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. I just want to thank once again Nancy Petrin, our Tonto, our head of practice for extending the invitation, which I understand actually comes from our abiding abbot, who is David Zimmerman. um and as always i uh want to thank my teacher and so it's that isn't who sees me um i'm really glad you're all here today uh i don't know how many of you live in san francisco uh or in the bay area or northern california uh i can just speak for this part of the country it was a very strange day today it was we had this huge layer of smoke that are coming from all of the terrible terrible fires that are happening tens of thousands of people are under evacuation orders we give our good wishes to them for their safety

[01:26]

and all the firefighters and all the support people. The fire is actually getting very close to our monastery that many of you know, Kasahara. Hopefully it won't get that far. But yeah, it was a very strange day. But in some ways it was beneficial for us in our practice to have this environmental catastrophe brought home to us. Everything is practiced, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which side of the practice you're on, for us in Buddhism. We're reminded, though, especially in days like today, with our smallness, our vulnerability as human beings and what a precious gift this life is.

[02:31]

It helps to sit during times like this. It helps to sit meditation. I sat several times today while trying to get the final bits together of this talk that sometimes didn't seem quite so relevant compared to what was going on. But sitting helps me a great deal today. It's always recommended in times of great stress and disorder. We say in Zen, wash your balls as a way to decide what to do after you get up from sitting. If there's a lot of anxiety or... if you're fixated on something in particular, like today I was, and feeling some anxiety. And that comes from Case 39 in the Book of Serenity.

[03:38]

This is a koan. A monk asked Zhao Zhu, I have entered the monastery. Please give me some guidance. Zhao Zhu said, Have you had breakfast yet? The monk said, yes, I've eaten. The judge said, then go wash your bowl. And this used to be interpreted as a very profound teaching. It's not to me anymore. It's just go wash your bowls. I came to San Francisco's Zen Center a couple of decades ago. I had just gotten into 12-step recovery. I am a deeply experienced drug addict and alcoholic, and I've just gotten into recovery. And in 12-step recovery, we have a similar saying, which is do the next best thing. Just do the next best thing.

[04:41]

When you're not doing drugs and alcohol anymore after you've been doing them for a long time, living normal life is filled with anxiety. And you just don't know what to do. So that's what my sponsor said to me. And I've been trying to do that ever since, whenever I feel overwhelmed. Just wash your balls. And these are getting back to the basics, basically. And that's really what the teaching of Buddhism is for me in times like this. And that's what it has been for the last... really, to be honest, a couple of several years where there's been a lot of overwhelming things going on, but particularly these last few months during the COVID crisis. I've had to focus on just living my life at the most basic, working if I can.

[05:45]

And for those of you who can, this is a really basic way of being for most of us. but just doing one thing at a time, which has been sort of a new way of trying to mindfully work, just doing one thing at a time. Eating, preparing a meal, having a simple day where I focus on meals, going for a walk, trying to sleep properly. These things alone are essential for giving extra attention to in order to maintain some kind of presence in life. Try not to watch too much news. I probably still watch too much news, but I'm cutting back on it. Although it gets difficult sometimes when new things happen, and I find myself fighting that once again.

[06:45]

Returning to basics as far as formal Buddhist teachings are concerned. for me has meant the Satipatthana Sutra. And this is one of the Buddha's basic teachings. And it's a wonderful sutra to read. It's a short sutra. And what it is, is really sort of a basic guide to how to be. And it acts kind of as a tour guide of the universe inside of us, of how this unendable universe that we have inside of us is connected with the external universe outside of us.

[07:46]

It shows us, it gives us a technique to go on this epic journey And it begins with the breath, this life-giving phenomenon, this life-giving activity that we do most of the time, not thinking about it at all. But it asks us to begin to pay very close attention to this amazing activity that so many of us are having a relationship with right now in so many different ways. The smoke, you know, it's been really hot. You want to have the window open. The window open means there's smoke outside. Breath has been taken away in front of our eyes. It's been brutal to watch the death of George Floyd. So this essential thing, the Satipatthana Sutra asks us to really pay attention.

