Good morning, and welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. I'm pleased to see such a large turnout today, given the fact that it's a beautiful, sunny holiday weekend. So I'm glad you all came. We have a very interesting and unusual practice period going on at City Center now. So usually our practice periods are led by one or two teachers. But this practice period is being led by 12 different teachers. So the six most senior teachers at Zen Center each invited one of us to participate with them in offering a class. related to the practice period. And my teacher, Michael Wenger, invited me to teach a class on courage with him.

[01:10]

So that's what I'm going to talk about today. And the overarching theme of the practice period is the way of the bodhisattva. And a bodhisattva is a person who has set his sights on enlightenment, but vowed not to enter nirvana until all beings have entered nirvana. So they've vowed to be the last one over the finish line. And another way of expressing it might be to say, that the Bodhisattva vow includes the vow to save all beings. So a while back, I had a conversation with Michael Winger, my teacher, about courage. And I'm not so happy to tell about the deluded truth

[02:16]

point of view that I manifested in this conversation, but I will. I was at a pretty low point in my life. I was feeling pretty down and out, and he was probably trying to get me to buck up and have some courage and gumption. And I said that... Sometimes people have told me that I'm courageous. And I know they mean it as a compliment, but it's never meant very much to me or made me feel very good. Because what I really wanted was to be brilliant and talented and beautiful and articulate and creative and all of those things. And he said, being courageous is much more important than any of those qualities or all of them put together.

[03:21]

And he's right, of course. But the thoughts that I was having were things like, if I had those qualities, I wouldn't have the problems I have now. And also that courage seemed to me like something you do in the face of difficulty. And I didn't want to have any difficulties, so what do I need with courage? I need these things that will keep me from having difficulties. So this is a fairly extreme form of wishing you had some other life, that you don't want your own life as it really is. You want some other life.

[04:23]

And this is delusion. But I won't ask you to raise your hands if you've ever felt that way. So it's true, I think, that you can't really do anything worthwhile, even for yourself, and you certainly can't help other people without courage. So I've really appreciated this class as a time to study how to work on developing my courage muscle, which is kind of atrophied. So you might ask what courage has to do with the bodhisattva path. And one bodhisattva who comes to mind, who had a lot of courage, a lot of courage, was the Buddha Gautama in his quest for enlightenment.

[05:35]

So when the Buddha was born... an oracle told his father, the king, that Buddha would either be a great king and ruler, or he would be a holy person, a spiritual seeker who would guide the entire world, and his impact on the world would exceed that of any emperor. While his father wanted him to follow in his own footsteps and take care of the country and be a good king and ruler, he didn't want him to go off and become a homeless wanderer and seeker after truth. So he kept him in the palace well amused with all kinds of royal pleasures.

[06:40]

and protected him from heat and cold, and protected him from finding out much of anything about the world. If a servant became sick, the king had that servant leave the palace until he got well. So... You know, Siddhartha, who became the later Buddha, that's who we're talking about, didn't see flowers that were wilted or people that were sick or people that were old. Everyone around him was young and beautiful and perfect. And this kind of worked until he was almost ready to turn 30. And then he felt like he needed to see the country that he was about to, that someday he would rule.

[07:40]

And he talked with the king about this. And the king gave him permission to go out with his chariot to a tear. And so they went out into the world and did a little sightseeing. And on the first trip... Siddhartha saw a person who was sick, all bent over in pain, and he asked the charioteer about it and was told, yes, that's sickness, and that happens to all of us. We can't escape it. And on the next trip, he saw someone who was old and frail and wrinkled and bent over, and he had never seen an old person before. So he asked the charioteer about it and was told, yes, that happens to every human being who doesn't die young.

[08:42]

And it happens to all of us. We can't escape it. And then he saw someone carrying a corpse. And he had never seen a dead person. He was quite shocked. And the charioteer said, this too happens to every single human being. There is no escape. And then on the next trip, Siddhartha saw a homeless wanderer who had a begging bowl and was meditating. And he looked very peaceful. content, and Siddhartha was inspired by this image. So he went back to the palace and pondered all of these things. And it became pretty clear to him that he felt like he needed to leave the palace, that what he really wanted to do was be a homeless spiritual seeker.

[09:51]

And he told the king of his wish, and of course the king wanted nothing to do with it. So Siddhartha finally left the palace one night in the middle of the night. He left his beautiful young wife and his infant son and all of his royal finery and went out into the world to pursue the meditative life. And he did not stop by the SFCC bookstore to get one of the 500 titles that might tell him exactly how he should proceed. He walked about on foot with his begging bowl and the clothes on his back and talked to people about different teachers. And when he heard of a teacher... that people seemed to think well of, he would go check out that teacher.

