teacher on a specific subject and right now we're studying with Ryushin Paul Haller and we've been studying the text of the Heart Sutra and if you're here for the first time or just dropping in and haven't been here for a while this is what we're currently in the middle of and what we're doing and I've been asked to be the Shuso to share the seat with Ryushin Paul Haller. And the Shuso is the head student or head monk. So tonight's talk will be in that theme. And I'm very glad to have all of you here. The thing that we all really identify with and joins us is the central tenet of Buddhism, which is If anyone in this room has not suffered, please raise your hand.

[01:05]

It is many times a prison of our own making. I remember one time, I was at our mountain monastery down south, Tassajara, and we had a bat that had gotten stuck overnight. If you've ever seen a baby bat, they're really cute. A baby anything is really cute. A baby bat is just really cute. And they have these paper-thin wings that are so delicate. And this poor bat, overnight, had gotten into this shed and had flown into some electrical tape. And so here was this bat. And you can imagine that bats want to sleep during the daytime. And here it was the morning. It's bright outside. So this is not the bat's... habitat, if you will. This is not the place the bat feels comfortable. And you can't speak to a bat. You could, but it wouldn't help.

[02:05]

So there's no language, no way of communicating to the bat. And the bat is just there with its wings stuck with electrical tape, and it can't get back into the eaves. It can't fly. It's going around in circles, flapping itself. And so we had to try to find a way to help this bat. Now, of course, now we feel a pain inside. Because how do you help a scared bat? You can't convince it that you're there to actually help. And to make matters worse, we finally got the bat and we got it secured with some really good gloves and we put it on a table and we tried to hold the wings still while we pulled the electrical tape slowly off of And it started to actually tear the wing of the bat. And now the bat doesn't trust us at all, of course. And we're heartbroken that we have done anything to this poor bat.

[03:06]

And eventually, you know, it's trying to bite us. It's trying to make sounds. It's trying to fly. It's totally out of its element. And I can remember seeing that bat there on the table. And... this thing came over me. That is my suffering. I know there's people that are trying to help me. I can't understand the language. It's beyond my capacity to really understand what is going on. I know I'm suffering. I know that something is going on that is making me really sad, sad, full of grief, anxiety, but I just can't comprehend the context. I am out of my element. And here is this bat, and the bat is out of its element. And the bat doesn't realize that people are trying to help it. And maybe something has happened in my life that makes me not trust people who maybe are trying to help me in some sort of way or have good intentions, and I can't even see it because I've had my wing torn before.

[04:18]

suffering is there a way out of this it seems so impossible to explain to this bat how we were going to get out of the bat suffering thankfully we were able to find something to put on its wing that did actually dissolve the adhesiveness and we were able to get it back up into the eaves where i'm sure it sat up there totally confused not understanding what had just happened to it that morning and really wondering if this was going to happen again but I can remember seeing that bat sitting there on the table and feeling like this is my suffering. Is there a way out of this? Is there something that can change? Is there something that can help us on some sort of process? This was the original question of Buddhism, was what is this human experience of suffering and how... can we get a little crack in the light?

[05:21]

Just a little crack, some sort of feeling that we're going in that direction. The opening lines of the Heart Sutra have a very encouraging proposition. And the proposition is that there is some sort of way that can start to address suffering. There's many different translations of the Heart Sutra. This is the document that we are studying as our central text this practice period. And it reads the very first sentence, and that's all I want to talk about. Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva. That's one thing. When deeply practicing prajna paramita, so we have Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva, practicing something called Prajnaparamita. And then they clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty.

[06:22]

And then here's the huge statement, and thus relieved all suffering. I mean, that's a pretty big statement. And thus relieved all suffering. That's the document that we're studying. And it is the most read and most quoted document around the world in Buddhist studies. And the very first sentence, I feel is about that bat, about the confusion that comes up when we are in the midst of something. People might be trying to help us. They might not be trying to help us. We might think we're seeing, and there's all sorts of confusion going on, like a funhouse mirror. It's based on something, but we don't really see what's going on. Now I find it very encouraging that the very beginning of this document is Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva. It's the Bodhisattva of compassion. It's the context for what we're talking about.

