This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers. I know there are many of you sitting here this morning with us. And for those of you who are not mothers, but have had mothers or have mothers, what are you doing here? Why aren't you home feeding breakfast to your mother? Or if your mother is

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not around, gone far from this world. Maybe it's just the perfect thing that you're here today to remember her with some quiet time. Maybe you can take a walk in the garden among the flowers and think about your mother. My home mother is gone a very long time by now. And I think of her, and I miss her. She was a really sweet person, full of devotion. And among all the things that she was devoted to, the thing she was devoted to the most was her children, as so many mothers are. I've talked to lots of people over the years, and I now realize that there are mothers who are not so devoted to their children. There are mothers who didn't really want to be mothers or somehow were mothers by mistake.

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So they didn't have so much devotion to their children that was maybe painful for their children. Still though, the fact that we're all sitting here today as reasonably healthy and sane individuals, I say reasonably healthy and sane individuals, is testimony to the fact that our mothers did bear us and feed us and protect our lives when we were incapable of protecting them ourselves. So Mother's Day is always a good day to remember that and have gratitude, even if one's gratitude is a little bit touched with Some regret or bitterness. But that's okay. That's life, right? There's always a little regret and bitterness mixed in. We would be lying if we didn't say so. Also, I know that today is the culminating ceremony for the coming of age program.

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So maybe there are an extra number of mothers and fathers here today because of that. And it's actually quite beautiful, I'm sure, on purpose, that this ceremony was scheduled for Mother's Day. And some of you may know that this particular program is really dear to my heart because years ago I participated in the very first coming-of-age program, which I wrote about in my book, Taking Our Places. And that really changed my life. I really was appreciated working with those. young men, those boys. And it made me realize that in the end, spiritual practice is actually not something so special or fancy. Actually, spiritual practice, and I think this was always the thought behind it, although somehow it got obscured, the spiritual practice is always just about growing up.

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becoming a grown up, full human being, coming of age, taking our places in our own lives, taking our places in the world. And it turns out this does not come automatically. It takes time, it takes reflection, it takes effort, and also we all need some help. And that's what this program, I think, is supposed to do and does do. Because it's not easy. Maybe it was never easy, but especially now it seems like it's not easy for young people to take their places in a world that's so confusing with a future that seems so shaky. So I really appreciate that the Zen Center has continued this program over I don't know how many years now. It's been a while. And I'm grateful for that. And I know that it's helped a lot of young people and their parents to find a way forward in what turns out to be a lifelong process of growing up.

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I wish you all really good luck with your ceremony this morning. And I have no doubt you have already had a wonderful program leading up to it and a moving one. So congratulations to the parents, the young people and the mentors we're doing this so here's some poems about mothers here's one by Emily Dickinson who in this poem compares nature to a mother a gentle wise mother I like this poem because it has a few of the odd clumsy words that Emily Dickinson sometimes had in her poems, words like, waywardest. You know, the most wayward is the waywardest. And how about this one, infiniter. More infinite than infinite, infiniter.

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So this is the great genius of Emily Dickinson. So here's her poem. Nature the gentlest mother is, impatient of no child, the feeblest or the waywardest, her admonition mild. In forest, in the hill, by traveler be heard, restraining rampant squirrel or too impetuous bird. How fair her conversation, a summer afternoon, her household, her assembly, and when the sun go down, her voice among the aisles, incite the timid prayer of the minutest cricket, the most unworthy flower.

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When all the children sleep, She turns as long away as will suffice to light her lamps. Then bending from the sky with infinite affection and infiniter care, her golden finger on her lip wills silence everywhere. Here's one by Walt Whitman, who is our greatest and biggest poet, which means he's either the most generous poet or the most narcissistic. It could be these two things are quite similar. So this poem, which is called Unfolded Out of the Folds, is about mothers who

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It's about birth. And of course, it's about Walt Whitman. So unfolded out of the fold. Unfolded out of the folds of the woman. Man comes unfolded as is always to come unfolded. Unfolded only out of the superbest woman of the earth is to come unfolded. the superbest man of the earth. Unfolded out of the friendliest woman is to come the friendliest man. Unfolded out of the perfect body of a woman can a man be formed of perfect body. Unfolded only out of the inimitable poem of the woman can come the poems of man. Only thence have my poems come. unfolded out of the strong and arrogant woman I love.

