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. Nice to see all of you. I'd like to thank my dear friend David, Tonto David, for the invitation to be here this morning. And to Abbot Ed, my dear friend. Thank you for the warm welcome to the temple. So thank you very much. And thank you all for being here. I would also like to give a special thank you to Sarah, who is doing the closed captioning of my talk.

[01:03]

this morning so that my dear old friend and fellow priest Keith Baker can read along as I speak. So thank you, Sarah, wherever you are. I am a bit thrown off this morning, and so I need to start with that. And I realize that I am shaking a little bit, and I need to let you know it's actually not from nerves. I just got word that that one of my very dear Dharma sisters passed away, Gengetsu Jinsai Janadraka. Several of you may know her. I had been up on the blog about her, but I didn't know that she had passed away, and this has rocked my world a bit. So... There's nothing like a death of a friend to suddenly take away any nervousness of just a Dharma talk.

[02:04]

It kind of puts things in perspective. So I would like to dedicate my talk this morning to Gengetsu Jensei Janadraka, one of the most fearless people I ever met, She basically successfully and wonderfully and compassionately ran a sangha for homeless people, among many other things that she did. But she was fearless. And to be fearless and have a heart that big is almost unheard of. Usually fear closes us down. Usually it does. And that's going to be part of what I'm going to talk about today. But never, never with Janna. Never. It's like the more fearful the challenge, the more open and up she was for it. So thank you, Jana, for the inspiration and for putting in perspective just a Dharma talk in the grand scale of life and death.

[03:12]

How I was going to start this Dharma talk is that I had the great good fortune to spend the first three months of this year with Abbot Ed and many others of you in this room at the Tassajara winter practice period. Tassajara is the monastery of San Francisco Zen Center and a practice period is three months of intense monastic practice, meaning the wake up bell is at 3.50 in the morning and the refuges end at nine o'clock at night. and it's a lot of sitting, and a lot of formal meals in the zendo, and a lot of chanting, and not much else. So you're kind of filled with this all day. This is three months of no internet, no cell phone, sometimes no road, We had about three weeks, I think, of no road, which means that the occasional New York Times is three weeks late.

[04:20]

So there's kind of no point, right, in staying up with this. And when I got out... I was not surprised by the headlines when I got out. I've been at Tassajara practice periods during election years before, so I wasn't so surprised by the headlines. I remember one time when I – I think it was the 2004 election. Anyway, I can't remember. But I remember coming out of that, and I called my dad, and I remember saying to my dad, you know, dad, the headlines aren't any different three months later now than when I – went in, right? So the headlines weren't that different and they didn't really surprise me. What did stun me when I got out of the practice period in April after having gone in in the first week in January was the extent of the solidification of rage and hate. This was a shocker. Probably because I had just spent three months with 65 other people being a wee.

[05:27]

What's interesting during a Tassajara practice period in particular is that you very quickly become one body because you're all doing the same thing all the time. And if somebody leaves or is even absent for a morning with a cold, you feel that. You palpably feel that absence. And when somebody walks behind you in the zendo, you know who they are because you know how that person walks. So it's very... It's very intimate. It's very intimate. And so I was primed for that. And then I came out to this divisive, hateful, rage-filled separateness. And I don't think I was just making it up. No. I've got several people shaking their head agreeing with me that I wasn't making it up. And it seems to me that in that three months that we were in there, in Tassajara, that what happened out here was that two things got lost.

[06:30]

The first is that we lost our ability to distinguish a true emergency from drama. And the second... more important thing that we lost, is we lost us. We lost a sense of we. There is a palpable lack of we going on. There's lots of separation. To put that in Buddhist terms, we lost sangha. And I don't mean this sangha. This sangha seems to be, I mean, you're all here this morning, all the other things you could have done Saturday morning, you're here, thank you. I'm not necessarily sure we lost this sangha. But we lost that sangha. There is a palpable loss of we.