[10:55]

And he found a couple who really inspired him, and he spent a long time with them. However, in the end, he learned all that those teachers had to teach, so much so that they invited him to take over their communities and be the teacher. But he knew he hadn't really found the piece he was looking for. So he continued on his way. And he practiced severe austerities. Well, for one thing, he sat at night alone in the forest and in jungles where there were snakes and wild animals and real things to be afraid of. And he vowed that when dread came upon him, he would keep his seat, He would not change position until he had calmed his mind. And so he learned to be less afraid.

[11:58]

And he didn't eat very much at all. And he became quite emaciated. And finally, he was really near death's door. But he realized that he still had not attained the way. He still had not found what he was looking for. And he knew that if he continued what he was doing, he was just going to die. So he remembered a time when, as a child, he had meditated briefly and how peaceful and pleasurable it was without depending on anything unwholesome. And he decided that that would probably be the route to his awakening. So he sat down and vowed that he would not get up until he attained enlightenment. And on the eve of his enlightenment, Mara, the evil one, sort of like a devil, came to visit him in many guises and tempted him in many ways in an attempt to knock him off his seat.

[13:13]

And his final blow, Mara's final blow to the Buddha was to attack his self-worth. He said, who are you? Who do you think you are that you can attain Buddhahood? And the Buddha touched the earth as his witness and vowed to keep his seat and continue his effort. And in the wee hours of that morning, he was enlightened for our benefit. So I think this is a story that required courage in the beginning, the middle, and the end. He had many difficulties to overcome, and he was very courageous, and we are all the benefactors. So I think we can see from this story that there are other words besides courage that mean something very similar.

[14:23]

Patience, faith, fortitude and difficulty, determination, and fearlessness. We sometimes hear about fearlessness when we're studying Buddhism, and it certainly does sound appealing, doesn't it? What could be more wonderful than to be fearless? But fearlessness doesn't mean not having fear. It means being really acquainted with your fear so that you're not blown around by it. In preparing for this talk, I spent a lot of time with Pema Chodron, not physically, unfortunately, but with her wonderful books that I recommend. And she talks about fear and hope as being two sides of one coin.

[15:29]

They're a duality, like other pairs of opposites, like... hot and cold. So you can't have hot without the existence of cold. And cold can't exist without hot. So she says that hope and fear are like this. And that both of them, both hope and fear, but especially hope, comes from some feeling of lacking something in oneself or in one's life. A feeling that something is missing, that you want to get something more. And also they both involve living in the future. When you're involved in hope and fear, your thoughts are about the future itself. and you're taken out of the present moment. And she proposes that the antidote to fear is hopelessness.

[16:36]

So that sounds pretty counterintuitive and kind of shocking, doesn't it? Hopelessness has a quality of being depressed, desperate. kind of deep in the well. However, she says that hopelessness is the path to fearlessness. And, you know, usually we think of fear as something bad and hope as something good. So this is a different take. And the kind of hopelessness she means is that we have to give up our hope of there being some better place for us, some better place to be, or some better person to be, or that we're going to get it all together and then everything will be okay.

[17:47]

And we have to give up our belief in our story about the way things are, and particularly about the nature of our own existence. She says that only when there are no alternatives to being oneself, where one is, can you really settle in and get comfortable with who you are. Make friends with yourself and stay with yourself no matter what happens. So when we talked about hopelessness in the courage class, forgive me if I don't quote this quite right. I hope I have the general idea right. One of the people in the class said, well, suppose someone comes to me and he's very inspired to practice hopelessness.

[18:49]

because he hopes it will make him a better person. Should I tell that person that he should give up that hope? And I think the answer is ultimately, eventually, yes. But I think of Mel Weitzman's comment, Mel was one of our former abbots, that we have to be careful not to undelude people too quickly before they're ready. So hope is the Dharma gate, and it brings people to practice. And it's really interesting, isn't it, that something that's a Dharma gate can also be our hindrance and block us from achieving enlightenment. So I think that there, I'm going to suggest that there are three ingredients to one possible path to fearlessness and that they are intimacy with our fears and deepening our connection, deepening our awareness of our connection with other human beings.

