David is a university professor, lecturer, and author. He is also a teacher in the Zen Sanbo tradition of Japanese Buddhism. In 2019, his most recent book, Ekodharma Buddhism, Buddhist teachings for the precipice, became available to the public. David, we're extremely grateful that you're here tonight to speak with us and share your Dharma with us. Thank you very much. Well, thank you for that, Mary. Maybe I can check first of all. Can everyone hear and see me okay? Is the connection all right? I see some thumbs up. That's good. Thank you for the very kind introduction. I'm also very grateful that I can be here with you, especially since it didn't look like it would happen for a while.

[01:00]

Of course, we all would have preferred or I would have preferred if I could have been there in person, but I'm nonetheless pleased that we were able to have this alternative. And that sounds like an alternative that we're all going to get used to very soon. I think I should start by saying that what I have to say this evening, it's not going to have anything to do with the Zen Teisho, such as we're familiar with. And in fact, I'm really not going to be talking about Zen at all. Rather, the issue, the question before us is more generally about sort of Buddhism. What does Buddhism in general have to offer that can help us understand and respond appropriately to the ecological crisis. And you'll notice that I don't say climate emergency, although that's certainly a very important part of it, but I see that as just the tip of a much larger iceberg that includes things like species extinction events, many different types of pollution, loss of topsoil, loss of habitat, lots of forestry,

[02:21]

overpopulation, and so forth. So it's a much bigger issue than just climate change, as I think we know. So, what is there within the Buddhist tradition that can help us understand and respond to that? And one possible answer is not much. The Buddha, of course, lived in a very different time and place, Iron Age India, and... He didn't know anything about this kind of problem. This wasn't around at his time. And this applies also to the other Buddhist traditions that developed as Buddhism spread throughout the rest of Asia. So, I mean, it seems unreasonable to expect that the Buddhist tradition would have anything very direct to offer. But we can also remember that from the very beginning, Buddhism has emphasized both impermanence and insubstantiality. And it exemplifies that in the sense that we've seen how Buddhism has been able to adapt, to transform itself to new conditions.

[03:29]

And now that Buddhism comes not just to the West, but really to a global civilization, even if one that's fairly shut down right now, we can ask, as part of that global civilization, we have this ecological crisis. How can Buddhism be adapted? What is it within the Buddhist tradition that we can turn to and maybe extrapolate to get some wisdom that can help us here? I think there are a number of things that would be well worth talking about if we had time. But given the limitations, what I'd like to do is just pick out one in particular, one issue that continues to fascinate me, even though I've been researching and talking about it for a long time. And what I mean by that is it's the parallel that I see between what Buddhism has always had to say about our individual predicament, what our problem is, and how we might understand it, how we might respond in a way that would actually address and resolve it.

[04:35]

That's the kind of perennial of the tradition. I'm just fascinated by the parallel between that and our collective situation today in relationship to the biosphere. I mean, one simple way to say it as a kind of a prelude... As Thich Nhat Hanh famously said, we are here to overcome the illusion of our separateness. And we usually understand that on the individual level, right? The sense of separation, that there's somehow a me inside and feeling separate from the rest of you and the rest of the world outside. But isn't that really also at the root of the ecological crisis as well, that we feel this sense of separation from the earth, that we treat it as simply a source of resources, to be used as needed and as a dump to dump our waste into. Anyway, I think the parallels go much deeper than that, but I think that always suggests something that I think many of us have suspected, and maybe I can put a little bit of life onto this claim, that the ecological crisis isn't just an economic or political problem or scientific problem, but...

[05:52]

In some sense, maybe it's also fundamentally a spiritual problem. At least that's what I would hope would come out of what I have to say today. Anyway, so what I'd like to do is present a talk in two parts. The first part, I'd like to give you my own sort of personal take on this. perennial predicament that I think Buddhism is talking about. And I'll be using somewhat different language than we find either in Zen or the usual kind of Four Noble Truths that we read about in the Pali Canon. And having done that, then what I'd like to do is sort of spend the rest of my time looking at the parallels and basically arguing that, hey, this gives us a lot of insight into our collective challenge these days. And of course, What that raises, of course, is the question is, are there therefore also parallels in the solutions? I mean, we know what the Buddhist solution is to our individual predicament.

