This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzz.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Thank you for coming through the rain. Thank you for the rain. a small portion of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke from the Ninth Dueno Elegy. He's responding to a question that he's just asked himself. Why then have to be human? Because truly being here is so much. Because everything here apparently needs us. This fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us.

[01:04]

Us. Us. the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing, just once, no more. And we too, just once, and never again. But to have been this once completely, even if only once, to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. So I want to begin this morning with a seasoned greeting from my lost youth and the Three Dog Night. For those of you much younger than me, that's a rock band. And as an aside, Three Dog Night is a name they gave themselves based on an aboriginal story that on cold winter nights, native people in the outback sleep with their dogs for warmth. So a three-dog night is a very cold night, indeed.

[02:09]

Joy to the world, all the boys and girls, joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea, and joy to you and me. It goes on from there, but I won't sing it. You need a whole band to make it sound good. So this tune, along with many others, simply popped into my head earlier this month from out of that uncharted mystery that we call human consciousness. A mystery which someday I hope to assign to some higher purpose than show tunes and rock songs. But anyway, for now, that's what's in here. I think they're being stimulated by the twinkling colored lights that started appearing in the neighborhood recently. This programming of our cultural memories for good and for ill began long before any of us learned how to speak.

[03:15]

And as a result, each of us is greatly influenced by our parents and their parents before them. going all the way back to the very beginning of life itself. So even though you and I are fully responsible for the consequences of our thoughts and our actions, maybe it's not entirely our fault. Or maybe it doesn't matter if it's our fault or not, because it's now our responsibility to pay attention to the world and to our cultural conditioning. Our world is turning in on itself due to ancient cultural conditionings. And so with that in mind, I'm going to share a few from the Buddhist tradition, while at the same time welcoming traditions of all stripes. So what I want to talk about this morning is this word joy, which I think may be my favorite of all words.

[04:24]

even sounds like what it is, you know, joy. And yet, as with all words, it comes with a caution, as the Jungians famously call it, shadow. Shadow is usually an opposite. So the opposite of joy is sorrow. Of light, darkness. Of life, death. destruction, creation, is, isn't, good, evil, me, you, and so on. I actually remember being tested on my skill at opposites as part of a college entrance exam. So in order to talk about joy, I also need to talk about sorrow. and to talk about the primary teaching of the Buddha, which is the teaching of non-duality, in which the Buddha said that there really aren't two things at all, you know, that it's a mistake, a mistaken view that we are continuously making.

[05:43]

And the mistake is that we imagine that opposites can literally be separated one from the other, you know, like the North and South Pole. But I think, as you know, if we did that, the Earth would split in two. So opposites actually depend on each other for their very existence. Like the front and back foot in walking. No light and no darkness. No truth, no lies. No joy, no sorrow. No birth, no death, no me, no you. So then where does this notion that opposites can be separated come from? Well, the Buddha said, as do modern philosophers, that it comes from human imagination, itself undivided.

[06:50]

But we imagine that every word creates a separate thing, an independent existence of its very own, or what the Buddhas pejoratively called an own being, own being. So it's this fabrication of self-existent entities that in turn create in us a dualistic view of reality itself. For example, I think it's really easy for us to imagine that each of us sits separately in this room, surrounded by things which are outside of ourselves, things and other people. That you and I are isolates. Now I'm over here, and you are each over there, and never the twain shall meet. Now, twain is an archaic word for two. Never the two shall meet.

[07:54]

And right there is the source of all sorrow. But fortunately for us, it's something that we made up. And therefore we can unmake it. Because made and unmade are not two things. So when the Buddha saw... What he was making up, as he sat there quietly under a tree, he declared that this view of himself as an isolate was a disease. And he named the disease the fundamental affliction of ignorance. And what was he ignoring? Well, he was ignoring the non-dual nature of reality, that each of us, all of us, are inseparable parts of reality. No way in and no way out. And for him, according to legend, that realization took place as he gazed at the morning star, realizing it was not outside of himself, that nothing was outside of himself.

