This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Your way-seeking mind brought you here, so welcome to Beginner's Mind Zen Temple. Some of us have been sitting for several days, and so this is This is our last day of sitting together in silence for several days. And it's also the last day of a six-week training we call practice period. We call it ongo, which means peaceful abiding. So we've been... We've been fully intending and putting our bodies here for six weeks, peacefully abiding in the midst of the San Francisco activity that goes on all around us and through us.

[01:19]

So I wanted to talk a little bit about bodhicitta, bodhicitta. Chitta, the mind that seeks the way, or the mind, chitta, which wants to wake up. Bodhi, meaning to wake up, which is the root word of a Buddha, one who wakes up, which is something each of us feel. Maybe it's a challenge. And sometimes there's a wish. Why is it so difficult? I thought I'd read a opening few lines of the ninth duino elegy of Rainer Maria Rilke. The opening lines really kind of cry out for why is it so hard to be a human?

[02:31]

This elegy goes on for a number of pages, so I'm only going to read a few lines. It was written back in the 1920s. Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all other green, with tiny waves on the edges of every leaf, like the smile of a breeze. Why then have to be human? And escaping from fate, keep longing for fate. Oh, not because happiness exists, that two hasty prophets snatched from approaching loss. not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which would exist in the laurel too, but because truly being here is so much, because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us, us, the most fleeting of all.

[04:02]

This is a Stephen Mitchell translation. I'll read it one more time just for fun. Why? If this interval of being, this interval of being, an interval of being between what? Between non-being and non-being. This interval, if this interval of being... can be spent serenely in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all other green, with tiny waves on the edges of every leaf, like the smile of a breeze. Why then have to be human, and escaping from fate, keep longing for fate? So here he's using fate as... a longing for certainty and acknowledging that for human beings we have faced the perplexity and conundrum of choice, that we have to make choices.

[05:21]

So he says keep longing for fate as if there were no choices. But then realizing how fleeting happiness is, he says, oh, not because happiness exists, that two hasty prophets snatched from approaching loss. Looking at birth and death. Impermanence. Not out of curiosity, but, and not as practice for the heart, which would exist in the laurel too. So here he's saying, we share this with the laurel. We actually share a lot of our DNA with the laurel. But because truly being here is so much, because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us, us,

[06:29]

most fleeting of all. So looking at what is this, is there something that is reliable in the face of everything that we see being so transient? And knowing that our own lives are that way, that our own lives are transient. And knowing that our friends are not reliable. We've been talking during this practice period of friends, being Dharma friends, supporting each other in practicing this way of engaging with reality.

[07:29]

And we can do that. We can support each other. And we do do that. And we've been really appreciating how we can support each other. And at the same time, you know that your friend is not always going to be there. In fact, your friend may make other choices. Or your friend may be subject to... circumstances beyond their control. And eventually your friend will die. And so that's all unknown. So one of the Chinese monk pilgrims who was facing this question and had bodhicitta, the mind seeking the way, arising for him, visited Huineng, the sixth ancestor, sixth Chinese Zen ancestor.

[08:42]

And so he showed up as a kind of a pilgrim, and Huineng asked, where do you come from? And Nanyue, later his name became Nanyue, Nanyue said, from Mount Song. An ordinary straightforward question and an ordinary straightforward answer. And then Hui Nong asked, what is it that thus comes? And Nanyue was nonplussed. He didn't know what to say. This was not on the same level of question as where do you come from? Although it could be, depending on how you hear it, but what is it that thus comes?

[09:49]

So Nanyue decided to continue his practice there and consider this question. What is it that thus comes? What is it that thus comes that is evidence of something more reliable than the transient phenomena? My favorite part of the story is that eight years passed. Eight years passed. It could have been eight days. It could have been 18 years. It could have been anything. But in Nanyue's case, it was eight years, and he had an understanding. And so he went back to Huynong and said, I have some understanding.

[10:53]

And so Huynong asked, what is it? And Nanyue said, to say it is a thing misses the mark. So Huayong said, can it be made evident or not? And Nanyue said, I don't say it cannot be made evident, only that it is never defiled. It is never defiled. I don't say that... When Dogen was quoting the Zen master, maybe you don't all know, Japanese Zen master who is in our lineage here at Zen Center, who brought Zen from China to Japan, was quoting this...