[06:56]

Does that help us perhaps give us some sense of what's needed collectively? Anyway, we'll see. I hope that makes sense. So I'm just going to jump right into the first part of the talk and give you my own sort of take on what I think the Buddhist path is about. The Buddha, of course, started with dukkha, and it's pretty clear from what he said that that's the most important term, really, in early Buddhism, maybe Buddhism. It's the term, of course, usually translated into English as suffering, but that really only makes sense if we understand it in the broadest possible sense. Not just physical, mental pain, but... dissatisfaction, frustration, anxiety, dis-ease. I mean, the Buddha said quite clearly all he had to teach was dukkha and how to end it. And he talked in the Pali Canon about different types, dukkha due to physical and mental pain, due to impermanence, maybe especially our own impermanence, our own mortality.

[08:03]

But it's the third kind of dukkha that... I want to focus on this evening. It's the dukkha connected with this other really important term in the Pali canon, anatta, usually translated as not-self, non-self, no-self. Tricky term. What does it really mean? To me, the most fascinating thing in the whole of early Buddhism is the connection that the Buddha makes between dukkha and the delusion of a separate self. Interestingly, in the modern world, we have another way of talking about this. We would say, and you know, child psychology talks this way, that the sense of self, and I mean, it's not something that infants are born with, right? The sense of self is a psychological, social, and linguistic construction. In other words, the self, you could say, it's It's a kind of a function. It's the way that mostly habitual ways of thinking and feeling and acting and reacting and remembering and planning and intending, it's the way that they work together and reinforce each other.

[09:13]

The sense of self is also a social construct in the sense that it involves being socialized in a certain way, right? It involves learning to see ourselves in the way that other people see us. For example, maybe our mother, when we're young, she looks into our eyes and says our name. And we learn to identify with that. And again, we learn to understand that we're a self in the way that other people are. And finally, this sense of self is also a kind of linguistic construct in that it's also very important connected to that, you know, learning how to use language in certain ways, learning the meaning and the proper way to function, to use them, words like I, me, mine, you, yours, his, hers, and so forth. So anyway, that's pretty straightforward. I don't know that there's much there to argue about. But what's interesting about Buddhism is that, again, as I said earlier, the emphasis that there's something fundamentally unsatisfactory about this sense of self.

[10:16]

And maybe we can make sense of this. I mean... If the sense of self is a construct, if it doesn't refer to something real, it's not a thing, it's not a pure consciousness, if it's a function, then in a way there's nothing there. And the result of that, you could say, is that the sense of self is inherently uncomfortable, inherently insecure. Maybe that's the best term. Insecure because there's nothing there that could be secured. And in fact, I think we become aware of this. I think we are aware of it. The way we become aware of it is as a sense of lack, by which I mean the sense that something is wrong with me. Something is missing. Something isn't quite right. And in fact, I think this is one of the great secrets, one of the great open secrets of life, that we all have this sense of lack, so far as I've been able to tell.

[11:19]

And yet we don't realize that everyone else does too. We tend to think of it as our own individual problem. But because we have this sense of lack, because we have this sense that something is wrong with us, we need some way of trying to resolve that, which I do call lack projects. Or sometimes I call them reality projects because another way to express the problem is we don't feel real enough. And if we could just... attains whatever we think will make us feel real, then we'll be okay. Here, we're very influenced by our society. I mean, I think our society tends to condition us in terms of the projects that we become preoccupied with. For example, growing up in the United States, I think we learned pretty quickly we don't have enough money. We don't have enough consumer toys. I think that goes pretty deep, and it doesn't matter how much money you have, it's never enough. That's the nature of all of these lack projects.

