I vow to taste the truth of the Pathagata's words. I have a request to make of all of you. We are in the midst, a few of us are in the midst of a retreat this weekend, a retreat for women. And so I want to ask all of us, whether we are male or female, to imagine that for the next couple of hours we're going to manifest as much as possible the feminine aspect so that we would like to invite all of you to join our women's retreat for the next little while. So I'm really, what I have to say is in the context of that retreat and I hope that it will be of some interest and use to others of you. Before we begin, I'd like to ask a couple of questions by way of knowing a little bit better who you are.

[01:06]

For how many of you is this your first visit to Green Gulch? And for how many of you are you unfamiliar with the Buddhist tradition? Mostly? Sort of? Okay, good. All right. Thank you. That's helpful. Sometimes when we have lectures here, I imagine who it is who is here listening to the lecture and I wonder, does it make any sense or do you think you suddenly found yourself in Mars? And hopefully we can demonstrate the heart of the Buddhist tradition in terms of friendliness and welcoming to anyone who comes here, but also hopefully we can be somewhat understandable insofar as the path of meditation is understandable in ordinary terms.

[02:09]

There is a sutra on the cultivation of happiness in which people gathered for the particular teaching say to the Buddha, Buddha, will you please tell us what constitutes happiness? And one of the verses late in that... I hate to see you guys standing. Why don't you come in here and squeeze in? Really, I think there's room. One of the verses late in the sutra, the Buddha describes happiness in the following way. As the condition of living in the world with my heart undisturbed by the world, with all sorrows ended, dwelling in peace, this is the greatest happiness. So, as I read these verses, and that one in particular, especially these days,

[03:16]

I wonder, what on earth does that mean? How is it possible, given the world that we live in today, to dwell in the world with my heart undisturbed by the world? Recently, I participated in a retreat which lasted for about three weeks, and during that time, the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, etc., and so forth. So we emerged from the retreat four or five days after all that started happening. And it was quite startling, you know, to come back into the world of Iraqis invading Kuwait, and random killings in New York City, etc., etc., around the world. And so, perhaps the difficulty with this description of happiness,

[04:17]

this description of this way of being that the Buddha is suggesting is possible, seems especially puzzling and difficult to me this morning. And yet, I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with someone who demonstrated what it looks like to be undisturbed by the world, who, when people treat him rudely, doesn't notice it, just sees the friendliness and warm-heartedness in people, whether they know the code of conduct that reads as polite in his culture, which is different from ours or not. So anyway, I just want to put that description of a possible way of being out there

[05:18]

for us to sort of muse about. There are several things which I understand which contribute to this capacity to be in the world but undisturbed by the world. Things like dropping self-clinging, dropping being preoccupied with, how am I doing, and how is what I'm doing compared with everybody else, etc., that kind of preoccupation with oneself. The heart of the Bodhisattva vow which declares an intention to be on the path to enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. So becoming involved in and concerned with the well-being of all beings, quite a different state of mind and experience of the world when one does that. In the qualities of a Bodhisattva, one who stays in the world of suffering,

[06:27]

of birth and death, until all beings are released or liberated from suffering, attain enlightenment, the qualities that lead to that condition of being a Bodhisattva are sometimes described as the six perfections or the six paramitas. And for some long time now I'm still stuck on the first one because I keep again and again and again seeing the benefit of the cultivation of the first perfection which is the cultivation of generosity. What does it mean to be generous to others in a way that includes being generous with myself? There are all kinds of things that I think we all think of in ordinary terms when we think of generosity. Giving someone something to eat or clothes to wear, participating in some way in helping someone have a place to live.

[07:30]

In the traditional texts there is a description of generosity that is the generosity of giving the teachings, the Dharma, the truth when beings want to hear about the truth. There is generosity in the expressions of warm-heartedness, in greeting each other with a smile or some warm feeling, saying hello. Saying to my friend who lives here where there's a water shortage, may I do your laundry for you? At my house where there's also a water shortage but it's somehow not as severe as it is at the Green Gulch house. The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh talks about the practice of generosity beginning with cultivating our ability to listen which then leads to understanding

[08:32]

which then in turn leads to the arising of compassion. This is certainly in this territory, I think, called the cultivation of generosity. So I'm asking myself this weekend and these days over and over again how to cultivate this quality of generosity in particular in my inner life and the life that has to do with the practices that I'm engaged in on this path revealed and described and informed by Shakyamuni Buddha among others. During the retreat which I was recently on, I was led by a Tibetan teacher who gave a lecture last week.

