Welcome to all of you and especially thank you to my assistants this morning who I think actually have your own program in the student lounge and maybe at this time you can make your way over there. But thank you for joining us and helping out. Before I talk about the Four Noble Truths and other things, I want to just say that it's something kind of wonderful about the innocence and the openness of kids.

[01:04]

And their shyness, et cetera, too. I'm the father of two kids, except they're now grown up and on their own. And when they were quite young, Someone asked me what it was like to have two little kids. And I hope I can say this. But I replied, you know, it's like having the best puppies you could ever imagine. I would walk into a room and they would start crawling towards me. And they would pick up and, you know, smile and want to play. And then they changed. Sure. A sense of compassion and kindness arises naturally in the presence of children and what a gift they are.

[02:09]

Also, they're not always a gift. They're complicated. And that needs to be acknowledged as well. I heard a story of a young girl. I think I heard this secondhand from Linda Cutts. And she said that this young girl's family, there was another sibling that was sick with leukemia. And this sibling was becoming profoundly ill. and not recovering. And they figured out that a bone marrow transplant was the solution, would be helpful. And in fact, it was figured out that this young girl, the sister, was a donor match. And so the parents wanted not to just assume that they could say this for the child.

[03:17]

So they talked with the child about what it meant. And tried to get sort of an active relationship or something of that. And of course the little girl said yes. You know, I want to help my sister, my older sister. And then at the time when they were in the whatever room where this procedure was happening, just as they were preparing and about to do the bone marrow transplant, the little girl looked up at her mother and said, Is this when I start to die? Well, imagining that that maybe was what was going to happen and still kind of willingly going into it for her older sister's sake. So there's something as lovely about the spirit of a child. Sometimes.

[04:18]

Well, welcome to the San Francisco Dance Center. And welcome to some of you to a one-day sitting, some of you to the beginning of a six-week practice period about the heart, not about the heart surgery, but the four levels. And for some of you, just welcome because you've managed to find yourself here today. So in all cases, you're warmly appreciated your presence. So this is a Zen Buddhist temple at the San Francisco Zen Center. And starting to start, I just want to say, what is Buddhism?

[05:19]

I want to ask that question, and I'm going to try to offer a simple answer. And in this simple answer, I want to say that... It's actually not so simple. Buddhism is a contradictory bunch of things sometimes. But one way of understanding this practice is that it's a way of life. Another way of understanding it is that it's a discipline, a spiritual discipline. You might believe that it's a religious practice. But However you frame it, what I believe a Buddhist study is about is about learning to wake up, making the effort to wake up from what might be a fog. And even the word Buddha is...

[06:31]

in some ways it's the same its meaning is a woken up person Buddha is someone whose eyes are open who sees clearly the way things are and the Buddha who lived 2500 years ago named Shakyamuni Buddha when he woke up at Bodhaya, his very, very first teaching was about something called the Four Noble Truths. And I want to, in a moment, talk about the Four, maybe mostly about the First Noble Truth. But I'm going to stop for a second on this thing called Waking Up. Waking Up. All of us wake up every day.

[07:50]

For me, I usually need the help of an alarm clock to wake up. I'm sound asleep and the alarm rings and I put my hand out and I turn it off and I lay there for a moment and then I swing my legs off of the bed and I stand up and I wake up. It's one kind of waking up. And you know, waking up is waking up. Let's not make it too fancy about it. I woke up from a dream and I entered the day. But in my heart, actually, I think that actually that's not entirely what's meant by waking up. In Zen practice, we have a kind of special vocabulary that we use on the topic of waking up.

[08:58]

A learned vocabulary. And... In some ways, this special Zen... speak has a grounding in a non-dual has a grounding in non-duality and so when one hears it spoken about it might seem kind of lofty for instance at the Zen Center we might hear teaching and we might even chant this in this room at morning service sometimes Each moment of zazan, zazan is meditation, each moment of zazan is equally wholeness of practice, equally wholeness of realization. This is like a hammer striking emptiness.

[10:00]

So we might hear something like that. It's like a hammer striking emptiness and before and after its exquisite peel permeates everywhere. So this is something that our Zen ancestor Dogen wrote. And yes, this is a teaching about waking up outside of limited conditions. But I worry, actually I don't even worry, I'm quite certain that for most of us, when we sit down and face, sit down in a zendo or sit down at a table across from someone we're having dinner with and face the reality of that moment, it's not like a hammer striking emptiness, it's like Jordan or any one of yours, substitute any one of yours names, working away through the day.