[12:21]

We misunderstand the origin of the problem, and we think what we lack is something out here, and if only I can get enough of that, then everything will be okay. Other examples might be fame. I think that's very common now. The desire to be famous, the desire to be a great Zen master. What about that? Or... The romantic project, you know, the idea that if I can just find that perfect other person that will sort of complete me, then, like they say in all the fairy tales, we'll live happily ever after. I mean, I think these are three kind of classic examples, and there's lots more, but three classic examples of life projects that we so easily fall into because our society tends to be conditioned. we're conditioned by society in these sorts of ways. Two important points to say about these lack projects or reality projects.

[13:26]

Number one, they all sort of involve a certain kind of relationship with the future, right? In the sense that we, right now, here and now, I have the sense of lack, the sense of inadequacy. But the idea is that Sometime in the future, when I attain of whatever it is that I think I need, then I'm going to be okay. So it tends to fall into a certain kind of devaluation of the present, or rather using the present as a means to get somewhere else in the future. It tends to make us future-oriented. And the other thing to say, of course, is that insofar as we have this sense of lack and we feel this need to fill it up, it also tends to make us somewhat self-centered in the sense that The meaning of my life is pursuing these lack projects which can make me feel whole, make me feel complete, fill up this black hole at the core of our being. We could pursue this in a lot of different directions.

[14:28]

For example, lack isn't just an individual problem. We can see that this is also a larger social-economic problem insofar as we have an economic system that depends on exploiting our sense of lack, persuading us that... You know, it's the next thing we buy that's going to make us happy. We could spend a lot of time on that, but in fact, what we're going to do, what I'd like to do, is rather shift to what Buddhism has to offer here. Because I think Buddhism has something really important. It's like the wonderful thing about the Buddhist path is... it actually can show us how we can actually resolve the problem. And in terms of what I said before, you know, insofar as this sense of self is a construct, we can understand the Buddhist path as deconstructing and reconstructing the sense of self. I mean, isn't this what's going on when we're meditating, right?

[15:30]

So when we're meditating, what are we doing? If the sense of self is composed of all of these habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and so forth, when we're meditating, We're letting them go. We're not identifying with them. And so, in this process, we can come to this experience that Dogen talks about of forgetting ourselves, that is to say, letting go of ourselves. And we can have this experience of non-duality. Or as Dogen puts it, realizing our intimacy with the 10,000 things, right? Actually, my favorite formulation of that is... not by a Buddhist, but by the Neo-Advaitan Nisargadatta, who put it so well, so succinctly, when he said, looking inside, I see that I am nothing. Looking outside, I see that I am everything. Between these two, my life flows. Beautiful, beautiful. Wisdom and compassion, right?

[16:31]

Looking inside, That's the wisdom, seeing I'm nothing. Looking outside, it's the love of realizing that I'm everything. The two pillars of the Buddhist path. And it also shows something, I think, about the nature of what we call the bodhisattva path. Too often it's been understood in a kind of mythological way as the bodhisattva is sort of sacrificing his or her own well-being. They could sort of go to nirvana, but they choose to kind of stick around for the rest of us. Whereas what this, I think, clarifies is that insofar as awakening is realizing my non-duality with you and everyone else, what that implies then is a shift in the focus of the meaning of my life, right? As long as there was a sense of separation, preoccupation with

[17:32]

my well-being with the delusion that that's separate from other people's well-being. Once I realize that that separation is a delusion, then obviously I'm going to live in the world in a different way. The other side that goes along with that, of course, would be, as I mentioned earlier, this idea of reconstruction. And actually, I think that's the real meaning of the karma teaching, although we don't have time to get into that anymore this evening. Insofar as the karma teaching is all about transforming our motivations, you know, to make sure that we're not motivated by greed, ill will, delusion, but rather by generosity, loving kindness and wisdom. I think that's the real meaning of the teaching. So it's not simply that we have some experience of non-duality, but that we embody it, we integrate it in terms of how we actually live in the world. Okay, enough on our individual predicament. Obviously, that's a little different language than we read, say, in the Pali Canon or even in some of the Zen stories.

