This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. It's my great pleasure and honor to introduce Brother David Stanlrest. Brother David has been a Benedictine monk for many years now, 57? Would it be that many? Somewhere in that range. But who's counting? He's also done practice periods here at Tassajara, came here quite soon after it started, and has carried both of those traditions through his life. and has made a personal commitment to exploring many of the religious traditions of the world and discovering the resonance at the core, how the spirit of practice is truly ecumenical.

[01:19]

When it goes beyond words and there's nothing to be said, there's no separation. between these wonderful traditions. When it turns into words, then we have the joy of discovering that what we're trying to say is the same thing. And I'm personally deeply appreciative that I have learned this so much and so often from Brother David. So thank you very much, Brother David, for coming here. It's high tech. Paul and I, and it's always such a tremendous gift for me to be here, to begin with and then with Paul and to share.

[02:26]

We have been doing that several summers now in a row. And we always explore and always find new things. And one of the ways we have found to for sharing one of the particularly helpful ones is using poetry. And today we have been talking about faith and hope and love and the Christian aspects and the Buddhist aspects. And so to introduce it, I'm reading a few lines from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. He says, I said to my soul, be still And wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing. Wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

[03:28]

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light and the stillness the dancing. And faith and hope and love are such central and important virtues. We call them divine virtues. the highest virtues, virtues of the divine life within us in the Christian tradition. And I was pleased to hear that in the Buddhist tradition, we have three key terms that really correspond to these three. So we thought, for a starter, it might be helpful for us to talk a little bit about that. And then the most important part of our public dialogues is always the questions that you bring, And so this is only priming the pump. And if you want to ask something that seems to have nothing to do with faith, hope, and love, trust us, we'll connect it.

[04:53]

Maybe one could ask the question why the poet here tells us to wait, and why he tells us we are not ready for hope, because hope would be hope for the wrong thing. And the reason might be that he's talking to our little ego, not to our true self, but to our little ego, which we run around most of the time, and... is telling us, is referring to a very important distinction between hope and hopes. And the little ego constantly confuses its hopes with hope. Now, hopes are things that we can imagine. And hope is openness for surprise. Now, the things that you are... can imagine will not come as a surprise even when they come about.

[05:56]

Openness for surprise is a pretty good working definition for the divine virtue of hope. But it presupposes faith. These three virtues are usually lined up in this order, faith, hope, and love. And there's a good reason for it, because Before you can be open for surprise, you have to entrust yourself to life. And that is what faith is rightly understood. And we are most of the time not ready for faith either, because just as we are confusing hope with our little hopes, so we are confusing faith... with our beliefs. And there's a very important distinction between faith and beliefs. If you have faith, faith being courageous trust in life, you entrust yourself to life, very much in the way in which somebody who wants to swim has to entrust themselves to the water.

[07:04]

Get into it and get wet and trust that it will carry you. And if you have that faith, then... you will also tend to formulate your faith in statements and things that you have faith in, and those will be your beliefs, but you will hold those beliefs very lightly, firmly but lightly, just as you are holding your hopes firmly but lightly when you are a person of hope. Yes, you have them, but... if the hopes are shattered, you will not be shattered with them. But you will retain this openness for surprise, and you will say, oh, it's all down the drain. So what next? And tomorrow you will have another crop of hopes, because the hopes grow on hope, on this openness for surprise. And you are not clinging to it.

[08:06]

So the difference between hope and hopes is... That hope doesn't cling to hopes. It has hopes, but it doesn't cling to them. Faith has beliefs, but doesn't cling to them. It expresses itself as best it can, but realizes that life is too big to be exhausted by our articles of faith, by our statements of faith. And then... When you have this trust in life, that's how it starts, and we give that to one another, we facilitate that to one another by showing ourselves faithful to one another. So if you have the good luck that you were born into a family where faithfulness was shown to you, then you're in a very good position to trust life. But many children are disappointed over and over, and then it's more difficult. But we owe it to one another, at whatever age it is, to show one another that faithfulness so as to build up that trust in the other, ultimately trust in life.

[09:16]

And when you have this faith, then you can be open for surprise, and then you can go one step further. What happens to you, the greatest surprise, is that you can say yes to belonging. Limitless belonging. And that is a working definition for love. And live, yes, to belonging. And you can try that out for any way, any situation in which we speak of love, from romantic love to love of a country to love of a community, love of relatives, friends, everywhere it will fit the definition, yes, to to belonging. We belong together and express that. And love in the fullest sense as a divine virtue is that yes said to everything, limitless yes to everything. We belong together.