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Only thence can appear the strong and arrogant man I love. Unfolded by brawny embraces from the well-muscled woman I love. Only thence comes the brawny embraces of the man. Unfolded out of the folds of the woman's brain comes all the folds of the man's brain duly obedient unfolded out of the justice of the woman all justice is unfolded unfolded out of the sympathy of the woman is all sympathy a man is a great thing upon the earth and through eternity but every jot of the greatness of man is unfolded out of a woman. First the man is shaped in the woman.

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He can then be shaped in himself. So probably motherhood really is pretty great. but also maybe, like in this poem, it can be a bit overdone. Maybe motherhood, as womanhood, as Whitman writes here, the great womb of the world out of which every single thing is unfolded. Maybe what we're praising here and amazed at here isn't so much about women and only women as it is about women and all of us too this capacity for love and compassion and generosity and unselfishness this is an amazing thing that women are capable of and so are men and when we honor motherhood and womanhood I think we're honoring mothers and women but also that

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these most prized human qualities. Because, you know, when we're inspired and amazed and grateful to our mothers, that's what's so inspiring and amazing, isn't it? That our mother loves us and cares for us, weeps for us when we're in trouble, feels our trouble even more than we feel it. And she will do anything. no matter what it costs her for our well-being. And that's what's so heartbreakingly beautiful about mothers. And we're all inspired by these qualities. And I think this is part of coming of age, isn't it? Part of growing up is to identify how important these qualities are and to begin to learn how to develop them in ourselves. I know I do.

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As I've gone on practicing year after year and decade after decade, more and more it gets simpler. And more and more compassion, love, concern for others is what I value the most and what I appreciate the most about spiritual practice and about human life. You know, it's all wonderful. I really love practicing and studying the Dharma. But you know, in the end, you can throw away all the books about philosophy and doctrine, teachings. You can throw away all the rituals and all the lore. And even, you know, dare I say it, here in the Zendo, you can even throw away the meditation. But if you still have love and compassion, then the essence of what the Buddha taught is still preserved.

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When the Buddha was awakened, in the Zen version anyway of this story, he doesn't say, wow, I'm awakened, I'm the smartest guy in the world, what's wrong with all these other dummies? He says, How wonderful, how marvelous. I and all beings on earth together awaken in this very moment. The Buddha's awakening was an awakening into the sense of universal belonging and caring and universal shared identity. A few years ago, I began, with all this in mind, I began studying it. a text of Tibetan Buddhism about love and compassion, which is called a mind training text or Lojong teachings. And when I study something, it always helps me to share what I'm studying with others.

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So wherever I went, I was talking for a long time about the Lojong texts and about compassion and about love. And after a while, I had done quite a bit of talking. And some of the students in our groups in Mexico appreciated these teachings and made transcripts of my talks. And so I took those transcripts. It was so moving, you know, that they had done this, that I said, oh, I should do something with these transcripts, and I made them into a little book. And I was a little surprised, to be honest with you, that Shambhala, wanted to publish this book since there are already so many commentaries to the text. But I guess there weren't commentaries by an ignorant Zen person before. They were all wise Tibetan Buddhist practitioners.

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So maybe the fact that it was for Zen, it's sort of called a Zen commentary. Maybe that made it a little different, I don't know. Anyway, so in honor of Mother's Day, And in homage to our own inner capacity for love and compassion, I want to read you a little section from the book. First, I should explain that lojong means mind or heart training. And so the idea of this text is that you can train, it's an amazing idea, isn't it? You can train your heart, you can train your mind to increase your capacity for love and compassion. You just don't have to. assume that your capacity is always gonna be the same, you can actually extend it, widen it, broaden it, you can feel more. That's the underlying theory of this text. And it's organized under seven points, seven points of mind training or heart training.

