This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. As I was coming in, I gave the talk last week, Wednesday night talk. But when I came in, the Buddha was shrouded in saffron. And we had something constructed right here. And then throughout the weekend, we had ceremonies. All sorts of people came, and we did all sorts of things.

[01:04]

And now it's just a memory. Not to say it was inconsequential. We now have a central abbot, and an abiding abbot, and so does Green Gulch. which we had before, but it was different persons. Impermanence. What I wanted to talk about tonight was equanimity and concentration. Maybe they should be the other way around because in the seven factors of awakening, concentration would be six and equanimity would be seven.

[02:09]

But I think in many ways, equanimity is... I don't know if we could say it's essential, but it certainly... to a balanced, settled concentration. Equanimity is a significant ingredient. And then as I've been teaching in the Anapanasati, the four attributes of liberation. Impermanence is the first one. And I was just thinking, oh, and of course, we have this dance we do with impermanence. We remember whatever.

[03:16]

We remember it, we remember it. We relive it. We reassociate with it. We had the mountain seat ceremony. And now it's gone. And now we've returned to normal. As if time could go backwards. And we could go back to where we were before all the workings that were made to allow the mountain seat to happen. And in a way, Equanimity is about holding the big picture. Can you hold all of that? And then part of the challenge over the teachings of Anupanasati is it says, well, so you have impermanence, and then you have dispassion, and then you have cessation, and then you have...

[04:27]

relinquishing, just thoroughly endorsing, dropping it all, dropping any kind of way of struggling with what is. And yet one of the qualities of equanimity is to hold all that a human life can put forth. not just our own human life, but our collective human life. Like when we had those ceremonies on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the number of people, people from five years ago, 10 years ago, 30 years ago, Witsu and Shongo coming the whole way from Japan.

[05:37]

And they came and they went. And the whole event happened and it's over. Is that it? Dispassion? It came and it went. Like spring, summer, fall, and winter. They come and they go. Are we being asked to neutralize our life? Just let it come and let it go. Is that what zazen is? Is that the essential ingredient in stabilization and sustained contact with what happens?

[06:46]

As we explore what it is to shift from doing something, to being what is. Is dispassion the essential ingredient? There's a monastery in Kyoto, the Rinzai monastery, and they have what they call pre-con, cons. And the pre-con, cons are about the breath. They're about how are you relating to the breath? And then it's expressed, that question is parsed out into, if I remember correctly, about 20 or 30 questions.

[08:02]

as we shift from thinking about meditation, thinking about awareness of the breath, thinking about awareness of the body, thinking about awareness of sound, sensations, Having the experience. Someone told me this. I never actually visited that temple. But someone who had practiced there told me. That kind of inquiry into the very stuff of our lives. You can inquiry into, does your reset button think, okay, the mind sits over and here we are back to normal.

[09:25]

Is that how it is for you? Or do you feel more like, okay, and now we've got to do this. got that done, strike it off the list of things to do, and now we've got to do the next thing. That normal is a constant flow of doing things that need to be done. you have 20 inquiries into what you are and how you are. And this whole notion of dispassion,

[10:28]

the notion of that equanimity has as its essential ingredient a kind of calmness or steady such as it is. thought about awareness and equanimity as a constant growth. Okay. You can be aware of your body and mind when they're calm and settled. How about being aware of them when they're a little bit unsettled? How about being aware of them when there's some thinking? How about being aware of them

[11:38]

when your body's not so comfortable? How about being aware of them when this isn't really what you want to have happen right now? Can equanimity grow in a way that it becomes more and more accommodating and accepting and engaging of all the stuff of your individual life and our collective life. What if you thought about them that way? For many years I taught with the Benedict monk brother david standel rust and one day someone asked him what is god and he said god is opening to greater being what if we said awareness is opening to greater being equanimity is opening to greater being

[12:58]

Look, the way my mind works is like we did something utterly amazing. We created the notion we will build a platform and we will kind, we will call it a mind seat. And we will create ceremonies in relationship to it. And they will be intricate and we will rehearse the intricacies of it. And we will invite lots and lots of people to come and bear witness and participate. And then we'll do ceremonies that last hours and hours. And then when it's done, we'll feed all the people.

