Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept. I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. And welcome. Welcome to Green Gulch on this beautiful mid-spring day. Special welcome back to the Lotus in Muddy Water, Columbia Buddhist Peace Delegation. Good to see you people. I'm looking forward to a complete report. And it is nationally recognized as Mother's Day.

[01:01]

and some other countries as well. So I immediately think of taking care of Mother Earth and also think of how we mother ourselves in our practice. So I wanted to read a little bit from a talk that Suzuki Roshi gave back in 1971, February. Before I do that though, I should just acknowledge none of us would be here without our biological mothers and none of them would be where they are without their mothers. So we actually, I think can cultivate appropriately a feeling of gratitude for our very existence.

[02:10]

Painful though it is. Impermanent though it is. My mother taught me to say please and thank you and keep your elbows off the table. Don't wolf your food and sit up straight. And so those basic practices actually I resisted and forgot and ignored and was reminded. And now I've, as an adult and a parent myself, I take those up as a practice, particularly the sitting up straight. So even sitting up straight, just as my mother suggested, helps cultivate some confidence in true nature.

[03:15]

Just being able to sit right where you are with some sense of presence and dignity. She didn't use the words presence and dignity, but there is that. I think that was what she was looking for. So Suzuki Roshi said, When you really take care of yourself, then you will have mother-like mind. The so-called Soto Zen way, so-called Soto Zen way, puts emphasis on Zazen, and this means you have to be yourself. How to be yourself is how to treat yourself, including various desires. how to treat your painful legs, how to have good posture, how to make your breathing good and smooth. When you really take care of yourself, then you will have mother-like mind.

[04:16]

You will say to yourself, oh, don't eat too much. When I read that I thought, hmm, yeah, a lot of people tell me that their mothers say, please eat more. So maybe it was Suzuki Roshi's mother was a little different saying, don't eat too much. Or maybe he's talking about his own practice. That his own mother-like mind is reminding him now, don't eat too much. Or you may say to yourself when you become angry, oh, don't be angry so much. In Zazen, you cannot shout, don't do that. So naturally, even though you are angry, without saying, don't be angry, you will know how to treat your anger. So naturally, eventually, anger will go.

[05:21]

Actually, you have no time to be angry. So that is how you take care of yourself. This is Suzuki Roshi's words still. So what you learn by Soto Wei is how to treat yourself and how you live in this world without creating karma for you and for others. You cannot escape the law of karma. How you make your bad karma into good karma is also a power of practice. Because of your good practice, bad karma will change its direction. Karma itself is not good or bad, but when you work on your karma, it will be good karma. So, this practice of learning how to treat yourself or how to cultivate a mother-like mind, I've also been thinking of as winnowing, attending and winnowing

[06:32]

your tendencies or your samskaras. We have a word in Sanskrit that has a complex, very broad meaning. Sometimes it's translated as formations. And those of you who are studying the Heart Sutra, we say, you know, no form, no feelings, no perceptions, no formations. Sometimes in the past we've translated it as impulses. No impulses. Another definition I like is volitional bundles. So it really has to do with how we carry our karma in our bodies and minds as habits, as psychophysical constructions that involve our whole body and mind and all of our tendencies to respond one way or another to the events that happen to us.

[07:33]

I think it's helpful to study these tendencies very directly. Zazen practice is an opportunity to do that where you can actually sit and be simply present, noticing your tendencies. Sometimes it may also be useful to study these tendencies in other ways. say intellectually, getting some sense of perhaps naming them and understanding that some tendencies are inherited, some tendencies are biological, some tendencies are decisions that you made, maybe with the help of others, maybe decisions you made with the help of your family or your culture, that this is a way to react or respond So we need our tendencies. We need our samskaras.

[08:36]

We can't exist without karma. As Suzuki Rishi says, karma itself is not good or bad. But it may be helpful. Or it may be destructive. It may move in the direction of more trouble. But with intelligence, and compassion with some clarity of mind and some compassionate feeling for your own karma, then you can winnow out what is destructive. You can understand it and release it. So this is our practice. The samskaras are also part of what's in Buddhism called the chain of causation. Pratichya Samuppada in Sanskrit and that is recognizing that one set of conditions leads to another set of conditions.