[09:34]

For those of you who were here, I'm afraid that his teaching was perhaps not so accessible given the obscurations of translations and translators. And this particular translator had his own suffering these days. But perhaps you got some taste of what someone who has been on the path for 60 plus years looks like and that can be informative. During our retreat, one of the things that Thay Rinpoche kept saying over and over again and which is the main point I want to look at with you this morning. He kept saying over and over again, Take it easy. Don't have expectations. And do as much as you can. It's a troublesome combination. What on earth does he mean by that? I remember and I think those of us who were fortunate enough

[10:40]

to practice with Suzuki Roshi remember him saying over and over again, Don't sit with any gaining idea. I think that's what Rinpoche means when he says don't practice with expectations. But I also know that he and other great teachers talk about practicing with very clear intention. What is your motivation? Check your motivation. Develop clear intention. So what's the difference between expectation and intention? I think there is a difference, but it is a subtle one perhaps. Expectations often are in that realm of the unexamined. We realize we've had an expectation only when we are disappointed, when what we expect to happen doesn't. When we sit a seven-day Sashin and we don't have some big or small enlightenment experience.

[11:44]

When all we have is aching legs and back or sleepiness or whatever. When we expect some warm-heartedness from someone that we live with, someone in our family or someone we work with, and instead what we get is a growly, snarling face. And then we feel heartbroken or disappointed or sad or whatever. So often our expectations don't lead to trouble if we've noted that we have them and given the people that we're with the benefit of the doubt by saying this is something I'd like to have happen. Is it possible? Are you up for it? Am I up for it? So that we move our expectations from the realm of the mysterious and unexpressed into the realm of what we can put before us and understand more clearly.

[12:46]

And there's some shift then, I think, from a kind of blindness to the kind of clarity which this notion of intention or motivation is more about. Anyway, I think in terms of doing meditation practices, practices of many different sorts on the Buddhist path, for example, when we talk about not having a lot of expectations, it has to do with what a baseball coach said when asked about his winning team and do they think about winning. He said, you can't think about winning and play at the same time. You have to do one or the other. So you do practices or you're absorbed with your expectations. We probably can't do both at the same time. I think something like that was behind what Theravada Rinpoche was suggesting to the group of us who were on our retreat together. So then how do we understand that in combination with also do as much as you can?

[13:51]

Do as much as you can without expectations and taking it easy. I think I can probably get at it by giving you an example. I'm doing a practice these days that has to do with the recitation of a text that includes some meditations and some recitations. And the full version takes something between an hour and a half and two hours to do. And so, of course, being Americans, as you can imagine, this particular practice comes in the expanded form and the condensed form. And there's the long condensed form, the middle condensed form, and the short condensed form. And the short condensed form is one page, and it was given to me recently with the statement that it was the approved short condensed form.

[14:56]

So if you're really busy, you can rattle this short condensed form off in 15 or 20 minutes. If you're really pressed, you can just do a couple of meditations, which I've been able to do in about six minutes. So maybe that's the short, short, short condensed form. So towards the end of our retreat, Tarun Prasad said, I don't like to think of wisdom in the condensed form. Somehow it just doesn't make me happy. It doesn't feel right. What we want is wisdom in the extended form. I only want you to do the extended, expanded form. And we all sort of went... We're going to make a commitment to do this recitation for an hour and a half or two hours every day for the rest of our lives. As one of my friends said, only a high tantric lama who only does practices would make a request of his students like that.

[15:59]

But he then went on to describe what he meant. He said, if you don't have time to do the full recitation in any given day, if the best you can do is to do the whole thing over two or three or four days or a week, then do that. Do the most you can. He was also saying, don't drive yourself crazy. Genuinely consider what your life is about, what you have to take care of, with your heart clearly committed to doing the most you can, thoroughly and reasonably. So if what you can do is a practice that takes 20 minutes, do that fully and wholeheartedly. I find that pretty encouraging, especially for those of us who live with most of our feet in the world,

[17:03]

with a family and work and many obligations and a lot of responsibility falling to us. But I also think that what happens after one begins doing practices, after one begins doing a meditation practice in particular, you begin asking yourself questions about, are you really doing as much as you can? There comes to be a place in us which calls for an opportunity to cultivate an inner life, a spiritual life. And I think that that capacity for calling for a deeper spiritual life is there in virtually all of us. We just don't always listen to it. So I've been thinking, what is it that keeps me from doing as much as I can? What are the obstacles? What are the distractions? What contributes to the dispersing of my attention?

