Last week I used a story that I heard on the news and read on the internet as an expression of basic goodness. For those of you who weren't here, what I said was there was a massacre in an Amish community, which probably most of you know, but you might not know, is that two extraordinary things arose out of that tragedy. And one was the story, there were two sisters and one was shot and died, and the younger one was shot but survived. And the younger one told her mother when she was able to, several days after the incident, that her sister, the one who died, had said to the gunman before he started to shoot anyone, he'd lined everybody up, all the girls up, to shoot them. Before he started to shoot them, the girls said to him, shoot me first. Shoot me. I'm the oldest. Don't shoot them. The other remarkable particular to arise out of that tragedy was that the Amish community, the very same families who'd lost their daughters in that senseless brutality, contacted the wife of the man who killed the girls and brought her to the community.

[01:32]

to give her support. And in fact, they started a fund to give her financial support too. Personally, I can't help but be struck by incidents like this. What is it? in the human spirit? What capacity is it in our being to behave and act in such a way? How do we tap into that? How do we stay true to that? How do we clear out of the way all the preoccupations and distractions that obscure that? Is it possible to prescribe such a way of being?

[02:35]

Is it possible to say, okay, I'll do this and this, and then I will be such a one? Is it possible to let the gravity, the immensity, the power, the authority of such a way of being shine a light on the person that we are and the life we're living? Is it possible to let it reframe our priorities? So last week I was saying these kinds of questions give rise to in the Zen context and I think beyond it in any spiritual context to the expression, the direction and guidance of what in Buddhism is called sila, the way of being that brings us close, that is in accord with this basic goodness.

[03:50]

Buddhism in its heritage expresses the perspective that everybody has this capacity everybody for basic goodness and that simply we get distracted from it we get cut off from it as if like a muscle that when you don't use it the muscle atrophies the capacity to connect to that when we don't use it atrophies becomes obscured and hard to contact. So today I'd like to talk some more about Sila. Somewhat in the context of meditation, which in the Zen school is one of our primary expressions of it.

[04:59]

And also because today, about 70, I was already spending the day until this evening, 9 o'clock this evening, meditating. So I'd like to talk about it in two ways. I'd like to talk about it from the perspective of how... it informs the complexity of urban life and then how it finds its expression in the tradition of Buddhism that Zen takes up in its own particular way. In the particulars of Buddhism, this sila runs through our practice in a couple of ways. In one way, we have a formulation called Sila Samadhi Panya.

[06:08]

Picking up that incident, we could say, how can we ever know what exactly happened, what was going through that girl's mind and heart, or what's vibrating in the hearts and minds of the Amish community then and now. Literally, we can't. But I think in another way, we get it. Something in us gets it. Something in us knows. That's an expression of basic goodness. Whatever that means, that's an expression of it. expression has its own gravitas. You know, Rilke said that God is the gravitas of being.

[07:10]

He didn't use the word gravitas. He said the gravitas, actually he said, God is like, the translation I read, God is like a boulder whose weightiness brings you down into the depths of being. I think such incidents bring us, they have a gravitas, they have a gravity, they take our human life with all its perplexities and complexities and they show us, you know, right there in the middle of brutality senseless brutality it can be met with unflinching unqualified basic goodness but that incident has gravitas that when we pause and let it register

[08:25]

It guides us. It brings us dying into a sense of greater being. The exact nature of Zen, of Zazen, is that every moment has that. That immensity. That weightiness. So a day like today, for those of us who are spending it doing Zazen, is to literally practice letting every moment have that gravity, have that authority, have that complete expression of how to practice with karmic existence. Right in the midst of karmic existence, liberation can manifest. can be expressed.

[09:28]

How is that so? Why in the midst of their pain and loss didn't that community contract into anger and revenge and hatred. So that then is simply to meet karmic existence and allow that basic goodness to express itself. And this is enabled and expressed by being completely present. That's jhana.

[10:38]

Sila brings us to that occasion. Sila enables us to be completely present for that occasion. So the sila of zazen, the discipline, the orderliness of zazen is posture, breath, openness, receptivity, and this complete willingness to be the moment, just as it is. And jhana is to engage that fully. And then panya, wisdom, is how that sheds light on the karmic world. And that very same world becomes, when it's illuminated by that basic goodness, that very same world becomes demonstrative of the path of liberation.

[11:42]

We can take the actions of that Amish community and they can be a koan for us. How is it? What is it to be such a one? Zazen is each moment presents itself asking us, how is it to be just this, to be such a one that stays present, that doesn't contract, get distracted, get confused, be bitter because it's not the way we want it, or filled with yearning, or hopelessness, or all the amazing ways in our human life we can be distracted. So that's the basic proposition. I just realized I have an agenda, which is kind of... You know, awareness can get you into a lot of trouble.