[07:25]

If we're going to talk about suffering, your suffering, my suffering, let's talk about it in the context of compassion. Let's start off with something that can actually hold the awareness of of this suffering. You know what it's like when you're suffering by a prison of your own making and you get tight, you get judgmental, you have an idea about how you should be and you aren't and the distance between those two people that you see is another level of suffering because I should be here and I'm here. Bodhisattva, the one who sees, Avalokiteshvara, the compassionate one, the one who hears the cries of the world. You know what it's like when you're around someone who's compassionate, naturally compassionate for you, not forced nice, not someone who feels they should be nice to you.

[08:28]

You know what it's like. There's a spaciousness. You can be yourself. And so that's the context with reading this document, is with compassion. Because this practice is an acceptance practice. Not an approval practice, an acceptance practice. And how we learn to hold ourselves in the midst of suffering, in the midst of our own suffering, in the midst of things that we have going on in our world, has so much to do with how things are going to go in the future with that suffering. Now, if you took a nine-month-old, to the grocery store. Let's say you need to go to Whole Foods to get some peas. So you go to Whole Foods to get some frozen peas. And you've got a nine-month-old. And you bring that nine-month-old there and you have it in the cart. And as you start to get near the frozen food section, the fans are whirling.

[09:30]

It's getting a little bit colder. And the nine-month-old gets a little bit scared. And you get in there and you start getting frozen peas and you start putting them into your cart. And the nine-month-old is starting to cry. They don't know what's going on. They're scared. It's cold. It's noisy in here. And you stop. Now, what are you going to do? are you going to explain to the baby about social etiquette and whole foods and how we don't really cry in here and there's no reason and the fans and you have to have that so the peas stay cold and so it hydrates and there's no frost and you aren't going to go into judgmental discursive mind with the baby that's not going to help anything alleviate anything there needs to be an acceptance of what's happening right now you just hold the baby you just hold the baby you aren't approving saying yay baby you're crying but you hold the baby. At the very beginning of addressing a document on suffering, we talk about compassion, the one that hears the cries of the world.

[10:40]

Until I can learn to hold myself like that, not with approval saying, yay, Michael, you did that thing again that you did ever since you were 12, and you learned it because of your family and because of your grandfather and because of... No, it's not approval. But you know, so many of the things are just inherited from the universe and our great-grandparents and our neurobiology, and we didn't have a project plan to be this way. And there it is. It came forth. It arose. What am I going to do with it? The context of holding it is the context of holding that baby in the grocery store, if you will, with compassion, with understanding. with gentleness, with curiosity, and not with judgment or disapproval. This is the container. It's Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva. When practicing Prajnaparamita, when practicing the perfection of wisdom, as Thich Nhat Hanh translates, he likes the word understanding,

[11:51]

perfection of understanding he says understanding is more like water it's like a flowing stream it's constantly moving he feels that it conjures up a little bit of a fixed state with knowledge or wisdom but understanding flowing into all the places but being adaptable I haven't arrived yet avalokiteshvara bodhisattva when practicing deeply Prajnaparamita, the perfection of wisdom, the perfection of understanding. There's many ways in our Buddhist practice and our practice here in the temple that we practice learning, developing, cultivating, as we call it, Prajnaparamita, our understanding. One of the ways is by observation and and being with.

[12:53]

People typically find a teacher, and they're with that teacher. And you notice how they do things. People talk about Suzuki Roshi, how he did things. I believe it was, well, it might not have been Steve Stuckey, but someone was saying, I just looked at his feet, Suzuki Roshi's feet, how he took care of them, and I knew I could learn the Dharma from that. You're with a teacher, you're with someone. I think of many of you might remember Sassy who used to live here. And she talked about learning from cowboys. She grew up in Montana. And she said all day long cowboys would not say much. But you learned how to build fences by being with the cowboys. And you would go out and you would just spend all day with the cowboys. And you would build fences. And there weren't a lot of questions. maybe two or three sentences in the course of the day, how they did things, the manner that they did things, this knowledge that comes from being with, being with the teacher and noticing.

[14:07]

There's a poem I'd like to read called Shoveling Snow with the Buddha. It's a time-honored tradition of having teachers and just being with teachers and and cultivating our understanding, paying attention and being mindful of what's going on. This is Billy Collins shoveling snow with the Buddha. In the usual iconography of the temple or the walk, you would never see him doing such a thing, tossing the dry snow over a mountain of his bare round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot, a model of concentration. Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word for what he does or does not do. Even the season is wrong for him. In all of his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid? Is it not implied by his serene expression, that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe? But here we are, working our way down the driveway, one shovel full at a time.