[12:04]

And he said, Ananiwe said, I don't say that practice and realization cannot be made evident. The practice and realization cannot be made evident. Just that they cannot be defiled. So this is a pretty careful use of language to express something that goes beyond our usual language. So this is also kind of a glimpse into the sincerity and the full awareness that these practitioners are bringing to their inquiry. To say that this cannot be defiled

[13:08]

actually flies in the face of our usual feeling and our usual sense that things are pretty messy. That things are chaotic. And the art lounge is a little art show from, is Mike Sullivan in the room? I didn't see him. So Mike Sullivan, it's called, calm in chaos, or calm within chaos. So to say it cannot be defiled is to actually say that chaos is calm, that there is no difference, fundamentally no difference between chaos and stillness, between everything that seems to be moving around and thusness, the reality that does not change.

[14:16]

So we say that the reality that does not change, it does not change because it has no fixed characteristics. So it can take on any characteristics. Suzuki Rashi would sometimes say, and he's often quoted as saying, you are perfect just as you are. You are perfect just as you are. And then in case people thought, well, that meant that everything is locked into some frozen state of perfection, he would say, And there's room for improvements, which doesn't necessarily mean, but there's room for change.

[15:18]

There's room for, yeah, improvement. There's room for birth and death, birth and death. There's room to step off, we say, if you're on the top of a hundred foot pole to step off. There's room for that. There's room for the next moment. So one of the ways that we describe this practice is with this perfection of things. We call it the six perfections. We've been chanting at lunch for our noon service here, we've been chanting Dogen's part of Dogen's writings on the first perfection, the perfection of giving or generosity. It actually helps me, excuse me, to think of the six perfections as Dhana, Shilak, Shanti, Virya, Jhana, Prajna in Sanskrit, helps me remember.

[16:38]

So they're usually translated as dhana, as giving or generosity. And shila as ethical behavior or morality. And shanti is usually translated as patience or forbearance. But I learned a new word for it because I was just looking at Dale Wright's book. Dale Wright teaches Buddhism at Occidental College. Translates Shanti as tolerance. Which maybe I'll come back to that. Tolerance. And Virya is effort or energy. Jhana is the word for Zen.

[17:50]

Jhana, Paramita. But it's often translated as meditation. And the sixth one is Prajna, wisdom. Now, all of these... All of these actually are one practice. Present moment, fully aware practice. But sometimes it's helpful to open it up and look at our lives in these six ways. Having these six kind of components that come along and Sometimes it's helpful actually to focus on one and practice with it for some time. A week, or a month, or eight years, or a lifetime.

[18:58]

The last one, Prajnaparamita, I should say, well, yeah. I don't think he even said what, the word paramita is the word that's translated as perfection, usually translated as perfection. Paramita means something like going beyond our usual world. It doesn't mean that it's a different world, although sometimes it's, we talk like that. Oh, that this world is seen, but that this world is seen differently. That this world that we usually think of is composed of you and me and the tummy mats and the street outside as separate things, is seen as one whole without separation.

[20:08]

Everything mutually depending on each other. So that if that plane is flying, we can hear, right? We can hear some vibration. We just hear some vibration. But we know there's a plane flying. And the words you hear in this room are are dependent on that plane flying. The words here in this room help the plane flying and the plane flying helps you to breathe right now. So usually we think that we can get rid of some things. That the world would be more pure if we could get rid of some things. We have, you know, I think for a long time we thought we could throw things away.

[21:23]

And we still have kind of a throwaway culture to kind of a large extent. So we think, oh, we can use it and then dispose of it, throw it away. But more and more people are realizing there is no... other place. This is just in terms of the ecology of the earth, that there's no other place. Now, we do know that we could load things on missiles and shoot them and dump things on the moon. We have left a few things on the moon, I think, now. But the moon is included. There's no other place. And now we're maybe slowly learning that we are recyclable.

