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 morning. Welcome to all of you. It's wonderful to see all of you here. Many, many friends and familiar faces and many new faces. So welcome all. My name is Linda Gallion, and I'm now the president of San Francisco Zen Center, something that, somewhat to my surprise, I'm finding a tremendous amount of joy in doing, in taking up this responsibility. So I'm really happy to be talking with all of you today. So today is the Zenathon. We've been talking about this for a couple of months now. This is our

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spring fundraiser and today is the day that we celebrate. So there's a big bike ride and yoga and hike and of course zazen going on at Green Gulch today. So if you want to go out there this afternoon, I think it's going on for quite some time. It will be a lovely celebration of our community, our practice and generosity, the practice of generosity. So that's what I want to talk about today is the practice of generosity. So generosity is the first of the paramitas. The paramitas are the practices or the qualities of mind of a bodhisattva. And paramita has this double meaning. One meaning of paramita is to cross over to the other shore from our life in the relative world where we struggle and suffer to nirvana or awakening.

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So it's crossing over to the other shore. And the other meaning, it's the same word, but it has this kind of dual meaning, is the practices to be cultivated. So it's the perfection. The other meaning is perfection. So the crossing over to the other shore is... is the practices to be cultivated, the practices of a bodhisattva. Bodhisattvas are awakening or enlightening beings that help all other beings to cross over to the other shore. So we're all bodhisattvas. And you could say that all Buddhist training centers, all monasteries, all Zen centers, are Bodhisattva Training Academies. I borrowed that from Greg Fane, who's here with us today. So here we all are in Bodhisattva Training Academy, and what do we train in?

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We train in many things, but the traditional trainings are in these paramitas, these perfections. So one of the wonderful things about the paramitas is that they're both the means and the end. When we think about it as training practices, then it's the means. It's what are we doing? What are we taking up? But it's also to realize that we're not separate from that other shore that we're trying to cross to. So it's also the end. It's also the qualities of mind of the bodhisattva, of the buddhas and bodhisattvas, these paramitas. are the natural qualities that we experience when we're awakened, when we're free from fear, when we're free from hindrance. So you could also say that the paramitas, and there are six of them, it's generosity, ethical conduct, patience, effort or energy, meditation, and wisdom.

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Actually, there are various lists of them. That's six, some lists are ten, but this is one of the most common ones. You could say that these are the adornments of emptiness. Isn't that nice? The adornments of emptiness. So within emptiness, there's kind of little sparks, and this is a way of describing the various facets of the jewel shining out in the world. You know, this generosity, this ethical conduct, relating well with people, relating well with the world, actually, not just with human beings. With patience, the ability to be with what arises, the effort or energy to simply keep going, to keep meeting what arises. And the meditation practice that both supports us and helps us find the mind that

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that is free, and the wisdom to see that we're completely not separate. So in all lists, I believe, the first is generosity. And generosity has a huge place in all spiritual teachings around the world, all ethical teachings, in fact. And it's no different in Buddhism. It's a foundational practice. Actually, in the early Buddhist teachings, there was a lot more discussion about generosity because there were many more teachings specifically for lay people. And for lay people, that was one of the main things that they practiced was generosity. Not just generosity to the monks, but generosity to one another, to their families, to themselves. So there are many, many teachings in the Pali Canon on generosity. So traditionally, the teachings are, one of the questions is, what do we give when we're generous?

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And in the tradition, it is said that there is material support, and I just learned that there's another one I never knew before, which is protection, and that feels really relevant in these times, you know, to think about. I think we're very aware of people and beings and environments that are vulnerable. So this is a gift that we can give is of protection. And then there's the teachings, the Dharma. That's something that we can give generously of. And the final gift, which traditionally was reserved for monks but is now widely available, is the gift of non-fear. And this is one of the most powerful gifts, is the gift of non-fear. And I'll come back to that in some depth. So we practice generosity and the perfection of generosity. So dana is generosity and paramita is perfection.

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But perfection is not perfect in the sense of without blemish or without flaw or something wrong with it. It is in a sense, but it's... in order to go beyond flaw, it means to go beyond duality. So when there's no separation, that is perfection. So the perfection of generosity is beyond the duality of any idea of a giver, of a receiver, or of a gift. These are completely inseparable. So our usual state of mind is there's me, And then there's everything else. There's all of you, there's the world, and... Yeah, you're all just part of the out there that's not me, but we all... Yes, we all have that point of view. We all have times when we inhabit that particular point of view, and that is...