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And there are 59 practice slogans that are organized under these seven points. The second of the seven points is called training in compassion. And it's divided into two parts, absolute compassion or absolute bodhicitta and relative compassion, relative bodhicitta. So I'll read you the part about, under that second point. This is a section from that part. Now let's begin with considering what empathy and compassion actually mean. In English, there are at least three words to describe the capacity to feel the feelings of others. Empathy is the capacity to feel another's feelings. It requires that we not be so self-absorbed that we're tone deaf to the experience of others.

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Most of us unfortunately, and without realizing it, are actually living out Bette Midler's old joke. Maybe you remember this joke. Okay, enough about me. Let's talk about what you think about me. It's ridiculous, but actually, when you think about it, That is how we are concerned about the feelings of others. We're concerned about the feelings of others insofar as they have to do with us. Is she mad at me? Does he like me? Is he going to cooperate with what I need now? Was he offended by what I just said? Is she jealous of me? This is how we feel the feelings of others. But this really isn't empathy. Real empathy requires that we develop the capacity to put our own concerns aside just long enough anyway to notice what somebody else is going through internally without any reference to ourselves or whether we approve of it or disapprove of it or whether we have the solution to their problem.

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Just to feel what they're feeling from their side. But the way I'm using the word empathy, and as I've been talking about this, I realize people have different ways of understanding these words, but the way I'm thinking of empathy anyway, you can be empathetic, but not necessarily care about somebody, right? You can be really good at sensing what other people are feeling just enough to be able to control or manipulate them. So con artists are probably very empathetic. They really get what other people are thinking and feeling. Sociopaths are probably brilliant empaths. So I'm using the word sympathy to mean empathy plus caring. So when we're sympathetic to others, we can feel their feelings, but now we actually care about them.

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We want them to be happy. We don't want them to be unwell. We actually care. And then compassion is sympathy for others, specifically in the case of their suffering. So most of us think of compassion as a warm, fuzzy, pleasant feeling, but actually it's not. Because it's not that easy to really feel the feeling of another person when that person is suffering. We have to take in the suffering. And then, compassion also means that we care about the suffering, and we want to do something about it, and we're determined to do something about it, even if the only thing that we can do is listen to them. Because a lot of times, possibly most of the time, when someone's suffering, the only thing that we can do is care and listen. So the training in this Lojong text

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is about the cultivation of all three of these capacities, that we are empathetic, sympathetic, and compassionate. And the technical term for this in Mayana Buddhism is bodhicitta, which literally means the impulse or desire for spiritual awakening, which doesn't sound much like sympathy or compassion. Seeking awakening sounds like something else, yet implicit in the Mahayana Buddhist understanding of spiritual awakening is the thought that spiritual awakening actually means precisely awakening to a heartfelt concern for others since any selfish effort even with a goal of supreme wisdom and enlightenment for oneself could never lead to actual awakening it would always lead to more and more rarefied and sophisticated forms of narrowness Spiritual awakening is exactly dropping the sense of one's own narrow separateness.

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In other words, it is essentially and profoundly altruistic. So cultivating bodhicitta means cultivating true and heartfelt concern for others in a way that's not clinging or arrogant, but is based on the accurate wisdom that none of us could ever be alone. that we all need each other and we are all closely related to each other. In our culture, intelligence and caring seem to be quite different from each other. A highly intelligent person may often be a little arrogant or abstract, we think. A deeply feeling person, we think, probably is a kind of a fuzzy thinker, you know, because they're so confused by their constant emotions. But in Buddhist thought, true intelligence and real caring would always go together. They're like two wings of a noble bird that must be activated together in flight in perfect harmony and rhythm.

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Buddhism assumes that true intelligence and true altruism will always merge. The essence of bodhicitta, as I am saying, is love and concern for others. And we start to try to cultivate these. And as soon as we do, we realize that this is not something we're going to do on our own. Of course we need other people to do this. Because opening up our own lives means opening up to what's around us, to others, to the world, to our radical connectedness. So bodhicitta is the feeling of love based on the deep recognition that what we call self and what we call others are designations, concepts, habits of mind, deeply ingrained, to be sure, but not actual realities of the world.

