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. Good morning. I just love looking at everyone in this room and, you know... For you to sit here and face me is... I have to think that sitting here is sitting in Buddha's seat. It's not my personal seat. It's Buddha's seat, and I'll try to do my best to honor that. So I wanted to wish you a happy new year and a happy new life starting today.

[01:12]

It's not that today is a particularly special day. What is it, the 12th? January 12th, 2013. But it is, you know. And every time we sit down, and it is sitting on Buddha's seat, even if, you know, you're not giving the talk today. You're giving the request from Buddha's seat. And because of that, I would like to, do you know how the person who talks usually makes bows? The bows are supposed to be on everyone's behalf, but that's not explicit. It's implicit. But today I'd like to make this a little bit explicit. And you know how the lecturer usually carries a little stick, which is a symbol of power and authority to express the Dharma. But this stick is, this is a lotus stem from bairite.

[02:22]

LAUGHTER And Linda Ruth Cutts gave Wendy, Tova, and me each a stem of lotus, and I dried it. And it's truly extraordinary, so I would like to pass it around. Thank you, Shindo-san. And everybody gets to hold the stick today. Because I want to speak about a topic that I think that we all have experience of. And that is forgiveness. But I can tell you the usual message of forgiveness in a nutshell. Okay. Holding on to ill will is bad. Forgiving is good. Please forgive. You can do it because you're awake.

[03:25]

And in doing so, you will realize emptiness in a number of great gifts. The end. Huh? Yeah, tea and cookies, right? Yeah, exactly. Let's get to the important thing. But... Round two. What about when it's not so easy? What about when someone has shot, you know, 20-something kids and six teachers, or that's inspired a number of copycat killings? What if someone... violated, if your intimate partner violated your relationship?

[04:26]

What if someone hit you with a car? What if you're a member of a cold, unfeeling organization that doesn't care if you have health insurance or not? You know? These are everyday situations in which we find ourselves day after day. What if you're trying to, I don't know, feed your sick child and no one will let you pay for your one item and get out of there? You know, these are things that happen to us every day. And it's very easy to say forgive and forgive from a place of Buddha's wisdom and compassion. But Sometimes we're faced with absolutely unforgivable circumstances. And what do we do? How do we enter a place of forgiveness?

[05:32]

And should we even do that? Should we even enter a place of forgiveness for certain things? What about racism? You know, what about homophobia? What about violations of human rights? What about the planet? You know, should we forget that? Again, lecture number two, it's all very easy to say. We need to act. We need to do right action. And the Buddha taught right action. And let's do it every day. End of lecture, tea and cookies. Right? So there's a variety of answers that we can give ourselves and each other. And it's not satisfying. And it's not just not satisfying in a way like everything's unsatisfactory and everything's unsatisfying because that's the first noble truth and that's how things are.

[06:35]

Life is suffering. It's unsatisfying in a way that we feel personally responsible for sometimes. Like, if I let this go on, have I colluded? That kind of thing. If I forgive it on the one hand, maybe I've colluded, but if I complain or rail against this or whatever, then that's also not okay. How do we live in a world in which everyone complains about everything or which perfectly human acts go unforgiven? You know, there's always another side. Anyway, so I've been thinking about this for a while now, and I haven't come to any satisfying answer. And that's lecture number three. There's no answer. Each of us is responsible for this question on his or her own.

[07:41]

Tea and cookies. But anyway, knowing that what I will say may or may not work, I'll try. So when I was in a difficult situation with another human being one time, this was a very difficult situation that lasted for a long time. And I decided to find out what the Buddha had to say and came to the first chapter of the Dhammapada, one of the most popular of Buddha's teachings and one of his first for my inspiration, in which Buddha says that all things are made by mind, conditioned by mind, established by mind, and arise from mind. If a person speaks and acts with unclear mind, bitter grief pursues him like the wheel follows the foot of the draft ox.

[08:54]

And all things are, all experiences preceded by mind, led by mind and made by mind. But when someone acts and acts with a peaceful mind, happiness follows like a never-departing shadow. He beat me. He abused me. He defeated me. He robbed me. A person who thinks this way will not be free from hate. She abused me. She attacked me. She defeated me. She robbed me. For those who do not carry on like this, hatred ends. Because hatred never ends through hatred. By non-hate alone, it ends. This is an ancient truth.

[09:57]

And then this is the Dhammapada. The end of this little half section of the Dhammapada is... Many do not realize that we here must die. For those who realize this, quarrels end. Okay, that was cheerful. But really, we can also say we may never be in a position like we are today to end whatever it is, to reconcile ourselves with whatever it is. Everything changes, and this opportunity may not last. So it stops here. It stops today. And for those who aren't familiar with this translation of the Dhammapada, I just want to hold it up. This translation that I read, I used, half of the translation that I used was...