[12:53]

As I stepped on the tatami there, I had a thought, and then that thought was about being absorbed in the moment. I looked at a sea of faces and bodies and thinking how utterly and completely amazing every moment in our shared existence is. Everybody's intrigued by the wrong version of reality. How can we know what's right here in this room? It struck me. as this piece of magnificent theater. There's a poem I really like and each chapter starts with magnificent mistake. Here we all are perpetrating a magnificent mistake.

[13:55]

And the amazing thing is that if we just see it and be it, it illuminates the path of liberation. It shows us directly what it is to be awake and alive. So I had that thought as I stepped on the tatami and I thought, to heck with what I was going to talk about. That's what I should talk about. So awareness gets us into trouble. Each moment expresses its own authority of being. And we don't know it before it happens. And we don't know what it's going to ask or request or bring forth. So a few moments ago when I thought, oh, back to my agenda for this talk,

[15:05]

I'm going to talk about this, I'm going to talk about this. But one aspect of sila has not exactly adherence to prescription. It should be like this or it should be like that. But it does have guidelines. I think sometimes... Discipline is not such an easy notion for us. It's like there's some way in which it sort of misses the point. If everything just is, well, what's all this discipline? I'd like to talk about that this way.

[16:06]

but how to let our life express basic goodness. So in terms of sociology, there's a five-fold, I think it's called the five aspects of whole being or healthy being, and they are physical, And this is not a Buddhist teaching. And as far as I know, I think it was social theory made up by a sociologist. Physical, emotional, cognitive, interpersonal, or social, and spiritual. So each one of us has these five dimensions. Physical, emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual. Each one of us has these five dimensions to our being. And then we're busy... trying to have each one of them optimized.

[17:08]

And probably finding it difficult to balance them all. I was teaching a class recently and we came up with the notion of asking people to Think of the main categories of activity in their life and how they prioritize them. Going to work, exercising, eating, cleaning your apartment, where you live, spending time with your friends, reading, whatever those activities are, and then giving them some And then how do you prioritize them? Which one do you say, okay, well, if I have this much time, I'm going to do this and not do that. So the great thing was this group was about 40 people.

[18:23]

And of course, you get 40 formulations. But what really impressed me was that What a great teaching it is to do that. To just do that in your life really illuminates how you spend your time. What do I do with my time? You know, there's a wonderful saying in Zen that says, do you use the 24 hours or are you used by the 24 hours? I think that's a great question of our age. Are we trying to catch up with our life or do we feel like we're grinded and centered in it and living in a way that reflects our priorities and values? So there you are, I would recommend that one for your own edification.

[19:25]

And then Sila says, how Do your priorities and what you do reflect enabling basic goodness? How are they in accord with it? And then spiritual light or religious life is in each religion we could say or spiritual practices a particular formulation in relationship to that request. How to set priorities and behaviors that reflect basic goodness and bring us to that experience.

[20:31]

and express that experience of basic goodness. I think if you take this up, and then just to complicate matters, I would suggest you overlay those five basic areas of, what would you call it? Hierarchy of need? No, no, no, no, no. I was thinking of a different social notion. Not so much that they're in hierarchy, but more that they're in a holistic constellation. That they all need to be attended to. That they're all part of our being. attention to those two and then also to study the disconnect between what your priorities are and what you're actually spending your time on as we studied this as a group it became very clear to me we could spend a year studying this and working with this a formidable challenge

[21:59]

So from a Zen perspective, this full presence for basic goodness is fully connected to it and expressing. Jaina, which literally translates as absorption, means to be fully engaged. In my own contemplation, when I thought of that little girl in that situation, under those extraordinarily stressful and difficult circumstances, to be able to speak with that kind of authority, to have that capacity to go beyond fear and hatred. and a very limited sense of self-concern.

[23:12]

In my contemplations I thought, how incredibly present to do that. So sila. helps to shape our life in a way that supports that, our behavior, our priorities. And those moments, you know, really, if you think about it, our life is made of moments. There are moments that happen to us, for us, that we're engaged in, that we become part of, that become emblematic or definitive, our typical, of how we hold our life. Part of what happens when we sit zazen is that those powerful moments, those moments that we've imbued with special significance, often they come and present themselves.

[24:32]

Sometimes it's moments that hurt us deeply. And we sit there and we play that intrigue. So in our subjective experience, in our subjective world, when moments like that arise with energy, and emotion to let it register this is significant in my subjective world and to see it clearly what is it what's being experienced how is this moment being constructed and held what feelings right now does it generate what understandings about the nature of me and other in existence or implicit in it.