[11:09]

to meet the person and not always knowing if we are. Shakyamuni Buddha, in the first chant, short kind of teaching that we just read, about the Four Noble Truths and actually Shakyamuni Buddha throughout his entire teaching career even though it was extraordinarily prolific and there are many many things he said I'd say one of the most amidst all of those different Dharma offerings he made he consistently said that the one thing I teach is I teach about suffering and how to realize the end of suffering And here at the San Francisco Zen Center, Suzuki Roshi, our founder, talked sometimes about suffering.

[12:25]

He said in 1965, in a talk he gave, he said, why we suffer is because everything which will give you suffering is something created by our mind. And I said that, but don't take my word for it, because actually we have Suzuki Roshi here with us. Keep them. Thank you. Thank you. It was a little tough, maybe.

[15:56]

I had an infection because I was a little no longer, like it said here. And I apologize for the scratchiness of it. One reason that I wanted to play the actual voice of Suzuki Roshi is because... In some way, this practice period is also dedicated not just to the Four Noble Truths, but to Suzuki Roshi and to honoring and recognizing the fact that 50 years ago he came from Japan to America. And also three weeks from now, it will be in fact actually the 50th birthday of that. And on a Saturday program on May 23rd, we'll have a whole bunch of stuff that will happen about Suzuki Roshi. So I just mentioned that. And I believe that audios and talks by Suzuki Roshi, including this one, are going to be posted on our website. And I think that if you listen to them with earbuds, they're much more audible.

[17:05]

Later on in this same talk, Suzuki Roshi said why we suffer. He said... why Buddha told us about the Four Noble Truths is to destroy our easy way of understanding life. Why Buddha taught us about the Four Noble Truths is to destroy our easy way of understanding life. And then, in that same talk, just a few moments later, he said, a long period of Zanglen is very difficult, you know, But also, a short period of zazen is very difficult too. People differ in their circumstances.

[18:16]

People differ in their fortune. And though we are different in so many ways, what we share in common is this fact that things change. And what we share is the experience of the world as an impermanent shifting event. And I think this is a bond that we all have if we acknowledge it, if we notice it. and one part of the teaching of the Four Noble Truths is that even when our circumstances might seem positive even though it might seem that fortune is shining upon us there is dukkha there is change there is impermanence and we cannot count on it and when we start to count on it that is when we suffer because it will not remain the same

[19:20]

Let me clarify or say something more about that. The first noble truth of impermanence is not some sort of dogmatic statement that everything is suffering. Even though just a moment ago I said... in my talking about how things happen and how things change, and then we suffer. I said that we suffer. Well, but that's not a fact. Excuse me, that's not a necessary fact. The Four Noble Truths are rather a reflection of the way things can develop. And... It's not so much that everything is suffering, rather there is the truth of suffering.

[20:26]

Suffering is an experience that we have, not a condition that is our birthright. Because part of the Four Noble Truths is that... There is a path. There is a suffering and there is a cause. And there is a way to end suffering and there's a path. There is a cause to ending suffering. There is a path to follow. And even the word suffering that I've been using about the first of these four noble truths, it's kind of a melodramatic word.

[21:42]

Because actually, and it's a limited word, because the first noble truth also includes the truth of joy. It includes contentment and satisfaction. Because these are also conditions subject to impermanence. And these are what make up dukkha, make up change. These are the things that happen to us that we experience. We might be happy on the day of our marriage. And then some years later. I hope we're still happy. We might have a strongly positive moment or ten moments in meditation. The bell rings, we get up and we run into somebody and something happens.

[22:42]

So things change. And the first noble truth is that when we look for our... for our happiness in those things that are conditioned, anticipating their continuation, well, we will have something very close to what that word suffering means happens to us. So... Duga, impermanence, the first noble truth is the recognition that our conditioned life, our conditioned life is subject to change. There is at the very end of the Diamond Sutra a short verse, a kind of well-known verse in Buddhism, in the Mahayana school.