[10:17]

We might even belong together in a position of tension. I might have to defend something that you attack. For instance, when it comes to environmental protection, I might have to defend a position that someone else attacks, just one example, but not with violent means, but always nonviolently because we all belong together. And that means one thing in which we all belong together is our true self, and that is then the opposite to the little ego. When you go back into yourself, you discover that within yourself there is the observer that can observe your little ego. And as long as there is someone who can observe the observer, you can always go further back, and eventually you come within yourself to that observer

[11:22]

that can no longer be observed. And then that is your true self, and that is everyone's true self. And not only are human beings true self, but are trees and plants and the whole universe has one self. And in the Christian tradition, we call it the cosmic Christ. It's the spirit within us, the divine reality within us that we all share. To live that, to say yes to that, that's then love. That's why we say God is love. It's the ultimate. And what we do, and that's always nowadays my particular interest when we come to talk about these things. So I hope somewhere we'll also be talking about it this evening. is that this can only be realized in relatively small communities, something like Tassajara, where you know one another, where you share a counterculture conviction.

[12:28]

Our culture is for war. We are for nonviolence. Our culture is for greed. We are for sharing. Our culture is for... Each one for themselves. We are for togetherness. So that would be one perfect. OK, I agree with all of that. So T.S. Eliot, he talks about waiting. And how I understand that is that these beliefs, these hopes, and how love can be the object or objectified through the passion of desire. And all these things from the perspective of the small self are very compelling.

[13:37]

These are how we will make meaning of the world. We will have beliefs. These are how we will have the motivation to engage our world. We will have hopes. And we have within us this deep, deep wish to be fully alive, to embrace the Beloved and to be loved. And it's intrinsically woven into desire. but to wait, to pause, to start again. Sometimes in the spiritual traditions to be reborn, to realize, to rediscover what is fundamental. But these distinctions, the distinction between entrusting what is and encapsulating it

[14:42]

within ideas and beliefs to discover the distinction. We wait, we pause, we examine carefully. And this pausing is not some academic, philosophical, intellectual activity. We pause throughout each day and rediscover what's happening now. What is this moment that I so casually say, oh yes, I've been in this dining room before, I don't need to look at it, I know it. I can operate from my belief. Oh, I know this person, I've met them before. I can operate from my belief. Everything's afresh, everything is new. And in this process of rediscovery, we discover what can be trusted. And the Buddhist term for this is shraddha.

[15:44]

And this is foundational. In the five faculties of awakening in Buddhism, shraddha is the primary one. To discover how to trust the life we're living. To discover how to trust the life we're living now. how to discover, how to trust constant rediscovery of a life we're living, rather than the necessity to cast it into beliefs so that we have confidence in our own knowledge, that we have conviction in our beliefs. The old Zen saying, nothing to know, everything to learn. Day by day. And as we do this, we earn, we create the trust. We learn the process of entrustment.

[16:46]

We can get into the water and we can be stiff and we can put all that stiff, desperate energy into trying to stay afloat. And then we exhaust ourselves and we sink. Or we can discover how to trust the natural buoyancy of water And how then our effort becomes a natural, harmonious relationship to water. So the second faculty in Buddhism is... I don't want to talk too long because we're very interested in your questions and thoughts about this. So just a few more thoughts. The second faculty is Viriya. Viriya covers everything from... perseverance, engagement to energy. That it's in the contact, it's in the exchange, it's in the interaction, whether it's a body in water, whether it's a person interacting with another person, whether it's how you taste the water and let it become part of you and you become part of the water and life itself is nourished.

[18:08]

in the activity. This is virya. This is the energy of engagement. And this, as the shraddha ripens, it has this hopefulness. It has this capacity to engage. When the trust is there, engagement is as natural as breathing. It's as natural as opening our eyes and seeing what we see. This week, one of the modalities we're exploring this vast topic is the five senses. So each of the senses is constantly expressing our trust in belonging to existence. Each of the five senses is constantly discovering what it is to be energized by what arises through the contact of the five senses.

[19:22]

And this interface between the trust and the energetic engagement, the motion, the motivation, the impulse, this is our expression of hopefulness. Usually we engage to create a certain outcome. These are our hopes. I will do Zazen and I will be a great Zen student or whatever. I will be enlightened. I will realize something, everything. But this hope, this engagement that has no deliberate outcome than the process of engaging. This marvelous way of being nobody and going nowhere.

