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 evening, everyone. It's a joy and honor to be with you all again in this virtual Buddha field. And as Kodo just said, for those of you who are joined recently, we launched a 10-week study of the topic of karma at City Center and on the online practice center just last week. And the full title of the practice spirit is Becoming Unbound, Understanding, Working With and Ending Karma. And for those of you who aren't or maybe are unfamiliar with the concept of karma, the word means action, need or doing. Although the Buddhist emphasis is using the word in a sense of intentional action or volitional behavior.

[01:02]

And as the Buddha said, intention is karma. Intending, one does karma by way of body, speech, and mind. So in Buddhism, the theory of karma is also known as the theory of cause and effect, of action and reaction. And this evening, I want to consider with you how our karmic consciousnesses form. through the activity of selfing. And I want to begin by sharing a personal reminiscence. One of my favorite places when I was young was along a body, a water body known as the Pine Creek. And Pine Creek is a tributary in the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. For anyone who is from the East Coast or knows Pennsylvania at all, you might know that area. The Pine Creek River flows near my cabins that my grandfather used to own in the Tioga State Forest Mountains.

[02:04]

And every summer for about five years, when I was between the ages of 10 and 15, my father would take us there for vacations. And we'd go usually several times a year. And the previous five years of my childhood have been very difficult due to family circumstances. And this was one of the few places where I began to feel that I could finally reconnect with a deeper, more authentic part of myself. And I would spend hours exploring and hanging out along the creek. There was a little kind of a ledge that I like to crawl under and just sit there for hours as well. And I particularly enjoyed sitting on a rock. jutted out. It felt to me as a young kid, it was like, oh, this is really far out into the creek. But when I actually went back a decade or so ago, it was only like three feet away from the bank itself.

[03:07]

So it wasn't actually that far. And I would sit on this rock and simply watch the water flow by and laying on it, perhaps watching the clouds pass overhead. And oftentimes as I sat there or I laid there, I would reflect on past events that had brought me to that point in my life. And I would think about everything that was happening in the present at that time, as well as where it might all lead in the future. And a particular concern was what course my life would take in the future, and whether I would have more control over my circumstances that I did in the past, and to what extent. As an ancient sage once said, according to the Buddha, Oh, Brahman, it is just like a mountain river, flowing far and swift, taking everything along with it.

[04:12]

There is no moment, no instant, no second when it stops flowing. But it goes on flowing and continuing. So, Brahman is human life like a mountain river. And as the Buddha at another point told Latapala, the world is in a continuous flux and is impermanent. Now, consider for a moment the nature of a moving body of water, such as a river or stream or creek and its particular flow. While the banks and the underlying bed are what give the stream a definable shape or location, it's the flowing water that constitutes a stream or a river. And each stream is unique and has its individual nature or character.

[05:13]

And, you know, obviously some streams are... flow clear and fast, and others are somewhat muddy. And while we can affix a particular name to a stream where rivers, again, such as Pine Creek, Pasahara Creek, the Ganges River, when we stand back on the bank and look into the body of the running stream, what do we see? we see there is no constancy there at all. We may be looking at a fairly steady shape, but the actual makeup of the stream is always changing. So we see the water in front of us just for a moment as it passes, immediately replaced by a new swash that also then moves on fairly quickly. And while there may be various things that appear in the stream, fish, a leaf, a boat, an eddy, they are all temporary vents passing through.

[06:28]

So nothing is fixed in a flowing stream. But something is always there. It's an ongoing pattern, you could say, of changing waters. if we consider a river or a stream in terms of a framework of time, then as we stand on the riverbank, the narrow portion of the stream we're looking at can be likened to the present moment. The past moment has already flowed downstream, and the future moment is still upstream. Nothing remains the same from one moment to the next, except the shape. the river that's kind of delineated by the banks. You could imagine the shape in some way. Those banks form a body of sorts. And there's no enduring entity to the stream.

[07:32]

Just as there's no, let's say, lasting self in the mind. And as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, no one ever steps in the same river twice. Or it's not the same river. and they are not the same person. As I sat on the rock watching the Pine Creek flow by, I enjoyed observing the way in which the water behaved. I was particularly captivated by the way in which, as the water flows over rocks and ledges and around obstacles in the stream, eddies would often form. Eddies have a tendency to circle. spinning around and around, but remaining somewhat fixed in their position. And they are, you know, become a bit of a kind of backflow or backwater in the stream while the rest of the water kind of flows by.