[18:37]

But I think it's one way to articulate what the fundamental problem is, what it is that Buddhism is working on and how it can help us resolve this deep-rooted delusion that causes so much suffering, so much dukkha. What I'm really struck by... continually fascinated by is the parallels between what I've just said and our collective situation today. Because, frankly, everything that I've just said about our individual predicament also applies to our collective one. For example, we not only have individual senses of self, we also have collective senses of self. So, I'm not just David, right? I'm not just David Loy. I'm a man, not a woman. I'm American, I'm not Chinese. I'm white, I'm not African American. We fall into the same kinds of separations or dualities, and as we know, we can get into a lot of the same kinds of problems insofar as we're pursuing what we think is the best, the well-being of the group at the expense of the outside group, the other group.

[19:49]

But here, the really interesting duality is, or The really interesting self is our human species as a whole, or maybe we should say our now global civilization. That we can understand as the self, and the other that we feel separate from would be the rest of the Earth, the rest of the biosphere in particular. And again, I think it's hard to deny that we have a sense of separation there. What we don't always realize is that that sense of separation hasn't always been the case, that that's, in fact, just like I said about the individual sense of self. So, likewise, the collective sense of separation that we have from the earth wasn't something that always existed. I mean, if we just go back, well over 95% of our human history, we were hunting gatherers. And, you know, hunting gatherers, for example, they don't feel separate from the rest of the natural world.

[20:53]

You can't. I mean, if you're going to be a hunter, you've got to think like the prey. And if you're going to escape the hunter that's hunting you, you've got to think like that predator as well. And if you're going to be gathering nuts and fruits and roots, you've got to know where they are and when they are, all that kind of thing. So there's a sense, you know, at that point, we're still animals, and we're still aware that we're animals. The distinction... And please excuse me if this seems like kind of extraneous, but it's not at all. It'll make a lot of sense in a moment. The really strong distinction between sort of human society and the rest of the natural world, it's interesting that that actually goes back to the Greeks, to the Greek civilization, which curiously, you know, we tend to sort of trace Western civilization back to classical Greece, don't we? They were the ones who made this strong distinction between what they called the natural world, Fusus, and human culture, nomos. And it was because of that that they were able to create this new kind of political system, democracy.

[21:56]

Not a very good one by modern standards. Women and slaves needn't apply. But the fact that they felt that they could reconstruct their society was... a new insight, something that we, of course, take for granted today. But in fact, it's important to realize that before the Greeks, when we look at archaic civilizations, they tend to take their civilizations, their social structure, their hierarchy, they tend to take it for granted. That's just the way things are. They take it for granted in the way that they would take their ecosystems for granted. And likewise, they wouldn't distinguish between, say, the sacred and the secular, right? So the guy at the top, and it's usually a guy, the emperor or whatever, I mean, he's both a secular ruler, but he's also like the high priest, the one who's most connected with the sort of gods. So that distinction that's so fundamental to our civilization between secular and secular doesn't apply at all. And they basically took their social structure as sort of sacred.

[23:02]

They took it for granted because of something, that we, in particular, have lost today. What I'm pointing at is the fact that every one of these archaic societies that I've been able to study, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the pre-Columbian, and so forth, all of them believed that they had an important role to play in keeping the cosmos working, which is, again, something that the Greeks lose once they distinguish human society from the natural world. What do I mean by that? Well, for example, the Mesopotamians, they believed that humans, we've been created by the gods as their slaves. And if we don't feed them with sacrifices or maintain temples for them and so forth, they'll get angry. And you don't want the gods to get angry. Maybe the best-known example, though, which all of us have heard about at one time or other, the Aztecs, who had this unsavory...

