Darlene and I were each scheduled to lecture today for good reasons. She because she's giving a workshop this afternoon and her workshops usually begin with her lecture in the morning and perhaps even some of you will find the lecture so intriguing you'll want to stay for the workshop even if you hadn't planned to, I don't know. And I was scheduled because I'm leaving tomorrow for three months to go to Tassajara and I wanted to say a few parting words. So we're going to both lecture, me for a few minutes and Darlene for the rest of the time. Because my parting words are fairly brief, you know I must admit I love to practice at Tassajara but I hate to leave here. But I'm in a situation that Abe Sensei once said to me, Masao Abe, who's a delightful Japanese teacher who was here, said to me, no matter how long I practice the Buddha Dharma

[01:10]

still I cannot be in two places at once. So for the next three months I will be at Tassajara practicing with a few of you who are going down there with me and many others who are already there and some other new students who are coming from Hiranyan and I look forward to it very much. And if it weren't for the fact that there were so many good teachers right here with you when I'm gone I would feel very bad about leaving you but I leave you in excellent hands as you will see in a moment. But I do want to speak a little bit to each of you. You know we all came to practice for some reason, some reason of our own, it was not

[02:16]

somebody else's idea. I find that my reason for practicing is to keep discovering moment after moment how I want to live this brief and precious life. How I can live to benefit beings. We, we, maybe the primary thing we do in Buddhism is to take refuge in the three treasures, in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. But taking refuge in Buddha we need to be careful not to look somewhere else for Buddha.

[03:23]

Buddha, Buddha is right here where you are and if you look for it somewhere else you may always or you will always not find it because it's right here. So how to, how to take refuge right here in this very body and mind, in the Buddha which is right here and never separate from you, also never separate from anyone else so that you are always connected with everything all the time. So we sit to settle the self on the self and let the flower of the life force bloom, as

[04:39]

not as something else or not as someone else but as you fully and completely being yourself. This blooming helps all beings. The joy and beauty of this blooming helps all beings to have confidence in themselves, in the possibility of manifesting Buddha right here where they are. And taking refuge in Dharma, we don't take refuge in the words of others as something that we need to make our own, we take refuge in the Dharma, the teaching of the Buddha

[05:42]

and all of the ancestors and all of the teachers who we happen to have the good fortune to meet as guides to finding the truth of our own life so that we can share it with others. And taking refuge in Sangha, in the community of practitioners, in all of those who for the same reasons that you came to practice are here to practice. We recognize how much we are supported by everyone else in this effort to manifest this Buddha which is here for the benefit of all beings, in this effort to find out how to live this life in a way that benefits all beings.

[06:45]

And recognizing how much we depend on all of our friends who are practicing and how much they depend on us, this wonderful interdependence becomes very clear to us. And so we are moved to help one another practice and to support one another in practice and to appreciate the support we are receiving constantly from the whole universe to support our practice. And seeing this interdependence, we find ways to bring harmony to the Sangha which continues to support our practice fully. So I encourage you all while I'm gone to continue your practice, to deepen your practice, to support one another and be supported by one another as you practice.

[07:55]

And to not look outside of this very one for what you are seeking. To really appreciate just this is it and it is enough. I want to share with you a poem of David White's which he read last night at his Millennium's Edge talk. Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath. If not this breath, this sitting here. This opening to the life we have refused again and again until now.

[09:06]

Until now. Enough. These few words are enough. If not these words, this breath. If not this breath, this sitting here. This opening, this opening to the life we have refused again and again until now. Until now. And now I would like to say farewell until we meet again and ask Darlene to take over. Good morning.

[10:31]

I would like to begin by thanking Blanche for including me today. It was her prerogative, of course. She is the most generous of Abbesses. Thank you, Blanche. Thank you, Blanche. Thank you, Blanche. Living in the environs of the Bay Area now is to be surrounded by a culture of getting and spending money. I personally, and I don't get out much, but I personally haven't been anywhere socially in the past year or so,

[11:41]

even on a desolate island in the Sea of Cortez where stocks and startups and millions of dollars in assets aren't being discussed. At least on that pristine beach in Baja, California, we all yelled, Shut up! when people started discussing their stock portfolios. This Zen Center neighborhood itself, as recently as five years ago, was host to street drug deals, corner whores, vomit and broken glass. In fact, the building right next to the cafe was a crack house that many people in the neighborhood tried to do something about. And now many of the cars parked along the streets routinely are BMWs or expensive SUVs. In fact, there are so many flower boxes now in front of my house around the corner that I have to hack my way to the car.

