Welcome, and thank you very much for coming here this morning. So, the poet Gertrude Stein said, a river in its rush and turn can become muddy, but in its course of flowing, the mud gradually settles and the water runs clear again. Of course, there are many ways to talk about this river. Each one of us is this river, but also all of us together are this river. or maybe say it more correctly, but grammatically incorrect, all of us together is this river.

[01:14]

So each one of us, I assume, has a different motivation for coming here this morning. And I think if we would take the time and change the form here and share our motivation, we would meet in the realm of difference, realm of diversity. That's a realm where each of one is different from the other. strikingly different, in fact, unfathomably different. I think a river cannot be fathomed.

[02:26]

Once we try to measure it, it has already moved on. But I also think or I'd say I wish to think that all of us are here because we have this very human longing to be whole. This longing of the heart to merge. Merge with our surroundings. Merge with each other, but in the end, to even merge with ourselves. And this longing of the human heart, I think, is an indication of the realm of oneness, a realm which is as valid

[03:33]

for our lives as a realm of difference. And it's my fate which I would like to express this morning that if we look deeply into our individual motivation for being here, we will start to see it as an expression of our wish to merge. And when we begin to see this, the two realms which we inhabit, which, as you know, can sometimes be in conflict, will naturally be in a state of harmony. So, I bring up difference and unity as a way to speak about the human heart.

[04:46]

Because it's in the human heart that we find difference and unity and also the fundamental harmony between both. And I think today, on this pre-Valentine's Day morning, I would suggest that this exploration of the human heart is the heart of Zen practice. I have been asking myself a question lately. What is the gift of the broken heart?

[05:54]

Now, I would not be truthful to you if I wouldn't share with you that this question arose from a deeply painful experience in my own life. make a long story short two weeks before Christmas somebody I deeply cared about somebody I deeply care about broke my heart maybe I don't have to say much more about this My heart has been broken before, and I just think that many of you in this room have gone through a similar experience.

[06:55]

However, I want to say I feel each time it happens, it's a new, very powerful, and all-encompassing event. I felt abandoned and deeply alone, deeply alone. At night, after one or two hours of sleep, I woke up and was visited by these raging currents of jealousy and wrath. The river, so to speak, ran very fast and was muddy. In these hours I became deeply grateful for our practice.

[08:07]

All I could do was to just lie there and watch. In other words, to be mindful of the difficult guests who had arrived at my doorstep. This might be going far, but I want to say this. In these hours, I understood how such wonderful and yet brokenhearted people as us can be stalkers, even murderers. There were moments when there was no difference between me and stalker and murderer.

[09:12]

However, what stopped me from acting on my impulses was our compassionate practice. I knew that a rift cannot be healed by creating another rift. And then, one night, in the midst of my passions, I made this vow. I vowed not to abandon my broken heart. I vowed to stay with my broken heart, to allow it to express itself to myself. I vowed not to try to fix it. I vowed

[10:19]

to surround it with kindness and patience. I had a deep feeling that there was something to learn from this heartache, something new to open up to. One night, I woke up after two hours of sleep and in this unguarded state, I felt the abandonment. It was like a pulsating wound behind the belly button. It was as if the umbilical cord had just been cut a second time. And then, as if out of nowhere, this question appeared.

[11:29]

Do you really want things to be different? And to my own surprise, there was this very clear answer. No. So, I would say... For me, it needed a complete surrender, complete acceptance of what was happening before the gifts cautiously began to appear in the middle of the pain. And I want to be cautious right now Because a gift might be a word too strong for something that I experience as timid and tender voices in the midst of very strong expressions.

[12:39]

So... gifts on the deepest level that I can be in touch with that I can experience the broken heart the heart is pure visceral sensation And if we can stay with that, which I think sometimes really needs courage, we can notice that it is porous. It's like a sponge. It holds the fluids of pain, if you can say that. But it is not the pain itself.

[13:46]

then we can notice that because it's porous, it's responsive. As the heart is open and spacious to embrace our own joy and pain, so it is open and spacious to embrace the joys and pains of others. Sometimes in these difficult days, but also now, just a strained expression on a face could move me deeply. But also this, thinking of the person who, conventionally speaking, had broken my heart.