[09:12]

So that's the good news, that reality does not need to be fixed. What needs to be fixed is how we understand it, how we understand the world and ourselves. And this is where the Buddha said we need to apply the medicine to address and fix our illness. So again, ignorance of the non-dual nature of reality is the primary mechanism of our sorrow, both as individuals and as a world. And out of ignorance, there seems to arise an unlimited capacity for hatred, for greed, and for stupidity, which you can confirm for yourselves by turning on the radio on the way home. And yet, if that's all there were, ignorance, well, there would be no hope.

[10:14]

We'd be doomed. But I think you and I all know that there's something more that arises from human consciousness. There's also an infinite and limitless capacity for wisdom and for compassion. Because opposites cannot be separated. Generosity is the shadow of greed. And kindness is the shadow of hatred. And wisdom is the shadow of stupidity. When one side is illuminated, the other side is dark. So the real challenge for us is how to turn it, you know, how to make it spin. And I'm afraid that that takes a great deal of effort and patience and concentration and ethical wisdom.

[11:20]

moral discipline. It also takes a tremendous amount of courage. Courage is the Latin word for heart. It takes a lot of heart. As another great spiritual teacher famously said, forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do. And if they did, how could they possibly do such a horrible thing to another human being? How can we? You know, by knowing for ourselves the depth of suffering and of sorrow, then compassion arises in us. It's natural. Since we were children. Puppy. Poor puppy. And compassion is the birthing place of joy. So this arising is called by the Buddhas the bodhicitta, or the thought, or the mind of enlightenment.

[12:24]

And it's the beginning of a spiritual life. By doing unto others as we would have done unto ourselves, we may awaken and discover that there aren't any others. In fact, there's just this one and only precious life. Just once. Beyond undoing. So the teaching of non-duality is like a gyroscope. You know, it kind of self-corrects as it moves along. Is or isn't, up or down, right or wrong, inside or outside, not so clear, not so clear. One side illuminated, the other side is dark. And although I and you have heard many times that there really is no place else to go and nothing to seek, that we're already there, this is it.

[13:25]

You know, this is the place and here is the place and the way our lives unfold. Right here. Kind of makes me nervous. Intimacy. And the funny thing is that it's not difficult to be present. In fact, we have no choice. We're always present. right where we are. What's difficult is to see how that's so, to realize it. And that's because we are being tricked. We are being tricked by ourselves and by the significant influence of our parents and their parents and all the way back to the beginning of life itself. And it's for that reason that the awakened ones gave us teachings that act like corrective lenses to rectify this false view we have of ourselves and the world.

[14:35]

This is from the Song of the Jewel Mira Samadhi, a poem written by Tozan Ryokai, the founder of our school. The ancient sages pitied them and bestowed upon them the teaching. According to their delusions, they called black as white. When erroneous imagination cease, the acquiescent mind realizes itself. When erroneous imagination cease, the acquiescent mind realizes itself. So the Buddha, out of his great compassion, went to the heart of human concern, to the conjoined twins of suffering on one side and the end of suffering on the other. what in Sanskrit is called samsara and nirvana. And he named these the noble truths. Noble truths. And along with these truths, he detailed a method for moving from one side to the other, but most importantly, and then back again.

[15:45]

And back again for the sake of all suffering beings. We're not trying to get away. We're trying to understand what's going on here. This is the original No Child Left Behind program. And he called it a pathway. A pathway. But today I'm going to call it a revolution. A revolution in the way that we humans think. And the basic instruction for the revolution is called Turn the Light Around. Turn the light around. This is an instruction of how to bring the light of human consciousness onto the mind itself, the mind with which you right now are listening and with which I am endeavoring to speak. Are they separate? Can you hear me? Is this the place where the twain shall meet?

[16:52]

You know, it's not so easy to answer these kinds of questions. And yet, questions themselves are a clue for us. Because they engage our inquiring mind. What is it? Where are we? Who am I? And what are we doing here on this rainy day? Inquiry and curiosity are the... means by which we navigate the passageway from samsara to nirvana and back again. You know, a dark impenetrable passageway. And eventually we arrive at that place where words themselves are being born. So by studying very carefully the mechanism of how dualistic notions, false notions, are created and how they thereby create the world, we can begin to see how distorted views led us to undertake our life, our life's journey, when we were very young.

