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. Good morning and welcome. Abiding Tassara teacher, nice to have you here. Um... If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it truly is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. William Blake. So this morning, I want to continue talking about the elements of Buddhist enlightenment that were transmitted to future generations through his own analysis of what had happened to him under the Bodhi tree, the transmission of what we call the Buddha Dharma, Dharma transmission.

[01:09]

One of the key elements of that transmission, which I spoke about yesterday, appeared in the refrain at the end of each verse in which the Buddha describes the sequence leading up to and including the complete, perfect, and awakening of the Buddha. And that phrase being, I allowed no such pleasant feelings that arose in me to gain power over my mind. So which brought to my mind an experience and some reflections about that experience that I had some years ago following a vacation in Norway. It was during that trip that I learned from a fellow traveler about... a condition that's brought on by absorption in the contemplation of sublime beauty. And it's called the Stendhal syndrome. It's named after a 19th century French author who described his own experience of this phenomena during a visit to Florence where he was spending his days looking at magnificent works of art.

[02:15]

He said, I reached a point where one encounters celestial sensations. Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, which in Berlin they call nerves. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling. So in 1979, this condition was given Stendhal's name by an Italian psychiatrist who in the course of several years had treated over 100 people with similar cases among the tourists and visitors who had also succumbed to absorption in the sublime beauty of Florentine art. This condition is known as the Florence Syndrome, and it's also in Latin, hyperculturemia. And this is all true. mean at least it's in Wikipedia as true as that is so apparently according to the psychiatrist Italians themselves are immune to this syndrome perhaps from centuries of overexposure as our tour groups who have the good fortune she says of traveling at a fairly rapid pace thereby providing them with a buffer to this type of intoxication real intoxication

[03:34]

this is getting to my point, requires concentrated effort. So the reason I'm bringing this up has to do with the whole idea of enlightenment as an experience that one might have. Like all of a sudden, such an experience that I've heard referred to in the Zen camps as Kensho or Satori, which is not something that we talk about so much in Soto Zen, do we? Except around the coffee machine. think they had it or got it or something. Anyway, while I was traveling through Norway, I think I was struck by such a moment myself, as were my two traveling companions, one of them an old Zen student named Nina Hagen, who leaned over to me and said, have you heard of the Stendhal syndrome? Which I hadn't. So anyway, the three of us were on the deck of a ferry boat, and the sunlight was streaming through the clouds, creating a double rainbow across the fjord. And all we could manage to say was, oh, my God, over and over again.

[04:39]

Oh, my God. You know, we're Buddhists, but we kept saying, oh, my God. It was like our little mantra. Anyway, I wouldn't say that we were actually in danger of falling, but there certainly was an experience of breathlessness and of intoxication from repeated exposures to such incredible beauty. So I think some of you may recognize this condition from listening to music, or from eating certain foods, or from riding very fast on the back of a motorcycle, as I once did when I was 21 years old. And I might not have lived much longer if my friend hadn't been a very good driver. So I look at this condition, and I checked it out on my computer. And there it was, the Stendhal syndrome. And even though I mostly found this really amusing, at the same time, it helped me to notice something deeply familiar about myself. You know, a particular pattern which I imagine may be common to the human being.

[05:41]

And that is the letdown that follows the exaltation. Just like the Italians in Florence, as the days go by, through no fault of my own, I simply got bored with the celestial scenery in Norway. I just couldn't take any more, none of us could, so we spent the rest of our time playing cards below deck. And it's one of the problems of these heavenly states. Blossoms don't fall, weeds don't spread, and children don't age, peaches never ripen. And yet the memory of such moments becomes lodged somehow in our neuronal wiring. Like, boy, that was special. Yes. So as a result, for me anyway, ecstasy as a destination has seemed somewhat overrated. I don't mind passing through ecstatic states, but they are just no longer places that I want to live, nor are they the standards by which I want to compare the rest of my life. So it was really interesting to me when I looked up this word ecstasy in the dictionary, which began as a Greek word,