[12:47]

And there's even a guy who takes a taxi to Zazen regularly. I've seen him in the morning. And I never turn on the TV news without the channel featuring at the end of the news. They usually have some little, you know, human interest thing. Well, now they feature helpful tips on what to do if you're suddenly wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. I subscribed to the New Yorker magazine, and the whole issue some months ago was devoted to the importance of money and the fantasies about money in our culture now. And one of the cartoons that was especially interesting to me was called Finding Happiness with Money. And there were four panels, and in the first panel it said, first, get lots of money. And it showed the cartoon person with wads of bills in both their fists.

[13:54]

And the second panel was, exchange the money for goods and services. And it showed the cartoon figure surrounded by cars and suits and boats. And then in the third panel it said, enjoy the goods and services. And it showed the cartoon figure on a beach. And then in the fourth panel, the cartoon figure was saying, thank you money, thank you, thank you for my happiness. So this is kind of a giddy time, kind of a giddy time. And it seems to me that it could be a particularly distracting time for anyone who wishes to get in touch with some authentic lifestyle Now, I don't mean to exclude having money as an authentic lifestyle.

[14:56]

I just mean that the acquiring and spending of money could be distracting if you're trying to live authentically. Jacob Needleman, in a book that he wrote a couple of years ago called Money and the Meaning of Life, says about our culture now. He says, the outward expenditure of mankind's energy now takes place in and through money. The fact that we live in an affluent society means not only that we have much material wealth, which other cultures in history have had as well, but that we may be the first culture on earth to want this wealth more than we want anything else. All the ways that were once intended to help us find our authentic well-being are themselves deeply stained by the money question. Religion, education, pursuit of scientific knowledge, medicine, government, our day-to-day relationships have all been surrounded and captured by our compulsion for material wealth.

[16:00]

The conditions of our culture more and more favor the diminishing of our being. Ever-increasing distance from one's conscious presence in the midst of life. All our technologies allow us to function more and more automatically without conscious presence. And to me, Jacob Needleman is basically saying that if our chief concern in life is to live as authentically as possible, to cultivate a conscious presence in all of our activities, that we're not going to get a lot of support from our culture right now. So it sounds like we'd better keep our eyes open, our heads up, and pay some deliberate attention to what our intention is about how we live. And also to pay some attention to what we just soak up from the very air itself when we live here.

[17:03]

What the impact is on us from the collective consciousness that we're part of. So the basic questions I want to raise about this are, first of all, when you choose to live a life of the spirit, as I assume most of us in this room value, and most of us have made that choice, and I'm defining life of the spirit simply as choosing to assign a lot of value to intangibles, things that you can't buy or see. So what are the unconscious assumptions that we have about money that might make it difficult for us to both take care of our financial and our practice lives? And secondly, how can we live simply, without envy, in a place as flagrantly acquisitive as the Bay Area is now? We should know whether we unconsciously equate how much money we have or are paid with our intrinsic self-worth.

[18:13]

We should know if we do that or know the ways in which we do that. We should know if we think money is somehow dirty, less important than coursing in non-material realms. We should know that. And my main reason for raising these questions to you as spiritual seekers is that I think many of us have a lot of confusion about them, me included. And I think the consequences of this confusion are to make us much more vulnerable to distraction and being disturbed by the Bay Area culture as it is now, being unconscious of the ways in which we choose and feel makes us more vulnerable to disturbance. And I think the things that we all get confused about in this realm boil down to a couple of issues, maybe four that I can think of.

[19:16]

One is valuing the spiritual or non-material world differently from the material world, thinking one is good and where we should make all our effort and the other bad and polluted, that only crass people worry about. An offshoot of this is how we look at people who have chosen to live very acquisitive and materialistic lives. Do we envy them or do we get self-righteous and judge them as more deluded than we are? Do we scorn them as hung up on tangibles which we assume, perhaps without much basis, we assume that tangibles are more impermanent than intangibles such as our own virtue? And second, the second issue is confusion about ascetic practice versus living with a goodly amount of material comfort and beauty. Now this is a very old dilemma. It's at least as old as Buddhism, which we know because the first sutra actually addressed this situation.

[20:31]

Well, actually that was two hundred years after Buddhism, but we can assume, human nature being what it is, that this was always a problem. So what is the middle way in this matter between asceticism and material hedonism? Thirdly, how do we determine our own self-worth? If we can command a high salary, can we see that fact as independent from our self-worth? Or if we've chosen to work for Zen Center or for a non-profit at a substantially lower pay than we might be able to command in the wider world, can we do that without resentment or the feeling that we're being used? And fourth and finally, the issue of spiritual materialism. That is, strengthening our sense of self and accomplishment through spiritual practice rather than material acquisition.

[21:33]

In other words, we don't change any of the basic dynamics of ego gratification, we just substitute spiritual attainment for material acquisition. So we feel gratified then when we're having good states of mind or something as opposed to getting a new car. So what is the teaching for us in all of these issues? How can we use our envy, our confusion, our dedication to authenticity, our Dzogchen practice to learn something about ourselves and how we're affected by the milieu in which we practice? So first of all, do we seekers of the way need to get our hands dirty in the first place? Can't we just retire from the dusty world and develop our Dzogchen practice and leave the shark tank to the sharks? Well, I think we come to Zen Center to strengthen our resolve. We go to Tassajara to train our mind-body and it feels so right.

