This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening and welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. My name is Rosalie Curtis and I'm a priest at Zen Center. And together with Wendy Lewis, I'm currently co-leading a practice period. So we're in the fifth week of this six-week practice period. And we're studying a text called The Six Perfections, Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character. And the author is Dale Wright. And I will be using that text for a lot of my talk tonight.

[01:03]

It's a wonderful book, and I recommend it. And I also recommend the study of the six perfections. It's been very helpful for me in my life. So, the six perfections, or paramidas, is the Sanskrit word. are, starting with the first one, generosity, ethics, tolerance or patience, energy, meditation, and wisdom. And these are six qualities that an enlightened bodhisattva has. But they're also the name of... the practices that lead us along the bodhisattva path to awakening or enlightenment.

[02:06]

And I want to say something about what a bodhisattva is. So a bodhisattva takes the vow to save all beings. And at the end of the lecture tonight, we will chant, beings are numberless, I vow to save them. Another way of expressing that would be to say that a bodhisattva vows to devote his life to leading everyone to awakening or enlightenment. And yet another way of expressing it, which I feel much more comfortable with, is to say that a bodhisattva lives or endeavors to live for the benefit of all beings. So that's the definition that I like to use. And this vow is sometimes called the thought of enlightenment or bodhicitta.

[03:17]

And I'm just telling you all this because I'll be using some of these words in my talk tonight. And you'll hear these words a lot if you listen to talks and read about Buddhism. So tonight, I want to zero in on the third perfection, the third paramita, which is... or tolerance. It's sometimes translated as endurance or forbearance or courage. And a person who possesses this quality is imperturbable, calm, and focused in the midst even of adversity.

[04:20]

or turmoil. So it's a strength of character that enables composure and a constancy of purpose so that the bodhisattva can pursue universal enlightenment despite the enormous difficulty of that undertaking. So it's a help and a resource for the active bodhisattva. And bodhisattvas cultivate this capacity through practicing the paramitas, through practicing, in this case, the perfection of patience. They build the capacity to withstand danger, suffering, injustices done to them. and the onslaught of their own and other people's negative emotions.

[05:25]

The Mahayana texts recommend that bodhisattvas develop three kinds of tolerance. And the first is the capacity to tolerate others. all forms of personal suffering. And the second is the capacity to tolerate injuries to our body or our ego that are caused by other people. And the third is the capacity to tolerate the truth of how things actually are, which may not be the same as our ideas about things. It may conflict with some of our strongly held views. So I want to talk about the first kind of tolerance, the capacity to tolerate all forms of personal suffering.

[06:34]

And this makes me think of the first noble truth. So the Buddha said that life entails unavoidable suffering. And we know that this is true. We know it in our own lives. And we know that no one can avoid old age, sickness, death, not getting what we want, getting what we don't want. being separated from people we love, and having to associate with people that we dislike or even hate. The third noble truth says that we can end suffering through insight. And we bring insight to bear on...

[07:42]

seeing the inevitable alternation between suffering and its opposite in our lives. So we're always going back and forth between suffering and some more positive feeling or emotion, and we don't have much control over it. And we accept suffering as part of the human condition. as part of doing this training in the perfection of patience. And it's good that we can accept this, because if we didn't realize that it was just a natural part of the human condition, we might think that whenever we're suffering, it means that we're doing something wrong, or that something is wrong with us. or that there must be somebody to blame for our situation.

[08:45]

And this would be very destructive to our relationships. We don't always accept suffering, sometimes because we believe it to be unjust or unfair. We may say, why me? Why me? What did I do to deserve this? Why is this happening to me? And so the early Buddhist teachings on karma and rebirth tell us to regard all suffering as just repayment for our actions in this or a previous life. And that teaching answers the question, why me? So whether or not we can believe that everything that happens to me is the result of my past actions, it certainly is true that good actions produce good results and bad actions produce bad results.

[10:07]

I think we all know this in our lives. And our actions become altogether our personal history, our identity. And so, in a sense, we are what we do. And that's why we take such good care of our actions and what we do in the world. The second kind of tolerance, the capacity to tolerate injuries of body and ego that are caused by other people, involves a lot of working with anger and hatred. We develop our capacity to tolerate insults and injustices and other harmful actions that people do to us.