[15:13]

We toss the light powder into the clear air. We feel the cold mist on our faces, and with every heave we disappear and become lost to each other in these sudden clouds of our own making, these fountain bursts of snow. This is so much better than a sermon in church, I say out loud, but the Buddha keeps on shoveling. This is the true religion, the religion of snow. And sunlight and winter geese barking in the sky, I say... But he is too busy to hear me. He has thrown himself into shoveling snow as if it were the purpose of existence, as if it were the sign of a perfect life. As if this sign of a perfect life were a clear driveway, you could back a car down easily and drive off into the vanities of the world with a broken heater fan and a song on the radio. All morning long we work side by side. me with my commentary and he inside his generous pocket of silence, until the hour is nearly noon and the snow is piled high all around us.

[16:18]

Then I hear him speak. After this, he asks, can we go inside and play cards? Certainly, I reply, and I will heat some milk and bring some cups of hot chocolate to the table while you shuffle the deck and our boots stand dripping by the door. Ah, says the Buddha, lifting his eyes and leaning for a moment on his shovel before he drives the thin blade again back into the deep snow, glittering in all its whiteness. Just being with a teacher, being with the Sangha, being with those who are practicing, looking deeply, Being with those and paying attention. Around here we have a surplus of teachers. We have a surplus of people to learn from. We have a sangha. Many people don't have a sangha. There's many beautiful people in this sangha. And each person has a different lesson that they learn from a different person.

[17:24]

And somebody you might overlook, somebody else might feel like that as their teacher. Being with. The other way Paul has also been talking about a lot in our classes, and that is the formal study, the study that we have in Zazen, or the formal scaffolding and ways of looking at moments as they arise, these energized moments as they arise, the things that cause our suffering. Any of us could think over the last week of an energized moment, a moment that we felt inside very clearly, Something happened. And in our class, we had a few different ways we could work with this. The five skandhas, as they are called, the five aggregates, are what Avalokiteshvara sought through.

[18:27]

Seeing through these five heaps, these five elements that comprise a human being, our body, our feelings, our perceptions, our mental formations, all making up our consciousness. Seeing through these things, and how do we do that? Aligning the body, breath, and mind with subtleness, being upright. Something happens. Can we align our body and take it in? And can we simply be with that experience of the physical sensation? That's the trickiest part. Because instantly I want to go somewhere else with that feeling. You might feel it in your triceps, in your stomach. You might feel it in your chest, in your biceps. When you're three and there is something scary going on,

[19:36]

under the bed, and it's dark. One of the best things you can do is get out of the bed, turn on the light, get your flashlight, and look underneath your bed and see that there's no monsters. But that is so hard some days. I feel it in my chest. Something happens. Someone did something. I want to not feel this way. I want to escape. There's all sorts of ways to escape. We're invited to stay with our body and that physical sensation. And then let the body breathe us. Notice your breath the next time you have an energized experience. Can I just follow my breath? Usually when I start noticing my breath, I want to breathe deeply. I usually become aware of the fact that I'm not breathing deeply, and then I take in a really deep breath. And then I breathe out a really deep breath. I've done this so often in my life that actually when I start to breathe deeply, it makes me anxious.

[20:41]

Because it's associated with me trying to actually calm myself down. What is it like to just sit there and notice your breath? I mean, you can surf Wikipedia for 90 minutes and breathe and stay alive the entire time. But as soon as you start to then notice your breath and you want to breathe deeply, oh man, I'm breathing so shallowly. How's my brain getting any oxygen? I need to like get some air in here. Just see if you can sit and notice your breath without controlling it. Comes in, it comes back out. It comes in, it comes back out. Let it be shallow. And get used to noticing the body as it reacts to these things, as it happens. Because we're just there on the table like a bat. And we're trying to find our way out. And if I don't get to know this one, the very first of the skandhas is body.

[21:46]

The very first of the things that Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva saw through was the impermanence. Can I get to know this body and how it manifests? Especially in the midst of the flurry. We all know what the flurry is. The flurry of being a little bit disturbed, a little bit energized. And then the mind. Oh, the mind will want to go all sorts of places. Something happened, and that person said that thing, And then I'm sitting there, and then boom, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, their face just pops up. Like a cold brick on a warm afternoon, it just landed right on your head. Where did that come from? Someone's face. And then that face maybe is someone that said something ten years ago, two weeks ago, this afternoon. And I want to tell a story about them. Or I want to push them away.