[08:36]

And if you study an eddy, you can observe the way that inside the eddy, the momentum concentrates and moves inward to a pattern of circling. It's as if it's kind of a tension where the tension turns away from the fresh, free-flowing stream and is drawn into the central peter force of the circular pattern. And that activity, that action, is what defines an eddy. Of course, in a river or stream, an eddy depends on many conditions. These include the... The state of the eddy itself, just one moment ago, what happened before, the shape of the riverbed, the new part rocks, the water flows immediately upstream, the water, the amount of snowfall last winter, any obstacles in the stream like branches, fallen trees, and so on, right?

[09:40]

All of it has some kind of impact. And each eddy that is formed is unique. It has its own... individual nature and character. You could say its own suchness. And once in place, the characteristics of an eddy kind of tend to continue, right? More or less the same, unless the conditions for its formation change or end, in which case it dissolves. Now, if you want to take a cosmic view, going back and back in time and space, The conditions for the manifestation of an eddy depend on the history of the earth, the formation of this planet. You could say the formation of the solar system, the whole history of the universe. And science tells us essentially that a river is fluid stardust, a flow of light.

[10:45]

And that a particle of any size, including a water particle, is congealed energy. So eddies are energetic patterns of a river. And similarly, you could say, all forms of matter and energy, quarks and galaxies, are patterns of the, let's say, the substrate of the universe. All phenomena. you, me, trees, animals, clouds, traffic, your dinner, the soup I had for dinner, and so on, all are essentially merely temporary eddies in the ever-flowing and universal stream of existence. Pretty amazing, huh? So now, the stream or

[11:47]

flow metaphor has been used in descriptions of mind and reality for thousands of years and by numerous philosophical and spiritual traditions, including, of course, Buddhism. In Buddhism, in the teachings of Buddhism, a sentient being is often described with the metaphor of mindstream. Mindstream is an English translation of a Buddhist philosophical technical term, Kitasamthana. Kitasamthana. I think I said that, right? Which is Sanskrit and represents the moment-to-moment continuity, the samtana, the continuity of awareness. Furthermore, it's said that each of us is defined by a life stream of connected moments. One moment of consciousness, acting as a principal cause, transfers its karmic burden to the next. and so on, during our entire life, as well when you to death.

[12:54]

According to Buddhism, it's our very belief in a self that holds this karmic stream intact and enables us to have the illusion of being a separate, discreet person. In the way that the characteristics of a stream or an eddy tend to repeat themselves, once they are set in place or set in motion, it's said that the repetition of karma formations is what gives the sense of continuity to one's personality. It's said that it is this illusory idea, or rather, the energy of it, which is structured according to our karma, our intentional actions, and that continues from one lifetime to the next. So let's look more closely for a moment at how personality, or I'm thinking of it as self-eddies, form.

[14:06]

How does selfing, or belief in a separate self, happen in the first place? And even though the Buddha, neither affirmed nor denied the existence of a self, he did talk of the process by which the mind creates, you could say, senses of self, what he called I-making or my-making as it pursues its desires. And according to Buddhist philosophy, what we call a being or an individual or I is only a combination of ever-changing physical and mental forces or energies, which can be divided into five groups, five aggregates. What is known in Sanskrit also as skandhas. And skandhas means heaps, aggregates, collections, piles, groupings.

[15:10]

And so in Buddhism, skandhas referred to the five aggregates of clinging. which are the five material and mental factors that take part in the rise of craving and clinging, which gives rise to desire. And they'll also explain as the five factors that constitute and explain a sentient being's personality. And the five rather good through heaps of clinging are as follows. These are all in Sanskrit. rupa, vedana, samjana, samskara, and vijjnana. So rupa means form or material image or impression. The second one, vedana, are sensations or feelings received from form. Vedana in this case is not a matter of emotions, but it involves the sensing or the feeling of something as pleasant or

[16:18]

unpleasant or neutral. And the third, samzhi, which means perceptions or cognition, refers to the capacity to grasp or to recognize the distinguishing features or characteristics of a minor. And then the fourth is samskara, mental activity or formations, which I'll let us say a little bit more about in a moment. And finally, the fifth, Vijnana, which is consciousness or awareness. It's that which recognizes, that which knows. So the skandhas or aggregates work together to create our experiences. And while we could spend time looking at each of these aggregates to understand them and how they contribute to a sense of self, given that we're studying karma, I want to focus on the fourth aggregate of mental formations, samskaras. And samskara is more about our predilections, our biases, our likes and dislikes, and other attributes that make up our psychological profiles.