[24:04]

custom of dragging war captives up to the top of the step pyramids and cutting out their steel beating hearts with obsidian knives. Why? To offer to the sun god. They had to do that to keep the sun god on his course, or he might get lost. I think you can see my point here. What's fascinating about these archaic pre-Greek societies, which... which sort of took their social structure for granted, was that they really thought that human beings weren't separate from the world, that we had a role, a role to play, a very important role to play. And if we didn't do it, things would fall apart, the cosmos. And the result of that was that it gave them a kind of social security that we today, I think, can hardly imagine. You could say that today we no longer believe that we have a role to play, right?

[25:18]

What kind of society should we have? What's our relationship? What's our responsibility to the rest of the biosphere? We don't know. In fact, Thanks to the way that we understand evolution, we think of humans as mere accidents of genetic mutation. And basically, all we can do is sort of enjoy ourselves if we can, while we can, as long as we can. That's kind of like what's become the meaning of life, which connects, of course, with the whole emphasis on consumerism. I mean, sometimes it seems to me that the real religion of the modern world is consumerism. In fact, it's the most popular religion ever. It wins converts more quickly than any other religion because it's got these great proselytizing techniques called advertising, right? It teaches us what's really important about the world and how to live in it. But what's going on there?

[26:22]

I see that as a response to an alienation. that is built on the fact that because we feel separate from the rest of the world, because we don't feel that we're part of something greater than ourselves, because we don't feel we have any responsibility to anything greater than ourselves, there's a dukkha built into that. Or, to use the language that I used before, there's a kind of lack. I think there's a kind of a collective lack built into that. And one of the best expressions of it, I don't know... If you've had a chance to read this book before by Yuval Noah Harari, I'm sure some of you are familiar with it. What I'd like to do is just quote a few of the last sentences. This is the very last thing that he talks about in the book. Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind. It's not that brief. It's 470 pages. But let me just read to you how he concludes what he says about our history or the situation rather that we're in today.

[27:27]

Despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We've advanced from canoes to galleys to steamships to space shuttles, but nobody knows where we're going. We're more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods, we are accountable to no one. We are consequently wreaking havoc in our fellow animals and on the surrounding ecosystem, seeking little more than our own comfort and amusement, yet never finding satisfaction. And then his last sentence, Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want? I mean, what do you think?

[28:33]

Is he on to something there? I think so. I think he's touching on what I would call our collective sense of lack. The fact that our dissociation, our sense of separation from the earth, that our civilization now involves, that there's a lack, a dissatisfaction built into it. If you're with me so far, I've already sort of developed the parallel pretty far. We have sense of separation. You remember when I spoke earlier about the individual problem. We have this individual sense of separation from other people. And it's not... To use a modern language, it's a construct. Just the way our sense of... Separation from the earth is a construct. And to take it one step further, it's a construct that actually is infected with dukkha, that there's some sense of lack, some dissatisfaction built into it. And basically what I've just argued so far is exactly the same, I think, is true for our now global civilization.

[29:40]

Alienation constructed and that there's dukkha built into that. Following on the parallel, how have we responded? What's our collective lack project? You remember I spoke earlier about our individual lack projects, right? If I can just get enough money, become famous enough, become whatever. Is there a collective version? And I think there is. I think as soon as we look forward, it becomes kind of obvious. I think it is our collective preoccupation with never-ending economic growth and technological development. what we tend to call progress, although I think now more and more of us are tending to doubt that. In fact, that it actually really is progress. Interesting questions. If you ask, when will we consume enough? When will we have all the technology we need? And why are those such weird questions?

[30:42]

Because, of course, we know that there's no end to the process. It just goes on, which makes me ask. And so... Are we headed for something or are we running away from something? Or to put it another way, why is more and more always better if it can never be enough? What all of that implies, of course, is a particular kind of relating to the earth. That is to say, we relate to the earth as a means to our end. It's hard for us to experience the earth, to understand the earth in any other way. The idea that the earth would have rights, that we would have responsibilities, that we would be beholden to it in some way, that's very hard for us to conceive of. It's simply a means to an end. The means have become the de facto end. So we don't really know where we want to go or what we should value.

