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 evening. My name is Wendy Lewis, and my talk tonight is an introduction to the six perfections following up on Rosalie's talk. So the perfections of paramitas, generosity, ethical behavior or morality, patience, effort, meditation, and wisdom are a wisdom teaching. There's no overt mention of compassion, but the implication is that these wisdom teachings lead to compassion. Compassion teachings tend to be directed towards others, even though they include ourselves.

[01:07]

But wisdom teachings look inward. They kind of can make us sort of squirm a little bit because they turn the focus onto our assumptions, our motives, our behavior. and our perspectives of the world. The basic Buddhist wisdom teaching is the Four Noble Truths. And what the Four Noble Truths actually say is that the human condition is unresolvable, and this is why. But there is the possibility of freedom. All the Noble Truths, there's, you know, the first... is wisdom, then suffering, and then the cause of suffering or desire, cessation, freedom, nirvana, and the fourth one is the eightfold path, which I'm not going to talk about.

[02:14]

But all four of these are always true. It's not like one of them is, and then the next one, and then the next one, and then the next one. They completely are interrelated to each other. And in some way, through our Buddhist practice, we kind of hope we get to hang out in the third truth, the cessation. But that cessation doesn't take us to another place. It's actually freedom from the second truth. from desire, which is basically our preferences, because desire is longing and aversion. So when you think about it, freedom is to no longer rely on our preferences. And in Buddhist teaching, this is experienced as peace. But how to live without our preferences and all of our justifications for them is kind of impossible to imagine.

[03:23]

I would say that generally we prefer our sort of longing and desire and pleasure direction and dislike pain, anger, aversion things. And of course, that's very complex. And there's some irony in it because desire for desire reinforces desire. And aversion towards aversion reinforces aversion. So I think that in order to work with the six perfections, it's necessary to have some clarity about our preferences so that we can see how they even affect our interpretation. of the perfections. I think when we're making an effort to live through wisdom or examine ourselves through wisdom, we end up asking this question that the author of a book that we're using for our class, Dale Wright, says this way, how shall we live our lives?

[04:44]

It's very, very simple. And I think initially this question sort of puts the two poles of the Second Noble Truth at ends, far ends from each other. It's almost like We want so hard to get practice right and to be good and to be seen as good that our sort of aversion gets pushed aside and denied in a certain way. And yet the maturity of both desire and aversion needs some integration with each other. I lived at Tassajara for many years. Many, well, several. And there was a while where I just kept thinking to myself, what a goody two-shoes.

[05:48]

You know, I always wanted to be right, and I thought I was doing stuff so well. But it was actually kind of moving to me that I was seeing myself that way. I thought, what is it I need? What is it I'm wanting here? You know, why do I need to be good? Why do I need to be seen as good? And one of my teachers told me that I had very high standards. And I said, well, I don't really expect people to meet them, but I feel like if I don't have high standards, then we won't even meet the lowest ones. And who was I talking about, right? I'm very hard on myself, and I still am. But what I think that did is I expected everyone was being hard on themselves and that they should be. It wasn't very pleasant to realize that. And I always have to be careful because that's what happens. And the harder I'm on myself, probably the more I expect other people to be hard on themselves.

[06:52]

But at the same time, I realized that I had always been a good girl. I, you know... was very careful not to be angry, and I was very shy and everything. And so I decided, well, you know, this is my only chance. Being here at Tassajara in this unusual, you know, how many times are you going to live in that way, you know? And I thought I would just take a risk and see what it was like to let my anger arise and then to deal with the consequences. And I'm not recommending it, but I felt like I just had to do that. And it's not the kind of experiment that you are praised for. And I did embarrass myself and upset other people a few times. But also something else happened.

[07:54]

Sometimes my anger brought about some accountability. and some kind of intimacy with others. And I think the accountability part was often when my anger was based in disagreeing with someone who was in authority. And that was also interesting to me. oh, I see, you know, I'm trying to understand something. And so I get angry when someone, you know, has an opinion that I think is wrong or unfair or controlling or all the things that I am too. But I think that on the political, social level, suppression of anger or repression of anger is a form of injustice. And it's also a way to maintain the status quo.

