This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Soon you'll be able to go outside. Very soon. Okay, a story. Maybe some of you know this story. Peaceful piggy meditation. Do you know that one? I bet some of you know it. Yeah, and you've heard it before. Peaceful piggy meditation. Sometimes the world can be such a busy, noisy place. You ever notice that? Yeah? Yeah. You never know this?

[01:01]

Good for you. Sometimes it feels like you always have to hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. If you go to school, you have to rush in the morning, don't you? Hurry up and have breakfast. Hurry up and get in the car. Hurry up and go to school. You can't be late. Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. And you feel like you can't slow down even when you're sitting down. and watching television and playing video games and jumping up and down and having lunch all at the same time. So even when you're sitting down, it seems like you're still in a hurry. And it can be hard not to lose your temper when you're angry. Ever get angry and start screaming, you never got angry? She did. She did. Mommy says, ah, she actually did. And you can get really frustrated when things don't go your way.

[02:05]

Yeah, you can get frustrated. It's okay. So it's good to have a peaceful place inside. Inside. It's good to meditate. Peaceful piggies know when to take a break. So if you're having a hard time and you're frustrated, you take a break. You find a quiet spot and you just breathe, breathe, breathe. Can you try that right now? Breathe. That's so nice, isn't it? It's very peaceful. Yeah, just breathe.

[03:10]

Take a break. Then you're not in a hurry so much anymore. And if you're mad, you calm down a little bit. Mom or dad might help them set up a special place with a few things. Maybe a crystal for clear thinking. A stone for stillness or even a flower for kindness. Can you imagine a special place in the house where you have a beautiful stone and a flower and a crystal or something nice that reminds you of peacefulness? And then peaceful piggies and of course this book has pictures of the piggies sitting in meditation like they're sitting on a throne. That's what it says. They sit in meditation like a king or a queen on their throne, feeling the solid earth beneath them and the big sky all around them. Can you imagine sitting there and you could feel the solid earth underneath you and a big, [...] big sky all around you everywhere?

[04:20]

And they sit every day feeling their breath going in And going out. It's so nice, huh? And if they breathe like that for a little while, their minds calm down. So peaceful piggies feel free like a bird in the sky. And as calm as a pond on a cool, clear night. And there's the bird in the sky. And the beautiful pond. And the piggies are looking into it. This makes it easier to accept things that happen. And stop wishing for things to be different.

[05:22]

Do you ever wish for things to be different and they weren't? Has that ever happened to you? Yeah. That's painful. Things seem to just be the way they are, not the way we wish. When you're truly peaceful, you can be truly fearless. Best of all, when you're feeling peaceful, you like who you are, just as you are. So it's easier to face the truth about yourself. And it's easier to stand up to others. Peaceful piggies take good care of their friends. And their enemies, too. They try to be loving and kind to all beings.

[06:24]

And here's a couple of peaceful piggies hugging one another. That's pretty nice, huh? Can you see? Two little piggies hugging each other. Why don't you two guys hug each other and show us how it's done? Can you do that? Not right now. But later. They're kind even to worms. Even to worms. By slowing down peaceful piggies, notice all the magical little things in life like the way raindrops race each other down the window. The way clouds tell silent stories. And the way birds sing songs just for you. Having a peaceful place inside helps keep a happy heart happy.

[07:28]

So that even even on a horrible, painful, disgustingly rotten day. Did you ever have that type of day when everything is rotten and disgusting and horrible? Even on a day like that, a peaceful piggy can smile. And there's a smiling, peaceful piggy. Even on a rotten day. That peaceful piggy can smile. And that, my friends, is the end of the peaceful piggy story. It's as simple as that. But there's a little part at the end where the author of the book says this. My husband and I raised five children. Five children. Well, that's a lot of children. while leading a hectic city life. So it was only through desperation that we first began making time to meditate with our kids regularly.

[08:36]

Can you believe with five kids they meditated regularly? It seems hard to imagine. It started as an emergency measure to help them through a terrible family crisis, but gradually we began to catch on to the fact that our children were just generally nicer people when they meditated every day. It may be hard to believe that stopping to meditate together, the whole family did it together, for just a few minutes each day could possibly make your kids happier and more peaceful and confident, but give it a try for three months and see for yourself. I saw it in my own children and I see it all the time in families I work with as a children's meditation teacher. So this author is a children's meditation teacher. Carrie Lee McLean, certified children's meditation teacher. I don't know anybody certified meditation, children's meditation. But anyway, she's certified children. And she teaches at the Colorado Shambhala Children's Rites of Passage Program, where she's the director.

