewhere to live. There should be a special house for them and they should be taken care of, a special house and all live together. That's what this house was for.

[01:00]

And so I could imagine whenever it was in the 1920s, young men walking up and down the hallways, probably very excited, moving to San Francisco, getting jobs. Well, it's funny how different people are from each other. are completely different from women. It's amazing, they can talk to each other even. Old people are completely different from young people. There's tall people, short people, people interested in Zen, people who are totally uninterested in Zen, all kinds of races, cultures, preferences, sexualities, economic profiles. What a mixture we are.

[02:04]

And at the same time, there is something very much the same about all of us. In a way, we're all exactly the same. We're born, we die, we have parents. We love somebody or hope to love somebody. Somebody loves us, or we hope that somebody will. And everybody has something that matters to them in just the same way. Even if different things matter to different people, the way in which things matter, matter in just the same way. So it is astounding when you think about it, how much we are exactly alike and how little we notice this when we meet each other. our tendency is to be wary to wonder about the differences to wonder whether we will be acceptable or they will be acceptable the other person will be acceptable to us that's what we notice mostly we don't notice the similarities one of the things I I do is I work with conflict resolution professionals people who

[03:25]

put themselves in the middle of conflict and try to resolve conflict. And I've learned a lot from working with this group. I learned that there's so much conflict all over the place. In fact, working with them for a number of years, I figured out a new one-word definition of conflict. Relationship. Because it seemed like... Every relationship has conflict. Even if the conflict is not so severe, it's always there. And then I thought, well, but you don't even need two people to have a conflict. You're going to have a conflict all by yourself. It could just be the condition of being a person is to be either in conflict or just having been in conflict or going to be in conflict any time. soon. So that's why I'm enthusiastic about the new book that I just published.

[04:37]

And that's why I'm really happy to be running around here and there talking about it, even though it means a lot of airplanes and airports. I'm having a good time, because I'm really enthusiastic about compassion. and love. This is something worth being enthusiastic about and worth taking some trouble about. If you ask people anywhere in the world, you know, what's the most important thing in their lives? What really matters to them? One way or the other, the answer is always love. You know, my family, whatever it is. It's always love. That's the answer to what's in the end the most important thing. And love depends on compassion. Because if you really want to love somebody, you have to be willing to take in their suffering, to really be able to feel it and care about it and want to help.

[05:42]

If you can't do that, then in the end, it's really impossible to love. Because if you're too scared... to love somebody for fear that there'll be a problem and that you'll have to run away if there's a problem. How can you love anybody? You'll be scared. And I think a lot of us are struggling with just that. And if you're too scared to love somebody, then it's really hard to have a happy life, isn't it? You end up feeling lonely and alienated even from yourself. Maybe you can't even have compassion for your own suffering. So even if you don't feel comfortable with compassion, and you're not sure that you're able to go there, usually you think compassion is a good idea. In fact, across all political spectrums, it's very unusual to find somebody who will argue against compassion. No, I don't like compassion.

[06:46]

Compassion is a bad idea. Nobody should be compassionate. I'm against this on principle. Very seldom. I'm sure there's a few people somewhere. But even those people are probably just saying that to be provocative. Because mostly everybody thinks compassion is a good idea, whether or not they feel it. And I actually am pretty sure that we are collectively, as a species, beginning to notice how much we all need to be compassionate. we are beginning to notice that we are made for compassion. That's sort of essential to who we are as human beings, that compassion is our destiny. So good, I'm hoping that my book here will add another little drop in an already full bucket in which many drops are being dropped until it overflows with compassion.

[07:51]

The text is based on a famous Indo-Tibetan text that many of you might have heard about. It's used all the time in Tibetan Buddhism. And there have already been lots of translations of the text and commentaries on it in English. Pema Chodron, I think, has done many books about it. Chogyam Trungpa, years ago, did one. So I knew about the text and I decided that I wanted to bring it to our Zen groups because I think most people don't appreciate the fact that Zen practice is 100% about compassion. If you go to a Zen center, you could miss that point. But actually... Zen is 100% about compassion.