[20:25]

Not that we have suppressed the hopes but we see them as a metaphor. We see them as a realm of possibility. We see them as a way of giving vow direction. It's a very different notion from when these hopes arise in the service of the small self. When they arise in the service of vow, our intention to be part of everything, they are a vehicle of engagement that opens and connects. And this is the heart of the intimacy of interbeing. The term in Buddhism is dependent co-arising. Each thing through this energetic exchange brings other into being. Our life literally depends upon each other and all things.

[21:39]

Take away the air, in five minutes we're dead. Take away the water, in three days we're dead. Take away the food, eight weeks, nine weeks, ten weeks, we're gone. We can't exist separate. We can think of ourselves as separate, we can act as separate, but we belong more thoroughly, more completely then we can't imagine. This is dependent co-arising. And this, the very activity of engaging, the very activity of non-separation, is the constant thread of the intimacy of being. And as we taste it, as we taste the water when we're thirsty, There is something wise in that, because it harmonizes with our interbeing.

[22:50]

And that harmony arouses within us a gratitude and appreciation for the water. When we open up to each other and discover the delights, the support, the encouragement, the guidance that we can offer each other, this appreciation of interconnection brings forth the quality that we conventionally call love. So, those are my words. And now what we'd like to do is hear your comments and your questions about this and any other thing you may want to talk about in the context of interfaith dialogue, spirituality, and such matters. Please. I can hear you. Can everyone else? How would you describe the role of imagination in creating faith?

[24:20]

I will answer you by telling a true story. Joan of Arc was burned on the stake. She was a very simple peasant girl in France. during the time of the wars between the French and the British. And then she defended the French and they followed her. They had many victories. Then she was captured and was captured by the British. And they burned her at the stake as a witch. And her trial is very... It's word by word written down, and we can read it today. It's kept. That was way back in the 15th century, even in the 14th century. And they tried to trap her again and again with theological questions.

[25:25]

And one of those questions had to do with faith and imagination. And they asked her... She had had visions. She didn't want to put on men's clothes and go to war. She was very happy in the village where she was, but she had these visions that made her go. She heard all these voices. And so the theologians at the trial asked her, these voices that you heard there, were they not in your imagination? And... you should expect this simple peasant girl to defend, no, that wasn't Michael who spoke to me or something like that. And we have it on record that he answered when they asked her, these voices that you heard, were they not in your imagination? She said, well, how else should God talk to me? I think that...

[26:30]

And when you look at Buddhist psychology, it says something very similar. Every construct, every concept that comes into being is a creative act. We take in information through the senses and with our mind we process it and say, given that, then this. Given vision, then person sitting there, given hearing, then question, this person speaking their mind. Is this not a creation? Without it, could anything enter into something that we broadly call intelligible? And if we didn't do such a thing, if we didn't construct a sense of time and space, the difficulty comes when we forget the element of imagination and confirm it as belief.

[27:56]

Belief being, you know, this is definitely, completely, absolutely true. Well, In the context of Christian tradition, the answer will hinge on the notion of contemplation. Rightly understood, contemplation implies action.

[29:00]

The word contemplation is made up of in Latin from which our contemplation comes. Contemplatio is made out of the little syllable con or cum, which means together, putting something together. Then the end is atio, that means a repeated process, doing something repeatedly. And the little central piece, temp, we know... has to do something with measure. We have it in other English words like tempo and temperament, which is the measure of, according to the ancient medicine, the measure of our fluids in our bodies, and temperature, heat and cold. So this temp has something to do with measure, even template, and of course temple. building, a temple building.

[30:02]

So contemplation means putting again and again together something by measuring. And the idea behind it is building the temple, which originally was not even a building, but it was something like Stonehenge or the stone circus that we know. It was a kind of walk-in sundial or walk-in star dial that was reflecting what was going on in the heavens. So you kept your eye on the vision above where everything is in perfect order and then you projected this vision on earth and put things down here in order. And... And this process of putting the two together again and again, that is contemplation. So it includes the action of putting things down here in order.

[31:05]

There's even a Hindu saying that says, when the proportions of the temple are perfect, the whole world will be at peace. But the temple that we are building are the communities. That is the temple. And in the Christian tradition, it says, you're a temple for the Holy Spirit. You are all building blocks. And you're a temple that is built together. In turn, your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. There's all these temple ideas. And a community like this here is a... In the Christian tradition, we call it a contemplative community. The main focus is... getting the vision. But in the process, because they are contemplative, they are bearing witness how one lives when one keeps the eyes on the vision and projects it down below and creates peace here, thereby. Contemplative process.