[08:51]

to this, and that's how it is that it begins. It goes on to take us through the body, to ask us to do a scan in the body, and to be honest about what it is that's going on. And one of my favorite parts, which I always like to read, is... Again, monks... He reviews this same body up from the soles of the feet and down from the top of the hair, enclosed by skin, as full of many kinds of impurity thus. In this body there are head hairs, body hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews, bones, marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, diaphragm, spleen, lungs, bowels, mesentery, contents of the stomach, feces, bile,

[09:52]

phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, grease, spittle, snot, oil of the joints and urine. Looking very closely at every part of the body and not leaving anything out. This is what the Satipatthana Sutra asks of us to pay attention to everything. Sometimes it's called the four foundations of mindfulness. And the four foundations are focusing on the body, on feelings, the mind, and on dharmas. And by learning this practice, we proceed on this tour to see what it's like to be alive. What is it like to be a human being in this body, in between birth and death? What does it mean? to really investigate it in great detail without leaving anything out.

[10:54]

It's an investigation of both joy and of suffering. The investigation that Dogen asks us to do, Ehe Dogen is our 13th century founder of the Soto Zen School, where he takes this training into account and sums it up by asking us by saying to us, to study the Buddha way is to study the self. And to study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by myriad things. But in this, we're not trying to really figure anything out. We're not trying to come to a conclusion about what it is that we see. We're just going deeper and deeper into what it is what it is that it means to be alive. We're trying to recognize the nature of the mind.

[11:56]

What occurs in the mind, in the body, our feelings, and even in dharmas is not permanent. It's not fixed. It's passing. We have to be careful because some things are very unpleasant to look at. We have to be relentless though. Because there's no conclusion, that means there's no end to the tour. When I priest-ordained, there were six of us who were priest-ordaining at the same time. And so we were very lucky to have Mel Weitzman, who's the abbot of Berkeley Zen Center, come and give us our final talk the day before we were going to be ordained. asked what it meant to be a priest. He said, you stay in one place and go deep. You stay in one place and go deep.

[12:59]

And for me, that's what the Satipatthana Sutra trains us to do. We can see what it is by looking in this way. We can see what's ingrained and what's conditional in how it is that we're experiencing ourselves and the world around us. We become aware of self-deception. And dishonesty is sometimes the place that we go to when we're faced with our own what at first appears to be ugliness. And this book is a fantastic book. And if you... Want to study the Satipatthana Sutra, Paul Haller, who, former abbot, says this is the best book right here.

[14:01]

And it's an amazing book. It also has a study guide. And it's by Anihilo. He's a Theravadan monk. And he says, the task of mindfulness is to remain receptively aware by clearly recognizing the state of mind that underlines a particular train of thoughts or reactions. Such uninvolved receptivity is required because of one's instinctive tendency to ignore whatever contradicts or threatens one's sense of importance and personal integrity. The habit of employing self-deception to maintain one's self-esteem has often become so ingrained that the first step to developing accurate self-awareness is honest acknowledgement of the existence of hidden emotions, motives, and tendencies in the mind without immediately suppressing them.

[15:02]

Maintaining non-reactive awareness in this way counters the impulse towards either reaction or suppression. contained in unwholesome states of mind and thereby deactivates their emotional and attentional pull. In contemporary Buddhist communities, anger has been seen mostly, I think it's changing a little bit right now, but anger has been seen as bad. We want to be calm and we don't associate anger with calmness. Many of us, that's why it is that we come to Buddhism to try and become calm and equanimous, to become stable. Anger is not associated usually with that. But it's important for us to understand our anger and also

[16:06]

Connected to that is our reaction to other people's anger. Now, reaction to other people's anger, our reaction can come from trauma, and it's very important to identify that if that's the case for you. You need to be careful and kind with all of the investigations of the Satipatthana Sutra. I'm going to focus mostly on anger here. But we need to look both at our own anger, how it arises, and what's it like inside of us, and our response to other people's anger. What does that feel like? What's happening when I have a certain kind of response? I've come across in some of the Buddhist communities that I've been around a kind of anger phobia. turning away from anger, not wanting to look at it.