[08:51]

But in Zen, the emphasis is so much on the means of expressing and generating compassion on zazen that the compassion part is almost entirely implicit. It's completely there, but it's never talked about directly. And That makes sense because when Zen was born in China, most Chinese monastics who undertook Zen had already had a thorough-going grounding in Buddhist teachings. And so they had already studied and knew about the compassion teachings. And so they were going to the Zen places to learn how to turn the heart around, to express the compassion. They didn't need to hear about the compassion. But we, in the West, who don't have that grounding, we need to hear about it. So I thought it would be really important in our Zen groups to make what is ubiquitous and implicit explicit.

[09:56]

So that's why I took up these Tibetan texts and began talking about them in our different groups and giving classes and workshops and using it as a subject for sessions. And people really enjoyed these teachings so much that they recorded them and made transcriptions of them in Spanish and English because most of the transcriptions were made in our groups in Mexico and so you know all of a sudden I get in the middle of this big sheaf of transcriptions and I was so moved by all the work that people had done to it's a lot of work you know to transcribe something so I thought well I have to do something with all this material so I I began to take it and make it into a book, which I didn't think anybody would publish because so many books already exist. But to my surprise, somebody did want to publish it. And as I was working on it, I realized, well, this was originally for Zen students, but also I wanted it to be for anyone who cares about compassion.

[11:10]

So I think the book does read like that. like a book for anyone who is willing to do the work of opening the heart to compassion. It's not a complicated book or complicated original text. It's very simple, really. It's just that it takes some time and some commitment, some persistence. Dogen's great word is gyo-ji, continuous practice. Dedication. Take some dedication. One has to be willing to keep on going with the practice, come what may. So much of what we do is focused on immediate results. Why would I want to continue with something tomorrow if I didn't get results yesterday? But paradoxically, the more you focus on results, the less good results you get.

[12:14]

So one has to have a spirit of dedication to persist and not focus so much on, did I get a result? The results come in their own way. So the original text is based on two ideas that might be counterintuitive to many of us. The first idea is that the way to be happy, personally happy, even selfishly happy, is to widen and brighten your world to love and really care about others. This seems like, what? That's the opposite of being personally happy. But actually it's true. Because when your heart is open to compassion, you will brighten toward others, and others are going to brighten toward you. And then all of a sudden, you find yourself living in a world of sympathetic, sweet people, rather than a world in which mistrust and wariness is the norm.

[13:20]

This is a pretty different world. Even if you have lots of money and fame and lots of other personal satisfactions, if you find yourself living in a world basically of mistrust and conflict, then you're not a happy camper. You have problems. So love, which needs compassion to be loved, is the key to happiness. You might not realize that. And the second point that might be counterintuitive is that this loving and caring for others can actually be learned. It's not just either we have a good family background or the predisposition to it or we don't. No, it actually can be learned. If we have love in our hearts, it can be stronger and broader and bigger. If we don't, it can appear. The learning is not the kind of learning we think of, cognitive learning.

[14:22]

It's experiential, emotional learning. It's more in the body and in the heart than in the mind. But it is learning. It is education. In Zen practice, I think we have the best way of doing this. And it's so simple. And as I say, it's not explicit. But the best way is just to sit in the present moment of what it actually feels like to be a living being. That's the ground. That's the basis of love. When you sit there, you realize that this feeling of being alive is the same feeling of being alive that I share with every other person who ever lived and was living now. So there's a magic, a healing power in just sitting, if you pay attention to it. If you sit long enough, sooner or later, you will find yourself in accord with everything and everyone.

[15:30]

But like I say, it's good that we make this more explicit. that we explicitly and intentionally work to cultivate a mind of compassion. Suzuki Roshi's wonderful metaphor was that zazen is like the soil, the ground. You work the ground. If you make the ground really good, you till it, you turn it, you put compost in it, then whatever seed you plant will flourish right away. So maybe that's a good way of looking at it. So in this original text, it's actually called, literally translated as seven points of mind training. And there are 59 sort of sub points, slogans they often call them, organized under those seven main points. So the seven points in my own version, I've changed. sometimes the wording a little bit to make it more easy to understand.

