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. Express our gratitude to the San Francisco Zen Center and to Leanne and David for inviting us to come here and do our favorite thing in the world, which is talk about Dharma. And I'm grateful to all of you for coming here today. I have to say I'm a little taken aback. I'm always... You know, we hear so much about interdependence when we look at the Dharma, and it's such a pervasive thing, but it's also so delicate and so intricate. And we don't often have very powerful visual... examples of interdependence coming into our life. But when I see all of us coming here together, I recognize that it's through very powerful links of our aspirations and our actions and our drive to seek freedom for ourselves and other beings that brings us here today.

[01:17]

All of us here in this place on this beautiful day, sitting to share the Dharma together. And there's just such a powerful sense of embodied interdependence in this room. I'm really, I'm just really thrilled by it. So thank you all for coming and giving that powerful display. It's not easy in this world full of difficulty and distractions to choose to spend our time with Dharma. And so I'm very happy happy and grateful that we can all be together to do that. In our tradition, we usually think of experience as being encapsulated by body, speech and mind. So we often start any Dharma activity by just settling and clearing away body, speech and mind. Some of us have been sitting already this morning, but whether we have or not, we can just get into our body, gentle our body and let it

[02:18]

settle into the ground, setting down roots into the ground at the same time that our spine is reaching up to the sky and all of our muscles just relax into this place, into this seat. When we settle speech in Dharma activity, more often than not, it's the inner chatter that goes on in our minds. In our tradition, we use the examples of three pots that might have some flaws to them as vessels. So a pot might be overturned, in which case no matter how much you pour into it, it just spills all over the place. Or it might have holes in the bottom, such that even if it's right side up, everything just spills right back out again. Or it might be right side up and completely solid, but have some kind of contaminant or dirt inside that taints whatever you pour into it. So these are examples for how we work with this inner chatter prior to any Dharma activity.

[03:19]

We ensure that our mind has stilled it so that we are open and receptive, we can retain the Dharma, and we don't mix the experience with any disturbing emotions that may disturb the natural tranquility of our minds. Or we do the best we can in any case. And then finally, we try to polish the mind, which means really stoking up the intention, the motivation of bodhicitta, the mind of awakening, that supreme resolve that seeks to set ourselves and all beings in Buddhahood. It's that resolve that takes a personal responsibility to do that, to put all beings in this state of infinite potentiality, that is the emptiness replete with all excellent qualities, such as wisdom and compassion and kindness, magnanimity and so forth.

[04:23]

So I just ask that we take a moment to settle our body, speech and mind in this way as much as we can. I understand from Lien and David that there is a six-week practice period that is underway focused on wise effort. And I'm sure most of you already know wise effort is one of the eight limbs of the path of noble beings that the Buddha taught as part of his four truths. Wise effort is a really interesting one because it forms... a limb that serves as a cusp in a way. The first two limbs of the Eightfold Path are wise view and wise intention.

[05:28]

You could say that you could group those into the category of view. And then we have wise effort, wise mindfulness, and wise concentration, which fall under the rubric of meditation. And then we have wise speech and wise action, wise livelihood, which fall under the umbrella of conduct. So these three view, meditation, and conduct relate to what the Buddha called the three trainings. In Sanskrit, shila, samadhi, and pranya, or it's kind of the reverse of how we just said it, ethics, meditation, and knowing, or wisdom. So when we were invited to come here and we knew it was just part of a six-week period for some of us, maybe some of us like us, are just coming for today, we wondered what could we contribute to such an expansive practice period on wise effort?

[06:32]

It's such a huge topic. What can we do in such a short time to contribute to that? So what we thought we would do is to just offer our personal experience with a way to really become grounded in the Dharma, to develop confidence. It's a method that we learned and have been practicing in the monastery, our home monastery in Nepal. And it takes its roots back to the earliest sutras of the Buddha. We can see in the Pali canon, in the Mahayana Sutras and so forth, pedagogy, you could say, of listening, contemplating, and meditating as a way of really integrating the Dharma. For me, one of the things that I continually work with is how to integrate the Dharma in our life through practice and in everyday experience.

