This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good afternoon. My name is Shinshu Roberts, and I am one of the teachers and co-founders of Ocean Gate Zen Center, which is in Capitola. which is essentially one side of the street is Santa Cruz and the other side of the street is Capitola. So if you know where Santa Cruz is, you know kind of where we are. So today I want to talk about suffering. I want to talk about the Four Noble Truths. So usually the way I kind of like to work is to... I'll talk to you about what the sort of traditional meaning of it is and then we can talk about the practice of each one of those truths and how to cultivate wisdom. So... The first thing I want to say about the Four Noble Truths is that it's what's called a path statement.

[01:08]

So the Four Noble Truths indicate to us a way of thinking about the nature of our experience as spiritual practitioners. So essentially what it's talking about originally is what's the Theravadan path. So in the Theravadan path The idea is that you get off the wheel of birth and death. The idea is that no more rebirths. So you follow the Four Noble Truths, which was the Buddha's original discourse. You follow the Four Noble Truths. And it's fairly complicated when you get into it. It pretty much covers all the teachings of earlier Buddhism. So you get into the Four Noble Truths, you follow that path, and you get off the wheel of birth and death. So as you can imagine, Buddhism, Buddha was alive in the 5th century BCE, okay? Long, long time ago. So you can imagine all these people in the meantime have had all these ideas about Buddhist practice.

[02:12]

And in the Mahayana Buddhism, we talk about the Bodhisattva path. And in Mahayana Buddhism, we talk about the clinging of the Bodhisattva, the karma of the Bodhisattva that... catapults the Bodhisattva into the next lifetime is a desire to benefit or save all beings. So that's a different kind of way of thinking about the nature of our experience than to think that life is suffering, we need to get off this wheel of birth and death, that that's what our path statement is, to the path statement of, I want to follow the Bodhisattva path, I want to cultivate myself as Buddha, and that I end up continuing to be rebirthed to come back into this Saha world to help beings. So that's kind of a different mindset. I'm not making a value judgment here about the two separate paths. I just want you to know that it's a kind of different way of thinking about it. And Sen is a Mahayana school, so we have maybe a different way of talking about and thinking about what the endgame is of the Four Noble Truths.

[03:19]

So I thought I'd start out with, okay, so... Did somebody give me the first noble truth? There is suffering. There is suffering. Okay. Let's write this down. One. There is suffering. I know it doesn't matter if you can read my handwriting right because you all know this. There is suffering. So Duga is suffering and the translation of this is actually instead of there is suffering it's this is suffering this is suffering I thought that was interesting so for us as Zen students this this could be a koan we don't necessarily have to say this is this life we could say what is this what is this this that we're talking about here what is it that is suffering who is it that is suffering so

[04:21]

Here's a come on for us. So in the original teachings about the first noble truth, we say this is suffering. And this suffering is because of impermanence. It's because we're in a body. It's because of that phrase, old age, sickness, and death. We talked about the five aggregates. And we talked about, and I'm not going to get into some of these... But Jaka is going to talk about this tomorrow. She's going to talk about no-self, and she's going to talk about the 12-fold chain of causation, right? A little bit. So the 12-fold chain of causation is in these 12 steps of how we get caught in our karma, how we get caught in our craving, and that causes us to be reborn. So that's all incorporated in this first section here of there is suffering. Another way to talk about it that I think we can all resonate with is there's the suffering of the mind.

[05:32]

We're talking about the suffering of the body. So with the pain that we experience, we are in the form realm. I think it's highly unlikely that any of us will go through our lives without suffering some kind of physical pain. I would say that we have all had physical pain up to this point, and I can tell you the older I get, the more I'm aware of this physical pain. Not young people have physical pain. No, we just have physical pain like we cut ourselves or we break our arm, that kind of pain. So that comes with being in a body. What also comes with being in a body is having a mind, right? Human beings. Personally, I think our mind is an amazing, wondrous thing and it's also a curse. So we have this mind that causes suffering for us. And it's one of the ways, three ways traditionally that we suffer.