[11:12]

with some grace and serenity. And we learn to let go of resentment. And resentment is a very good thing to let go of. One of our former abbots, Mel Weissman, once said that resenting someone is like allowing somebody that you dislike to live rent-free inside your head. Shantideva is a 9th century Buddhist monk and poet who wrote a version of The Way of the Bodhisattva, another version of the same teaching about the perfections, in verse form. And he sort of glosses over the first two perfections, generosity and ethics.

[12:14]

and spends a lot of time talking about arousing the thought of enlightenment or bodhicitta. And he spends a lot of time talking about patience or tolerance. And he begins his chapter about patience very dramatically. So I want to read what he has to say. He says, gathered in a thousand ages, such as deeds of generosity or offerings to the blissful ones. A single flash of anger shatters them. No evil is there similar to anger. No austerity to be compared with patience. Deep yourself, therefore, in patience, in all ways, urgently, with zeal.

[13:23]

So this is one of the most emphatic instructions that I have seen in a Buddhist text, and I'm impressed by it. It shows me how important this ancient monk... felt that it was to work with our anger and to cultivate patience. And we do this through meditation. First of all, through calming meditation, which makes it easier for us to see and accept all kinds of truth. and also through three forms of insight meditation that are described in the early sutras. So the first is meditative reflection on the thought that every negative thing done to us is a direct karmic result of our own past actions.

[14:33]

it suggests that we consider the person who harms us as doing us a favor by helping us to end the effects of previous wrongdoing. Now this instruction relates to the Buddhist belief in karma and rebirth. So the idea is that If someone makes you suffer, you are expiating the karma of previous bad actions and being saved from having that karma still present at the end of your life and therefore having a bad rebirth. Does that make sense? You know what I'm saying? And if instead of being grateful to that person, we get angry and retaliate, we perpetuate the whole cycle and begin all over again producing more karma.

[15:51]

So the second form of insight meditation that's recommended is reflection that those who treat us unjustly and with malice... are our teachers of the perfection of tolerance without their being aware of it. So those who harm us give us an opportunity to practice disciplined behavior. Our friends and the people who love us can't give us this. Only our enemies can do this for us. can irritate us and make us suffer and give us an opportunity to practice patience. And therefore, the sutras say that we should be grateful to them. The third form of insight meditation is the reflection that it is because of a misconception of the self that we have

[17:01]

all of our afflictive emotions. And this misconception of the self is a belief that we exist in a permanent way, that we have a self or a soul or are a person that continues and has an existence separate from other people and things. And this is a false idea. We know that the teachings say that this is not true. But from this idea of a self come all the afflictive emotions, which are anger, hatred, concern about praise and blame, envy, jealousy, fear and anxiety, depression. lots of negative things that cause us lots of suffering, and it all goes back to this belief in our self and living in accord with this belief in our self.

[18:06]

So one of the ways that we can loosen the grip of these afflictive emotions is to reflect on interdependence. which shows us in a situation where someone is harming us, that it asks the question why they're treating us so badly and encourages us to see the reasons, which might be that... People treated them badly. Maybe their parents were abusive to them or they have particularly stressful difficulties in their life right now. Anyway, it's worth investigating what the reasons are that a person might be treating us badly to look into the conditioning factors. And also there's this classic question about...

[19:14]

what to blame. So the way this is sometimes expressed is, if someone's hitting me with a stick, should I be angry at the stick that's causing my suffering? Or should I be angry at the person who's wielding the stick? And I think what this points to is that when people are treating us badly, It's not the person who's harming us that we should be angry at. It's the afflictive emotions that are driving them. It's the conditions that are causing them to treat us this way, that are causing suffering for them as well as for us. We practice as part of our training in the perfection of tolerance. cultivating equanimity in the face of praise or blame.

[20:21]

And we do this by understanding how ephemeral both of them are. So we alternate between praise and blame just as we alternate between suffering and its opposite. We have no real control over it. Both of them are going to arise many times in our life. And if we can have some equanimity with it, we'll be much happier and cause less karma-producing grief in the world. The third kind of tolerance is the capacity to tolerate the truth about oneself and the world. So we bring wisdom to to bear on the practice of tolerance. This is the same wisdom that is the sixth perfection.

