This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Is the sound on? Can you hear me? It's our last day of Sashin, and I have some excitement about this day, this kind of a bridge between the silence and schedule that we've been following to returning to our our everyday lives, whatever that looks like.

[01:02]

It's different for different ones of us. And I just feel very grateful to have had this experience of co-leading the practice period and working with you and getting to know some of you and working closely with Rosalie over the last 10 weeks. I've learned a great deal, thanks to everyone in this room. Thank you. So as I was preparing for my talk today, I found a page from the Little Zen Calendar from Sunday, October 3rd, 1999. It was tucked in, tucked into one of my favorite books by Joanna Macy called Coming Back to Life. And the saying on it must have spoken to me then, and it seemed very relevant today.

[02:07]

It's by Ikkyu, the haiku poet. And it says, one glimpse of the true human being and we are in love. One glimpse of the true human being and we are in love. I hope we've all gotten glimpses of the true human being in each of us and also in one another during this sashim. And practicing with metta, with loving kindness, is one way to access that. But sometimes it just comes upon us unexpectedly. Last night, the words that I spoke in the zendo, My teacher calls them encouraging words, and I hope that the words Wesley and I have offered this week have been encouraging to you. There was the first few lines from the poem Wild Geese by Mary Oliver, and they just came into my mind as I was coming into the Zendo.

[03:12]

I had planned to say something else, but then I thought, oh, I'll trust Wild Geese. And I thought I'd share the entire poem because it also seems a relevant poem for the last day of Sashin. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the world goes on. Meanwhile, The sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

[04:17]

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exacting, over and over, announcing your place in the family of things. So as we reenter our everyday lives, the question may come up, what is our place in the family of things? And how do we move from this time of silence, of turning inward with the support of others, how do we move from that to a world of speech, electronics, the many choices about what to eat, what to wear, what to do, how to spend our time

[05:25]

And what can we take both from our practice, Sazen, this week, and from some of the words of the bodhisattvas that might help us in the days to come. So in the class that Rosalie and I taught, the text that I used was Tygen Leighton's book, Faces of Compassion, Classic Bodhisattva Archetypes and their modern expression. So classic bodhisattva archetypes are those that we are familiar with. There are seven that Taigen talks about in his book. The Buddha as a bodhisattva, Manjushri, Samantabhadra, Avalokiteshbara, or Kuan Yin, and Jizo, and those may all be

[06:30]

somewhat familiar, and he also includes Maitreya and Vimalakirti, who was a lay person who lived in the time of the Buddha. So, in the class, I taught about all of those except for Maitreya, and I said at the last class that I would save Maitreya for Sushin. So here's our chance to learn about Maitreya. And I think that I saved Maitreya for last partly because I was avoiding Maitreya. I've always been kind of puzzled when we chant Maitreya, Buddha of future birth, what does that mean? And how does Maitreya embody some of the qualities of the bodhisattva? So as I prepared for this talk and studied about Maitreya, I learned quite a bit, and my views about Maitreya have shifted.

[07:37]

I think Maitreya has a lot to share with us about some of the qualities that can help us live our lives. Maitreya's name actually in Pali is Maitreya, from Metta. which means, we know, loving kindness. So Maitreya means loving one. And in Chinese, his name is Milo. I don't know if Milo was named after Maitreya. Are you here, Milo? I will ask Milo about that. And in Japanese, his name is Miroku. The legend of Maitreya has a very long history Aside from Shakyamuni himself, Maitreya was the first bodhisattva to be venerated and recounted in Buddhist sutras. And one of the first also to be embodied in stone, and by that I mean turned into an image of Maitreya, was Maitreya.

[08:52]

one of the first images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas to be sculpted. And there are Maitreya figures from the same time as this Gandhara Buddha that we have on our altar, the Gandhara Age in Afghanistan, Pakistan. Those are currently what that part of the world is called. Those images go back to the second century. A.D., our common era. So Maitreya, the legend of Maitreya is that Maitreya was a disciple of the Buddha, and the Buddha predicted that Maitreya would become the next incarnated Buddha in the distant future. That while he was awaiting his destiny, as the future Buddha, Maitreya sat and still sits, according to some, in the Tushita heaven, a heaven where people sit and meditate, contemplating the nature of consciousness and perception and considering how to save all suffering beings.