[14:13]

And then when that's done, we'll clean everything up. And we'll put all the pieces away until the next time we need them. And we'll send the stuff that we rented back to the rental agency. And then we'll put the Buddha Hall back together as it usually is. to our daily rituals. What an amazing way to live. What an amazing way to express and support this practice of opening to greater being. What an amazing thing to put upon our human experience.

[15:26]

And how could it ever be simply dispassionate? We live in a world of pleasant and unpleasant, with some neutral. But actually, if you pay close attention, there's not so much neutral. A very interesting reflection is at the end of your day, reflect on all the successes and failures you had. And of course, you've got to tweak a little bit because you might think, well, I didn't succeed that much and I didn't fail that much. It was more or less in the middle. But what if you just kind of like turned up the volume a little bit on success and failure and thought, okay, well, that was kind of like a success.

[16:43]

I had an animated conversation with someone today. And they were being very passionate and very adamant. And I was searching for some common grind, some way to like, you know, oh, but we both think this. And they weren't having any of it. And then we talked some more, and they got more adamant. And I said, well, didn't you see that three times in this conversation I tried to agree with you? And they went, huh. They just weren't having it.

[17:54]

I thought, okay, then. And then as they were walking away, they said, but I still love you. And I thought, okay, I'm marking that done as a success. What a marvelous way to end an intense discussion. I don't know if they'd heard me quote Suzuki Roshi. A couple of weeks ago, I quoted Suzuki Roshi as saying, sometimes you're difficult to love. That's what he said to the students. There's a way in which that we're hardwired for pleasant and unpleasant.

[19:09]

It's a basic Buddhist teaching. It says there's a term, a Pali term, Vedana, which is usually translated as feeling. But it really is kind of like deep-seated, and then the initiating characteristics of it are pleasant and unpleasant. And the teaching is that pleasant and unpleasant stimulates something within us. Whether we call it success or failure, or whether we infuse it with desire, or aversion. That's how we're hardwired. And there's an interesting way in which we can be blatantly or subtly reactive to it.

[20:25]

It can trigger our reactiveness or not. And that reactiveness can draw us towards it with attraction. And that attraction can grasp and clink. In early Buddhist teachings, there's threefold action. And we're attracted, we grasp, and then we cling. Or, on the other side, we're repelled, or we tend to withdraw, or we have aversion. Can that reactiveness, can something in us be not so caught up in our reactiveness?

[21:53]

Can we be the human we are? Can we have the impulse towards attraction or aversion we have? Can we have even the moving towards or the moving away? Without this becoming a solid reality. Without losing track of this is a dynamic interplay that life presents. This is how it is for us. I live across the street, and there was a priest here, Jordan Thorne, and he died several years ago.

[22:57]

And his daughter, I think of as still grieving, sometimes comes around. And sometimes she sleeps on my doorstep. And as far as we can tell, she's addicted to crack. Sometimes she leaves the paraphernalia lag there. And I think of it all as about grief. She comes around looking for her father. Not that she's stupid and thinks her father is still here somewhere, but in a more emotional, grieving way, she's looking for her father. And each time we interact, we just look at each other.

[24:05]

She's a smart person. She knows all the things I could say. There's no need to say them. Just look her in the eye. Be with her. Let there be a little oasis of non-reactivity. It's not to say that the whole situation is just fine. I don't think of it as just fine. I don't feel it as just fine. But something about opening to greater being. People grieve. And sometimes

[25:21]

in their grief. They do all sorts of things. But even they would rather they didn't do. And then each of us, every day of our lives, we do a dance between responding and reacting. the reacting, we're triggered. And before consideration, we present something. What if we said, this passion of Anupanasati, of the four attributes, that lead to liberation. What if we said it was discovering how to loosen up the bonds of reactivity?