[09:40]

And the tendencies or samskaras that are problematic and part of suffering arise from the basic confusion, basic confusion about existence or ignorance. The most basic confusion is not accepting impermanence, not accepting that things change. It's pretty hard to accept actually. And the occasion of mothers becoming mothers And humans being born is a profound teaching in impermanence, actually. There may be a sense of permanence in the womb before we're born.

[10:48]

But clearly, when we emerge into this world, something big has changed. We're no longer held in the same way. We actually have to breathe or we'll die. How does that happen? And what's our feeling about it? You know, last week we had a big celebration here for Buddha's birthday, Shakyamuni Buddha, the historic Buddha. There's a big part of the pageant we had right out here on the lawn. Some of you were here. So it's a big pageant with masks and music and a kind of a poetic proclamation that Norman Fisher wrote a few years ago.

[11:53]

And so there's a big emphasis upon Queen Maya, Buddha's mother. and then Buddha is born, Shakyamuni Buddha, or Gautama is born. It struck me that there isn't a comment then that Queen Maya dies. I asked Norman about that. He said, well, that's not part of the story. Not part of the celebration of Buddha's birth, right? But that Queen Maya dies, according to the story, maybe about a week after Gautama was born, is another huge teaching of impermanence. It must have been very difficult for Gautama to have his mother die when he was only one week old.

[12:58]

I imagine he would be pretty angry about that, actually. If your mother lives, then you have a chance later on to be angry. Usually two-year-olds express it, right? At some point, you know, when you're a year and a half old or two years old or something, you realize there's this conflict that actually you still want to be your mother. You still want to be completely connected with your mother. In most cases, a little bit later, there may be other kinds of mothers you don't want to be connected to. But... But then you also realize, no, you actually are independent.

[14:06]

And so you say to your mother, get out of here. No, I don't want to. Mothers sometimes have a difficult time hearing this. So then there's this experience of kind of a furious feeling, right, that your mother actually can't be you. The recognition that you actually are separate is exciting and painful and So I think it has many components that go into our deep feelings, including rage.

[15:08]

Why do I have to be separate from the universe? So people who sit and do meditation deeply at some point realize this experience of we say that Buddha realized his past lives. So realizing that this is a part of being born is being actually separate. With all of the responsibility and difficulty that comes with that. So it takes a deep composure to fully be present and completely and deeply understand the meaning of that. So in this practice of Zazen, we cultivate the composure, the power, as Suzuki Rishi said, we have this power in Zazen to actually transform bad karma.

[16:20]

Bad karma in this case would be, say, refusing to accept the reality of one's existence, refusing to accept the feeling of that, we have the power to actually accept it. I wanted to say a little more about mothers. Historically, the Mother's Day was made a national holiday in 1916 during the Woodrow Wilson administration. During the time I was growing up, my mother, in her great compassion, would say, it should be called Parents' Day. She was willing to include my dad. On the other hand, my dad said, we should have a Father's Day. And then during the LBJ administration, then Father's Day was made a national holiday also.

[17:26]

So it was about 60, 50 years later. I don't think Father's Day quite has the same power somehow, which is okay. I think it's really appropriate that, but there had been lobbying for years, for decades actually, particularly since the civil war in this country to create a day and for a while it was thought of as International Women's Day, which would be for peace. Part of the motivation seems to have been that from all the wounded and the losses from the Civil War in this country, women from both the Confederate side and the Union side would get together and form bonds of friendship. to heal the wounds of the Civil War.

[18:29]

So I wanted to read a woman named Julia Ward Howe called for women, especially those who had lost husbands and sons in the Civil War, to gather. And this is a proclamation. I'll read some little parts of it from 1872. Arise, then, women of this day, Arise, all women who have hearts. Say firmly, we will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands will not come to us reeking with carnage for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience. We, the women of one country, will be tender, two of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained not to injure theirs.