[20:12]

and acknowledgement that we don't know. Dogen Zenji said that to study the way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. So fearlessness doesn't mean to escape fear. It means to get really intimate with our fear and tame it through familiarity. So when we're afraid, we notice what we're afraid of. And we notice how it feels in our body. What are the physical sensations that we experience when we're afraid? And then, what do we do next? Do we have some mindfulness practice to help us? come to grips with our fear?

[21:17]

Or do we protect ourselves with some story about how right we are and how wrong someone else is? Or become very angry or self-righteous? Or do we go the route of distractions or addictions? Do we go to sleep So those are many ways. There are countless ways that we deal with our discomfort, such as fear. And then, what are the results of whatever we did in our life and in the lives of the people around us? Did our mindfulness have a good result? Did our running away have a bad result? Can we explore that? Now, if you're like me, you probably have to do this through the back door.

[22:21]

I don't mostly do this process in quite that order. More often, I'm really angry and I go backwards into this. I... try to look at my anger and see what's underneath it. What is it that's making me feel so uncomfortable? And usually it's something more tender and painful and kind of yucky than anger. It's usually fear or hurt or sadness or something like that. it's easy to go to something like anger because it has some energy in it and possibly some self-righteousness which sort of bolsters you and makes you feel good for a little while.

[23:23]

So that's the intimacy approach to exploring fear. And I think it's also very useful to... explore the depth of our connection with other human beings. And one of the reasons for this is that often what we're afraid of is other people, things other people say and think, things we think other people are doing to us. So the more comfortable we can be around our fellow human beings, maybe the less fear we have. And it's helpful to see that our fear is the same as everyone else's fear, that we're really all in the same boat. So one practice that I like for this is a variation on loving-kindness meditation.

[24:26]

And I'm going to briefly describe loving-kindness meditation because I think it's so useful to I have this very wonderful set of CDs that was made by the Mind Life Institute, which is a bunch of scientists, psychiatrists, philosophers, maybe even poets. And they worked under the sponsorship with the Dalai Lama. And they're just... a collection of scientific and other schools or other disciplines who are interested in the workings of the mind. And they hooked up some very advanced meditators to brainwave machines. I mean really advanced meditators. I think that it was like people who had meditated 10,000 hours and more and studied their brainwaves while they did different things.

[25:32]

styles of meditation. And the loving kindness meditation produced off the charts by far the most pleasurable brain waves. And the conclusion was that it helps the meditator. It makes the meditator happy. So this is the practice that you do. you send a wish or a prayer for yourself or someone else for their well-being, and you meditate on that. So this is a seven-stage process, a seven-step meditation. And the first step is to say, may I be happy and free from suffering. And then you pick out someone who is beloved to you, who was important in your life and helpful or generous, a favorite teacher or grandparent or something.

[26:42]

And you say, may this much-loved person in my life be happy and free from suffering. And then you do the same thing for a friend. May my friend be happy and free from suffering. And then you choose a neutral person, maybe the clerk in the store or the person delivering the mail. May this person who wants happiness as much as I do be happy and free from suffering. And then you choose someone you dislike. maybe not your worst enemy yet, maybe not the nemesis of your life, but somebody that irritates you. And you say, may this person who bothers me be happy and free from suffering. And then you visualize these five people all lined up in front of you, yourself, yourself,

[27:47]

the loved one, your friend, the neutral person, the person you dislike, and you say, may all these five people be happy and free from suffering. And then you extend it to everyone in the world, everywhere. May all beings be happy and free from suffering. So that's loving-kindness meditation, and sometimes it's done in the meditation hall, but I actually think it's a really great thing to do when you're out and about. For one thing, it infinitely extends the amount of your life that you can spend meditating, and it puts you in a much better frame of mind to meet whatever arises in the world. So the little variation on loving-kindness meditation that I think is helpful in dealing with fears is, may all those people everywhere in the world who have the same fears that I do and who suffer from them as I do, may all those people be happy and free from suffering.

[29:09]

I found this interesting quote on the TED website. Go fail with a child. As kids, we are taught only how to succeed, but we need to be taught how to fail, too. If we experience failure and see others fail, we learn the courage to overcome the fear of it. and realize that failures are only stepping stones towards success. Well, I'm not so convinced that all failures are stepping stones to success. I think they can be, and a lot of them are, and it's useful to keep alive that possibility when things are occurring in our life. But I think the truth is closer to we don't know. We don't know ultimately whether the things that happen in our lives are good or bad.