[32:06]

And then comes the outreach. And I know that St. Senator has a prison center, I guess. You can tell us more about that. So there is then spontaneously the outreach, and even people who just come here and are inspired by what the community is doing are going out and are carrying it out. So the action is built into that whole process of contemplation as long as we are aware of it. But if we forget it, then it's not really contemplation, it's just temperation. We're just keeping our eyes up there, like this famous picture where somebody is putting their head through the atmosphere there and looking out onto the stars. He isn't doing anything with his hand re-ending the world. We should look up to the stars and... keep our feet on the ground and do something here.

[33:07]

That would be the rest. There's what we do and there's how we do it. And I think it's very important for us in the West to realize that whether we realize it or not, the notion of good and evil is always there as a tempting paradigm. You know? And that good and evil has within it certain implicit notions. And in other words, that this is intrinsically by its nature good, and this by its nature is intrinsically bad. It's so bad, it's evil. Well, what should you do with evil? Well, you should crush it. Evil is the enemy. So many of the wars in Europe were fought with God on our side.

[34:11]

It was a spiritual activity. In contrast, from Buddhist thought, we all have the capacity to misinterpret, to misunderstand, to forget. And that in our misunderstanding, in our forgetfulness, are the actions we have based on that cause harm. They don't acknowledge and they don't express within the nature of the action the interconnectedness of all being. They express something other than that, and as such they cause harm. So the actions are the harmful thing. The person is simply misguided. you know, that silly question like, well, if you met Adolf Hitler in 1935 and you had a gun, would you or would you not shoot him?

[35:12]

You know, and this is a great dilemma. You know, is this a lesser reaver for a greater good? Well, why isn't the question, if you met Adolf Hitler in 1935, why wouldn't you become a deep friend and have many long conversations with him about what is for the greater good of all being? Why wouldn't you say to him, why can't that marvelous, dedicated energy you have be directed in a constructive and mutually beneficial world for everyone? So in a way, this is the challenge for us. Where is our action coming from? Our interconnectedness? are from some fixed sense of separation, some fixed sense of good and evil. And if you think, if you think of Gandhi, if you think of Martin Luther King, if you think Nelson Mandela, you don't think they were marvelously effective at crushing their enemy.

[36:18]

They were marvelously effective at holding on to some righteous view and clubbing some part of society or some person with it. It's a very inclusive, unrelenting, inclusive attitude that made them so powerful and made them so effective. So I would say, yes, we need action. And we need the process that goes along with it, that makes that action skillful and effective in the greatest sense that we can as human beings, that our actions will include the whole planet, that will include all the life within this planet, not just human life, and certainly not just whatever race or creed or ethnicity that we tend to believe in, in contrast to them.

[37:22]

Will you find that? Yes. Please. Yes. The Japanese notion of Satori, the attainment of the pure land, seems different from heaven. that the religions have a different notion of what you might call the final goal? What term would you use? Yes. Yes. One of the main difficulties one has talking about the Christian tradition, and you're familiar with that, is that one always first has to correct the misconceptions about the Christian tradition.

[38:36]

Buddhism is younger here in this country, and so apparently it hasn't had so much time yet to be misunderstood. And one of the big misunderstandings is that Christianity is about heaven that comes later. Jesus was absolutely uninterested in it. Read the Gospels and there's no interest in what comes after death. He was interested in doing something here and now, right now. And the kingdom of God is not heaven that comes later. We, with our interest in perpetuating our little selves, just like people in the West are so interested in reincarnation because they want to perpetuate their little self, and that has very little to do with the real notion of reincarnation. So they were also very interested in perpetuating their little selves and projecting this whole thing, the kingdom of God in heaven, something comes after death.

[39:41]

That's not at all what it was all about. Jesus created a little radically revolutionary community in which people lived so against the prevailing domination system. And instead of war and retaliation and so forth, they lived peacefully. Instead of ranking and pecking orders and domination, of certain classes, women, of course, they were way down there and the children were not existing at all. He had an egalitarian community. He lived by sharing instead of amassing things and healing. Mostly what he did was having table fellowship with people with whom you weren't allowed to have table fellowship because they were the outcasts.

[40:44]

And so... he created that little community. And that was so dangerous, both to the political and to the religious authorities, that he was executed for it. You're not executed for promising people that they will go to heaven if they do nice things or something like that. Here and now, but the idea of heaven does come in here, namely, that if you, in the present situation, in this domination system in which we all live, and which, put this in parentheses anyway, anyway, where we live now in this time, if we live this radical other kind of social concept, we will probably sooner or later also be wiped out. and killed.