[07:33]

And for us, this process of listening, contemplating, and meditating has really helped do that to a very great extent. So it's a very experiential practice. It's not something that's easy to just talk about. So we thought we'd just walk you through how that might work in the context of just one word. One word that we interact with as practitioners and as people in the world, and that has an impact on wise effort. That word in Sanskrit is virya. In the Pali it's also virya. And it's interesting because Sanskrit shares a common ancestor with Indo-European languages. So we see this root vir in the virya, in the English word virago and virile and even virtue, has a sense of very strong power and energy and courage, perseverance and so forth. Most of the time when we see this translated into English, it's translated as

[08:39]

Not probably the most popular word in the English language. So sometimes, maybe in an effort to get the original meaning out, it's translated as joyous effort or enthusiastic persistence and the like. Again, maybe trying to get a little distance between the speaker and diligence. we thought we'd go ahead and embrace diligence and see how that goes. And why? Well, first of all, it's certainly something that the Dharma encourages us to cultivate. Yet we might have a lot of difficult personal associations with diligence. For example, we might be resentful, thinking we already do so much. And as soon as we hear we should cultivate diligence, we feel like, I've had enough. It's all I can do. Or we might feel guilty because we're not doing as much as we'd like and we feel like we're letting others down.

[09:40]

Or we might feel angry that people are judging us. Or we might even feel proud that we do so much and others don't. Basically, it's the full gamut of emotions that we might end up with when we think about our personal associations with diligence. We might just reflect how do we feel when we hear that word or when we hear to cultivate diligence. Then all of that happens in the context of a culture that also has all kinds of ideas about diligence and what we should and shouldn't be doing. We have the idea of an overachiever who's just doing way too much and is trying to get all the credit. Or the idea of a slacker who just isn't worth much, or whatever it may be. So what happens when we look at diligence is showing us what happens in this first leg, the listening part. A lot of times when we hear dharma, There are a lot of words that have been translated for us, and to some extent that's valuable because we understand what they're saying.

[10:42]

And the other extent, we might have to dig a little deeper than our usual personal and cultural associations with the word. So this gives us a sense of what the listening is. We hear the word, and we don't immediately assume we know what it is. A question mark starts to arise in our head. So then we start to think, huh, well, I'm not so crazy about this diligence, but the Dharma seems to think it's a good thing. What does the Dharma have to say about it? And we find that the Buddha really gives diligence pride of place among many, many of his prodigious list making. He was an incredible list maker, that Buddha. So we see diligence among the six paramitas, among the five supporting faculties. the four bases for any success. And we say, okay, well, that's really important. How so? Now, if we go back to what we talked about earlier, that shila, samadhi, and prana, the ethics, meditation, and knowledge or wisdom,

[11:50]

We see that that relates to the six paramitas as well as the eightfold noble path. So the paramitas are the perfections or transcendent virtues. They are ethics, generosity and patience. So the first three and they relate to the training in ethics. Then if we jump over diligence briefly and we go to meditation, meditative concentration, which is the fifth paramita or perfection. That relates, unsurprisingly, to the training in meditation. And the sixth paramita, or perfection, is knowledge, sometimes translated wisdom. And that also, unsurprisingly, relates to the training in knowledge. But where's diligence in all that? Well, it turns out that diligence suffuses all three trainings in ethics, meditation, and wisdom. So we have... This is the next step that often happens when we're engaging and listening. We find that there's a seeming conflict between perhaps our personal associations and cultural ideas of, say, diligence and the place it holds in the Dharma.

[13:02]

So then we start to say, well, how do we hold that paradox? Do we reject our own experience or do we reject the Dharma? Or do we just hold that paradox and become curious about it? Now is where things get interesting. Because that curiosity is what helps us make our practice into a process of developing intimacy with ourselves and the Dharma. How does that work? We become curious about the difference between our experience and how the Buddha describes diligence. We say, well, maybe I need to find out more about diligence. What is he meaning? Not just stick with the words that were given in our language. As translators, we often talk about source language and target language. And very often, the source languages, predominantly Asian of Buddhism, will have a lot more rich meaning that we can capture in just a single word. in English as a target language or other Western languages. So then you have to look at what are some definitions of diligence, for example.