[22:38]

Should we live that way indefinitely? And some people do, but not all of us do. In 18th century Japan, the most revered Zen master of his time was Hakuin. And Hakuin frequently complained in letters that we have that his monks used to monastery living and to quiet routines were quite undone by the dust and confusion of the world of activity whenever they had to venture into it. He said the most trivial matters will upset them. How does one obtain true enlightenment? In the busy round of mundane affairs, in the confusion of worldly problems, amidst the seven upside-downs and the eight upsets. I don't know what those are technically, but I'm sure that you could come up with them yourself.

[23:41]

I think Hakuin's words point to the teaching present when we find ourselves aware of the possibilities of stillness and a sense of proportion in the midst of all this materialism and wealth around us. The true equanimity and compassion can best be tested and honed in the confusion of worldly problems amidst the seven upside-downs and the eight disturbances or upsets. We might find that our equanimity, our practice, are mere poles in the midst of a raging river. So how thick and strong do we have to stay where we are? How thick and strong do we have to be to stay where we are in the midst of the raging river? Or maybe closer to the point, how porous do we have to be? Most of us do believe that we have to choose one or the other, accumulating worldly wealth or developing spiritually.

[24:55]

And I think that's because we tend to think of the spiritual life and material pursuits as either-or, as separate. New students come to Zen Center determined to develop spiritually, and they give up everything unnecessary. They often put things in the goodwill downstairs, which older students, who no longer see things in such black-and-white terms, gleefully scarf up. And I think that this is very good, to dedicate yourself to a simple life indefinitely, to experience life on a very simple level, to start with your body. What does your body need? You know, there's a big difference between what your body needs and what your ego needs. And often, if you settle into your body, you can simplify your life tremendously by following its dictates. Not always, depending on what they are.

[25:59]

So if you give up material goods, and, well, on the other hand, just simplify your life very finely and peel it down to what you need to live your life, however it is, at the very least, you discover that you don't need those extra things, or, on the other hand, that it's difficult for you to do without them. Of course, a problem arises if, when we give up things, we think we're doing something special, that we're spiritually superior to people who continue to accumulate material goods. But if we practice with these thoughts and understand them as a form of spiritual materialism, I think that it's okay. So I'm going to shorten this. So we all vary a lot on this continuum, from asceticism to material hedonism. And we have to be pretty careful to put our own point of view in perspective when we feel righteous or we feel defensive about our own point of view.

[27:09]

But we must also investigate what is our point of view, and what is our unquestioned habit. So what's your point of view, and what's just a habit of the way you've always done things, or the way your parents did things? Do we just fall back into our old assumptions, or do we actually come to some conscious interaction with this realm? I think it's extremely important for every one of us to understand what we think about all this. What are our unconscious assumptions about the taint or the comfort of money? Do we feel shame about our own needs, any stirrings we have toward acquisitiveness? And do we judge others if we've successfully denied our own yearnings? And if we give up material things and just shift our greed to the spiritual world, pursuing particular states of mind, then what is that? So we've inherited this split between materialism and spirituality, but we don't have to continue it.

[28:16]

As Zen practitioners, we study in our classes and in our meditation the interdependence of all things. We understand that any polarization, like materialism and spirituality, is just conceptual. It's just for convenience in talking about it. It's not an accurate description of reality to divide things up that way. So starting from that informed place, how do we fulfill or satisfy our spiritual natures while participating rightly and truly in the relative world of gaining and losing? So I think we must give money its due respect. We must take it seriously because, first of all, it's literally the coin of the realm in the world in which we live. And I think we must understand that and not hold it from us in some rigid point of view.

[29:19]

If we practice, we tend to allow all the forces of life to participate in ourselves, to be embraced by our consciousness. When we have spiritual ideals which prevent us from facing our financial needs with intelligence and care, these spiritual ideals just remain ideals. They don't enter into the details of life. We may develop all the compassion in the world, but we can only really manifest it when we attend to the material realm of people and their needs, their cares and concerns. So you have to mix it up. You can't hold yourself apart. So I think when we practice in the material world, it means that we treat material things and financial matters like everything else, not putting them higher or lower than other things we respect. In Buddhism, we practice according the material world the same respect we have for our noble feelings like compassion and loving kindness.

[30:31]

In fact, we understand that the way we treat objects and the resources of this earth reflects our basic respect for all the ten thousand things, the material world. Taking care of everything, including material considerations, but being a slave to nothing. One gives to one's material needs the energy and intelligence that's required to satisfy them. We make choices based on all the considerations in a situation, how other people are affected, how our state of mind is affected, and so on. Now, as I said, this middle way between asceticism and material hedonism is a very old topic. And, let's see, I think it's called the Sutra of Turning the Wheel of the Dharma, was the first sutra in which Buddha talked about this.

