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. Good morning. Welcome. I'm very happy to see you and to practice with you today. And I also want to welcome everyone who's sitting in the dining room and the people who are listening online. Please come in and have a seat. If there's an empty place next to you, could you raise your hand? Okay, so there's lots of empty places. And please make yourself comfortable. Don't worry about taking your time. And also, if you're just listening to the talk, it is good to sit still to listen to a Dharma talk.

[01:12]

But it's even better to sit still as a natural result of taking care of yourself. And that will help everyone take care of ourselves as well. Because our practice of love and compassion in the world is a continuum that starts with practicing loving-kindness towards oneself and extends into the most difficult situations and into the largest situations for the benefit of all beings. That's one of the main reasons to practice is because We don't know how to do that. It's a very big job. It's a very big job that requires us to be people who we don't even know that we are. Right? So in studying this question of how do I wake up for the benefit of all beings, we transform ourselves and heal the world.

[02:21]

And so today... Today I would like to continue the lecture that I started in March. And I know it's a long time between these talks. And the subject of the talk is something that Dave, could you raise your hand? And I have been studying and teaching about together for several years now. And that subject is love. the lecture in March started a conversation about love and power that has continued online. And, you know, I keep studying and it keeps opening up. And so today I would actually like to speak about a practical side of what to do with love and power and how the Buddha teaches us to do that.

[03:23]

And that is, what are some of the levels at which we can practice the right use of power through the universal quality that love brings? And so I would like to speak in a general way about the self, about the other, and about all beings. If I had six hours to speak. I would be very specific about this. But I want you to be able to actually sit here for the talk, so I'll be general and brief. I've been thinking about this not just for months and years, but also very strongly in the past month as my student Tozon G.N., Michael Warner, was in the hospital with end-stage pancreatic cancer.

[04:32]

And Michael was a very special person who was passionately engaged. He was a man of the world, and he loved himself, his wife, and the world. And the cutting edge of his practice, like many of ours, is how to engage difficulty based on our larger vision of our purpose in life. How do we actually express ourselves moment by moment in a way that's consistent with a love for the self and a love for the world? I'm not talking about an idealized love for the self. I'm not talking about a deluded love for the self or deluded love for humans, which is the near enemy of actual love. I'm talking about a realized love, a love that is true and upright and comes from a sense of deep humanity, but not just as an ideal, but as a realization that we can do in the world.

[05:49]

Now, just like many of us, Michael often put himself second. He didn't always know how to care for himself as much as he cared for others. He was an activist. He was an expressor of light in the dark. He was an expressor of a lotus growing in mud. He saw both sides, the brightness and the darkness, with humor, and even with a sense of trickery, particularly in relation to authority. But I'm talking about these qualities of a particular person because we're all particular people. We can all see ourselves as we honor one person. I just want to say one more thing about Michael. that he was most at home in steep mountains, hunting for herbs.

[06:55]

So I first met him. He was living in the Ventana wilderness above Tassajara, and he would come down for food. Later he became interested in Zen. But nature was his first teacher, as it is for all of us. Why do I say that? I grew up in New York, and when I first went to the mountains to Tassajara, my attitude was, ew, bugs. But nature has a bigger voice than ew, bugs. Ew, bugs is an expression of the difficulty I had appreciating nature growing up in the city. I could appreciate it from a distance. But by living in the mountains, I made it my home. And the activity I did there, I made my path. And Michael was an exemplar in doing this.

[07:58]

I honor Michael Warner as I honor many people whose names I don't know. who have passed on or are in need of help today, maybe you could take a moment to think of their names and to honor them in your heart. So Thursday, in the wee hours of Friday, when Michael passed away, was also... United Nation Day. And the United Nation has a statement of inclusion called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As Michael was a passionate activist, I feel comfortable mentioning it today.

[09:02]

And I specifically want to talk about Article 1. You ready to hear it? All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards another in a spirit of brotherhood. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards another in a spirit of brotherhood. And so what this points out is that love is a tempering force for power. We all have power. We all have our individual or personal power which comes from our experience.