[09:42]

So that's the story of Peaceful Piggy. So I think you should all go home and insist that your parents meditate with you every day. If you can remember between now and tomorrow all about this, then tell them. Thank you, kids. Have a wonderful time outside. Peaceful Piggy. I don't know if they have this book in the bookstore here, but they'll get it probably. Bye. Bye. Bye. See you. What's that? They're tired. Anybody else who would like to go outside, go ahead. It's a nice day. A few years ago, not long after his ordination as a Zen Buddhist priest, our friend Rick Spencer, who now lives and practices with our groups in Mexico,

[10:59]

Soon after his ordination, he went to a Chan Buddhist retreat. And he went in for an interview to the Chan master. And he said to him, what advice do you have for me as a new priest? And the Chan master said to him, whenever you make a mistake, It is very important for you to confess to another priest. If there are no other priests where you are, then you can offer incense and confess to the Buddha. But it's better if it's another priest. That was the advice he gave him. And Rick was really surprised at this response. I think most Western people who come with an interest to practice Zen or any other kind of Buddhist practice come because they're burned out on sin and guilt and confession.

[12:12]

This feeling that we have somehow caught in the wind or got more directly from our parents or our churches or synagogues that somehow we're all wrong or we've done something wrong. We're not even sure what. Sometimes we do know what, but sometimes we're not sure. So we're burned out on this feeling. It's a bad feeling. So we think that this is a Christian or a Jewish obsession and we can escape from it by going to Buddhism. It was no fun to have that for so long and now we can get away from it. And it seems like You don't find all that in Buddhism. But actually you do. This great inspiring conception that Buddhism has of liberation, awakening, freedom, might sound like an escape from all that, but it isn't really an escape into some kind of immunity.

[13:23]

or irresponsibility or freedom from right and wrong. That's not the freedom that liberation promises. In fact, in all schools of Buddhism, Zen included, liberation depends on purity of heart. Taking precepts and keeping precepts is a basic part of the practice in all the schools of Buddhism. So is confession and repentance and remorse and forgiveness. It's an important part of the practice. The last time I noticed at Green Gulch here every day the verse of confession is chanted. Is that still true? Every day, yeah. Yeah, every day the community chants all my ancient twisted karma. from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow.

[14:28]

And that's a sincere and true confession that's made every single day. And having confessed, we are then forgiven through taking refuge in the triple treasure. When we confess and take refuge, then we're forgiven, we're washed clean, and we're ready to begin again every day fresh. In Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other theistic religions, morality is ordained by God. In other words, morality comes from a source greater than ourselves. It comes from something more than our self-interest or our understanding. But this is also true in Buddhism. Even though Buddhism does not have an idea of God or a supreme being, Buddhism does have the triple treasure at its center.

[15:39]

The Buddha, who is understood not only as the teacher, a human being, but also as more than that. The Dharma, a teaching which is also understood as more than a written teaching, and the Sangha, a community not only of practitioners who share practice together, but also of all living beings. And the triple treasure in Zen and Mahayana Buddhist understanding is identical to cause and effect to karma. Karma is a force, a dynamic force, which is greater than ourselves and larger than our understanding or our interests. Having deep faith in karma, deep faith in cause and effect, deep faith in the triple treasure is actually just as important in Buddhist practice as having deep faith in God is in theistic practices.

[16:52]

Now, To be sure, you can certainly begin Buddhist practice without this faith. And most of us in the West who are not born into a Buddhist understanding or Buddhist faith do begin this way without having that faith in the beginning. And we can practice meditation effectively for a long time without that faith. But eventually, if you continue your practice and you actually pay close attention to what's going on, and you have honest observation of your own heart and mind through the practice, which will cast a soft but persistent light on your heart. You do develop this faith, whatever language you use for it, because your direct experience will show you that when you do say or think something harmful or hurtful, your heart gets twisted and occluded.

[18:03]

It's painful. And when you behave like that in thought, word, or deed, the liberation that you are seeking becomes more distant from you. And instead of liberation, you feel pain, inner distortion, stubbornness, clinging, unhappiness. And you notice that when you do the opposite, when your speech, deeds, and thoughts have their source in compassion and loving kindness and concern for others, you feel good, you feel happy, and you feel like liberation is right there. So freedom in Dharma doesn't mean being free of moral constraint. It turns out that freedom exactly is morality.