[30:16]

And that makes me think of a story that some of you have probably heard too often, but it's a good story, so I'm going to tell it again. It's about a farmer and a horse. So there was a poor farmer, and he had this beautiful stallion... And he made some part of his living by renting the stallion out for breeding purposes. But one day, his son carelessly left the gate open, and the horse got away. And the farmer asked around among his neighbors, and none of them had seen the horse. and they were all quite sympathetic to him and said, oh, I am so sorry, that is such a misfortune. And the farmer said, well, we shall see. And he continued looking for the horse and asking around about the horse, but he eventually gave up.

[31:25]

And then several weeks later... the stallion returned with a beautiful wild mare. And when the farmer told his neighbors about this, they congratulated him on his good fortune. And the farmer said, well, we shall see. And his son was very taken with this horse and spent all his time with her. But she was wild and he was trying to break her and to learn to ride her. And she threw him hard and he broke his leg. So the villagers were quite sympathetic and told the farmer and his son that they were really sorry that such a misfortune had befallen them. And the farmer said, well, we shall see. And a bit later, a war broke out. And all the young men in the village were drafted to be in the war.

[32:32]

However, the farmer's son had his legs still in a cast and couldn't go, so he was left at home on the farm. And unfortunately, tragically, all the young men were killed, and only the farmer's son survived. And then the parents of the other young men were so envious of the farmer, and they said, oh, you are so fortunate. And the farmer said, well, we shall see. So that's the end of the story that we have. We don't know if there's more to that story or not. But that's like our own lives. We don't really know the end of the story until we die, if then. Things happen, and we don't know whether they're ultimately for good or bad.

[33:33]

So why be so afraid? And everything changes. As long as we know that everything changes, If it gets really bad, it's going to change. So that helps us also with our fear. I think worry is a good example of this. How many things do you worry about that never actually happen? Trungpa Rinpoche said that most of our fears are ultimately negative. about our fear of death or fear of our own insubstantiality, the possibility that we never existed in the first place. In Buddhist time, monks were sent to the charnel grounds to meditate.

[34:35]

A charnel ground, as I understand it, is a place where bodies were chopped up and dumped and left to wild animals. So there would be... It was a pretty disgusting place. There would be body parts in various stages of decomposition and being eaten by animals. And in addition to that... there was a lot of feeling that negative spirits wandered around in these places. So it was a gruesome, disgusting, fearsome place to be. And monks sometimes meditated there at night. In our life, our... story around death on corpses is much more sanitized. Our sick people are mostly in the hospital where we don't see them if they're really sick.

[35:47]

And old people with Alzheimer's, many of them are in nursing homes. We don't see so much of that in our day-to-day life. And the corpses are in coma. where there's a whole city to take care of all the dead people so that they aren't in our way in San Francisco. So Trungpa said that we've all survived to adulthood, had some time to live, and he said that you have plenty of opportunity to live experience intimations of death in everyday life and get used to it. And these are things like disappointment, things not working out the way we had hoped they would, not getting what we want, getting what we don't want.

[36:52]

old age, sickness, and death. All the signs that we are insubstantial and that there's something going on besides us and that someday we're going to die. This is the first noble truth that life is suffering. And... That seems like a tough message, but actually it can be a very comforting message because it means that when we're suffering, it's not because we've done something stupid or we didn't try hard enough or... I don't know what. You know, it's not necessarily our fault. This is the nature of existence. We all suffer, and we do our best to live our lives in a way that minimizes suffering.

[37:57]

But suffering is going to happen. It's inevitable. And we can make ourselves more comfortable. in life if we can relax with this knowledge, with this reality, and enjoy the present moment as it actually is. So I want to end with a passage from Suzuki Roshi from Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. This is called Nirvana, the Waterfall. I went to Yosemite National Park and I saw some huge waterfalls. The highest one there is 1,340 feet high, and from it the water comes down like a curtain thrown from the top of the mountain. It does not seem to come down swiftly, as you might expect.

[39:02]

It seems to come down very slowly. because of the distance. And the water does not come down as one stream, but is separated into many tiny streams. From a distance, it looks like a curtain. And I thought, it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes time, you know, a long time, for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river.

[40:04]

Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. It is as if the water does not have any feeling when it is one whole river. Only when separated into many drops can it begin to express or have some feeling. Before we were born, we had no feeling. We were one with the universe. This is called mind only, or essence of mind, or big mind. After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. you attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created.

[41:08]

When you do not realize that you are one with the river or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life. So I would like to send you my wish and my prayer that you may be happy and free from suffering and hope that we can enjoy our... travel down the mountain to the bottom of the waterfall together. Thank you.

[42:05]

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