[07:35]

And more dramatically, perhaps, we. or maybe emergency, if that's a word, is we lost a sense that there needs to be a we. What's the use of we anyway? Why bother? Now, I realize that other speakers in this seat over the past probably weeks and months have sat up here and talked to you about the Dharma and talked to you about the positive aspects of the Dharma that can give us some hope. about this situation that we have. I do not share their optimism. I need to be really clear about that, and I'm sorry to put that out there. I do not share their optimism. I am 60 this year, and especially the profound change that I found when I came out of Tassajara leads me to suspect

[08:36]

that things may not get better in whatever time I have left. I'm not dying that I know of, but I'm closer to that than I am to the other end now. So I am not hopeful, actually, that things will get better in my lifetime. And Dogen says that this is when our practice is most important. He says it's most important to bring our practice to the fore when, quote, things are getting dark and we know they won't get light again. So what do we do? Give up and go home and crawl in a hole? Well, I'm a kind of extreme introvert, so that has its appeal, I must admit. But but these robes tell me differently.

[09:39]

So what do we do? There was a very helpful book written many years ago that some of you may have read called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Some of you probably read that, Harold Kushner. And Mr. Kushner says that there are two questions that are not helpful in this darkness of Dogen's. He says the first question that is not helpful is why me? says the vastly better question is now what? Now what? Okay, so it's getting dark and you don't think it's going to get light again, Valerie. Now what? Now what? Okay. He also says, and excuse me for bringing in other religions here, but I need to do this for just a minute because he brings up this very important point, and he says that we have a tendency when calamities strike, and not only to ask why me, but to ask, well, where is God? Okay. Where was God when all of this calamity was going on? And Kushner says that's also the wrong question. The question is not where was God, the question is where were we? Where were we when all this rage and separation was going on?

[10:45]

So Buddhism's take on this, on this answer to the question of what to do, Buddhism's answer is don't make it worse. Just don't make it worse. Sometimes we think we only have two choices, to make it worse or to make it better. And in many cases, we can't do that. What we can do is to not make it worse. This is sort of the middle way, right? Is if we can't do anything else, to maybe to just not make it worse. In karmic terms, this means that if we can't loosen up the karmic knot to at least not yank it tighter. So to not make it worse. So I'm going to get to how maybe we don't make it worse a little bit later on, but I want to just review and remind us that from a Buddhist perspective, what we do that actually does make it worse. Let's just review that for just a moment of the things that we do that actually do make it worse. And in this context, you know, usually the Buddhist answer to that is greed, hate, and delusion, right? That's kind of the blanket way in which we make it worse is greed, hate, and delusion. And there's some specifics on that that I would like to get into in terms of three of them.

[11:50]

One of the ways that we make it worse is chasing and accumulating mostly stuff to make us feel safe. So we accumulate things to build our fortress, to defend ourselves. Nagarjuna has a wonderful take on this where he says, we build our fortress and nobody can get in. And we can't get out. So we accumulate and we cling. And by doing so, we trade happiness for safety and get neither. So this chasing and accumulating classically in Buddhism is known as thirst or tanha, T-A-N-H-A. This is the definition, Walpola Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, a wonderful book. Here's the definition of thirst. Tanha, collecting and clinging. The term thirst includes not only desire for an attachment to sense pleasures, wealth, and power, but also desire for an attachment to ideas and ideals, views, opinions, theories, conceptions, and beliefs.

[13:03]

According to the Buddha's analysis, all the troubles and strife in the world, from little personal quarrels in families, to great wars between nations and countries, arise out of this selfish thirst. From this point of view, all economic, political, and social problems are rooted in this selfish thirst. Those who try to settle international disputes and talk of war and peace only in economic and political terms touch the superficialities and never go deep into the real root of the problem. As the Buddha told Rathapala, the world lacks and hankers and is enslaved by So we grasp and we cling the eighth and ninth factors of the 12-fold chain of causation of suffering. We grasp and we chase and we accumulate and we build our fortress. Guilty as charged.

[14:05]

So... Let me confess right here that I spent a good portion of my life being terrified of being seen as incompetent. This is called imposter syndrome, for those of you that are familiar with this, that we don't dare seen as being seen as incompetent. So we do everything that we can to look like we know what we're doing. And my fortress for my... My fortress of competence was books. Because I figured, you know, if I looked like I'd read all these things and knew all this stuff, then nobody would challenge me and nobody can criticize me, right? That was kind of the clincher right there, right? And those of you who know me well could really say, well, you're still a little bit like that. And it's like, yeah, you didn't know me 30 years ago. So this fortress that I built of books, I accumulated and chased books. And I did read books. Most of them.