[19:10]

To live in a relaxed and happy manner, free and easy, it turns out, is to live in goodness and kindness. Your meditation cushion will show you that your conduct is probably not as good as you thought it was. Sitting and breathing steadily over time becomes more and more difficult to be dishonest with yourself. Much more difficult to believe in the various self-defensive rationalizations and self-serving perspectives that we all have and that we usually deny that we have. So a meditation practice has the effect of making us pretty humble and realistic about ourselves and about one another.

[20:20]

But also, I hope, At the same time, exactly because of this, it makes us a lot more forgiving of ourselves and of others. Because human beings are human beings and will always be human beings, which means imperfect beings who can imagine and long for perfection. Because of this, forgiveness is and will remain an important practice in Buddhism and in any religion. Because forgiveness is basic hygiene for the heart, not something for a special occasion when something goes awry. But every day, just like here at Gringotts, it's not like, let's chant the verse of confession when things are in a mess. No, let's chant the verse of confession every single day so that things won't be in a mess. As long as we're alive, we need to practice forgiveness.

[21:31]

We need to forgive ourselves. We need to forgive others. We need to forgive cause and effect in the world. That it is what it is. And it's not what we would like it to be or what we think it ought to be. This is not so easy. Forgiving ourselves to begin with is not so easy. I thought about this a lot and I've come to the conclusion that not only is it not easy to forgive ourselves, it's actually impossible. When it comes to ourselves, I think we are all quite unforgiving. Sometimes you know someone who is really arrogant and feels really great about themselves.

[22:37]

You just can tell. And they're completely convinced that everything they think and everything they say and everything that they do is absolutely always right and never wrong. Usually everybody else is wrong, but they're always right. Somebody we know like that, maybe. But I am sure that even someone like that, underneath me, all the things that he's doing and thinking, and even all the things that he himself believes, underneath all that, self-protection. Even this person is probably pretty unforgiving of himself. Because it seems to me that this is a built-in suffering of self. And this is something that Buddha noticed right at the beginning. of his life of practice no matter how much you protect and justify the self it never quite works the self always comes out suffering in the end because the isolated self-protected self is inherently lonely and desperate

[23:56]

So, on a profound level, we have to forgive ourselves for being ourselves, and since this is completely impossible, we have to rely on others to forgive us for being ourselves. And that's why the Chan master told Rick that he should confess to a priest. It could be anyone, of course. It doesn't have to be a priest. But the Chan master suggested that it be a priest because if that's what a priest has to do, a priest has to forgive you. That's a priest's main practice is to forgive. That's the priest's commitment. So a priest has to forgive you for your mistakes. And then when you're forgiven by another, it's possible then and only then to forgive yourself or If there's nobody around, like the Chan Master said, then you can go and offer incense to the Buddha and confess to the Buddha, please Buddha, forgive me.

[25:09]

And the Buddha will always forgive you because that's the Buddha's practice to forgive you. It's just the same in our great theistic religions. God forgives you because God is inherently forgiving. And forgiven by God, you then can forgive yourself. Now, forgiving yourself is not quite the same thing as excusing yourself. You can, by yourself, excuse yourself. You can say, well, yes, I did this and that, but it's not so bad, after all. It's okay. To really forgive yourself, which is to say, to be profoundly forgiven, is to know, well, I'm not so good, after all. And I will never stop addressing that imperfection in my life.

[26:15]

But, with the help of others, I can do it. And I can be happy anyway. Every minute. So a certain amount of bad feeling or remorse is necessary in this process. If we hurt someone else, we can't just go up to them and say, forgive me so I can feel better. We have to suffer some remorse for what we've done. And when we approach the other person with the weight of that remorse on our shoulders and with the understanding that we can't expect them to forgive us, and that's really honest and real, then maybe the person can forgive us.

[27:19]

And if they don't forgive us, we can still cherish the remorse itself because It makes us stronger and deeper human beings. It helps keep us straightened out. And after a while, we appreciate it, you know, as a kind of treasure. I have some things that I did long, long ago. And I still feel painful remorse for these things. And I don't expect that I'm going to get over this. Probably when I'm dying I'll be thinking about these things if I can still think straight. But I don't mind because these are the deeds and these are the feelings that connect me with others and connect me with

[28:31]

an essential part of myself. And I think that's a good thing. It took me a while to come to this feeling about it, but that's how I feel now. There's a famous passage in the Talmud about forgiveness and repentance and confession. And it says, more or less, That it's a better thing to sin and repent than not to sin at all. And it says that it's like a broken leg. When you break your leg and it heals, the leg is actually stronger in that place than it was in the beginning. Which apparently is actually true. I don't know if there's any doctors in the house, but apparently that's true. And I think some of the rabbis in the Talmud were... also doctors, and they knew this.