[10:03]

We all have role power which has to do with the jobs we have in the world both unofficially and officially delegated. And we all have status power that comes from things that we are born with or endowed with by others. Qualities such as our gender, our skin color, our wealth, and the kind of emotional yayas that people invest in our positions. And I refer you to the work of Cedar Barstow, The Right Use of Power Institute. That work is available online, and if you can't find it, please email me and I'll send you a link. But one of the quotes that Cedar makes when she's talking specifically about how to begin our study of love and power is,

[11:15]

this quote from Gandhi, which points to how we can balance the use of power with the free use of our heart. Gandhi said, The force of love is the same as the force of soul or truth. We have evidence of its working at every step. the universe would disappear without the existence of that force. But you ask for historical evidence. It is therefore necessary to know what history means. If it means the doings of kings and emperors, how they became enemies of one another, how they murdered one another, and if this were all that had happened in the world, it would have been ended long ago. Now little quarrels in millions of families in their daily lives disappear before the exercise of this force, the force of love.

[12:23]

Hundreds of nations live in peace. I know hundreds of nations don't, but hundreds of nations do. History does not and cannot take note of this fact. And then Gandhi says, history... is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul. History is really a record of the interruptions of the even workings of love. The interruptions, the negative, is what we notice. The shadow of love is what we notice. When it's absent, that's what we notice. Gandhi says soul force being natural is not noted in history. And so we can start addressing the quality, the right use of power through practicing friendliness towards the self.

[13:29]

That's our easiest and best aspect of our life that we can use. And Christina is leading a practice period right now here at City Center, has been for several weeks, on awake body, awake mind. And so, awaking one's body, personally awakening one's personal body, is the beginning of how we work with the practice of friendliness. We are part of many bodies, of course. Like, for instance, when we have a friend or when we're married or when we have a sangha or when we have a town or a country or a world, those are bodies. But our own body is accessible to us through our senses.

[14:36]

in a way that other bodies are not. So this is a way to begin the practice of love and friendliness in a realistic way. So how do we do this? Well, before he was enlightened, Buddha's first act of seeking what is suffering and what is its origin and what is its end, his first act, was to give up all his possessions which would distract him and go and study with the best yoga teacher he could find. His name was Alara Kalama and he was well known in the kingdom in which the young Gautama had been a prince. So he went to study yoga. So I want to talk about five yogic qualities.

[15:38]

of friendliness towards the self. And these are in personal disciplines. Now, in the monastery, we often rely on the group schedule or the group practices to discipline us. But unless and until we actually take them on as personal disciplines, we cannot, like if we were stuck on a desert island with no one in sight, we wouldn't be able to recreate the practice for ourselves because we wouldn't have bells and whistles and other people telling us to wake up when we fell asleep and so on. So I really think that even though we're studying in a temple right now today, that we have a primary responsibility to create a temple of one as well as a temple of many. By the temple of one, I mean to create those disciplines in our own bodies and minds, to cultivate them.

[16:43]

We don't create them. They're given to us by human life. And the first one is called shocha, and it's cleanliness or purification. So it includes food, sleep, and exercise, as well as cleanliness and organization. And all those little things that we think we should do but don't, you know what I'm talking about? So the things that we forget when we're busy or don't think we can take care of ourselves. If we really want to honor the fundamental in every action, we have to practice a sense of simplifying and purifying our life. And so to take food at the right time and in the right way, to bathe, to take care of ourselves appropriately is a way to honor and respect and practice realistic love towards ourselves.

[17:51]

The Buddha's name for this is the middle way. Not too much, not too little. And the second discipline is santosha or contentment. That in our Zen practice, this is expressed by the name of our practice of giving and receiving food. That is called oryoki. Oryoki means just enough. Oryoki means that just enough means that we take food as an offering, uniting giver, receiver, and gift. But for ourselves, we can take everything that we're given as just enough. That doesn't mean to violate our own boundaries. So for instance, if people aren't giving something that is in accord with the sense of being equal in dignity and rights, we can say, this is not just enough.