[18:09]

And when I was thinking about what I wanted to say to you this morning, I started thinking about entertainments. You probably aren't going to be thrilled with what I'm going to say. A couple of months ago, on the new moon, I took a particular version of the precepts that included not only not killing, not lying, no intoxicants. Actually, there were eight precepts. Not killing, not lying, no intoxicants, celibacy, no adornments, perfumes and jewelry, no sitting on high places, and no entertainments. I'm missing something. Oh, one meal before noon. No meat. That was sort of embedded in some of those others.

[19:15]

Well, there's nothing like taking some promises like that, especially with someone whom you respect and admire and trust, and then doing your best to keep those promises, which we all agreed to do for 24 hours. And I kept thinking, well, what's an entertainment? What is it I've agreed not to do? And it was very interesting. There were all sorts of things I began to see that come into this category called entertainments, and I began to think about how much reading the newspaper, listening to the radio in the car, going to movies, reading Elmore Leonard, et cetera, et cetera. Those are all entertainments, some more or less harmless, more or less, some more, others less.

[20:17]

But what that day of saying, okay, no entertainments did was it heightened my attention, my awareness, with what takes my attention away from doing the most I can on this path called cultivating the capacity for being a bodhisattva. And without pushing or forcing, I found that there were some things I could pretty easily let go of in the realm of taking it easy, not forcing the issue, but just noticing the consequences of certain kinds of activities. How given the choice between going out to dinner and eating at home, there's a certain quality of containment and simplicity in eating quietly at home that has some real benefit. So I want to drop this notion of noticing what is dispersing,

[21:20]

noticing what activities in your life take you away from doing as much as you can, of what comes out of your deepest heart's request to be happy in this way that the Buddha talks about, being on a path of cultivating a capacity to be in the world but not disturbed by the world. It's an interesting, challenging combination. It doesn't say be a recluse, it doesn't say be in the mountain, be a hermit, be in the world but undisturbed by the world, being willing and able to be present no matter what happens. For most of us, when things get unpleasant, unpleasant, violent, difficult, painful, whatever, we want to leave.

[22:23]

It's pretty understandable. So what is that deep confidence, that deep capacity for presence that allows me to be present in the world and undisturbed? I found that day of taking those eight promises very helpful with regard to this intention. It made me laugh because we did this ceremony of taking these precepts at four in the morning. The text suggests that you do this particular precept-taking at that hour in the morning when it's still dark enough so that you cannot see the lines on the palm of your hand. How's that for describing when you're supposed to do something? So we did it at four in the morning. And so a number of us took a nap later,

[23:26]

like about 5.30. And I was staying at the place where I was at the time, I was in the dormitory, on the top bunk. I didn't even think about getting back into my cozy bed on the top bunk. I got up an hour later and realized I'd just gotten down from a very high place. I thought, oops, well, right away I've not kept the first promise. Our bed at home, which we returned to that night, having made this promise, is higher than this from my elbow to the tips of my fingers, which is the definition of a high place. So since our bed is higher than that, we had to figure out, well, where are we going to sleep that's lower than that? Like the floor. It was amusing and attention-getting. Why would we do something like that?

[24:29]

Why do we here at Green Gulch not eat meat, but when we go out we often eat a hamburger or whatever, barbecued chicken? I think this whole notion of living in our lives with restrictions is something that is not exactly the all-American way. We don't think of ourselves as living lives of restraint. And yet what I'm talking about, I think, has everything to do with restraint and discovering the benefits from limitation. So, for example, having a certain kind of limitation in our diet when we eat together is one way of helping ourselves be more mindful about what we eat, what is the effect on the starving people in the world, on eating meat or not. How does the limitation in our diet help us see and understand

[25:33]

the interconnectedness with all beings? How does that limitation help us practice mindfulness and gratitude for what comes to us? There are all kinds of restrictions that one can take on that can be beneficial in this way of helping us see more clearly the consequences of the activity in our lives, the consequences in the way we think about things, the way we speak, the way we treat ourselves and others. The practice of generosity as the antidote to self-clinging or stinginess is a kind of restraint, not allowing ourselves to just go forth with whatever negative state of mind arises. It becomes a kind of limitation. Oh, I'm promising taking on the practice of generosity

[26:36]

to not act from whatever arises that has to do with holding mine. No, you can't have what I have. So it's restraint, the notion of practicing with restraint, that has some friendliness and warm-heartedness in it. So from that perspective, if I think about this suggestion that we take it easy and that we not have expectations and that we do as much as we can, begins to have more particularity for me as I think about how do I do that, what does that mean. Often in texts, Buddhist texts, there's a description of practicing using the image of rubbing two sticks together when you want to make a fire.