[08:59]

And we're generally enculturated not to express anger. And so I feel like we have to do the work of maturing our anger to a place of discernment and as a kind of the voice of everyday justice. And I mean just really everyday. simple things that have come up at work or between you and another person. And I think that some of the problems of expressing my anger have become a little more subtle. I mean, every once in a while something will happen, but... And that... And I... I think that the subtlety is that a certain kind of ironic insight is a form of anger.

[10:01]

And this irony is kind of necessary for us to avoid emphasizing perfection over integration. So, you know, noticing that things are two poles, then... the irony of that, how it diminishes us and limits us in our expression of ourselves, you know, while we're trying to be so good, I think starts to bring them closer and helps with some sort of integration. There's this program that's called Nonviolent Communication, and it's about, it has lots of different levels to it, but a lot of it is about dealing with anger. And there are some types of anger that are very destructive. And so what I've realized is that there's nothing like a non-lustful communication program.

[11:11]

And I think that's the same split as These things that are painful to us, that cause pain to others, you know, we want to do something about it and fix it and everything. But things that go towards more our pleasure and our desire and our addictions and our fun, we don't sort of get so specific about how we examine those things or people don't create programs, at least that I know of, to address that. So, you know, aversion for pain is very sensible, but it doesn't end the possibility that, you know, you'll still feel it, and the aversion often makes it worse. But we're not so interested in limiting the sort of... physical, imaginal world of our pleasure fantasies or whatever.

[12:17]

And so this duality is something that we can't escape, but it can be seen in a different way. And in Buddhism, the instruction is to see all this through emptiness or interdependence. In the introduction to the six perfections, Dale Wright proposes, each of the six perfections functions as a system of training to overcome the narrow and myopic sense of self that we all have in immature stages of development. As we progress through the perfections, even if we began for essentially selfish reasons, the practices themselves undermine that sense of self. gradually showing us its superficiality and opening us to a more comprehensive vision. The general criticism of self-cultivation as being too individualistic fails to recognize that we are unable to be of service to others until we have undergone enough self-transformation to begin to see larger realities beyond the importance of our own personal well-being.

[13:35]

Now, there's good news and uncomfortable news in that, but as Rosalie described in her talk on Saturday, emptiness is defined in terms of three early Buddhist concepts, impermanence, dependent arising or suffering, and no self. And since the sex perfections are the path of the bodhisattva, this is how the bodhisattva sees the world. When she thus surveys dependent arising, a bodhisattva certainly does not see anything that is being produced without a cause, nor does she review anything that is permanent. She reviews nothing as a self, a being, a soul, a creature. So that what emptiness or interdependence implies is that even... if we become enlightened, that will always be relative to the enlightenment of everyone else.

[14:43]

And to me, that's the basis of the Bodhisattva vow. It's not so much this kind of idealistic vow that, I mean, it is that, but when we interpret that as, oh, I'm not going to be enlightened until everyone is enlightened. Well, you can't be. You know, it's... you're actually just stating a truth. There's, you know, I will be enlightened when everyone's enlightened. Okay, so what do I do? How does that mean I live? How does that mean I think? How does that mean I feel? How does it mean I have relationships with people? So liberation is contingent, and it arises through our experience of the human condition. So the bodhisattva is not a perfect or autonomous being, but it's someone who participates through like and dislike, desire, aversion, self, and other.

[15:54]

Dale Wright says of a maturity of self-cultivation, this enlightenment is not intended as the property of anyone in particular. but as the common good. So our preferences tend to kind of extend over and define our world. And what we already know as pleasing or displeasing, we sort of lay over everything. So we're not seeing anything in a new way. And that really limits the development of our maturity and our compassion.

[16:54]

And so that's one of the reasons we take up these wisdom teachings. Almost all of Buddhism is wisdom teachings, and they provide a way to study our conditioned self in both a creative way and a deconstructive way. I'm going to borrow an image I read about the artistic process, which I shared with Janine, that the thought of enlightenment we're allowed to pursue the thought of enlightenment through wisdom teachings into eventual but nevertheless surprisingly fertile cul-de-sacs. And a cul-de-sac is a blind alley or a dead-end street or any situation in which further progress is impossible. When we find ourselves there, and I find the wisdom teachings take me there often,

[18:04]

I'm asked to look at my projections of reality, and there's nowhere to go, and there's nothing to cling to while I'm doing that. A friend of mine and I co-led a painting retreat down at Tassajara, and she had a sitting-by-the-creek painting. And I was working on these stones and the moss and the water, and... It got to this point where I just wanted to throw everything in the creek. My painting, the paints, my brushes. And it was very confusing. I didn't know what was happening, you know. So I waited for a few minutes and I thought, okay, I'm just going to put everything away. I'm going to go find Claire, you know. So I did that and I told her, I don't want to paint anymore today. And she said, well, sit down and tell me what's going on. And I told her about it, and she said, you know, that happens to me all the time.