[06:33]

Not getting what you want, right? Not getting what you want. Losing what you want. So that's kind of the same idea. Getting what you don't want, right? And the third thing is technically called re-becoming. Re-becoming. So this is this desire to kind of build this edifice of self that comes down in various ways. So I'll talk about that. Not getting what you want is a kind of greed, right? It's kind of, ah, I'm missing something, I'm missing something, I want something, I want to find something. Yesterday at our Zen Center, a woman who had just received the precepts gave a Dharma talk, a way-seeking mind talk. And she said something really great about craving. She said, you know, her experience was that when she wanted something, a physical thing, you know, that she would anticipate and anticipate and anticipate

[07:46]

And then she would finally get this thing, and this thing really didn't satisfy whatever that craving was, so then something else would arise. So she said, you know, the things go away, but the craving stays. So I think we can all relate to this, this desire for something. There's kind of like, for some of you, you're not old enough for this, but in Saturday Night Live, when it first started out, there was a character. played by Gilda Radner, she'd always, Roseanne, Roseanne and Dan, and she'd always say, you know, there's always something, there's always something. So that's the sense of craving that we have, and that creates suffering. And then there's the side of getting what you don't want. Often, relationships that are problematic are like this. I don't want this relationship. I don't want to deal with this person. I don't want to sit in a meeting with this person.

[08:47]

I don't want to work with this person. I don't like this person. Gee, could they go to another monastery? Isn't there some other training center they could go to? So this sense of, we're like little kids. I just don't want this. And when we feel that way, what comes out of that often is a kind of aversion, right? That's a kind of aversion. The first one's like, gotta have, gotta have, gotta have, and the second one's like, I don't want it, I don't want it. The third one, I would say, is a kind of, we would say, is a delusion. They're all delusion, but we could say, if we're talking about greed, hate, and delusion, this third one would be a delusion about the nature of the self. So, if we talk about no self, what is no self? A definition of that would be not having inherent existing, not being an inherently existing self. What does it mean to not have an inherently existing self?

[09:50]

It just means that you have a self that's interconnected with all being. That we are in this interconnected, interpenetrating relationship with everything. We are engaged in this life with everything. We could not live this life without the activity and practice and effort of all things, all being, all space and time. So even the thing that you want to get rid of is helping you practice. That's really immediate, actually. The Tibetans say, when there's something that's causing you suffering, you say, oh, thank you very much. Thank you. Or when I was here, we would ruefully say, oh, another opportunity to practice. But it is an opportunity to practice. It's like the the grit that creates a pearl inside an oyster, right? It's like it wouldn't happen if there weren't that little piece of sand in there. So these difficulties, this suffering that we want to get rid of, this suffering is actually the genesis, one of the ways that we express our practice, the genesis of our wisdom.

[11:03]

We could not have wisdom without experiencing suffering. So... So here we have, this is the first noble truth. Okay, the third one is very important. That's why I started talking about no-self. Traditionally, the desire for re-becoming is this desire to keep replicating a fixed notion of self, right? So it's not to say we don't have a self, When you get defensive about something, when we get defensive about something, that's trying to replicate our sense of self. If we say, well, I know what's right. I know what's right in every situation. So we take the precepts and we say, in every situation, I should never steal. And if anybody steals, there's something wrong with them. They're a bad person.

[12:04]

But I bet every one of us could think of a situation where we might think stealing was okay. So everything isn't completely fixed and written in stone. But when we make those kinds of statements, what we're doing is validating our sense of self. Does this make sense? This sense of reifying our notion of who we are. If we say, I know what's right, I know what's wrong, we're saying something to ourselves about the nature of who we are. It's actually not about the other. It's about trying to shore up our sense of self. Yes, I'm right. I'm here. You know? I, I, I. So, this sense of re-becoming, and we do it in the same way when we say negative things to ourselves. If we say, oh, I'm always this. I'm always clumsy. I always say something stupid. Whatever that negative voice is, that's a reification of self. That's a way of saying... of getting caught in something about a story that you have about the nature of what's going on that doesn't include the totality of the situation.

[13:16]

Because remember, we're in an interconnected, interpenetrating relationship with all of reality. So this whole reality has to be taken into account in the nature of our experience and the nature of our definition of self. So it's this re-becoming this clinging to, as they say, clinging to rebirth, this re-becoming, clinging to want to reify your sense of who you are, that also creates these karmic problems. So, one of the ways to work with this first noble truth, there is suffering, is to acknowledge that there is suffering. Lots of times we want to say, If I were a good practitioner, I wouldn't be suffering. Enlightened people don't suffer. So we have this whole story about the nature of how we understand how we should be. And that story usually doesn't include suffering.

