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 by people like you. This chant that we do, you know, it sounds like maybe I have some unsurpassed penetrating and perfect Dharma that I'm going to bestow on you. I don't understand the chant that way. it says an unsurpassed Dharma is rarely met with, even in a very long time. Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tantagata's teaching. The unsurpassed penetrating and perfect Dharma is, the way I understand it, is all around us, all the time. It's just the truth of what is. what is right here, right now, always.

[01:03]

But we rarely meet it. We rarely, really attend to it and meet it directly. And so we say in this chant, this time I'm really going to meet what's right in front of me. I'm going to be right here, right now and see the truth of what is as it is. In this moment. I vow to taste the truth of the Jatagata's words. Taste is a very intimate sensation. So let's try to taste the truth of the Jatagata's teaching together. I hope you had a pleasant Thanksgiving. And I wonder if in fact You took the opportunity to really be thankful, to really be filled with gratitude for this completely gratuitous gift of life that we've been given.

[02:18]

I don't know, maybe you're like me. I was a little preoccupied. Was the meal going to get out on time? And were my kids going to arrive on time? Particularly the one who's usually late. And well, he was late again, but you know, he had stopped. It was because he had gone by his friend's house to pick two huge bags of persimmons because his friend has a tree and doesn't eat them himself. And he knows that I love persimmons and he knows there are a lot of people at Zen Center. So he brought these two huge bags of persimmons and it made him late. But there he was with these two huge bags of persimmons because he knows I love them. So, you know, I have a choice. I can be irritated because he's late or I can be grateful because he brought the persimmons. You know, take your choice. What are you going to do? This past ten days or so, I've been pretty preoccupied because my husband, Lou, who's 92, had some surgery.

[03:27]

And it was, you know, it was not serious surgery. But when you're 92, I mean, the last time he had surgery was 1923 when he had his tonsils out. Before I was born. So. And I've been having a cold surgery. It suddenly occurred to me, I have to work on my lecture for Gringouch. And also the Tassajara Reservations Office has been bugging me to get them a description of a workshop that I'm going to be doing with Brother David on gratefulness at Tassajara this summer. So I had to put the two of them together, thinking about the... I mean, here it was, Thanksgiving, what better time to think of gratefulness and to bring it to the forefront for us to look at together.

[04:31]

I don't know how many of you, how many of you know Brother David Stein de Rest? I recommend that more of you get to know him. He's a marvelous person, marvelous person. He's a Catholic monk, Benedictine monk, who studied with Suzuki Roshi, sat with him at Tassajara. back when we first got Tassajara. He was once on the board of Zen Center years ago. But he's just a delightful person. And he wrote a book some years ago called Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer. And his website and his work, you know, his website is called gratefulness.org. And his whole work is to help people realize the joy of gratitude. You know, when you come to think about it, the fact that we're alive is just completely fortuitous and amazing.

[05:44]

I mean, here we are on this blue-green planet that... is a planet of a minor star in a galaxy that has a great many stars. I'm afraid I don't know orders of magnitude here whether it is a million, is it a billion, but a lot of stars. And this is just one galaxy and as far as we can see there are more galaxies, maybe another million or a billion. But this particular planet around this particular star has just the necessary ingredients to support life. It has water. It has oxygen to support the animal life and carbon dioxide to support the plant life.

[06:46]

And its surface temperature is... in that very narrow range of 100 degrees centimeter between when water freezes on one end and when it boils on the other. And we have not yet been able to find, we don't know if there's another planet like it anywhere in all the millions and billions of stars that exist in the universe. So we're actually hugely fortunate to have this opportunity to be alive, to be awake, to be aware of being alive, to be able to be full of gratitude for this gift of sentient life. One of the things I particularly love about this fact of life

[07:52]

is this reciprocity between the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom. You know, we breathe in oxygen to support our life and breathe out carbon dioxide. And the plant kingdom is exactly reciprocal. It breathes in the carbon dioxide to support its life process and produces oxygen for us. How amazing. not be full of gratitude for such a situation? And yet how many of us actually notice that? You know one of the same reasons, actually my text for today came from the comics on Friday in Mutz. Mutz was hugging a hugging a turkey.

[08:54]

This is on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, right? So being grateful that the turkey is still alive. And he's hugging a turkey and he's saying a poem of John Greenleaf Whittier. I don't know how many of you remember John Greenleaf Whittier. When I was in school we studied him. But he was he was a poet of an American poet of the 19th century. Sounds like a Zen master to me. No longer toward, no longer forward nor behind, I look in hope or fear. But grateful take the good I find, the best of now and here. We spend a lot of time looking forward or behind. in hope or fear. At least I do.

