Good evening, everyone. Very happy to be with you. My name is Kodo. I'm the head of the meditation hall at City Center. Tonight we continue the spring practice period at City Center with a Dharma talk by our head of practice, Mary Stairs. We'll begin with the sutra opening verse, which we can all chant with microphones muted. You'll hear my voice. And then we'll begin the talk. You can find the text for the sutra opening verse. If you open the chat window, you should very shortly see the text there. Perfect dharma. is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas.

[01:12]

Having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good evening and welcome. Welcome. My name is Kodo. So kindly introduce me is Mary Stairs. I'm a resident teacher or resident priest at San Francisco Zen Center City Center. And this evening, I'd like to not only thank Abbot David for inviting me to lead this practice period. Thank you, Abbot David. I'd like to thank Abbot Ed. for his guidance and always being willing to take a call from me. So thank you very much, Abbott. So City Center is currently in the middle.

[02:19]

This is week three of a six-week practice period. And we've been studying the Lojong teachings or the mind training teachings. And this is the fifth talk in a series of talks. And one of the things that it occurs to me to say, particularly after last Saturday's class, is that for those people that are specifically taking the practice period class, the way I designed this practice period is to have talks that were building on each other. And so if you enjoy the material, or if you're here for the first time this evening and your interest is kind of awakened, then what I would suggest you do is go to the SFCC website and look under the Dharma talks for the practice period and you'll be able to listen to all five talks and that will help you catch up to this material.

[03:22]

It's a little disorienting for those of you who are joining the talk for the first time this evening because, as I say, I'm not starting from the beginning, although I think these talks can also be used to develop your interest and then you can start looking for more. And, in fact, The whole six-week offering is designed in that way. So my encouragement to each of you is that if you're interested in the lojang or mind training slogans, that this is an overview. It's meant to orient people to the teachings. It is not meant to be conclusive or it's not... It's only to whet your appetite, I would say.

[04:26]

There's so much that I've learned over the last decades around this teaching, and I have so much more to learn about these teachings, and I cannot pretend even know a straw on this big haystack, which is called the Lojang teachings. So I... I'm interested in people learning a little tiny bit and then working yourselves to find out more information. There's so much on the website if you are to Google the Lojong teachings or the mind training slogans that you could spend years studying. So I invite you all to... to begin your study of this if it's interesting to you. So tonight, the focus of the talk will be on point three of the mind training slogans.

[05:27]

And there are seven points in total. So tonight, we're going to focus on 3.3, which are slogans 11 through 16. And the heading of this... is transforming adversity into the path of awakening. So that's one translation, transforming adversity into the path of awakening. So in the first talk, it was actually the second talk. So the first talk was the introductory. The second talk was about the first slogan, which is first training the preliminaries. And the purpose of that slogan is to, provide motivation for each of you if you're doing this work, and to provide a bedrock or groundwork or stabilization. So point one, first training, the preliminaries, the purpose of that is to form a bedrock that one can build on.

[06:32]

The second point are the main practices, and those are slogans two through ten. The point of those is to first introduce you to absolute bodhicitta and relative bodhicitta and offer specific practices around those two concepts. So absolute bodhicitta, another name we could call that is emptiness. And it also, you could think of it as sort of abstract thinking. Relative bodhicitta is compassion, and you can think of that as emotional intelligence. And to have practices that allow you to expand your thinking around emptiness is incredibly important for the lojong training.

[07:36]

And then also to develop... through relative bodhicitta, the idea of development in compassion is critical to this. So the slogans two through 10 are specific things that allow us to develop those two areas. Slogans 11 through 16 are this idea of taking the practices from the relative and ultimate bodhicitta and kind of holding them up to your life and testing out for yourself if you think that this will assist you and to do this over and over again. So I think

[08:37]

one of the things that is important is for all of us at some point in our practice to realize that the world that we live in is not one of ease. That samsara exists and there will always be difficulty. I think many of us think that if... if we go about our lives right, if we make the right decisions, that we will have no difficulty or that we'll somehow be able to manage the difficulty. And I think that the teaching that I, as I understand it, is that our realization of our lives as involved in a samsaric world is that there's no escape from that. And so, realizing that is a big endeavor, actually.