[14:08]

In our tradition, we use a definition of diligence presented by the Bodhisattva Shantideva in his text, The Way of the Bodhisattva, reflecting the way the Buddha described diligence. And he uses the definition to delight in virtue. Diligence is delighting in virtue. So the first thing we notice is there's nothing about action in there. We often think of diligence as this hard slog, this stuff we have to do. It can be caught up with responsibility and duty and obligation. But in this definition that we hear, that we listen to, we hear delighting in virtue. It's not about action, it's about an attitude. It's about an inner frame of mind. Now of course if we delight in virtue, what happens? It comes out in our actions. That mindset informs our actions and suffuses our actions.

[15:09]

And here again we can look at our own experience. What is it like when we really delight in something or in someone? We just want to spend our time with that person or doing that thing. And when we can't be doing it, we can't wait until we get back to it. That's what this sense of delight is talking about. It can also be rendered as enthusiasm or inspiration or appreciation. And we don't need a lot of explanation of that. We really know what that's like in our own experience. So now we're starting to get into the contemplating branch. We're taking the Dharma and we're looking at it in our own experience. Does that really fit or does that not fit? How does it fit? And at some point we get the sense of, oh yeah, that's really the case. That piece is what we call it certainty. It's that first leg of really understanding in a very embodied way. So let's look at this definition some more. Delighting in virtue. Well, the interesting thing is we just heard that virtue's root, that vir in virtue, shares ancestry with virya, the Sanskrit for diligence.

[16:17]

That sense of bravery and power. But what is meant by virtue exactly? There's certainly a lot of lists in Buddhism, like other spiritual traditions, about what's good to do and what's not good to do. But what this is pointing to really is what actions accord with our intentions. Effort to be wise is effort that accords with the results that we're seeking, the wishes that we have for ourselves. And when we get down to it, Sentient beings wish to be happy and free of suffering. Won't find a single sentient being that's dying to be unhappy and suffering all the time. When we get down to the very essence, that's what our intentions are. So virtue are those actions that accord with results that are happy and free of suffering. Just boils down to that. It's not something that's just been handed down or told to us or required.

[17:20]

It's just what... actually accords with our wishes. And certainly the Buddha has a lot of suggestions for that that we can use as supports. But again, when we're doing this listening, contemplating, and meditating, we're looking at it in our own experience. So we start to think about, well, what does make me happy in the long run? If I keep the precepts, even if we haven't taken the precepts, but we're living in accord with them, what does that do? We experiment and say, let's see what that's like. Oftentimes we'll find, wow, this really is delightful. This brings a sense of calm and peacefulness and being in harmony. Now we start to stoke up some of the delight. Now this definition on the page of a book is starting to come alive in us. This for us is what we call the difference between spiritual dharma and realisational dharma. Spiritual dharma is what's on a page or that we hear at a talk.

[18:21]

Realizational Dharma is what we live, what we embody, what we bring to others in life. So we can see how this listening and contemplating has already brought us in dialogue with the Dharma in our own life, in our own experience. We really are developing that intimacy with the Dharma so that if something goes wrong, we can go back to our mind and turn into self-reflection. as a way of understanding what does and doesn't work for us. And there is where we start to think about this confidence, this conviction about what to do and not do. Through self-reflection and experience, experimenting with the Dharma and seeing for ourselves what does and doesn't work, we gain confidence in the Dharma. We gain confidence in the teachings. Even if things don't go quite right, that's just fine. We're still working with... self-reflection and experience. It's part of the process of gaining intimacy with the Dharma.