[14:20]

But, you know, we suffer anyway. Even with the story, we're still all suffering. Now, in the way we talk about this in Soto Zen, Dogen Zenji. Does everybody know who Dogen is? Dogen was the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, 13th century. This is a sentence from Vasco Neshobo Genso, which is the true Dharma Ai, called Kato, which means the complicated or problems. He says, in general... Although sacred beings all aim to learn the cutting of the roots of the complicated, okay, so we all aim to learn how to cut the roots of our problems, cut the roots of our suffering, they do not learn that cutting means cutting the complicated with the complicated.

[15:29]

So the first is to say, we learn that we want to cut off the roots, but we don't understand that the way that we cut off the roots is through entering into our problems. Entering into and transformation through our problems. And they do not know that the complicated is entwined with the complicated. I think this complicated entwined with the complicated... He's talking about the true intimacy of our life, this true intimacy of all beings practicing together. So when we talk about suffering, the first step is we have to acknowledge that we're suffering. And even if we acknowledge, and I mean in a specific way, it's like if you're upset about something, if you're having a difficult relationship, If there's something about yourself that you don't like, there's something that you want to turn away from, we have to acknowledge that there's a problem before we can work with the problem.

[16:39]

So we have to be willing to understand that suffering is the nature of being a human being in this world. And it's okay. It's really okay. We cannot escape suffering. And again, I'll say to you that your suffering is... the way that you will find wisdom. Because as we work through the issues and difficulties that we have, we learn about empathy. We learn about our connection with all being. We learn about the fact that we can, as Buddhas, we can be with this and that it's okay. We can be with this suffering We can look at the suffering and acknowledge the suffering and see what that's about. And that is the way that we'll learn. That is the way that we have this intimacy with our life. This is how we cut the complicated with the complicated. So the work that we have to do as practitioners is right now

[17:54]

in this life, in this moment, in this place. It's not somewhere else. A lot of people, for you who are residents here, you know, a lot of people outside when I give this kind of lecture, I say, you know, you don't have to go away to the monastery. You don't have to go away to some special place because we say, oh, if I could only go to the monastery, if I could only go to Tatsuhara, well, then I could practice. Now, I ask every one of you who's been here Did you leave all your problems behind when you came to Tassajara? You know, maybe for a week or so. Maybe for a while it was like really special and great, you know, until all of a sudden the schedule was like, oh, I don't like this so much. Oh, gosh, I have to deal with other people. There are other people here. So suffering is not necessarily a bad thing. Problems are not necessarily a bad thing. And they follow us around because it's about our mind.

[19:00]

It's not somebody else's mind. It's about our mind. So the problems that we have in our everyday life are going to come right here with us. But of course, this is your everyday life now. It's not something special anymore. This is just life. Getting up, going to work, right? Going to Zazen, going to work, having relationships, working on a crew, lugging around all the dirty laundry. All of those things that you guys do, working in the kitchen. I worked in the kitchen here for many practice periods. So, Jakku was head of the cabin crew when you were here in the summer. Okay, so, one more thing about this. It's really important to cultivate your faith in Buddhist teachings if this is what you want to do. Because sometimes we can't see where we're going. So if we want to deny the truth of suffering, this teaching that says there is suffering requires a level of faith.

[20:07]

So when your teacher says something to you that you don't understand, it might require a level of faith for you to take that teaching and to actually apply it to your life. Because Buddhism is experiential. It's not an intellectual pursuit. It's about experience. So this experience has to come from a kind of faith to jump into the pool. And then Buddhism says to us, if you jump into this pool, this should become clear to you at a certain point. So you're not asked to kind of keep this amorphous faith going endlessly. But we do have to have faith that this is true in order to explore and find out about the fact that it is true. Okay, so what's the second noble truth? Anybody know the second noble truth?

