Saturday Lecture

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can you can you hear me can you hear me when i go like this and you hear me when i go like this okay this thing as a little funny sometimes wow
look at all of you i'm surprised i thought everyday will be back in the midwest eating turkey leftovers today
or whatever
so

so something that we don't do so much but we probably should do more as introduce ourselves the speaker my name is jeffrey schneider i'm a priest here and currently i'm the director of the city so
enter so that's who i am and some of you i know in some of you i don't know so it's good to see all of you can just see it like a little
hand of people who are here maybe for the first time or haven't been here more than a couple of times okay good so this a lot of
this a lot of new people that's great
so in that case i think i should
offer a little cautionary
thing you know i don't really know when i lecture who i'm gonna be lecturing to so some of you may have a lot of experience i know some of you have a lot of experience in some of you may have no idea of what buddhism is about or san or anything like that so i may be in
insulting the intelligence and experience some of you and you know
completely losing the rest of you so so those of you in the middle will be just fine
and the rest of you can just done practice forgiveness and patients
so let's see
how does that thank you for the water

in in buddhism we tend to like to make lists of things you know the five hindrances in the seven factors of enlightenment in the eightfold noble path and twelve old chinos causal conditioning and the you know gazillion marks of the buddha in all of them
but one of the things that we have a list of is the five fears and the five years our fear of death fear of loss of reputation fear of loss of livelihood fear of loss to no fear of unusual states of mind and fear of speaking before the assembly
now isn't that interesting that that should be like right up there with fear of loss that you know death a fear of death and going mad and things like that actually now that i sat down i'm feeling very comfortable but when i was upstairs i was trying to sit thousand and one of the rooms upstairs
and i was little bit nervous which is
probably good
but so on
about oh several months ago in the spring i was visiting our monastery tassajara tassajara is out in the mountains outside of monterrey and it's in a very deep and narrow canyon with the little stream running through it sometimes it's a big stream
i'm in the winter and i was there in the in the spring and it was very very beautifully you know everything was blooming and blossom mean and i was for me i was lying on the grass under a plum tree those of usually know tassajara will know the plum tree i'm talking about it's right in front of the office and the grass was you know
blooming and the sun was shining and the plum tree had lost its flowers but there were these beautiful purple leaves you know and it was a perfect day in many ways it was not too warm not too cold i was relaxed i was among people that i knew and liked and i was lying there under the plum tree
before work meeting in the afternoon looking up at the sky which was seen a perfect tassajara blue and as i lay there with a gentle wind wafting over me i thought to myself i wish i were dead
i really did
and i thought our that feeling came to me quite unbidden you know i wasn't like you know making a catalogue of the disasters of my life or anything like that it just sort of happened and so this was very interesting i talked about this i've talked about a to some of the people i see for spiritual instruction or guidance or
or who are just kind enough to put up with me and my primary teacher norman fischer who is you know until recently the additives and center we were talking about this and he said oh that makes perfect sense at a perfect moments such as you've described it is you know
harman to desire to merge with the absolute
and i thought oh that sounds very nice but you know that's not what was going on
so respectfully you know i decline that
that interpretation of what was happening i didn't want you're laughing this is beth suffering
it is so we're going to talk a lot about suffering
but anyhow you know as i thought of it and as i sort of examined the experience a little bit more closely in retrospect i realize that what i was experiencing at that moment regardless of the pleasantness of my surroundings was the experience of that suffering which is entailed in the unremitting nature of x
experience
hey you got that the unremitting nature of experience you know it doesn't stop it just keeps going on you know so so what we're talking about his
the nature of consciousness okay and consciousness in itself as suffering you know and there are times in our lives when consciousness itself becomes intolerable
and most of the time for most of us you know there's this this underlying pain suffering that goes with consciousness now the buddha knew about this a lot because you know the the point of the buddhist point of deportation and guess it's
where they want was about suffering you know he didn't get up one day and it was a beautiful day and everything was grand and decided to cut off his hair you know where rags and go into the forest and sit under trees you know it's he he his his need