[21:24]

It's the perfection that is our goal. It's the final perfection in the series, and yet we need it to inform our training all along the way as we practice generosity, ethics, tolerance, energy, meditation through wisdom. So we bring that wisdom into our practice and cultivate insight into the emptiness of things. And emptiness, the concept of emptiness, includes the understanding from early Buddhism of impermanence, dependent arising, and no self. The ideas that we are completely impermanent and changing all the time on a cellular level were not the same for two moments in a row.

[22:35]

And also we're dependent upon everything else. My existence is dependent on my parents and food and sunshine and the earth. And actually it's dependent on everything except some self of mine. And also the understanding that there really is no lasting... person here. There's no fixed entity that's independent and separate from everything else that lasts. So these are the ideas from the Buddhist teachings of impermanence, dependent, arising, and no self. And that constitutes the teaching of emptiness. And this is a very advanced... it's difficult to realize and stand this truth, which conflicts so deeply with our ideas.

[23:39]

And so until we realize this truth, we accept it on faith. However, the practices of the paramitas move us along the path to wisdom and realization and that truth. All of this raises a reasonable question about what a modern ideal of tolerance would look like. Who would that person be? So for example, are we to tolerate anything and everything? Should we always be patient and willing to wait no matter what? And if not, how do we draw the line? What criteria do we use? So we need wisdom.

[24:47]

We need to inform our practice with wisdom to know when to accept injustices done to us or other people. and when to courageously insist that justice be done. And it's important in this consideration to distinguish between the action and the agent or doer of the action. So we know we can't tolerate murder, rape, violence, racism, some evils. And our practice of tolerance can't be grounded in a lack of conviction or courage and just be a passive indifference to accepting everything that happens.

[25:53]

The perfection of tolerance is the art of understanding what... and when and how to tolerate, shaped by wisdom. And it's based on the conviction that all beings deserve to live under conditions that allow pursuit of happiness. Passively tolerating evil is participating in that evil. So we try to develop skillful means for tolerating or for developing tolerance and also for working with our anger, which is a big hindrance in our life. Anger is usually said to be the worst of the three poisons. The three poisons are greed, hate, and delusion or ignorance.

[26:58]

And the particular ignorance that this refers to is the belief that we exist from our own side, that we have a permanent self. And out of this selfish idea arises greed and also hatred and anger and other afflictive emotions. So the selfishness that we have shows itself in the difference in our response, say, to when injustice is done directly to us and when just injustice is done to other people. So if we get much more upset when injustice is done to us... And we're not so concerned with injustice done to people on the other side of the world. That's an expression of our selfishness. And selflessness is the basis of insisting that injustice be done to no one.

[28:11]

And that's holding other people equal to ourself. This is a very difficult practice to do. In our universe, we are number one, and the idea of holding all people, including ourselves, as equal is a very advanced practice. So can we imagine an ideal person who does not respond to cruelty, and injustice, with anger and retaliation, but who nevertheless takes an energetic and effective stand against us. And I think we do have examples of such people in the modern world. Gandhi was one, Martin Luther King, Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama still living.

[29:14]

And all of these people knew and taught that to overcome evil in one's enemies, one must face them in a posture of love and not contempt or hatred. They understood that violence just begets more violence. And as Gandhi said, an eye for an eye. eventually blinds everyone. I am impressed that Martin Luther King was inspired in his social activism by Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh. And what it means to me is that good acts done in the world will inspire more good acts in the future by other people. And we can participate in this too.

[30:22]

So when we perform good acts in the world, they may inspire future good acts by other people who see us as examples. These people that I named were motivated by compassion rather than anger. And this profound passion Compassion enabled them to have the conviction and the courage to insist on peace and justice in the world, even for people that they did not know, even for strangers. A posture of anger sets up a dichotomy between a good us and an evil them, which doesn't work in the world. Instead, we have to include the perpetrators of evil as part of the us that we care about.

