Welcome to Green Gulch Farm and Green Dragon Temple on a drippy morning. Are any of you here for the first time? Okay, a few hands. So welcome. I'm aware that it is nationally recognized as Mother's Day. And there are probably a few mothers in the room. Can you hear? Not so clear. Some people are saying not so clear. Maybe I can speak up a little. And I would imagine that everyone in the room has a mother. So I want to keep that in mind today in this talk.

[01:04]

And also, a few days ago, it was recognized as the National Day of Prayer. And some of us from Zen Center joined an interfaith gathering in Marin at, what's it called? Roda Shalom. go to Shalom in San Rafael. And there were about 200 people gathered there for recognition of an interfaith gathering. And one of the speakers was our own Linda Ruth Cutts, senior Dharma teacher and former abbess of Zen Center. She said that, well, we don't use the word prayer much. and Zen, but then she said that we, you might think of every action, actually, that we do, mindfully, the mindful action that we do as prayerful activity.

[02:14]

So we sit, and Zazen is a kind of silent prayer, and then our activity is a mindful, prayerful activity, so we're praying all the time. but then sometimes we get together and we do some event and participate in this kind of prayer. And then one of the other speakers mentioned, quoting Annie Lamott, I think she said, this was Sister Mary Neal, who was a wonderful speaker, but she quoted Annie Lamott, who said that there are, I don't know if there are two or three kinds of prayer, basically. I remember two. And the first one is, help! Help, help. And the second one is, thank you, thank you, thank you. So the wisdom of Annie Lamott.

[03:19]

And I think the thank you, the prayer of gratitude is something that we really take into our practice. Each time we sit, there's a feeling of gratitude for this precious human body, this body that is, we say, is the fruit of many lifetimes. So actually there are many mothers, many generations of mothers being recognized when we have this thought of the fruit. this body being the fruit of many, many lifetimes. So this then, I think, is expressed in a spirit of generosity. So loving-kindness then is a characteristic of what we experienced or what we want our mothers to be. We want them to be loving and kind.

[04:22]

Probably to some extent they were, right? I know people also often have had some difficult times with their mothers. And so I think that we should honor that too, honor the difficult times. But to cultivate a feeling of gratitude for the whole business, the whole business of generations. And so I want to talk about that a little bit. But I also, I think, at various times today, want to dedicate a metta meditation or a loving-kindness meditation to mothers. So I will lead everyone in that. I think many of you are familiar with metta. Metta is a Sanskrit word for loving kindness.

[05:24]

And so a loving kindness meditation. But before getting into that, I just want to also acknowledge the pain or the loss around mothering. So there's birth and death that come together. Mothers come into being with the birth. In fact, we had a birth here last Sunday, right? Seems like many things happened this week, but it was only a week ago, right? That we have a new member of our community here named Frank. Frank is a week old. And so we also have a mother who's a week old, as a mother. So mother and baby come into being simultaneously. But I also want to acknowledge then the pain of... of lost children. I was reflecting on this and noting that both my maternal grandmother and my paternal grandmother, both of my grandmothers had the experience of children dying before they reached adulthood, either very young as an infant or in one case as a teenager.

[06:52]

So this is a tremendous... Because there's such a tremendous bond, it's a tremendous pain and confusion, maybe, in some cases, for the whole notion of identity around being a mother. I do know someone in our sangha whose baby died at birth. And she was very confused. You know, am I a mother or not, you know? I went through pregnancy and I went through all of the labor, in this case, and then there's no child. So this is a very powerful, very human, very mammalian experience that all of us participate in in some way. So to acknowledge that, I think is also a part of just understanding what we're doing when we're honoring mothers and honoring Mother's Day, a day for mothers.

[08:03]

I don't know when Father's Day started, but I know my mother was very generous, and early on when I was a child when we'd have Mother's Day, she would thank us for whatever we did for Mother's Day, make breakfast. But then she'd say, I think it really should be Parents' Day. So she was very generous about that. Then later on, I think Father's Day was added in as a consolation. So I feel that any words that I say are not equal to the potency. the powerful meaning of this whole matter of motherhood. But let's, please join me in a metta, loving kindness meditation moment.