to leave home and apply himself to the truth of our lives was brought about by a deep understanding and personal experience of suffering
so you know after a while after doing his various practices and after you know attaining what we what we call enlightenment whatever that might be you know he decided to try and share what he had learned or experienced with other people and in order to make it easier for people to understand
he was a little schematic you know the indian mind likes to make lists so he talked about the four noble truths okay
and the first noble truth is actually the one that i'm sort of interested in starting with today and i'll reach you a quote from the scripture where the buddhist first sermon i believe where he talked about that
the first noble truth is that of suffering
and i quote what is the noble truth of suffering birth is suffering aging is suffering sickness is suffering death and suffering sorrow and lamentation pain and grief and despair are suffering association with the loathed is suffering dissociation from the love to suffering not to get what one
wants to suffering in short the five aggregates affected by clinging are suffering parenthetically what he didn't put in there is to to get what one wants is also suffering
in short the five aggregates affected by clinging are suffering so let's look at the five aggregates some of you will know and some of you will not know what these are
the five aggregates okay so the buddha said that existence as we know it has basically three marks okay
it is impermanent i mean that's pretty obvious right you know just look around you
it is involved with suffering will go back to that in the little bit more closely and it is without self okay so what we think of as the self as buddhism is explains it is actually sort of vague we call it the aggregates the scandals the
form feeling impulse on perception and consciousness i don't get get them in the right way in the right order but let me reach you again the buddha says what are the five aggregates affected by clinging they are the form aggregate you know body and all of that affected by clinging the
feeling aggregate affected by claiming the perception aggregate affected by clinging the formations aggregate afflicted by clinging and the consciousness aggregate affected by clinging okay so here we go consciousness
so what i was experiencing under the plum tree was the consciousness aggregate affected by clinging okay so consciousness in itself as suffering when it is associated with clinging and i don't know about you but to some extent all of my life and all of my thought and all of my been as six is of
directed by clinging which is where suffering comes from so the word that we translate usually a suffering in the first noble truth is actually duca k that's a sanskrit word and it means killing it means suffering but it also means dis ease on
on
discomfort on
unsatisfactory us here that sort of thing
and all of our experience affected by clinging is
is involved with suffering of that sort you know and the word that the buddha used to talk about clinging was actually on very graphic the word is tom hop in sanskrit which means thirst okay so imagine if you've ever been like really really thirsty maybe you've been working outside and a hot day or so
something
the
and you know and you haven't had a drink for a long time and you're really hot and you know how every cell in your body is like screaming out for water for replenishment well that's the kind of thirst data that is that the basis of all of our suffering whether we're aware of it or not
and speaking of which partly
so consciousness affected by clinging equal suffering and that was my experience you know under the under the plum tree and there was nothing wrong with the plum tree or the day or the breeze or the grass or beautiful tassajara the lovely people they are even with me except this clinging to experience
which causes suffering and you know it was so subtle that it took me to be completely relaxed to notice and suffering
so without this clean without this thirst with letting go everything is without difficulty you know maybe we've experienced that very occasionally in our lives for a moment or two you know we let go and you know each thing manifests itself he knows the bright emptiness of buddha nature
but holding on you know we get to experience the opposite there's a story that i heard once and i'm not sure if it's true or not but it's a nice story anyway that when indian buddhist monks first came to china to preach the dharma dharma for those of you who may not know is just another word for teaching the
he didn't speak the language they didn't speak chinese and so the way that they taught was to hold up the clenched fist is a clenched fist of suffering and just let go this was their teaching you know
but our experience or at least my experience is more often that the clenched fist you know is full of ground glass and i'm not willing to let go no matter how much it hurts you know a friend of mine says and i never let go of anything that didn't have claw marks on it you know