[22:26]

Our whole bodies are recycling. It's kind of hard for us to accept. There is a strong impulse to believe that we persist. a strong impulse to find it inconceivable that there could be a universe apart from the way I think about it. It's hard to accept that everyone in the room has their own universe. Each person has your own idea of the universe, but still there's just one universe that includes every every possible idea about it. So paramita, meaning crossing over, is to shift, be able to shift your view from the view that is grasping at your own self to the view that includes

[23:42]

all possible views. So when you do that, there's this feeling that everything is right at hand. Everything is part of your own field of awareness. So when we do the training here, we are working on how to stand it. How to not be dismayed by letting go of my own view. How to not be completely dismayed

[24:43]

It's very, very... But we usually don't think, oh, it's just my own view, unless something does upset us. And then we notice, oh, I thought it would be that way and it's this way. And often we, because it's hard to hold the feeling of being upset, we make it about someone else. So we go around here and we have various forms of the way things are supposed to be done. In the temple, we have many little rules about how things are supposed to be done. It's kind of like a kindergarten, you know. Because then you notice when someone doesn't do it the way it's supposed to be done. And of course, people are coming in there all the time, not knowing how it's supposed to be done.

[25:52]

And so when I say, so you're all welcome here. And there's no way you can make a mistake. Because nothing can be defiled. You can't make a mistake. You come in here. But since you don't know how things are supposed to be done, then someone will feel some tension. So we just have a formal way of eating a meal in the zendo, in the meditation hall. And today, This morning, we had our breakfast. And I'm eating my breakfast. It has been served very nicely by servers coming in.

[27:00]

And then, sometimes, because I'm an habit here, I get to correct when someone doesn't do it the way it's supposed to be done. If they stand here and they're supposed to stand here and they're serving me, I might say this. Now, if you're not an abbot here, you're not supposed to do that. You're not supposed to correct the server. You're supposed to sit there with the agonizing tension in your body and let the server serve the best way they know how. And the server, servers are always doing the best they can. So if you can sit there and feel the tension in your body and the server, so for me, it's always a choice.

[28:10]

Do I, at this time, make some gesture, Or do I just notice it and not make a gesture? I don't want to interrupt the concentration of the server unnecessarily. Sometimes it's better to wait and see if this was just one time that the person spaced out or do they actually need some more information. So I say this is like kindergarten because the practice of sitting still with this little tension in the body about some silly little rule is very informative. It really tells me how much I get caught by my idea of reality.

[29:16]

I get caught. And when something is even a little different, it affects me. Can I stand that tension? It's not so dangerous when someone stands here or stands there. It's much more dangerous when you're driving your car down the highway and someone comes over into your lane. And there, there's maybe bigger tensions. And you need to take, maybe you need to take some action. You need to make a quick judgment. And to see clearly what's happening, it's helpful if you're not so attached to your reality that you fail to perceive what's happening.

[30:18]

If you can't believe that this unusual thing is happening, then you don't know how to respond. You see what I mean? If you're so locked into your own view, you may not even see. It was interesting to me that this literally happened. I'd been living at Green Gulch for years, and at one point I hadn't been driving very much at all. So it was kind of a novel experience again to get in a car, and I was driving out, came to Tam Junction, made the turn towards San Francisco, and I'm driving around that turn, and lo and behold, someone's actually coming at me in what's supposed to be my lane. And I just drove around them.

[31:22]

And it was only afterwards I realized, well, that's kind of unusual. Oh, OK. If I had insisted on my lane, I don't know whether that person would have realized in time and pulled back into their side. Similar thing actually happened to me just a few weeks ago, riding my bicycle in Sonoma County. And the car, this was a road, a country road without lane markers, without a center line in it. But I'm pedaling along and I notice the car coming toward me. It's just kind of drifting over and towards, so I, I'm ready to actually bail off the road. Fortunately, there was space. I would have had to go into the ditch, but there was.

[32:26]

But then I think the driver was just distracted and they pulled over. So anyway, that's kind of a mechanical example. But then there are other examples. more like human interaction examples. So this is coming back to the Kshanti Prajnaparamita. So if we put the wisdom, if we put Prajnaparamita, we put wisdom in with Kshanti, which is patience or forbearance, tolerance. We're learning the flexibility of mind. The flexibility of mind to see that things are constantly changing.

[33:28]

The flexibility of mind that lets go of my own holding on to how I want it to be. It doesn't mean that I don't know how I want it to be, but it means that I don't hold how I want it to be so tightly that it creates a kind of rigidity in my whole universe, in my body, in my mind, in my whole universe. So I may know how I want it to be, and at the same time, I can allow it to be the way it is, which is not the way I want it to be. So that means that then I can allow my friend to be who they are. I can allow my friend to be the way they are and give them that freedom. That they don't have to be the right way, the way I want them to be.