[09:04]

And so I'll say a phrase and I think you could just either say it silently to yourself or you could murmur it. It doesn't have to be. too loud because it's more a matter of being present kind of right at the edge of your inner awareness and your outer awareness. So this is maybe a murmur. So the murmur, may I be happy. May I be free from fear and live in safety. May I be at ease and abide in peace. May mother be happy. So alive or not, it doesn't matter. It's a, may mother be happy. May mother be free from fear and live in safety.

[10:06]

May mother be at ease and abide in peace. So later, maybe we'll do it again and we'll extend it beyond mother. So the other side of this, to take it to prajna understanding, we say that there's wisdom, which is what we know, what we can know, And then there's wisdom that goes beyond wisdom. The wisdom that we actually can't know, we can't actually grasp. But we can have some feeling for it. So we say this is prajna, wisdom, paramita, wisdom that goes beyond wisdom. And we say that prajna paramita is the mother of Buddhas.

[11:18]

Prajnaparamita then is this kind of a notion in Buddha Dharma of that, say, dynamic energy that we can't exactly name, but actually produces consciousness, that actually produces awareness, that actually produces the thought of enlightenment. So we say that Prajnaparamita precedes Buddhas, actually, that Buddhas come into being because of this field of prajnaparamita. So how to point to that? How to even begin to get a sense of the implications of that? This winter practice period at Tassajara was teaching from the writings of Nagarjuna, one of our ancestors in this lineage of teachers that goes back to about 200, the year 200 of the Common Era, or about 700 years after the original founding Buddha, Shakyamuni, lived.

[12:38]

And Nagarjuna wrote, wrote in Sanskrit, and we just in the past few decades have had translations in English of some of the writings of Nagarjuna. So, one of his writings is called the Mulamajamaka Karika, and it took me a while to learn how to say that. And the first verse of the Mula Madhyamaka Karika is, so it's a series of verses, 450 or so verses. But the very first one says, nothing comes from itself. And nothing comes from something else. And nothing comes from both. And

[13:41]

And nothing comes without a cause. So if you can follow that. Actually, that translation is from Stephen Batchelor, in Visions of the Sublime. which is actually a pretty good translation of that first verse. Nothing caused by itself. I can see if I had Garfield here. Let's just stick with that one. So nothing is caused by itself. Well, you know, then The first time, as I read this, I was thinking, this doesn't really leave any room for my usual understanding of things.

[14:46]

Nothing is caused by itself, nothing is caused by another, nothing is caused by both, and nothing just pops into existence out of nowhere. So that to me was a kind of a conundrum which prompted me to think of the I wrote Mula Madhyama Kakarika Blues. Which I won't really sing. Maybe I'll murmur a little bit. Nothing is caused by itself. Nothing is caused by another. Nothing is caused by a father. Nothing is caused by a mother. Nothing is caused by the sun. Nothing is caused by the moon. Nothing is really happening, and it's happening much too soon. So you know what I got? And it really gets me down to my shoes. It's nothing but the Mula Madhyamaka Karika Blues.

[15:49]

So another way, when we say nothing is caused by itself, This reminded me of a phrase of Scoop Nisker, who makes it very personal, which is, you are not your fault. And then nothing is caused by another, right? Nothing is caused by another means you are not your mother's fault. So it's good to pause for a moment and kind of take this in. So just in case you may actually have adopted the belief that you are your own fault. That's not so unusual that people actually have the feeling of, which we sometimes call shame, that you are your fault.

[17:01]

But then if you, think, oh, maybe it's my mother's fault, or my father's fault, then that's blame, right? So it's hard to stay at the place where we're not involved in shame or blame. But this is what Nagarjuna is pointing to, along with many other implications that he elaborates in all those 400 verses. So... This is good to reflect on, to consider that not being one's own fault, you have, you're guaranteed actually when you see this and you know that everyone has no fault assurance right away. You don't have to pass any legislation for that. And if you are a mother and you know this, okay, that that your child is not your fault. Whatever mess they make, whatever that behavior is, it's some relief to know that, okay, you're not the cause.

