Good morning. On the inhalation, the world arises. On the exhalation, the world descends, like a bright green turtle on the open ocean. Wonderful. Wonderful. A month or so ago, I told my daughter that if she wanted to watch videos on a school night, they would have to be educational videos. And after enduring somewhat of what we call her attitude, she finally agreed that she would watch one of my old favorites.

[01:00]

It's called The Powers of Ten. This film was made in the 1970s by Charles and Ray Eames. And this husband and wife team were quite influential in our culture and are perhaps best known for their very stylish molded plywood chairs, which I think all of you have probably sat on, whether you know it or not. And among many things that they influenced, architecture, design, they also did a great deal of experimental film. So this film, called Powers of Ten, was created to illustrate the relative size of things in the universe. Charles Eames had been taught by his mentor

[02:03]

that one way to open new insights and to solve design problems was by changing your point of view. In particular, to look at a thing from its next smallest or its next largest perspective. So in Powers of Ten, the film starts with a blanket and a picnic, a couple are on a blanket having a picnic, and the scene is one meter square, viewed from one meter distance away. And then every ten seconds, they would multiply the distance by ten and the width of the frame by ten. So in the first ten seconds, we see that the picnickers are on a blanket in a park by a lake. And ten seconds later, it's the city of Chicago.

[03:03]

And ten seconds after that, the continental United States. After a minute, we're looking at the entire planet Earth, filling the frame. At ten to the ninth, the orbit of the moon is visible. Ten to the thirteenth, the solar system. Ten to the seventeenth, the nearest star. And ten to the twenty-first, the Milky Way galaxy. And at this point, we are moving very fast, multiple times the speed of light. By ten to the twenty-third, our own galaxy is visible as a tiny speck of dust in a dusting of light, of galactic light. And finally, at one hundred million light years away from home,

[04:05]

the dusting itself has vanished, and we are left only to our imaginations. Well, we can't stand that for too long, so the camera begins moving back toward home, again at powers of ten until we're on the picnic blanket in the park by the lake. But not stopping there, the camera continues to move inward, this time using powers of magnification. And like tiny alices in Wonderland, we start entering the hand of the now-sleeping picnicker. And that journey ends at ten to the minus twelve, where we are all packed inside a vibrating proton in the nucleus of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule of a single white blood cell coursing through a capillary of the hand.

[05:08]

And once again, we are left with the utter silence that surrounds and permeates our imaginal universe, the silence of don't-know. At that point, the credits began to roll, and we were back in the living room, where my daughter turned to me and said, somewhat incredulously, Mom, are we in outer space? And I thought, well, at age ten, you imagine you've told your children most of the facts of life, but it never occurred to me I hadn't mentioned that we are indeed in outer space. And where might that be? Outer space. I don't think we have much more of a clue

[06:13]

than those tiny little arrows like you see at the mall on the maps. You are here. At a picnic in the park. So this is what I want to talk about today, about the surprises that we encounter with sudden shifts in our perspective, in our point of view, when we think of the unthinkable, when we stretch past familiar boundaries into the world of wonderment, into the world of imagination. So in this regard, for many years, I have been pondering just what was going on in old China and old India, when the Mahayana, or the great vehicle teachings of the Buddha, fully flowered into a literary form. I think most of you have been exposed to the Mahayana teachings,

[07:17]

whether you know it or not. It's a lot like the Ames chair. Every Sunday, our speakers here at Green Gulch, being students of Zen, are also offspring of the Mahayana tradition. So you've often heard quotations from the Heart Sutra, or the Vimalakirti Sutra, Avatamsaka Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, and so on. I recently finished teaching a six-week class on the Vimalakirti Sutra, so I was struck again by the power within these verses to induce a radiant vision of alternate universes, and then at once to snap us back to ordinary perceptions of reality, if by no other method than simply closing the book. So I wanted to give you a small example of these texts

[08:17]

from the Vimalakirti Sutra. This is a verse called The Inconceivable Liberation, and in this chapter, Vimalakirti, who is a very wise and nicely dressed layman, has just imported 3200,000 jeweled thrones which have arranged themselves neatly in his small house without causing any crowding, so that he might provide seating for his 3200,000 guests who have come to listen to him expound the Dharma. Then the Venerable Sariputra said to the Lathavi Vimalakirti, Lathavi is his tribal name, he's from the Lathavi tribe, Noble Sir, it is astonishing that these thousands of thrones,

[09:19]

so big and so high, should fit into such a small house, and that the great city of Vaishali, the villages, cities, kingdoms, capitals of Jambudvipa, the other three continents, the abodes of the gods, the Nagas, the Yakshas, the Gandharvas, the Asuras, the Garudas, the Kimaras, and the Maharagas, that all of these should appear without any obstacle, just as they were before. The Lathavi Vimalakirti replied, Reverend Sariputra, for the Tathagatas and the Bodhisattvas, there is a liberation called inconceivable. The Bodhisattva who lives in the inconceivable liberation can put the king of mountains, Sumeru, which is so high, so great, so noble, and so vast, into a mustard seed. He can perform this feat without enlarging the mustard seed and without shrinking Mount Sumeru.