[21:09]

I've written down. There is a cause. There is a cause. or there is the arising or the cause. And then again, it is, instead of there is, it's this is. This is arising or cause. Okay. Suffering arises from desire or passions, anger, pride, ignorance, any kind of emotion that you can think of that's maybe not so wholesome, greed, any of those kinds of emotions that we think that are the source of suffering for ourselves. This is a kind of, when we talk about the second noble truth,

[22:12]

In this way, so those would be the mental afflictions that we have. And then the sort of body aspect would be the action. The actions of how they come out and how we operate and how we work. Our habitual responses that are unskillful. And that's what creates this kind of clinging karma that catapults you into the next rebirth. Right? So it's not the... I'll just add this. If you think of, if you ask yourself, well, what is it that's reborn? Like, is it a self that's reborn? If you think of it like a rope that's made up a lot of different strands, so each strand might be a lifetime or a moment or something like that, but this first strand and this strand over here are not going to be the same strand, so in that way, this no-self is impermanent. What's going from lifetime to lifetime or from moment to moment has a kind of continuity, yet simultaneously it's impermanent. So what is here and what is here are not the same thing.

[23:17]

Does that make sense to you? So it's not like we have this permanent self that transmigrates or rebirths from one lifetime to the next. But actually there's this, it's like these strands made up that make up the karmic stream. Um... So you're creating these karmic responses. Now, in traditional, earlier Buddhism, we're talking about lifetimes, creating what clinging, that karma that creates and throws you into the next lifetime. But in Zen, we talk more about this moment and this moment and this moment and this moment. We talk about, you know, what's happening right now. How can you enter into this moment right now? So how do we enter into this moment with a kind of generosity, not being caught by our places, not being caught by our anger, not being caught by what we don't want and what we want to get or what we don't want to have. In Uji, Dogen talks about the nature of time and being.

[24:23]

And one of the things he says is that if you think about your experience in this moment as a 360 degree moment, holistic moment right you enter into this moment if you're caught by habitual patterns and ways of thinking the way you're going to exit that moment there's only a narrow degree of exit but if you enter into that moment in which anything is possible if you enter into the moment with a mind of generosity with a mind of compassion, with a mind of openness, flexibility, you have the ability to respond in this model, in 360 degrees, to what's happening. Dogen says, to carry the self forward is delusion.

[25:24]

To carry the self forward is delusion. To allow myriad things to come forth is realization. To carry the self forward is entering that moment. with all of these ideas that we have, all these reified notions about the nature of our experience that shoot us across the moment and pop out the other side with this very narrow response. So maybe the thing that you go to is when you're upset is you go to anger, or maybe you go to feeling like a victim, or maybe you go to being jealous, or maybe you go to many other possibilities. If we're caught there, if we're being led around by that, we don't have any freedom, in a way, to respond to the moment because we're just caught in this world view. So, to talk about the Four Noble Truths is to say, how am I caught in this?

[26:26]

What is this catch here? What's getting me? So, one way to do that is to say, well, How do you notice that? How do you see that that's happening? So one way to see that that's happening is that you're upset. You're upset. Your body's upset. So you're tense. You're mentally not in balance. Now you might say to yourself, if I really had to work really hard on anger, so I would say to myself, well, you know, I'm not angry, I'm right. So that's a way we say, well, I'm not this, I'm this. Like, this other thing is okay. But actually, no, I was angry. I was upset. All those little plaque were building up in my arteries. Who knows, maybe I'll have a heart attack from the karma of spending an angry childhood and adolescence and young adulthood or whatever. But the point here is that...

[27:29]

that we notice what's going on in our body and minds and we notice and acknowledge that we're agitated and that acknowledgement is not some kind of crime and that's what goes back to what I was saying earlier that it's okay to acknowledge your suffering it's okay to acknowledge that this is happening so that you can work with it so you can enter into the complicated Dogen also talks about using the ground to stand up from the ground We have to use our problems to stand up with our problems. And we can also think about the ground as our true nature. Who is it that practices? Where does your desire to come to practice from? Where does it come from? It comes from the fact that you are Buddha. It comes from your deepest, as Suzuki Roshi would say, your inmost request. I'm just throwing a lot at you here.

[28:34]

Hopefully some of us were sick. So we talked about practice realization. Have you heard that expression? We don't practice to become realized. Our practice is an expression of realization. We are Buddha nature. We are this interconnected, interpenetrating activity, process, called life, that is going on and dependent upon each other, that's the essential nature of a Buddha, is waking up to that fact. Waking up to that. Carrying the self forward is delusion to allow myriad things to come forth as realization. These myriad things is that activity of all being. We are already Buddha nature. Do we always express that?