[17:10]

And this can do so much damage. It's a reality that's not being looked at when we experience anger. It's a normal human experience. It's there usually for a series of reasons. And when we don't look at it, when we don't look at the reality of anger as we experience it, both in ourselves and as we respond to it in others, It shuts down dialogue. And when dialogue is shut down, transformation is stifled. It's through interchange and interaction with one another that we are able to heighten our transformation. That's one of the reasons why we focus on monastic practices and we say you rub the rough edges off by being in close proximity with each other. And so we value that. that dialogue, both verbal and physical dialogue that we have by being around each other.

[18:15]

And Buddhism asks us to transform our suffering into wisdom and then to apply that wisdom to the end of suffering. So looking at anger, both our own anger and our response to others' anger is actually about ending suffering. even though counterintuitively it seems like facing it is actually deepening our suffering. The opposite is true. Now, I might as well tell you, tragically, I am a straight white male. And now is, to say the least, an interesting time to be a straight white male. um we've we've had power for uh a minimum of 10 000 years in western culture um and uh as we just take the most cursory look around uh we see what a mess has been made of the world um and so in many ways that can be summed up to the leadership of straight white males

[19:34]

This is a time of great power shift, though. Things are changing. How deep they change and how broadly they change, we will have to see. And it's up to us to continue investigating power dynamics. And this practice is a part of that for me. I feel like this era of change, kind of started historically around gay marriage. Up until that time, I feel like many of the power controls that straight white males had had were very much entrenched. And although they were changing, they were changing very slowly. But with gay marriage, there was a sudden shift that happened for a whole... range of different fascinating reasons and important reasons.

[20:39]

But I feel like this period began then, and then being very brief about this, the MeToo era made it so that we're going once again on a deeper inspection of patriarchy. And now we're looking once again in a deeper way around racism. And as we do, I see, I can't help but see that I'm taught by one of the great things that's come out of this COVID shelter in place situation is more study. And studying has shown Almost everything that I have in my life has come to me in part because I'm white and because I'm a male. And this is a massive shift in perspective, and it's very painful in many ways.

[21:49]

I've had a sneaking suspicion that that was the case for a couple of decades now, but now I must... look at that squarely and fully face it and uh it makes me angry um it makes me angry not the loss of power uh because i think that's long overdue um it makes me angry because of what it is that i have to witness and be a part of with this new perspective, the injustice for everyone who has been oppressed by street white males and the power institutions that have been controlled by that group. Anger is, it's not a new investigation for me.

[22:55]

I'm not suddenly angry for the first time. I didn't really think I was that angry until I got into recovery a couple of decades ago. And then 12-step recovery has a wonderful sort of pre-satipatthana sutra preparation training. And it teaches you to look at your anger. And it's called resentment very politely there. But it's a wonderful... introduction to Buddhism, in my opinion, 12-step recovery. And very quickly in investigating my anger, it was shown to me that I have trauma that is a very common kind of trauma and that it comes about from childhood neglect. My father was an alcoholic and my mother died when I was very young. So absolutely no one touched me and very few people spoke to me for sometimes years

[24:00]

on end and it caused lots of problems. And there are now problems that I feel genuinely grateful towards, mostly because of therapy, 12-step recovery and Buddhist practice. And they are now, this is trauma that although it's not gone, my understanding of it inside of me connects me with other people in many ways that are very much in line with this Buddhist practice. So if you're working with the Satipatthana Sutra technique, by identifying internal experience of anger, You see that there's heat. You identify the physiological experience of it. There's heat.

[25:02]

There's constriction. There's something other than heat that's sort of a kind of a shame of warmth. But most importantly, what I found is that it fades away. So I'm not permanently angry. And I don't believe anyone is, although we sometimes refer to people as such, and we sometimes respond to people as if they were permanently angry. It's something that we are trained in Buddhism to notice arises, comes into being, and then fades away. And it's very important to over and over again investigate that process of anger to see then that it's connected to other things. There's something behind it. And for me, what's behind anger is fear. And, you know, my early investigation identified the trauma that I just spoke about.

