This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Welcome. It's lovely to be here with you all. I'm Dan Gudgel. I'm a resident and a priest at Beginner's Mind Temple, San Francisco Zen Center's temple in San Francisco. Welcome to all of us, and particularly if there's anyone who is here for the first time, or the first time in a long time, welcome to you. I'm glad you're here. We, as San Francisco Zen Center, are very glad you're here. And if you have any questions after this talk... as we mill about, feel free to ask anyone in a robe or a rakasu. They might not know the answer, but they are deputized to help you investigate the question.

[01:06]

I will leave a little, I hope, leave a little time at the end of this talk for some discussion, and then there is some more open and casual discussion time outside afterwards as well. Just as a A very brief background. I first encountered this Zen practice about 20 years ago. I became a Zen Center resident in 2019, first living here, doing a practice period and working on the farm, then spent a number of years at the Tassajara Temple, and I have been at City Center for about the last three years. And this is the first time I've had the pleasure of giving a talk at Green Gulch. So thank you for the invitation, and it is delightful to be here. I think the basic message of this talk is pretty simple.

[02:09]

I'm trying to point out that it's very special to be alive, and that I think that specialness ought to inspire us to be extra nice to everything. So as they say, a child can understand it, but even in a whole lifetime, it is hard to practice. But if later on you're trying to remember what this talk was about, that's pretty much it. We're lucky to be alive. Please try to be nice. So befitting such a simple premise, I'm going to start with a story from when I was five years old. I was in kindergarten, and we were let out onto the playground one clear, crisp winter morning, and there was a big partial moon up in the sky, bright and white, and particularly from that five-year-old perspective, seemingly enormous up against that sharp blue sky.

[03:19]

So as a five-year-old, I hadn't yet really noticed that the moon is actually often out in the daytime. In fact, the moon is famously predictable. But at that time, I just thought of the moon as something that happened in the nighttime. And I thought that seeing the moon in the daytime was some freak occurrence, that this was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing, and that I might never see this again. Since it was so amazing, I thought that everyone else would be as excited as I was. So I started running around the playground, shouting, pointing at the sky, trying to get everyone to notice, the moon, look, the moon is out in the daytime. Ran all around the playground, just yelling my head off. And nobody cared. Because it turns out this actually happens all the time.

[04:23]

And I think there's a wonderful innocent sweetness about that five-year-old, which sometimes I like to reconnect with and can be very supportive. And also, I think that little kid was right. It actually is an incredible, rare, and wondrous thing to see the moon in the daytime. Even if it is happening every 28 days, it is still amazing. On the one hand, the moon itself is kind of amazing. It's much larger in relation to the planet than any other moon in our solar system. So we get to get a really good look at it. But the really amazing part about seeing the moon in the daytime is being alive and being aware and being able to see it, to understand what we're seeing and to really experience this experience of seeing the moon.

[05:31]

We as human beings have assigned a great deal of value to rarity. If something is rare, we think it is worth a lot. But our view of rarity, I think, is very skewed. For instance, we consider gold to be rare and therefore very precious. But gold is actually not so precious. In this universe, every day, an amount of gold that adds up to several hundred times the mass of this earth is created every single day. Most of the matter in this universe is just simple atoms in piles of varying sizes. As far as we've been able to see, life is actually the thing that is incredibly rare. There's only one place that we know of in this whole universe where weird fish with glow in the dark heads swim around in the dark ocean depths.

[06:46]

And that fish, even as we might consider it useless, that fish is infinitely more rare than the common minerals that some people would propose to mine the ocean floor to collect. In fact, the dog poop that we grimacingly scrape off the bottom of our shoe is much more rare than gold. There's no dog poop anyplace other than on Earth. And in an absolute sense, there isn't even all that much of it. So our rarity-based value system, I think, is deeply flawed. Each and every one of us has already won the cosmic lottery. Every single thing that we encounter is unimaginably rare, preciously unique in this universe. far, far rarer than gold or gemstones.

[07:52]

And I think when we deeply understand how special this opportunity to be alive is, we naturally want to take really good care of everything. As Dogen said, to take care of everything as if it was our own eyes. In the , one of the chants in our chant book, Dogen also quotes Chan Master Lung Ya as saying, in this life, save the body, which is the fruit of many lives. And at the beginning of this talk, we chanted, the Dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. We have many teachings that point us back towards the incredible opportunity, temporary, short opportunity we have to be in a human body.

[09:01]

So many unlikely things had to happen for us to be here together today. And to use this rare human opportunity to perpetuate suffering, I think is heartbreaking. For me, noticing the rarity and unlikeliness of being alive raises compassion and tenderness and care, along with sadness at the suffering of the world. I think the precepts, our Buddhist practice, ethical guidelines for how to live, can emerge naturally from deeply feeling the wondrous rarity of life. Along with ethical conduct, the bodhisattva vow to encourage others along the path, I think, can also be inspired by deeply feeling this rarity of life.

