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. Maybe like some of you, I've been wondering about the world. Is the world a hard, cold, difficult, painful place filled with anger and greed and abuses of power? An unfathomable

[01:01]

violence and harm? Or is the world inexpressibly beautiful? So many shades of green, the phenomena of sunlight and fog, the sound of trees, the leaves rustling, filled with so many tender, courageous, sincere beings. All of us trying to find our way. we see depends on where we look.

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I have a practice of reading the newspaper. I don't necessarily recommend this, but it is part of my vow not to turn away. And when I step away from that, the world looks a particular way. And I have another practice, which way goes hand in hand for me, which is the practice of walking my dog, my little dog in the park, in Golden Gate Park near where I live. a different world. Yesterday, I was walking the paths, the trails in the park, which are very familiar to me.

[03:32]

I've been walking these same places day after day for years. Hearing the dog, missing my dog. So my dog and I were walking the path, and I saw something I had never seen before and actually didn't know what it was. It was this little creature about this big, and it had a little bit of hair or fur, but not very much, more like fuzz, and these pointed ears. And it was kind of looking like this. I thought for a moment I might be in a Disney film. It was like this sort of magical creature. And we had a moment, this creature, and I saw it, and it saw me. And then the little creature saw my dog.

[04:34]

And it quickly turned around and went in the other direction. You never know who you'll meet when you're walking the path. And I realized when the creature turned and began to walk away, oh, it's a baby coyote. And I quickly turned and took my dog before he saw this fresh new life, and we two walked the other way. This practice is learning to be with, to be with all of it. The Buddha said in the earliest teachings from the Dhammapada, he said, in this world, in this world, hatred never ceases from hatred.

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From love alone does hatred cease. This is an eternal truth. Ancient and inexhaustible. Over and over I hear and I feel, what should I do? There's so many things to be done. So much attending, caring for that's needed in our world. But where does our action come from? Does it come from hate? Does it come from love? We are in the final week of studying the Xin Xin Ming, a mind of great faith.

[07:08]

And it strikes me the further we get into the text that this is really what Sang San is pointing to. And a mind of great faith is a mind that trusts. It's a mind that can rest in this love. Even, maybe especially, in the midst of searing pain. What does it mean to cultivate a mind, a heart, that can trust, that has faith, that there is a This love. And that our path is the path of cultivating that. This is not an easy lesson for me.

[08:15]

Maybe not for many of us. When I first came into practice, I came because I was aching. Because I wanted to be free of this pain. And I had very little faith in love, here or there or anywhere. Maybe, like some of you, I had whiffs, you know, glimpses of it. But I didn't trust it. My early practice was filled with doing.

[09:20]

But it wasn't exactly doing that came from love. A little bit. I was very devoted. It was something quite... Lovely, you know. I see it, I hear it as I talk to others. This sincerity that we bring to practice. But I was also quite convinced of my own brokenness. And so I did a lot. I added a lot of practice in an effort really to try to fix myself in some way. I remember at some point I took on this practice.

[10:23]

I did it with a friend and we called it putting others first. This was a practice of kindness, of generosity. And I thought it was quite virtuous because I had noticed as I was paying attention to my own mind, this kind of, You know, the nature of the self is to be selfish. And my selfishness was always, you know, I was the one who was always early to the talks, who sat in the front row and raised her hand. I was also the one who pushed to the front of the line, you know, for meals and noticed how much I would take the last scoop of whatever it was, brown rice or gamachio tofu stew.

[11:26]

And I didn't like that part of myself. So I thought, okay, I'm going to do this practice, putting others first. And so I did. And I began to hold back, you know, and let someone else go in front of me in line or let them take the last, you know, tongs full of salad. was pretty proud of myself and I went to talk to my teacher and I told him about this practice fully expecting praise and instead he said why are you doing that practice was not the question that I expected but it stopped me it's not so much what we do but where is it coming from why are you doing this kindness practice?

[12:31]

And I said, well, I'm doing it because I think that if I practice these acts of kindness and generosity that will help me, you know, kind of soften up the hard edges of this pushy self that I've noticed. Still, I was feeling pretty virtuous. And there was this long... very awkward silence. That was how it felt inside of me. And finally, he looked at me with tremendous tenderness and said, someday you will understand. that you have it exactly backwards. I was practicing kindness because I wanted to empty myself.

[13:41]

I heard in the first line of the Heart Sutra, which we chant each morning, I had heard that if you see into the emptiness of the skandhas, of the parts of the self, That seeing deeply in this way would relieve all suffering. And I wanted that. So I was focused on wanting to empty. But that emptying, that desire was coming from aversion, hatred really, of myself. Anyhow, when he said that to me, I was quite indignant. I thought, for sure, he must have misunderstood what I was saying, because I know that what I'm doing is good. But it stuck with me, and I chewed on it for a while.

