Good morning. Good morning. I'd like to introduce Jamie Howell, who's been practicing here for over 25 years. But he's got her hands so much on Saturday mornings. He's the chairman of the board. She's here for about four years ago. He's a soccer coach. He's a basketball musician. And the middle side. Thank you, Michael. And I think most importantly of all, a grateful student of Michael Wanger's. Michael took me in about 28 years ago. And whenever I have a moment of not

[01:06]

showing up at the Zendo for a couple of days, I get a call and Michael says, how are you? What's going on? So, in order not to disappoint Michael, I sheepishly show up at the Zendo again. He's got a very skillful means of managing me. So we're in a practice period now. I got drafted into it so late that I'm not even sure what the exact title of the practice period is. But it's the Bodhisattva Path. I got a call from Jordan about a week before the practice period started and he said, well,

[02:09]

would you like to teach a class on Thursday nights with Mark Lancaster? I said, sure, do we get to pick our topic? And he said, no. No, we don't get to pick our topic. You and Mark get to teach the four Brahma Baharas. Of course... Turned out that we weren't teaching on Thursday nights. After I'd cleared my schedule, about three or four days before the practice period started, we were told that we were going to teach on Monday nights. So it's fine. It's wonderful. I have a wonderful class. It's really enjoyable. And then, much to my surprise, Jordan said, oh, and you're speaking on May 17th. which was last week. Heidi and I went to Tassajara for the no race, so I thought that would get me out of speaking altogether.

[03:15]

But Jordan, in his wisdom, said, oh, we'll swap you. We'll put you on May 22nd. So that's how I've landed here today, May 22nd, and here I am. boy, does the view look differently from up here. So I wanted to talk a little bit about myself first and how I got to practice. I don't want to get too boring and do a way-seeking mind talk. Most of you have heard that before at some point or other. But I also want to In talking about myself, talk about how I found a layman's path to practice here at Zen Center. When I first came, there weren't a lot of layman practicing here.

[04:27]

And there weren't a lot of vehicles and venues to practice. your practice. I think the Saturday Sangha and the general encouragement that we at Zen Center have fostered for lay practice in the last five to ten years has been a wonderful thing. And I'm grateful to people like Mary of the Saturday Sangha who have made such a strong commitment to lay practice. I think it's really the backbone of this institution and it's very important that we encourage it and so I'll tell my story it's a little off the beaten track because I was in some ways a pioneer in that regard but anyway I'll get to that

[05:35]

So in the late 70s, I was on a plane ride. As Michael mentioned, I was in the rock and roll business. And this plane ride had some rock and roll stores on it. I was road managing them. And it's a little tiny plane. It was really bumpy. And they kept saying, you can't land here. We were in mid-state New York. up near Binghamton. You can't land in Binghamton. You can't land in New York. You can't land in New Paltz. You can't land in Hartford. There was a terrible storm, lightning, turbulence, and all I could envision was the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly. Finally, we touched down at Providence, Rhode Island, and gleefully, I skipped into the bookstore. And for some reason, there was a book on Zen Buddhism, which I had never... Well, I had spent a couple of years boring my wife by reading her Paul Repp's book, Zen Flesh.

[06:50]

And when I would read one of the koans or one of what I thought was, wow, this is really great, she would reach over and slap me. But I found this book written by Joshua Sasaki Roshi, one of the few copies that was published called Buddha is the Center of Gravity. And I had no idea that there was a Zen center five minutes away from my house here on Page Street. So I went down to Cimarron Zen Center in L.A. where... The book jacket said Sasaki Roshi lived and knocked on the door and said, I'd like to see Sasaki Roshi now to the guy who answered the door. And they looked at me like I was nuts. Finally, I got out of them that Sasaki Roshi was leading a sashim on Mount Baldy that was starting the next day.

[08:02]

The only way that I could see him in the near future was to go and do the sashim. So, not having sat a period of zazen before, I went and sat at Rinzai sashim, getting up at 3 a.m. and going to bed around 9.30 p.m. and being yelled at if you moved and hit the sticks and given a koan. I was... I remember the seventh day, towards the end of the period, thinking... Well, first, let me back up about thinking. At one point during the Sashin, I thought, why am I thinking so much? I had never noticed that I had so many thoughts. I actually at one point thought they were putting something in our food. LAUGHTER So I think on the seventh day, it was about the last hour right before we were going to be dismissed, I said, okay, you proved to these then people that you could do this.

