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. Welcome, everyone, to San Francisco Zen Center. My name is Kyoshin Wendy Lewis, and today I will be addressing freedom. I was discussing this with a friend and they suggested that I title my talk, The Agony of Existence, based on something I had said during our conversation. And it occurred to me that a lot of our teachings and our talks are about freedom or liberation and suffering or the agony of existence. So the subtitle of this talk is, accommodating the agony of existence, as I think that's what freedom does.

[01:04]

So, all of our ideas about freedom, yes, they're all included. But any effort towards freedom is fraught with risk. It requires testing our ideas, our views, our relationships. And our networks of trust, and this isn't to destroy them or doubt them in a certain way, but to clarify the truth behind them. What's real in a certain way? And of course, this can be exhilarating and or devastating. And I think those are both necessary experiences in personal and spiritual development. So the process, though, is accompanied by an extraordinary sense of liberation, that freedom to test. And by extraordinary, I partly mean that most of us will not make those sacrifices, not because of anything limited about ourselves, but because of what they require.

[02:20]

And that's not particularly recommended. So, you know... I often ask this, do any of us want to live as the Buddha did or many other spiritual predecessors or as many artists and writers and philosophers have lived? And yet we need them and they need us. I think our predecessors were and are. imperfect people in this imperfect world, but they managed to think in creative ways and contexts about meaning and how to live this one limited life, circumscribed, I guess. So they were and are fallible, and their confidence is informed by skepticism,

[03:23]

When you think of the Buddha, he's wondering, doubting. He has all these different teachers and then ends up saying, no, I'm just going to go into the forest and meditate and see what happens. So skepticism, frustration, and a sense of humor or irony. And for me, a couple of examples of this are John Donne and Niccolo Machiavelli. Dunn was Catholic in England during the 16th and 17th centuries, and that was a particular time when Catholics, it was their turn to, and this was a case with his relatives, friends, and acquaintances, were imprisoned or executed for their beliefs and their practices, and they were not eligible to hold sort of civil service and court positions. So he shared his poems and writings.

[04:26]

He published very little during his lifetime with his friends, and some of them were satires and criticisms of the government. And one work was called The Catalogus, and it's a list of made-up books and authors for the use of courtiers so they can pretend to be wise and better informed. than they actually are. This was his way of trying to see these things through a different lens than just, I can't get a job, you know? It was more like, it's funny. What was unique about him, and I think about a lot of people like him, including Machiavelli, is their ability to laugh at and argue with themselves. So it's not just like criticism and satire of others.

[05:28]

And in the meantime, Dunn had to figure out how to make a living. Some of his friends gave him financial support and, you know, work here and there, secretarial work and that sort of thing. So he was very well educated. And he spent many years in poverty as his family grew and grew and grew. And then after his wife's death, he converted to English Protestantism, became ordained, and eventually... was appointed as the dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. And when he was there, he became famous for his sermons. Thousands of people would show up for his sermons. The OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, cites 340 words that he invented. And these include beauteousness, bystander, emancipation, and horridness.

[06:33]

So that's where those come from. And he especially liked using the prefix super, super miraculous, super exaltation, and super infinite. Catherine Rundell wrote a biography of him, and she used super infinite as the title. So most people who know of Dunn associated him with his writings, Death Be Not Proud, and No Man Is An Island. And I think there is something in all this, his life, his struggles, he often was ill, that's about independence or freedom under the pressure to be conventional, and obedient, and also the resistance and the compromise that accompany that sort of effort.

[07:37]

And Dunn was a contemporary of Shakespeare. He was another Catholic, keeping his head down. And like Shakespeare, as I said, he was well-educated, well-read. And during that time, education consisted almost completely of memorization. So these wordsmiths and these thinkers had this deep well of language, cadence, imagery, fiction, and history that they had memorized and they could draw from. In Dunn's satire-free... his satire three on religion, he considers inquiry and truth. Though truth and falsehood be near twins, yet truth a little elder is.