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So in other words, it turns out that real altruism is not self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, a guilt-driven sense that we should be good, we should be nice, we should be kind. We're all familiar with that. But real bodhicitta is something else. It's the profound recognition that self and other are not fundamentally different, only apparently different. And because of this, the range and feeling of bodhicitta is much wider than we would expect. A whole world of altruism and its effects opens up before us. There's almost no limit to what can be done to benefit others. And we now see that the only way that we could love ourselves is by loving others. And the only way that we could actually love others is to love ourselves. And this explains a lot of crazy love that turns out to be painful, right?

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Because sometimes you have self-denigration and we're loving others, but it doesn't work out. because we don't also love ourselves and vice versa. So in other words, there's really no difference between self-love and loving others. And when we understand this, it changes our lives. And once we open to it, it's impossible to go back. It's impossible to continue to fool ourselves with selfishness and resentment. Now, of course, probably we'll have plenty of selfish and resentful feelings because we have a big, long-standing habit of having those feelings. But now, we will know them for what they really are. And when we know them for what they really are, they're far less compelling because we will have seen for ourselves how stupid and childish and blind these feelings really are.

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And it wouldn't be so bad to be stupid and childish and blind. That's all right, you know. But the thing is, it's also so painful. And we begin to notice this. It is really painful. Self-centeredness and all the emotions that we feel that come from our self-centeredness, our envy, our anger, our greed, our frustration, and on and on and on. This is the pain of our lives, right? And who wants to go on and on and on feeling pain when you realize that the reasons why you're feeling that way are stupid? And you've seen through that stupidity. Who would want to go back? So it does become impossible to be willfully and intentionally aggressive. It becomes almost impossible to be willfully aggressive. and intentionally disrespectful of others, because we can simply see with our own eyes, just as clear as we can see the sky above and the sun when it sets, that all of life is one sky warmed by one sun.

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So who in the world are we resenting here? Who are we angry at? To separate self from others is simply not in accord with the way we see our lives. So there is no way to be resentful, hateful, or self-centered favoring ourselves over others. Even though, as I say, our habit this way is very strong and these feelings keep coming back, we know better now. We see that love is not a rare emotional option that maybe we're lucky enough to participate in once in a while No. Love is a fact of life. It's there in every blade of grass. A fact of life we now desperately know we have to conform to for our own good and happiness. And this is a much deeper change of heart than the conventional resolution to be good, to be nice, although probably we will be good and we will be nice, but with a different feeling.

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Much more raw, visceral, and intimate response to our lives. So absolute bodhicitta is absolute love. A love that's bigger than any emotion. That would include all emotions. It's bigger than any object of love. So big that there's no beloved and no lover. total vision of life as love itself. And within such love there cannot be any loss because it's bigger than that. It includes all loss within it. It includes absence. So nothing could ever be lost. Absolute bodhicitta is the empty, perfect, expansive, joyful, spacious nature of existence itself. It's not something we've added on to existence.

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It's always been there in life, as life. It's always been how things are. Love has been surrounding us all this time, but we have been so convinced by our smallness that we just never looked around and noticed. So in contrast to this exalted state, an exalted view is relative bodhicitta, which means now we have to do a little work. Relative bodhicitta is when I roll up my sleeves and get on with the business of actually loving somebody. Relative bodhicitta is when I try to do something, when I try to help in some way out of my feeling of concern, when I try to offer encouragement, support, food, clothing, better laws. improved political systems, and on and on and on.

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With relative bodhicitta, we now make efforts that we might be successful at, or not. With relative bodhicitta, we love and we suffer loss, and we cry over the losses, and our hearts are broken, and we grieve, and we want our hearts to be broken, and we want to grieve. Or? We take delight in our own delight and the delight of others. With relative bodhicitta, we try to defend our friends and help people in need. There's no end to the work demanded by relative bodhicitta. Sometimes it makes us take on huge projects. We make heroic efforts for years, maybe lifetimes. We understand that relative bodhicitta is literally a project without end. So when we're successful after maybe an entire lifetime at something, we say, good, now let's go on.