[16:36]

But the seven points are, first, resolve to begin. Because you need to examine your motivation. You actually have to go a little bit deep and examine your motivation and come up with strong motivation. Otherwise, if you just willy-nilly jump into it, pretty soon you're doubtful. So you start with your motivation. Resolve to begin. The second point is train in empathy and compassion. And there are two parts to this, absolute compassion and relative compassion. And we'll talk about this maybe later. The third point, transform bad circumstances into the path. Because if you go along just fine until something difficult happens and then you say, whoops, I guess I can't do my spiritual practice anymore because I'm having a hard time, which many people say, you know. Sorry, I haven't been around, but I've been having a hard time. That's when you should... That's when this whole thing matters. But nobody thinks that.

[17:37]

So you have to learn how to transform these difficulties into path rather than distractions from path. The fourth point, make practice your whole life. Most people think of spiritual practice as a really good thing to do. Going to the gym, eating good food, doing spiritual practice, studying Spanish. And then they find they don't have enough time. And it's true. Spiritual practice is another item on your list of things that you should be doing. Forget it. You actually don't have enough time. No. Spiritual practice is not a thing on your list. It's the way you do everything on the list. It's your whole life. And you have to learn how to make it your whole life. That's the fourth point. The fifth point is assess and extend. You need some tools to figure out how you're doing. And when you go off, how did you go off and how do you get back on track? Assess and extend.

[18:39]

The sixth point, the discipline of relationship. Because it turns out that we live with one another and that all of our relationships are spiritual practice 100% of the time. How do we make that to be so in our lives? And the seventh point, the last point, is sort of, in my view, a grab bag of various kinds of slogans that I collate under the category of living with ease in a crazy world. Because the world is pretty crazy, as we all know. We don't have to even talk about it. We all know this. But just because the world is crazy doesn't mean that we have to be crazy. There can be a way of living with ease and even delight in a crazy world. And that's what this last bunch of slogans is about. So I'll read a little bit from the book, but just a couple of other points.

[19:40]

First, working with slogans. So these slogans are little pithy sayings, right? You could write them down. Some people have them on cards, three by five. Remember when they had those cards and file cabinets? Recipes. Recipes, yeah. Now, I don't know, if you go to the stationery store, can you even buy 3x5 cards? Do they still exist? Yeah. Anyway, people put them on cards or they put them on their computer screens. So one thing you can do is just sit, breathe, repeat the slogan to yourself over and over again. Be with it. Memorize it. Let it be something that pops up in your mind all of a sudden. Just a watchword in your own mind that becomes your own thought. When you think about it, we all already have a whole bunch of things that pop into our minds, unbidden, right? Only we didn't decide that we wanted those things there.

[20:44]

And when you think about it, many of those things might not be all that advantageous to our living. So wouldn't it be better to say, well, here's some things I would like to pop into my mind, and these actually are for a better purpose. And maybe they could replace some of those other things. that pop into your mind. So slogans work like that. They pop up, you reflect on them, you use them as directional pointers for the way you want to go and the way you want to choose in living. Now, there's a difference between slogans and affirmations. These slogans are not affirmations. This is a really, really, really important point. The slogans are not saying, you're supposed to feel this way, you're supposed to think this way. And then what happens is when you hear that, you pretend that you feel that way and think that way. And you censor out all the stuff that isn't that. And that's not at all the way the slogans are intended.

[21:44]

These slogans are invitations to aim yourself in a particular direction. And aiming yourself in a particular direction, it becomes very, very important to be honest with what actually is going on. not to pretend that you're doing something you're not. Very important. Self-honesty is essential to the method of working with these slogans. So if you look at a slogan and you think it's stupid and you don't agree with it, then don't do it. Let it alone and go to another slogan. So those are some quick points about how slogans work and how to work with them. So I'll read you a few pages. This is from the first part of empathy and compassion. Generating empathy and compassion. Let's begin with considering what empathy and compassion actually mean.

[22:49]

In English, there are at least three words that describe the capacity to feel the feelings of others. Empathy is the capacity to feel others' feelings, which requires that one not be so self-absorbed that we're tone deaf to others' feelings. Most of us, unfortunately, and without realizing this, are actually living Bette Midler's joke. You know this joke? Okay, enough about me. Let's see what you think about me. It's ridiculous when you hear it, but actually it's very common because what do we think about how others are feeling? How do they feel about us? This is the real point. Do they like us? Did we offend them? Are they impressed with us? This is mostly how we consider the feelings of others.