[18:10]

Very, very young and perhaps too young to know any better. And certainly no one told us otherwise. But to what end? I assumed that I'd know when I got there. And even though the journey isn't over yet, I'm still very curious, to what end? So in my own youth, I gave the workaday world kind of a modest shot. I had a job for a while. And then I found a lot of comfort and solitude in what I thought was an alternative cultural universe of a Zen monastery called Tassahara. I had finally arrived at a place where no one seemed to care about my story. They didn't want to see my driver's license or my passport or my college diploma.

[19:14]

I was called only by my first name And if anyone asked me, I said that my vocation was a monk. That's very romantic. I still am. Quite romantic. And yet I took that vocation quite seriously. So seriously that even the monastery didn't seem authentic to me. I mean, it's in California, after all. And it didn't seem strict enough to... gouge out the sorrows that had grown in my neural pathways. You know, sorrows that began quite young. Assassinations of presidents and Dr. King and hydrogen bombs and the dogs of war, which have never returned to the kennel in my lifetime. So that was enough. That pretty much did it. And I know for sure that I'm not the only one in this room who's been infested with sorrows.

[20:16]

And I also know for sure that this infestation is not over. So while I was at Asahara, I found an ancient text called the Vasudhi Maga, or the Path of Purification. Great title. Written in the 5th century by a Buddhist scholar monk named Buddha Gosa. And then by the 12th century, this text was the standard for orthodox understanding of the Theravadan tradition. So in this text, which I'm still very fond of, there's a detailed set of practical instructions for us to follow in order to purify our minds for de-infestation. And there are three main parts to this text, which is a rather thick manual. And the first part is the purification of virtue. The second is the purification of consciousness.

[21:19]

And the third is the purification of wisdom. So under the purification of virtue, which is always considered a good place to start, you know, to clean up our act, it begins with some ascetic practices that you can undertake, especially if you are living as I was in a monastery. So I picked a few of them that I thought would fit into the schedule and that would not make me stand out because I didn't want to be visible. So the one I chose was called the One Bowl Eater's Practice. And in that practice, you just take one scoop of each kind of food that's offered to you. So we have three bowls that we eat from in the monastery. And so I took one scoop. of each kind of food, and that was it. And as a result, it wasn't very long before two things happened.

[22:22]

I got very thin, and I stopped caring about food altogether. Because I had lost my preference for whether I wanted more or less of anything. One scoop. The end. You know, it was a very free feeling, very liberating feeling as long as it lasted. But then other people started to say to me, you're getting too thin. And so I confessed that I was doing this practice and they suggested I stop. But instead I went back to my manual, purification manual, to see what it would say. And I was very surprised because what it said was, When one is doing this practice, it means that you are doing this practice. When one stops doing this practice, it means that you are no longer doing this practice. And that was it. And I thought, well, what kind of practice is that?

[23:28]

There was no consequence, there was no punishment or damnation, nor were there any enticements to continue. And then I thought, well, what kind of virtue am I being taught? And then I realized, not right away, that I was being taught the virtue of not judging oneself or others. The virtue of no excuses. Either you do it or you don't do it. But either way, it's the making of conscious choices from which we learn. The best way to learn is to see the consequences of the actions that you've taken as they occur. And in fact, I was getting too thin. But an even bigger surprise was the verse that appears at the end of each chapter of this manual.

[24:31]

And I don't know why I missed it until sometime quite later, but there it was. these words, it said, these practices are for the purposes of gladdening good people. In other words, for the purpose of bringing joy to humankind. That was amazing. Because in all of my seriousness as a real monk, I had lost sight of the purpose of our endeavors to bring joy to the world. You know, all the boys and girls. Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea. joy to you and me. So a number of years later, as I continued my studies of Buddhist scripture, I read another very famous text, a Mahayana text, called The Holy Teaching of Vimalakirti. And by that time, I was pretty much on to this idea that the Buddha's primary insight had something to do with his knowledge and perception of non-duality.