[41:45]

And so the question comes, what then? And so you say, well, there is another dimension. We try to realize it here, but we don't know. It isn't wiped out. It goes on. And that is the aspect by which something beyond death, not after death, death is when my time's up, but beyond death comes in, that this is something that cannot be wiped out. And that's where heaven comes in. So heaven is our openness for the surprise that what we try to realize here will be realized even if we are not accomplishing it on this end. But all the emphasis both in Judaism up to the Christian era and in the early Christian tradition is Do it here and now. And that was the reason why so quickly, so small a community of just a few people grew to be as big as practically the Roman Empire because that was so appealing to people.

[43:03]

This is a very appealing notion, this kind of community, exactly the kind of community that you see when you come here to Tassara. that kind of counterculture community. That's really the main thing. And since some people die for it, many people die for it here on Earth and never see it realized, our heart says there must be somewhere dimension where this is realized. So Zen in particular, adopts an agnostic stance, with the notion that when we talk about sartoria or we talk about what's the release, accomplishment of the Pure Land or even heaven, or some mystical realization as a Catholic saint.

[44:08]

We're talking about an experience. Now, before the experience, we have ideas about it. We can have beliefs about it. We're trying to talk about something that we haven't experienced. We're trying to talk about something that goes beyond words. And yet, we want some guidance, we want some guiding star, we want some ideals that will direct us, and we want some way to relate. If we just say, it's beyond our experience, the ideas we have about it fall short, then how do we possibly know how to practice? So each day,

[45:09]

We discover. To go right back to T.S. Eliot's notion. Maybe the word he uses is waiting. We wait on making beliefs. We wait upon being certain, this is the goal, this is what happens, and that's how I should behave. This day-by-day practice that happens here and happens now, in the activity of practicing, something is expressed, something is manifest, something is realized. In that realization, time drops away. Just the now. So the whole notion of something elsewhere, something at a future time becomes quite literally irrelevant.

[46:15]

So not only to hold with our agnosticism such beliefs, but also to realize the implication of how that guides our practice. that through the very activity of now and embracing and engaging and waking up to the activity of now, we both realize and directly express and experience the now. And so in our tradition we say the practice of it and the realization of it are a simultaneous event. And to misquote the poet David White, call it by any name you want. In the end, what does it matter? The practice of it has its own authenticity and its own validity.

[47:26]

So we need to close in a moment. I'd like to offer some final comments. Well, maybe the notion of the now that you were just talking about, that might be so central and so common to both traditions, that maybe that would be a good point to end on. And again, to come back to that notion of heaven, the now is not in time. The now is eternity. That is actually how St. Augustine defines eternity. He says it's the now that doesn't pass away. That is eternity. And we always think, we tend to think that now is a little stretch of time, a very short stretch of time. But it isn't. If you cut that little stretch of time in half, half is not, because it is no more, and half is not, because it's not yet.

[48:28]

And as long as it's a stretch... you can cut it in half. It says hair splitting, but yes, it's hair, you can split it, so keep on splitting. So you find eventually that now is not in time, but time is in now. Now is the real, is the reality. And within it, there is also room for past and future. And it's fine. It has its advantages. And the main point of it is it gives us opportunity so that we don't have just one opportunity, but many opportunities. And since life in its generosity gives us abundance of opportunities, we speak about past and future, the opportunities that we have had and partly missed are the past and those that are still coming are the future. But that is all caught up in the now. And when my time is up, that is death, I have no time left but the now.

[49:34]

That's eternity. And that is also how that did so perfectly with what you said. So come back to practice. The only thing that we need to practice is living in the now. And my particular practice for living in the now is to be grateful. That's so easy because everybody knows what it means. I don't have to explain much about being grateful. It's compatible with everything, with yoga, with Zen, with every other practice. And when you are grateful, you're grateful now because you can be grateful for the past and for the future, but not in the past. If you're grateful, you're in the now. So every time you're grateful, you're in the now. And that's what we all practice together. That's really our common practice. Thank you. So thank you very much. And I hope that within each of us, this conversation will spark, I hope it will spark within us some authority

[50:45]

and trust to explore and express what's deeply true for us. And express it, and if I may suggest, explore it and express it, not as some ponderous, sanctimonious thing, but some extraordinarily innocent and lighthearted discovery. So thank you for coming, and please carry with you whatever seems worth carrying with you. Thank you. And leave behind whatever seems that you should leave behind. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge 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 sfzc.org and click Giving.

[51:51]

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