[34:36]

So in sitting this, we discover that the idea of how my friend should be comes up in my mind when I'm sitting, jhana, zen, jhana paramita, the perfection of meditation. And sitting in the perfection of meditation, I'm realizing that I have some residue, some memory that comes up in my mind. And it's the last time my friend insulted me or disrespected me. Or maybe it wasn't the last time, but it was like 10 years ago. And suddenly it comes up and it's important right now. And it's really vivid. And the pain of that is vivid. The insult. And I can feel my neck, my hair on my neck rising up.

[35:48]

and I can feel my eyes burning. So this may come up in meditation as an opportunity for forbearance, for patience, for tolerance. This is an opportunity to sit still and not do what one might want to do. reinforce the opinion that that person is bad. That person did wrong. That person treated me. That person mistreated me. And to go off in all these stories of how I've been mistreated by that person, when they're not even here right now.

[36:52]

They might have even died. It doesn't matter whether this happened yesterday or happened 30 years before. The vividness is right now. And it becomes very clear that this is happening in one's own consciousness. This is happening in one's own mind, in one's own memory. It's not what's happening except in one's own mind and memory. And then one can see that this is something that I've been holding this all this time. I've been holding this attitude all this time. The practice then of of this paramita, of this, of going beyond it, is to see the connection, the feel, actually to feel the connective reality, that past, present, and future are all here right now.

[38:08]

Past, present, and future, all here right now. And that this, Cultivation of tolerance means I have a chance to sit. I have a chance to choose to be at peace with what's coming up in my own mind. And I realize it's my own mind that I'm coming to terms with. I don't have to go back and get the other person to shape up. Now, if they're still living, there might be an opportunity to do that. But it's not driven by my need or by my delusion to think that my discomfort is their responsibility.

[39:21]

So it's not driven by that. The tolerance is something I can choose to, if that person is living and they might even remember what it's about, and if I go back and talk to them, it may be helpful to do that. But that's an opportunity freely taken. It's not driven by my own failure to be willing to be present with the contents of my own mind. So this practice of Chantiparamita can be carefully examined and investigated when one is sitting. And sometimes then it can be, when one is stable enough, then one can take it into the world of activity.

[40:26]

a great exemplar. So it doesn't mean passivity. It doesn't mean, oh, that you just are servile. So for me, an example of the practice of Kshanti Paramita is Rosa Parks. People know Rosa Parks. Recently, I just bought a whole sheet of stamps. But Rosa Parks, I really enjoy putting them on the very few snail mail envelopes that I send out these days, you know. But people know Rosa Parks in the 50s in Montgomery, Alabama was a young woman in her 40s at that time. And she had the, I'd say, equanimity to decide when to sit, when to not move.

[41:29]

When the bus driver said, you all need to move, make room for these people, these other people getting on the bus, who were white people, and she at that time said to her, no, I don't, I'm not gonna move. So that not moving was actually moving. That not moving was taking action. That not getting up was based upon the capacity of her mind to be very peaceful and calm with all the feelings that she was feeling. take the action of sitting, realizing that, okay, then she's going to get arrested and various things happen from there.

[42:38]

So this was, say, a beautiful action of tolerance that went beyond the customary, say, frame of reference at that time. the rules of that city, the laws of that city. So it's a much bigger deal than whether the server's standing here or here. But it's the same kind of thing. Same kind of thing. So if you can sit still, and sit through the difficulties that come up in the movie screen of your own mind, your own memories, and begin to sit still so that you can actually make peace with what's coming up in your own mind, then your action is informed by the reality that's more stable than your own small view.

[43:56]

And your action can be in this world of what is undefiled, the world that is not defiled by the views of comparative evaluation thinking. Oh, sorry. I just noticed it's time to stop. So I only talked a little bit about one of the six paramitas. And we could easily spend a whole week talking about each one of them. But maybe this is helpful to realize that in those eight years for Nanyue, coming back with his understanding, he was doing this kind of practice. He was doing the practice of cultivating his own capacity to see clearly the very scary world, the real world, behind the false world that we tend to believe in.

[45:16]

So please continue your own inquiry. And it's good to take time to sit still. Thank you for listening.

[45:57]

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