[29:33]

So it's hard to forgive yourself. Also, not so easy to forgive someone else when they've hurt you. And everybody here in this room has been hurt. It is normal, if you're human, to have been hurt deeply. And so this is the world that we're living in. We're living in a world in which everybody is running around having been deeply hurt, and they're confused by that and acting out of that wound. It's this scar in the human heart that is the reason why, wherever you find... The human community from any time in a distant, distant past, you always find some form of religious life. And religious life, once it develops and articulates itself, always has some form of forgiveness practice.

[30:50]

It's always part of any religious culture. The opposite of forgiveness is resentment. Resentment means to re-feel. To feel again and [...] again. So someone hurts us and naturally we feel the pain. But then. Long after the event. We feel it again and [...] that's resentment. And sometimes we're aware that we feel this resentment. And sometimes. We don't even know that we're feeling it. Sometimes the hurt and the subsequent resentment goes deep underground and blends into our general attitude toward life. So without even realizing it, we become generally resentful, easily offended, suspicious, disappointed people.

[31:58]

constantly expecting things not to work out, constantly afraid that things won't work out. And when it turns out they don't work out, or sometimes even when they do work out, we continue to feel this underground resentment. This actually might be the normal, usual way people are. It's possible that most people are like this almost all the time. And in this case, forgiveness goes beyond, I forgive you for what you did to me last week. It's much deeper than that. Maybe the person who originally hurt us is long gone from our lives. The resentment is still in our hearts, so forgiveness is something we need to do for ourselves.

[33:06]

It actually doesn't have to do with the other person so much. It's really something we need to do for ourselves, to free ourselves, to release our heart from the hurt that is making us so hard-hearted and preventing us from loving. So liberation is becoming free of this deep habit of heart and mind. so that our heart can be open and soft instead of hard. And we can have a general feeling of gratitude and appreciation, even if things don't work out, just like peaceful piggy. Even when things don't work out, we could have a peaceful feeling of gratitude. Because when you think about it, just, you know, like in a completely dispassionate way, Just think about life. You know, what a fantastic thing it is to be alive in this world.

[34:08]

It's such a beautiful world. You know, the sun shines. I mean, what could be better? The trees? Sky? I mean, we couldn't have designed this so well. It's just fantastic. All these little details that are so bright and pure and beautiful. Of course, you know, there are problems. things happen we don't like, and so on and so on. But at least we're alive to feel all that. I mean, that in itself is a fantastic thing, that we could feel joy and sorrow. We could feel happiness and sadness. We could feel love and we could feel alone. This is a fantastic thing that any of us, if we just thought about it reasonably, we would be celebrating this every minute. You know, that we could smell, that we could see, that we could hear. It's a fantastic, completely unlikely thing. Who would have thought, you know? And the alternative to this, that we're not here, right?

[35:17]

That we're not alive, that we don't feel and see and hear and think and experience anything. This is not that great, right? The alternative... In fact, it's exactly nothing. The alternative to this is nothing. So in other words, instead of nothing, we have something, this incredible something. Right? So how come we're not all falling all over ourselves constantly with gratitude and delight and joy? Because it really makes sense when you think about it that we would feel that way. But we usually don't, right? That's very unusual. To have a day where you feel, I am so happy to be alive today, I can't believe it. Probably you've experienced that, but not every day. I don't think once a week even. Once a week would be one-seventh of the time. I don't think once a week. I don't think once a month.

[36:18]

Maybe once a year, but maybe not even once a year. Maybe decades have gone by and you haven't had a day like that. But why wouldn't you feel that way every single day? So we have to practice forgiveness because the reason why we don't feel like that when it makes sense that we would is because of our hearts that have been occluded and wounded and made hard and scarred in all kinds of ways so that we can't simply notice like little piggy, the peaceful piggy, the raindrops racing each other down the window. We don't notice such things. We don't notice that the bird is singing just for you. If we did, we would be so grateful. The antidote to our occluded, scarred hearts is forgiveness. And it starts locally with forgiving the person or persons who have hurt us.

[37:22]

But then we go beyond the local to the universal. And we Practice in a profound sense, this practice of forgiveness. And it will bring us to a feeling of gratitude for our life, whatever it is today. And that's liberation. Feeling happy and grateful for our life. And resentment is replaced by gratitude. And that's the fruit of the religious life. a life of gratitude and appreciation for this day, this life. So how about we take a little time and do some forgiveness practice? I'll practice these few practices with you, and just in case you find them useful, you can continue with them.