why or you know it's kind of like know the other the other thing that occurred to me it's it's a little bit like unity the story of the old lady who swallowed a fly you know i knew no lady who swallowed a fly i don't know why she swallowed a fly perhaps she'll die i knew an old lady who swallowed a spider that wiggled and killed and tickled insider she swallowed the spider to catch the fly but i don't know why she swallowed
the fly perhaps she'll die and then she goes on to swallow a mouse to catch the spider in this muna and a cat to catch the mouse and a dog to it etc and finally i knew an a lady who swallowed a horse she's dead of course
that that's an old one from the kids but you know that's what we try to do right you know something's wrong with you know we get a little we got a little fly inside is so we swallow the spider know anything we can think of to fix the unfixable self we keep adding more and more and more and we keep tangling the tangle
and
more untangle ugly you know the not we just add more knots
so you know how do we release from this clinging which is in itself suffering and how how is you know the suffering generated in a some of our suffering is built into the nature of things you know as i just read old age sickness and death or three of the biggies
in and we're all going to experience them at least death you know some of your younger people make it run run over by a truck as you leave here and you'll hear you won't care old age sickness but you know there will be death
you know so one way or the other we're in for it right
you know it's but some of our suffering is not inevitable some of our suffering is inherited you know some of our suffering is generational karma you know this a way to think of it you know in our families for example we inherit the burden of the stories of our parents and of our grandparents and of there
whomever you know mother eve and you know and the the patterns of behavior in the patterns of thought and the patterns of feeling and communication are inherited you know our learned you know
sometimes you know these are okay sometimes they're mildly difficult you know it and sometimes most horribly their patents of abuse violence alcoholism poverty irresponsibility and all of those
all of those things that on we know too much about
you know we also inherit the accumulated karma the accumulated stories and consequences of of our cultures you know consider the long sorrow and the many crimes that have passed between the people of the middle east osea northern ireland africa
you know consider the effects of racism
in this country consider the effects of how native people have been treated here in this country in the world over you know so we inherit all of this we inherit the fear we inherit a suspicion we inherit the stories we inherit all of these things you know this is a lot of that this is a lot of bad
baggage you know and the inheritance of these stories and the accumulated actions and the accumulated
consequence of these actions you know it's like a mighty current against which we are trying to swim upstream when we try to liberate ourselves from this
no and in our own lives the habits of our own heart you know we're still caught by the flow of of our own stories you know the story of how we describe ourselves to ourselves the story of how we understand other people the story of how we describe the world to
to ourselves there is a very old scripture buddhist scripture goes very far back and it's called the dharma pada that the way of the way of the dharma and the first line of that is all that we are as the result of what we have thought
you know all that we are as the result of the stories of the language of the things that we've been telling ourselves of the stories we've inherited every all of our learned behaviors you know
this is this is what we are
so in a sense you know spiritual practice of any sort is the discipline of changing habits of thought changing habits of behaviors and in a way it's like learning a new language you know a spiritual practice is basically about deconstructing the self deconstructing the store
worries deconstructing the patterns deconstructing the language that we used to describe ourselves other people in the world's to ourselves
so and our karma of but you know by the way i've been using karma in the the sort of popular sense what karma really means literally is a volitional action volitional activity this sort of popular sense of karma is actually where is actually you know when we say oh that's my karma actually what we're talking about of the effects
karma and i believe the word for that is actually for parker said right to zuma said right they know for parker
okay well if nobody knows i can get away with it
okay
but you know that this this karma this volitional activity you know creates the environment of our lives okay you know cause and effect it's about cause and effect but it's not like one on one you know it's not like here you dropped the apple and a get splatters with you dropped a glass and it breaks it creates know our karma of thought our karma of behavior or karma of
of description
creates the environment of our lives
so we can choose oh and part of karma this very very important you know with all of this stuff that we inherit we also inherit choice okay so within the mix of everything else there's a choice about this moment and the next moment and each of those choices will of course have consequences
