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 morning and welcome to Green Gulch Farm. especially to those who are here for the first time. My name is Anna Thorne, and I was a resident here for several years. I recognized some faces. And in 2017, I moved back to Germany. So now I'm visiting, reconnecting, and enjoying Green Gulch Farm a lot. And I'm very grateful that Jiryu and Fu invited me to sit here today and explore the Dharma with you.

[01:08]

So when I thought about, like, what would I talk about, one word came up, tolerance. And I think... It has to do with maybe somehow the deterioration of tolerance in what I would call the political arena. And that is not only here in the States. I also feel there is a shrinking kind of process in Germany. There is a very strong polarization going on. So I just wondered what could be helpful in this regard. So when we look at the word tolerance, it comes from the Latin word tolerar, carrying a burden, enduring a condition of hardship.

[02:21]

So the one that is tolerant would be the one who can stand, that the so-called other person has a different opinion, that they act different, that they feel different, and not only different, but we might not like how they act and feel. But we are not just reactive. to it, but we negotiate it and make space for it. So in the Buddhist context, tolerance is a part of kshanti parameter. The kshanti parameters are the perfections of the bodhisattva, and I will talk later about that. Shanti is a Sanskrit word translated as forbearance, endurance, tolerance.

[03:34]

And shanti is essential to develop the practice of the Buddha way. We need endurance to be with suffering in an immediate sense. We need endurance to be with suffering. illness, dying, mental stress. We need patients to be able to be open in a situation that would immediately lead to shutting down, turning away, not wanting to be where we are, not wanting to face. what is happening right now. But where we actually, where it's necessary, where we stay through it, where we stay with it.

[04:36]

And this moment of staying with the unbearable, I think it appears in this poem by David White. The title is Sitting Zen. After three days of sitting hard by the window, following grief through the breath, like a hunter who has tracked for days the blood spots of his injured prey, I came to the lake where the deer had run exhausted, refusing to save its life in the dark water, and there it fell to ground. in our mutual and respectful quiet, pierced by the pale diamond edge of the breath's listening presence.

[05:37]

For me, David White gives a series of images here for a pivotal moment of staying with a deadly pain or threat, and it is a moment of no fight or flight. but just letting go. And when I say letting go, I mean it's not an active, it's not an action. Conditions are coming together that something can dissolve. I came to the lake where the deer had run, exhausted, refusing to save its life in the dark water. And there it fell to ground. in our mutual and respectful quiet, pierced by the pale diamond edge of the breath's listening presence. Sitting strong can really help us to go through painful and difficult situations and not run away from it.

[06:49]

Mindfulness breathing can be the ground for moving through the waves of pain. physical and mental pain. Zazen practice, just completely sitting, is practicing shanti. Suzuki Roshi says in beginner's mind, In the Zazen posture, your mind and body have great power to accept things as they are, whether agreeable or disagreeable. In the zazen posture, your mind and body have great power to accept things as they are, whether agreeable or disagreeable. I think Suzuki Roshi expresses the essential point of shanti, to accept and invite our life as it is completely. And acceptance is the completion of tolerance.

[07:54]

completely accept what is in front of us, we need to first tolerate it. To bear what we do not like, maybe. Then we need to fully listen and give it space. And then we need to let go of what we are holding on to. When we start to sit regularly, there might be difficulties arising. Maybe our knees start to hurt, or our mind cannot be convinced to settle down. We have the tendency to not be satisfied with the moment, as it is happening right now. And we are able to widen our capacity to be with what is. we can deepen our patience and endurance beyond the scope of our habitual patterns of impatience and intolerance.

[09:07]

And the more we are able to accept our pain and live through it, the more we open up to the complexity of our reality. Not being satisfied with this moment will always return to us as long as we are not completely welcoming this moment. Impatience is a clear marker for us that we would like to get away, that we are not really happy to be in this situation. When you remember a moment of impatience and maybe just a simple kind of impatience. You are waiting for someone who is supposed to arrive and who is late, and worse, who is always late. How could we turn this into an opening, a gift?