[19:38]

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, disarm. The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Let women now leave all that may be left at home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first as women to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace. So those are powerful words from Julia Worthow. in 1872, still relevant, still needed. So being a parent is sometimes stressful.

[20:43]

I was recently reading a book also called, that I'd recommend, for everyone, called the Female Brain. Some of you know it. Luann Brizendine, MD, she's a doctor here in the Bay Area, founded the Women and Teen Girls Mood and Hormone Clinic, teaches at UCSF and a med center. And, So she's collected in this book a lot of research about how hormones affect behavior. So as I was thinking about our tendencies, our samskaras, there are definitely hormones involved in our tendencies.

[21:44]

So I think it's helpful to understand a little bit about that. the section which she calls the mommy brain. The mommy brain is when particularly oxytocin is the level of oxytocin in the body becomes elevated. She has a nice way of describing the effect of oxytocin. She calls it fluffy, purry, kitty. cuddly, nurturing Earth Mother. The good witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz. Finds pleasure in helping and serving. The sister of vasopression, the male socializing hormone, and sister to estrogen, and friend of dopamine, another feel-good brain chemical.

[22:50]

So then she says, even fathers, adoptive parents and women who have never been pregnant can respond maternally after close daily contact with an infant. The sweet smell of an infant's head carries pheromones that stimulate the brain to produce this potent love potion, oxytocin. The physical cues of suckling, touch and smell forge new neurochemical pathways in the brain that create and reinforce maternal brain circuits aided by chemical imprinting and huge increases of this oxytocin. These changes result in a motivated, highly attentive and aggressively protective brain that forces the new mother to alter her responses and priorities in life. She is relating to this person, this child, this baby, in a way she has never related to anyone else in her life. The stakes are life and death.

[23:55]

In modern society, where women are responsible for not only giving birth to children but working outside the home to support them economically, these changes in the brain create the most profound conflict of a mother's life. So what is a parent to do? What is a mother to do? What is a father to do? This is... I'm thinking right now of Tassajara. Also last weekend I was at Tassajara. And there's been a little baby there for the last training period since December. And you can see people coming around with this little baby and touching its head, gazing.

[25:01]

So there's this little climate of this atmosphere around the baby. It's quite powerful. So I think, now I'm thinking that maybe We should have a baby present during the practice period and have everyone come up and just generate a little oxytocin, right? And then help that, actually help people then work with their own tendencies in this compassionate way, right? And relate to each other more compassionately, right? Say what? Ah, yes. Yeah. Now we're giving a big job to that baby. Yeah. But it is actually that kind of thing that Julia Ward Howe was talking about, you know, with that kind of counsel for women who would bring this quality.

[26:12]

Yeah, I was recently reading, and I don't remember quite where it'll come up. Yeah, in some Mideast peace negotiation, there was some question about whether to let women come in to help with the negotiation and some man, I'm not so proud of, said, no, we can't let the women in. They would just make compromises. So of course, you know, what would be more appropriate for peace negotiations? And actually, I think in this case, I'm trying to remember exactly what, but I remember where I read it.

[27:21]

It's in Jean Shinoda Boland's book, which I was gonna cite here later. Urgent Message from Mother, Gather the Women, Save the World. So she gives various examples of how Women actually can be particularly helpful at this time of global crisis, global crisis on many levels. My grandmother actually taught me a little bit about winnowing samskaras in the form of cracking walnuts. She said, here boys, me and my cousins, she'd say, okay, she'd give us a big basket. These were black walnuts that were collected around from the black walnut trees, which we had on the farm.

[28:30]

And she'd give us a brick or a flat stone and a hammer and the walnuts, a bag of walnuts, right? These are really tough nuts to crack. Has anyone here cracked black walnuts? All right, a few people. So you know that you have to be very careful when you're six, seven, eight years old and you're trying to hit the hammer on the nut and not your finger. But we do it. We pound those. Of course, you could cheat. You could take, you could put like several of them there and take two bricks and do this and you wouldn't have to aim. But if you could break the walnut, then you had the problem of digging out the little, the actual walnut meat, right, digging that out. And she'd say, you know, now don't eat too many.