[18:58]

That's a legitimate expression of a boundary. But also... What we receive is just enough to practice right here and right now, whatever it is. Do you see the difference? It doesn't mean letting go of or forgetting our boundary or our dignity. It does mean receiving what we are given and equally honoring giver, receiver, and gift. What if someone's an abuser? Do we honor them? Yes. We honor them as a human being, though we pay attention to our boundaries and to their behavior. Does that make sense? So contentment doesn't mean throw out your sense of justice. Contentment means honoring the gift that we are given, no matter what it is. Tapas means discipline. And it means that when we have an intention to practice, that we do it.

[20:03]

that thinking about practice or reading about practice is different from doing practice. So we need to do it. It doesn't mean overdoing it or underdoing it. It means doing it. Svadhyaya means self-study. Now this is interesting because sometimes we think of self-study as just studying ourselves. But did you know that what we think of as ourselves is limited by what we think of as the world? What we think of as the self is limited by what we think of as the other. I suggest that if you want to read more about this, you can study Michel Foucault's great book, Madness and Civilization, in which he talks about how we other people of different mental, intellectual, or personality abilities, and how that defines a society. and defines us without our knowing it.

[21:06]

So svadhyaya means study the self, but studying the self also includes studying what we think of as the other and the world. We can think of it as a way to read the sutra of our own bodies. So for instance, right now we've been sitting for a little while. How's your knee? That's studying the self, right? How is your knee? What are your boundaries about your knee? Are you giving your knee its dignity as a human heart? I'm just asking. You don't have to say or do anything. But now you have a point of choice where you can discern what you need to do. If you need to take a rest, then use your hands to pick up your legs and reset. Be comfortable. Comfortable doesn't mean lounging, but it means with dignity, honoring the requests of the body.

[22:12]

And then the fifth discipline from yoga is Ishvara Pranidhana. Ishvara is a universal being unconditioned by place, time, or condition. So it means to honor that in us which is unconditioned. That in all of us, which is unconditioned. So that's friendliness towards oneself. But one can be friendly towards oneself and still think of oneself as an object and not a subject. One can say, oh, here's my poor knee. Yes, it hurts. Why don't I just rest it? Why don't I rest it? Do you hear? Why don't I rest it, my knee, that knee? which is really a bad knee. See, I have bad knees, right? So it's a bad knee, and I am going to rest it. I am going to rest it.

[23:15]

Okay, so the next feature of love, realistic love towards the self, is called karuna, or compassion. And it means practicing the three pure precepts towards one's pain. Three pure precepts are part of the vows that we recite every month in this temple. What are they? Well, the first one says, avoid evil. What's evil? Okay, evil, well, we want evil to be out there, right? But evil is the part of us that does not know. does not hear, sees nothing, hears nothing, when harm is presented to us. Okay? So it's impossible to objectify our knee if we alienate ourselves from the evil that we are doing towards our knee.

[24:18]

Does that make sense? So we have to know what the harmful impact of our sitting practice is on our knee. Does that make sense to you? So, Ni, what is my sitting practice and what is its harmful impact on you? Oh, sorry, Ni, I didn't realize I was doing that, that I was sitting cross-legged in a way that had my upper thigh facing this way and my lower leg facing this way. Why don't I adjust that? Okay, so I hold my knee. I find the inner and outer tendon of the knee. I make sure that the upper leg and the lower leg are facing the same direction. And then I set it down without losing that.

[25:20]

How is that knee? You're welcome. So we can do that with any impact that's presented to us. We can take the time to hear and understand the impacts of what we do on how we feel. That's called karuna, understanding our pain. So understanding... means that we're not doing evil towards ourselves. We're not ignoring the request, the ao that's coming from our impact towards ourselves. Instead, we're taking the time to sit with that ao and understand it. And then the next piece is to do good. The next three pure precept is to do good.

[26:25]

Do good means that now that we are not ignoring the knee, we can do good for the knee. How do we do good for the knee? Knee? Oh, the knee is actually speaking to me in here. It's saying my cartilage is made up more than 50% of water. Excuse me a second. this to my knee. But it's complicated, right? Because I have a cup of water because I'm sitting up here and you're sitting there. You don't get to drink water till after lecture. But do you promise to hydrate after lecture? There's going to be tea out there. Okay.