good or bad pleasant or unpleasant liberating or more binding
so so we can choose little by little to cultivate this atmosphere this environment of either fear or face
either generosity or are
greediness you know all of those things each moment each moment we have their choice to create that and you know i had this quotation here says happiness is not fortuitous but the result of virtue and unfortunately i forgot to write down who said it so apologies to whoever here she was but happiness is not fortuitous but
the result of virtue
and another a quote that i have written down that i i heard long ago from in this room actually from our our erstwhile avid richard baker he said it is by observing the virtue of others that our own virtue grows so taken together does really of very interesting you know happiness is not fortuitous but the result of virtue and it
is by observing the virtue of others that our own virtue grows and
what he means i believe by that or what i mean by that at any rate is that in order to observe virtue in others you know it is our virtue is a which is observing the virtue of others and so part of it is learning we'd learn to become virtuous by seen our teachers and our friends behave virtuously are pair
ants are mentors whomever but it is our innate virtue that is able to see that virtue
so that's pretty cool
so i've touched on the two components of spiritual practice a little bit each cultivation and release
our surrender so i'd like to return to release for a few moments more
letting go release you know letting go of the
the crushed glass in our hands letting go of the clinging to the aggregate of consciousness and all of the other ah
aggregates the you know this is the mysterious parts so how do we do it
so you see even and even in surrender this a little bit of cultivation
how do we not to it you know what are we letting go of you know and know letting go is i believe for most of us for me certainly absolutely terrifying you know it's like death in it is a sort of death because let him go the things that we most need to let go of our the ideas of
who we are and how we are in the world and this is death this is death of the person we thought we were on whom we thanked all of our plans our hopes are plots on whom we've depended for happiness which of course is just around the corner once we can control the situation and get everything just the way we want it right
you know plenum
shortly before i was ordained a priest i was talking to
my teacher about the ordination and you know we were talking and he said he looks so sad and i said i'm morning they said who are you morning or what are your morning i said i'm mourning the person who i was who's going to die you now
and you know that was not a person i particularly wanted to hang on to either
but you know we we we mourn who we were because it's who we are as as we become someone else because that's the only person we knew right
so anyhow about this about this clinging this grasping and stuff so you know imagine the thing that you most want in the world and do not have whatever that is you know a person and job situation you know that great car on returning to some place where we were
happy or thought and think we'll be happy again any of those things what you most want and don't have
and then you know when you thought about that for a moment
what would it be like to give up this thing in your heart
not to just give it up but to give up the wanting of it without bitterness or longing
to give up in our hearts without bitterness or longing what we most want
i find that absolutely terrified
but you know when we don't do this or when we can't do this it's like living between living that living in the time between the medical test and the diagnosis of a fatal disease
if you can imagine what that's like some of you may know
in mostly we live that way all the time to a greater or lesser degree
and you know one disease that i think that we all suffer from the okay what does that i suffer from and i think that maybe some of you will be able to
understand is the sort of spiritual agoraphobia you know the fear of the vast spaces where we have no definite path or sign poster guide and no safe boundary and you know the boundaries that we have that we cling to so tenaciously that we create for ourselves you know the most
most durable one is our sense of self you know and of course that is the
boundary that is responsible for the greatest part of our suffering and oddly enough we seem to fear
the absence of pain and we seem to fear and have a terror of not wanting
so you know letting go of this suffering
requires a great deal of faith
so that when we climbed to the top of one hundred put foot pole and keep going you know it'll be okay we have to have that kind of face you know it's kind of like avalokiteshvara are wiley coyote remember wiley coyote in the road runner you know finding out that they could sort of like dance in mid air you know
as long as wiley coyote didn't notice that he was overlooking the chasm he was fine you know
and as long as avalokiteshvara the bodhisattva when practicing deeply the wisdom beyond wisdom says that all five conscious are empty she's fine to that relieves all suffering