[29:34]

No. Are we always a Buddha? Do we always act like a Buddha? No. But we never are not that other thing. We never, never are not Buddha nature. So even in the midst of our problems, even the midst of suffering, we are still Buddha nature. We cannot help but do that. And that is, that is what, that's our big mind. That's the mind that that encourage us to practice. Dogen says, at the moment of your aspiration for realization, we usually think of these as sequential, the aspiration for realization, practice, realization, and then nirvana. By the way, Dogen's definition of nirvana is birth and death, this very light. And he says that all four of those things arise simultaneously. They are not four stages. We can talk about them as four stages, but as soon as you have the mind and the aspiration for realization, that's your Buddha mind coming forth and that's nirvana.

[30:44]

That's practice. That's realization. So we can be very encouraged by that. And yet, we suffer. Okay, so that's a way to talk about the second one. Let's see. So you want to notice, you want to wake up to the fact that you're suffering. All right, does somebody know number three? Or number three? There's... Cessation. There's cessation. Do you have a scholar over here? Thank you. I'm teasing you. I'm sorry. Okay, so this is cessation. Okay, so what is cessation? Traditionally, cessation would be getting off the 12-fold chain of causation, not being reborn.

[32:03]

This freedom from craving. It means nirvana. So nirvana is, can be translated, the root words for nirvana can either be freedom from craving or to put out the flame, put out the fire. this fire of the Klesias, this fire of all of these various things that we've been talking about. So how do we do that? So now we talk about number four, which is commonly the Eightfold Path. But I'm not going to talk about the various parts of the Eightfold Path. What I want to talk about is to continue to talk about the path of practice, which I would say is maybe the way we talk about practice more often. And I was thinking about this and I thought, my experience of Zen practice is that it has several elements that make up the path, the actual expression of our practice.

[33:18]

It also, this path is also how we engage and enter into our experience. So Zazen, right? Do Zazen, ritual, work, relationships, our community, and study. So these are ways that we practice, that you practice here at Casa Haro. You sit Zazen, you experience ritual, you work, you are in relationships, and you study. And in every one of those activities, you may experience suffering. So you go to Zazen and you experience the suffering, the physical pain of suffering. Or you experience the mental pain of questioning the activity that you're engaged in. You say, well, gee, I'm, you know, I had a great Zazen yesterday. What's with it today? Why am I not experiencing a wonderful experience today?

[34:20]

Well, yesterday, the period of Zazen went by in about two seconds, and today it feels like the Doan went out to town to get a cup of coffee. So that is this way of staying with the practice. In Zazen, it's great because you can't get up and leave. There's this environment of once you enter the Zendo, you're going to stay there. So part of our practice of working with suffering is, as Poma Chodron says, stay, like little puppies, stay. Stay with this. Investigate this. Be curious about it. Not judgmental, curious about it. Oh, this is interesting. What is this about? Oh, I don't like this person. What is this about? I don't like to walk around in Gosho. What is that about? I don't like to bow. Is the Buddha a god? What's with all these people bowing? I don't like to do this. But you stay.

[35:22]

You go to the ritual. You keep doing it. You explore the nature of that in the midst of your resistance. Are we getting close to needing to stop? I'm hearing various bells. Okay. So we have these various experiences that bring up in us It's often, you know, joy. We have experienced joy and we experience difficulties. So we experience sometimes joy in Zazen, sometimes difficulties. Also in these various ways, some people will come, they love the schedule. They love it. It's like they hide in it. I was a person who struggled with it all the time. I didn't want to get up. I like ritual. I like ritual. I like work. I just didn't like being on a schedule. So these various activities give us all sorts of entryways into experiencing suffering and joy.

[36:25]

So we come to the monastery or we come to our own lives like just going to work every day. Forget about being Tassavara. You know, you have to make a living. So you get up every day and you go to work. So this way that we're willing to enter into our lives, wholeheartedly enter into all of these activities and see what happens, and see what happens in the midst of that. So this is the way of, this is a way of looking at and exploring the nature of what it is. So I'll leave you this last, I wrote this quote up here. Suzuki Roshi said, you will have this practice. So this is our practice. We will have this practice. Of not fighting with things. Not fighting with things. So fighting with things is the source of suffering. This way in which we are gentle with ourselves. Gentle with each other. Gentle with things.