[06:52]

to stand outside of oneself. Very similar to the idea of being out of one's mind, as if it were actually possible to take a break from being the person that you are. And yet there's a longing, I think, that we have for these breathtaking experiences that we call ecstatic, heavenly, blissful, euphoric, or perhaps even enlightening. But how do we really think about them? And what is their proper role in our actual day-to-day life of practice? I think we've all heard by now that the Buddha got enlightened. And I, for one, have tried very hard to imagine what that might be. You know, what happened to him as he stared at the morning star? I've also tried to imagine how it might be for me if I had such an experience. What would it be like? And how did the Buddha feel afterward? Did he ever have a bad day? Was he ever angry or upset? There are some indications in the old Pali text that he did get irritated, with the monks mostly, as he got older.

[07:59]

And when his back started to hurt, he was in a lot of pain. And that's recorded. So could enlightenment be similar to traveling through Norway or viewing Florentine art? Is the Stendhal syndrome all that we can really ever hope for? a kind of weakness in the knees and palpitations of the heart. And just to confuse things even further, our beloved former abbot, Mel Weitzman, once said to me, whoever told you that enlightenment was something you were going to like? And yet it's really hard not to be attracted to our fantasies of some peak experience, not only wishing for them to arise, but then to linger, you know, maybe even forever. You know, once I'm free, once I'm out of here, which for most of the world's great religions is exactly what's being offered as one's final reward, an eternal life of unimaginable bliss. Unfortunately, the offer depends on how well you behaved here on this wonderful green planet while you were alive, but then that's somebody else's story.

[09:08]

I'm imagining that we are all familiar with this tendency inside ourselves to wish for a better place or a better opportunity than this one. And I don't just mean right now here in the Zendo. I mean the one that we were given at birth. You know, this very life, marked as it is from inception by impermanence, by loss, by change, and by the utter absence of an abiding self, which to hang all of our stories including stories about our experiences and therefore no matter what I do or where I go or how hard I try my life story and my identity my relationships and all of my experience much like greased pigs continuously wiggle and squeal their way out of my grasp just like the trip to Norway over five years ago and just like my breakfast this morning. And so it's going to be with this talk and with all of you by and by.

[10:14]

Gotta go. So first it was the womb, gone. And then my childhood, gone. And then my parents, gone. My own child, off to college and beyond, gone. With all the more to come. My friends, my health, my housing, my community. the storehouse of my possessions, gone. Until finally, so I've heard, my very own life will be gone. So what's a girl to do who has everything and at the same time, nothing at all? Well, the best thing I could come up with, I guess, was practicing the Buddha way. Having once been a human being himself, the awakened one tried to help us to deal with the most challenging fact of our life, impermanence. Not through some power he had to make it go away, to make us permanent, but rather by helping us to truly understand that that's how it truly is.

[11:20]

And as a result, maybe not to be so sad about it all. As someone famous once said, it's truth that sets you free. and along with an understanding of impermanence the Buddha gave us a number of things to keep us busy while we recover from the inevitable state of panic that arises as we encounter the facts of life for example in his very first lecture when he taught about avoiding the two extremes as we negotiate the pathway to an ever more balanced state of mind as we seek true sanity At one extreme is the tendency we have to interpret freedom as annihilation or nihilism, gone, gone, gone beyond, completely gone beyond. And it doesn't sound like there would be much left after that sequence of negations. And at the other extreme is our tendency to interpret awakened presence, bodhi, as eternal bliss, a kind of once and for all.

[12:26]

so if it meaning this is not either of those a permanent nothing or a permanent something then what is it what is it that we are truly seeking what is it that we truly are so one clue might be the word at the very tail end of the Heart Sutra the teaching the Buddha gave up on Vulture Peak, the word being svaha, meaning hallelujah. Or as Dogen proclaimed in his death poem, leaping live into the Yellow River, svaha. Or as Thelma and Louise shouted as they drove their convertible over the edge of the Grand Canyon, yahoo. And yet we don't have to wait until the very end for one final exaltation, We can celebrate the ultimate fact of our liberation at each and every moment by not getting caught by a fantasy of abiding in anything, not in ourselves, in our feelings, in our thoughts, or in our inclinations, not in heaven or hell, not with the demons or the ghosts, the animals or the humans, and yet completely willing to visit, to have a cup of tea, and then to pass on through.