[18:16]

However, we also notice that people are participating with each other. So, on the one hand, there's no one that's causing anything, and on the other hand, there are mothers and there are children. there are fathers and children, there are families, and the dynamics of the family is something that is so complex, it takes a tremendous amount of study to know what's actually producing this particular mess, this particular manifestation, or this particular happiness. How is it coming into being? It's not easy to see. So it may be then, I'd say it can generate a sense of gratitude towards the greatness of it all. Then some people would think, well, there's maybe some great being or some great mother or some great god.

[19:22]

And in Buddhism we say that what there is is dependent arising. or interdependent existence that everything is actually working simultaneously to produce whatever's arising at this moment. So there are untold billions of causes and conditions right now that it's producing this moment in this room that is supporting us, each of us to be here in the particular way that we each are here at this very moment. And at this moment, is unique and unrepeatable. Whether this is a good experience or a not so good experience, it's best to acknowledge it and let it go because you can't have it again. So when this... I'd say sometimes maybe we...

[20:27]

get caught than expecting somehow to produce a particular experience. Or we expect a mother to produce a particular experience. So we expect sometimes a lot from a mother. We sometimes maybe expect the mother to be capable of producing a beautiful, perfect life for me. Maybe for you too, but most of us are particularly involved with me. So that maybe is part of the confusion we have in our culture of having, maybe expecting so much from mothers. There's a book called The Mother Line, written by Naomi Ruth Lewinsky.

[21:28]

where she notes that problems arise when we expect more from our individual mothers. We expect them to actually function as more of a kind of a god or as kind of an archetypal figure. So this is, she says, when individual mothers become saddled with cultural baggage or archetypal expectations, Because the gods are dead, mothers are expected to stand in for them, taking the blame, stand in for them, taking the blame for much that more truly belongs to fate. She says fate, I think we would say, belongs to karma, belongs to the unfolding of many, many countless actions in the past. that now are contributing to this current experience.

[22:34]

So this can be confusing. And I wanted to read a little story here that was, this is a verbatim account of a daughter's effort to reconcile with her mother when her mother had been ill. And that's this I'm, I'm going to read a little section here. This was published in the book, How Can I Help?, a book written by Ram Dass and Paul Gorman some years ago. And so in the book, there have been interviews with many volunteers, and there are no names attributed to any of these stories. But here's this account. God bless my mother, and God bless me. We made it through. She had a stroke and a long period of rehabilitation, and it was clear she was going to have to stay with us for a while. I had all these things in my mind.

[23:38]

It was a chance to pay her back for all those years. There were these things I was going to help her clear up, like the way she was thinking. I wanted to do the whole job very well, this big opportunity. We should all feel good about it at the end. Little things like that. Some little. Oh, fights? Classics. Like only a mother and daughter can have. And my mother is a great fighter. From the old school of somehow loving it and being very good at it and getting a kind of ecstatic look in your eye when you're really into it. but it got really bad. Over a hard-boiled egg, we had a bad fight. We'd both gotten worn out, irritable, and frustrated. Boom. I don't remember what about, just about how it was all going and why her stay had gotten difficult and all of us had become more irritable and short-tempered.

[24:44]

And in the middle of it, she stopped short and said, why are you doing all this for me anyway? It just sort of hit me, and I started... to list all of the reasons that just came out. I was afraid for her. I wanted her to get well. I felt maybe I'd ignored her when I was younger. I needed to show her I was strong. I needed to get her ready for going home alone, old age, and on and on. I was amazed myself I could have gone on giving reasons all night. Even she was impressed. When I was done, she said, Junk. Junk, I yelled back at her. Like, boy, she'd made a real mistake with that remark. I could really get her for that. Yes, junk, she said, again, but a little more quietly. And that little more quietly tone got me. And she went on.

[25:47]

You don't have to have all those reasons, she said. We love each other. That's enough. I felt like a child again. Having your parents show you something that's true, but you don't feel put down, you feel better because it's true and you know it, even though you are a child. I said, you're right. You're really right. I'm sorry. She said, don't be sorry. Junk is fine. It's what you don't need anymore. It was a wonderful moment, and the fight stopped, which my mother accepted a little reluctantly. No, I'm joking, actually. She was very pleased. She saw how it all was.