[11:08]

adapted from a number of translations, but the other half was from this fairly new translation by Gil Fransdahl, my ordination brother, and yesterday was our 31st anniversary, so I wanted to use his book. For those who don't know Gil, his place of teaching is it's in Redwood City, Insight Meditation in Redwood City. And he also has a more rural place for retreats. And one of the things that I love best about my ordination brother Gil is that he grew up in many lands. And because of that, he has a very wide experience from the very early age of

[12:12]

people and how to greet people and be with people, how to make them feel friendly and welcomed in several different languages. It's one of the things I love best about him. He has a very peaceful way of expressing himself, even in conflict. And he helped San Francisco Zen Center develop our ethics and reconciliation policy, which includes not just rules about how to behave, but an idea and understanding of where it comes from, how we want to be in the world, how we want to be in the world with each other, and how we want to be in the world as an institution. So I recommend this translation of the Dhammapada, and I also recommend looking at I think it's, does anyone know if it's still on the website? The San Francisco Zen Center's, yeah, what's it called?

[13:19]

No, the Ethics and Reconciliation document was on the website for a long time, and I don't know if it still is, but if it is, it's a really good document to read. If not, it's available. by asking basically any administrator or anyone who's in charge of anything here. So, you know, the best teaching I've been able to find about forgiving the unforgivable comes from Lily Tomlin or maybe Landrum Balling. And this is a good quote which I've practiced with. Forgiveness means giving up the hope for a better past.

[14:22]

And I also like this quote from a psychologist whose last name is Gartner, but I wasn't able to research him. or her, that forgiveness allows us to absorb the full impact of the evil that, he says men, but I say people do, while not losing sight of their humanity. Forgiveness is a both-and affair. And... For me, I think the point is that traditional religious exposition of forgiveness goes something like this. Please collect all of your resentful, angry, upset feelings into one bundle and replace them with loving feelings.

[15:28]

But in recent years, people have been going a little bit deeper and saying that mature forgiveness, and particularly in an unforgivable situation, is not the replacement of negative, hateful feelings with loving feelings, but more of a realistic view that includes a very wide range of observations about the self and others and happens in the context of a relationship with the other. And so the thing about unforgivable acts is that the unforgivability of the act or the situation sometimes prevents that sense of dialogue. Like, for instance, the young man who did the shootings is dead.

[16:39]

And even if he were alive, would we be able to forgive that? You know, by thinking of him as sick or damaged in some way, perhaps. I don't know if thinking of him in that way would allow us to forgive that. But where are we pointing? Because he didn't act alone. I don't know if anybody besides me read the entertainment section of the Chronicle on Monday, in which Mick LaSalle talked about violence as a normal part of our culture at this time. And he said that... basically when we see violent movies over and over and over again and play violent video games, that these are in effect simulation situations in which we become inured to expressing ourselves in certain ways.

[17:52]

So in that case, the culture itself, there are many different levels at which unforgivable acts occur. the culture can prime a vulnerable person to do an unforgivable act. Or let's say in my case, many years ago when I was in that difficult situation, immaturity can prime a relationship in which one person does an unforgivable act. Unexamined assumptions can prime a situation to culminate in something unforgivable. Because we assume things about each other and about life all the time. And then when people transgress our assumptions or our sense of right and wrong, good and bad, those transgressions can become unforgivable for us.

[18:59]

And we can... In some cases, it's not just a question of mental assumptions. It's a question of being human. Like, what sort of actions come from seeing some people as human and other people as not? What sort of systems come from that? So... The best I've been able to come up with is that in examining mature forgiveness, we have to understand that there are levels at which actions occur, that almost every action that we can think of has a personal aspect that has to do with ourselves, that we have to practice with our own assumptions, our own

[20:00]

perception, how it has come to be through our past experience and our current motivation. So there's a personal aspect to every action that happens to us or that we participate in. And then there's an interpersonal aspect to it as well. So, for instance, what we've heard from other people or how our relationship has come to be. Like the guy in the New York Times article, the young man who killed his girlfriend. And this was in last Sunday's New York Times where a man killed his girlfriend. And there was a transcript that he... recited of what happened. And in the moment, they argued passionate things occurred, and he ended up shooting her. So there's an interpersonal aspect that doesn't excuse it or condone the action of killing, but it is part of how the action comes to be.

[21:12]

And then there's an institutional aspect component to it like the the rules and regulations the laws the structures that we've created to live our lives like you know the church or Buddhism or marriage or traffic rules or laws are institutions so there's an institutional element like for instance In America, we define certain activities as abuse. And in another country, those activities may not be abuse. Like, for instance, when a teacher puts their hands on a student and hits their leg to make them do a yoga pose in a certain way. In my experience in my classes in India, that is normal part of teaching.