[27:29]

The third of the three pure precepts, after we don't do evil and we do good, is to spread it around. In some places this is called purify the mind, which means to address our limited idea of self and the world by taking in more and understanding more. In the Zen school, particularly this Zen lineage, we tend to express the third pure precept, as live and be lived for the benefit of all beings. Okay? So I'll hold off on trying to explain that for you. Okay? Because each of us has to understand from the beings in our life, including the beings that make up this body, how to live and be lived for their benefit. Not so easy. Because think about it.

[28:32]

If I were living and being lived for the benefit of my knee, I would be living and being lived for the benefit of everything that's not my knee as well. Does that make sense? So my habit of ignorance covers my entire experience. Addressing my habit with my knee with an inclusive frame of mind. includes more than just my conception of what a body is. Okay? As I said, we're part of many bodies. We're part of our individual body, our friendship or marriage body, our work body, or our school body, our community body, our practice body. Okay? So I don't have time... to explain this, if I were trying to explain this or speak about it, we would be in conversation with many, many more people than just me or you.

[29:40]

Okay? And the conversation will take a long time. So let's start this conversation today and continue it for the rest of our lives. Okay? And the... So that was friendliness and compassion. And then there are two more aspects of love that are taught in Buddhist practice. And one is called mudita, which means knowing what gives joy. And upheksha, or equanimity. Knowing what gives joy... is also a lifetime practice. And it's easy to see if we study it in our own body. I'm not talking about pleasure, I'm talking about joy. They're different, okay? So pleasure is kind of, pleasure is great, you know?

[30:47]

I love pleasure, and I don't like pain. It's great, pleasure is great, but joy, transcends pleasure. So what gives me joy? So that's important to know. So that's love, realistic love towards the self. And how am I doing on time, by the way? What time is it? 10 till 11? Okay. So I can speak. I can speak a little bit more, not too much more. But are you getting me so far that the practice of love starts, realistic love, practical love, can start with what's really closest to hand, which is our own body. And the difficulties that we have in our own body are an intimate part of that, an intimate part of that, because of the way we tend to ignore or push them away.

[31:50]

That that kind of course, 101 level course, that introductory level course in friendliness of listening to the body extends to everything that we do. One of the ways that it does this is by helping us activate the healing nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system. So I don't know if you already have studied this or not, just in daily life or in your general reading about science. But you know how there's two main nervous systems, the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, as far as the way that we interact with the world. And the sympathetic nervous system has to do with reaction. It's a short-term emergency nervous system that we use in times when we are...

[32:51]

angry, scared, or disconnected. So in times of anger, fear, or grief even, we can go into the sympathetic nervous system, and it's very useful. For instance, if we're sad, we can understand that we just have to give ourselves time. It creates a kind of exhaustion of that nervous system that limits our perception to what's immediately in front of us and to the situation we're trying to deal with. If we're scared, we can know that we would tend to objectify what we're afraid of as outside of us and go away from it. So fear is a negative reaction that's projected into the future. And it brings up... heightened awareness of what we're afraid of.

[33:54]

And its hidden request is support. So for instance, when I was in a big accident and my cerebellum was damaged, I had no sense of balance and I couldn't really cross the street. I also had PTSD about crossing the street because I was hit by an SUV. And I couldn't bring myself to cross the street. Every time I looked at the street that I was supposed to cross, there would be a car right there that I couldn't go past. It was like a big, hungry animal that was going to get me. And so I didn't realize for a while, but then eventually I realized that I could ask someone to support me to cross the street. Or I could take the support of the street light I could walk to a place where there was a streetlight and get support. So friendliness towards oneself can start even if the sympathetic nervous system, the emergency nervous system is activated because of its sense of request in fear.

[35:06]

But what about anger? Well, anger is a provocation of the fight response. fight or flight response, right? So in anger, the hidden request is what do we need that hasn't been supplied? What boundary we have that has been crossed? What respect do we need that hasn't been offered? So those are the hidden requests of anger. Anger has been developed for millions of years. to allow us to understand our safety and our territory and what creates it. So can we hear its requests in the body? So when we have that sense of adrenaline, that's the sympathetic nervous response. Instead of narrowing our perception to what we're angry at or what we're scared of, can we listen for the deeper request?