[31:45]

We've become demonically, I think, demonically in the sense that we just want more and more, more economic growth, more power, more technology. What's the meaning of it all collectively? It's an end in itself. Where is it going? We don't know. It's taken on a life of its own. It's interesting, on the individual level, if I relate to you or if I relate to other people simply as means to my ends, we see that as problematical, right? I'm a psychopath or a sociopath, and yet that's what we are doing to the earth. We sort of take that for granted. We don't see that as problematic in relationship to the earth. So what's the solution then? Returning to nature? There's another sort of interesting parallel here. with Buddhism. You know, for Buddhism, it's not about getting rid of the self. We can't get rid of the self, right? Because there's never been a self.

[32:46]

It's not about getting rid of something. Rather, it's simply realizing something about the way things have always been. That the self is a construct, necessary in certain ways to function, but nonetheless a construct that also becomes problematical. In the same way, we can't return to nature. Why not? because we've never left it, of course. And if you're not sure about that, well, please try stop breathing for four minutes and see what happens. Or stop drinking water for a week and see what happens, right? We learn pretty quickly that, you know, the earth isn't just our home or just a place where we happen to be. It's our mother. And in a fundamental sense, it's even more intimate in that we never really cut the umbilical cord, right? The environment isn't simply an environment, a place where we happen to be. It's the ground from which and within which we arise.

[33:48]

We're not in nature. We are nature. We're one of its many manifestations. My body doesn't end at my fingers and toes. Our blood is salty. Why? Because it reduplicates the original salty home, the ocean. We share over 99.5% of our DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos. We're embedded in the natural world, and yet we spend so much of our time and energy creating environments where we don't feel that and trying to distinguish ourselves from the rest of the natural world. It's interesting, too. Lots of things are interesting here, but one old philosophical problem in Buddhism is this issue... If there's no self, if there's really no self, if the self is just a construct that needs to be deconstructed, who is it or what is it that becomes enlightened?

[34:49]

Once you start to think about it, it's pretty interesting. But I wonder if, in a way, the Buddha himself answered that, at least according to a particular myth that we find in the Pali Canon. Supposedly, very soon after the Buddha's great awakening under the Bodhi tree, he was approached by Mara, who challenged him. You think you're awakened. You think you're enlightened. Well, who authenticates that? Who verifies it? Maybe it's just your fantasy, your delusion. What did the Buddha do? He touched the earth. And then he said, the earth is my witness. Wow. What does that really mean? It's a really interesting question. How do we understand that? I've been very impressed by people like Brian Swim and Thomas Berry who've offered a more sort of spiritual take on the evolutionary process, for example, in the book The Universe Story.

[35:58]

And basically what they come down to is arguing that maybe we human beings are the way that the earth wakes up. Maybe we are the way that the earth becomes self-conscious. That with human beings, you know, as sometimes we now think of ourselves as some kind of a cancer, but maybe we can understand the earth in some way as, given that we're part of the earth, given that we're a way that the earth is manifesting, maybe there's something going on here. Maybe there's something really... more intimate, that the earth is doing something with us. And maybe if we can just realize that, if we can wake up, if the earth can bear witness to our awakening, then maybe we can get in touch with our responsibility. Maybe we can gain this new role. understand our relationship with the earth in a different way, where we also feel that we have this role to heal it and to preserve it.

[37:03]

Still, though, this does leave this issue of, how to say it, does this understanding, would this understanding resolve the basic anxiety that still haunts us, where it seems like we have to create our own meaning in a world where God has died, right? We still have this sense of of separation. And what this really amounts to, I think, is going back, trying to complete the parallel that I've been arguing for here. What collective parallel might correspond to the individual awakening that the Buddha had and that the Buddhist tradition helps us to experience? I'm reminded of something else Thich Nhat Hanh said. The Buddha attained individual awakening. Now we need a collective enlightenment. to stop the course of destruction. Collective enlightenment, that sounds right, but what would it really mean? Does it mean that everyone is going to start meditating? Well, if so, it's going to be a long wait and maybe much too long.