[22:17]

especially if the teacher really knows what they're doing and can hit the level or layer of skin, flesh, bones, or marrow that needs to respond. But in the U.S., if that happens to us in a yoga studio, we think of that as abusive and bring it up as a grievance. And no one is wrong there. The institutions are different. The history, the culture is different. So that brings us to the fourth element, the culture. You know, when I went on the Internet to look up what people think of as unforgivable, one of the first references I found was a white supremacist website in which there was a chat room about what is unforgivable. And in that culture, what is unforgivable is very different from what I personally or this culture considers to be unforgivable. So there are cultural elements as well.

[23:21]

Culturally speaking, we live in a world in which we can make consumer choices like, should I buy meat or should I buy lettuce? Should I have a car or should I not have a car? We can make these choices in this society. But culturally speaking, if we make certain choices and create certain fashions, and some other countries see middle-class life as what we do here, what we can end up with is a world that no one can sustain. Maybe the people who have created the culture need to acknowledge that we didn't know what we were doing when we created a culture in which everyone has certain things that require certain resources, which if everybody did the same thing, it would not be a good world.

[24:36]

Anyway, so how do we forgive ourselves for the unforgivable act of creating a culture... which seems wonderful to a lot of people, the imitation of which is destructive. Anyway, these are my personal reflections, and in no way do they reflect on San Francisco Zen Center as an institution. I don't know what San Francisco Zen Center as an institution would say about some of the things that I've said today. This is me personally speaking to you as a human being times a hundred or however many people are in the room. But from the point of view of Buddhism and from San Francisco Zen Center, I do want to say that each of us has a responsibility to ourselves to be awake, to find out what...

[25:44]

What happens when we're in the present? And in the case of unforgivable actions, there's so many ways in which we tend to avoid having to deal with them. What is an unforgivable action anyway? So, you know, again, the best I've come up with is unforgivable can mean that I refuse to forgive. Or it can mean that the other person is ignorant, like maybe even sometimes willfully ignorant of the impact of their actions on me. Or the institution is indifferent. But anyway, unforgivability often has a sense of non-repentance or non-acknowledgement of impact. So when I consider... unforgivable actions like betrayal or damaging the world in which we live in in some way.

[26:56]

Often there's an element of non-repentance or non-avowal. But there's more. To me, for something to be unforgivable, it has to affect me personally, and it has to affect me where it counts. There has to be a sense of woundedness that shatters or undermines something important to me, like my boundaries or my sense of control or my basic beliefs about good and bad. Or my very sense of humanity, my sense of justice. When any of these is damaged by an interaction or by a system, I can think of that as unforgivable quite easily.

[27:58]

In Japanese, there's so many ways to say, excuse me, I'm sorry. And one of the things that... I trained in a Japanese monastery for some time, and there were so many, for a short time, and there were so many rituals of forgiveness. So in one of the rituals of forgiveness, this was a small act, like maybe when someone sneaked in meat and and the authorities discovered the chicken bones in the compost. I personally am a vegetarian, but as the senior person, I was responsible for the actions of the group. So there was a ritual that I had to go through of apologizing for what happened.

[29:03]

And if I had been a... a Japanese monk in training at that Japanese monastery, I would have had to probably utter the phrase, what I did was unforgivable. You know? And then I would have been forgiven because I acknowledged the unforgivability of what I had done. Anyway, I... I think that acknowledging unforgivability is often part of being forgiven for unforgivable acts. Like in restorative justice, in that young man's case, he acknowledged to the family the impact of what he did and said, nothing can excuse it. Nothing can excuse the loss of your daughter. And they forgave him.

[30:06]

It didn't mean that he didn't have to be responsible for the consequences of his action. He went to prison. But it did mean that the ill will was accepted and resolved. It was brought to ground. So how do we do that? Well, I would say that one of the ways we do that is by finding ultimate reality and by understanding that there's a big picture to any action, any activity that comes up in the world. And finding a sense of acceptance. and finding a future.

[31:08]

We have to accept our wound to forgive an unforgivable act. We have to accept that the wound that we receive in some cases has a permanent impact on us. We have to become engaged in our own healing. We have to become transcendent. without leaving the world. One of the beautiful writings that I read when I was trying to understand how to speak about this topic is by a doctor named Kathleen Young. She's a clinical psychologist who treats the... people in the aftermath of trauma. She asks some very good questions.

