Morning. My name's Susan. I don't live here right now, but I have had that great opportunity to live at Green Gulch. And it's, don't tell the people in the city, but this is home. So it's New Year's Eve. This is a threshold, a bridge, time to focus. And while there's not really a substantial difference between yesterday and today, merely our idea that there is, this delusion of real time is a good time to focus our intention.

[01:10]

and intentions that involve actions or intentions that are the lens through which we wish to respond to the world. So intentions of acting or being. In most years, I take advantage of this time to turn towards a particular practice or interest or concern And then I use that as the guide star for my study for the coming year. How about you? In the past, the focus of my practice has been things like greed. I studied greed for a year and I would do Dharma talks and I would pick something in my world that I was attached enough to. that when I gave it away, I could feel what that was.

[02:17]

And it couldn't be something too precious, because then that was painful. So I would practice giving things away during Dharma talks. People started coming to those talks. I gave a cashmere sweater away once. And I had another one. And then I studied, you know, what is truth? And then I studied hope. And then I studied busyness. And I studied spiritual friendship and equanimity and fear. I wasn't so familiar with fear, I thought. So it was important to really investigate what it is. And last year I focused on what I called energetic practice. excuse me, energetic patients. Energetic patients. And as I started to prepare for this talk, I asked myself, well, what do I care most about right now?

[03:23]

And of the things that I care about, what quality would be most beneficial to the most amount of people for me to focus on? So what If I got more clear about something, what would have that scalable, as they say in the Valley, scalable result? So I invite you to consider that same question. I'm aging. We're all aging, but some of us are more aware of it than others. as the signals are more clear or dramatic. And awareness of aging affects the choice of what we focus on and perhaps even the depth of the commitment. I'm also collaborating on the development of a Zen-inspired senior living community

[04:38]

We intend to train the staff and any resident who's interested in what we call contemplative care. And that training includes three modules that we've identified. One is called Abiding Presence, and that has to do with finding your own meditation practice, your own stillness practice, your own presence practice. And another module is called Conscious Aging. And the third is Active Compassion. So last year, when I studied energetic patience, it was as a helpful ingredient in being able to consciously age, to stay with the change. While I have not finished that study, my heart-mind has been pulling towards this other module, this other question of what is active compassion?

[05:56]

And why am I being pulled towards it? Well, one of the reasons is that the concept unsettles me. And I discovered this. So it's really wonderful to be asked to do a talk because your life all of a sudden gets very focused on what would be beneficial. How do I share something? What should I say? And so as I knew I was coming towards this, I went to someone else's talk, this man that was the head student at the city center for the fall practice period. So I was starting to think about the concept and practices of compassion. But I listened to this man, his name is Tim, say, what would it be like to refer to the temple in the city, which is called Beginner's Mind Temple? He says, what would it be like to refer to it as Beginner's Heart Temple?

[07:07]

And when I heard that, it was like, boom, you know. That struck me. Never had that, even though heart-mind, the word shin, means both heart and mind. We always say it, you know, Zen mind. And this was Zen heart. So it struck me and I went, oh, heart, love, oh, that's what I'll talk about. So at first this talk was going to be about how love is a better word than compassion. But then I realized that was just a strategy to redefine the word compassion so that I could feel more comfortable. So it started to become clear to me that I've actually been hesitant to deeply consider what compassion is.

[08:10]

We use it all the time around here. We say the two wings of the bird, wisdom and compassion. I've said it a thousand times. But do I actually know what it is? So on the other hand, if I was going to be talking about love, that's also a pretty scary thing to talk about. So I was, you know, either way, this was going to be a difficult exploration for me. So having this aversion, and it's an actual aversion to the word compassion, because there's stuff behind it, which I'll get into, is a little bit embarrassing when you're a Zen teacher. Right? But I was encouraged because this fall we sent out a newsletter to some of the people who've shown interest in this conversation.

[09:12]

senior living community. And we included, it was at Thanksgiving, we included a talk that Linda Ruth had given on gratitude. And she started the talk by saying, confessing, that she had a streamed relationship with that word, gratitude. Because it was associated with a should. And I think you use something like, you know, I should be grateful for that ugly sweater and you know, Sally gave me, or something like that. She wouldn't say ugly sweater, but you were kinder than that. So there was a clarity and a recognition of a discomfort and a kind of a light being shown on some of the background to that resistance. And then, of course, with that, her talk went on to say she was able to then re-approach the practice of gratitude, having kind of smoothed out that barrier of should.