[15:07]

So that I would have this fortress of competence. And then I was at the fall 2003 Green Gulch practice period. And when I got done with that practice period, my daughter was away at college, so I went back to the house in Palo Alto to check on it. And as it turns out, the entire interior of the house had been destroyed by a hot water leak while I was at... Green Gulch and my daughter was away at college and we got to throw away the entire contents of the house including my entire library. There went my fortress. I suspect that if we don't dismantle our fortresses ourselves something will do it for us. So there went my fortress and The sadness lasted about five seconds, which really surprised me, and got replaced by a feeling of utter relief.

[16:08]

Utter relief that this fortress was now gone. And what that thing did to me, that flood, was it cured me of things. It cured me of things. All of my possessions now fit in an 8 by 10 room, probably because I've lived monastically for quite a while. But anyway... So this need to defend and to separate is a great contributor to the loss of we. A fortress is by definition not we. It's us versus them. So this is one place where we go sideways on not remembering that it's we. So that's the greed part. Very related to the greed is a specific kind of greed, which is number two. The second way we make it worse, and this is the one that I found when I got out of Ktasahara.

[17:12]

Clinging to our own point of view. Grasping an attachment to our own point of view. This is intoxication of views. And in the Buddha's time, this hits the fifth precept, for those of you who are familiar with that, a disciple of the Buddha will not intoxicate mind or body of self or others. In the Buddha's time, intoxication of views was considered worse than intoxications by drug or alcohol. Intoxication of views, and I would suggest to you that we've got rampant intoxication of views going on right now. pretty toxic, and in some cases, deadly. So we get into great trouble and we lose we when we cling to our views. We live with people who think like us, who read the same blogs we do,

[18:22]

and who vote like we do. And we build a fortress out of our views. And the third way that we separate in a very toxic manner is that we believe, actually, that we are separate. Some of you who are in the practice period, those of you who are in the practice period are studying a poem by Schurto, 8th century monk, called The Harmony of Difference and Equality. The English title is very important, The Harmony of Difference and Equality. and I'm going to come back to the sandokai, that's the Japanese word for it, which I'll refer to because saying harmony of difference and equality all the time is kind of long, so I'll just call it the sandokai, which means the same thing. Okay, harmony of difference and equality. I'm going to come back to that, but Shurto speaks to this belief that we're separate and how we reinforce that with our language and our labels, our rush to either identify something or someone as us or them instantly.

[19:36]

us or them, this belief in separateness, which gets even worse in our belief that we don't make each other. This is a problem in a belief that we don't really make each other, that that person is over there, I'm over here, I'm right, you're wrong, I'm this, you're that, da-da-da-da-da-da, and I don't, my rightness actually doesn't have anything to do with your wrongness. We think that. We don't think we make each other. There is a classic question in Buddhism that says, what makes a Buddha? And the answer is all beings. All beings. Unfortunately, it's the same answer to what makes a terrorist. All beings. We're all complicit. in making each other. But we don't believe that we are. We don't believe we make terrorists.

[20:38]

We may not believe we make Buddhas either. But we don't believe that we make each other. And yet we do, from Buddhist standpoint. So we separate. We us them. Yeah, I just made it a verb, because it is. It's action, speech and action that create the us and them. We blame. We do the silent treatment. Ooh, that's a bad one. We withhold. We relentlessly criticize on the smallest things because of the label we've attached that makes you them. We take that label and we run with it. Right. off a cliff. So we accumulate and we cling and we build our fortress.

[21:41]

And mostly we build a fortress of views. And then we say all of you out there are other and different and separate. And me in here am right and upright. and didn't have anything to do, my fortress didn't make you. Wait, think about that for just a moment. My fortress didn't make you? Really? Okay. So, what do we do? How do we not make it worse? Even if we think it's not going to get better, how do we at least not make it worse? And Buddhism has three antidotes to the three poisons. That's what they're called, greed, hate, and delusion. They're classically called poisons that I just gave you. So the antidote to grasping and clinging, of course, the facile, easy-to-say antidote to that is, you know, don't grasp and cling, right?