[26:49]

Everything after that was, well... easier, less pressure, less trying, less pushing, happening more by itself. And the visit ended up fine. We just spent time together. And then she went back to her house. So the editors commented on this as a practice of witnessing. saying that by simply witnessing the character and conflict of our reasons for helping out, then we are making room for an essential change of perspective. Our actions are less hostage to our needs. We can call upon a deeper, more universal source of action, one that is steady, reliable, less likely to burn out. We love each other. That's enough. So in the daughter's account there, after that experience, with her mother where she says, everything after that was easier.

[28:01]

She points out, less pressure, less trying, less pushing, happening more by itself. So I think there's something that we can all take from that. notion of having a particular expectation or a plan or something that you're trying to, you're really working hard trying to get it to turn out a particular way. And at some point to realize that you're actually just in the middle of a situation of love. That the life that we're living right now And we'd say it is a, sometimes we say we're living, actually, when you stop and are willing to be present in this moment, really being present in just this moment, you realize that you are in a Buddha field, we say, a field of awakening. It's a feeling of being spacious and a feeling that whatever's happening is already included.

[29:13]

And so you're actually ready then to simply respond and you don't have to have all of your big plans. They may be helpful or they may not, but there's a kind of way of holding those more loosely, more lightly, so that you can be present and you can appreciate that what it is, this whole field of benevolence that is nurturing and supporting us, Or we wouldn't be here right now in this moment. It's something that we can call motherly love in a big sense, right? The motherly love of big mind. I was lucky myself to have a grandmother One of my grandmothers in particular I felt was a wise person, wise sage in the family, but I didn't realize it until just recently really, until after I had been sitting zazen for many years, it began to occur to me that my grandmother, who died when I was a teenager, but she was someone who saw things

[30:44]

and was kind of just attentive to things, maintained a perspective. And she was pretty quiet, but worked in the background, doing more work in the background, I think, than any of us realized. Actually, after she died, it was discovered that she had a whole trunk full of poetry that she'd written. That was kind of very private. She was not well educated. She only went, I think, to the fourth grade. So her poetry was not educated, but it was meaningful to her to find some way of, I think, as a kind of a meditative practice and a deepening of her own life and awareness through a poetic expression. So I have a story about her that... I tell every once in a while, maybe once every few years or once, I don't know, I lose track of time.

[31:52]

So some of you may have heard this story before. But it was when I was 12 or 13 years old and we had just acquired a new horse, a mare, a pretty spirited horse. She was half thoroughbred and half quarter horse and had been used in barrel racing, for those of you who know anything about that. And so a new horse, and I was not an experienced rider, so my father had said, you can only ride this horse around the yard. Don't take her out into the pasture. because she couldn't really get up speed, you know, riding around the yard. And I guess that was his thinking anyway. So I was riding around and around in the yard with the new horse, and my grandmother came out, and she had her garden there, and I was going by the garden, and she stopped, actually, and sat down on a...

[33:07]

There was a stump to sit on there. She sat on a stump and watched me go by a couple times and then I came by and she held up her hand and I said, whoa, stopped the horse. And she said, why are you just riding around in the yard? And I said, well, Dad told me. I couldn't take her out, take the mare out into the pasture, you know, so... So I'm just following his instructions, you know. Yeah, I must have been maybe 12 or 13, because later on I wouldn't have followed his instructions. So I rode around another couple of times and she held up her hand again and she said, you know, I'm wondering if there's water in the reservoir. And I said, yeah, Grandma, I think there's water in the reservoir.

[34:10]

And she said, well, I'm wondering if you would go and check. You know, take the horse and check and see if there's water in the reservoir. And I did a quick calculation here. I thought, well, she's telling me to go ride in the pasture where my dad said, don't ride the horse. But she's his mother. So she has some authority, so if I get in trouble for this, I know who to blame. So I said, okay, so I took this mare. I keep avoiding saying her name, but the mare's name was Lady. Hilarious Lady, actually, was her registered name. Sometimes horses have funny names, right? But lady, so we just called her lady. So I took lady out into the pasture and walked along and went out to the reservoir and sure enough, there was water in the reservoir.