[10:17]

So I thought, well, if Linda Ruth can be adverse to the word gratitude, I guess I could be adverse to the word compassion. So thank you very much for the permission. So my first kind of realization when I towards this word was that I have this idea that some people are more naturally or innately compassionate than other people and I'm not one of them so I consulted a friend of mine who I see as a very compassionate person I would say that's her kind of default position and And she helped me clarify some of the barriers. She said, oh, you think I'm a bleeding heart and you're an icy heart. And I went, whoa, yeah, I kind of do.

[11:19]

I kind of do. So in this conversation, it started to help open up for me the barriers to my understanding and practicing compassion. I don't know, there's a wide range of ages in this room, but there was a show on television in the late 80s called Rescue 911. Anybody remember that show? What they did was they took actual emergencies that real people had responded to, and they reenacted them. So you got to see... the person driving down the road and then you notice there's a car crash and he goes and he gets the person out of the car or jumps into the pond and pulls somebody out or all of these wonderful kind of instinctual responses to helping.

[12:21]

I watched it every week and even then I knew what I was doing is I was trying to train myself in that response, in that innate response to suffering. So that doubt of whether I have it or not has been there for a while, to the point where I thought, I better train myself. I better get to embody these wonderful instincts that beings have. And then I saw another kind of layer of hesitation around this concept of compassion. And it has to do with the mythology of compassion in Buddhism. So it's so grand and so mysterious.

[13:26]

There's a tale about the Buddha in something called the Jakarta tales? Is that how you pronounce it? Jakarta? Jakarta. Jakarta tales about the Buddha giving his own body. So this being at that time was born into a family of Brahmins, renowned for their purity of conduct and great spiritual devotion. And so the Bodhisattva, who will become the Buddha in his next life, became a great scholar and teacher in this past life. With no desire for wealth and gain, he entered a forest retreat and began life as an ascetic. It was in this forest where he encountered a tigress who was starving and emaciated from giving birth and was about to resort to eating her own newborn cubs for survival. With no food in sight, the bodhisattva

[14:33]

out of infinite compassion, offered his body as food to the tigress, selflessly forfeiting his own life. So these tales can be inspiring or they can be overwhelming if you try to find yourself in that situation, in that tale. So another barrier for me that I came across was that the word compassion paints a picture of feeling with, which means that potentially we're able to cross the divide between our experience and another's experience and know the extent and quality of the other's pain.

[15:45]

Now, that may not be true, but that's a way of thinking about compassion that I found that I had. So, I don't know about you, but I have a bit of a concern about being subsumed by misery. And it hurts just to even talk about that, you know, to admit that, right? So this is out of order of what I was going to say, but I found something, and it's because the great teacher Ram Dass recently died, and there have been wonderful statements that you can read on the Internet, things that he said. And I found something he said that's the antidote to that

[16:45]

concern about being subsumed or merged into misery and distress and that intimacy of feeling with. So here's the story. Ram Dass said, Everybody you know, you see, you remember, and everyone you will meet is another face of God. Be so in love that the love prevents the veil from coming between you and the beloved. So this, when the veil disappears, that's a very particular, tender moment where a lot of skill is required. So he goes on to say, when this journey has wended its way, you finally become like Hanuman. who kneels at the foot of Ram. And Ram, in love of Hanuman, tries to raise Hanuman up to sit beside him, at which point Hanuman would merge into Ram.

[17:59]

But Hanuman makes himself so hard and heavy that Ram cannot lift him. He wants to stay separate in order to remain with the beloved. Finally, we play right at the fine line between becoming the beloved and standing back one pace, one breath. And then the breath changes and we merge once again. And then in the next breath, Here we are. It's the two and the one in a delicate play of love. It's the whispering of pillow talk between lover and beloved. Difficult. Skill, great skill needed to get in there, to be aware of the continuity of being.