[17:29]

And samskara is defined by Buddhists in many ways. Forms are volitional formations, mental impressions, conditioned phenomena, dispositions, forces that condition psychic activity, forces that shape. moral and spiritual development. And samskara figures into many Buddhist teachings. Besides just being the fourth of the five aggregates of the five skandhas, samskara is also the second length of the 12 full chain causation. The 12 lengths of dependent origination is another way to refer to them. And we'll be studying these further on in the practice period because they provide insight into kind of, you could say, the spinning wheel of existence. And as such, they're very closely linked to karma. So, under mental formations, under skandhas have included all the additional activities, both good and bad, wholesome and wholesome.

[18:33]

And they're said to be 52, and I'm not going to go through the whole list, so I'll spare you that. But you might want to look it up, you know, because there are wholesome and unwholesome, and there's kind of different groupings out there. Now, remember, the Buddha's own definition of karma. He said, karma is volition. It's volition that I call karma for having willed one acts by body's speech and body. And volition is mental construct, mental activity. Its function is to direct the mind in the sphere of some kind of activity, good, bad, or neutral activities. In other words, you know, volition is kind of an impulse, urge. It's a conceptual motivation behind the direction of mind's attention. Almost like a rudder in some way. Sending things in this direction, creating attention to go in a particular direction.

[19:35]

And while there are said to be six kinds of volition that correspond to each of the six sense faculties, seeing, hearing, sensing, smelling, tasting, and consciousness, it's said that only volitional actions, such as attention, will, determination, confidence, concentration, wisdom, energy, there's also desire, hate, ignorance, conceit, idea of self. Only volitional actions can produce karmic effects. That's one of the things we want to come to understand in our study of karma. How is it that additional actions are the only ones that create karma? Okay, so for example, let's say you walk into a room and you see an object. So sight is a function of eduna, the seconds condom. The object you recognize is an apple. And that's the samja, right?

[20:41]

Perception. An opinion arises about the apple. You like apples. Or you don't like apples, maybe. I don't like apples. So that reaction or mental formation is a samskara. All of these functions are connected then by the fifth, which is vijjana, awareness. So our psychological conditionings, our consciousness, our subconscious, are functions of some scars of applicants. If we are, for example, afraid of water, or we quickly become impatient, or we're shy with strangers, or we love to dance, all that falls under some scar. And will for actions create karma. Again, the fourth skanda is linked to karma. In the Mahayana Buddhist philosophy of Yokachara, samskaras are impressions, and they collect in what's called the storehouse consciousness, the alayavijyana.

[21:50]

And it's said that the seeds, the bija of karma, arise from this. So I spoke about in the class before, and I think in a previous lecture, this idea that there are a lot of agricultural analogies used around karma. So here you see it again, seeds, that give rise to future results. So all of the above is to essentially describe what we call a being or an individual or an I. And it's only a convenient name or label given to the combination of the five aggregates. And like all conditioned things, they are themselves all impermanent, all constantly changing. In his book, What the Buddha Taught, a great book, if you have a chance to read it, he writes that one thing disappears, conditioning the appearance of the next in a series of cause and effect.

[23:05]

There is no unchanging substance in them. There is nothing behind the five aggregates that can be called a permanent self in Atman. Individually or anything that can in reality be called I. None of the five aggregates alone can be really called I. When these five physical and mental aggregates that are interdependent are working together in combination as a physio- psychological machine, we get an idea of I. This is only a false idea, a mental formation. Just one of supposedly 52 mental formations that fall under the fourth aggregate of militia. And Wahula adds then, he says, in other words, there is no unmoving mover. Behind the movement.

[24:06]

It is only movement. It is not correct to say that life is moving. But life is movement itself. I'm going to read that again. It's not correct to say that life is moving. But life is movement itself. Life and movement are not two different things. In other words, there is not a thinker behind the thought. Thought itself is the thinking. Thought itself is the thinking. Thought is movement in the mind. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found. If you remove the thought, there is no thinker to be found. Remember, Ron... No. Epstein, I forget his first name, Rob Epstein, or maybe I think in the filmmaker, but Epstein has a book called Thoughts Without a Thinker, right?