[10:21]

And the deities of the assembly of the four Maharajas and of the heavens do not even know where they are. Only those beings who are destined to be disciplined by miracles see and understand the putting of the king of mountains, Sumeru, into the mustard seed. That, Reverend Sariputra, is an entrance to the domain of the inconceivable liberation of the Bodhisattvas. Such a Bodhisattva can pick up with her right hand this billion-world galactic universe as if it were a potter's wheel and spinning it around, throw it beyond universes as numerous as the sands of the Ganges, without the living beings therein knowing their motion or its origin. And she can catch it and put it back in its place without the living beings suspecting their coming and going. And yet the whole operation is visible.

[11:25]

So I would like to propose that what was going on back then in the ancient Buddhist world at the level of literary art and craft was a shifting of perspectives not unlike in the powers of ten. And these shifts we also are familiar with nowadays through other films, obvious examples like The Matrix, Harry Potter, The Sixth Sense, Jacob's Ladder. But the motivation for those literary inventions of long ago was not simply intellectual or artistic playfulness. Those things are fine, of course, too, but I think it was a re-inspiration of the deep compassion that flowered in the heart of Shakyamuni Buddha on the occasion of his enlightenment. What the Buddha saw as he sat under the Bodhi tree

[12:33]

was that he, not unlike my daughter, had mistakenly believed that the world was simply what he saw and what he thought, and even more importantly what he liked and what he didn't like, and how he was going to get things to go the way he wanted. If we imagine ourselves under the base of that tree day after day after day with no other resolve than to watch the antics of our thoughts and our perceptions, as they arise and as they fall in the mental gymnasiums of our own minds, soon we would see that all of them eventually will curl up into our laps and take a snooze. This is the innate talent of the human mind for tranquility, for perfect peace.

[13:35]

Once the tiger has been tranquilized, you can wash out its ears, open its eyes, and check in its mouth for cavities. But most importantly, with a calm mind, we can see virtue in ourselves and in others, and we can begin the reconstructive activities that break down those ceaseless and unpleasant habits of speech, thought, and action, which are the plague of our lives and of the lives of those that we love, or perhaps would love if they could get close enough to us. Calming the mind again and again is the most basic practice of the Buddhist path. With a calm mind, we open the sutras to receive the guidance of the ancestors' teaching. And not only are we led to an understanding of the teaching, of Buddhist theory,

[14:41]

but most importantly, to a reenactment of the Buddhist experience itself. Toward that end, the Mahayana tradition has intentionally invoked in us the extreme grandeurs and the extreme plasticity of our imaginal worlds. On the inhalation, the world arises. On the exhalation, the world descends, like a bright green turtle on the open ocean. Wonderful. Wonderful. Well, one problem is that we have so much going on in our minds that we've become accustomed to. And we've hardly noticed that the conjurations that we create throughout the day are how we make the world, the world that we live in, the world that we inhabit. The Buddha called this ignoring of how the mind works

[15:43]

and of what it's doing throughout the day the fundamental affliction of ignorance. Unlike children that we once were, we have forgotten for the most part to simply be in awe of these conjurations. Stories about ourselves, about our neighbors, our friends, our colleagues, and those alien nations grow very large in our minds until they result in destructive and violent behaviors or unwholesome attachments. And yet we are deeply afraid of what might be left of us without our convictions, our opinions, and our righteous indignation. But like it or not, the day will come for each of us without exception when those stories and all the props with which we have given ourselves the illusions of safety

[16:44]

and self-control will be taken away. For some it will be very sudden, and for others there will be a long wait. We call this sudden change in perspective death. And we think of it, if at all, as the most unwelcomed guest in our house. So for that reason I wanted to tell you another story about our dear brother death. And this story is free of fear and is marked by beauty, grace, joy, love, and humor. Over the past few months I have been privileged to be among a rather large gathering of family and friends of a woman named Allison Rudy

[17:45]

who, not unlike the Ames chair, has been a part of your lives whether you know it or not. She has, through her many community services, brought great benefit to the community that we live in, in Marin County, both as a council member and as the mayor of Mill Valley. She was the mother of a wonderful son, a sculptor, an interior designer, and a serious student of philosophy, of art, and of spirit. She also shared her deep affections with two very distinct communities in the Bay Area, one being Glide Memorial Methodist Church in the Tenderloin, and the other being Green Gulch Farms and Center. At the beginning of her remarkable journey, I don't think it was so different for her than it is for the rest of us