[19:07]

But I just keep painting. I just keep working. This way of seeing the world as we expect it to be, or we sort of imagine that it's always going to be a certain way, is something that Dogen addresses in the Genja Koan. First, he says, you know, it's this one section, and in that section he said, the world has features that are infinite in variety. We don't see that very often, you know, the way we see the world. You see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. So... Our eye of practice is often very limited. And we should be sympathetic with ourselves for that because there are reasons for it, conditions for that.

[20:12]

And when we see ourselves on a path going to some predefined place, some kind of enlightenment that we already imagine as being a certain way, then our eye is limited. And we project these horizons that actually don't exist. And he says, the ocean looks circular and does not look any other way when you're in the middle of it. Sorry, I'm sort of presuming incorrectly that everyone has memorized it. But the image is you're out in the middle of an ocean in a boat and you can't see any land. And so the ocean just looks circular. And I think when we struggle with these wisdom teachings and find ourselves in these blind alleys, these cul-de-sacs, that what we're forced to do is extend our horizons and imagine something larger than our expectations.

[21:27]

And I think it's helpful to remember that we won't always like to do this or want to do this or enjoy it. And that's the value of taking a vow or taking on a wisdom teaching or studying one particular precept or perfection or something like that. And another value I think is... seeing how perfectionism both supports and kind of undermines our effort. So in a way, our intention to be good, to do good, to be kind to others, include others, to express compassion, keeps us on the path. But if we over-define it, then we lose that kind of vitality and that spark of some of the mistakes that we can make.

[22:41]

And many people quote Suzuki Roshi saying, a Zen master's life is one continuous mistake. But I think this is what it's about. You know that you're limited, and so you just keep trying to push those limits. So this book, Dale Wright, says in the introduction that in spite of his effort to kind of limit special terminology or assume that the readers are going to know stuff about Buddhism or Buddhist concepts, that the book will not be easy to read. And I found that was true. It was not easy to read. He says, it will require of you both a willingness and ability to think hard about issues that are so close to our lives that they are difficult to see. Philosophy that is easy to read and simple to conceive is not really philosophy.

[23:43]

So wisdom teachings are not oriented towards a goal that we can know before we reach it. These It's also good to remember they're not in historically verifiable documents. The documents that they're in are documents of faith and documents of practice. And they're actually inviting us to apply their critical thought to our current situations. I've been thinking of all of this in terms of reconciliation. And I think of that as this integration that I was mentioning. And this is not a kind of integration that solves my problems or

[24:57]

relieves me of my desires or my personality issues or my relationship issues or anything like that. I think that reconciliation means to just keep starting where you are and not from where we imagine we should be or where we imagine we are. And the way that this is bodhisattva activity is that from both our mature and our immature actions and perspectives, all of us are enlightening beings for each other. It's uncomfortable that that's true, but I even had...

[25:58]

an experience that I've been working with lately. I had this experience a couple years ago, I think it was. And I've been realizing how much I learned from it and wondering if there was any way that I could find reconciliation with the other people who were involved. It was an absurd argument, which sometimes that's what they are. They're absurd. But it was very painful. the people involved, we lost trust between us. But I started to understand some things about why I was being perceived that way and how I was inviting that kind of language, tone of voice, whatever it could be, and also what was happening for the other people. I started to understand better what was that... somebody had felt pressure to speak to me about something that they didn't really want to speak to me about, and so there was extra energy in it, that sort of thing.

[27:06]

So I think this is how reconciliation works, and it's not quick or, what do you call it, final. There's one thing that the Buddha, said in some of these faith documents, there are two things I can do. I can meditate and I can wait. And I think that that waiting, you know, meditating is like doing this wisdom practice and like, you know, work and work and work and this waiting where you relax and feel this reconciliation and it kind of prepares you, you know, for deeper and deeper work. So I read a lot, and my vow for the practice period actually was to not buy any books. I buy them and I read them, but I read a lot.