[19:09]

let the barrier that we protect ourselves from pain dissolve. But not too much. Not too far. Because we need to be able to be with compassion. Feel with. So in this study that I'm just beginning, when I was talking to my very, very compassionate friend, we talked about there are a couple of approaches one might take if one has a doubt about one's capacity for compassion. And one way to look at it would be, well, how do I increase it? How do I build on it? How do I, you know, maybe understand better how we're all connected and so that other pain is my pain, and build an ability to be more compassionate.

[20:16]

The other approach is releasing the obstacles to reveal possibly what's already there. What if the very nature of consciousness is compassion what if it's not what I think it is what if it's already there not just in miserable me but in everybody so both of those processes growing, developing, practicing compassion, training in compassion, or uncovering and allowing that it's already there, involves understanding better what I think it is, what you think compassion is, and what it isn't.

[21:27]

We have great training manuals And one of them talks about the near and far enemies of compassion. So the near enemies are the qualities that could easily be mistaken for genuine compassion, but it's actually antithetical. And the far enemy is the opposite. So the near enemy of compassion is pity. Oh, poor you. And then there's this ego separation from the person you're feeling pity for. We feel superior. So that is not the kind of compassion that I'm interested in. And we all know what that feels like when we receive that. It's often well-intentioned.

[22:34]

But it's really heavy to receive that kind of input. The far enemy of compassion is cruelty. barrier, possibly to compassion, is similar maybe to what Linda Ruth was discovering around gratitude, is feeling like she should have it. So there's a kind of a sense of an obligatory need, I need to have compassion. And I read this wonderful treatise by Gil Fronsdale, a teacher who is of this lineage and also of a Theravadan background, and he has very accessible teaching.

[23:40]

I highly recommend him to you. So Gill says, it is important not to feel obligated to be compassionate, as this often leads to self-criticism and stress that interferes with the arising of natural compassion. So he's hinting at that it's already there-ness. It's natural compassion. He says, Buddhism doesn't require us to feel empathy and care for others. It does say, however, that we have the capacity to be compassionate and that doing so is a wonderful asset to ourselves and to others and to the practice of freedom. So it can be helpful to focus on how compassion enriches us not how it depletes us. So there's this aspect of trust or faith in that compassion is already there.

[24:52]

Is it? I ask myself. Is it? So Gil suggests that we observe the conditions that give rise to it. So when it does agree, I'm not saying I never experience compassion. This is about refining and deepening and clarifying what it is so that whatever my practice ends up being around compassion, it's more flexible and more... able to appear in a skillful way. Less limited. So there are less situations in which it isn't, there are barriers to it arising. So I had a little encouragement a couple of weeks ago. I was listening to another talk.

[25:57]

This time it was by Paul Haller in this city. And he was telling a story about a monk named Ryo Khan. And it involved a father and son, and the son was a teenager, and he was acting out, and the father didn't know what to do. So he went to Ryo Khan and he asked, please would Ryo Khan meet with this young man? So Ryo Khan said yes. And they sat down and had tea. And during the tea, they just talked about ordinary things. I don't know what the boy said. Probably didn't say much. Teenagers don't usually when talking with adults. Maybe he talked a little bit about, you know, what he was interested in. And Ryokan didn't say much either. He certainly didn't give any advice. So when they were done the tea, they came out and the father... Oh, I guess the father was at the tea.

[27:02]

Maybe that would have been hard for the boy. Anyway, he came out, and somehow the father knew that not much had gone on. And he kind of said, well, what was that all about, to ryokan? And the father's eyes went, for some reason, looked down and saw wet marks on his son's shoes. And he looked up. And Ryokan was in tears. The sun went away and completely stopped acting out. So when Paul told that story, all of a sudden I was going, well, what happened? And I had this awareness of what it might be like to not to try to change somebody who was in pain, to just listen to them, to be there with them and be vulnerable enough, to feel enough to be moved to tears, and that that could change everything for someone.

[28:26]

The idea that that came to me as an understanding of what compassion is, I thought, oh, okay, all right. I like that. I like that way of understanding compassion. It feels like it's in the middle. It's not too much, it's not too little, but it is complete. In this case, it involved being with. with an open heart, enough of an open heart to feel some of the distress that this young man was in. How much? I don't know. What's the capacity there? I don't know. But enough that it changed this young man's life. And I'm very, very aware of this because I have a relative right now who's in a great deal of and it's very, very difficult to not want to give him advice or to indicate that he might be somewhat responsible for the trouble he's in.