[09:17]

Now just get off your cushion and get into your rent-a-car and drive to the Claremont Airport or the Ontario Airport and just never come back. But I finished the sashim. This was, I think, 1978 or 1979. And about three weeks later, I did another Sashin. And now that I reflect on my period at Mount Baldy, I was a Sashin student, and I didn't sit very much in between. I kind of think it was my Tangorio period for these temples. I don't know if all of y'all know what Dengoryo is. But historically, if you want to get into a temple in Japan, like Daitokuji or A.A.G.

[10:19]

or Sokoji, you go and knock on the door and somebody opens a little slit and peers out and says, what do you want? And you'd say, well, I'd like to come in and be a student. And they shut the slit down and go away, and you're supposed to sit there until the next day you can knock on the door again and say, what do you want? I mean, you say, can I come in? And they say, what do you want? Different temples have different periods of time that they will put you through that. We do that at Tassahara. We don't do it quite as masculinely, quite as nastily, but it's still Tongariyo it's a very important period to where you you show your commitment to wanting to do this practice and to do this difficult practice we don't have Tongariyo here although sometimes in the early period when I first came here when

[11:34]

there was very few people practicing and there wasn't a lot of smiling going on. As an outsider, I felt like that was your Tangorio period. But I think that thinking about my time at Mount Baldy practicing with koans and practicing sashims with Sasaki Roshi was really my Tangorio period to come. find my lifelong teacher, Michael, who has managed to keep me from excesses such as sloth on one side and overzealousness on the other. I've located the middle way from way out here to right about here. I haven't even gotten into near the middle yet but with Michael's help I've surrounded it a little bit better as Michael said I started practicing here about 25 years ago and the first 10 years I was

[13:01]

in my extremely zealous period. One period in the mid-80s, for a good couple of years, we had Zazen in starting at 5 a.m., and I was living at home on Clipper Street, which is, at that time of the morning, they used to have flashing yellow lights on Dolores, so I could actually make it here in about seven minutes. because there's no cars on the road and it was all flashing yellow all the way and so I had my robes laid out and Zazen was at five and I was either Jiko or Chidan every day Jiko two days a week and Chidan five days a week so I had to be here around 4.40 Jiko is what Mary did carrying the stick of incense and assisting the priest in the morning.

[14:06]

And Chidan is the person who lights up all the altars and the whole building. There's four altars to light up in the morning. There's the kaisando and the kitchen altar. And what am I leaving out, Michael? This one. Two kitchen altars and the zindo. Well, the zindo is somebody else's. But Heikisan, the beloved Heikisan, I don't know if very many of you remember Heikisan, but I loved himself, was Eno for many of those years. And as Jiko Urchiden, I was expected to be here 4.40, 4.39, and I was here at 4.41 every morning. And every morning... Heike-san would be at the top of the stairs tapping his foot with a scowl on his face. What?

[15:07]

Tom Giordale. Tom Giordale, right. A wonderful man. For a long time there was pictures of Tom for sale in the bookstore and I regret not buying one because I thought they would be there forever. We don't seem to have pictures of Tom anymore. So if somebody has a picture of Tom, I would love to get one for my altar. That would be great. He was a great teacher. So, yeah, I was quite zealous. And I remember at one point I read Marion Mountain's book, and I don't know if any of you all are familiar with Marion Mountain or know who she was, but it was at her home in Los Altos that the lectures were given by Suzuki Roshi that became Zen Mind Beginner's Mind. And she was... I never met her, so maybe Blanche or Michael know her, but she was evidently a fairly middle-class woman until she met Suzuki Roshi.

[16:22]

And by the end of it, she had given away her house and... moved into a trailer and lived in Carmel and Big Sur and practiced in a different way. And so I was really excited about the prospect of giving away all my possessions, but neither Michael nor my wife Heidi were very excited about that idea. So I didn't give away my house and I kept practicing here. So I'm... think the most interesting thing to maybe some of you that are practicing as lay practitioners now might get from this is that I don't know if there have been very many shusos that have never lived in any of the practice places.