[22:54]

Don't give in to two-day free shipping. Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't grasp and cling. And that's hard. That's hard to do that. In the Buddha's last sermon, the Pari Nirvana Sutra, there's a piece that is often overlooked and not talked about when we talk about the Pari Nirvana Sutra because usually we do it at a particular time of year and we're focused on the Buddha's passing. But farther up in that sutra is a very helpful list called the Eight Awakenings. And the first two things on that list are have few desires and know how much is enough. That's the antidote to grasping and clinging. Having few desires and knowing how much is enough. Subtext, not giving in to two-day free shipping. And just so you won't sit here and wonder what the other six are, I'm going to read them to you. But those first two are, I think, the most important for our discussion today of the not grasping and clinging and building the fortress.

[23:58]

But these other six kind of apply. So let me read the whole eight. These are the eight awakenings from the Pari Nirvana Sutra. Have few desires. Know how much is enough. Enjoy serenity. Try that in a fortress. Make diligent effort. Do not neglect mindfulness. Practice meditation. Cultivate wisdom. And here's my bridge to the point of view poison. Do not engage in hollow discussions. So to have few desires and to know how much is enough, is important in resisting the call, the siren call of two-day free shipping. But if that is kind of too much, too far, a bridge too far, too much to ask for you right now, if you would still like to collect and get attached to things, Buddhism has some suggestions about some other things that you might collect and get attached to that might not make things worse.

[25:07]

So let me just... Buddhism is nothing if not a spiritual tradition of lists. We've got lists for everything. So let me just suggest a couple of lists that might be helpful. The first two, of course, are kind of the quintessential Buddhist things that we might get attached to if we need to get attached to something, compassion and wisdom. How about getting attached to compassion and wisdom? How about that? How about that? But there are some others. Loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and tranquility, the Brahma Viharas. the abodes of the Brahmas. If you need to get attached to something, how about getting attached to those? Or generosity, ethics, patience, energy, mindfulness, concentration, the paramitas that Ed was teaching during our winter practice period. How about getting attached? I mean, if we've got to get attached to something, how about that?

[26:07]

How about that? As the Meta Sutta says, do nothing that is mean or that the wise would reprove. How about getting attached to doing nothing mean? I think that sounds pretty nice. Of course, the punchline in all of this is that if we're compassionate and doing nothing mean, we can't get attached to that, right? Because it's instant by instant. It's moment by moment. But if we need to fill up, if we need to fill up our room with stuff, how about filling it up with practices of kindness and compassion and generosity and patience and ethics and da-da? I refer you to the Abhidharma, 89,000 things that you can meditate on, right? Pick your list, pick your favorite list in Buddhism and go be that. That's the antidote to the grasping and the clinging. And on the way, you might find that you are able to enjoy serenity because you've discovered you actually have few desires and you know how much is enough, maybe.

[27:11]

On the poison of clinging to our particular point of view, The antidote is right view. I need to say just a moment about right. The word right, very unfortunate translation right up there with emptiness kind of makes you go, oh, what is that? Right in Buddhism doesn't mean right versus wrong or right versus left or right versus correct. You know, this kind of thing. Right means is right as in upright. So upright. And this doesn't mean rigidly upright. It means the ability to come back up to uprightness after you have been knocked off. And in terms of right view, what this means is the 360 view, the all-around view, not sticking to our own tunnel vision of our blog and our political party and all of this, but being willing to take down that fortress of that view and expand this view, expand and deepen our center of gravity like ships do. Well-built ships have a well-defined center of gravity that allows them to come back upright.

[28:22]

And the way to get that is to distribute the load evenly in a ship. That's the way to do that. So this is what we do in 360 degree view, is we redistribute the load so that if somebody knocks us off balance, we are more able to come back up to upright. The second guidance that Buddhism gives us about how to get this right view is the first two factors of enlightenment, attention and investigation. To listen and to inquire. Usually when we're listening, what we're doing while we're listening actually is we're crafting our rebuttal. We're not listening, really. We're crafting our rebuttal so we can slay the argument of the other person, is what we're doing. So this listening and inquiring is the antidote to the greed and the hate of our own particular point of view and building a fortress out of that view.

[29:25]

It's a willingness to step outside the castle and inquire about the person outside. I need to be really clear about this. It doesn't mean you have to agree with them. It doesn't mean you all of a sudden love them. It means that you just listen. You just listen and inquire. And my experience is that if we listen and inquire, then that's what we get back, is that we model a listening and an inquiry. And then if we do that, we can say, I don't see it that way, rather than, you're wrong, you idiot. We can say, I don't see it that way, here's how I see it. And maybe there's some sharing and maybe not, but at least nobody gets shot. This is how to not make it worse, is to listen, to attend and investigate the first two factors of enlightenment.