[23:54]

And this is not really empathy, right? Actual empathy requires that you have the capacity to put aside your own concerns entirely long enough to really notice what somebody else is going through without any reference to what that has to do with you. So that's empathy. It takes a little work. But you can be empathetic but not necessarily care. Right? You can be empathetic and think... what a stupid bunch of feelings that person is having. In fact, you can be quite good at sensing what others are feeling for the purpose of controlling or manipulating them. Sociopaths, con artists are probably geniuses at feeling the feelings of others. Sympathy is empathy plus caring.

[24:56]

We actually want the other person to be happy and well. We really don't want the other person to be upset or unwell. We actually care. And compassion is sympathy for others, specifically in the case of suffering, when others are suffering. So compassion has to do with the suffering of others. So it's actually uncomfortable, compassion, which is why a lot of us, I think, shy away from it. When we're compassionate, we're actually willing to take in and feel for ourselves the suffering of others and to care and do something about it when we can. So the training suggested in this second point of mind training is the cultivation of all three of these capacities, empathy, sympathy, and compassion. The technical term for this training in Buddhism

[25:58]

is the development of bodhicitta. The word bodhicitta literally means the impulse or desire for spiritual awakening. Well, that doesn't sound much like compassion, does it? Yet, implicit in the Mahayana Buddhist understanding of spiritual awakening is the thought that spiritual awakening actually means awakening to a heartfelt concern for others. That's what spiritual awakening is. Since any selfish effort, even with a goal of wisdom or enlightenment for oneself, could never lead to real awakening. It would always lead to more and more narrowness. Spiritual awakening is exactly dropping the sense of one's narrow separateness. spiritual awakening is essentially and profoundly altruistic.

[27:02]

So cultivating bodhicitta means cultivating true and heartfelt concern for others in a way that is not clingy or arrogant, but is based on the accurate wisdom that none of us is alone. That we all need each other to be who we are. That we are... so closely related to one another that we might as well be siblings parents and children together in our culture it's very commonplace that intelligence and caring seem quite different capacities when we think of our image of a highly highly intelligent person we think of such a person as being a little bit abstract or removed, maybe slightly arrogant, haughty. When we think of a deeply feeling person, we think of someone who's very messy and emotional and maybe doesn't think straight.

[28:06]

This is very deep in our culture. Way back in the Greek philosophy, they had this idea that there's a big difference between the feelings and the intellect. But in Buddhist thought, true intelligence and real caring always go together. They're compared to two wings of a bird. The bird can't fly and soar without perfect balance between these two wings. Buddhism assumes that true intelligence and true altruism always merge. To be sure, Western culture and religion also value empathy, sympathy and compassion. Everybody does. But we usually don't link these feelings to intelligence, and we have no concept that we could train in them. We take it for granted that we will be capable of caring or not, depending on our personal character and our upbringing. And if we're not capable of it now, well, maybe later, somehow, something will happen to us to turn us around.

[29:14]

Maybe somebody will influence us. Somehow it'll happen. We don't know how. And this is true. It could happen. But Buddhism adds to this possibility the sense that the impulse to altruism, if absent, can be encouraged to appear, and if present, can be extended and strengthened with training. So the essence of bodhicitta, then, is love and concern for others. And when we kind of really... think about our lives and what's really important to us, we realize, yes, that's important to me and I really want to do something to develop that more in me. Because we realize, you know, life is really pretty rough. And if we don't live with more intention, as we go along, you know, it gets harder. And we realize that we have to practice with others because opening up means opening up to others, to the world.

[30:19]

to our radical connectedness. So bodhicitta is the feeling of love based on the deep recognition that what we call self and what we call others are designations, concepts, habits of mind, and not concrete realities of the world. This is a really important point, because it means that real altruism is not, as we all automatically think, self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. A guilt-driven sense that we should be good, we should be nice, we should be kind. No. It's the profound recognition that self and other are not fundamentally different, only apparently different.

[31:22]

So because of this, the range of activity and feeling of bodhicitta is much wider, much more expansive than we would expect. And a whole world of altruism and its effects open up before us. We now see that the only way, the only way that we could ever love ourselves is is to love others. And that it's impossible to actually love others unless we really love ourselves as we are. And this makes the whole thing quite different. We realize that the difference between self-love and loving others is actually quite small once we really understand others and ourselves. And when we take this truth into our hearts, it is truly and profoundly life-changing. And once we actually open up to it, it becomes impossible to go back.