[08:41]

Be busy to seek her, believe me this, he's not of none nor worst that seeks the best. To adore or scorn an image or protest may all be bad. Doubt wisely. In strange way to stand inquiring right is not to stray. To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill, cragged and steep, truth stands. And he that will reach her about must and about. So he says, doubt wisely. And that the pursuit of truth requires that one about must and about must go. And so, you know, this is the task or the risk of testing truth and falsehood against our knowledge and experience.

[09:48]

You know, should we flatter? Should we criticize? Should we test ourselves against our circumstances or go along with what seems to be most acceptable and expected? One of the questions of life. And what's the point? So I think in this effort of about must and about must go, one moves between keeping silence and feeling compelled to say something. Back and forth, back and forth. Because freedom is not about right versus wrong, or it would fall right back into the dichotomy of preference, or what we call desire. Dunn was very worried that some of his works, including the catalogus and some other more incendiary things that he wrote, satirizing royalty and the government would be discovered and threaten his life and that of his family and his ability to earn money to support them.

[11:03]

Six of his children died very young and his wife, Anne, and a stillborn child who would have been their 12th died during labor at the age of 33. And Dunn was often ill. And in the midst of this, he goes on writing and thinking and feeling and talking to people. He had a variety of friends from all different levels of class, I guess you could say. And entertaining and challenging everyone and himself through his wit, and his expressions of beauty, sorrow, faith, and philosophy. So what is freedom? Niccolo Machiavelli, in 15th and 16th century Italy, was barred from holding public office,

[12:08]

because his father, who owned and worked lands around Florence, was always in debt, and debtors and their families were barred from holding government positions. So he made do with sort of diplomatic assignments and secretaryships, and he would go on these diplomatic missions and invariably get sick, because he had to stay in sort of cheap inns and eat and drink, whatever he could afford. He was not particularly conventional. He was bisexual, and he enjoyed visiting a brothel near his home for conversation and entertainment, you could say. And he had a lot of friends and peers in government, and some of them also supported him financially, similar to Dunn. And so, you know, caught in between, being very well educated and having all those qualities and not having to make, um, having the opportunity to make a living through them.

[13:18]

He wrote political philosophy, poetry plays. There was one play of his that was done several times in the theater there. And, uh, he also wrote satirical plays and, uh, and most of us know him for The Prince. And he's remembered for his ability to describe blunt truths related to power, if you've read The Prince, very blunt. But there's this humor and also his sort of stunned sense of what power takes for granted that are also very striking. I finally read The Prince, and I thought, but wait, this is funny, you know? And it's stunned, that sense of being stunned by what the prince feels that he's empowered to do and not do.

[14:20]

And one of Machiavelli's translators, Daniel Adano, wrote about the prince, Time has not dimmed its direct and uncompromising honesty. Here there is no bowing to pious clichés, to pretended sensibilities, or hallowed euphemisms. Seldom has a writer done so little to ease the way for his ideas, and one may wonder, in fact, whether those who have reacted to Machiavelli with such voluble horror have not been more shocked by his candor than by the character of the ruler he describes. So these two, Dunn and Machiavelli, were kind of outsiders or outliers, you could say, in their times and in their circumstances. And they dealt with it through perspective and applying their knowledge in these creative and transformative ways and offering this sort of humor, beauty, friendship, entertainment.

[15:33]

through their high level of literary and philosophical skill. And the undercurrents were risk, danger, loss, and disparagement. The joys, on the other hand, were this friendship and this freedom of expression. Because when you have all that at your hand, there's all of that memorization, all of that, study and everything, where do you take it? So to have that freedom of expression, to look at it, both applying it outside and personally. And so I've been thinking that there is a part or function of the brain that can hold these contradictions of a human experience without judging it. And it can bear the conjunction of the senses that the brain tries to sort out in its ordinary way.

[16:42]

And provide them with a spaciousness that allows for always alternative interpretations. And I think part of this is the ability to argue against yourself and your conclusions. Keep asking, experimenting with that. and particularly in the area of piety and the sense that what is right is what is of benefit to oneself. And so for those of us experiencing, studying, and interpreting Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, from a Western perspective, it can be tempting to embrace a kind of piety that allows us to ignore and avoid circumstances that that are all around us, both interpersonally and globally. And yet Zen, when you look at all the stories and the history of it, offers a context of contradictions, stories of hardship, of realization, of quirkiness, creativity, and unexpected insights or realizations.