[19:25]

And so we're right there. We don't have to be judging how well or poorly we're doing it. Just the fact that we're doing it is Dharma right there, right then and there. So then the third part of the listening, contemplating and meditating is a slightly different kind of meditation than we think of when we think of Zazen or Shamatha, the sitting meditation. It's a combination of that with an analytical part. So through our reflection and experience, we have a sense of, aha, I get that virtue. I see why there's something really positive, and I really am kind of delighted with this. And that sense of certainty is something we sit with in formal meditation, in zazen or shamatha, calm abiding. And that's a way of integrating that into our mind stream. So fusing our mind stream with the sense of certainty in the delight of practicing virtue or wholesomeness. So in this way, we're able to really integrate this sense of delighting in virtue and what that means.

[20:32]

And then we're able to embody it through our experience that we gain more and more certainty that behaving with virtue leads to the results we seek and then nobody needs to cajole us or convince us or talk us into it we just do it and what's even better what happens if we don't do it what happens if we're looking at how diligent am I for example maybe I'm 100% diligent 87% anybody for 50% All right, let's just get down to 0%. Let's say we, through our self-reflection and our experience, we say, okay, I'm at right about 0% diligent. What is that doing for you? You're still reflecting. You're still experiencing. You're still in dialogue with the Dharma about what virtue is and how it's delightful. So at 0%, what's happening?

[21:33]

You have no hope or fear about doing too much or doing too little. You're right at 0%. It's that sense of beginner's mind. It's that sense of curiosity about ourselves and delight in the Dharma that is our guide. It's that sense that we can stay open and present to the Dharma without having to fiddle with it, without having to change it, and letting the Dharma change us. I'm going to stop there so that Zoba can talk a little more about the nuts and bolts of how this works. Thank you all so much. okay so let's get right into it so uh for those of you who might be dharma geeks like myself then uh i think you'll be happy for all the rest of you i'm sorry but these lists will go very quickly i hope so first let's just look at diligence and and its antithetical uh factor uh laziness

[22:44]

So in looking at diligence and laziness, it's helpful to look and see again, as Yeshe was speaking about, getting on the same page about what it is that we're talking about. So I'm basing this on the Ornament of Precious Liberation, which was written by Gampopa, one of the founders, a great meditation master, monk. doctor who was one of the founding masters of our particular lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. And he wrote this text in the early 12th century. And of course, it's based on the Sutras of the Buddha, which he cites quite a few of, as well as teachings of many different Indian masters. But in this, in the chapter on diligence, he talks about three different types of laziness. So laziness or wasting time is another way that it's sometimes translated if we have too much association with the term laziness.

[23:45]

So when we look at laziness, the first type of laziness that he brings up is the laziness with which we're familiar, that we often call laziness, which is the laziness of indolence, of being attached to ease and the laziness of just not really wanting to get anything done because we want to take it easy. So that doesn't need too much explanation. The second form of laziness that he talks about in Tibetan, the term is literally the laziness of the sheep's knees, which is a pretty funny one, right? So sheep's knees laziness, which means just like the wobbly knees of a sheep. And one way to think about this is it's just this being so faint-hearted that we don't believe in our own capacity. We don't believe that we are someone that's capable of accomplishing Buddhahood or even practicing, even doing a five-day sit or sitting in the morning.

[24:50]

It's just too much. There's no way someone like me could accomplish that. So I'm not even going to try. And I find this fascinating myself because... We don't normally think of this as laziness, but from the Buddhist perspective, it is a form of laziness because it's a way that we end up wasting our precious time, right? We think, oh, I can accomplish something like that, so it's not worth trying. So that's the second form of laziness. And then the third form of laziness is the laziness of prioritizing the wrong things. And this is an interesting one, and it's one we have to be careful about. But so the laziness of prioritizing the wrong things is where we're investing our sense of what's going to bring actual happiness. Our sense of what's going to make us happy in a lasting long-term way. And we're investing it in things that actually won't fulfill that. So let's take an example.