[32:30]

It becomes impossible to fool ourselves anymore with selfishness and resentment. To be sure, we probably still have plenty of selfish and resentful feelings. But now, we will know them for what they are. And they will be far less compelling. Because we will have seen for ourselves just how stupid and childish and blind these feelings are. And that wouldn't be so bad if they weren't also really painful. And we get to see more clearly just how painful these feelings are. Self-centeredness and all the whole complex of emotions that flow from self-centeredness, you know, envy, anger, greed, clinging, grasping, and so on and so on.

[33:31]

A whole host of, you know, most of the things we feel, right, that are painful, come from self-centeredness. And we realize now how painful they are. And we no longer feel like we want to go on feeling that pain when we realize how stupid it is. all our reasons and justifications all of a sudden sound flimsy. So it becomes almost impossible to be willfully, intentionally aggressive, almost impossible to be willfully, intentionally disrespectful of others because we can simply see with our eyes just like we can see the sky above and the sun when it sets on the horizon, that all of life is actually one sky warmed by one sun. And to separate ourselves from others is simply not in accord with what we see.

[34:37]

It's an old, unsuccessful, shaky habit. So we can't anymore be resentful, hateful, or self-centered We can't anymore just simply favor ourselves over others, even though, as I say, because we have a powerful old habit, we will still have these things arising in us. We know better now. We understand that love is not an emotional option that we may be lucky enough to experience once in a while. Love is a fact of life, maybe the fact of life. A fact we know now that we desperately need to conform to in our living for our own good and our own happiness. So this is a much deeper change of heart than the conventional idea that we should be nice, we should be good, we should be kind. Although we probably will be nice and good and kind.

[35:41]

But somehow it runs deeper than that. It's more raw. It's more visceral. It's a more intimate. and honest response to conditions. So a couple more minutes. Everybody all right? You're not ready to go to the bathroom or have a cup of tea yet? OK, a few more minutes. So then there's a distinction made in the text, and there's two separate sections for Absolute bodhicitta and relative bodhicitta. So let me read you just a few more pages which deal with that distinction. Absolute bodhicitta is absolute love. It's a love that's bigger than our emotions, bigger than any object, so big that, as they say, there's no lover and there's no beloved because the two become one.

[36:46]

with absolute love's force. Love that amounts to a total vision of life itself as love. Within such love, there cannot be loss. Because this love is so big, it includes everything, even absence. So loss is actually impossible. Absolute bodhicitta is the empty, perfect, expansive, joyful, spacious nature of existence itself. Nor is it something that we have to add to existence. It's already been there in life, as life. It's always been the nature of how things are. Love has been there all along, but we've been so convinced by our smallness that we fail to look around and notice it. Maybe we could say that absolute bodhicitta is like God. They say in theistic traditions, God is always present everywhere, even in absence.

[37:57]

So our awakening to absolute bodhicitta is our coming to know that there is nothing but God. There never was anything but God. There never will be anything but God. and that everything is always held and always has been held, and we are always loved and we have always been loved, and so has everything and everyone else always been loved. That's absolute bodhicitta. So in contrast to this exalted view, relative bodhicitta means we have to do a little bit of work and maybe experience some suffering ourselves. Relative bodhicitta is when I actually roll up my sleeves and get on with the business of actually loving somebody. Relative bodhicitta is when I try to do something to help somehow, to offer encouragement, support, food, clothing, better laws, improved political systems, and on and on and on.

[39:00]

With relative bodhicitta, we make efforts that we are successful at or unsuccessful at. We suffer losses. and we cry over those losses, our hearts are broken, and we grieve, or we take delight in our own delight and the delight of others. With relative bodhicitta, we try to defend our friends and help those in need. There is no end, literally, to the work and effort demanded by relative bodhicitta. Sometimes it makes us take on very big projects, that cause us to make heroic efforts for years and years and years, sometimes even whole lifetimes. But it doesn't matter. Relative bodhicitta is a project without an end. So that when we're successful, that one little part of it, we are happy for a minute, but then we say, tomorrow we start again.