[29:34]

Save some for everybody else. So we'd have our job cracking walnuts. So it's just this process of what pressure is skillful. When you're working with your own tendencies, sometimes you really have to make an effort to see what is going on. I don't want to change the way I do things. I want to control the situation. If I control the situation, then I can rest. If I can control you, then I can rest. This is one tendency that some of you may have encountered at some point in your life. That you believe, or you've run into someone who believes that if they could just control you or put you in a box,

[30:37]

In fact, this is one form of parenting, right? Where you endeavor to have absolute control over your child. And it depends on the child, right? I imagine there are some children that accept that. Isn't it great to be told what to do all the time? I was not that kind of child. I was the kind of child that said, you can't tell me what to do. So we had this battle. And now I still have that tendency, you can't tell me what to do. So with cracking walnuts, that's one way. There are others, I'd say, that are more like waiting for... a clam to open, that you actually notice that you have some, you may notice that there's tension in your body.

[31:49]

Frequently in zazen, we are reminded to pay attention to our physical experience, to actually notice, oh, there's some knot in my body. And it often doesn't work to try to crack it open. It actually works to cultivate trust and allow that to open when it's time for it to open. More like allowing a flower bud to unfold. We have... You know, a chance to work with our whole parent, mother-like capacity at different levels. One level is the level working within ourselves.

[32:53]

Another level is working as teacher and student in this practice. So we have the image of the mother hen and the egg that's often cited that the We could say that the young Zen student or practitioner needs to be protected actually, just as an egg needs to be protected, needs to be incubated, needs a supportive environment, needs to grow internally to a certain point where the teacher who's also helping provide the supportive environment, realizes that it's time to come out. It's time to emerge. It's time to wake up. It's time to be yourself in a more mature way. And so there's this idea of the chick inside the egg beginning to peck and begin to move and open up.

[34:06]

a Dharma gate for stepping out, and then the teacher, a mother hen from the outside, doing a little pecking and assist from the outside. Timing is critical. So part of what we cultivate in this practice is a sense of timing, actually. One of the paramitas or the perfections of this practice is the practice of patience. And patience doesn't mean just sitting idly by, but patience means bringing sustained, careful attention. Enduring all the, say, the frustrating times that there isn't maturity. Protecting the environment during this incubation phase.

[35:17]

So this image of teacher and student as hen and egg and chick and then of course the chick or the baby bird then begins to fledge and flap its wings and fly. So we all want to fly, right? I'm amazed actually at birds actually, at birds. I feel I was being taunted the other day as I was going up the road to Hope Cottage. And there was a scrub, a blue jay sitting there on a bush. And he'd kind of hop ahead of me a little bit and hop ahead of him a little bit. And then when I got close, he just, he was actually sitting on a baccarus on a coyote bush. And then he just dropped off the hill. Wow. Just fell.

[36:26]

He could just fall. And then Whoop, open his wings. You can't follow me. Kind of had that feeling, you know. You can't do what I can do. So, this is part of accepting one's own dharma position, right? That this from the dharma position that I have, I can appreciate. And actually experience this kind of actual feeling of this bird is kind of falling right through my own body. Right through my own chest. And then opening its wings. Just to appreciate that. Say, what other reason is there for me to exist? And then just to appreciate that. So it should be noted that not all parents do parenting so well.

[37:39]

Many people suffer. You know, we all suffer to some extent from the limitations of our parents. Fortunately, there are some people going to prepare lunch. We all suffer from some extent for the karma that our parents have inherited from their parents. And so we have legacies that get passed on. And we suffer from some extent from the conditions around their lives that they could not control. that limited how they took care of us when we were young. And the stress of being a parent is profound.