[10:17]

Or about a more difficult situation. What about when we're suffering from not wanting to get old? We really have no choice here. And this kind of suffering comes through a number of conditions, and one of them being that we hold on to the image of a person that actually doesn't exist anymore. So only if we can let go of this grasping of youngness, and if we can accept the age, our age, except in being as old as we are. Can we really be welcoming to this life, our life, right now? For this kind of attunement, we need patience and kindness with ourselves. In a way, this is a learning process to me.

[11:21]

And I find that in every learning process there is a patience going on, a holding space of forbearance. Like when you imagine a child is learning to walk or learning to ride the bicycle, it's often a parent that is holding this role of endurance of difficulty or encouragement to move into an unknown situation or into an unknown field and to do it again and again until the body knows the move that it's supposed to learn. I also think that in our creativity there's always a moment of patience when we just give something a little more time or space to develop to a point that we cannot know.

[12:28]

And we would miss this point if we would not give it this open space and our full presence. Sometimes, if you move carefully through the forest, breathing like the ones in the old stories, who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without a sound. You come to a place whose only task is to trouble you, with tiny but frightening requests, conceived out of nowhere, but in this place beginning to lead everywhere. Requests to stop what you're doing right now, and to stop what you are becoming while you do it. Questions that can make or unmake a life, questions that have patiently waited for you, questions that have no right to go away.

[13:44]

Another poem by David White. By now I hope we have a sense of what this vast field of kshanti could open to. To be a little more specific, I would like to turn back to kshanti in the Buddhist context, kshanti as the third parameter, the perfection of the bodhisattva. As you might remember, The Bodhisattva makes the following vows. Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. And you might remember that we chant these vows at the end of the lecture each time.

[14:50]

We also chant these vows in the ceremonies, in the initiation ceremonies when we receive the precepts, and in the full moon ceremony each month when we recommit to the precepts. The first vow is the intention. to save all beings. It is the intention to engage in the liberation of beings endlessly. It seems to be an intention that can never be fulfilled. It has some kind of paradoxical element. Your vow to liberate all beings is to vow to do the impossible if we think we are doing something. On the other hand, it is also the only liberation that is possible. Only if every being is liberated can we be free.

[15:56]

As long as our freedom excludes the liberation of other beings, this freedom is compromised. So this vow is based on the understanding of complete interdependence. clarity of wisdom and the gentleness of compassion are the companion of each of the Paramitas. The Paramitas, just to name them, are generosity, ethical conduct, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom. in Buddhism, patience has three essential aspects. Gentle forbearance, calm endurance of hardship, and acceptance of the truth of reality.

[17:01]

So I find this description helpful from Michelle McDonald. The first aspect of patience is gentle forbearance. We may be on the verge of making a brilliant retort to a co-worker, but we hold our tongue rather than say something hurtful. Even though our patience is triggered, we can tap into the deeper reservoir of our motivation not to do harm. Gentle forbearance may feel difficult, even contrived, because it doesn't constitute true acceptance of things as they are. But it is nonetheless a critical aspect of patience, because it helps us to restrain ourselves long enough to determine the most skillful action for this moment.

[18:14]

the most skillful response. And that is actually always the question. What is the adequate response to this moment? So gentle forbearance helps us to anchor our attention in the movement of the breath. Can we truly receive just one breath? Can we sustain our attention? from the birth of the breath through its life, through its passing away, we notice that in those moments of attention we are temporarily freed from mental torment. There is no need to focus on our expectations or attachments to results. Impatient thoughts come and go by themselves, just as the breath comes and goes by itself.

[19:18]

Any time we want life to be different than it is, we are caught in impatience. We lose our sense of humor, and self-pity, despair, and blame seep in. Gentle forbearance includes the spirit, of forgiveness. When we feel conflict with others, understanding their suffering is the first step of being able to communicate, forgive, and start again. The practice of forgiveness happens when we are able to realize the underlying cause of our anger and impatience. Serenity and calm develop as we learn to accept imperfections in others and in ourselves.

