Good morning. this holy life does not have gain, honor, and renown for its benefit, or the attainment of virtue for its benefit, or the attainment of concentration for its benefit. But it is this unshakable deliverance of mind that is the goal of this holy life, its heartwood and its end, the middle-length discourses of the Buddha. So two weeks ago, I flew to Durango, Colorado, to speak at a gathering of eighth grade girls, 300 of them, all in one room.

[01:15]

It was perhaps the most electrifying audience I've ever faced in my entire life, like a swarm of exuberant bees. which reminded me of a story from when my child was little. I enjoyed reading to her stories about Winnie the Pooh. And one of those stories, Winnie the Pooh rolls himself in mud to disguise himself as a little black rain cloud. And then he gets a blue balloon and floats up into the air in order to get near a hive of bees. And he sings a little song while he's up there to sort of calm the bees. He sings, how sweet it is to be a cloud floating in the blue. Every little cloud always sings aloud. How sweet to be a cloud floating in the blue.

[02:22]

It makes him so proud to be a little cloud. And so he sang. I don't know if you remember this story, but then he asked Christopher Robin to get an umbrella and walk below him to further induce the bees into believing that he is a little rain cloud. But I don't know if you remember, his plan doesn't work so well. And as he says, I think the bees suspect something. What sort of thing? asked Christopher Robin, standing far below him on the ground. I don't know, says Pooh, but something tells me that they're suspicious. Well, perhaps they think you're after their honey, says Christopher Robin, rather matter-of-factly. To which Pooh replies, it may be that. You never can tell with bees. So that's how I was feeling pretty much that day.

[03:24]

standing in front of this mass of wiggling pubescent girls, you know, that they might be suspecting something. And I was further convinced when this paper airplane went sailing across the back of the auditorium. This is a true story, by the way. So being an adult, I ignored the airplane and went on with my inspirational speech about coming of age, going to college, becoming adults, finding their places, and so on. But as I was talking, even I became a little suspicious about what I was saying. So then at the end of the all-day conference, actually this was a wonderful conference put on by the Women's Resources of Durango, For 15 years now, they've gathered all the girls in the county to talk about going into high school and all of the things that, you know, I think all of us were afraid of those years.

[04:32]

And it's called Girls to Women, Women to Girls. So I was very delighted to be the keynote speaker at this event. So anyway, I was then sent back up to the podium at the end of the day to say some closing words and so I remembered that teachers I know who teach teenagers had recommended that you need to amp it up when you're talking to kids and you know more like an MTV performer and so I started moving my arms more and exuding confidence in these promises I was making about their bright futures so that went a little better And then at the end I said, well, I think you all know that I'm a meditation teacher. So what we're going to do now is to sit silently for 40 minutes. Exactly what they, no, they didn't laugh.

[05:33]

Their eyes got really big. Their mouths were open. They were audible groans. And, you know, I thought having been an eighth grade girl myself, gotcha. Gotcha. So anyway, they were very kind and I was kind and I told them smiling. I was just kidding. We weren't going to sit. I said a few more words and then they let me finish and I let them go. So all in all, as I've become fond of saying lately, you know, all's well that ends well, which it did. Very sweet. Sweet memory for me. So anyway, training our children and training our minds is pretty much the same thing. Not so easy. It's not so easy to bring our attention to what the Buddha called the great matter. The great matter. Great matter is that all things are impermanent, that there is nothing at all wrong with you, and that the...

[06:46]

purpose or the only worthy goal of our life is to bring joy to ourselves and to others. You know, simple, but not so easy. So this is the basic training that the Buddha offered, you know, training the mind. It was the core of his teaching and the core of his method. And it was a result of his own realization about the cause and the cure for human suffering. And so again and again he said, the problem you're having is within your thinking. It's how you're thinking. This is the source of fear, of hatred, of lust, confusion, of ignorance. How you think. It is this unshakable deliverance of mind that is the goal of this holy life, its heartwood and its end. So in addition to meeting with the young girls, I've also had the privilege of helping to raise a child myself, who tomorrow will be 22 years of age.