[25:38]

So It wasn't so surprising that in the Vimalakirti Sutra there's an entire chapter called The Dharma Door of Non-Duality. And Vimalakirti was a very wealthy merchant, a layman. He was wise and compassionate, and he represents in the Buddhist tradition the embodiment of liberative techniques. And because of his great skill, all of the Buddha's disciples were afraid to go and see him. Because every time they met up with Vimalakirti, he'd kind of embarrass them by upsetting their views and their disciplined practices. He even made them laugh. There are some jokes in this sutra, the only ones I know of in the Buddhist sutras. Maybe there are others, but there are actually some very funny jokes in the Vimalakirti Sutra. So here's a brief description of him. He had attained patience as well as eloquence. He had penetrated... profound way of the Dharma.

[26:40]

He was expert in knowing the thoughts and actions of living beings, knowing the strength or weakness of their faculties, and being gifted with unrivaled eloquence. He taught the Dharma appropriately to each. His wealth was inexhaustible for the purpose of sustaining the poor and the helpless. He observed a pure morality in order to protect the immoral. He maintained patience and self-control in order to reconcile beings who were angry, cruel, violent, and brutal. He blazed with energy in order to inspire people who were lazy. He maintained concentration, mindfulness, and meditation in order to sustain the mentally troubled. He attained decisive wisdom in order to sustain the foolish. So his main technique as a teacher was the reconciliation of dichotomies, or these two things. In fact, it's the alternate title of the sutra itself, is the reconciliation of dichotomies.

[27:47]

So by pitting polar opposites against each other, such as calling black or white, up or down, whatever, he helped his students to eliminate a fixed view of either one. And by persistently applying this method, Over time, the student's mind is freed onto open ground, beyond attachment to concepts of any kind, at play in the fields of the Lord. So in this chapter, The Dharma Door of Nonduality, there are 30 examples given by various bodhisattvas who have been enticed by Vimalakirti who feigns sickness to get them to come and visit him. So eventually, although reluctant, the Buddha encourages them to go and give his best wishes to Vimli Kirti. Each of them goes, and when they arrive, they're asked to give their understanding of non-duality.

[28:49]

So here's one example. The Bodhisattva Manikuttar Raja declares, It is dualistic to speak of good paths and bad paths. One who is on the path is not concerned with good or bad paths. Living in such unconcern, she entertains no concepts of path or non-path. Understanding the nature of concepts, her mind does not engage in duality. Understanding the nature of concepts, her mind does not engage in duality. This is the entrance into non-duality. So once each of these thirty had given their explanations, their teachings, then they all turned to Manjushri, the figure that's on the altar here, the bodhisattva of wisdom, and they say to him, please, you'd give us your understanding of non-duality, great master, crown prince of wisdom. So Manjushri replies, good monks, you have all spoken well.

[29:56]

Nevertheless, all your explanations are themselves dualistic. To know no one teaching, to express nothing, To say nothing, to explain nothing, to announce nothing, to indicate nothing, and to design and to design nothing, that is the entrance into non-duality. And then the crown prince says to Vimalakirti, We have all given our own teaching, and now, noble sire, please elucidate the teaching of the entrance into the principle of non-duality. Thereupon, Vimalakirti kept his silence, saying nothing at all. The crown prince applauded. Excellent, excellent, noble sire. This is indeed the entrance into the non-duality of the bodhisattvas.

[30:57]

Here there are no use for syllables, sounds, or ideas. When these teachings had been declared, 5,000 bodhisattvas entered the door of the Dharma of non-duality and attained patient acceptance of the continuous arising of non-existent phenomena. Kind of sounds like the end. So, usually, this is the end. in terms of understanding kind of the high point of this sutra, Vimalakirti's thunderous silence. And so for that reason it came both as a surprise and somewhat of a delight to me when I turned the page and began reading the next chapter, which is entitled The Feast. I forget the rest of it, but it starts with The Feast. So there, in the very first sentence of this next chapter, it says,

[31:59]

Thereupon, the venerable Shariputra thought to himself, if these great bodhisattvas do not adjourn soon, what are they going to eat? And then I thought to myself, well, that's just perfect. Here the great philosophers of the Buddhist tradition are spending their time discoursing on profound teachings while the kitchen staff and their attendants are worried that they won't have anything to eat. When one side is illuminated, the other side is dark. So compassion can be easily spoken about. And when it is, it might sound like it's a thing, you know, a thing that you can be or that you can have, like a noun or an adjective. But actually, it's a verb. You know, it's what we do and how we behave. So in thinking about this, I was reminded of an older version of the meal chant that we do here before meals at Green Gulch, Olive Zen Center.