[18:49]

when we consider the matter of our own dying. It is inconceivable to us how it might be not to be. And it's scary. You know, it's so scary. And yet much of our poetry, our love songs, our humor, art, our music, reach into the heart, past the wall of fear, and draw on that special relationship we have with our own mortality. My own mother is one to joke about these things. Oftentimes she'll complain about some new ache or pain, and then, knock on wood, she looks up to the heavens saying, Not that I'm complaining, you understand. So we would rather be here with our pains and our aches than be we don't know where.

[19:49]

In some spiritual traditions, as you well know, reassurances are given. There are pearly gates, St. Peter, angels, music, white gowns. I was raised as a Christian child, and unfortunately I lost my faith. But I wound up here with the Buddhists, and what I got in turn were philosophical teachings and some stress reduction exercises to reduce my anxiety, my lust, and my anger. But Alison has given me something more. She's brought the teachings to life, and I'm deeply, deeply grateful. She gave me access to her work as she continued living right up until the very last moment and the very last breath. In the words of Master Dogen,

[20:59]

In birth there is nothing but birth, and in death there is nothing but death. Accordingly, when birth comes, face and actualize birth. When death comes, face and actualize death. Do not avoid them, and do not desire them. So I went to see her every few weeks as the changes within her body that were brought on by the cancer became more obvious. She said it didn't hurt, but pretty soon she could no longer eat, and eventually she could no longer drink, so she was starving to death. But she could think, and she could feel, and we all saw how she used her reasoning and her feelings to clear the way of remorse,

[22:02]

hostility, grief, and despair. And she turned her awareness toward the clear lights of her life. And that light shone in her eyes and in the sweet, tender kisses that she gave each of us when we arrived and when we parted. And it showed in her love for her son, her siblings, her old friends, for the rain, the lagoon, and for holding in her hand a glass of clear water. I'd like to read a poem that was crafted from her words by a friend, and it begins with the friend speaking. I am thankful to have ears to hear tonight the words I heard last from my friend, to hear her say she has found her life in what she's lost. Let go. I, who have been living in the glitter, year on spangly year,

[23:04]

now know God is not in what's gold, what's bright. God is in what's clear. I had to give up eating, drinking, live on sugar dripping in my vein, to see all beauty in this glass I raise to light before I tip it to my drying lips, to see all joy in what comes through this gift of water. Water. Simple. Clear. As the time went on and Allison grew weaker, she invited our sitting group to come and join her on a Friday morning, and she sat on the couch. She was in the arms of her son, and we did our usual morning routine of sitting together, ringing the bell, talking about the teaching, and in this case, her offering to talk with us

[24:08]

about what it was like to be dying. The intimacy, directness, clarity and fearlessness of that conversation was like giving the tiger a bath. A week later, Allison was even closer to death, and it reminded me of the way all of us are close to our pillows at night. On the last night of her life, another smaller meditation group came that met on Wednesdays and sat with her. One of the members suggested that maybe Allison would like to ring the bell, even though she hadn't moved or registered a perception of their being there. And then suddenly she reached out her arm and took hold of the bell. Within a few minutes of the ending of that period of meditation,

[25:11]

Allison's brother Tom came upstairs where the ladies had gathered after the sitting to say that they had done their work and that his sister had been able to take her final breath. Meanwhile, back at my house, we were getting ready for bed when the phone rang to say that Allison had just died. I was willing to wait until the next morning to go and see her and the family, but my daughter began putting on her shoes and crying, and she said, We have to go now. She's our family. And so we did. And again, how grateful to have gone to a place where I might imagine it would be sad or scary, but instead found it to be only beautiful, loving, and filled with gratitude. It took Sabrina a few minutes to go into the house because she was afraid,

[26:14]

but finally she overcame her fear and went inside to the room where Allison's body was laying. And then we all went inside, and we touched her, and we talked sweetly to her about our love and our gratitude and our respect. Sabrina then asked, Are we going to give her a bath? Allison's son, Chris, and her brother, Tom, had made her very beautiful there on her four-poster bed, surrounded by long-stemmed white roses. So we all agreed to wash her body together and to dress her in such finery as only her closet would allow. A burgundy silk blouse, golden pants, and a beaded scarf. With a last brushing of rose petals, we all stood back and proclaimed her one meter square. At that moment, the most gorgeous and beloved spot on the earth.

[27:19]

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. May our intention equally...

[27:31]

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