[07:59]

OMG. And I also now have the good fortune of having a neighbor whose name is Miro, who is two years old. And I can remember really well the first moment when he came over with his mom and he looked at me as someone else outside of himself that very first time. And I said to him, Miro, you're here. And he in turn gave me one of his radiant smiles. So watching a child's consciousness grow, as many of you have, day after day, reminds me of watching how a butterfly emerges from a chrysalis. At first there's just this struggling living creature, struggling with its own sensations, its own bodily parts, trying to open.

[09:04]

And then, as if by magic, the human mind begins to expand and widen. into this kind of boundless and light-filled sphere in which all of us are sitting at this very moment. The sphere of awareness. Beginningless, shapeless, boundless, timeless, transparent. And as far as any of us can tell, ungraspable, inconceivable, unnameable, to name just a few of its uncharacterizable qualities. Awareness itself, or we could just say Buddha, meaning awake. We are all awake. We have been born. We awakened from a long, dark sleep, and we call this birth.

[10:08]

The long, dark sleep we call death. So this is the great matter, the great matter of birth and death. So I think it's so that for all of us sitting here now, it seems as though this awareness continues to grow and open. It seems continuous, moment after moment. It appears to be that way, day after day. And all of us together are accumulating more and more knowledge of the world as awareness continues to grow. In fact, our human intelligence has allowed us to learn a great deal about the world, both for good and for ill. The origin of the word education itself is a pretty big clue to what we imagine is going on with ourselves from when we're born. It's from a Latin word, educo, meaning to lead out.

[11:11]

To lead out from the dark into the light. The darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge and awareness. And hopefully of wisdom, if all goes well. But of course it rarely does. Because it begins with children. It begins with their education, and we are the ones who are educating them. And we in turn were educated by our parents and so on, as far back as we could possibly know. And our parents were terribly, terribly confused. And that's because they, as with almost all humans, are overwhelmed by what they are thinking. but even more importantly, by what they believed to be true. And this is what the Buddha saw, and it's what he said.

[12:13]

And it's just as valid now as it was when he was teaching thousands of years ago. The human mind, in its unenlightened state, what we call normal, is characterized and driven by three primary forces. Greed, I want it, Hatred, I don't want it. And confusion, I'm not sure yet if I want it or not. And then all of that, in turn, is in the service of the grandest illusion of them all, which is that we believe that we're separate from one another. And as a result of that belief, we believe that we need to protect ourselves. from the other. And most often, as has been well documented, that protection is in the form of attacking them first. Attacking the other.

[13:17]

You know, this nation where I have grown up and lived for as long as I can remember has been attacking the other. Making us feel safe. Day is Memorial Day. So what I want to talk about today is how important it is what we teach our children. Because another thing that I did while I was in Durango, and I almost want to say I'm sorry right now for what I'm going to tell you, because it's very painful for me. even as I'm beginning to enter. I read a book, a very difficult book, by a courageous woman named Barbara Coloroso, who many of you may know as an educator, teacher about children, about disciplining children, not punishing them, but disciplining them, teaching them, helping them to have boundaries and standards and to do well, you know, as best they can.

[14:31]

But this book is a little different. Barbara Coloroso began her adult life as a Catholic nun. And then she left the order, married, had children, became a teacher, and then she became an educator to all of us, I believe. The book I read is called An Extraordinary Evil, The History of Genocide. And it was very painful, as you can imagine, to read this book. And yet I think it's really necessary, really important. And she draws parallels between the behavior of children on the playground and the behavior of adults in nations of the world where genocide has taken place and continues to take place to this day. And in her view, it starts with bullying. in which there are three participants who are required.

[15:33]

There's the bully, there's the bullied, and then there are the witnesses who stand by, either encouraging the bully or indirectly encouraging them by walking away. When nations become bullies, it's not any accident of history, it's not sort of some inevitable consequence of tribal warfare, anything else like that. When nations become bullies in the form of genocide, it's calculated, planned, and executed long in advance. And the signs are always there. They're always there to be read. And the three examples that she gives of this particular form of horror are all within recent memory. I can remember as a child, I don't know if you all do, but My mother would say things when we didn't finish our food. She'd say, remember the starving Armenians, which I didn't know what that meant.