[20:24]

The second aspect of patience is calm endurance of hardship. Endurance of suffering doesn't mean doing nothing to alleviate it. Patience isn't passive. It's motivated by an acceptance of and compassion for suffering rather than a desire to eradicate it. When we feel impatient with our relationship, our work, or our spiritual practice, we need to realize that we are resisting how things are. A sense of humor and curiosity about our lives can also help. us to confront this impatience. There is a very strong image of what endurance of hardship might look like from the Christian context.

[21:32]

That is, Marta Dolorosa, Maria, when she's suffering through the dying of her son under the cross. And there is an old poem about this with the title Stabat Mata. And there's also a lot of music pieces with this title, Stabat Mata. If you like to look on for it, I can recommend the one by Gian Battista Pegolesi. It's a very beautiful piece and it's not just heavy, not just grieving, but also has very vital light pieces in it. So for me it's actually helpful to listen to it when I'm deeply hurt by something and have to go through some grieving.

[22:39]

The third aspect of patience, acceptance of the truth, is the most difficult one. It calls for the understanding of emptiness of everything, of emptiness, including of emptiness of ourselves. We can accept our experience as it is with all its suffering, when we have realized emptiness. If we after long negotiations or on the spot understand that we are not existing as this independent, self-sufficient person that we imagine we are, but that we are only independent on all beings, we might be able to completely accept our life, even if a lot of pain is going on in it.

[23:51]

This acceptance of things as they are requires profound wisdom and compassion. And I think it takes a long time of attunement to emptiness. Now I would like to speak to the point of tolerance and inclusiveness which originally moderated this talking. Thich Nhat Hanh speaks about inclusiveness in the context of patience. Inclusiveness as the capacity to receive and the absence of hatred is an expression of patience. developed patience. In Shantideva Guide to Bodhisattva's Life, we can read, There is no evil like hatred and no fortitude like patience.

[24:57]

Thus I should strive in various ways to meditate on patience. Hatred and anger cause pain. There is nothing good to be said about anger and hatred. If we express them, we inflict injury. They induce reactivity, and soon insult and injury go back and forth. At the time of Twitter and the like, reactivity of enormous potential can play out, and we have not found yet the ethical framework that needs to be set to help us negotiate this potential. To ease out the reactivity of anger and to avoid the damage of hatred, we need to cultivate patience.

[25:59]

We need to be mindful of our emotional reactivity. To take insult, slander, humiliation or degradation with equanimity, and not react in anger. We first need to get to know our anger. We can't become intimate with it. We need to become familiar with it and own it. We easily blame someone for something. when we feel insulted. Right there we need to look inside and maybe follow the following instructions that we can find in the scriptures. Reflect on the possibility that we suffer as a result of karmic conditions. Reflect on the possibility that this experience enables us

[27:07]

to learn tolerance, and that this instant is our teacher. Reflect on no self and emptiness. Kshanti, forbearance, endurance, could be translated to German as Langmut, for example, which translates as a long-lasting courage. or Gleichmut, which could be translated as equanimity. To bring back Langmut and Gleichmut to the political process that seems to be totally disintegrating would mean to reconstitute tolerance and curiosity and welcome discussion. Kshanti Paramita, the perfection of Kshanti, is welcoming our life in all aspects.

[28:13]

Kshanti is not only passive endurance, but at the same time the courage to move into unknown territory and take on difficulties. I would like to close with a Kovan story. You might have heard this before. It's one of Reb's most liked stories. It's about Hakuin Ekaku, who lived in the 16th and 17th century. A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near Hakuin. One day, without any warning, the parents discovered that the girl was pregnant. This made the parents very angry. The girl would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment, she named Hakuin.

[29:22]

In great anger, the parents went to the master. Is that so? was all he would say. After the child was born, it was brought to Hakuin. By this time, he'd lost his social reputation, which did not trouble him, but he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else that the child needed. A year later, the girl could not stand the situation any longer. She told her parents the truth. She told her parents that the real father was a young man working at the fish market. The mother and father immediately went to Hakuin and asked for forgiveness.

[30:26]

They apologized at length and also asked to get the child back. Hakuin willingly yielded the child, saying only, is that so? Thank you very much for listening. 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.

[31:13]

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