Good evening. I thought I'd begin again with some introductions, kind of demographically, so you all know who's here with you tonight. Among the guests, how many of the guests for the No Race are here for the first time? Quite a few. Welcome. How about the guests who are returning that have been at the No Race before? Same people. No, no, it must be. And the students, how many of the students are new summer students? Great, welcome to you. And how about the old students who've been here year after year, yeah.

[01:06]

And then we also have some of our residents from City Center. I saw Susan raise your hand. City Center residents. Gringosch? Who's that? Gringosch. Hey, John. I thought it was just me. Anyway, okay. Well, that's... Amazing. So this is pretty much the population of Zen Center. Always. City Center, Green Gulch, Tassajara. We have new people, pretty good sampling of new people. We have people who've been around a long time. And then we have students that, I say the bulk are newer. The bulk of the people at any time are somewhat new to the community, which isn't really a good thing. It's kind of a freshness of stuff all the time. So thank you all for being here. So a lot of us who have come to Tassajara have come here to do the practice, to practice together, meaning quite a bit of sitting practice is often what we mean by practice, but also living together.

[02:12]

Learning how to live together is a practice for sure, as you all know. And some people have lived here for a few months, others have lived here for many years. I was here for three years, about 35 years ago. And then I came back for the first time to do a practice period in January this year. And I stayed for three months. And it was wonderful. The 90-day practice period, in Japanese the word is ango, which means peaceful abiding. And it truly is peaceful abiding. We all kind of melt into the the place and the sounds and being together, the containment of being in the same place, not driving in a car or talking on the phone and so on. It's a wonderful privilege. So along with the peaceful abiding, there was also some human drama.

[03:15]

We weren't exempt by any means. We had poison oak, a severe case of poison oak and a broken toe, badly sprained ankle, herbal tea poisoning. That was one of the big ones. And then my dog, Mac, ate his pain medicine, the whole bottle, and ended up for 10 days in the emergency pet hospital in Monterey. I drove him out at 1 in the morning. So yeah, we had some things happen. Oh, and a baby. That's right. I got a baby. Born. Little calliope. And relationships, of course. That's one of the most common. Sparklings of new beginnings and endings of relationships with one another. But all in all, I think we all came through it with a renewed appreciation of one another, of this beautiful world, and of this amazement that we call human life.

[04:24]

And although we all came into the valley for the purpose of studying the Buddhist teaching, I think as it turns out, as my therapist often reminded me, human first. Human first. So that's what I'm going to talk about this evening. Human first. I think the theme for this weekend together is an ethical life. Is that right? Did I get that right? An ethical life. And I think in order to understand ethics from a Buddhist perspective, it's useful to begin with an understanding of what it means to be human first. And what it doesn't mean is that you start off human and you become something a lot better. I think that's often a mistake people make, particularly in spiritual endeavors, that you think you're going to get rid of this rotten human thing. It's going to go away, you're going to have a much better product at the end of your effort.

[05:30]

But actually, I think what it means is that our entire lifespan is an engagement with what it means to be ethical, what is an ethical life. And the only way that that question can be answered is through daily confrontations with that dynamic duo of doing good and avoiding evil. My therapist used to say, I quote him a lot, a devil on one side and an angel on the other, whispering little nothings in our ears. And Buddhist ethics actually can be summarized in three short instructions. The first one is to avoid evil, and the second to do good, and the third is to purify your heart. These are called the pure precepts, the three pure precepts. And there's a story about this from the tradition, Zen tradition, about a teacher by the name of Birdnest Roshi.

[06:36]

And Birdnest Roshi got his name because he lived in a tree. And when a famous governor poet came to visit, he asked Birdnest, isn't it dangerous up in the tree? And Birdnest said, no, it's more dangerous down where you are. The governor said, well, but I'm the governor of this province. I don't see what danger there is for me. And Bird Ness said, well, then, sir, you don't know yourself very well. When passion is burdened and the mind is unsteady, this is the greatest danger of them all. Then the governor asked, what is the teaching of Buddhism? And Bird Ness responded by reciting this stanza from the Dhammapada. Dhammapada is a text, very old 3rd century text, and it means basically the footsteps of truth. Dhamma is the truth or the teaching. Not to commit wrong actions, but to do all good ones and to keep the heart pure. This is the teaching of all the Buddhas.

[07:40]

To which the governor said, well, any child of three knows that. Birdnest replied, a child of three may know it, but even a person of 80 years will find it difficult to practice. So I think we all know that all of the spiritual traditions of the world have an aspiration for some kind of version of purity or goodness, to avoid evil and to do good. And they all have guidelines and rules and commandments and ritual in order to help to purify. the individual, and to come to some kind of idealized result, like a saint or a martyr or an ascetic, who have always populated the religious communities for millennia. That's where we find people with this intention at heart. Now what makes, I think, Zen Buddhism particularly unique in human culture, is both its purification process, but also its idealized outcome.