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There's still a lot more. We're just barely scratching the surface. Tomorrow, we'll get up and start all over again with the business of helping, righting wrongs, healing the sick, mending broken hearts. This may sound exhausting already to you, maybe you think too much. But actually, it's not exhausting. Because relative bodhicitta is built on a foundation of absolute bodhicitta. If relative bodhicitta is an endless job, absolute bodhicitta is the endless peace and the endless love that underlies the endless job, so it's Okay, and no problem. We always chant after the Dharma talk, as we will in just about a minute or two, the four great vows. And I always amused that people who come for the first time, you know, stumble into the room and somebody hands them a card or something and they chant, beings are numberless.

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I vow to save them. Pretty big job. So after the lecture, you will be committing yourself to this job. So you might ask, who in their right mind would make such a commitment? And yet, all these years, people have been coming to Green Gulch week after week and chanting these lines. I wonder what you're all thinking. Maybe you don't notice what you're saying. Or maybe you think, well, it's just like all the other religious mumbo jumbo that they chant everywhere, it doesn't really mean anything. Or maybe you think, well, this is Zen, and Zen is famous for extravagant, paradoxical, outrageous pronouncements. But actually, no.

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This is serious, it's literally a sensible commitment, in my view, the only reasonable thing for a person to do in a lifetime, the only reasonable way to spend a life. Endless need. We acknowledge, endless need. We're not surprised when there seems to be more need. Endless need, perfectly and exactly matched by endless love, endless caring, and endless commitment. And this is not something we have to somehow laboriously, you know, earnestly produce. It's something that we recognize is how the world already works and has always worked. And all we have to do is cooperate by letting go of our stupid habit of self-clinging, which ought to be easy. It's not that easy, but it ought to be easy.

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So relative bodhicitta, we try hard to help in a practical way with real caring and real feeling. Absolute bodhicitta. We don't need to worry about it because even if our helping doesn't do a bit of good, and often it doesn't do any good, it's fine. Because of the big love that's everywhere and that heals everything anyway, no matter what we do or don't do, so we can drop the desperate idea that everything depends on us and we're weighed down by the world's cares and worries. Actually, everything does depend on us, but it's the big us, the absolute bodhicitta us, not the relative small us that it depends on. And because of this big us that we really are, Everything is already taken care of. And so we are free to love and to do our absolute best to help, working really, really hard our whole life through in happiness, in delight, and without having to be burned up by our concern for others.

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So these two, absolute bodhicitta and relative bodhicitta, depend on each other. They're just two sides of a coin. Without absolute bodhicitta, relative bodhicitta becomes forced. Maybe some of you who are in the caregiving community know about this. You get really mad at the people you're helping because they're not getting better and they don't even appreciate what you're doing for them. And you're so exhausted that you're mad at them for this. That happens. No. We need absolute bodhicitta to sustain our work. But without relative bodhicitta, absolute bodhicitta becomes a kind of grand religious abstraction. A big lofty ideal with no substance to it. What good is a really big love if it never gets applied in the world? What good is a really big love if we never love anybody?

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If we never support anybody? And when we do love someone, when we do support someone, when we do try to help someone, something magical happens. We become awakened. Thanks to those people. It turns out we're not helping them at all. They're helping us. And they liberate us from our dream of self-clinging. And that's the only way we can become truly and lastingly happy. But that's the trick. To be liberated from our dream of self-clinging. And isn't that the problem? We are all so absolutely convinced in ourselves. is not worried about themselves and what's going to happen to you.

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We've been convinced to think this way. In fact, you know, it's developmental. We have to be convinced of this and then we have to get the convinced. That's what it means to really grow up, isn't it? To be convinced that we're somebody, to know who we are and then to realize we're everybody. That we can't go on being trapped in the prison of self, the dream of self-clinging. That loving and caring for others is the way to be happy. And that's what our mothers do. Our mothers take care of themselves by taking care of us. So maybe we could change the name of the religion and call it motherism instead of Buddhism. Maybe the two words are actually synonyms at their best. Thank you very much for listening.

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Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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