[27:37]

And I think this exactly describes what it means to do as much as you can. If you want to make a fire out in the woods and you rub two sticks together, and then after you've spent a lot of energy rubbing the two sticks together, and then you put them down. You go for a walk. And then you come back and you rub the two sticks together. And then you put them down and you go swimming. And then you come back and you rub the two sticks together and then you go to bed. Pretty consistently, you rub the two sticks together but you don't have a fire. You have to keep rubbing the two sticks together continuously long enough to have heat and then a spark and then you have a fire. And doing practices is a version of rubbing two sticks together. So how do I live my life keeping my intention with those practices that constitute the particular

[28:40]

two sticks I'm rubbing together today and this week? What does that look like, for example, if the two sticks have to do with producing the fire of generosity? What are the kinds of things that I can do so that I don't forget at any moment in the day or night that that's what I've set forth to accomplish? It's a very interesting question, I think, to ask ourselves. And certainly from that perspective distractions take on a whole different look. When I distract myself, when I get embroiled in reading the morning paper in a way that is not on the path called cultivating generosity, I'm putting the two sticks down. What I did discover, I love to read the newspaper,

[29:41]

particularly old newspapers. They're not as hard to read as the one that came this morning. I did discover that I could read the newspaper with an eye to understanding both the hindrances and opportunities for the cultivation of generosity. And it means I read the newspaper very differently. It's not that I have to give up reading the newspaper, but can I read it in a way that helps me remember my intention is the cultivation of generosity. I'm not the Elmore Leonard fan in our household, but I suspect that reading spy novels and whodunits may be a little more challenging. Maybe even to be given up, I'm not sure. That's up to the Elmore Leonard reader in the family. His name will remain unmentioned.

[30:45]

So, I think I've been thinking about this also because tonight Green Gulch is going to start a seven-day session. It's called the expanded version of the text. No doubt about it, we all know it's the expanded version of the text. The challenge is the day after session, when we go back to what looks like the short condensed version. So, how do we let our lives every day be the expanded version of our spiritual practice, our spiritual life? I think that what we have to do is be imaginative about how we set about cultivating these qualities that are described as being on this path of the

[32:00]

Buddha's way. Frequently, I remember a line from His Holiness the Dalai Lama, which I think shows up in a lot of texts actually. But the question he asks is, have you ever known a generous person who was not happy? So, I would encourage you to again and again think about the first perfection, the cultivation of generosity, and think about how you can practice generosity in the expanded version, and think about what it is that interrupts or takes you away from the cultivation of that quality. Consider how to set about the cultivation of generosity in a way, in a style that's

[33:05]

taking it easy, not having a lot of expectations, and doing as much as you can. Asking yourself, how can I do that in my relationship with myself and in my relationship with others? Being curious, not just when you're successful, but curious when you notice, gee, I felt a little stingy in that particular exchange with so-and-so. You can be generous with yourself in that moment by being interested in what was going on, by being interested in what made me say that, rather than something a little kinder. Being interested in one's own inner process and that of others in our lives. An interesting and challenging

[34:06]

combination of suggestions. So, I want to live in the world, and I want to find that capacity for having an undisturbed heart, no matter what happens in the world, no matter what headline I read, or what news I hear about. With some sense of the possibility of all sorrows ended and dwelling, abiding in peace. To find a way to be in the world exactly as it is, to see the perfection of the world in

[35:09]

this moment today, this morning. It's pretty easy to see that perfection this morning in the garden in Green Gulch, but can we also see it over the hill this afternoon when there's a traffic jam going through the Waldo Tunnel that you're stuck in, or in the middle of an argument with your loved one, in the middle of the city with all of its difficulties, in that moment when your wallet is stolen. That's when the challenge comes. When my wallet is stolen or my child whom I dearly love is harmed somehow. Can I see the perfection of the

[36:09]

world in that moment? I'm quite convinced that the teachings of the Buddha are quite accurate in showing us how to come to the cultivation of such a heart and mind. How to get to that place of being undisturbed by the world still is mostly a mystery for me, but I have some sense that there is a way of getting to that state of mind. And over and over again I'm struck by how much the ground of generosity is what leads to all of the other stages or steps to such a place. So I would invite your company in this practice of happiness and invite you to

[37:16]

ask yourself what will be the particular version of taking it easy, dropping expectations, and doing as much as you can. What will be, what will your version of that be? Don't let anybody else tell you what that version should be. Discover for yourself what's possible. Thank you very much.

[37:47]

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