[25:51]

Say you work an 80-hour week and you're very happy doing that. You put your effort into it. So from one perspective, this may be the laziness of prioritizing the wrong things, right? Because you're putting your effort into your 80-hour workweek because you're looking to this to find a sense of lasting security, a sense of happiness, right? And I can feel the room tightening up a little bit right now. Oh, my God. But it's not necessarily the case, right? Because working an 80-hour week could also be a form of diligence, a form of diligence according to Buddhism. right? Because working an 80-hour week and succeeding, being a successful CEO, for example, of course, from a worldly standpoint, that's diligence. But if we're doing it as a way of accomplishing happiness and we're looking to that work, that job, that business that we're creating as being a way to really get what we're looking for, that lasting happiness, it may provide temporary happiness, but looking for that lasting happiness, then that's from the Buddhist perspective, Lee's

[27:07]

But so again, here, it's so important that we remember that laziness and diligence are attitudes of mind. It's an inward sense in the mind where we're, what we're looking for, what we're seeking for. And what this points to is that actually any activity could be Dharma. Anything is not just sitting on our cushion. It's not just listening to Dharma teachings. Anything that we do in life can be an aspect of practicing the Dharma. So that person who's working, you're working your 80-hour work week. And if you're working this 80-hour work week out of a sense of non-attachment, non-aversion, non-apathy, non-delusion, you're working out of this... feeling of developing the wholesome qualities of mind, then that 80 hours you work a week isn't laziness.

[28:08]

It's the diligence. And it's diligence, delighting, and virtue. So I just want to make that clear so that we don't get too uptight about the laziness of prioritizing the wrong thing. So those are the three types of laziness. And then when we look at the three types of diligence, which Gampopa mentions, The first is called armor-like diligence. And this armor-like diligence is just the sense of how meaningful it is to achieve enlightenment, how meaningful it is to get to that point where we've recognized the true nature of ourselves and the universe, where we're living in harmony with ourselves and one another in such a way that we're perfectly beneficent and perfectly settled in what we are. So recognizing that, feeling that, how worthwhile a goal that is to achieve, and at the same time recognizing, yes, I'm going to do it, but it's going to take some effort.

[29:12]

It's going to take some energy. And again and again, as we go about our days, as we go through our practice, whatever it is that we're doing, when we stoke up that feeling of this is worthwhile and I'm going to accomplish it no matter what, then this is that armor-like diligence, that diligence that armors us so that when we do encounter obstacles, we're able to work with them and get through them. I know, a list, I'm still going, but we're getting there. So the second form of diligence that Ganpova mentions is the applied diligence. And this diligence has three branches. It has the branches of applying our diligence in the form of accomplishing what is wholesome, applying our diligence in eliminating the klesias or the poisons of mind, the disturbing emotions that draw us away from the inherent clarity and peacefulness of mind.

[30:18]

And finally, the applied diligence in benefiting others, in doing what we can for the welfare of others. So when we look at this applied diligence, then it's interesting because it sounds, again, like doing, right? But remember, diligence is this inward attitude of mind. So just being focused on ridding our minds of the kleshas, being focused on cultivating all the wholesome qualities of loving kindness, wisdom, compassion, beneficence, patience, all of these different things. inward turn of mind is about is diligence that delighting in that delighting in having this opportunity to do so and even this the third one where it's talking about working for the welfare of others benefiting others right when we think about that as an inward attitude as opposed to an outward action then it's just cultivating that sense of really wanting to help others really wanting our life to be good in the sense of

[31:26]

being helpful to one another. And then out of that, of course, as Yeshe mentioned, all of these actions will spring, they'll come. Then finally, the third type of diligence that Gampomo mentions is the insatiable diligence, where we feel like no matter how much we've done, if we've done a week session or our daily practice, or we've studied for a long time, studied for years or done retreat for years, that that in and of itself isn't enough. It's wonderful. But until we reach that place where we have achieved the perfect awakening, enlightenment, that is the perfect benefit of ourselves and others, we're not going to stop. We're going to continually seek more and more ways to do good for ourselves and others. okay we made it through the lists so those are the two uh the two lists but then how how do we apply this dharma how do how do we apply this in our lives well first we have to look at uh our minds and and how it is that mind works so to uh paraphrase go tsangpa