[37:27]

Things themselves. Right? So not fighting with things. Then you can be with the suffering. Resisting And fighting with things makes the suffering worse, right? So then you can be with the suffering. So how can we be with suffering and not fight with it? That's a koan, right? A big koan for a lot of us. What is this? What is this? I'm feeling suffering. I'm feeling a deep grief. I'm feeling all of these emotions that I don't want. So how can I soften and be present with this? So he says, then you can be with suffering without cutting off the chain of suffering. So this goes back to what Dogen was saying. We're not cutting something off. This is not a violent act. We're not looking for some way to eradicate pain in our practice.

[38:28]

Soto Zen, Dogen's very clear that this is not about getting rid of something. This is about acknowledging that this is the human condition, that this is a source of our wisdom, that this is a way that... looking for suffering, because you'll find it. It will come and help you, right? So we're not going out looking, trying to make problems for ourselves, but when these problems arise, that we change our attitude towards them. So he says, you will have the practice of not fighting things, And then you can be with suffering, without cutting off the chain of suffering. At that time, it is not suffering anymore. Okay? So that's a pretty radical statement. At that time, it won't be suffering anymore. My understanding of that is that suffering is what we're defining something as suffering. So when we go through this process, this is just like enlightenment, right?

[39:34]

Suzuki Roshi said, well, be careful what you wish for, because it may not be what you think. And actually, Dogen said that in the Shobo Genzo. We don't really know. We have a preconceived idea about what it means to be enlightened, a preconceived idea about what it means not to suffer. So Suzuki Roshi is saying, as you enter into this and experience this and have a softness and curiosity and a kind of wisdom and equanimity about the way we approach these problems, they will transform, our mind will transform in its relationship to these problems. And that transformation itself is realization. We don't know, maybe from this place, what that place is. So, we stay in this place, and in this place, we experience practice, we do our practice, and that practice, again, we have faith that it's also realization. That is practice realization, to have faith in that.

[40:40]

Okay, so I think I'll stop here and ask you if you have any comments or questions. Thank you. No one suffers here? Has anyone got? Yes, sir. I'm interested in that image, you said carrying the cell board over, maybe like a ribbon in a traveling group time or something, passing kind of dimension. And then we encounter suffering on the path. And to be with it, I almost feel like it's the path we are, that ribbon is almost going with the suffering for a second. It meets it, two points meet. and then it goes with it. I have this visual of what you were saying. What do you think of that?

[41:44]

Is that kind of how you visualize this? Well, I think it's really interesting if we think of it as a friend. I don't want to get too goody-two-shoes about this, but this way in which we befriend the experience that we're having, so we meet. What I was talking about, as I was saying, if you're caught in an habitual way of thinking about things, you don't have the flexibility to skillfully respond to the whole situation as it arises. But also, if we have a hardened notion about the nature of suffering and not wanting it, wanting to get rid of it, then when we meet it, we can't become friends with it. We can't cut the complicated with the complicated. We can't actually say what is it. Because what we're doing is we're trying to cut it off and get rid of it. We don't want it or not see it. So in that way, I like what you're saying because it's like we meet, you know, we meet and say, oh, hi, you.

[42:48]

Yeah, okay. Can we, like, walk this path together with each other? Even though we don't want to? Can I, like, put my arm in yours and now we're going to check this out together? Like, I don't like this person, but... I understand that that's suffering. Now how am I going to work with that? How am I going to take responsibility? Oh, I left this out. This is like huge. You have to take responsibility for your actions and for your mind. If you don't take responsibility, you cannot make transformation. You will be totally caught. So if you don't like something, you have to take responsibility that you don't like it and to be willing to explore the nature of that experience without immediately trying to change it. without making the other the problem, right? This is like big number one thing, is to take responsibility. The bad news about taking responsibility is that you can't blame somebody else.