[25:17]

So if the mind stops moving, there's no thought. Thinking is movement in the mind. And even when there is movement in the mind, there is no one thinking. does that happen? So if that wasn't already unnerving enough to learn that there is no real I behind the sense of a self constructed through the operation of the aggregates, the Buddha then goes one step further by claiming that these five aggregates, which we together typically call a being, are themselves dukkha. They are suffering That is, the aggregates and dukkha are not two different things. The Buddha says, O bhikkhus, O monks, what is dukkha?

[26:22]

It should be said that the five aggregates of attachment are dukkha. One and the same. And Buddhaghosa summarizes all these previous points when he says, Mere suffering exists, but no sufferer is found. The deeds are, but no doer is found. So there are actions, but there's no one behind the actions. There's no one behind the curtain. Who's drinking this? Who's talking? Who's looking at the screen? Who is it? You're all eddying. You're all selfing. Okay, so going back to the eddy metaphor, what we tend to take as our being is nothing more than an eddy in the total screen of life, in which no I or core entity can be found at the center of the vortex.

[27:40]

I don't know if you've ever done this. I actually like putting my fingers in the middle of an eddy and seeing what happens. I just like watching the interaction of fingers and eddies and just kind of watching things change. But there's never anything I can grab. You can't grab an eddy. There's nothing there to grab. So you get this now. Individual mind streams also contain eddies. They contain... patterns, patterns of volitional energy that repeat over and over, the patterns of which together form our personality. So some of these patterns are beautiful, right? They're the qualities that we like, compassion, generosity, kindness, intelligence. And some of these patterns, that's so nice, you know, they're painful. qualities of selfishness or realness or confusion.

[28:43]

And however, every self-eddying or selfing eddy, like playing with different formulations about selfing eddy, is a composite of aggregates. And as such, compounded of parts, dependent among causes and conditions, and thus impermanent. Therefore, clinging to eddies, Patterns of any type, trying to hold on to the pleasant one, you know, or to struggle with the unpleasant one. I like this, Eddie. I don't like that, Eddie. It's going to be full of frustration and tension. And ultimately, it's going to be futile. You can't grab on to it. So clinging to Eddie's, we could say, is suffering. It's dukkha. Clinging to anything, our thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories, bodies, loved ones, they're all Eddie's. and all that clingy is suffering. Now, because of our

[30:10]

Self-edding circling and the conceit habit patterns are mind eddies. You have this tendency to check its circular motion often. Monitoring how careful, monitoring carefully how it's doing so it can be able to circle well. How am I doing? Am I circling well? And all this is to kind of remain some sense of of being confident with what's familiar. I'm familiar with my particular habit patterns of circling and how are my boundaries in circling? Am I okay? Am I circling? And then eddies also compare themselves to neighboring eddies, judging and evaluating, wondering, how do I measure up to the other eddies? Am I big enough? Am I fast enough? Am I beautiful enough? You know, whatever the comparison might be. And because our

[31:10]

selfing eddie imputes itself as separate, as an independent. Therefore, it feels it needs to be protective of its own circularity. In fact, it comes to cherish its activity of swirling, that kind of dynamic that creates its own tiny little universe. It identifies with its swirling. And furthermore, it cherishes all the stuff, all the debris that gets caught in its swirls and vortex, the leaves, the twigs, the insecurities, the wounds, the misunderstandings, the resentments, the fears, the clothing, the earring, the car, the house, you know, whatever you got sucked into your particular vortex, cherishing it. the activity around it, the swirling around it, all with a sense of personal reference about each of the particles trapped in its muddied orbits.

[32:16]

So the next time you grab something and you call it, this is mine, feel the way that there's something circling around it. If you have any kind of sense of attachment to it, kind of that vortex of sucking an end to the self, it's mine, my precious. Just kind of feel that energy and notice how that helps perpetuate the spinning of suffering. Because repeating samskaras or mental formations make us think we are something in an ongoing way, the more likely it is that those patterns... or eddies, will come up again in the future. They'll rise again in the future as a way to confirm our self-image. So you could say our repeated actions, our habitual karma, strongly condition our personality view.