[08:45]

As one teacher said to me when I first arrived at Green Gulch, Paul Disco, who directed the building of this building and many others at San San, he was living there at the time, and I sat down at the table near him, and he said, you know, it's not what you're going to get out of this, it's what you're going to lose. which sounded pretty ominous, as I must admit. I thought, because I did come here to get something. Why else would I have come so far and given up so much if I wasn't going to get something? But basically what he was talking about is the Buddha's primary insight, which is that this entire edifice that I call myself is a total fantasy. as are all of the notions I have about other people and about the entire world. It's a story, and I'm making it up, as are all of you.

[09:52]

And it's kind of amazing how that process began in the first place. We can look back in our ancestral history, back to the early primates who began to grunt and point at the objects around them. giving them names. Tree, fish, bird, tiger, friend, enemy. So the Zen purification process has to do with coming to understand how that works, how that works, how we create through language and words elaborations that we call stories, but even more to the point, how we believe them. We very rarely doubt what we think. This is one of the initial steps we are invited to take in our practice, is start doubting what you think. Not really? Is that so? I've been reading a book, it's a wonderful book, called The Meaning of Everything. Has anybody seen that one yet?

[10:56]

It's The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. There's a wonderful picture on the cover of this scholar with a long beard, and he's wearing a little hat, like a mortarboard, And he's in a room with thousands of little cubbies. And each one has a word. And they're amazing. This is obviously the early form of what computers were to become. But they spent almost 75 years completing this dictionary. Monumental effort. It's quite a wonderful book. Anyway, it seems that the primates and their descendants have been quite busy pointing and grunting and coming up with names for things, because by the time the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is completed, there will be over a million words for ideas and things in the English language alone. A million words. And yet it may be that our creation has given the Creator a backseat.

[11:58]

And that language has become a significant barrier between ourselves and the awesome world around us. As much the way I think cell phones and computers are functioning in our own era, you know, they're beginning to replace face-to-face contact. And my daughter texts me every day. She doesn't particularly like to talk on the phone, but I get a little text message. It's very short. I think I'm succumbing to the same patterns, you know, with friends and shooting little emails and texts. So I was in a meeting with a woman who's the superintendent of public schools in Marin County, and she was saying this is the great issue of our time for the children, is the children are so used to using electronic devices that they are very poor at social skills. and not very good at speaking to one another, looking each other in the eye. And this is a real concern for them going to job interviews or dating for that matter.

[13:06]

How do you have a conversation with another actual real person? Not easy anyway, but particularly if you haven't been practicing. So in Buddhism, these barriers are called distractions. And they're distractions, you know, and I wonder, from what? What are we distracting ourselves from? Well, that's exactly it. We're distracting ourselves from questions like what? What is important? What is it? Who are we? What are we doing here? What's the problem? What's going on around us? What are we to do about it? And are the woes of the world my problem anyway? If it's not in my backyard, do I really need to worry? Why do I need to worry? What business is it of mine? So these are the very questions that drove the young prince who became the Buddha away from his cozy palace and out into the lonely forest in search of meaning and in search of relief from his own existential practice.

[14:20]

And... His crisis began at the age of 29 when he learned, this handsome young prince, that he too was subject to aging, sickness, and death. He'd been quite sheltered by his parents. They didn't want him to know the facts of life. So, as he said, by finding out the truth that he was subject to these things, these horrors for him, well, probably for all of us, The vanity of his youth and devotion to pleasure left him, and he now became what in our days we might call severely depressed. So whereas maybe those of us in this room might start hunting through the internet for some clues or answers to major questions in our life, the young prince began his own search for meaning by using the method's most common approach. in his era, which were introspection and meditation and asceticism.

[15:23]

So that was how his culture was exploring the meaning of life. What are we? What are we doing here? What's our assignment? So he undertook both of these with a great deal of enthusiasm, and he was quite determined to find his way out of the seemingly inevitable facts of human life, of death. Aging sickness. And he did find his way up, but it wasn't the way that he dreamt of. It wasn't what he had hoped it might be. And what he did find, however, was insight into the workings of his own imagination. How words and language formed into stories. And the stories can be quite frightening, as we all know. And it turns out that the place where stories and dreams are made was the very key to his liberation, to his awakening.

[16:25]

And yet, ironically, as it turned out, in order to explain to others what he discovered about this entrapment in the world of fantasy made from words, he had to use words in order to explain it. So this is called using a thorn to take out the thorn. and using the trap itself in order to free others from entrapment. So what he said was the way out isn't out at all, it's in, it's inward. That rather than abandoning the world and running away from our life, from the facts of our life, liberation we're seeking can only be found by turning the light of our awareness inwardly, you know, onto the...

[17:11]

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