[31:29]

Wise tolerance neither allows evil acts to continue nor positions the doer of those acts outside the scope of our care and compassion. So all of this is contingent on working with anger, and practice is key. When we're involved in a situation that makes us angry and we feel gripped by emotion, I think the first thing we should do is pause and focus on our breathing. Just the pause helps because we stop and we may stop ourselves from reacting in some way that's harmful and doing actions that we regret.

[32:33]

And the focus on breathing slows us down and calms us and cools us out. so that we have a much better chance of being able to think clearly and see clearly before we act. I want to suggest some meditative techniques to use when we're angry or when we're gripped by emotion. We might consider... the ethical and practical consequences of the various possible responses we could have. Think them through and think realistically about what will happen if we take one course of action versus another. We might reflect on past occasions when we've been angry, and especially those occasions where people

[33:43]

we did act out our anger and create a bad situation. Maybe if we remember those now, we can prevent doing it again. It's important to learn to notice right away our anger when it arises and learn to identify it. Know what it feels like in our body and... note its detrimental effects so that we see the symptoms and can be on the alert that we need to be especially mindful. When we're angry, I think it's useful sometimes to just divert our attention from the person or situation that's inflaming us to something else. So one of my favorite ways of dealing with upsetting situations is to take a long walk, to get some fresh air, see some of nature, maybe have some actual enjoyment or joy.

[34:57]

And then when I come back and look at the situation again, I'll have fresh eyes. We can compare... the likely consequences of what we might do in this state of anger that we're in with our goals as a bodhisattva to live for the benefit of all beings. We may see that one course of action blocks the other, that they're incompatible, and then we can choose which is more important to us. It's always helpful to analyze the situation and understand what's really going on. So often our anger is based on underlying beliefs. For example, we often think that someone is deliberately harming us.

[35:58]

And that so often turns out not to be the case. Often people are just living their lives and trying to find happiness just as we are. And they may run into us because they want the same things we do. But they're usually not trying to harm us. And also the consequences of... The harm done to our lives may seem much smaller when we reflect on it after some period of time. Sometimes I feel like I have to do something about a situation right now, and I get all full of adrenaline. But a few days later, the situation doesn't seem really so important at all. So there are some pitfalls to avoid when we're in this situation of a difficult circumstance.

[37:15]

And one of them is when things go badly, responding badly usually makes it worse. Whereas if we can somehow have a good and positive response, we may be able to turn the situation... and make it better or at least not make it any worse. Becoming resentful and dwelling on our expectations of some entitlement is usually not a good course. I think Buddhist teachings would say that we have no entitlements. We don't own anything. So thinking about what we're entitled to and expecting other people to honor that is probably not going to be a fruitful course of action. Becoming cynical and convincing ourselves that nothing is ever going to go well or that nothing matters will just push us into despair, which is a form of giving up and surrender.

[38:29]

So practicing tolerance, we learn that accepting reality, patient people do not waste time resenting and wishing things were different. Things aren't different. They're the way they are. And what is helpful is to have as positive a response to that as possible. And it's helpful, I think, to remember that Feelings are not permanent. And we won't feel like this for very long. If we're in the grip of some really strong emotion, there's such a lot of adrenaline and movement to go do something or retaliate or show someone that they're doing the wrong thing. But if we can just hold our seat and... sit with it and wait, usually these feelings will go away, even though we wish they would go away sooner.

[39:37]

And things will change. Our circumstances will change. And our problems will not always be the same. Our problems will be different tomorrow than they are today. So I think it's useful to remember that. And I want to close with a really simple meditation that I do sometimes that helps me with anger and upsetness. And it's called Just Like Me. And it's about interpersonal relations. So when I'm upset with someone, when I think that they're trying to harm me or do damage to me, I say to myself, Just like me, this person wants to be happy and safe and free from suffering.

[40:37]

And they're pursuing their happiness just like me. And I can say this for my friends, my teachers, people I don't know who live in other countries. and people I dislike. It works for everyone. And I think the more you use it, the softer your edge of anger and negative emotion will be. So I think this helps us to hold others equally with ourselves and cultivate selflessness. And So my wish to live for the benefit of all beings means wanting all others to be happy and safe and free from suffering. And I hope that little practice is of some benefit.

[41:41]

So thank you for listening. And I've used up all the time. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[42:12]

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