[38:24]

So if you would just return your awareness. Is that okay? Are you ready for this? I guess if you don't want to do it, you can go outside now or you could think about something else. Sometimes when I have been on book tours, I would go into bookstores and meditate with people and I would say, if you don't want to meditate, you can think about something else now. So I offer that to you too. But if you want to join, please begin with your your body. And this is a forgiveness practice that is taught by Joko Beck, one of the great Zen teachers of our recent times who passed away within the last year or so. She taught this practice and these are her words.

[39:30]

So what I'll do is I'll read a little bit and then we'll take a pause and meditate on what she's said. In our culture, the term forgiveness is a very loaded word. The idea to forgive usually implies that there's some form of magnanimous acceptance of another, even though the other did wrong. This understanding of forgiveness is not what a forgiveness practice is about forgiveness is primarily about seeing through our own emotional reactions seeing what stands in the way of real forgiveness real forgiveness has to entail experiencing first our own pain then the pain of the person to be forgiven And it is from this understanding that the barriers, the separation between the two beings can dissolve.

[40:33]

Forgiveness needs to proceed in three stages. The first is to see how unwilling we are to forgive the person, to experience the degree to which we would rather hold on to our resentment, our anger, our bitterness, even when we see how it closes us off to life, we have to bring a nonjudgmental awareness to this resistance, to the fact that we choose to harden our hearts and stay stuck in our self-centered judgments. As we acknowledge this unwillingness, as we open to experience it on a sensorial level, it gradually allows us to move into the second stage. So for this first stage, think of someone, whoever pops into your mind, someone who you need to forgive from something that they did or said yesterday or last week or maybe someone from decades ago.

[41:49]

that you need to be forgiving. Let that come into your mind. And feel how much you really don't want to forgive the person. Feel how stubborn you are about that. You don't want to give them this satisfaction. And just notice that. Don't try to change it. Just notice it. And send breath to it. Breathe with it. Joko goes on.

[43:15]

The second stage is to bring into awareness all of the emotional reactivity toward the person. To experience that without judgment, to see it with a what-is-it mind. As we bring an image of the person into our awareness, we allow all of the reacting emotions to arise. Is there anger or resentment? Bitterness? Fear? Grief? Whatever arises, we just experience it through our bodily sensations. If we get lost in thoughts and memories and justifications, we keep coming back to what we feel in the body. Where is the tightness, the contraction? What does it actually feel like? We stay with this gestalt awareness of our body emotional reactions to this person.

[44:19]

We stay with them as long as is necessary to be able to reside in them, painful as they may be, without having to push them away. Let's take a moment to, in relation to this same person, notice our own feelings. in our bodies, how that feels in our body. Where in the body do we feel our resentment, our fear, our anger, our grief, our shame? And what does it feel like? And breathe with and into those feelings. Djokov goes on.

[45:36]

The third stage is actually forgiving the other person, which is not the same as condoning their actions. It means to see that they only acted from their own pain. But to do this before doing the first two parts would have little value. It would be simply adding cosmetic mental constructs over our suppressed feelings. For this third stage, imagine this person that you're trying to forgive. Imagine that they are on their deathbed and that in this time of extremity they're being confronted with all the pain that they have felt and caused in their lifetime. Breathe with that moment in this person's life and feel the pain that they have experienced.

[46:43]

The pain that unacknowledged caused them to behave the way they did. And let the breath support you in this difficult reflection. Joko concludes, we have to first see and experience the degree to which our own emotional reactivity is what stands in the way of real forgiveness.

[47:55]

We can then and only then truly understand, truly understand that the other person was simply doing the only thing that they could do given their beliefs and conditioning. We can then say, I forgive you. I forgive you for whatever you have done to cause me pain. I forgive you because I know that what you did comes from your own pain. And she points out that this is not something we can do in 10 or 15 minutes or an hour for people that we deeply resent and need to forgive. It may take quite a long time of continuous practice to be able to forgive the person and we just keep working on it well maybe that's enough of that for today it's hard work not cheerful stuff

[49:13]

Let me conclude, though, with a poem that somebody sent me the other day. There's a little story behind this poem. It's a poem by somebody many of you may have heard about, Theodor Rotsack. You know who that is? The older people in the room will remember that name well. In 1969, Theodor Rotsack wrote a book called The Making of the Counterculture. He actually is the one who coined the term, the counterculture, which those of you who are younger don't know, maybe, that this was a word that described the phenomenon of all the stuff that happened in the 60s, the counterculture. That was fun. Too bad we don't have a counterculture now. We are desperately in need of a counterculture at this moment. Anyway, Theodore Roszak was... Yeah, yeah, I know.