so this is this is a kind of faith that we need and i'd like to tell you a couple stories about faith

one is a story about st francis of assisi the patron saint of our city and i don't remember where i heard this story and i have no idea whether it's supposed to be a true story or fictional one but it serves my purposes
so the story is just st francis as you know may know with like the buddha really a wandering mendicant for much of his time and so the story goes that he and one of his companions were walking along you know the road and they've been walking all day and they were very hungry and they were very tired and
and you know it was getting on towards night and you know let's say it was cold and getting to rein to you know just up the ante here and you know they saw they saw a monastery a building up the up the road a bit and st francis said zoos companion brother shall we shall i show you
what is perfect happiness and his brother said sure you know when you sounds good to me so they walked up to the they walked up to the monastery door and they banged on the door they knocked on the door and you know the old on the old monk who was the gatekeeper you know sort of opened the door and said what do you want you
and said excuse me brother but were called and retired and were you know where to to have your brothers in christ begging here and could you put us up and go away slammed the door
so they're walking down the road and francis turns to his a companion says brother that was perfect happiness
so
let me read to another story
so this stories is in story this story is about the great master matsu matsu was one of the one of the big names right in the golden age of chinese then
okay
matsu was residing in the monastery of tempo in where he said constantly and meditation the master aware that he was a vessel of dharma went to him and said virtuous one for what purpose are you sitting in meditation
matsu answered i wish to become a buddha thereupon the master picked up a tiled and started rubbing it on a stone in front of the hermitage matsu asked what is the master doing the master replied i am polishing this tile to make it a mere how can you make a mirror by polishing a tile exclaimed motto
do and how can you make a buddha by practicing zazen countered master
so these are two different stories about face
st francis you know his idea of his experience okay of perfect happiness was faith because at the moment when the door was slammed and he was hungry and cold and tired and foot sore
he depended upon nothing but his god
he completely abandoned himself to the absolute
in complete and utter face
this was his idea of perfect happiness to depend upon nothing but
that power which completely enfolded him the god of his understanding
matsu later on down the road
i came to realize the same kind of faith although i'm sure he would have described it in a different language
abandoning himself to
well we sometimes call emptiness for weeks sometimes called buddha nature what we sometimes call you know the own eight the innate perfection of each thing but it was the same kind of faith actually the face to let go the face to you know sometimes operationally i like to think that what i
try to do is to abandon myself to the bodhisattva vow to save all beans you know that's another way of thinking of what we abandon our self to so so you know matsu did that and became a great master and i don't think that he stuck sitting south end by the way i think he probably continued
although perhaps somewhat typically oh you know just for those of you who are new and i don't know if they told you this you know then the words in it just means meditation it's a child it's a chinese now it's japanese transliteration of a chinese transliteration of a sanskrit word and just means meditation so there's the mystery cleared up sazon is just been sitting meditate
ation saw sitting like soft who that's the thing i'm sitting on so anyhow i think that's who probably continue to sit zazen
okay so where are we oh yeah so this states you know one of the things that we talk about the dogan century who was the thirteenth century founder of this particular school to stream of of zen practice in japan talks about practice enlightenment okay and so what he means by that it
is in this is pertinent to the matsu story is that we are not practicing zazen or anything else to become enlightened we are practicing out of our own enlightenment
okay we're practicing as an expression of that original
unbreakable always present enlightenment buddha nature what have you so each person in this room today if it's your first time here if you never come back you are here whether you know it or not because you've had a glimpse of your own enlightenment and once we've had that glimpse if we're lucky
enough we can pursue ways of pursuing it okay but each one of us his head their clips and for some of you this may be the way that you will choose to pursue it for a greater or lesser time for some of you this is not the way but please please be assured that
what you need you have
so
so i've been speaking of the two poles of and of practice you know cultivation and surrender and there is attention here and i'm not going to try to resolve that either for you or for myself because it continues to be a practical question deep in my own practice but the question for me then or the ques