[17:27]

I came to this temple with three children and a pregnant wife and a refrigerator and a mortgage payment and a job and there was never it wasn't an appropriate time in my life to ever move into the building or go to Tassajara or go to live at Green Gulch and so I did it in a different way and Zen Center accommodated me to do it in that way and Now we have even more ways to accommodate that kind of practice through the Saturday Sangha and some of the other means. But if you are a lay practitioner and you do want to deepen your practice and really make a commitment to Zen Center, they'll find a way to embrace that and take you in and make it possible to

[18:32]

for you to do that, to deepen your practice and to ultimately even be Shuso. So I'm very grateful to the temples and to Michael and Blanche. I remember Blanche, I was given my permission, I think, to take Jukai, lay ordination in 1983. And I think 1999 was when Blanche snatched away these little scraps of cloth that I'd been working on for 16 years and said, okay, you're going to take Jukai to the next ceremony and here's your Rakasu. About two weeks later, the most beautiful stitched Rakasu appeared. There's some... if you all want to take a look at this later, there's a couple of places where the stitches are really not very straight.

[19:41]

Those are probably the only stitches I put in. The rest were done by Blanche and Dharma brothers and sisters in the sewing room. I'm grateful for that. Probably would have never happened. So, I want to say a little bit about what I should have been talking about, which was the four brahma-vaharas and the bodhisattva way. The bodhisattva way, and I think of the bodhisattva way and the practices that come about from that side of practice. more compassionate side of Buddhism as just being the other side of the Kohen of the meditative or the wisdom side.

[20:43]

So on one side you have the Avalokiteshvara side. This is just the way I think about it. This is not classical stuff that I'm teaching now. But you have the Avalokiteshvara side which is compassion for each other and the environment and well that's enough to say about that and on the other side you have the Manjussri side and for a long time I thought well the compassion side really does rise out of your deep meditative wisdom side and it just sort of experientially it just comes up And then as I began to explore the compassion side, a lot of that, if you really take a look at it, reduces subject-object disease that we have.

[21:54]

If we can become one with the environment, one with another person and have compassion for them or sympathetic joy. It's really just a duplication of that non-separation that we have when we're practicing Zazen. So they really support each other and they're really both equally important. So before I start to talk about the four Brahma Viharas, I do want to mention that as I was preparing this talk, I asked for a lot of people's advice. And the best piece of advice that I got came from a friend of mine who is a minister of

[22:56]

of a small church in Kwanna, Texas. We went to high school together. He was the golden boy, the fullback on the West Texas soccer team, watching Friday Night Lights. You'll get it completely. But he was the golden boy, and then he became a successful businessman in West Texas. And then about four or five years ago, Wayne... gave up his business, gave up living in a large town, moved to a population 3,000 town, declining West Texas Village, and began to minister to people there. And Wayne and I have been exchanging emails for a long time, and I said I was going to be giving this talk. I said, Wayne, what would you say? And He said some wonderful things.

[23:58]

He sent me an email back, and I just want to read this one. There are two sentences that he said. If we would just love one another, that would encompass all of the commandments. This would remove all the hate we have for our fellow brothers and sisters because of color, the color of their skin, their religion, their gender. their sexual preference, and their nationality. And I wanted to share that with you, not only because it's so true, but because here in San Francisco, we often get a distorted view of what's going on in West Texas, Kansas, or Nebraska. I don't even know if we're a red state or a blue state. I forget. But there's some wonderful teachers out there that are teaching within their own context, but they're teaching some wonderful stuff.

[25:10]

And that fellowship that Wayne talks about all of us having and him giving up his successful job and going to minister to a small impoverished town in West Texas is just another version of the Bodhisattva way. I have some other things I wanted to read before I started to talk about the Four Brahma Vaharas. Shingen a Chan master of the 20th century gave a wonderful description of shikantaza and since it's the other side of the coin of the compassionate side that we're going to talk about in a second I really liked this and I grabbed it and I wanted to pass this on and I'm going to put on my reading glasses that I stole from my wife they're purple so they're quite manly I think

[26:26]

While you're practicing just sitting, be clear about everything going on in your mind. Whatever you feel, be aware of it, but never abandon the awareness of your whole body sitting there. Shikantaza is not just sitting with nothing to do. It is a very demanding practice requiring diligence as well as alertness. If your practice goes well, you will experience dropping off of sensations and thoughts. You need to stay with it and begin to take the whole environment as your body. Whatever enters the doors of your senses becomes one totality extending from your body to the whole environment. I don't know why I think that's so good, but when I teach... the few students I have, I just tell them to let phenomena wash over them without judging, without labeling, without language.