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That sense of duality, that sense of separateness is the root of suffering. That's actually where suffering starts. So when we have this experience of an isolated or alienated self, that's when we begin to suffer. So to overcome that, we practice. So our motivation... in giving to others is at least as important as what we give. So in the early sutras, in the early teachings, there were lists. There are many lists. It was an oral tradition, so there's lots of lists. And one of them was the list of right and wrong motivations for giving. So some of these, some of the wrong motivations for giving are being shamed or intimidated into giving. giving to receive a favor, and giving to feel good about yourself.

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So, these are considered impure motivations. And it's really easy to think that impure means that there's something bad that you should get rid of. I'm gonna get rid of those impure things and then I'll be pure and then I'll be fine. And there's no end to that, actually. I can promise you there is no end to that. Because that trying to get rid of something, that's the last one, right? That trying to get rid of something, the idea that there's some problem with that. So in Zen, the teachings are very clear. I think it was always inherent in the teachings, but Zen teaches it very clearly that to be impure means to be dualistic. means to be suffering from this sense of separation, this duality, this me and everything else view of the world. So that's all impure means.

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And you can see, yeah, if I'm worried about being shamed or intimidated into giving, then I'm worried that you're going to judge me for how I'm giving. I know that feeling. You know, am I giving enough? Like we're all supposed to give. Am I giving enough? Am I giving too much? Am I attached to giving? Oh no, now I'm having impure thoughts about being pure. So, you know, this is just our minds doing what our minds do. So the first noble truth is that there is suffering, or there is stress, or there is worry, or there is difficulty. This exists in the world. We have some relationship with our world, and when we want it to be otherwise, then we have what is, we usually translate as suffering. We resist. And the second noble truth is that the cause of this is that we hold on.

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We cling. We try to make it otherwise. And you could also say we avert from it. Clinging and aversion are just two sides of the same thing. Or we're afraid of it. So, we're not trying to get rid of attachment either. We live with our attachment. There's a lovely phrase, to live like a lotus in muddy water. So the lotus only grows in muddy water. It doesn't grow in pure streams. And it grows right up out of the mud of attachment and aversion and the world. And here's this beautiful flower. So this is how we can live in the world. This is possible for us. But when we do have those moments of giving with a pure motivation... That is dhanaparamita. That is the perfection of wisdom.

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So that's how we're practicing generosity to develop this perfection of wisdom, which is completely beyond any ideas of giver, receiver, and gift. And just the fact that you might not be there all the time yet, don't let it stop you from being generous. You know? It's just because you can't, like, oh, you know? Fine. Fine. Fine, just watch that. Just like zazen, just watch what arises. It's a practice. And then you get to notice when it does arise easily and it's just completely natural. It's like, oh, I didn't even think of that as generosity. Of course my friend called and was unhappy and I took time to talk with her. I didn't think about it. I didn't think I'm being so generous, so kind. stopping what I'm doing to talk to my friend. No, of course. So much of what we do is naturally generous.

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We don't even see our own generosity. We often see others. Or those of us who are very fortunate have a practice of gratitude to see others' generosity, which brings us a lot of joy. So another way you could say it is that Dhanaparamita, the perfection of generosity, is a spirit of responding to the world and giving what is needed and appropriate at the time. So one of the manifestations of that is Avalokiteshvara or Kuan Yin, who is often depicted with a thousand hands and arms, able to reach out to anyone in the world and meet their needs. Usually considered as a manifestation of compassion but also as generosity, also as just boundless giving. And Avalokiteshvara appears in the Heart Sutra.

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Avalokiteshvara was deeply practicing Prajnaparamita. So it was deeply in a state of non-duality, of awakening to the true reality of all things. And there's a line that says the bodhisattva relies on prajnaparamita, this emptiness. And the mind is no hindrance. Without any hindrance, there is no fear. Far beyond all inverted views, one realizes nirvana. So when bodhisattvas, when we bodhisattvas in training, are relying on the actual state of the universe, and we have some faith that this is how things are, whether or not we're deeply in contact with that, we have some sense that, yeah, that's actually... I can somehow see that things are okay.

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Down at the bottom, things are okay. Then our mind, whatever our mind is doing, it's not a hindrance. actually. The hindrances are not a hindrance. It's like, I'm upset, okay. I'm anxious, okay. I'm angry, okay. You know, we can ride with that. We all have things we know how to ride with now. I have a headache, okay. Like, I don't get headaches much, so when I get a headache, it's like, oh my God, I have a headache. You know, it's like, I actually tell people, I have a headache, you know. I have a lot of friends who get headaches regularly, and then they'll mention something like, yeah, I've had this headache for three days, and I'm like, oh my God. But for them, it's just like, it's no hindrance. It's just like, I have a life, I keep going with my life. So everything in our life can just be our life, and we can meet it with some equanimity, some grace. It's possible to meet the whole of our life with grace.