[10:14]

So thinking of Maitreya can awaken hopes for the future for some people who believe that Maitreya will come back as the Buddha. And also, if we think about Maitreya as a future Buddha, how do we then think about our lives on this planet at this time, and what can we do to address some of the suffering in the world. It's not just about sitting and waiting for Maitreya to come. In the early sutras that were written down a few centuries after Shakyamuni Buddha died, and in some of the commentaries, Maitreya developed as a figure who represented a future golden age of enlightenment.

[11:19]

You know, if we think about a Buddha of the future, when we think about the seven Buddhas before Buddha and all the Buddhas before those Buddhas, there is a sense that there were many Buddhas of the past and there will be Buddhas in the future. And if we think of all those Buddhas as being present in this current moment, Because the only moment that we really can experience is this one we can imagine and the support and contribution of all those Buddhas past and future and all of the ways Buddha manifests in each of us as awakening beings and So at different times in history, Maitreya was revered in China and in Korea in particular.

[12:22]

And at times, there was a period of a few centuries between the 5th and 8th centuries in China when groups of people visualized Maitreya and had very powerful experiences dedicating their lives to the practice of visualizing Maitreya and thus being of benefit to people around them in their own milieu. Maitreya is also depicted as Hotei, or the Chinese name is Budai, and Hotei is the figure we often see in Chinese restaurants, kind of a round, smiling figure.

[13:23]

And the word Hotei comes from a cloth bag, because Hotei is said to have carried with him a cloth bag full of gifts and treats for children, and manifesting that loving kindness, that benevolence He was said to be playful and wise and was supposed to be a reincarnation of Maitreya, and that was in the 10th century. So Maitreya is somewhat different from the other bodhisattvas, especially Samanta Bhadra, Avalokiteshvara, and Jizo, who actively engage in assisting beings who are in difficulty. Maitreya's loving kindness is, it seems, less hands-on. And yet he embodies several of the paramitas' patience, when sometimes in a situation, nothing can be done immediately, and we just have to wait it out or come back to it at a later time.

[14:41]

So that quality of patience, but it's an act of patience because his patience includes the practice of meditation, studying the self and examining the nature of consciousness in order to discover the cause of suffering. And that our practice of meditation certainly can help us develop the quality of patience as well. And his approach to generosity is based on loving kindness and devotion, simply wishing happiness to all beings. So, when Taigen talks about bodhisattva archetypes, he thinks of qualities of these different bodhisattvas as manifesting in the world throughout time and manifesting not only in what he calls the classical bodhisattvas, but in people we know of or people we may know directly.

[15:55]

And as we can identify those qualities of bodhisattvas and others, we may be also able to see them in ourselves and our friends, our family members, our teachers. So In terms of Maitreya, there are three aspects of Maitreya that are relevant to thinking about Bodhisattva archetypes. The first one is looking towards the future and recognizing the unfulfilled potential of our own time or being and envisioning a better one. So can we think of the way we like things to be? and work towards creating that world we'd like to see around us, whether it's around us close by in the Sangha or in our families or at work or in the wider world.

[16:59]

The second is a deliberate, introspective study of consciousness, which Maitreya embodies. And the third quality is practicing with loving kindness. So one of the ways in which Taigen sees the qualities of Maitreya appearing in recent times was in the 60s counterculture with the call for an age of peace and love as a representation of Maitreya's energy. I don't think people in the 60s thought about it that way. But looking back, we can think about it that way. And among young people in that time, there was a strong sense of possibility of new ways of living. A lot of people lived in communal groups, communes, and bringing kindness and compassion to the political realm.

[18:10]

as well. So Abby Hoffman is one of the people that is mentioned as an embodiment of Maitreya. And in addition, the poet Lou Welch, who was also a Zen student, he was a friend and colleague of Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, some of the other beef poets. And he wrote a poem about Maitreya that I thought I would share with you. It's just called Maitreya Poem. At last in America, Maitreya, the coming Buddha, will be our leader and at last will not be powerful and will not be alone. Take it as a simple prophecy. Look into the cleared eyes of so many thousands, young and think, maybe that one, that one, that one.

[19:18]

Look out. The secret is looking out and never forgetting there are phony ones and lost ones and foolish ones. Know this. Maitreya walks our streets right now. Each one is one. There are many of them. Look out for him, for her, for them. For these will break America as Christ cracked Rome. And just tonight, another one got born. Seeing the potentiality of everyone as Maitreya, as the future Buddha, as Buddha nature in all of us. Another exemplar of Maitreya that Taigen identifies is Joanna Macy, who is living in our community.