[29:50]

Those thoughts are going through my mind in Zazen. My response is to want to wake up. Not that that kind of a response couldn't also be compassion. But it doesn't feel like it. I'm avoiding somehow that deep pain of feeling his suffering. That's a strategy. So one of, you know, besides the self-concern of not wanting to feel too much pain, which I think is in the way of compassionate response, another area that I've discovered for myself is that I have a commitment to outcomes. Right? I really like solutions. And I'm good at them, right?

[30:56]

You know, and is this whole talk about compassion, do I have a wishful outcome that I'm going to be better at it? Yeah, I do. Is that going to get in the way? Probably. Probably. But this commitment to outcome, and I know better. Years ago, our teacher, Rab Anderson, used to teach quite often that offering compassion was to be done with no idea that the situation would change. I remember that. He said it often, often, often. Give with no expectation of result. And it's one thing to hear that. It's another thing to wonder, can I actually perform in that way?

[32:05]

Can I actually be that way? And I would say, it's going to take some practice. And it's going to take a deeper commitment on my part to want to know and be. First of all, know more what it is and what it isn't, because I have some misperceptions. So, Is it possible for these set of misperceptions that I have? And I may have been mentioning some things that you also think, or you have others, misperceptions about compassion. Is that very real worldview capable of changing? So there's a faith aspect in here of, is it there? And can these... obscurations that I have dissolve. So I have another experience that gives me great hope for that, which is when I first came to Green Gulch quite a long time ago, I was and I still am a city girl.

[33:18]

I am not a country girl. And the thought of coming to Green Gulch was not fun. I was coming to the country. And my idea of nature was postcards. You know, you look at nature. You look at nature, pretty postcards. So I was here for almost a year and a half in that modality of, and I actually always lived what I called downtown. So I lived in the back of Cloud Hall for about five years, and I lived in the tea house. So it's like there are street lights down here. And it's downtown. I could handle that. So one day, there used to be this gorgeous oak tree, kind of where the bell tower is now. It was a big, beautiful, ancient oak tree. And I was walking out of the tea house towards this oak tree.

[34:22]

And all of a sudden, it popped. into three dimensions. It was like, oh, it's round. It went from this postcard, this one-dimensional view of nature, into this, I'm in it. I'm in it. I'm with it. We're together. And that changed everything. So if a city girl who doesn't hike doesn't really... I've been to the farm, but I'm not involved with the farm, could have a kind of a complete reversal. It's not even like opposite. It's like new. A new way of looking at things. So if that can happen, I have faith that if I keep confessing and studying and practicing... that maybe this set of painful delusions of thinking that I don't have what it takes to help you when my commitment is to help you, maybe that'll shift.

[35:36]

So here's another story about that. One day, a young Buddhist on his journey home came to the banks of a wide river. Staring hopelessly at the great obstacle in front of him, he pondered for hours on just how to cross such a wide barrier. Just as he was about to give up his pursuit to continue his journey, he saw a great teacher on the other side of the river. So the young Buddhist yells over to the teacher, oh, wise one, can you tell me how to get to the other side of this river? The teacher pondered for a moment, looked up and down the river, and yelled back, my son, you are on the other side.

[36:52]

There's more to say, but I'm glad I'm not going to save it because I can save it for the next talk. There are practices that I'm considering that are recommended, Zazen being one of them, to afford us the kind of space for the kind of grace to reveal itself. Actually doing the practice of caring about someone else more than yourself. What's that like? Doing some metta practice, which is not necessarily feeling the, being intimate with the suffering, wishing the suffering to be removed, but to feel love, which warms up the body and the heart. So I, you know, may I be happy, may you be happy. That practice, I think, is a precursor. If there is a hierarchy in the Brahma Vaharas, I don't know, but perhaps metta practice is a helpful, practice for people who think they have an icy heart.

[37:57]

And I would say that the last practice, which I'm considering and have tried, is to say in every situation, everyone is doing their best. Thank you very much.

[38:34]

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