[26:32]

What if we said it's a careful examination of our being that helps us to shift from reactiveness to responsiveness. When I think of equanimity, I think of equanimity as the mother of responsiveness. Think of equanimity as the mother of patience. When I started that conversation with the person who was being adamant, as I said, I wanted to find a common ground.

[27:44]

And they weren't having any of it. And I know the person pretty well. And even they were saying, yes, and you could say this and this about me, and it would be true. But still, here's my adamant point. And I'm not giving it up. your adamant point. I don't particularly like it. I agree with some of it, and I disagree with some other part of it. And I would rather we find we talked about the common ground, but that wasn't how it went. Maybe you could say at its fiercest, patience is a willingness to suffer.

[29:00]

Okay, you've got a discomfort. Well, so just experience your discomfort. Then within that discomfort, of our reactiveness can be triggered or not. And when it's not, something in us tends to loosen, soften. The capacity for responsiveness tends to kind of be more available. And as something loosens, it's almost like we can forgive ourselves, forgive others.

[30:16]

Karigiri Roshi said, and his name, Dainan, translates as great patience. And he said, When we take refuge, we forgive everything for being what it is. And everyone. And that dances with our equanimity. So be it. That's how it is. something in us starts to loosen up. And our desires and our aversions, they're not being so fueled.

[31:25]

They're not being so appropriate. It's hard to hate somebody and totally forgive them at the same time. You know, usually as we forgive them, being themselves, as if they had a choice in the matter, as we forgive them, something loosens up. about how it is for them. We can entertain their perspective more readily.

[32:30]

Oh, so that's how it is. Something, the next attribute in Anupanthasati It's a cessation, something in us. When we forgive, our aggression starts to diminish. The vehemence of our anger doesn't make so much emotional sense to us. something ceases. And at the same time, equanimity becomes more of a plausible way of relating to the human condition.

[33:39]

How can any one of us be anything other than what we are. Does it really make sense to look at someone else and angrily say, stop being yourself. Be the person I want you to be. And then when equanimity softens and creates the capacity for responsiveness, then the capacity for concentration or samadhi, which has two attributes.

[34:49]

And one of the attributes is to experience more fully. the experience that's being experienced. Experience it more fully in contrast to having a reaction to it. And when we experience more fully, as Dogen says so wonderfully in the Genjo koan, we forget the self. by what's happening. And in that actualization, the body and mind of self and others drop away. There's no lingering

[35:54]

comes to an end. Okay, it happened. It's over. We took down the saffron sheets, we packed them away, we put back the bowing med, and just got back to business as usual. Can we live like that? We do it. Fully. And when it's over, it's over. Can we be wholeheartedly in it? And when it's over, can it be over?

[37:08]

Can it leave no trace? And Dogen says, there's no trace of body and mind, not just as an individual, but as a collective. There's no trace of the bodies and minds of others. And Anapanasati says, and when that sort of cessation happens, it's thoroughly let go. And Dugan Sanji says, and that no trace continues endlessly. That's the magic of our lives.

[38:15]

Every single day. Every single mountain seat ceremony. Every interaction. And still I would say, you can entertain yourself. by saying at the end of the day, what were my successes and failures like today? I failed to persuade that person to be part of the common grind of where we could meet and agree. And I had the success of, we didn't end on bitterness.

[39:20]

We ended on a kind of sweetness. You know, many religious traditions, many spiritual traditions suggest this. At the end of the day, I was taught that I was raised Catholic, and I was taught that it's part of what we did. And I know of other traditions that have a very similar practice. Cessation. Can we cease? the bell strikes 8.30.

[40:21]

And I didn't get to the other concentration or aspect of samadhi. The other aspect of samadhi is that it flows. It's moment by moment recreation. And so That concentration is what we might call constant contact. Okay, now this, now this, now this. And of course, again, you can't experience this if you're holding on to what happened before this. Then this is sort of crowded out. This can't be completely itself. So the contact and the cessation and letting that cessation, as Dogen Zenji says, continue endlessly.

[41:34]

Or we could also take out beyond time, take out endless and just say beyond time. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:11]

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