[10:13]

We should want every person, every dog, every banana slug, every cypress tree, every mosquito, bacteria, rock, river, cloud, we should want everything to be its best, to be free and to be free from suffering. And we should also help those beings to stop causing suffering. Now, using this sort of rarity equals value kind of logic, it would be possible to say that nuclear weapons are cosmically rare, that suffering itself is cosmically rare and so could be called precious. But that is coming from a very limited and self-centered point of view.

[11:17]

This planet, the primordial Earth, once it had cooled into solid matter and liquid water, exhaled one breath from the rocks, from the oceans, from the tidal zones. One rocky breath that clung just to the surface of this planet, like the skin on an apple. That was the original atmosphere. inert and sterile. It was the product purely of chemistry and physics. And life, all life together, has been recycling sips of that one original rock breath ever since. We are basking in a rich energy gradient where our planet is orbiting. And because of that, we have this opportunity to catalyze chemical reactions and reap some of the energy of this system for ourselves.

[12:30]

So if we think of the earth as a single living body, we can imagine how the water cycle and the weather are like a circulatory system. how the stones are like bones, the overall mass of life is like flesh on the surface, plants perhaps are lungs and energy storage. And in that context, how might we think of human beings? Maybe as stem cells, able to go anywhere and become almost anything, do almost anything? And yet, what human beings have tended to do in the last few millennia, over-consuming and poisoning our surroundings, sounds to me much more like inflammation on the body of the earth.

[13:36]

Not that our existence or our presence is bad or wrong, but that we're currently growing out of control and crowding out a lot of other things. We have already crowded out many other species, like one part of the microbiome of the skin getting out of balance and taking over. Now we appear to be headed towards crowding out whole organ systems of this planet, like the feedback processes that regulate temperature. We are giving this planet a fever. And I think we are being called to be the white blood cells of this earth, not to go on being greedy opportunists, to begin mending life, ecosystems, and relationships, and not just continually building shiny new things on top of the rubble of the old.

[14:48]

Thinking about my own body What if every time I had a head cold, my body responded by abandoning this head and growing a new one? How long could I really keep that up? We, together with all the life on this planet, the geological processes and the fundamental laws of physics, we constitute this one great Earth. We really I think would do well to take the focus off of ourselves and our own immediate, limited benefit and look at the health of all things together. Our parceling up of the land into private pieces and extracting the riches of those pieces is like slicing up the arms and the legs, the lungs and the skin, and selling off those pieces.

[15:53]

just to benefit the brain. We really can't go on like this. This siphoning off of the wealth, the liveliness, the resources of this planet, the true wealth, life itself, is leaving deserts in its wake. It took thousands of years for us to turn parts of the world where we first began this process into deserts. The Middle East, the biblical Garden of Eden. We have managed to turn into a desert. We have become so much more efficient since then. at extracting resources, that we're doing the same to this continent in a much shorter span of time.

[17:00]

And even this historical comparison creates a false sense of separation. The strife and the environmental degradation in places that have been extracting resources the longest, those are not separate from what's going on here. The roots of the trees don't know or care what country they're in, and the blowing dust doesn't stop at the border. Fundamentally, I think we humans are using a flawed story to understand our place in the world and to organize our activities. We're using the wrong criteria for success. We're spending a lot of time arguing about how to maximize, about what is the best way to maximize income, resources, growth.

[18:18]

But I think this Buddhist path is saying we actually shouldn't be maximizing at all. We should instead be stabilizing and nurturing. I think Zen is not pointing at how to make better judgments. It's pointing at a different view entirely. Society wants us to cling to things And Buddhism wants us to balance in the midst of things. The I got to it first mentality of resource extraction, of private property, not only ignores the inequality of colonial history and industrial scale property theft, but also ignores the future life of this planet.

[19:26]

Truly, what are we leaving for the future? Judging our success only by an increase in material wealth will lead to increasing material wealth at the expense of all other considerations. Maximizing gross domestic profit will kill nations and environments. I think even the measurement of gross national happiness used by Bhutan may be too limited in its human-centered focus. I think we need to be looking at the really long-term thriving of the planet as a whole. Gross ecosystem health might be a better indicator, or maybe gross future possibilities. The earth breathed a breath, and that breath bloomed.

[20:37]

And we are that bloom. Not that we are using that bloom. We are that bloom. All life is that bloom. But right now, humans are eating it all up, not letting anything else have a chance. On many other planets, the primordial breath did not last as long as it has lasted here. We can look at the moon, at its beautiful, desolate surface. It couldn't hold on to an atmosphere. and couldn't nurture life. We've been extremely lucky. We should not be maximizing, not trying to use as much of everything as we can right now. We should be preserving what's here now and thereby protecting those who haven't even evolved yet.