[28:10]

And I read this series of books because I read almost everything. And I find sometimes I need relief from, like, reading things. religion or philosophy or whatever, history. And I read fantasy, you might call it. But I was in this bookstore, and this woman who was working there, I don't know how I got in this conversation with her, but she recommended this series of books by a man named Stephen Erickson, who... worked as an anthropologist and archaeologist for about 20 years, and then he wrote a series of books, and each of them is about this thick, like 800 pages, and there's nine of them. And I read them all really quickly, and he's just a very good writer, and it was really fun. But in the last of the novels, there's this kind of final Armageddon-like battle, and many of the characters die, and some of the characters you don't find out if they died or not.

[29:14]

And a group of surviving soldiers are sitting around among these rocks, kind of resting, you know? And they're all sort of huddled there. And then one of them coughs and then asks, so who are we fighting for again? And another soldier responds, everyone. And then there's a long pause. No wonder we're losing. And exactly, they all start laughing. And I think that bodhisattva activity is kind of like that. We're always losing. You know, we're struggling, we're concerned, we care, and in a sense we're always losing, but it's in this context of irony and companionship and what I think of as continued hope. Dale Wright says that irony is absolutely necessary for working with the six perfections.

[30:15]

It allows us to remember that we return again and again to examining who we are and how we relate to each other and where we think we're going and why and how we're living our lives. That's his question at the beginning. How shall I live my life? So I think that the... bodhisattva vow sort of includes all of the joys and the challenges that arise and pass away through that effort. Thank you very much. Does anyone have an opinion? about that? Questions or... Is it okay?

[31:17]

If anyone has a comment or a question. Yes. I may have just kind of missed it, but I'm not sure I understand the sort of definition of irony you're giving in the context of caring and struggling. It's something like we... I don't think irony is a joke. Irony is like seeing, you know, the sort of the humor and the awfulness at the same time, you know, that these things are always together. So it does make you laugh. It's like, so who are we fighting for again? You know, what are we losing? It's that kind of feeling, so. Yes, Jean.

[32:21]

So, I remember studying in the Schlesinger that the definition of irony was the implied other listener who didn't get, who didn't understand. So, I thought, you know, it's pouring rain here, and I thought, luckily, what had happened in the book? But there's another person who goes, no, it's not. It's not everywhere. So it was the implied idiot. And I'm wondering who is the implied idiot in the irony of the bloody sack of that? Is it us? Are we going to take it seriously? Because we keep trying. Yeah. I think so. And then there's more irony and more irony and more irony the more you look at it, right? Because how can you not? And so you laugh at yourself again. If you've made the Bodhisattva vow, how can you not try? How can you not fail? How can you? That's what I think.

[33:24]

Yes? Well, what I was doing is I am not like a professional painter or anything. That was the whole workshop thing. But I do a lot of watercolors and I just kind of taught myself. I was trying to paint something that I couldn't understand. how do I paint this huge stone with moss on it, with watercolors? And then the water flowing by. And it was immense. All of a sudden it was so immense, I just... I got angry in a certain way. It was a type of anger. It was just this frustration and confusion. And I didn't know what to do. I mean... The funny thing was, I think, that I didn't just decide to paint something else, you know, or that sort of thing.

[34:46]

But I think it was because it was in the context of, like, this workshop where I was supposed to produce something, right? We were going to show our paintings at the end of it. And so there was this kind of expectation that I was learning how to... And I was just like, yeah. So does that... It's like that sense to be able to see that, to know that what you're seeing is a circle and that it is not a circle. Like that sense, to recognize that you're only seeing, like what you're seeing is actually a subset or a jerk and actually be able to answer that. I think it's both a relief and also it's freaky to see expanded weight.

[35:50]

And not only can't weight, it's maybe iron expanded with that. Like, the person who's not included is like that. Everything outside the circle. Like that. Sensitably enough. What we're not seeing. It's like seeing what we're not seeing. Seeing what we would not otherwise see or something. It's like you can see beyond the circle. Well, you know that there's something. The circle, yeah. But you can only see the circle when you're in the middle. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[36:57]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:00]

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