[14:45]

And then one morning, I had this experience in the... morning service with the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra, this essence of deep wisdom. And what is the essence of deep wisdom? I think of the Heart Sutra as the No, No, No Sutra, the emptiest sutra. And one morning as I was reading or chanting the opening line, I heard it completely differently. It's like someone had taken the words of the sutra and thrown them up in the air and they landed in a new way. And I heard Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva, when deeply practicing, perceived that all five skandhas are empty and thus relieved all suffering. I had never heard before, every day chanting,

[15:53]

Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of great compassion, the bodhisattva who hears the cries of the world, who doesn't turn away. That's what wakes up. So what are we to do? We begin by allowing ourselves to hear the cries of the world and to respond as best we can from kindness, from love, from compassion. We're in our last week of the intensive here.

[17:00]

And there's a line in the poem, The Mind of Great Faith, that has been turning in me. The line says, To live in the great way. is neither easy nor difficult. And as I described in my own practice at the beginning, I was quite convinced that it was difficult. Difficult, difficult, difficult. And I've been hearing from many people that. It's difficult. And not only is it difficult, but then there's this additional layer of people thinking it's difficult. but it's supposed to be easy to get ourselves coming and going.

[18:02]

So which one is it? Is it easy? Is it difficult? Is the world beautiful or painful? There's a wonderful story that I'm happy to get to share with you that echoes this teaching from Song Song. And it's a story of Leiman Pong. It's actually not just him, it's the story of his whole family. Leiman Pong lived in the 8th century in southern China, kind of the golden age of Zen, and he was a wealthy merchant. And he had a wife and a son and a daughter. And he was quite devoted to the Buddha Dharma. And at some point he gave up his business, he gave up his wealth, and he devoted himself to studying.

[19:13]

And there's this great story. He's studying suttas in some version of the story, but some stories say he's actually studying the Xin Xin Ming. just like us. And he builds himself a little hut near his house, and he's off studying this text, and he comes home maybe, I don't know, for lunch, and he's complaining to his wife, and he says, difficult, difficult, this study, this understanding, this mind of great faith. And his wife says, I'm sorry to say that the wife, as far as I know, is unnamed. This is often the case with the wives. So Mrs. Pong, perhaps Ms. Pong. So he says, difficult, difficult. And he uses this metaphor I don't quite understand.

[20:18]

It's like trying to put sesame seeds all over a tree. I don't quite know what that means, but you could imagine if you're trying to spread sesame seeds on a tree, how hard that would be. They'd keep slipping off. Difficult. And his wife has a retort, and she says, easy, easy. It's like placing your feet on the floor when you roll out of bed. so which one is it? We think, yeah, difficult. Or then, ooh, she really got him, right? But now we have the fabulous daughter, the progeny, the synthesis of these two adults who overhears her parents having this argument, easy, difficult.

[21:19]

And she says, she says, ugh. Two old people bickering gives you a little bit of flavor of her character, right? It's a bit of an upstart. This young woman, Ling Zhao. I was very happy to hear her name chanted in the list of ancestors this morning. So two old people bickering, and they say, well, smarty pants, what do you say? And she says, neither. Easy. nor difficult. This catches their attention and they say, you know, tell us more. There are two pieces that sometimes, the first part is sometimes attributed to her and sometimes to her mother, but they say, oh, I see Buddha everywhere, in every dew drop, on the tips of the hundreds of grasses. Neither easy nor difficult.

[22:23]

Everything is Buddha. So that's one answer. And maybe they press her further and she says to them as they're asking. It's beautiful that they're asking. You know, they're not insisting on their position as parents. They are humble enough to hear some wisdom in their daughter. So tell us more. And she says, It's very simple. When I'm hungry, I eat. When I'm tired, I sleep. What sounds simple so often isn't. Certainly for me, having lived with diabetes for 50 years, eating is anything but simple.

[23:35]

I was having this memory of driving out of Tassajara, maybe the beginning of the summer or something for a vacation, and I was driving out with the woman who was the Tenzo, and she was quite a wonderful cook And she had made us this wonderful picnic. So we were driving along, and at some point she turned to me and said, are you hungry? Meaning, should we stop now and have our picnic? And I said, just a moment, I need to check. She said, what do you mean check? I said, I have to check my machine to see where my blood sugar is so I know if I'm hungry. And she said, you have to check a machine? To know if you're hungry. So we all have a version of this. You don't have to be diabetic to have some confusion about hunger.