[33:26]

And the personality view, our view of our particular self, our particular eddy view, right? in turn, reinforces the tendency to act in the same ways again. And in sorts, we identify with our habitual actions of body, speech, and mind. This is who I am. I do things in this way. This is an identification with a personality, which, as we have seen, is only made up of impermanent volitional formations. So each time we identify, We become that person that we think we are again. That habit pattern. I'm a good person. I'm someone who's a helper. Or I'm a greedy person. Or I'm an angry person. Or someone who has addiction.

[34:26]

Or who is righteous. Kind of a moralist. And identifies in that way with those particular things. character habits. And a negative self-image is inherently painful and unsatisfactory. Of course, we know that. But even a positive self-image can limit us. It can restrict our choices. It can kind of freeze us and frame us in a certain way. You know, then we think, I have to be a good person. I have to be kind and generous. But I kind of don't want to today. And whenever we have these entrenched patterns, we carry around this limiting sense of I. And we carry it on for years. It just gets perpetuated. And in many cases, it goes bigger and bigger and bigger. Unless you start maybe jumping. And then maybe it starts to shrink a little bit, a little bit, a little bit.

[35:30]

You stop spinning quite as much. You start collecting as much. The Dharma teacher, Guy Armstrong, in his excellent book, Emptiness, A Practical Guide for Meditators. If you have a chance, read it. It's an excellent book. He writes that if we think of people we know well or look close to mostly at ourselves, we can see how sometimes a dominant pattern becomes the organizing principle for a person's whole life. See lives organized around addiction, craving for attention, for money, ambition, need to control, fear, aggression, perfectionism, self. But even wholesome qualities can become neurotic if the identification is wrong. The compulsive helper. the strict moralist, perhaps the disciplined expert in the monastery.

[36:34]

I wonder who that might be. Maybe the Eno or the Tanto. Maybe the Abbot. Or the overly generous person who has time for others but not for the family. One's whole life can be built around trying to satisfy these urges, which ultimately are one's own making. Important. ultimately our one's own making. The patterns have been formed through our own ignorance in the technical Dharma sense of not knowing, not understanding. When entrenched, they feel very compelling and we lose touch with our freedom of choice. They bring suffering and are not easy to change. So later on in the practice, we're talking about freedom of choice and free will and how does karma and free will relate to each other. Not tonight. Wait, I'm running over.

[37:36]

I'm so sorry. So this is the bondage of past, bondage of our own choices, of our own karma. We're bound to our karma. It's of karma or action. The Buddha said, action makes the world go round. Action makes this generation turn. Living beings are bound by action, like the chariot wheel by the pin. So you have this spinning something again, circling around something. And the point of the Buddhist teaching is for us to step out of these patterns of action identification, of self-being. Living beings are confined by karma because... These patterns shape our actions in compulsive ways that lead to suffering for ourselves, and if you've noticed, suffering for others, right? Dharma practice is to free the heart in mind from compulsive karmic habits.

[38:38]

And despite the power and tenacity of karma, the Buddha unequivocally assured us that it was impossible to become unbound by the chains of karma through practice, particularly through meditation. It's possible to become free through the Eightfold Path, right? So his own insight into karma, the 95th Awakening, led to his formulation of the Eightfold Path, which was a path to become unchained, become unbound from karma. So, like I said before, to study Bodhidharma is to study karma, and to study karma is to study the self. So this means we need to develop awareness of our patterns. habits of body, mind, in our nervous system, they get very entrenched in our nervous systems. The whole body is basically resonating, vibrating with these habit patterns. They're in our thinking, in our emotions, of course, and in the actions we perform every day.

[39:44]

So if you study your actions closely, you will begin to see your karmic habit patterns. Why do you do what you do? You can study them through meditation, through mindfulness, whatever personal self-study is helpful to you. And once we identify our patterns, we can apply the yoga techniques we learn through meditation practice that allow us to, you could say, act on these patterns to respond to them rather than reacting out of them and changing those that we can. And in some cases, it might be Some of those we can't change so much. So can we accept them? Can we recognize them? You know, and just allow them to be what they are with some compassion and kindness for ourselves. And because ignorance of our true nature lies at the heart of suffering, and because there's clinging in each sense of self, the Buddha advised using insight or the perceptions of both impermanence and not self.