[38:44]

It's a huge responsibility and not everyone is ready for it. In the time of Shakyamuni Buddha, the tradition was that the pregnant woman would go back to her mother's household and give birth there where she had the support of her mother and that mature family and her aunts or all the people who actually knew how to handle the situation. These days we don't often have that same kind of support. Sometimes we do and it can make a big difference. Some people actually don't handle the stress of being a parent very well. And particularly if there's not a good support system, it can be very difficult.

[39:45]

And so some mothers become depressed. Some mothers become exhausted. And fathers too. And then what to do when you can't do anything. As a parent, it can be when you don't know what to do. When the baby's crying, you don't know what to do. So we need to cultivate gratitude towards our parents, actually. appreciate that they're doing what they could do, what they knew how to do given the limitations, given their own karma, given their own tendencies. And at the same time, I encourage people to cultivate awareness of how to be a parent.

[40:50]

I'm going to put in a little plug for a workshop at Tassajara this summer in mid-July that Fu Schrader who's director here and one of our teachers and is working particularly. She's learned a lot being a parent with a disabled daughter, or a daughter with some disabilities and many wonderful qualities. And I am doing just a, we're calling it Parenting Buddha, with the thought of... The parent is Buddha and the child is Buddha. That both parent and child have the opportunity to wake up and be completely attuned to each other. So part of gratitude then for one's parents has to do with forgiving. People who have had difficulty with their parents, with their mother, with their father,

[41:57]

may carry a burden of some resentment. Or just some thought, I wish it had been different. And as you enter this practice more deeply, you realize that any of those thoughts, wishing something had been different, is actually a burden that you're carrying around now. So the thought of how to handle that, how to release that, sometimes takes very deep insight into what's underneath that. What fears, what wounds, what karmic construction or tendencies are all involved that inhibit. You know, what if I forgive my father and that lets him off the hook I don't want to let him off the hook.

[43:03]

I want to see him hang there. But that's a very small pleasure. And it also means that you can't feel so much compassion. It means that you actually are always separate. But when you begin to sit with more of an open heart with this mother-like Soto Zen quality that Suzuki Roshi talked about at the beginning, when that quality grows, you realize you can't leave anyone hanging in pain and distress. You actually want to let them be at ease. But it means that to forgive them means you actually have to accept everything that happened. You actually have to make your peace right now, today, with everything that happened.

[44:09]

Pretty difficult actually, pretty difficult to do. You may think you have done it and then you're so happy that you've done it, made peace, And then something else happens and you feel that again. You're in the grip of some reaction again. But then you know, oh, that's that tendency. That tendency is coming up again. And each time it comes up again, you have to make peace with it. So the deep, profound intention to make peace with all of these tendencies that you carry is, say, a marked point of entry into the Dharma path. The path of being committed to actually live with reality, live in reality, with things actually as they are, rather than with things as you wish they had been.

[45:17]

So, on Mother's Day, It's a good time to recognize this opportunity to appreciate the great Dharma gates that all of our relationships offer us. A chance to actually see what's right in front of us. To actually see what's actually in our own bodies to be fully present with all of it. And then don't forget to call your mother. One last word of praise.

[46:26]

As it happened when Buddha's mother died, her sister took over. And we recognize her sister as Mother Maha, Great Mother Prajapati, Maha Prajapati. As the founder of the women's sangha, or of a complete community in ancient India. She raised Gautama, who later became recognized as the awakened one. And later she actually became a student herself. And then she had many, many disciples, many followers. And I wanted to read her poem. Her own enlightenment poem. Homage to Buddha, best of all creatures, who set me and many others free from pain.

[47:35]

I have been mother, son, father, brother, sister, grandmother. Knowing nothing of the truth, I journeyed on. Maya, that's her sister, Maya gave birth to Gautama for the sake of us all. She has driven back the pain of the sick and the dying. I have seen the blessed one. This is my last body. I will not go forth. I will not go from birth to birth again. All pain is understood. The cause, the craving is dried up. The noble eightfold path unfolds. I have reached the state where everything stops. Look at the disciples altogether. Their energy, their sincere effort is homage to the Buddhas. Thank you for listening. Intention.

[48:38]

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