[15:02]

I was happy. I am happy that he has found someone to intimately share his life with. So to say this a little differently, hearts break to open us to the reality of others. Broken-hearted people, people like us, are vessels of compassion and sympathetic joy. So that's the first gift I want to bring up and perhaps I think it's the sweetest one of them all. So if we can have the courage and just stay with our pain or any experience for that matter and feel it completely, we miraculously develop this capacity

[16:21]

to open up to the joys and pains of others. And from that place, I think, we can engage again and give. And this giving, this act, will come back to us and alleviate our own suffering. However, I want to say this again that's kind of important to me. In my experience, what it needed first was that I gave my own broken heart to my own broken heart. I had to stop trying to fix things. So one morning in these weeks around Christmas, I asked Renee, who works in the office here at City Center, I said, Renee, what is the gift of the broken heart?

[17:47]

Do you remember what you said? Well, without any hesitation, and a big smile on your face, you said, clarity. Do you remember? Well, I can say I was very impressed. And I actually think that, René, that you brought something up that is very true. And around the same time, I think earlier that week, it was senior Dharma teacher Blanche Hartman who told me that once when her heart was broken, she could see that it was the expectations of another person that were not fulfilled that led to this experience.

[18:55]

So listening to Zenke Roshi's and Renee's teachings, I thought broken heart can open us to the reality of how things truly are. But how are things really? Well... I would say we all crave to live in a world that is predictable and governed by forces that we can control. However, as you all know, that's not necessarily the case. I received the news that broke my heart at

[20:01]

4.45 in the morning, I had just gotten up, put on my robes, and thought I was on the way to the meditation hall to sit zazen, my almost daily routine. And then something else happened. I still went to the meditation hall and sat down. But right then, after the disbelief and the numbness, right there in Zazen, the world as I knew it vanished in an instant. It was, so to speak, emptied out in a flash of shock.

[21:12]

I felt brushed by something, and it was very painful. So, instead of this predictable, controllable world, I found myself in the universe, that is impermanent, momentary, and insubstantial. It was extremely painful. However, it was kind of close as an experience to how Buddhists actually have been talking about reality for the past 2,500 years. In Buddhism we say, or some people said, sickness and medicine heal each other.

[22:19]

It might sound strange, but that is because sickness and medicine are not really two separate things. we experience a broken heart as this traumatic shock, a sickness. However, I would suggest to you that the medicine for the broken heart is the broken heart. To be brushed by impermanence, can be nauseating because we usually try to avoid it. So again, we can see it as an experience of sickness. However, impermanence realized is also the medicine that heals us.

[23:29]

I actually think this is a miraculous concept. But more than that, it's a miraculous truth. But how, one could ask, how does it work? How is change? How are impermanence? in substantiality, not only frightening characteristics of reality for us tender human beings, but how are they characteristics that will free us if we completely open up to them, as our kind teachers tell us. and try to answer.

[24:41]

If we have the courage to look deeply into our broken heart, if we allow our broken heart to open us to the reality of others, I think we can see that nobody is spared this experience. I would actually like to go as far as saying, I believe we come into this world as already broken-hearted people. say this is my way, my pre-Valentine's Day way, to speak about what Buddhism calls delusion or ignorance.

[25:53]

Please, these terms do not carry a judgment. Brokenheartedness or delusion simply means that as humans we feel separate and incomplete and that we constantly grasp for something outside in the hope that this will make us whole. This is simply the human enterprise which we all share and is more or less doomed. May's clarity is clarity about delusion.

[26:56]

Clarity is not the absence of delusion. Of course, there are many Buddhist texts who try to explain to us what ignorance is and how we can open up to it. However, in the context of trying to speak about healing the broken heart with the broken heart, I would like to bring up texts from ancient Greece. It was approximately 150 years after the Buddha's death that the philosopher Plato composed a fictitious dialogue on the nature of love. In this text, which is called the Symposium, the Greek playwright Aristophanes explains that human beings, just like us, first inhabited the earth as beings

[28:21]

that were merged with other human beings. So perhaps we can imagine them like Siamese twins, people who had two heads and eight limbs and lived together in blissful harmony. But maybe something was already not so working out. with his blissful state because, after all, similar to the story of Adam and Eve, these humans rebelled against the gods. And Zeus, in his very human wrath, threw a thunderbolt and cut them in two. So since then, the story goes, Human beings have been roaming the earth with this deep longing to merge with their better half.