[32:12]

Is healing without forgiveness possible? And are there some harms that really are unforgivable and should not be forgiven? And anyway, it's too long to read this, but it's another article that I read And she ends up by saying that there are a number of options to explore when we contemplate unforgivable acts, including forgiveness, partial forgiveness, understanding but not forgiving, only letting go of bitterness and hatred, and active unforgiveness. She says, making peace with yourself, your past, creating the type of life you desire in the future can occur whether you forgive your abusers or not.

[33:20]

That you reach a resolution that makes sense for you matters more than the form it takes. Perhaps this is the most important thing to take away. Focus on your healing first. Reconnect with the past. Forgive. Learn how to provide safety for yourself. Once you have healed sufficiently, I trust you will know what needs to happen next in terms of forgiving others or not. So that's a very interesting point of view. And I personally don't agree with it for myself. I find that... But I think that my quibble with her statement might have more to do with the definition of forgiveness than with the rude philosophy. So, again, just personally, but also now speaking as a teacher, as a teacher of Buddhist wisdom, I think that the first...

[34:32]

The first priority when contemplating an unforgivable act is just to sit. Just to sit with it. Thank you. And to make one sitting upright enough, wide enough, and deep enough simply to hold the fact of what has occurred. And there are many situations in which it's virtually impossible to hold the fact of what has occurred, and I understand that. But I'm speaking from experience that there are unforgivable things that have happened to me and happened to people I love. And both as a human and

[35:34]

That's okay, watch out for that. The shelf fell. As a practitioner of Buddha's way, this, touching earth, is the first priority. I don't know if you remember the story of Buddha's enlightenment, and some people haven't heard it, but there was a point at which the Buddha was being attacked by Mara. He had made the resolution to sit and wake up for everybody's benefit, no matter what happened. And so first, Mara sent his daughters to dance seductively in front of the Buddha. And the Buddha said, Nuh-uh, I'm sitting. And the next thing that happened was Mara sent an army to intimidate the Buddha. Buddha said, sorry, I'm sitting.

[36:39]

You know, even if the army comes, I'm sitting, and kept sitting. And finally, Mara did the most insidious thing of all. He questioned the Buddha at a personal level and said, you know, I'm Mara. I'm in charge of deceit and delusion, and... I have so many supporters and so many witnesses and people who will vouch for the effectiveness of what I do. You've got nothing, Mara said to Buddha. You don't even have a single witness. You're just sitting here all by yourself. Isn't that what happens when an unforgivable act happens to us. And so what the Buddha did then was very interesting. He reached down, he touched his fingers to the earth, and he said, this is my witness.

[37:47]

This rock-bottomness is my witness. And actually, this might not happen. If you try this at home, what happened next might not happen for you. So the earth shook in six ways. Actually, if it does happen, I'm worried, right? But the earth shook in six ways, and then the Buddha went on to sit for the rest of the night, and he was enlightened. First thing that happened was he woke up to all the causes and conditions of all the beings, right? Right? And then he woke up to how suffering arises and how it ends. And that's what happened to the Buddha. It actually happens, it really does happen to us, but I mean literally, let's not expect the earth to shake in six ways.

[38:52]

But our earth might shake. Our assumptions and our bedrock beliefs might shake. if we sit and simply accept what has happened. And then from there, my next phrase is, don't get even, get effective. So effectively, we need to take care of ourselves. We need to take care of our own happiness and well-being and healing at that time. There I agree with her. And then maybe a long time in the future after that is resolved, we can understand whether and how it's appropriate to forgive. I personally prefer forgiveness. One of my big questions is, what would it take from this other person for me to forgive them?

[39:59]

What would it take from this institution for me to feel safe, happy, and connected? What would it take from our culture for me to not live in a state of persistent fear? Anyway, sometimes I ask myself specific questions like that. And then, again, this is me. Sometimes I go out and request those things. And that is often seen as unforgivable by those people. Anyway, it's a complex subject. Basically, all I can do in this situation is bring it up and say that if you sit with what arises, no matter what happens, no matter whether you feel a sense of serenity or not, you will be building unshakable serenity, unshakable friendliness and compassion in your life. that if you sit with and think deeply about questions of forgiveness, and particularly what's forgiving the unforgivable without avoiding it, without blaming someone else for it, without shaming yourself, without all the ways that we get in our own way, without doing any of those things, if we simply sit in the middle of that flame,

[41:30]

if we simply touch earth and then if we respond rather than react, we will grow and the people around us will be better off as well as ourselves. So thank you very much for your attention and I apologize for not giving you specific instructions on how to find peace. Again, I think here that we're all human, and this is a human question that we can all answer in our own ways. And that maybe all of our answers together will... create a culture in which forgiveness and peace is the most important thing.

[42:41]

So thank you very much. 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 Dharma.

[43:07]

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