[43:51]

You can't blame the circumstances. The good news about it is that that's how transformation happens. The good news about taking responsibility is now you can affect change in your own mind. It's not, you don't have to wait for somebody else to do it for you. Right? It's not somebody else's problem. Dogen says, if the time arrives, he says this in Busho, Buddha Nature, if the time arrives is the time right now. We say so much, well, if I had the right circumstances, if things were right, if this person were just different, then well, I could, you know, I could be generous. Right? I can be generous, but of course, they're the reason I can't be generous is because that person is like, you know, mean or whatever it is. No, that's not how it works. What works is your practice is right now, the time right now. If the time arrives means if the time of enlightenment, if the circumstances are right, I can have skillful response.

[44:53]

And Doug says, no, the time is right now. The time is right now. Please show me your Buddha nature, you know, right now. So as practitioners, we're, you know, not beating ourselves up, but saying, okay, my mind is my mind. I'm going to take responsibility for my mind. If I don't like somebody, maybe I could change, be more generous, more open, more empathic, whatever it is. You know, they are not responsible for changing to meet my needs. Yes? Sometimes when I'm in conflict with someone and then I... I decide, oh, I don't want to be in conflict with them and I want to be generous or I want to practice kindness. I almost feel myself starting to be kind of condescending in the situation because I know... You're better than they are?

[45:57]

Yeah, like, oh, I can see that they're suffering. Yeah. Yeah. Poor thing. And now I have my equanimity. Well, that's a near enemy, I would say, to generosity or compassion. Compassion is the English meaning of the word compassion is passion with, right? With, standing with. Pity is like this. I pity you. You're like not as good as I am. Empathy is to be with. So that's what we're going for. So when you feel that way, Just remember all the ways that you're not so perfect, right? It may not be the same thing as the other person, probably isn't. Although I find it interesting, the things that most annoy me in another person are usually things I'm afraid that I might actually be in my heart of hearts. So just throw that out there. Yes, you were first. Often when I think about

[46:57]

The idea of disidentifying or disidentification from strong feelings, I have learned to think of it in terms of that's not me, right? Like that feeling is not me. But I was recently introduced to the idea that disidentification could possibly also be that is not mine. Like this mind is not mine, right? Like this mind state is not, not only is it not me, it's not mine. possess it and as that being like potentially like a very empowering or useful. It's a very new idea to me, this flip side. I could see that being very encouraging in the sense that I don't have to be trapped here, right? I don't have to, as they say, reify this or make this into some concrete state that my mind is flexible, my mind is impermanent, right? That I can change. and different things can happen.

[47:58]

So I think in that way, it's really great. In the sense of thinking of it like it's not my mind, like I don't have to own this, I can ignore that there's a problem, that's not so good. Because we really do need to acknowledge that we have problems and that we need to work with them. Suzuki Roshi was really clear about this, this thing about problems and working with problems. He said, that's your practice. You know, that's what you're up to. And I would say that, yeah, that's true. Do you have anything else you want to say about that? No, no, I am appreciating your response. Yeah, okay, okay. Yes, sir. I had a question. When you were talking about the first number trip, you said that it's important to cultivate a faith in Buddhist practice, Buddhist teaching. Yeah. And I had a two-part question. What do you say to students that can't cultivate faith in Buddhist teaching? And then secondly, what do you say to students that would like to cultivate faith in Buddhist teaching but also can't and that's causing them suffering?

[49:04]

Just do it. Put yourself there and just do it. The problem is that requires faith. But you can have just a little bit of faith. You know, you can just go in with a little bit of faith. You want to find a teacher. That's another thing. And Jaku might talk about this. She's written a book about trust and faith. So this is one of the great, you know, finding a teacher is really important. Somebody that you trust, somebody that you believe them enough so that you can actually do what they ask you to do from a practice point of view and have faith that they're not going to ask you to do more than you can do. Now, you shouldn't leave your discerning mind behind. That's really important. Don't leave your intelligence behind in this process. And yet, it does require that you have some little bit of faith. And then, if you take that little bit of faith, and that seems to work, then it will just automatically get bigger and grow.