[38:10]

So how can we understand what's possibly going on here? And let me just conclude by sort of trying to answer, trying to give a different answer there, because my sense is that, well, certainly for me, sort of looking in the wrong place, I wonder if the collective awakening that Thich Nhat Hanh says we need, I wonder if it's already happening. Maybe we're just missing what's happening right in front of our eyes. And here, I'm inspired by a book that I'm sure many of you are familiar with, Paul Hawkins' book, Blessed Unrest. He was inspired to write that book when he realized that something is happening now that's never happened before in human history, that we have a very large number of groups of people, most of them small, almost all of them non-profit, sort of springing up organically, spontaneously, to work for social justice and the healing of the earth.

[39:14]

I think in the book he originally estimated between a million and a million and a half all around the world I think now maybe he has said it's well over 2 million, if I remember rightly from his TED talk. But the point is, it's not a communist conspiracy. Many of these groups are very small, very localized, but nonetheless, it's not about for them our own individual well-being apart from the well-being of the whole. He thinks something is going on here, and I wonder if he's right. And the chapter in that book that impressed me most deeply was the one where he compares this phenomenon with the immune system of our bodies. He says, can we understand this spontaneous, organic arising of all of these groups of people? Can we understand this as maybe the way that the earth is rising up to try to heal itself?

[40:16]

interesting question. He also emphasizes there's no guarantee that this will work. We know that our immune systems can sometimes fail, with HIV and AIDS, for example, where the immune system is destroyed. But nonetheless, I think he's on to something here that could be, I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me. And in fact, I tend to think of socially engaged Buddhism as playing a very small role in or being a very small part of this larger phenomenon. And that may be what Buddhism, the most important thing that Buddhism has to offer is the Bodhisattva path insofar as that emphasizes the dual practice. In other words, it's not enough to be engaged socially and ecologically. We also need to be working for our own transformation. And that's really what's so wonderful about the Bodhisattva path, isn't it? That we realize the non-duality of those two. that we need to work for our own transformation, as in our practice, as in our meditation, our zazen, for example.

[41:28]

But it's not enough just to sit in our butts and sort of enjoy our equanimity. We need to be engaged in the world. And in fact, I think there's a really important sort of insight here. The truth is, sometimes it's not that difficult in our practice to have experiences, you know, some insights that seem quite really important. But that doesn't mean that our deeply rooted, self-centered habits automatically disappear, right? They're still there. You have a Kensho, you have something, you have some moment of awakening, but those old habits, they die hard. How do we transform them? Well, we transform them, we integrate those insights into our lives by acting in more selfless ways that become habitual. And given the kind of institutional challenges we face today, it means acting in ways that also try to address the kinds of problematical institutions and larger social problems that we face today.

[42:32]

Anyway, that completes the parallel, and I hope that it makes sense, that we not only have this challenge of individual sense of separation, this constructed sense of separate self, that's infected with dissatisfaction, sense of lack. But we also have it collectively. We also have a collective lack project, which, like our individual lack projects, tends to be preoccupied with the future. Progress, it's going to get better. That's how we're taught to put up with all the things that aren't going well now. Don't worry, it'll be better in the future. And that we have... We need to realize... not only our non-duality with the earth, but maybe we also need to realize that kind of collective enlightenment that we are needing, that maybe this is arising, and maybe that we, as socially engaged Buddhists, we can see ourselves as a part of this, a part that has the special function of emphasizing the importance of combining the personal transformation with the collective one.

[43:40]

I hope that makes sense. Thank you all for your attention. To close, you can find the bodhisattva vows in the bottom of the chant window. May our intention equally extend to every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's way. Beings are numberless, I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them.

[44:45]

Buddha's way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it. Thank you very much, David. Thank you, Mary, for all of your help making this possible and to the others at the Zen Center. We'll have a chance to meet in person sometime. I hope so, too. It was my absolute delight. Thank you very much. And I hope you have a good sleep tonight.

[45:28]

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