[13:53]

with a mind that is flexible and opened to everyone and everything. Which for some reason reminded me of another very funny experience that I had at the end of my vacation in Norway. As I was walking through the duty-free market at Kennedy International Airport, where, as some of you may know, there are giant stacks of so-called luxury items, lining both sides of the aisles, beginning with alcohol. and then perfume, and then candy, and cigarettes. So the guy selling cigarettes held out a carton of American spirits, and he said, organic tobacco, after all, to which I said, kind of smiling, I've heard those things will kill you. And he smiled back and he said, they will, but slowly. so I think that is maybe what they ought to put on the pack you know cigarettes will allow you enough time to enjoy them before they kill you just how tempting is that it almost sounds like a good deal kind of like capitalism so at first when I began working on this talk I thought it was going to be all about Buddhist teaching of moderation from his first sermon a teaching called the middle way

[15:11]

The middle way is usually understood as the safe passage between the two extremes that I just mentioned before, the one of ecstatic states, eternalism, and the other one, utter boredom or nihilism. And then I thought, no, I don't think that's what I really want to talk about or even to recommend, especially if by doing so it creates an idea of some kind of bland or lukewarm in-betweenness, you know, another place where one could stand. down with excitement and down with despair. So what I really want to encourage is for all of us to have more encounters with celestial sensations through a deeper and more concentrated awareness of our breath, our thoughts, our sensations, and our movements. And in fact, I actually think such encounters, kind of like vitamins, are essential ingredients for our mental health and and our overall emotional well-being.

[16:12]

There is still so much that we need to learn from our passions, our dramas, and the occasional risk of falling flat on our face. I've seen the young kids trying to learn to walk at Green Gulch, and that's exactly how they learn. They fall down over and over again. The Stendhal syndrome, after all, is not known to be fatal. So the trick is how to engage with ecstatic states and then how to keep on walking once you've ingested just the right amount. In other words, how to get in and out of heaven with your dignity and your moral values still intact. So the first skill we need to cultivate is absorption and contemplation of sublime beauty, such as occurs upon mastery of samyak samadhi and the eight jhanas and the four foundations of mindfulness. that I'm going to be talking about tomorrow. The second skill is how not to get caught there, not to believe what appears before your very eyes.

[17:17]

Kensho or Satori are often mistaken for the Buddha's enlightenment. But as Professor Robert Scharf from UC Berkeley pointed out to us, a critical analysis shows that such states do not constitute the reference point for the elaborate Buddhist discourse pertaining to the path. In other words, this is not the way. He went on to say, the notion of experience is also overemphasized with the idea of Kensho, as if it were the single goal of Zen training, whereas the Zen tradition clearly states that the stink of Zen has to be removed and the experience of Kensho has to be integrated into daily life. In other words, glimpses of the true nature of reality are merely sparkles in the gravel as we walk slowly along together. True reality has never been absent from under our feet, not even for a moment.

[18:19]

And still, people often ask me how to find time in their busy lives to appreciate this amazing world and themselves as part of it, which is kind of amazing to me. One of my favorite methods for accessing the awesome beauty of this world has been by learning how to stop what I'm doing every now and then and simply look around at all of the tiny details of shape and color that are surrounding me in any given moment. Like, oh my God, I have fingers. You looked at your fingers lately? In my first drawing class, one of the things she had us draw was our hand. my god took hours and I hardly got started just amazing right I mean fingers the color yellow a wooden building a person a piece of paper an inhalation a thought a feeling and clearly chocolate so this method in the Buddhist tradition is called the vipassana