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How often do we eat when we're not hungry? How often do we deprive ourselves of food, of eating when we are? the most simple thing can be quite complicated. And if that weren't difficult enough, we live in a culture right here in the wealthiest country in the world, right here in the Bay Area with all of its riches. There are so many people who, live in poverty, who are, what do they call it, food insecure, who don't have enough to eat. Imagine you don't have a store in your neighborhood where you can buy fresh food.

[25:45]

Imagine you have to work multiple jobs. Maybe this is true for some of you. You have to work so many hours in order to feed your family, to try to have a roof over your head, that it's very hard to rest. Something that sounds so simple. Sometimes the simplest things, the things that sound the simplest, are the most... So what are we to do? You know, I've,

[26:56]

been practicing in multiple traditions. I practiced in the Theravadan tradition, insight meditation, in the Tibetan tradition, and in this tradition. And in the Zen tradition, the practice of Zazen, of Shikantaza, of just sitting. The most simple. And not the most easy. When you do yoga, for any of you who do stretch, you can get all kinds of complicated postures that you can put your body in. But the most difficult posture is shavasana, the posture of rest. So there's a story about...

[27:56]

Lehman Pang and the fabulous Ling Zhao later in their lives. And at some point they leave home and they're traveling around the countryside and they're making and selling bamboo baskets to support themselves. And in this story, it says that Lehman Pang, the father, trips and falls down. And Ling Zhao, his daughter, comes and lays down next to him. And he says, what are you doing? And she says, I'm helping. And he says, I'm glad that no one saw. good that no one saw.

[28:59]

And I see, I hear every day as I talk to people this extraordinary willingness to be sincere, to be vulnerable, to say what's difficult. It's hard for us to fall down in public It's hard for us to show our difficulty. We don't really want anyone to see. But when we let ourselves be seen, then we are joined. It's quite a gesture she makes. And it's... a teaching how do we respond to the cries of the world how do we help each other how do we undo the ancient twisted karma of our greed hatred and delusion when we fall down which we will when others fall down which they will

[30:27]

We don't turn away. And we also watch in ourselves this tendency to want to fix. Ling Zhao doesn't say, oh, give me your hand. I'll help you up again. Maybe she does that later. But first, she lays down with him. This is our vow. This is the essence of the Bodhisattva vow. To be with. To be willing to be intimate with our own suffering. With the suffering of others. It will never feel like it's enough.

[31:39]

And it's not enough. But it's just right. We do what we can. We engage from our heart. We let love lead. We do our best to keep it I feel often when I'm sitting with my own pleasant and unpleasant experience, with my own churn of views and opinions, can I be with myself in this way? Can I be with myself when my robe gets tangled up, when I trip as I enter the zendo?

[32:48]

And can I extend that same quality of compassion, of being with? This is what the word compassion means. Calm is with and passion. Passion is suffering. Can I be with? Can I be willing to fall down and get up and fall down and get up again and again? leave you with one last piece that I said to some of the folks online who were at the tea this week which comes from it's about being a bodhisattva which is what I think Ling Zhao is expressing here with her father and this is a way of understanding what it means to be a bodhisattva that comes from the Jewish tradition

[34:12]

in which there's this myth, what's called the Lamedvav, which means in Hebrew 36. The understanding is that our world, our world is always a balance of excruciating difficulty and pain and unfathomable beauty and love. And what keeps these in balance are these 36 wise beings. And it's understood that at any time, if there's less than 36, you fall off the cliff. You can feel very close to that sometimes. So here's the really great thing about these Lama Dvav who are here to... keep our world in balance to engage in these acts of kindness and compassion.

[35:21]

So the Lama Dvav are invisible, meaning they're not wearing a T-shirt that says, I'm a Lama Dvav, like be nice to me, be good to me. They are regular folks driving the bus, bagging the groceries, the people we see on the street, maybe the person sitting next to you in the Zendo. We never know who it is, who is so valuable and important to the survival of our world. But the other thing about the Lama Dva is that they don't know either. Even the Lama Dva don't know that they are these essential beings. Absolutely necessary for keeping our world in balance.

[36:28]

So try this on. It could be you. You, with all of the doubt and confusion... all of the sincerity and courage and vulnerability for each of us, we can consider that our walking this path, our finding our way to faith, faith in love, this This is ours to take up. And when we do, when we hold ourselves and each other this way, then we can act.

[37:34]

We can respond. We can trust that we will be able to meet whatever it is, whoever it is that we find on the path. And we might not get it right. We might fall down. It's okay. This is our practice to fall down and get up and fall down and get up again and again together. Thank you very much for your kind attention. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving.

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May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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