[16:35]

But now I do. So this is one of the examples that she gives in her book are the Armenians who were driven out into the desert to starve by the Turks. And then she talks about the Germans' treatment of the Jews that we all know pretty well. And then the Hutu and the Tutsi, which I think we all know very well in Rwanda, not so very long ago. And I'm not going to talk about what happens during these holocausts, because I think we all know what happens. I know what happens. Just all in very gruesome ways, what happens. But what seemed important to me was to mention to you the things I didn't know, that I thought maybe you didn't know either. And the surprising part had to do with how each of the leaders of these nations had followed the example of others that had gone before them. Hitler said to his fellow murderers, who is talking about the Armenians now?

[17:45]

And the Hutu used Hitler's manual. as a way of designing their extermination program. So they all learn from one another, as children learn from one another, from the elders who go before them, right? And all of them use the same playground patterns of disrespect, of slander, and of propaganda. to reduce the people that they wish to harm to less than human. They would call them things like cockroaches and vermin. I remember as a child some of those names that we called people on the playground. Don't you remember some of those things we said about other children, like the special needs children? We called them retards. So it's also the case that other nations, like our own, and the United Nations as well, stood quietly by, stand quietly by, describing these bloodsheds as civil wars in which two sides are fighting it out for dominance.

[19:11]

But genocide is not a civil war. It's mass murder. There aren't two sides. And they are perpetrated by ordinary people like us. That's what's really the shock of it all. These aren't insane people. They're not crazy. They're not mentally ill. They're normal. Greed, hate, and delusion is normal. So I think this is the big question that we all need to ask ourselves. and to try to understand is, why? You know, why? You know, we need to go completely down into our own humanity, each of us, and also into the humanity of our society. We know what's happening right now.

[20:13]

We're killing people who we think are different, and we are... You know, we are putting them in prison camps, masses of them, particularly males, dark-skinned males. And many of them are relegated to ghettos of poverty and unemployment. And it frightens me, and it should frighten all of us, that this is happening. You know, they're afraid. You know, don't shoot. Don't shoot me. But we do. We're shooting and choking. And we have tanks and automatic weapons. Isn't that amazing? And I am really sorry to bring this painful subject up today.

[21:16]

I'm sorry. But it's Memorial Day. We're supposed to use this holiday, this holy day, to remember people who have been killed by strangers for no other reason than they were told that this is your enemy. These are our enemies, and we should be afraid of them. And in this way, we have bred terror, hatred, and violence world-round. over and over and over again. And then we forget all about it and we go about our busy days, you know. It's a holiday. Who's left to talk about the Armenians? So this same weekend that I spoke to the young girls in Durango, I also did a

[22:19]

Dharma talk, and I led a one-day sitting for some of the adults in the town. It was quite lovely being with them. And I mentioned this book that I was reading. And one of the women in the sitting raised her hand and she said, my Buddhist teacher has told us not to expose ourselves to violence because it stains our consciousness. And so do you think reading about genocide is creating that kind of stain on your consciousness? I really couldn't answer her for a while. I mean, I really just wanted to scream. But I waited. And then I thought, well, yeah, don't we all want a mind that's free of stains of violence and of the disturbing news of the world?

[23:19]

I would like that, you know. I think I would like that. But I don't think we can do that. We can turn away. Because where would we look? Where could we turn? Where could we go or hide so we wouldn't know? And wouldn't that impact in itself be one of the conditions for this horror that takes place among us. The Buddha's awareness included both joy and suffering of the world. In fact, you can't get one without the other. No joy, no sorrow. No love, no loss. And the more we love humankind, animal kind, the forests and the oceans, the more we will suffer at each loss. And there is no choice unless we choose not to love at all.

[24:21]

And that's not what the Buddha recommended. He recommended unconditional love for all life, beginningless, endless, formless, timeless, spaceless, and most importantly, selfless. And he became a teacher of young children, including most of his monks and his nuns. He taught them what are now perhaps seen as old-fashioned virtues, etiquette, deportment, good manners, posture, and moral discipline. He taught them nonviolence and kind speech, generosity and enthusiasm and patience and concentration. And most of all, he taught them wisdom. Among my favorite regulations from the old wisdom tradition for training of a monk is don't hop into a donor's house. Another one is don't grab food out of your neighbor's begging bowl.