[19:32]

the cultivation of insight through meditation on objects of awareness. Vipassana is closely akin to mindfulness, meaning the moment-to-moment awareness of present events. It also means remembering to be aware of something. Another synonym for Vipassana is a Sanskrit term called Pratyaksha, meaning right before your eyes. What is right before your eyes? So once you've gotten the hang of focusing your attention on objects that are right before your eyes, it's extremely beneficial to further cultivate an awareness of those objects with a mind that is characterized by curiosity, openness, and acceptance. In other words, non-judgmental. This aspect of meditation is called shamatha, or tranquility practice. Saying yes to studying what's right before our eyes is the acceptance part. Yes, it is right before my eyes.

[20:33]

Curiosity is the part that allows us to challenge our own beliefs about what it is that we think we are seeing. And openness is our capacity to truly look and to listen what we are imagining to be other. The problem with this method of stopping and looking is that more or less wipes out your train of thought if you happen to be on one. So I've actually taken to having post-its around so that I can write down what I was thinking about while I take a little break and get off the train. Works very well. Except sometimes I can't read my handwriting, but that's another problem. So perhaps the most important insight practice of them all is full absorption. in the sublime beauty of this very mind and its creation. As the Yogacarans will say later on in their teaching, this very mind is Buddha. This very mind is Buddha. The word Buddha means awake, and I think this might be what he was talking about, a loving of oneself as inclusive of the entire universe, as Mr. Blake was pointing to as well.

[21:46]

Such a love as I also see reflected in this, my favorite poem by Kay Ryan, our talented neighbor and friend who is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and also was 16th Poet Laureate of the United States. She's a lovely human being, and she's promised to come and do a reading at Green Gulch, so I hope you'll all come when she does. If she only had one minute, what would she put in it? She wouldn't put, she thinks. She would take. suck it up like a deep lake, bloat indiscriminate on her last instant, feast on everything she had released, dismissed, or pushed away. She would make room and room as though her whole life of resistance had been for this one purpose. On the last minute of the last day, she would drink and have it, ballooning like a gravid salmon or the moon. So furthering the point, there is a YouTube interview with Kay Ryan in which she talks about the kind of pleasure that comes from absorption in the creative process itself.

[23:00]

To know something briefly, as one does in a poem, is to know something one has never known before. I write for pleasure, not necessarily fun pleasure, but the pleasure of the very most compelling game possible with your mind. It's exciting to write, extremely engaging, always a surprise, leading to a deep pleasure, a complex pleasure, and to a deep satisfaction that follows. Poetry allows me to find my way to the most interesting part of my mind. Something in the very nature of manipulating language as actively as one can gets the writer to a knowledge that is otherwise unavailable. and yet I can't hold on to it. I have to go back to the poems myself in order to see that crud line, such as the one left after a flood, because the mind sinks back to its quididian self. I can only visit there, too.

[24:03]

So finally, there is that skill one needs for passing through the sublime beauty of this world, a skill we were shown in the sequence of events I read to you yesterday leading up to the Buddha's own enlightenment and the advice that he gave to himself and now to us in the form of this refrain. I allow no such pleasant feeling that arises in me to gain power over my mind. And so it continues throughout the entire narrative of the Buddha's own awakening. When my heart was liberated, there came the knowledge, it is liberated. I had direct knowledge. Birth is exhausted. The holy life has been lived out. What was to be done is done. There is no more of this to come. Darkness was banished and light arose, as happens in one who is diligent, ardent, and self-controlled. but I allowed no such pleasure as arose in me to gain power over my mind.

[25:08]

So that's the refrain you might consider bringing to your own mind as you walk around these beautiful temple grounds today and every day. And to close, I want to offer one final verse by another great lady poet, Emily Dickinson. This is the hour of lead. If outlived, Remembered as a freezing person recollects the snow, first the chill, then the stupor, then the letting go. Svaha. Thank you very much. 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 sfcc.org and click Giving.

[26:06]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_97.54