[09:56]

I don't know about you. The staying in the present moment and actually appreciating what's here and now is really what our practice is all about. Being present for our life as we are living it in this moment and not getting caught up in fear, not getting caught up in daydreaming about what we hope for, but appreciating what's here and now and living our life fully in this moment. being awake. It's about waking up. Buddha means one who is awake.

[10:57]

And when we wake up to what we have here and now, we can be filled with gratitude. Another great Catholic monk, I think he's in mutts again today, it was Meister Eckhart, said, if the only prayer you ever said in your life was thank you, that would be sufficient. So Brother David, One of the things I remember about Brother David is he came, he was out at Newcomaldalee, the Catholic retreat center out at Big Sur and would come into Tassajara from time to time to visit with us when I was practicing there.

[12:06]

And I remember him coming in and talking about a monastic life from his experience as a Catholic monk. And he was speaking of celibacy and he said, If I want to love everyone the same, I either have to be celibate or very promiscuous. So I choose to be celibate. But I remember thinking at the time, wanting to love having the intention, the practice of loving everyone the same. That's quite a marvelous thing. That's meta-practice. That's the practice we do when we meditate on loving-kindness and cultivate loving-kindness for all beings, as we say in the loving-kindness sutra.

[13:21]

Whether weak or strong, in high or middle or lower realms of existence, near or far, born or to be born, may all beings be happy. May they be joyous and live in safety. Even as a mother at the risk of her life watches over and protects her only child, so should we cherish all living beings, suffusing love over the entire world, above, below, and all around without limit. So let one cultivate an infinite goodwill toward the whole world. When we turn our mind toward everything as a gift, this life and everything we have as completely gratuitous, then that gratefulness that fills us up

[14:29]

And support a practice of cultivating love for all beings. Suffusing love over the entire world, above, below, and all around without limit. You know, this fullness of gratefulness Brother David has a little quote here. I remember this. There's some other Catholic monk. I cannot remember who it was. But he says, I really long to see my God. I ask in every prayer. But he can't come to visit me unless there's no one there. So there is this relinquishment of self, this emptying out of self-clinging, this coming to terms with the teaching of emptiness of a separate self.

[15:49]

That is in our Buddhist teaching, but is also there when we come to the fullness of gratefulness. As Brother David says, this is his book called Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer. Since this book explores ways of coming more fully alive, self-fulfillment is a value of which we are conscious today. But we somehow fail to notice that people who live fulfilled lives are surprisingly selfless. At moments when we experience life in fullness, we are, if not selfless, at least self-forgetful. Don't we all know this from experience?

[16:54]

The fullness for which the human heart longs is always available. but we cannot lay hold of it. We cannot grasp it. Fullness flows into us in the measure in which we become empty. So the emptiness he's pointing at there, I think, is the emptiness of self-clinging. The recognizing that there is no self separate from all being, that all being is so completely interconnected and interdependent and interpenetrating that there isn't any separate thing we can hold up apart from what's being created in us and of us in each moment as we respond to the causes and conditions of this moment.

[18:02]

This codependent arising that is the Buddhist description of what it means to be empty of a separate self. This being co-created by all that is in each moment. And so... that is creating us in each moment, all of the causes and conditions that are arising in this moment are causes and conditions for which we can be grateful, we can be full of gratitude. As he mentions in the introduction to this book,

[19:05]

Brother David points out that often we aren't really aware of life as gift. Or the moment, the first time we really notice life as gift is maybe at some point when we almost lose it. And that was true for me in the case of having a heart attack about 18 years ago. That's when I really noticed that life was a gift because I stepped out of the, you know, it was a surprise. I walked out of the hospital into the sunshine. I hadn't expected to be able to do that. And in that moment, I had the thought, wow, I'm alive. I could be dead. The rest of my life is just a gift. a gift I just didn't notice it till now and he had a similar experience he said during the war in Austria where he was born and grew up during a bombing raid where he heard the sirens and he was not near a shelter so he rushed into a church and hid under the pew and

[20:34]

And heard the bombs going off. And felt plaster and broken glass falling all around him. And expected any moment to have the roof and ceiling come down and bury him in rubble. And then the all clear sounded. And he was very surprised that he was still alive. And in that moment then... gratitude for the gift of life could flood in. But we don't have to wait until we almost lose our life. We can notice right now what a gift it is. You know, even when things are not going quite the way you want them to, and of course that's often the case,

[21:35]

I find that I really like being alive. I really appreciate the fact that I'm alive. And so having been given this precious gift of life the question comes up well then how shall I live it? since it's not something that we earned in any way, since it's just a free gift, then I think it's a good idea to consider what's the best way to use this wonderful gift. Well, I think we might want to use this gift to make this life

[22:40]

as wonderful as we would like it to be. To take the opportunity to let go of all those habits of mind that make us miserable and make the people around us miserable. cultivate all those habits of mind that make us appreciate being alive. And that help the people around us to appreciate the fact that we're alive. That's why we cultivate the four heavenly abodes of loving kindness and compassion. And sympathetic joy are the joy for the well-being of others.