[27:41]

And we become the, well, we extend ourselves to the trees blowing in the wind, the buses turning the corner. This is a great place to practice because there's helicopters going over in the morning and if you've ever sat here on New Year's Eve, there's gunfire. There's plenty of things that you can extend yourself to that are the totality of the body. So, now we get to the four Brahma Vaharas. The four immeasurables. Traditionally, when we practice with the four Brahma Vaharas, we first try to practice with ourselves. And after we're able to practice with ourselves, we try to practice with a friend or a loved one.

[28:45]

And there's some recommendation that you not practice with someone that you feel sexually attracted to. I can understand that in some ways. And also that you don't practice with somebody who's dead. I can also understand that. But since I'm one of the older people around here, there's also an admonition not to practice with someone who's too much younger or older than you. So I would miss that a little bit. Once you can practice with somebody who's a friend, somebody who's close to you, then you can move that practice out to a neutral person, somebody who you see every day but that you don't have a lot of feeling about, that secretary in your office that sort of blends into the woodwork, somebody that you don't, that's very neutral and you can extend that

[29:56]

that feel that compassion or that sympathetic joy to that person. And then finally, you want to, well, not finally, because beyond finally, beyond extending that practice to somebody that you hate or dislike, that's an enemy, after you can extend that practice to that category of person, then you want to extend... your practice to the whole universe, to everyone. And that's ultimately the goal. No separation. No separation with the people that you love. No separation from the people that you don't have much feeling about. No separation from the people that you really can't stand. No separation from the whole universe.

[31:02]

So that's the goal. The first of the four Brahmaviharas, and as I was researching this, they have them, and you can find them in every order. So the first one I'm going to talk about is loving kindness, maitri, metta, and that's a common... of Vipassana practice, they talk about metta practice, love, compassion. There's a Maitreya Hsastas over here close by in Dubose, friendliness. So, one of the things that we find in the Western cultures that they didn't find so much in the Asian cultures is is lack of self-esteem. So when you are practicing this practice, you really ought to start with yourself, compassion for yourself.

[32:17]

Sometimes that's the hardest thing to do, is to practice with compassion for yourself. The near enemy of... loving-kindness, metta, is affection. And with the near enemies, each one of the four brawn vaharas has a near enemy, and the near enemies are something that looks like or feels like compassion, but effectively it's a separating emotion. It turns... compassion into a unification of Blanche and I, into a separation. Oh, I feel really affectionate towards. But then you're you and the object that you're, it's a subject to object situation.

[33:21]

Whereas compassion can be just, wow, it's just one thing. It's just you including everything. So it's really insidious. You have to really watch out for that near enemy, in this case affection. And of course, the far enemy is really easy to watch out for. The far enemy of compassion is hate, dislike, contends. So that's easy to watch out for. I think it's more important to watch out for that trickster. Affection, in this case. The second of the four brahman baharas is compassion, which is very similar to metta. I, myself, got to admit that I have a little bit of a hard time separating the two, but they feel the same to me in my heart.

[34:26]

But the near enemies don't feel the same to me. I remember going to Mexico after I'd been practicing for about 10 years. Heidi and I, for a couple of years, had a timeshare condo down there, and we would go down there a couple of weeks a year. And on the drive-in from the Mazatlan Airport to the condominium in Mazatlan, even though I grew up in Latin America, I wasn't prepared for the poverty, for the total lack of anything that a lot of these people had. No heat, no electricity, no health care, no anything. And I remember the first time I went down there, I think I had just finished a sashim, And on the way in from the airport, I just started crying.

[35:29]

And, you know, I think in hindsight, I think what was happening is I felt pity for those people. And I think, again, that's a real insidious emotion that... separates me from them. I was crying, and I felt bad for them, and I felt... But I ultimately was feeling pity, and I wasn't feeling unified with them. I was creating a subject-object situation, and I don't think that that's as good as if you just feel total compassion for somebody. A homeless man... ask you for change on the street. One of your reactions can be contempt and you just walk right by and that's pretty clear you've just messed up.

[36:33]

The other is that you can feel compassion and you can react to it in either giving him money or stopping and talking to him but whatever you do In order to negate creating a separation, you need to embrace the situation with them. And the most insidious thing that you can do, again, I keep using that word and I apologize, but I can't think of a better word for it, is just to pity him and give him a buck and move on. I didn't really feel bad for you, buddy. Here's a buck. I hope you feel better. you're better off stopping and saying, how are you doing? And if you give him a buck or not, that's not as important as you becoming one with him because there's really no separation here.