[25:24]

So I thought about those and I thought, he was teaching children. These were young children coming out of the villages, out of the forests. Many of them were probably orphans. coming to find something to eat, young boys and girls. And he instructed them as their elder in the same way that he'd been instructed as a child, as a young prince, how to live in harmony with one another. So many of the things that I said to the young girls in Durango I think I could say to you all today as well, you know, that taking our places as adults in our society requires us to be passionate, enthusiastic, and curious about ourselves and about the world in which we love, live, love and live. And that growing up in this world is not work that we can do by ourselves. And that's because maturity being grown up is about relationships.

[26:32]

Relationships with our friends and our families, with our neighbors, with the police, with the government, with our employers, with our employees. We always live in relationship with people who are different than ourselves. And the skills that we need in this life will come from learning how to live with others in peace. And it's not so easy. And even though all of you here have probably already chosen a career and this beautiful place to live, the biggest challenge for all of us still remains, you know, what kind of a person, what kind of a friend and a neighbor are you willing to be? Are you honest and kind, reliable, creative, generous, respectful? Do you have old-fashioned virtues? I think many of you do, and you behave in these ways, and you know those things.

[27:37]

But how do you maintain your good character when things don't go the way you like? Maybe you don't get what you want, or you don't get what you need, or when the people around you are falling into terrible troubles. And maybe you already know how that feels, because troubles are coming our way. Big troubles. Among them, aging, sickness, and death. The long, dark sleep. And finding resources inside of ourselves to ride with these changes as they happen is the greatest skill we can ever master. And it's what the Buddha meant by living a holy life. And that's why, in this community, we try our best to support the young people or anybody who comes here to live with us, to find those inner resources through what we call practices.

[28:39]

Practices for developing our character. And the primary method we use is to sit still and watch your mind. Sit still and watch your mind, please. You'll be amazed. And the next most important thing we teach is how to work together. Learning how to work is probably the greatest skill we have to offer and the greatest skill we all need in order to have a successful life. We ask our students to arrive on time. We ask them to follow instructions, to ask lots of questions, to clean their tools, to take care of the land and the water that they use while they work. And we teach them lots of different kinds of work, cleaning and gardening and growing food, fixing machines, you know, the tractor, the plumbing, the electricity.

[29:41]

I think we all know that everything is always broken. And yet the most important thing that we hope to teach our students is how to care for one another, how to be thoughtful and helpful to your fellow workers and to the managers who are trying their best to organize what you do. So hopefully by the end of the day, everyone gets to go home feeling like what they've done has been worthwhile, that they're valued, respected, and known. It's simple, but it's not so easy. So I want to end today by saying to you what I said to the young girls in Durango two weeks ago. We are here to cheer you on and to make good choices about your education and about your friendships to one another. So remember one other thing about this day. Your community really cares about you and really wants you, each of you,

[30:46]

to have a satisfying and joyful life. We know you deserve it. And we also know that only you can contribute the hard work that's going to make that happen. Truly growing up takes a peaceful mind, but also an active, decisive, and courageous mind. It takes knowing how to live well, knowing how to choose well, and knowing how to share your choices with others. So pay close attention to your choices and especially to how those choices make you feel about yourself and about the people around you. Once you've grown, there's going to be problems to solve, many challenges to overcome, many beautiful places and people to meet and to enjoy. Each of you belongs to a very big family indeed. And we, your very big family, all welcome you here. Soon, very soon, you will be turning back yourselves to welcome young children who are coming behind you.

[31:51]

Girls to women, women to girls, men to boys, boys to men, around and around, again and again, generation after generation. Helping young people to grow and mature is one of the greatest blessings of our human life. This holy life does not have gain, honor and renown for its benefit, or the attainment of virtue for its benefit, or the attainment of concentration for its benefit. But it is this unshakable deliverance of mind that is the goal of this holy life, its heartwood, and its end. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support.

[32:54]

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

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