[23:42]

And equanimity or even mindedness or impartiality. We cultivate those qualities of mind. They're called heavenly abodes because when we're in those states of mind, we feel like we're in heaven. So it's worth taking some effort to cultivate them. Not only that, the people around you appreciate it a lot too. It makes your whole world, the world you live in, when you cultivate loving-kindness and live with that mind, the whole world you live in is a world of loving-kindness. So it benefits not only you, but everyone around you. That would be a pretty good way to use this gift of life that's been given to us.

[24:51]

We could cultivate compassion, particularly compassion for those around us who don't recognize life as a gift. Who somehow see life as a burden. Can we cultivate compassion to be with people who are suffering in this moment? With kindness, with gentleness, with care. So that they also can appreciate the fact of being alive. In order to experience the fullness of gratefulness, we do have to wake up. Wake up to our life here and now. Wake up to our connection with everyone and everything.

[26:00]

Wake up to our dependence on and being dependent on this interdependence that's happening all the time. that we have everything that we have you know if we look at it carefully it comes to us through the kindness of others I mean here at Green Gulch we have this wonderful bit of this green earth on which we can grow vegetables for ourselves and for others through which we can walk down to listen to the sound of the ocean or to go swimming in it if you happen to be one of those polar bears who likes to swim in the ocean. There are such people around here who love swimming in that cold water. Bless them.

[27:09]

have the opportunity here to live and work on this land and provide healthy food for ourselves and others. Another source of gratefulness. We can appreciate the flowers that we grow here. What a great gift. There was a time when I was in charge of the guest program here. And one of the guests complained to me one morning about the noise that the owls made at night. I felt so sorry for her. I love the sound of the owl. to take care of a person like that and help them see the bright side.

[28:22]

So really this cultivating the heart of gratitude is well worth doing. There is a joy that accompanies gratefulness that flavors our whole life. And even when There is much work to be done to try to help the world to be a kinder place, to take care of the environment so that it continues to support life, to do all that we can

[29:48]

end the use of violence and war as a political I was going to say weapon but as a political tool whatever we have to do it without falling into the violence of mind that creates war. How can we work for peace in a peaceful way? How can we cultivate peace and gratefulness in ourselves So that as we work for peace, we are actually being peaceful and grateful.

[31:00]

We can't, you know, I think my first peace demonstration This may have been before that, but I remember one in 1950 on Hiroshima day when I was pushing my baby in his baby carriage around the perimeter, an eight-mile perimeter of the circle of total destruction in Hiroshima. So being in peace demonstrations is has been a way of life for me for a long time. But somewhere in there, I began to notice that I was fighting for peace and that there was no peace in me and that that was a major contradiction.

[32:16]

And I heard recently that Mother Teresa says, no, I won't go to an anti-war demonstration, I'll go to a peace demonstration. There's a difference. So how can we cultivate that peaceful aspect of ourself that can actually move the world closer to peace? I think that being grateful for the fact of our life and for the fact of the existence of this world which supports life, meeting that with gratitude and not taking it for granted is a very important way to move

[33:27]

our hearts toward peace. Taking our life for granted is like just going to sleep and not really being alive. But David has another in here that I like. Since this book is about life in fullness, it's about coming alive, I could summarize it in two words. Wake up. That's what the Buddha said too, wasn't it? Wake up. That's what we're trying to do is wake up. like Kabir is able to say these two words with a freshness that makes us sit up.

[34:33]

Kabir's poems have power. They wake us up to an aliveness we never thought possible. And here he's quoting Tabir. Do you have a body? Don't sit on the porch. Go out and walk in the rain. you're in love, then why are you asleep? Wake up! Wake up! You have slept millions and millions of years. Why not wake up this morning? So this waking up waking up to appreciate this gift of life that we've been given. To not take it for granted.

[35:36]

But to turn our attention toward how we want to live it to its fullest. How we want to share it with all of these beings that we share it with. How we want to recognize that our life Frequently interwoven with the lives of everyone around us. And to live our lives in a way that expresses that appreciation. That offers that connection to everyone we see. just hide ourselves in a cocoon and think that we're separate.

[36:49]

Maybe that's a sign that I've talked enough today. You know, when the microphone falls off, give it up. So let's just appreciate this life moment after moment, in each moment. And as we appreciate it, we will feel the connection with all those around us who also appreciate being alive. And we will look for ways and find ways to awaken that appreciation In those who have not yet. Wake up to it. Having been given this precious opportunity to be alive. Let's be alive in it. All together.

[37:50]

Thank you. 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.

[38:16]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_95.6