[21:41]

We're wiping out so much Not only is the passenger pigeon extinct, so is the intelligent being that could have evolved from passenger pigeons 10 million years in the future. Humans have already radically reduced the possibilities of the future with the choices we made in the industrial age. And always we need to look for balance in our views and in our relationships and in our ways of living. It's very easy for me to go overboard with my judgmentalism. For instance, I notice a sort of ongoing, deepening demonization of plastic that I have going on in me. The more I hear about plastic pollution in this world, the more of a bad attitude I develop about plastic.

[22:52]

I do have real concerns about microplastics in our bodies and in our environment. And plastic, as the product of complex human activity, is also one of the rarest things in this universe. There are some things that plastic is very good for. Some medical devices, for instance. Thank goodness we can make those things. But we have gotten out of balance. We've gone overboard, and we are suffering for it. If we use up all of these resources now, we might not be able to make plastic heart valves and cataract lens replacements in the future. I want to be grateful and respectful of the wondrous nature of plastic, even as I don't really want it accumulating in my brain.

[23:55]

So how do we live into this? What does this mean for daily life? And why am I talking about all of this in this Zen place to begin with? I don't really want to and I don't think I really can tell people how to live. The choices are too complex and the future is too unknowable. But I think there are elements of this practice that help us moment by moment to decide what is the right action to take. and to cultivate a stable basis for being in the world as it is right now. I think we begin with seeing the world clearly, with cultivating a deep wisdom about how things are, how they came to be, and what our place in this web of life is.

[25:09]

the Zen Buddhist practice of daily meditation, I think, is a really excellent place to start. Sitting quietly again and again with skillful guidance, we can begin to see the deeper truth of interconnection, of constant change, and of the shared sacredness of life. And as we wake up, the wondrous nature of reality, this meditation, this zazen, can become itself a devotional act. By giving our time and our awareness to just being in the world, we honor and directly experience the incredible rarity of being alive. The more deep reverence we feel, the more gently we will want to live on this planet.

[26:19]

We will cultivate care and devotion and help others cultivate it. That feeling of, oh my God, the moon, look at the moon, that can be found and cultivated in meditative practice. The wall, oh my God, look at the wall. Can you believe we have this incredible opportunity to stare at this blank white wall? Once we've cultivated that feeling, we can take that feeling with us out into the world. In addition, I think Zazen meditation gives us an example of not causing harm. When we're meditating, which of the precepts can we even break? Having that example in our lives can highlight the contrast with other parts of our lives where we are involved in harm.

[27:29]

If we're constantly moving, going, getting, consuming, we may be moving too fast to really see the effects that trail along behind us. But when we slow down, turn down the volume on everything else, our lives catch up to us. One piece after another floats up to the surface, each bringing a little lesson. It becomes unavoidable to us to see who we really are and what our place in the world really is. we see that life is precious. An urge arises to be kind. As we see our own circumstances more and more clearly, we see how everything depends on and is affected by everything else.

[28:32]

And again, care and compassion arise. It sometimes feels overwhelming to me to be aware of what I think of as the state of the world and all of the different ways that I think harm is and can be caused. I'm only a single stem cell in the great body of the earth, but I have my particular human abilities and I can choose among myriad roles and ways of being. The imperative, I think, is to keep trying, to keep showing up in our lives, to keep sitting down on the cushion, to keep opening to the truth of what is arising from our own direct experience.

[29:36]

If I think that I can fix everything or even if I think that things will be fixed within my lifetime, I will be disappointed. We're looking at multi-generational problems. We all have to realize and accept that we are not going to see the end of this story. There is no end to this story. There is just... constant change. Can we still be motivated to give great effort to reduce suffering even if we won't see the fruits of that in our own lives? I hope so. I think seven generations is nowhere near far enough to be thinking ahead. We should be caring for those who are

[30:40]

will be coming in 10,000 years, in 100,000 years. So we don't throw our lives away in blind consumption. We also don't throw our lives away in turning our backs on the world. We don't throw our lives away in pursuit of some idea of personal awakening. We find awakening in the life and the liveliness of this body and of the great universal body. We are simultaneously nothing special, just human beings doing human things. And at the same time, we are wondrously rare and unique. Not just unique,

[31:41]

in being humans and alive. But in each and every moment, we are uniquely unique in a fresh way that is only there in that moment. Humans are not a problem. Humans are an incredible jewel of the universe. And some of the things that humans are capable of doing right now can be uniquely destructive. So trust your compassion. Look for connection. Slow down. I would also recommend maybe try a little Zazen. We certainly believe strongly in it around this place. the next time you see the moon, let it astonish you.

[32:49]

Every time you see the moon, let it astonish you. And look for whatever in your own life helps you wake up to the incredible opportunity and the wondrous rarity of this moment. Keep bringing yourselves together with that astonishment and follow what arises within you. And I think we will be reducing harm. So that's pretty much all I have to say today. Please be kind, be nice, and try to recognize this wondrous opportunity we have. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[34:06]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[34:09]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_98.38