[26:08]

But there's, and there's some of that that's left over as embodied trauma that is from my childhood that's brought into the present time. What is left is fear that I experience now mostly as an adult male whose position is changing. And for an excellent contemporary investigation of anger, rage, and love is... Lama Rod Owens, which was going to be a much bigger part of my talk, but I strongly recommend this for people. It's a he co-wrote with Angel Kyoto Williams, Radical Dharma. We've studied that book a great deal and studied with Angel Kyoto Williams here at San Francisco Zen Center. But this is a really fantastic book.

[27:12]

He is African-American. He's a authorized Lama in the Tibetan tradition. And he's very experienced as a political activist and many other things. And for him, what is behind anger for him is hurt. He calls it hurt. And hurts is very similar to fear for me. But I identify what's behind mine as fear. It's different for everyone. Anger is different for everyone. Its responses to it are different for everyone. The point is really to have a method, a technique for discovery of how it is for you. And by seeing what anger is made up of and seeing that it's not permanent, that it has a life, that it rises and passes away,

[28:15]

I'm able to connect with other people's experience, even though it might be different. Meditation itself is actually really, in my experience, the best place to experience anger, to sit and be angry. And it's very easy to do. You know that you're in a safe place and you just touch the anger a little bit and learn to make it proliferate. and make it become really powerful. The most powerful anger I've ever experienced in fact has been during meditation where I got to a place to where it was safe enough to go deeper and deeper and deeper into it, always returning to my breath, always returning to the cushion and the safety of sitting in a safe place. But in this way, I was able to no longer be afraid of anger.

[29:18]

And seeing its impermanence, I can see how it is that it comes into being, it arises, it comes into being, and it fades away. I can be in control of my relationship with anger. It's no longer a threat. to me. It doesn't become rage, and Lama Rod Owens, he co-authors, he splits up, he differentiates between rage and anger. Rage follows anger. And that's no longer a threat if you're able to investigate it in this way. And so this This has softened my aversion to it, my wanting to push it away. I can let it live, and I can begin to investigate what's beneath it.

[30:22]

I'm probably never going to be without my anger. It's not something that I want to be without. It's something that is, as I said already, is a human response to myriad situations. And... It's taught me a great deal and will continue to do so. There is fear that's embodied as trauma underneath my anger, but it's quite specific. That old traumatic fear is very specific. It has a particular kind of feeling to it, and I'm acquainted with that now. Then there's sort of a generalized fear that I have about my, which is my response to the world as it is right now, running out of money, getting sick, getting old, what's happening in the world. But then there's this other deeper fear that is somehow a part of my being a mammal. I really notice it when I watch squirrels for some reason.

[31:26]

I really relate to the squirrels. Boy, that squirrel is really... expressing the same kind of mammalian fear that I have. But that's a topic for another talk, I think. So by seeing all of these previously hidden dimensions of my anger come into being and then disappear, I can relax around fear, which is very important to do and was a new experience for me, relaxing around my fear. And when I can relax around it, I can begin to have some mercy on myself and have mercy on the different kinds of fear that I have, and then to allow it to come up again, the anger and the fear that's behind the anger. So by investigating anger, I see this darkest thing, this thing which, coming to Buddhism, I wanted to cover up, hide from people, this secret that I had for so long.

[32:31]

actually becomes the way in which I connect most deeply with others. Because as I learn about the anger that I have inside and the fear that is behind the anger, I see how it is that I share that fear with everyone else as it's expressed in so many different ways by other people's different kinds of anger and fear. And it's four minutes past when I was supposed to stop. I'm going to finish with this wonderful poem from K. Ryan called Yeses. Just behind the door, a second, but smaller by a few inches, behind which a third again diminishes, then more and more, forming a foreshortened corridor or niche of yeses, ending in a mouse's entrance with a knob too small to pinch.

[33:33]

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. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

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