[17:58]

And the exemplars of Zen propose that liberation is not a matter of accumulation, but of shedding the fantasy or the cartoon of success. So unfreedom is viewing the world in terms of what I call dollar signs or gains and losses. And one of the qualities of what we call beginner's mind, or the free mind, is to recognize that our views are steeped in prejudices dressed up as facts. That's a quote. Steeped in prejudices dressed up as facts. So Dunn and Machiavelli are examples of people at those outer edges of power. who consider its strangenesses and potential with a skeptical eye and, you know, even with a kind of resignation.

[19:09]

But they don't give up or ignore it. And they look at it closely and humorously. And I find their example sort of encouraging, even though it's also a warning. You know, If you step out there, it's not just, you know, oh, yay, that you're going to meet. And yet, whatever response allows you to question again yourself, your intentions, your reality, your fantasies, all of that. So their perspective and their writing, as well as their biographies, I find deeply moving. And curious in terms of the human condition. Like, what are we each doing and offering and taking and examining and wondering about in our lives?

[20:13]

And how does that all sort of move together? And also, how does it inform how we stop? How we decide to sit meditation or... Think about things in a deeper and less, not exactly conventional, but stiff way. So I think this risking their lives and their well-being released them from the role of victims or of kind of obsequiously going along. with the principles and politics of those that push them to the edges. And it reminds me of that classical Zen response to the wish to be free. Who has bound you? So an aspect that's not so simple to unravel is their capacity for something I think of as forgiveness.

[21:23]

And this is an ability to include as a given, the sort of kind of madness that people resort to and uphold to establish and keep their power. And, you know, that includes, as they experienced, you know, either being on the edge or being silenced and, you know, being at risk of murder and imprisonment and those sort of things. for questioning, doubting, being skeptical, disagreeing with those in power, just out of this curiosity in a certain way, or someone who might threaten those in power by saying something that other people might get, you know, worked up about. So I think that freedom is partly having or claiming the spaciousness to develop one's own talents and abilities.

[22:44]

And that is kind of an awkward thing, and I don't think it ever ends. You don't sort of just end up knowing everything or... getting it or something like that. So Dunn's words that are titled No Man is an Island is a reflection on interdependence. Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. And Catherine Rundle comments, our interconnectedness is cast by Dunn not as a burden, but as a great project. Our interwoven lives draw their meaning only from each other. So the full title of this talk is actually Freedom, Forgiveness, and the Agony of Existence.

[23:46]

And I think freedom, or liberation, and the agony of existence or suffering are connected through forgiveness, this flexibility and tolerance about oneself, one's role, and the context of it, everyone else. And I think that this kind of forgiveness is not, oh, well, it's okay. or excusing people from culpability or oneself from that. But it's this tolerance for the great variety of the human experience and understanding. And I think it's also an act of generosity to disempower someone from an intention, I guess, to bully people or to make victims of others.

[24:48]

And it's also an act of freedom to release oneself and others from being bullied and victimized. So you can't get it right or wrong exactly. Just, yeah. So Dunn wrote, Though truth and falsehood be near twins, yet truth... A little elder is. So truth, in a way, is a kind of a wide view that doesn't cling to its own limited context. And falsehood is a narrow view based in self-reference. And yet they're very near to each other. I think they inform and take each other apart, turn and turn about. So freedom or liberation, though there's an awareness in it of danger and known and unknown consequences, includes what in Buddhism is called dispassion.

[26:00]

And it's a calmness that can bear conflict, disagreement, and inevitable chaos. It's an equilibrium or equanimity that doesn't assume or expect liberation to remove one from this ever-shifting, interdependent agony of existence or suffering. So accommodating the agony of existence, I think freedom just continues and continues to experience interconnectedness as a resource for humor, forgiveness, and continuity. Thank you very much.

[27:15]

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