[40:06]

with the business of helping others, righting wrongs, healing the sick, mending broken hearts. It will never end. Maybe I've just worn you out already, just thinking about this. But don't worry. Because relative bodhicitta is the antidote to fatigue. Because it's built... on a foundation of absolute bodhicitta. The two must go together. If relative bodhicitta is an endless task, absolute bodhicitta is the endless peace and the endless energy that underlies the endless task. So, it's okay. As you know, and as we will chant in just a couple minutes, beings are numberless, I vow to save them. This is an endless relative bodhicitta task.

[41:14]

It always has amused me that people stumble into the Zen Center the first time on the Saturday. They listen to the lecture, then somebody gives them a little paper, and they find themselves saying, beings are numberless, I vow to save them all. Little did they know. They were walking in, and they were going to be taking a vow. Actually, you're actually taking a vow to save all sentient beings. What a sneaky thing. And I often wonder, like, what do people think, you know, when they chant this? What are they thinking? Maybe you don't notice, you know, what it actually is you're saying there. Maybe you think, as I think I probably did when I first did it, oh, this is just another one of these absurd, zen, paradoxical, wacky things. Nothing to worry about here. But no, it's a serious... It's actually a serious vow and a serious commitment.

[42:18]

And it makes perfect sense when you think about this teaching of absolute and relative bodhicitta. Endless need perfectly matched by endless love and endless caring. And this is not something that we laboriously have to produce, you know... Every day we check off, well, I saved six sentient beings today. Think about it. If you have an infinite number of sentient beings to go, you never get anywhere, right? No, so it's not a laborious, onerous task. You realize this is already how the world is going. It's already how the world works. And all we have to do is surrender ourselves to it. So relative bodhicitta, we are trying hard to help in a practical and heartfelt way. Absolute bodhicitta. We don't really need to worry about it because even if our helping does not do any good and very often helping doesn't do good, it's okay because of the big love that's everywhere and that is inevitably healing anyway.

[43:34]

No matter what we do, So we can drop the desperate idea that everything is up to us. Actually, everything is up to us. But it's the big us, not the little us. And the big us is perfectly capable of taking care of it all because it's fundamentally already taken care of. And because of this, we can love, and we can do our absolute best to help, and we can work really, really hard, but we don't have to be burned up with frustration and the usual kind of concern. So absolute and relative bodhicitta really do depend on each other like two sides of a coin. Without absolute bodhicitta, relative bodhicitta will become forced, will become angry,

[44:38]

We'll become burned out with all of our caring and all of our helping. We'll even get mad at the people we're trying to help. Like, what's the matter with you? How come you're not improving? Don't you see all I've done for you? That happens, right? So helping like that gets really exhausting. So we need absolute bodhicitta to sustain us. But without relative bodhicitta, absolute bodhicitta becomes... a kind of grand abstraction, a big, lofty, religious idea with no substance to it. What good is loving all sentient beings if you never love one person? And when we do love someone, when we do support someone, we become awakened thanks to that person or those people. So actually, The people that we're helping are helping us more than we're helping them.

[45:42]

And we understand that. We don't think we're doing something for somebody else. We never think that. Because we're liberated from the dream of self-clinging. We woke up from that dream. And when we wake up from that dream, we can really be happy and easygoing, even in a tough world. So that's my little... talk. And I should say that actually I have two books that just came out. The other one is a collection of poems called The Strugglers, which with any luck at all they also have in the bookstore, but you never know. But that book is actually has many long poems in it about the struggling world. So it's a poem of, it's like a cry from the heart about this world and about loss and about love.

[46:46]

So maybe in the afternoon workshop I'll read one of my favorite poems from that book. But not now. So, yeah, it is really great to be here. I have a very funny state of mind at my age. All the past is always there, you know? I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. So I'm walking down the halls of this building, and I'm thinking to myself, all the effort and energy of 50 years and more, the audacity of the young people who said, we'll buy this building. We'll get the money somehow. We'll maintain it for 50 years. We'll have practice in this room here, this living room where the girls would sit. Here's where we'll have practice. Every Saturday we'll have a talk.

[47:47]

And we'll do this for 50 years, 100 years or more. How many people put out how much effort to make that possible? It's really astounding. So thank you. All of them, some of whom are no longer with us. And thanks to you for making it live today. And please take care of yourselves and I hope I'll see some of you in the afternoon workshop or somewhere else. We're ships passing in the night, so to speak, but it's nice when we meet. Take care. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving.

[48:53]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[48:56]

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