[50:15]

My son is there on Wall Street. If you look at the John, what's his name, the comedy guy, John Stewart, yeah, he did a little piece about it, and you can see in the picture of the protesters on Wall Street, our son, because he's wearing a great big mask in the shape of a coin. The person, and John Stewart in his little piece actually refers to this person who happens to be our son. because he's been doing a project on Wall Street called Summer of Change. He raises money online, and every few weeks he goes to Wall Street, and one time he gives away quarters, and he has a big quarter costume that he wears with the shape of a quarter mask, and then the last one he gave away 10,000 pennies that he just flings around on Wall Street while he's wearing. He figures, you know... the people on Wall Street really need this money. So he actually raises money from people and gives it to the people on Wall Street.

[51:16]

So he was very, he was doing this before any of the protests happened. And when they happened, he was, so we can't get his attention at all now. He's living in the park. Anyway, back to Ted Rosak. So he was a really terrific person. person who wrote that book and many other books novels and all kinds of things and he he was married to his wife Betty for 55 years which is you know quite a thing in itself and he died this spring and I'm good friends with his daughter and was trying to help the best I could during the time of his illness and death and just the other day we scattered his ashes in the ocean just a couple days ago and Betty said this is just what Ted envisioned he had the idea that somehow his spirit would be taken because he lived in the East Bay and he could see

[52:32]

the bay from his house. He had the idea that his spirit would be taken across the bay and across the water, and just around here is where it would end up, and so that's why we should scatter his ashes here. And so we did that, and she said, a few weeks before he died, he wrote me this poem. And so this is Ted Rozak's poem. his wife Betty called moon path a pearl floating in a cloudless sky the moon has paved the bay it has laid down a path of rippling silver across the water leading from here to where beyond beyond From my window in the hills, I watch an unreal world.

[53:36]

Toy-sized cars and ships and trains, movement without sound, noisy engines beyond hearing, calm and silent. Not really. I know the people who drive the distant freeway are troubled souls drowning in the daily terror and trivia, as I have for a lifetime. Official lies leak prophecies. The soils of Africa are planted with the bones of children. Mad Arabs have turned their god into a butcher. The head of Citibank insists he deserves every penny he stole. Rich and poor, lives driven by the fuel of greed and desperation. Do they ever catch a glimmer? of the moon path and the great quiet that waits to be found on the far side of the horrors there beyond Mount Tam and the Golden Bridge the world of stars that bless us with lordly beauty and indifference always there always there waiting the moon

[55:02]

half the quiet I remember another moon bright night like this years past the old Dodge parked up a dark street in Thousand Oaks the best young lovers could do to find seclusion you leaned across me in the car to look out the window what a beautiful moon you said I can remember the warm softness of your body pressed against me and the countless kisses that followed, each though we did not know it at the time. A pledge that said, I will stay with you. I will be here at the last. Were we ever that young? Did I know at some level of the mind when I chose you to be my one love that you would do more to lead me to the path than any words of wisdom.

[56:06]

Sensitive and innocent, we deserved a better world. But what we got was a swamp of illusions where madmen control, excuse me, where madmen contend for the dross of life. Do you know this is samsara? Shweka Roshi once asked me, smiling as if laughter were the best answer to despair. You don't escape it. You don't work your way out. Then what? You wait. Until? Until you realize, hey, I'm already on the path. No place to go. Nothing to do.

[57:10]

Wait. So that's a beautiful poem by Ted Rotsack. They had a ceremony of service for him in Berkeley. Yes, beautiful poem. And they had a beautiful service for him in Berkeley a while ago. Maybe some of you will go and look up some of his books. He has many, many of them. So, it's always really a pleasure for me to come and bow at the statue of Manjushri, like I used to do every day, now only once in a while, and come and see everybody here and practice with you. The world needs a little bit of Dharma, wouldn't you say? So I think we all need to take responsibility to bring some of the quiet that Ted is talking about to our own hearts and some forgiveness to one another in the world.

[58:26]

In tough times, a person who's stable. and clear seeing is a treasure and a necessity. So every one of us has to be that person. So thank you very much for your efforts to be that one. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[59:20]

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