[50:11]

But, you know, in Buddhism, the Buddha said, don't do anything that you feel like is wrong or something like that, right? So... So I think it's this kind of fine line in there, where you have to have a little bit of faith to do this, and yet simultaneously, you don't have to leave your mind behind. You don't have to leave your questions behind. So that's the other thing. You can always push on your teacher, right? Go into Dokestan and say, what is this? What is this, you know? Is there any way for a student to practice with no bait, or are they completely lost? Gee, you know, I don't know. You'll talk about tomorrow. All right, that's great. Please come tomorrow and Jackie can answer that question. Yes. These are good questions. Yes. On the note of faith, I'm not... I guess I'm curious what it is that you... What is it that we need to have faith in to practice?

[51:14]

Because my experience with Buddha's and more and starting to practice... And something that's so wonderful about it, in contrast to many other religions, is that I feel like you don't have to believe anything. You can just try it on. Right. And that it's almost like maybe that there can be, like a distinction might be that as long as there's curiosity, you don't have to be, have faith maybe, but that if you're curious and you like... Like maybe somebody says the source of suffering is attachment or desire or thirst or however you want to phrase it. And you can look for yourself. Like, okay, I don't necessarily need to believe that, but okay, I'm going to try that on. I'll see. I'm going to look in here and see if I'm having a hard time and if I'm attached to anything. Okay, I agree with you about that. I think you can come to Buddhism with a kind of curiosity, and I think that's really good, and this may help with what you're saying.

[52:18]

I completely agree with you. And I would also say, at some point in your practice, usually around the issue of no self, you have to step off the 100% pole, right? You have to say, okay, because every bit of your small self is screaming at you, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this, I don't want to do this. I don't want to apologize. I don't want to atone. I don't want to acknowledge the fact that I did something that was unskillful. I don't, I don't, I don't. You're like a little kid. And it's like it is faith that allows you, I would say, faith in that teaching that allows you to say, okay, I'm going to go to this teaching of no self and say, all right, I'm going to, you know, I'm going to cultivate generosity. I'm going to let go. I'm going to see what it's like here to... to go and apologize, to atone for my mistake, to realize that I'm not right, to realize that I live an interconnected life, and that includes this person I can't stand. Okay? I think that takes a little bit of faith.

[53:20]

That totally makes sense to me that throughout the process, especially when we're really stuck, when there's something we're really suffering over, feeling very small or contracted around things, It's often in those moments that it's hard to see the interconnectedness or to see that we're the ones that we need to take responsibility. And at that point, to choose a skillful action based on the teachings might be an act of faith. Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. It isn't like a faith like, well, theism as a kind of faith where we believe even though maybe you can't see God or somebody you believe that there is a God. Right, that would be a kind of faith that we, but that's not the kind of faith we're talking about here. Francis Cook talks about faith in Buddhism, and he says that, you know, your faith should be borne out. By engaging the activity, you should see the truth of this. And that's, Buddhism works like that, as we may have to take a leap of faith to get to the next step, but we should see the truth of it.

[54:26]

At some point, it should become clear to us that it makes sense. That is not about faith, it's empirically there. Yes, sir. Do you have a question? Yeah, I'm not so hung up on the word faith, but I'm hung up on the word curiosity. And, like, I really like how Dukin Roshi said, in the beginner's mind, you have to have faith in nothing. I don't think he's referring to nothing in a dualistic way. But that really worked for me. But then you were saying that we need to be curious about the suffering. And I have this story that I'm a fairly curious person, and I carry that from moment to moment. And my curiosity demands an answer. So that demanding of an answer causes me a real suffering. So what do you say to that? Well, I say that that's a really good koan. So keep being curious about that. But in particular, be curious about your suffering. What is it that you're clinging to? What is it that you want out of this?

[55:27]

Does curiosity demand an answer? No, not necessarily. You know, using the word curiosity actually comes from Trungpa Rinpoche. He used this word a lot. Curiosity is an attempt to free up when we get really strict notions about things and get really caught with something, where we're very intense about something and it feels very hard. So curiosity, he also used the word spaciousness a lot. So curiosity is this way that we kind of break open those hard places. And they take on this way in which we can be... The feeling of curiosity is soft, right? The feeling of... Another kind of feeling about trying to deal with something in a way that's very hard and harsh to ourselves. And so we want to avoid that. We want to avoid that. What we want to do is create this softness around the question.

[56:29]

But we want to keep coming back to the question. And actually, our life koans are going to keep coming back to us anyway. And this sounds like this is a koan for you. So go to Greg. And it's time. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, 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.

[57:08]

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