[22:48]

But if it sits there and I feel jealous, I feel five, I don't feel beautiful, strong, and brave, then I want to push that away. I want that to go somewhere else. Or I want to tell a story about it. Can I sit there with don't know mind and not add a story? That person was that way. I know they're trying to do that thing, and they're that way because of their mother, and they're just doing this other thing, and try to add the story to this thing. Can I just, hmm, yep. Like that curious artist just looking at the thing unfolding on the canvas, not knowing where the painting is going to end up. Just noticing, hmm. Yeah, that's what's going on. Not even putting it into a language. I don't need to explain it to myself. When you see a beautiful moon, you don't need to explain it to yourself. I don't sit out there and go, Michael, that is a beautiful moon. No, it's just you sitting there.

[23:51]

It's just pure experience. Can I allow my mind to be there with pure experience and to not direct it into all the stories or suppress all the things I don't want to think about? These are the five elements that we're seen through. They were seen to be empty. Empty of what? When you have a cup that's empty, it's empty of what? Well, it's empty of water or whatever goes in a cup. These five things that we're seeing through, they are empty of any separate self. And they are full of the cosmos. This piece of paper is full of Light from the sun. Thich Nhat Hanh opens up all of the different things about a piece of paper.

[24:53]

The mill. The logger. All the different things that brought that piece of paper to being there. It's all there. And what brought the sun? What brought the water? It is empty of anything that is separate. That thought, that idea that I had, is empty. It is not in itself separate. a true fixed identity. It is dependent on the rest of the cosmos. Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva When deeply practicing Prajnaparamita, clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering. That is one of the most optimistic promises that I've ever heard a document start with. And in some way, we can think about even our own experience with suffering expanding through seeing through it, through slowing things down, through having time to see through the impermanence of a situation.

[26:10]

I come from a long history of people who love ice cream. My grandpa loved ice cream. And when he got into his later years and he wasn't supposed to eat ice cream, he would take me to eat ice cream and he would buy me two ice creams. And then he would ask if he could have a bite of one of the ice creams. And we would sit there, me eating my ice cream, and then him taking a bite over and over again. of my other ice cream, as we enjoyed me having two ice creams. And when we got home and we talked to Grandma, Grandpa did not buy himself an ice cream. He only bought Michael an ice cream. And my mother loves ice cream. And when I was five years old, I loved ice cream. And if I was five years old and I was down the street at the ice cream place, and if you would have given me an ice cream cone, and I was about to eat it, and I dropped that ice cream in the gravel, unsalvageable drop into the dirt, I would have cried.

[27:21]

But I wouldn't have just cried because I was sad. When you're five and you drop your ice cream cone, you are going to cry like... that is all that happens in the universe. That is all that matters. You do not have a home. You do not have toys. You do not have a mother and a father. And if somebody gave you a button and you could push that button to end the world, you would do it. Because the world actually has just now ended. Your suffering is all that is going on. I think that now, today, I love ice cream more than I did when I was five. But if I drop my ice cream cone and it goes in the gravel and it is unsalvageable, it feels different somehow. Now, I'll be very sad and Hillary will need to comfort me. But... that there's some sort of perspective that has expanded through living, through being with other people, through eating other ice cream cones, through eating other meals, through having other relationships.

[28:33]

Somewhere along the line, I graduated in my awareness of the planet, at least with ice cream, where I can drop my ice cream cone now and I have perspective in some sort of way. we might need help in some other areas with our suffering. Things that are a little deeper, things that are a little harder to take. It's like that flat plain where you have a city. And at first, you know, you have a building that is my suffering. And... If I just focus on that one building and there's no other buildings in the city, like I'm five years old and I've got an ice cream cone, it just takes up everything. And the invitation that we're being given in the Heart Sutra is to actually slow things down. And to be with the experience as it's unfolding.