[36:09]

Can we take time to do that? And then... the anger, the fear, or the sadness becomes level. It becomes closer to an equanimous response. And we activate what's called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is our healing nervous system. And the perceptions of the parasympathetic nervous system are wide and deep and felt through the body as cooling or soothing, as nourishing or kind. And so love can be felt very strongly when we allow our sympathetic reactions to be tempered by our healing response. Okay, so we will go into this more in today's workshop, but I think it's important to understand

[37:11]

not just in a theoretical way, but that I want to just repeat that we are human and that we learn these four immeasurable practices of friendliness towards the self first before we practice it towards others, and that we learn it by making mistakes. We don't learn it by being good at it. We learn it by being willing to be bad at it. Be bad in every specific way one time. Okay, so the next time someone says to you, when you blah, blah, blah, I feel so and so because human dignity requires such and such, notice that they're talking about impact.

[38:13]

That's the other. But when your body says, when you such and such, I feel so and so because the dignity of my being as a part of the whole body requires X, Y, or Z, that's where you can begin to practice it. What does this sound like in thinking? Yeah. What are some of the obstacles that we can face in our minds when we begin to practice love towards ourself or towards another? Okay, stop me after a few, okay? I have written, I prepared for this lecture by writing down three pages of these excuses as they came up in my mind over a period of weeks and months. Okay. You're perfectly welcome to make a nod of ascent if this sounds familiar, if any of this sounds familiar to you.

[39:21]

That will ease my insecurity as a Buddhist teacher. Okay? Here are some. I don't know what loving kindness means, even. I don't really know how to deal with the dangers of anger, or rejection about what comes up. The dangers of rejecting are not important to me. I have bigger fish to fry. Patience. That sounds smarmy and unrealistic. I don't have time for it. Oh, here's one. Sometimes the other is just repulsive to me. I'm counting my knee. That's my bad knee. Okay. Here's another. I need to take care of myself. It can't be my priority to take care of another.

[40:25]

Another one. If I maintain loving kindness, I can't have boundaries. Another one. I have enough pain and suffering in my life already. without taking on someone else's. Here's another. Oh, I have a cruel streak. I get bored with the other. I have to think of my own survival to care as much as I will need to if I want to offer loving kindness now. I'm too competitive to be glad when another person does well, particularly that person. in that situation. I am not good enough. They're just annoying. They are unworthy. They don't care about me. Why should I care about them? It's too complicated.

[41:31]

My anger is righteous. I can handle it how I want to. Oh, I harbor ill will. My affections and hates are too intense for loving kindness. I can't just be friends or just agree to disagree with so-and-so. Anyway, there's like two pages more of these. These are just ones I took notes on as they came up. They're single-spaced pages. Anyway, I want to thank you for listening to this Dharma talk. Oh, there's one more thing I wanted to say about those things. I looked up some of the hindrances to the practice of the four immeasurables, Metta, Karuna, Mudita, and Upeksha, in Buddha Gosha's Visuddhimaga, which is a compilation of

[42:41]

Shila, Samadhi, and Prajna, the practices of morality, concentration, and wisdom. And these are teachings that were kind of culled out from the sutras as the teachings of Buddha by Buddha Gosha. And it turns out that every single one of these objections and all the ones on all of the pages have been listed for 2,500 years as part of the Dharma. Just saying. So it's worth studying the Dharma and studying our obstacles and our hindrances with other people. It's part of understanding how we can... Not just be in the world, but heal the world. Not just be for ourselves, but be of real service to both ourselves and to others.

[43:44]

And I'd like to close with a poem, a very short poem, by Tagore. And this is quoted by Cedar Barstow in her Right Use of Power teachings as well. He says, I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life is service. I acted. Behold, service is joy. I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted. Behold, service was joy. Thank you very much for your attention. Please, please take care of yourself.

[44:47]

Please take care of yourself and of the world. Thanks. 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.

[45:19]

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