[37:37]

There's no difference. The third is joy. And I want to back up for a second because I think we don't smile enough and Edson Center and we can go all the way back to the Buddha himself in the sixth koan of the Gaelist gate when he held up a flower and everybody kind of looked at him dumbfounded except for Masha Kashapa and he smiled and that was the first transmission of the Dharma So smiling, that's where it's really happening. Smiling is a big practice and a big open door for you to move into the bodhisattva way.

[38:38]

It's a big open door. So when joy, sympathetic joy especially, well, you can start with smiling. If you're smiling, it's hard for you not to be joyful. I don't. I think if you're smiling, you're going to have a tough time feeling contempt or hypocrisy or pity. If you're smiling, you know, when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you. Anyway. I... Sympathetic joy... Boy, that starts with yourself. I do it probably more than anybody. Michael's got a big stick that he beats me with. I'll have some success in something and I'll complain that I didn't do good and I didn't do well enough.

[39:40]

I'm always beating myself up. But I think start with yourself and give yourself sympathetic joy. And then give somebody that you love when they accomplish something joy. And then that neutral person joy. And then that enemy joy. Recently, when I was working at Paragon, not that recently, four years ago, the office manager of Paragon learned that I had once worked for Jefferson Airplanes, the umbrella company. And she said, oh, I'm dating the best friend of the Jefferson Airplanes manager.

[40:44]

Wanted to, I'll set up a lunch with you and Bill, you haven't seen him in a long time. She had no idea that I had great contempt and resentment for Bill. So I took it as my practice to go to the lunch and give Bill compassion and sympathetic joy. I had a really good time. We went to the... Presidio golf course dining room and he took me to Joe DiMaggio's locker and he said, this is Joe DiMaggio's locker. Kind of odd, but I had a good time. It was a really good time. You never know what you're going to get into when you allow yourself to be open to compassion and non-separation.

[41:52]

And just the other day I don't know none of you are realtors but I do see a friend of mine in the audience who's in the real estate business in a certain way so Bruce you'll know how I felt about this but I had a listing on Washington Street and it didn't sell and I got a call from the seller and said, well, our listing's up and do you want to list it again? And I said, let me call you back. And I thought about it for a while. And I said, well, you know, Erin Thompson. And I called him back and I said, Erin Thompson would be a better choice for you. She's a realtor who specializes in that part of town and in TICs.

[42:52]

Then yesterday I saw it come up on the new listings in my computer. You know, 2870 Washington presented by Aaron Thompson, North Beach Realtors. And my first reaction was, God damn, Aaron. But after I was able to back up, I was able to give... Sympathetic joy to Aaron Thompson, who's deserved it and is a wonderful person. And I didn't clutch and grab with jealousy and envy. I just gave it up. It was a real hard thing for me to do because I never want to give up anything. But, you know, what separated me, I'm friends with Aaron, but it separated me for a minute while I had to

[43:56]

release that envy. The insidious near enemy of equanimity is indifference. Indifference is probably more dangerous than the far enemy resentment. Equanimity is the ability to just stay calm, placid, even. Except the motorcycle going by. Except Mara coming up with his whole army. Harder for me, except Mara coming up with his beautiful daughters. But just accept it.

[44:58]

Don't be indifferent to it. Don't resent it. Just stay with it. So practice these four Brahma Vaharas for yourself and try to use them to be the flip side, the opposite side of of your Shikintaza practice, because that's what they are. And they're going to strengthen each other. Practice your meditation. Practice the four Brahma Baharas. And you won't feel as separate from the universe, and the universe will become you, and in some way it reminds me of Rinzai talking about the way he taught, but I'm not going to go into that.

[46:03]

I'll be in the back of the dining room if somebody wants to ask me some questions about Rinzai. I did... The net is great, you know, for Buddhism. I think we were the... Us and the Nazis have taken over the net. If you want to find out anything about... about Buddhism, you don't need to go downstairs to the library anymore. It's all in the net. Just type in what you want. And I found a great prayer that comes from the Theravada tradition. May all beings be happy. May all beings be free from suffering. May all beings be joyful. May all beings rest in equanimity, free of attachment and free of aversion. And I guess I'll leave you with that thought.

[47:03]

Thank you very much.

[47:06]

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