[29:36]

And in this tradition, be with others and notice them in the midst of things as they're unfolding. I can remember being at Tassajara about a year or two in, still a fairly new student to Buddhism and talking to somebody who had been at Tassajara for seven or eight years. And this person, I thought, handled situations that were triggering in a pretty skillful way a lot of the time. And... I can remember them telling me about some story and how they handled it, and it was pretty skillful. And I stopped them. I said, I don't want to hear your skillful story. I want to hear your story about before things were skillful and how things were really messy and ugly and how you did things inappropriate. And then I want to know that this got you somewhere. That illusion of getting somewhere. But that feeling that we know... that we're not in Kansas anymore. You look in your rearview mirror and somehow or another that thing just doesn't wind you up the way that it used to. There's some sort of spaciousness that's happened in that container that holds our suffering where we can hold more than just the ice cream cone and the gravel.

[30:46]

Maybe that difficult person, maybe that difficult family member, all of a sudden what used to ruin an entire day now just ruins half an hour and we feel really good about that. is a way out of suffering. That's the fourth noble truth. To have a document that starts to unpack that for us. What is more encouraging than that? Thank you all for coming tonight. And I think we might have a couple minutes left for questions, do we? So, if there are any questions, yes. a lot going on there and you know I think that you know most analogies are inherently reductive and so in this situation what I was more focusing on was if I was the bat would I be able to calm enough to be open to the help that was there that eventually got the tape off of

[33:21]

then the rest of it is, I mean, industrial society and all the things that encroached upon the bat's natural habitat and the bat, you know, with having light at different times at nighttime and it confuses the bat. I mean, there's all sorts of things going on there. But I was more just about the... I think I have felt disturbed and freaked out before where you just really can't see and... it might be as simple as just hold still. Someone is going to, you know, take this tape off your wing, but it looks like danger. And the practices that we've been going through in the Heart Sutra about letting things resonate in the body, taking in where the mind is going, are things that have helped me center and realize that that sometimes I can be my own worst enemy, that a lot of my suffering is the prison of my own making, that many times I have the key to that prison and I actually don't even want to use the key because I am so attenuated to the momentum of being, it's almost like I've been institutionalized to my own prison and I don't actually even want to use the key.

[34:50]

And I think that there is a softening and a slowing through this practice that gives some chance at seeing through our suffering its lack of permanence. Yes, Takado. I think that fear is so primal, so limbic, that it has to be respected. And if you go to the gym, on your first day of going to the gym, and there's a 200-pound weight, and someone says, okay, pick up that weight.

[36:02]

there are things that are bigger than us. And last year my father died, and it was a really messy time. And sometimes sitting zazen and just letting what came up was a bit much. And then I would go to a breath practice and count my breath. And so I think that I didn't want to turn away from what was going on, but I might sit for four or five minutes, see how things were going. But if you find yourself on the shore, just getting hit with wave after wave after wave, you might need to get off the shore. And so with fear, um, I think that you do your best with having the scaffolding to do the work. You know, if you know you're going to be in a certain situation that's triggering, you know, what's the preparation for that? Um, all good Olympic athletes have a warm-up, and it might be an Olympic event for you.

[37:07]

Sometimes I'm just hopeful and idealistic, thinking that my fears are going to go away, and if I just show up immediately in the situation, and I just try to be present, that all of a sudden my fears are not going to manifest. And I am disabused of that theory all the time. Many times it's really good for me to, I notice the difference between whether I'm sitting zazen every day, whether I'm working out, whether I'm sleeping. Am I catching myself during the day when I'm future tripping? Someone does something and I'm future tripping. And I'm just used to future tripping. And I've been doing that. I haven't even been living today in the present. I've just been future tripping all day long. And then something happens that's triggering on Muni or in my family or whatever. And then that fear comes up again. And I realize I'm not really in a place that has much of an emotional reservoir that's not full. My emotional reservoir is full. And so if anything else happens around me, everybody needs to be nice. Everyone needs to be perfect. And then my fear doesn't really have any space to manifest.

[38:12]

But if my emotional reservoir is a little bit maybe more spacious, that fear might manifest, and then it might not be great, but I have a lot better shot at it not just being all about the ice cream that fell on the ground, and now I'm just going to press the end of the world. It's my fear, but there's a bigger fear. There's a bigger world. I still have an apartment. I still have a life. I still have something that's going on. I don't like the fact that I lost my ice cream. I don't like the fact that I'm afraid and I'm triggered. But it's going to be okay. You know, maybe in half an hour. But, yeah, I think that having a healthy respect for fear and being prepared for it is the only way that I've ever dealt with it. Thank you. Are we out of time or are we? We are out of time. Well, thank you all for coming tonight. Hope you have a good evening.

[39:12]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_96.7