[33:09]

It went like this. Innumerable laborers brought us this food. Innumerable laborers brought us this food. We should know how it comes to us. Receiving this offering, we should consider whether our virtue and practice deserve it. So I don't want to assume that Manjushri and Vimalakirti and these 30 bodhisattvas don't deserve to be supported by the kitchen staff or by their attendants. You know, I think they do. I think they've taken their turns. And yet I think we all know how easy it is to forget, you know, particularly when we're among the most privileged class of people on the planet. the philosophers and the merchants and the beneficiaries of the warlords and the kings. And we forget about the ones who are working hard, you know, to provide for our enjoyments.

[34:09]

When we go out to eat, when we drive in our cars, when we go to the movies, when we fill our tanks with gas, and when we get fresh produce from the store easily, never a day without food. not in my life. We forget about farmers and bakers and cooks and steel workers and waiters, street cleaners and fishermen and those who labor in the slaughterhouses. I happened to be looking through my news feeds and I picked out an article about the Chicago Union stockyards, celebrating the anniversary of some kind. I don't know how many of you know about the stockyards, but for a while that was the largest slaughterhouse in the world. Millions and millions of cattle passed through there, pigs and cows.

[35:13]

And as late as the 1950s, it was a very famous tourist destination. People from all over the world visited the Chicago stockyards. classrooms of children were taken there to stand on the balconies and look down at the killing floor. It was kind of the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, and it was amazing how quickly, you know, from a farmer it would take a day to kill and dress a cow, but for the Union stockyard it was a matter of minutes with 120 workers. I don't think kids are allowed in there anymore. In fact, I think the stockyards don't even exist. They're closed. We've distributed production of meat and meat packing around the country. Local industry. So even as popular as the stockyards were in their day, being the beginning of this kind of industrial mass production, even then,

[36:23]

there were those who saw the darker side, such as Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle back in 1902, an expose of the meatpacking industry. And he said, One cannot stand and watch long without beginning to deal in symbols and similes and without hearing the hog squeal of the universe. So it struck me that we have really been darkening our exposure to knowing how food comes to us, how anything comes to us. We've kind of sealed ourselves in. You know, that darkened passageway between the living and the dying of animals, we've kind of soundproofed it. Even though I try to imagine when I go to Whole Foods and I see those rows and rows of packaged meats, I try to imagine the animals that they come from.

[37:31]

But I have been culturally conditioned to see hamburgers and hot dogs and filet mignon. I don't see cows and pigs and lambs. So our communal desire is not to go there. We don't want to go there. We don't want to go there where the workers go, into the factories or into the fields. It's just too hard. It's too painful. So much sorrow. And that's how duality works. We separate ourselves from them, you know, the rich from the poor, black from the white, the Christians from the Jews. the Sunni from the Shia, the Buddhas from the sentient beings, and me from all of you. And I don't know where we're going, but I do have a hunch how we got here.

[38:35]

And we did it all together. And yet only by listening and looking and requiring of ourselves a deeper and more truthful knowledge of how our lives are being supported Can we hope to turn this world? Can we hope to repay the great investment that has been made into making our lives so rich and so free? I think only then will sorrow be comforted by its beloved twin. And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it. trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands, in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart, trying to become it. Whom can we give it to? We would hold onto it all forever.

[39:36]

For when the traveler returns from the mountain slopes into the valley, he brings not a handful of earths unsayable to others. but instead some word that he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit tree, window, at most column, tower. But to say them, you must understand. To say them, more intensely than the things themselves ever dreamed of existing. Isn't the secret intent of this taciturned earth when it forces lovers together that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?

[40:38]

For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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