[20:23]

She lives in Berkeley. She is now in her 80s. And for much of her life, she has been writing and teaching about some of the threats to our environment, to our world, and how we can, by opening to an awareness of them, cut through some of the apathy, which she sees as one of the difficulties in our world today. Some of the challenges in living in our world today are so great that it's very easy to feel overwhelmed and just shut down. I had the good fortune of attending a workshop that Joanna Macy did in 1982 called From Despair to Personal Power in the Nuclear Age.

[21:32]

And at that time, she was giving quite a few workshops in the United States and beginning to teach around the world around this theme of nuclear power and other threats to the environment, which have only increased since then. And now many of her workshops focus on environmental issues. But she worked with groups of all kinds. And I went to a workshop that had about 50 people. We were there for a weekend. And we did various exercises, visualizations, and some of them helping us get in touch with our concerns about what was happening in the world to the world, concerns about poverty and war, as well as about nuclear weapons, and connecting with one another in a deep way so that we could then express some of our

[22:34]

concerns and feelings and move through them to think about what would the world look like if the world were a world in which all people could flourish. And then from envisioning that kind of world, what could each of us do to contribute to it in some small way? So at the end of that workshop, I asked two friends who were there to join me in an activist support group and we began meeting. We all lived in the same neighborhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And we helped one another figure out what each of us could do to move towards our vision of how we thought the world could be a safer and more caring world. And at that time, I was very concerned about the threat of nuclear weapons, and I joined a an affinity group that prepared to do civil disobedience.

[23:39]

At that time, the United States was storing nuclear weapons at an army base in Seneca, New York, and sending them to Germany and England. So some of you may have heard about Greenham Common in England. It was a place where nuclear weapons were stored and where people in England began protesting. and surrounding Greenham Common and climbing over the fence. And so I joined an affinity group that went to the Seneca army base and had my first experience after some training in civil disobedience of climbing over the fence with my affinity group. And as we climbed, we were singing and we jumped down on the other side and were promptly arrested. But it felt like for me a way of speaking out with my body not just writing letters or making phone calls or talking about how I felt, but actually putting my body there on the line.

[24:43]

And that practice of civil disobedience, which goes back quite far, I think probably before Gandhi, and was also practiced by Martin Luther King and so many people in the civil rights movement, still with us today. And there are many people who risk arrest to express how they feel about Guantanamo base, for example, the prisoner, and around the world about violence of various kinds. So that initial experience with Joanna Macy certainly shaped my life and I the other thing I decided to do was learn how to lead those workshops and co-lead them because I was at the time I was a social worker therapist and I did a lot of work with groups so it seemed like a natural thing that I learned to do and a few years later I had another workshop of Joanna's that I attended

[25:52]

She did a goal setting exercise at the end, and I thought that what I wanted to work towards was to go to Japan and to offer some despair and empowerment workshops in Japan, visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So my affinity group, my support group of three friends, which was still meeting, helped me figure out how to raise the funds. how to connect with activists, peace activists in Japan. And it was around that time that I met Kaz Tanahashi, who many of us know as a calligraphy teacher, but he's also, most of his life, been a peace activist. And he helped me connect with some people he knew in Japan. And I went for three weeks and offered despair and empowerment workshops in Tokyo, Kyoto, where I had a friend. in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, visited the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima, which was very upsetting and also, you know, moving in the sense that I really understood the importance of trying to prevent another nuclear war from happening.

[27:12]

So that was in 1987, 1986 when I went. And I think I'm sharing this because I think when we meet someone like Joanna Macy, who has the insight and the ability to convey her deep caring about the threats to our planet, which we all love so much, it can be very inspiring. And not that we all would dedicate our lives to doing that kind of work, but it can inform us in how we cherish life, you know, our own lives and those of our dear ones. And to be grateful for the lives that we have, knowing that

[28:22]

They could be gone in a flash. There are many ways in which we get woken up to that. That could be through our own illness or the illness or death of someone close to us. But being aware of how fragile life on our front is can also help us wake up and use our time to do what we feel is most beneficial. I think for many of us now, practice is a big piece of that, and sharing our practice. I wanted to, there is time to share just one of the teachings of Joanna Macy, It's a meditation that she calls 30 years hence, or 30 years from now.