[35:19]

And then I turned lady around and she just took off around. And I'm riding, first I'm going, whoa, whoa, whoa. but she had the bit in her teeth, you know. When the horse has a bit in the teeth, you can't actually control, right? You know what that means? She had the bit in her teeth. And she was in charge. And so we're flying along, and we come to the little creek, and I thought, oh my God, you know what's... And she leaps the creek. I'm riding bareback, by the way. I'm holding on to her mane. I just basically give up trying to control her, and I just hold on to her mane. And I almost fell off there, but then I straightened back up, and we're flying along full gallop, and then I realized, this is fun. And then, so I had some fun.

[36:26]

We're flying along across the pasture, and then we come to the end of the pasture, and there's a fence. And I'm thinking, uh-oh, she jumped the creek. Is she going to jump the fence? Ooh, and the fences, you know, I don't know. The barbed wire on the top, you know. And so, basically, I could only just try to hang on. I think she's going to jump the fence. We're racing along, and all of a sudden, just in front of the fence, she just plants her four feet. And I... slide up over her neck and over her head and land right there in front of the fence. So that was, and then I'd, so then, okay, lady's standing there looking at me. I gather up the reins, find a place I can get back up on her back and I gather her up and I ride back and go to my grandmother and I say, Grandmother, there's water in the reservoir.

[37:30]

She says, how was your ride? Okay. So she says, now you can ride anywhere. So to me, at the time, it had a meaning of, okay, now she has some confidence in my ability to ride. But then, as I reflected on it, I felt it has a deeper meaning, actually. It was really a kind of rite of passage. It was like getting a driver's license, maybe, right? now you can, you have autonomy in a sense. This autonomy is offered then by someone who has this maturity and authority and can then transmit it.

[38:40]

So, this is also a role of a parent, of a mother, and I think particularly of a grandmother, so I don't want to overlook honoring grandmothers. There's a particular freedom, I'd say. And now I'm a grandparent, I have two grand... two granddaughters. And there's a kind of freedom, you know, in that less direct, immediate responsibility, but actually a more, say... extensive responsibility with the perspective that you can have if you step back a little bit. You don't necessarily have to be engaged so directly all the time. So, I know many of you in the room are grandmothers.

[39:54]

Many of you are mothers and some of you are at some point going to have an opportunity to be a grandmother, a mother. So I want to invite you to receive that role wholeheartedly. To take up the role of being a complete, present person. Study the ways in which maybe you don't feel so comfortable taking that up. Noticing from your own karmic history, your own patterns that limit you or hinder you. Notice those. See if you can find them, find how you're carrying them, and release them. Release them doesn't mean push them away. It means just lighten your...

[40:56]

attachment or your grip. These are difficult times in many ways in the world today, globally difficult. I was at a gathering, one of our presentations, San Francisco Zen Center is sponsoring a series of events called Experts Mind. which is a takeoff on beginner's mind. And so one of the, there were two women presenting at, it was at the de Young Museum on Thursday night, and Haley Hamilton was one of them, she's a scientist at the Academy of Sciences, studying life forms in water primarily. And we were talking a little bit afterwards about the Gulf, of Mexico and the oil that's gushing up from underneath.

[41:59]

And scientists are studying, this is very unusual. Someone called it a catastrophe. And she said, well, in scientists, we don't call it a catastrophe. We call it an extreme event. An extreme event. But then she said, We human beings are an extreme event, actually, for the planet. So I say that thinking that we need all the wisdom of mothers. We need all the wisdom of grandmothers. We need the capacity for this love that doesn't give up and a resilience that that supports. So that we can not be divided from each other, but take care of each other.

[43:00]

Stay connected. Understand how we are already connected. And take good care of our children. Take good care of the environment around us. So again, I'd like to close with a metta loving kindness moment and invite you to murmur along. May I be happy. May I be free from fear and live in safety. May I be at ease and abide in peace. May mother be happy. May she be free from fear and live in safety.

[44:06]

May she be at ease and abide in peace. May the person sitting next to me be happy. May the person sitting next to me be free from fear and live in safety. May that person be at ease and abide in peace. May each being be happy. May each being be free from fear and live in safety. May each being be at ease and abide in peace.

[45:12]

May all beings be happy. May all beings be free from fear and live in safety. May all beings be at ease and abide in peace. So thank you all for your attention and your practice.

[45:46]

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