[40:49]

as a strategy or a skillful means to dismantle this tendency towards clinging, towards grasping. What are you grasping? There's nothing there. So whenever you see yourself identifying with anything that creates a sense of stress or anything that's impermanent and constant, whenever you're caught in your whirlpool of emotions and me and I-making, you might try on reminding yourself that This is not self. Not self. It's not worth coming into. It's not worth calling this myself. Why? Because it's painful. Why would you want to call it myself if it's painful? So realizing this and reminding yourself it's not self. That Eddie... It's not me. Helps you to let go of it.

[41:52]

That it is not my fundamental self. When you do this often and thoroughly enough, it's said that this can lead to awakening. This is what the Buddha discovered. So in this way, this not self-teaching lies at the heart of wise discernment, we would say. What, when I do it, will lead to my long-term happiness and welfare and liberation. This is what the Buddha was teaching. That you find true happiness by letting go, by releasing, in a sense of renunciation, renouncing grasping, surrendering that tendency to grasp, surrendering that tendency to the world, right? And just to be clear, the Buddha didn't say that all selfing or any creation is necessarily bad. In fact, we need a healthy sense of self in order to thrive and take care of ourselves and our body minds. So some ways, some forms of selfing, as the Buddha and his disciples found, are useful along the path.

[42:57]

So as when you kind of develop a sense of self that's conscientious, that's responsible, kind of confident in your practice. And while you're on the path, you can apply the perception of not self to anything that would pull you astray or have you start spinning in dukkha. But only at the end. you apply the perception of not-self to the path itself, right? When there's no more clinging to the regrets, you have no need for perceptions of either self or not-self because you're free. You found happiness. Let me see here. I have a little bit more to go, but I think what I'll do is rock it up because I don't want to go much longer. there's a practice question you can ask for yourself. Given that there are actions, what kind of action is suffering?

[43:59]

You study for that for yourself. What kind of action is not suffering? When is it skillful? And when is it not skillful? When does it bring a sense of ease? And when does it bring some subtle sense of dukkha? Suffering. And what skills can help you develop a skillful sense of self and learn how to use the process of not-selfing in a skillful way. So that ultimately, you get to that state of happiness, that state of the unconditioned, unlimited sense of being opens expansiveness, where you can put all the both-selfing and not-selfing aside. So there's no extremes. This is the middle way. It's not either or. And the Buddhist insistence that there is ultimately no I or no self, no center at the vortex of our personal eddies.

[45:03]

It raises an interesting question. How can there be karmic continuity from life to life? So that's something that we'll also be studying. The answer is that every intentional action needs a karmic imprint in the mind. And most often, this trace is so subtle that we're not even aware of it. Little seeds and swirls that continue on some way when they're not even recognizing it. And most often, it kind of remains within us at a kind of inaccessible level of the mind. Again, to refer back to Yogacara, the alaya, our universal unconsciousness, you could call it. And from there, it continues to influence how we experience things and think about it. So it takes a lot of work to actually notice at a very subtle level. Most of us are working at kind of the gross level, the very obvious level. But as you deepen your meditation practice, begin studying the mind-body at a much subtle level, you begin to be able to perceive these much more subtle ways that any forming is happening in some way, right?

[46:14]

There are karmic imprints that are happening. And it's the subtle consciousness. that's conditioned by our previous karma that is said then to exit the body at death and carries along our entire karmic history. This is possible because although ultimately there is no self, relatively speaking, each of us is defined by a life stream of connected moments. One moment of consciousness acting as a principal cause transfers this karmic burden to the next during our life, and it says, our death as well. It is our very belief in itself, according to Buddhism, that holds this karmic stream, this continuation, intact, and enables us to have the illusion of being a separate, discreet person. And it's this illusory idea that

[47:17]

structured according to our karma. Again, every time you hear the word karma, think action. According to our intentional action, that continues from lifetime to the next. Okay, so while I could go much deeper into the concept of rebirth, as understood in Buddhism, we're going to leave that one for another time. So I'm sorry to have gone longer than I intended, and there's no time for Q&A, so my apologies. It is my karmic tendency to do this. And I am studying that tendency. So I appreciate your patience with me. And so let's say goodnight and do the closing chants. And we'll see you all later. Rest well. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge. And this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[48:22]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[48:25]

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