[29:30]

And I'm not going to ask you to close your eyes and do a guided meditation because I want to have some time for us to engage in question and answer. But I'll give you the gist of it, and you can think about what your responses might be. She has us imagine that it's 30 years from now, and we're in a place where we are able to meet with a young person who's alive at that time. It could be someone we think of as someone in our family or a random child of that time. And she also says that between now and then, some things will have shifted in the world for the better. And I appreciate Joanna Macy's optimism greatly, and I hope she's right.

[30:34]

But we can all do our part. And as you sit, this child comes to you and asks you some questions. So the first set of questions is, Is it true what they say about life back then? Were there really millions and millions of sick and hungry people and bombs that could blow up whole cities? Could that be so? Clearly this child finds it hard to believe. And listen as you answer the child. And then the child asks you a second question What was it like for you to live in a world like that? Weren't you sad and scared all the time? And hear your own reply. And then as the child listens and then asks one more question, where did you and your friends find the strength to do what you did?

[31:47]

How did you keep on going? And then listen again to your response. Then the child is ready to go back to her friends, and as she starts to run off, she turns back, looks up at you, and says, thank you. So just reading that, I find it very moving, you know, that... thinking about the world that we're leaving for our children and grandchildren, whether they're our own or other people's, it can be painful to think about. And so what can we do and how can we make a difference so that children in the future could think back and say, thank you. And, you know, I feel that By practicing and practicing together and taking our practice into our relationships and into our community, we can make a difference.

[32:59]

We can bring that energy of Maitreya, that loving kindness, that awareness of suffering and a wish to meet it in so many different ways. And I know during this practice period, many of you have either begun or continued to write to prisoners, to sit in the library with people, both people who, I'm thinking of the Central Public Library, both homeless people who take refuge in the library and with people who work in that part of the city, to care for and protect sex workers in the tenderloin, to care for older people or friends who are sick, to teach children there's so many ways, and to care for one another in our times that we may have had during the practice period, to express our compassion in so many different ways.

[34:18]

and also just by sitting and getting to know ourselves more deeply and practicing loving-kindness towards ourselves. As we leave Sushi later today and re-enter the complexity of our lives, may we bring with us the patience, appreciation for practice, and loving kindness we have been cultivating for the benefit of all beings. And I'll come back to that saying of Ikkyo, one glimpse of the true human being

[35:23]

And we are in love. Thank you for your attention. We have some time if there are comments or questions. Can you speak a little bit later? I'm really feeling emotional. Yeah, I've been feeling really discouraged lately other than donating some money and going to some meetings and participating in certain campaigns. I haven't really done a lot, and I've been feeling frustrated in my desire to do more. And in the current landscape where so much of our government is being purchased by the very wealthy, feeling really, really even more discouraged and more sort of athletic.

[36:27]

And your talk made me cry a little bit because I realized that it's important not to give up and to continue to look for ways to make the kind of influence that I would like to make to help to create better future. So I just want to thank you because When I leave here today, I'm on a completely different trajectory, just because . Thank you. Thank you for your wonderful attention. Thank you for getting arrested. You know, I sometimes am hard on myself because I'm not doing that now, and some of my friends still put their bodies on the line, and I think I would if it were the right moment and the right, you know,

[37:51]

would do it again I was arrested more than once in the 80s and I also think you know there been a couple of times recently there was once during the Occupy movement when a group of us went to Union Square and there were people from many different Buddhist groups there and we just sat we sat meditation and I have also sat with other Buddhists outside in the times when there were executions, and that was a wonderful expression of concern. So I think there are other ways besides getting arrested that can express our concern. But thank you. Thank you. But I really do appreciate it.

[39:22]

I don't know if everyone heard her. She said she cried, too, because however much her intentions are, she feels she doesn't do enough. What I'd like to say to you, which I think others have said to you, is your whole life inspires me and so many others. The way you have embodied practice, the way growing up in the South with parents who took many risks because of their beliefs. belief in equality, how you've embodied that and brought that here to Zen Center in your work on the cultural awareness and inclusivity committee and all the students she's mentored. And I just think that you, I think, you know, it's easy to see what we haven't done and sometimes hard to see what we have done because we take it for granted.