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And generosity is one of those practices that really helps us to do that. So that line, without any hindrance, there is no fear. I don't have to be afraid of anything that happens. I don't have to be afraid of any of my states of mind. Everything that's out there is actually in here. It's all my reaction to what's out there. Years ago... I had two friends, and this was during one of the really terrible economic recessions, I forget which one, one of the big ones. Both were long-time Buddhist practitioners. One had commented, you know, I've had enough, I've had plenty all my life, and I have never, ever been free from worry about having enough, ever. He said, and even in this recession, I am really very, very little impacted.

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I see all the people around me being terribly impacted, and because of my investments, I'm not being really impacted. And I'm still never free of this worry. And there was another man who said, you know, I recently changed jobs and I was the last hired and, you know, I maybe let go. And I'm actually not worried. I was homeless at another point in my life. And, you know, it wasn't like it was easy sleeping under a bridge for a while. But I know what that's like and I'm not afraid of it. I know that I'll be okay. And I was so struck at the difference between these two people's experience. You know, that it wasn't about the circumstances. It was about their relationship to it. And it wasn't about their practice. You know, for the person who always had enough, he knew this was his practice. This was just his manifestation of suffering.

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We all have our manifestations of suffering. Those really noogie little things that don't go away, you know. And it wasn't like... And he was saying, yeah, this still arises. It wasn't like he was suffering with it in the same way that he used to. It's just like, yeah, this is still here. It doesn't really... Something about that has not yet moved. So... What fear does is it fosters greed instead of generosity. So the... mind of fear or greed is actually the mind of poverty. Lately I've been reading some really interesting studies about the mind of scarcity. They've studied this in some really interesting ways, like experiments where they'll set up, like, you think you don't have enough time to do a task, or they'll tell one group, you'll need to keep right on this, but you'll have enough time, versus...

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You know, you really have to keep going or you won't have enough time and then you'll fail, basically, at this task. And they found that almost without exception, the people who thought that there was some scarcity made bad decisions. They didn't do as well. And the only thing that was really different was that they thought they didn't have enough. They thought they didn't have enough money or property or time or whatever it was. That's fascinating. When we think we don't have enough... we're actually making worse decisions about the very thing that we're engaging with. When we think that we have enough and we're free from that worry, from that fear, we actually have the space to see what's there and deal with it. How remarkable, how encouraging. It's like, wow, worry doesn't really help. I mean, we know this, but it helps to really know this. That is, we've been told this and we know that that should be true, but do we really believe it?

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I know if I just worry about this in the right way, it will fix it. But the mind of worry is kind... It's a particular energetic quality of mind and it won't be satisfied. You know, it's like someone will tell you the perfect thing, which you can later see was the perfect thing. But at the time it's like, no, no, no, I'm just... I'm worrying here, don't try to stop me. Maybe that's just me, I don't know. So this mind of scarcity or lack, David Loy writes about the lack, you know, instead of suffering, there's this mind of lack. We have this sense of not enough, We're not enough, the world's not enough, whatever it is. Or it's too much. I mean, that's kind of the same side. Like, I'm not enough to meet this too much.

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Or I'm too much for the world. I can't get enough from it. Whatever it is. But from this sense of fear, then there arises greed. So, dana paramita is the medicine for this. The practice is actually the medicine for overcoming this painful state of mind. So the gift of non-fear awakens the mind of generosity. And we practice this non-fear so we can share it with others. I mean, we don't have it just for ourselves. Once we have it, it's like the immediate impulse is to want to share it. So there's no giving without receiving. No givers without receivers. I mean, this is what makes giving. I mean, in a sense you could say we just give.

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Like someone I knew in college walked in one day and she said, I'm in love. I said, that's wonderful. Who are you in love with? She said, I'm not in love with anybody. I'm just in love. And I knew exactly what she meant. It just arose spontaneously. So sometimes we just give to the world. But then, there's no giver, no receiver. But still, you know, giver, receiver, and gift are all there, and they're not there because they're not separate. So when we have this understanding, this is the perfection of giving, but when we sort ourselves into givers and receivers, then there's still generosity happening, there's still giving happening, but it hasn't yet come into its full flower. Shohaku Okamura once said that for a time he didn't want to receive gifts from others thinking that he should be giving, not taking.