[25:42]

Now, from the Zen School, this is not, even though I made it sound like this is a series of cognitive questions, from the Zen School, it's experiencing it directly and fully. And that experience experiencing it directly and fully, illuminates, casts light, makes evident the thinking and feeling that it generates. So those questions in the Zen School are pointing us towards experiencing fully, rather than asking us to create in our mind an answer to them. Rather than say, well, what feelings does it create? It's asking us to experience the feeling. Let the feeling, let the emotion speak with its own authority.

[26:47]

Sometimes we say wisdom beyond words and ideas. And then that direct experience quite naturally expresses itself in words and concepts. To stick with my agenda, now I'd like to mention a little bit maybe the pilgrim's process of the Zen school. So we start with this notion that everybody has the capacity for basic goodness. And right along with it, everybody has a karmic life. And the basic goodness is expressed in the context, in the midst of the karmic life.

[28:14]

Because that's what we are. You cannot express your basic goodness by being somebody other than yourself. It's not possible. can only be expressed in the life we already are. So we acknowledge the life we already are. As we do that, we see that in Buddhist terms we call it taking refuge. Really what that means is that we see The basic goodness brings forth a way of being that alleviates suffering, that eliminates or disperses confusion and unhappiness and draws out of us all a quality of being that has its own magnificence.

[29:37]

And then the next step is to shift how life is related to, from whatever preoccupation and agenda that's created out of that, to one that expresses, to a set of priorities that express basic goodness. In the formulation we use, we say, do good, don't do harm. It has a wonderful naivete. As if we could so readily and easily parse our life along those simple lines.

[30:44]

But you know, I think in a way we can. I think there is a way when we listen to our heart that maybe we can't exactly define all the particulars, but we can know what it is to come from a heart that wishes well, that has benevolence. And if we do that with a kind of innocence, maybe we could say humility, that we'll discover, you know? We'll discover just how what we're doing impacts the world, impacts ourselves. We'll discover indeed whether it did harm, our actions did harm, or did benefit. And then the third particular is include everyone.

[31:53]

Like the Amish community, they just didn't simply think, okay, what's good for us now that we've suffered tragedy? Their vow enabled them to include even the wife of the person who brought forth the brutal swaying of their children. Include everyone. It's not us and them, it's only us. What would the world be like if we could all stay true to that? And then we get to the, in the Buddhist tradition, then we get to the prohibitions. Don't do this, don't steal, don't kill, don't lie, don't intoxicate, don't misuse sexuality.

[33:06]

Because we don't live in generalities, we live in particularities. That's why it's so helpful to just look at your own life and to take out of it the particulars of your life. So each one of these admonitions is its own inquiry into how to live. in this great interconnected world it's perplexing you know you go to the store and buy a t-shirt you know seems like a simple innocent thing to do because it was on sale 30% off and then you discover it's made with swipe shop labor

[34:23]

in some third world country where people are being paid 50 cents a week and their children are starving. It's like each of these admonitions reminds us of the gravitas of our life. of the weight of responsibility that we have when we participate in the world in each other's lives and what we do with our own life. So in the Zen school, these prohibitions are not something that we assume are simple and obvious, quite the opposite.

[35:29]

We assume that they are complex and that ask of us to really bring to bear the best of our thinking and good intention and to act in accordance with it. to not presume that we have it all figured out. So I almost filled my agenda. So I intend to stop because the other part of the Zen school is having a schedule. There's a wonderful essay by Wendell Berry where he talks about the creativity of poetry comes out when it operates within the confines of a particular style of poetry.

[36:49]

So in the Zen school, we do things, we discover freedom by doing things within a particular style. I don't know if that made any sense to you, but the gist of it is we set a timetable and then we follow it. But you know, if I had to leave you with one thought, or one feeling, it would be that in the midst of this life, you know, recently, yesterday, I was reading about a rock, you know. What a heartbreak.

[37:56]

What a headache. What a tragedy. You know, what an expression of the complexity of global politics and agendas. Or maybe more true, what an expression of global politics and agendas gone wrong. What if it was all us? I know us and them. I know that's a naive notion, but I would also suggest that it's also a true one. How can each of us hold that in our hearts, our own version of it, in the context of the life we have? How can each of us sit down and open up

[39:00]

to the life we have in a way that we're not separating good from bad. That we meet it all with this basic goodness. How do we do that? How do we even think of ourselves as such a one, one who can do that? We discovered how to do it by doing it. That's the realization of all the Buddhas and ancestors. Thank you.

[39:50]

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