[40:25]

And I just hope that you feel the appreciation of so many who you inspired. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yes, Greg? What is your opinion and a lot recently a lot in history, civil disobedience has been networked violence by the government and then kind of spiraled out of control on both sides and turned into revolutions or, you know, civil wars like in Syria. I was just wondering what's your opinion on all those situations? I know there are sometimes

[41:31]

demonstrations that if I thank you again. There are sometimes movements and demonstrations that start out non-violently and given event might start out nonviolently. And sometimes people who espouse violence find their way in amongst the nonviolent protesters and can trigger violence. I think people who are committed to nonviolent action really are vulnerable in many situations. I think of, I'm not remembering the name of the square in Egypt, wherever people gather to protest something that's going on, particularly in a government that uses force to subdue other people, it's very risky.

[42:52]

And sometimes nonviolence or people protesting in a nonviolent way really do put their lives on the line. And I think the situations that have happened, that have been happening around the world, and particularly in so many Middle Eastern countries are situations that are very complex and there's a lot of change that's brewing up how that is all going to play out. I don't know. I'm not enough of a historian to really be able to analyze these different situations because it seems different in every country.

[43:54]

I have a friend, his name is His last name is Harzo, Dave, Dave Harzo, who started a movement a number of years ago called the Nonviolent Peace Force, which may be an oxymoron. But he has been working with others to train people in nonviolence in some of the volatile parts of the world. And there are many people around the world who are devoted to teaching on violence and I think it's still a very meaningful force in our world and yet we do live in a world where there are weapons and what can be done to change that you know when our peace fell in the courtyard was dedicated about two years ago

[45:00]

It came about as the result of an idea that Shinji Eshima, who's a composer and bass player in the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, had. We asked him to put together a concert, a peace concert, for our 50th anniversary. And he did, inviting many of his friends from the orchestra and other performers to do an amazing concert at the conservatory. And he had the idea of asking a sculptor he knew, Al Faro, who makes cathedrals and synagogues and churches out of guns and bullets. There's one that is on display at the De Young Museum. He asked Al Faro to make this peace bell, and then Al Faro donated it to Zen Center as a gift. And Shinji's idea was this bell could be rung, or will be rung, as long as there are still weapons in the world. and at such time as there are no more weapons, we will not need to ring a peace bell.

[46:05]

When that will be, I don't know, but it's a wonderful vision, and I think it's in a way the kind of vision that Maitreyuk can help us hold onto so that we don't get too discouraged by some of the violence in our world. Is there any time at all that violence is justified when you're faced with truly horrendous things you've done to your friends and family and you're at risk for your life unless you become violent? I don't think so. The Buddha, it's the story of Angulimala and the Buddha who Angulimala was a very violent person who wore around his neck the thumbs of all the people he had killed and people would see him coming and run he was very scary and so he approached the Buddha or the Buddha was walking and Angulimala was approaching him and the Buddha stood his ground and

[47:23]

And Angulimala was really surprised that the Buddha wasn't afraid. And the Buddha just, I don't remember the exact words, but something that could say how he saw Angulimala's suffering. And Angulimala became a disciple of the Buddha. So is that the way to meet violence? There's a wonderful story in this chapter on Maitreya. Maybe I can just summarize it, but it's about visualizing Maitreya, and it was a story about a Chinese pilgrim who went to India. He was a very well-known pilgrim who He went the whole length of the Silk Road.

[48:28]

And when he was on a boat in India, going down the Ganges, the boat was overtaken by pirates. And they were threatening to kill everyone on the boat. And this pilgrim, I'm going to let go of trying to find his name, had a very powerful practice of visualizing Maitreya. And he started visualizing Maitreya and thinking at least maybe if he were killed, he might be reborn in this Tulshita heaven. And what happened was a storm arose with violent winds and a lot of surf and the boat was rocking back and forth and the pirates were terrified and they let How did they leave the boat in the middle of the storm? I don't know. There's some holes in my memory of how this story goes.

[49:29]

But in any case, it was about the power of thinking about Maitreya in that moment that could just turn the situation around. So is violence ever justified? We commit small acts of violence all the time inadvertently. We kill insects. We wash them down the drain sometimes when we wash the lettuce. I mean, is that... That's not intentional, but I think that's a really important question to sit with and all over. How do we meet violence in our time? Thank you for bringing that up. So I think it's time to end and just thank you again for your attention and it's been wonderful to practice with you.

[50:34]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dorma.

[50:58]

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