[31:39]

Because it was a big issue, maybe in the same way that it is for us now, it was a big issue in his time. Since he was Siddhartha, the Buddha was born a prince and much is made of his having left his home. He left his family, he left his position in society in order to speak, in order to seek his own spiritual truth. And he spent six years then, when he left the palace, he spent six years doing the very austere practices that were the way to truth in that time in India. So the aim of this effort, of these practices at the time, was to transcend all attachment to the physical, which was where the problem was seen in any kind of world of non-spiritual life, the world of desire, the world of the body.

[32:43]

His great insight, and the insight that we celebrate today, was that the blissful states of mind that are brought on by these practices don't actually lead to the ultimate liberation from suffering. Instead, these elevated mental states were escapes, they are escapes from ordinary consciousness, and they end just like every state of mind. So, after having this wonderful blissful experience in a sasheen, or as a result of doing austerity practices, you have this wonderful blissful experience and then it passes, like all the other states of mind. In fact, it will pass very fast if you notice it. Oh, here it is, what, what, where? So these states of mind don't lead to freedom and happiness. So Buddha ended up embracing what we call the middle way, not taking a stand in either asceticism or material hedonism.

[33:49]

And he proposed the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path that we practice today. So the trouble with these extremes, asceticism and hedonism, well, first of all, hedonism is clear, right? If you just follow your desires, all your desires, then you immediately consign yourself to a loss of disappointment, to a life of loss and disappointment and scrambling, you know, frantically chasing after whatever it is that occurs to you that might make you happy. So that's pretty clear, we know that, in fact, that's usually people's first strategy in life, don't you think? It was certainly mine, you know, starting very young, you can see babies do this, and often this continues in adults much longer than it should, actually. But this is our first strategy, usually, that we try to relieve our suffering, is just get everything that we think will make us happy.

[34:57]

But you know what happens when you do that. So it's more subtle, then, to see the problems involved with asceticism, the fact that if you do distance yourself from worldly desires, that you're also subtly reinforcing the concept of I. When you run after desires, it's, I, fill me up, fill me up, fill me up. But when you reject worldly desires, then you have this very subtle smugness and arrogance, well, I'm not like the simple common folk. I am able to reject desire. And this can lead to dogmatism, you know, be convinced that your way is the only way, and conflict with other people who think, you know, along the various subtleties of denial, of rejection of material things, and so it leads to suffering again. So the middle way has been a prime motif accepted in all subsequent Buddhist practice.

[36:03]

Now there's, of course, been a lot of debate about where this middle way is, between asceticism and material hedonism, but the point is not to be caught by either grasping or aversion, by worldly pleasure or the acts of denial of the material. And as I've said before, I don't think the middle way means the average, that you always take the most moderate, boring course of action available. It's more like nowhere standing, that in any given situation you do what's appropriate. So if it's time to sit a seven-day Sashin, you sit a seven-day Sashin, you follow the schedule, and you eat what's offered rather than exercising your own personal preference. And in that situation there's no difference between an ascetic monk and you. But if your best friend's getting married and is throwing a drunken orgy to celebrate the event,

[37:05]

then you go to the drunken orgy, like everybody else. You're just tending to what's important in any given situation. You're not taking a particular stance that spans all situations. So when you're young, you practice with thoughts about sex and how to express your creative potential. When you're old, you practice with your fears of insecurity and loss. We do what is in front of us, young or old, rich or poor. The middle way is not standing in any particular position. We don't impose anything too forcefully on our minds. Including the renunciation of material possessions. But nor should we let our desire for material security alone determine the choices that we make in our lives. Letting the mind be in a very open way is our practice.

[38:08]

We cultivate the state of mind that allows ambition to come and to go. So there's no ambition to stir up thoughts, nor is there an ambition to suppress them. The desire to secure oneself in this world and to satisfy our material desires is just allowed to occur spontaneously. And I believe that it is also an expression of basic sanity. In order to practice with all these questions, we need to encounter in ourselves the one who doesn't care about winning or losing. We need to understand the difference between money and wealth. When we practice, we acknowledge our frantic clinging to whatever means security to us. We acknowledge averting from our fear in the name of our solid self.

[39:13]

And this includes recognizing our neurotic attitudes toward money. We become familiar with and accept the neurotic, acquisitive and jealous mind. The mind that watches what status is able to accumulate by any means necessary, even by practicing very hard. And we come to know it for what it is, and we work compassionately with its pattern. So I leave you with some words of Suzuki Roshi's. Renunciation is not giving up what you have. It's understanding that everything changes.

[39:56]

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