[32:44]

who was one of the great wandering yogi minstrels of our tradition. He said that mind is that which when grasped at cannot be seized, when dismissed does not go, and when placed does not stay. So we can see a little bit of our problem there, right? When it comes to diligence is we can't force the mind. The mind cannot be forced. Fortunately, though, the mind can be reasoned with. Our laziness, whatever laziness we find in ourselves, whatever diligence we find in ourselves, all of it can be reasoned with because the mind is clear and knowing. And we see this not just in dharma, but in everything, in how we relate to the world. When we see the benefits of something and the disadvantages of not having it, and we really believe that, then naturally our mind goes towards whatever that thing is.

[33:48]

So the more heartfelt our conviction is in the Dharma, then the more spontaneously our inclinations, our efforts will arise and flow in that way. So it comes down then to informing our desire, excuse me, informing our delight, informing what it is that we take delight in. And how do we do that? How do we go about that? It's as Yeshe was mentioning, this threefold process of listening, reflecting, and meditating, where we listen, we reflect over what it is that we've heard, and to the point where we really gain that certainty, aha, this really is the way it is. In the same way that we know, if I step off this cliff, I'm going to fall. That same gut level of certainty, wow, I really am going to die. So what's beneficial in that? When we have that strong feeling of certainty, and then we take that strong feeling of certainty and we rest in it one-pointedly in meditation, then this certainty seeps deeper into our mind stream to the point where it really does inform how we behave, how we act.

[35:06]

So in this way, it's a way of... working with view, meditation, and conduct. So when we divorce our meditation or our conduct from what we believe, from our view, it doesn't work as well. These three together, we need these three together. And recognizing that the way that mind works is through developing the certainty. Then instead of feeling like, oh, I'm not being diligent enough in my meditation practice, then we can say, okay, well, why is that? What is it that I'm believing? We can investigate for ourselves what it is that we're believing. And in investigating our view, this takes courage because oftentimes we have attachment to whatever activities we feel like we're missing out by meditating on. But the thing is, as we stoke up our courage and we employ our curiosity in looking into these different aspects of ourselves and what we believe, then the more natural and spontaneous our effort in what we're clearly seeing becomes.

[36:17]

And we become much more... grounded, settled in, flowing into practice, such that diligence no longer becomes an effort that we have to grit our teeth at and strive, but just a natural flowing of energy in the direction of what we really want and believe. So that curiosity, that courage is essential, as is this looking inward. And just one more final piece that I'd like to add is also appreciation, appreciating the fact that we're here, appreciating the fact that our bodies work to whatever extent they work, that our minds work to whatever extent they work, that we have this way-seeking mind, that we're looking for the truth. All of this, if we just take a moment to recognize how rare it is, and how precious it is that we have it right now.

[37:20]

This appreciation will in itself lend this wellspring of energy to our practice and our path. And oftentimes when we think about diligence, it seems like such a personal individual thing, but it's also important to appreciate and recognize the other aspects that we have. We have this amazing place to be in, this amazing place to sit and practice. We have amazing teachers like Leanne and David and so many others that we can go to with our questions, with our doubts, with our curiosities, with our strains. And not only that, but we also have each other. We have this community, this group of people that come together to practice. And all of this, if we recognize it and take a moment to look at it, all of this can... also increase our diligence our internal delight in virtue because it's a support it doesn't have to be diligence that i alone am forcing myself into but it's the recognition that we're all in this together and that we're all trying to do our best so those are just a couple of the things that have really um benefited us on on

[38:40]

our path as we continue to go about it. And we just really appreciate you all being here and giving us the chance to talk a little bit about dharma and to share it all together. So please join with us now in sharing whatever... positivity has come out of this, whatever merit has come out of this with ourselves and all others, beings like us, all beings who want happiness and want to be free from suffering, achieving that state of perfect Buddhahood, perfect liberation and omniscience, which is the very nature of our own mind. 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. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[39:39]

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