[30:27]

And I would suggest that they're the first two for a reason. If we don't get to those two, enlightenment is, forget it, because we're stuck in our fortress. And the last one about separation. about our natural tendency to label quickly in ways that separate. Schurto's poem is marvelous for this, so even if you don't know it, you're gonna get the gist of it really quick here, because basically what he does throughout this poem is he sets up dichotomies, Ed calls them dichotomies. And he sets them up. And we do this. We label things west and east and sharp or dull and light or dark and interacting and not interacting and pleasing and harsh. The whole poem goes on like this. It's about a page and a half. So there's copies of it up here for those of you if you want to see it afterward. But he goes on and it gets this nice rhythm and you get going and you kind of get lulled into this this and that and you get lulled into this separation and into this dichotomy and then he sets the trap.

[31:37]

And he says, these dichotomies that I've set up here oppose one another like the front and back foot in walking. And you go, well, wait a minute, that's not really a dichotomy. No, the front and back foot in walking is not a dichotomy because it's ephemeral, right? The front foot becomes the back foot and the back foot becomes the front foot. And to call that a dichotomy is... silly, and to make a judgment about it is even worse. And at this point, you hear Sherto laughing in the background, saying, and so are all the other dichotomies that you make. So are all the other differences that you make. They are the front and back foot in walking, and no more. That's all. So the Sandokai is a poem of Yes, and. It's not a poem of separation.

[32:42]

Now, what I have to say is that it doesn't say that we all suddenly get to kumbaya and love each other. Okay, it doesn't say that either. What it says is attend and investigate the distinctions that you make. Attend and investigate to them and see if they aren't actually the front and back foot in walking that actually help us move along. This poem is very helpful in helping us to recognize the little stuff we separate on east and west, north and south, front and back, light and dark, and then wham, to say, really? You sure you want to go there with the fortress between front and back foot in walking? If you did that, you wouldn't get anywhere. You'd be stuck. So the idea is to not resolve all the dichotomies into one necessarily.

[33:52]

That's a Buddha's job, and some people can do that. But... it's just to reduce this feeling, this rampant feeling of separation based on one or two qualities. Not in the Buddhist time, but in sort of the eastern genesis of Buddhism coming from India, Japan, China, Korea, there was a north-south division that was very palpable and that got fought over, maybe not with weapons, but certainly with words, And this was very palpable. And we go north and south, this is silly, right? Or maybe not. But these types of dichotomies, to examine them and to see if we can get them to the place where they are the front and back foot in walking. Now, some dichotomies are important. Let me just acknowledge that. The dichotomy between food and poison. is really important to know.

[34:53]

But I would suggest to you that the dichotomy between food and poison is an emergency and everything else is drama. So this really helps our ability to distinguish a true emergency from drama if we can investigate the front and back foot walking nature of the labels and the dichotomies that we so quickly make. if we can investigate that and hold off on our judgment about the other person by one label that we've used to go me, you, us, them, in, out, fortress knot, da-da-da-da-da, all this that we do to do this, if we can stop for just a moment and investigate, wouldn't that be lovely? Thich Nhat Hanh has this wonderful saying where he says, peace never depends on the other person. Really?

[35:54]

Gee, that means I'm responsible, yeah? Uh-oh. Or Jack Kornfield puts it a little softer. He says, compassion does not see the world's pain and sorrow as other. So we, sangha, has its uses. Non-separation has its uses. Three of them, I think. Sangha is a witness, meaning that Sangha listens. Sangha is a mirror. If we put out a division, we're going to get a division right back. And Sangha is encouragement. and accompaniment to help each other navigate the potholes rather than throw more rocks in the road.

[37:03]

So if we can accumulate kindness and compassion, wisdom, generosity, gratitude, if we can be willing to entertain another point of view to broaden our perspective and become more stable and perhaps help others to become more stable, if we can remember that it's we and not us and them or worse, us versus them, then perhaps we actually do have a chance to make it better in your lifetime and maybe in mine too. Thank you. 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.

[38:13]

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.

[38:27]

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