kitchen that i would just like to
explore with the few minutes said that remain i'm not going to go on forever i promise is a what can we do if anything to encourage us to let go to prepare the ground to prepare the karmic environment and atmosphere for that are another way of putting a perhaps more positively is what do we do that encourages
ace okay
well one of the things so i think we do is we are faithful
we become men and women who are faithful we show up on one of the many titles of the buddha is that is to target her and that means sometimes it's translated as the thus com or the dusk gone one i like to think of it is the guy who shows up okay the to
target as he or she who shows up in the world honestly and
on time
okay maybe that on time that's a that's a personal thing with me
but you know we also we also cultivate face with devotional practices bowing chanting the way we work together practicing generosity and gratitude and you know gratitude is not by the way just an emotion okay gratitude is not just something that that comes on us like a like a summer rain
ng gratitude is also a practice and the way we practice gratitude or one of the ways we can practice gratitude is by being being grateful walk down the street and as i walked down the street i am grateful for my legs as i see this flower i am grateful for the person who plan to ditch and i am grateful for my eyes
as you know as they take a breath i am grateful for the air and i am grateful for my lungs as i turn on the spigots i am grateful for clean water that comes to me by turning them on you know this is the this is the practice of developing gratitude you know if we have an emotion associated with it that's fine but week
can actually practice gratitude and generosity as practices this is the cultivation site okay
and another way of experts have been developing face or lady allow it faced to be developed his by experimenting okay so you know when we do zazen sitting meditation right basically what we're doing is treating or body and our mind is a great experiment so we can ask ourselves in any situation
once i behaved as though things were okay what would it be like if i behaved as though you were buddha and i was buddha and there was no problem you know what would it be like if justice once i behaved as though i were a man or woman of face a man or woman of no rank
you can try this out and if it doesn't work can get your money back at the door you know in all of your little in all of the pain and problems that that are associated with it
yo in one of the chance that we do here
we say there's the line if you want to achieve justice practice dustless without delay will the dustless we're talking about as the same root word as to thought to target her but if we want to practice faced if we want which she faced practice face without delay
a couple of other things that we do to encourage the development of faith our study you know we study to teach him particularly for those of us who have busy little minds that need something to i do you know to study the scriptures to study the commentaries to to take classes to to learn as
and as we learn more about on more about the teaching our confidence in it develops so that when you know some teacher tells us it is okay you know we may be more prepared to believe that and of course the other thing we do to develop faith is doesn't you know this
this practice of sitting meditation allows us to experience the truth of our teaching in our own bodies and minds so faith surrender enlightenment you know these are gifts okay we can't make them come we can prepare the ground we can prepare the environment we can nourish the atmosphere
and we can hold ourselves in readiness
so
the other day i was thinking about this this talk and it reminded me of upon that i'd read a long time ago and so i knew that have written it down someplace so it looks through my journals and i found it in my journal
it's a poem by allen ginsberg
and it's upon that i read
first at tassajara when i was living there in the monastery and this venerable old notebook
was is david i'm tossing are and nineteen eighty i was a very precocious child
so the upon by allen ginsberg it's called sharkey mooney coming out from the mountain shockey mooney is another up as another name for the historical buddha shocker was his clan name and mooney is something like sage so it's like the the wise
guy of the shakya clan something like that
k shocking movie coming out from the mountain
he drags his bare feet out of the cave under a tree eyebrows grown long with weeping and hook nosed whoa in ragged soft robes wearing a fine beard unhappy hands clasped to his naked breast humility is beatrice humility is beaten us
is faltering into the bushes by a stream all things inanimate but his intelligence stands upright there though trembling are hot who sought heaven under a mountain of stone sat thinking till he realized the land of blessedness exists in the imagination the flash come the m
d mere how painful to be born again wearing a fine beard re-entering the world a better wreck of a sage earth before him his only path
we can see his soul he knows nothing like a god shaken me gretsch humility is beaten us before the absolute world
thank you
me