[23:50]

And it goes like this. As stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp, a mop show, Dewdrops or a bubble. A dream, a lightning flash or cloud. So should one view what is conditioned. A dream, a lightning flash. So do we. So should one view our conditioned experience. The tradition of Buddhism, if we want to practice this way, it's actually sometimes useful to study what's gone before and to learn from people who are pioneers who maybe some hundreds or even thousands of years ago thought about the very same issues that we have in front of us today.

[25:02]

And on this matter of the way we experience the change of the world, and make it into something called suffering, there has been some research. And one of the results of this research is that there is a teaching that there are three kinds of suffering. And I'm going to briefly name them. Of course, there's only one kind, or maybe... one million gods. But I'm going to name three. Divide it into three. There is the suffering of suffering. There is the suffering of becoming. And there is the suffering of change. And this, as I said, this is a list that if you want to become a literate Buddhist you might remember.

[26:05]

Because it's part of the literate background of Buddhist teachings, sort of having some things. It's like a catechism, you know. So the suffering of suffering is like when we are hammering a nail in the wall and the hammer misses the nail and eats our common stick, you know. Even those of us who haven't had that experience can imagine, can agree, and sympathetically understand, yeah, that might be, that would be ouch. This is an example of the suffering of suffering. And the suffering of becoming is like the suffering that happens when we're born. When we're young kids that actually in order to become independent have to experience what it's like to fall over.

[27:06]

And the third type of suffering is the suffering of change. And this is a beautiful bouquet. One way to feel this in our life is a beautiful bouquet of flowers sitting on our table several days later is wilted. And the water maybe stinks in the base. And the suffering of change is that even though we might be sitting zazen all day long and at some point feeling calm and settled and concentrated, also our life force bubbles on and doesn't stop. We can't put that moment in a bottle and hold it.

[28:15]

Actually, the next moment comes and it changes. Our experience changes. This sensory world that we walk through is a sensitive experience. It means that we're always being exposed to things that maybe appeal to us and things that maybe don't. We might be always having something that we are attracted to or not attracted to. We make choices. We live in the midst of a duality. Today, I think I don't want to go to the Zen Center. Today, oh, yeah, it'd be nice to go to the Zen Center. This is part of the dualism of our life. In our life, I think we make an effort to distinguish ourselves.

[29:25]

We make our own modest or we might hope heroic effort. And a part of practice is to make these efforts and have them fail. I don't know if I can say all of us. I can say for myself that I didn't start off thinking that I wanted to make The truth of impermanence and suffering and the Four Noble Truths is a foundation of my spiritual life.

[30:27]

I came somewhat reluctantly to that idea, to that fact. It's not where I began. I think that this teaching of the Four Noble Truths is not something that is outside of our experience. It is in fact, it was a reflection that the Buddha expressed of the experience of his life. And I think it is the reflection if we look calmly of our life as well. The practice of Buddhism is a practice of, is a commitment to turning towards waking up.

[31:41]

And at the beginning of the day, the beginning of each day, we are asleep and then perhaps our alarm rings. We reach our hand out and turn it off. And then stand up and launch ourselves into the day. What sort of day will it be? One part of the small suffering of my life is that I've never really felt like I could sing so well. But I'm about to try to sing something.

[32:48]

Because, as I said earlier, that we don't have to always... We can look to our ancestors and people who came before us for help in this or for a little bit of guidance. And this is... a very recent, almost contemporary ancestor, and they were a group called the Beatles. And they had a song that included, I woke up, I fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head. Anybody who wants to. Found my way downstairs and I drank a cup. Looking up, I noticed I was late. Found my coat, grabbed my hat. Made the bus in seconds flat. Found my way upstairs and I had a smoke.

[33:58]

And somebody spoke and I went into a dream. A dream. We went into a dream. And you know... My alarm rings and I stand up and I walk into another room and someone speaks to me and the dream starts. Why did you say that? What do you mean? Somebody speaks and we go into a dream. What is this dream that is our life and how do we wake up from it? Like the Diamond Sutra says, as stars, a fault of vision, as a lamp, a mock show, a dewdrop or a bubble, a dream, a lightning flash or cloud, so should one view what is conditioned.

[35:00]

Seeing our life in this way, Understanding that our life is conditioned and subject to change. This is the path of practice. This is the path of waking up. Thank you.

[35:25]

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