[29:31]

Actually, the term comes from this Plutonian myth. And this better half, in the context of basically bisexual Greek culture, could be a member of the same or the other sex. So, a little bit about this. So Plato basically puts these words into the mouth of Aristophanes and says, and when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether a man or a woman, the pair, are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and would not be out of one another's sight as i may say even for a moment these are the people who pass their whole lives together yet they could not explain what they desire of one another for the intense yearning

[30:52]

with each of them has toward the other, does not appear to be the desire of lovers' intercourse, but of something else for which the soul of either, excuse me, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she, the soul, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment. And the reason is that human nature was originally one, and we were whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. The desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.

[31:54]

Excuse me. I like this sentence. Please allow me to play with it. The desire and pursuit of the whole is called Zen practice. So, how can the broken heart reveal the vision of wholeness? How can the sickness be the medicine? I think we doubt that. Isn't a broken heart the utter absence of wholeness, of completion? Isn't it the painful feeling of being fractured, cut off, separated? Yes, this is very true. Conventionally speaking, this is the case. However, just as I sometimes hear people say that hatred is not the opposite of love, but indifference is, so is the experience of a broken heart, a masked, veiled expression.

[33:23]

of our wholeness and unity, although, and I know this, a very painful one. But how can we not only think this, how can this become a lived, embodied reality? Well, I want to say it again. Please allow the broken heart to be just the broken heart. Don't try to fix it. Don't even try to understand anything. Let go of all the stories as to why, who, how. Be still with your heart's experience.

[34:31]

This is the way to enter the meditation, the samadhi of the broken heart. Become single-mindedly concentrated in your experience. In other words, don't try to get over it. Get into it. Then, in the middle of all the pain, the anger, jealousy, underneath all our stories, about past and future defeats or glories. Your, as Plato puts it, intense yearning for something of which the soul has only a dark and doubtful presentiment will make itself known.

[35:52]

It is our human yearning to be whole. which makes itself known in this way. Now, Plato seems to suggest that it needs someone outside of us to fulfill this yearning. And not only Plato, but our very basic experience seems to suggest that. But does he really say so? Please, for a moment, listen to the text again. Plato says, and when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, the pair are lost in an amazement.

[36:55]

I feel in this passage, boundaries of self and other are strangely blurred. As ignorant people, again, no judgment here. It's just a description. Wow. That is, as people who believe that self and other objectively exist. More often than not, of course we believe that it is the other that broke our heart, that it is the other who is responsible for our feeling of lack and abandonment. I want to be very careful here because I feel

[38:00]

this level of experience is very real and it needs to be addressed. However, I also think we cannot deeply heal if we stay within this kind of dualistic framework. So, I would say that Plato, just like Buddha before him, suggests that when we meet the other, in truth, he or she is us. Whatever is in front of us, man, woman, audience, speaker, in truth, this is who we are. This is what gives us life, moment after moment.

[39:10]

Our life is never prior to just this. So, it is only, it is only due to the blinding forces of ignorance. But those are very deep. That we do not understand that we, ourselves, have cut us off from our better half, so to speak. It was in Zeus. We were never apart. So please, Enter the meditation. Enter the samadhi of self and other. Merge with the samadhi of self and other.

[40:15]

Open up to the merging that has already happened. In this single-minded concentration, the veil of ignorance will be lifted. Samadhi is a gate. It is not the gate to actually merge with what appears to be in front of us. This is not how things are. Rather, it is the gate to realize that what appears to be in front of us is the actual half of yourself, as Plato puts it. Our kind ancestor Dogen says, immersed in enlightenment, you yourself are complete.

[41:31]

immersed in enlightenment, you are merged with your surroundings, merged with one another, and yourself is merged with yourself. So I would say, from the viewpoint of practice, Plato tells us a wonderful myth about the arising and effects of ignorance. According to Dogen, however, the fabric of life has never been split. It cannot be split, except in our imagination. So please, allow Iranian imagination to cease. Remember, Literally, remember, bring together again what you think is dismembered.

[42:45]

Make whole again. So, to end, please look deeply into your own heart whether it feels broken or joyful, whether it feels expansive or constricted, and enter. Whether you are partnered or single, whether you are monogamous polyamorous, promiscuous, or celibate.

[43:49]

Please enter the samadhi of self and other, and you will be in the presence of the beloved, because we always are. Thank you very much, and I wish you a happy Valentine's Day.

[44:09]

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