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As a monk he thought he should just be giving, not taking. And he said, when we understand the teaching in this way, we simply create another standard to measure gaining and losing. We are still in the framework of gaining and losing. But when giving is perfect, there's no gain and no loss. I used to have a really hard time receiving. It's still not easy, but I've worked a lot on that. So about 25 years ago, I was on pilgrimage in India for about three months. And I had saved some money to buy a Buddha statue while I was there. And I'd looked at the beginning and I hadn't yet found anything. And we were in Sarnath and Varanasi for several weeks. And I met this Russian woman. She was amazing. She was from St.

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Petersburg. She was a Buddhist scholar and a practitioner, very deep practitioner. And she had like no money. She'd somehow managed to get there. and she was going to stay as long as she possibly could, knowing that when she went back, she wouldn't have an apartment, she wouldn't have any place to live. There were no places to live, because it was a time of privatization of housing in Russia. I guess it was the Soviet Union at that time, actually, in the early 90s. Forgive me, my history is poor. And her husband had bought the apartment. So... And everyone had bought the apartment, so the only apartments left were hugely expensive, way beyond her salary as a university professor. And she wasn't worried about this. It was just remarkable. She's like, yeah, I'll live with friends, I'll sleep on their couch. She's like, okay. And she was such a lovely person and so sincere, and as the time for leaving got closer, I thought...

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oh, I would like to give her the money that I had set aside to get a Buddha statue. Because here's this Buddha who's like living on bread and milk every day. You know, we were eating for a couple dollars a day and we were eating meals and she was like getting these little funny loaves of bread and cartons of milk and very little else because she wanted to stay as long as she possibly could. And I knew that the money that I had saved to buy a statue... would let her live on a somewhat better standard of living for maybe a year, you know, because it was really cheap to live in India at that time. And that impulse felt so just... There wasn't a lot of thought. It was just like, oh, this is what I'm going to do. And it was lovely and free and just right. I knew that I could not, I didn't know that I could not, I didn't think that I could receive her gratitude.

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It was fine to give, but I couldn't receive her gratitude. So I put it in an envelope and I gave it to someone to give to her after I left, being sure it was after I left. And that felt, that was like, okay, that felt incomplete, but still like, Okay, I don't want her to be beholden to me. I could, you know, kind of pretend that it wasn't my stuff in a way. But somehow she managed to get my address and wrote to me and I couldn't write back to her. I could not write back to her. And I still feel the pain of that person who couldn't stand it, you know. I couldn't let that in. And I felt guilty about it for a long time. You can tell it's still kind of there. It is still there.

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So maybe five years later than that, seven years later than that, I took a lay precepts, I did Jukai. with my teacher, Sojin Mill Weitzman, at Berkley Zen Center. And I was starting to have those feelings about I don't know how to receive all this joy and attention that people were giving to me. There was a group of us. There were maybe, I don't know, 10, 15 of us. But on the morning of it, it was like people were being very excited for me, for us. And... I was getting uncomfortable. And then I realized, because I'd been to a Jukai ceremony the year before, I thought, this happens every year. This is just a joyful occasion. And my role this year is to hold this place.

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Like every other year, I'll go to one of these every year and I'll be on the other side. But this year, this is my place. And that allowed me to receive everything that was being offered. Because it wasn't personal. You know, it was just... And that was the problem before, was that it was terribly personal. I was really attached to that. And I didn't know how to respond. I didn't even know what I was attached to, but there was like fear and attachment. And somehow I found a way to make it not personal, to make it just about sharing joy so that I could receive it because it was just going right through. It was just completely circulating. So, suggested that we give without attachment.

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And what does that mean? How do we let go of attachment if we can't like throw it away or put it down? It means that nothing is really separate. So as is usual in our practice, the first step is just to turn toward whatever is hindering us in our giving, whatever we're giving, whether we're giving the, you know, material support or protection or the dharma or non-fear, just to turn toward whatever is uncomfortable. You know, we say suffering and that sounds so dramatic and oftentimes it's just this feeling of unease, you know, it's like, huh, What's that little hitch? Can I love that too? Can I be generous toward that part of myself that is holding back?

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And when we can open to that, when we can open to all the beings of our own mind, then we're naturally generous. We're naturally open. So I think that this is why the practice of generosity is the first in the list. Because... is just this natural manifestation of our original being, of our true nature. So please continue and notice and appreciate and be grateful for all the ways that you are already generous and the ways others are generous. And maybe you can take it up as a practice. Lean into what's uncomfortable just as an experiment. You could drop all your limitations.

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It's possible right now. Thank you very much. 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.

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