[09:42]

I think oftentimes as human beings, we think if we just get it right, our lives will be easier. If we just make this one decision right, then we'll have an easy time. And I think this comes up over and over and over again in our lives. If we're in the right relationship, We won't have to work so hard. If we're in the right job, it'll be an easy job. And I think the teachings, again, as I understand them, is coming to terms with the idea that the perfect job will still have complexity. It'll still have difficulty. It'll still present challenges. The best family situation in the world will still... provide us with plenty of suffering and challenge. And so it is coming to grips with that idea and then coming to understand that it is the training of our attitude around this and stepping into this that allows us to make changes.

[10:54]

So what I mean by this is... For example, this particular situation that we're in right now with the COVID-19 virus and with sequestering in place. So we didn't cause this situation. I mean, you could say that we did cause this situation. However, we're in the middle of this right now. So as it stands, We're all in our apartments or we're in some situation that involves a lot more limits than six weeks or eight weeks ago. So we could rail against this situation and we could say, I want out. I want this to change. I hate this. I'm uncomfortable. I want, I want, I want, I want. We could be doing that all day long or. Instead of getting angry at the situation, we could completely back away from the situation and pretend it doesn't exist.

[12:01]

And these teachings, particularly this particular set of slogans from slogan 11 through 16, is saying, hey, wait a sec. That isn't helpful. That approach is not helpful. Instead of pretending that it's not existing, instead of getting angry at it, what are you going to do? This is your situation today. This is the situation of the last five or six or eight weeks. So what are you going to do? How are you going to approach this? So slogan 11, which is, when the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps to the path of Bodhi. And this is a slogan that allows us to say, this is a very uncomfortable situation. I don't really like this and how it's happening. And what am I going to do to use this as a practice opportunity?

[13:07]

How do I welcome this? How do I open myself up to the reality of this situation so I can start working with it in a constructive way? How do I turn this into the path of awakening, the path of Bodhi. And this is part of our training, is looking at an uncomfortable situation or conversely, looking at a wonderful situation that's causing us to be emotionally overjoyed and delighted and so happy. And how we say, hey, wait a sec, how do I... transform this energy into the path of awakening. And why do I do that? Why is that important? So this is a relative bodhicitta slogan, slogan 11. It's talking about in our world, in our everyday existence, we come upon a situation and how do we open around it?

[14:15]

How do we awaken? How do we shape our minds to be the minds of a bodhisattva? How would a bodhisattva approach this situation? How do we not get overloaded with negativity? How do we not get giddy with so many emotions that we can't experience the moment? How do we balance these things? How do we return over and over again to the moment? So this imperfect world, the samsaric world, is used as a means to awaken. We don't deny the world. We don't shut off from the world. We don't necessarily get super involved in the anger of the world, but we work towards that as a path of openings. This slogan is not saying don't have emotions.

[15:18]

It's not saying don't get angry. What I think it's saying or how I practice with this is given this particular situation, given that I'm angry about this particular situation, how can I awaken instead of getting fixated on my anger? How do I invite this as part of awakening? Many years ago, I was training as a student chaplain in a hospital. And I remember that I was having a conversation with a woman. She was in her 40s. And she had a relatively young family. She was extremely ill with cancer. And... As part of the conversation, as the opening part of the conversation, I remember she said to me, I've led a good life. Why am I being blamed in this way? What have I done?

[16:21]

What have I done? How do I deserve this? And I remember we had a long conversation around that, and she was so angry and afraid. She was afraid. And what I... When I left that conversation, because for the whole conversation, I felt her anger. I felt her unwillingness to face the situation that she was in. I felt her wanting to blame other people about the situation she was in. I felt her difficulty with this situation. And what I didn't feel is her ability to say, okay, I have this terrible illness and these are some things that I need to do. This is how I can talk to my family. This is how I can be with my doctor. This is how I'm going to live today.

[17:22]

There was no exploration. There was no willingness to look at what her situation was. And I'm not saying she was in an easy situation because she wasn't. And it was notable at that time to me that she had this, it felt like kind of a habitual frustration with her life, habitual anger with her life, habitual wanting somebody to do something, and that she wasn't able to help herself. And at the time, I remember being very struck by that. And so I was so sad for her. Because over and over again, as I spent time with her, there was this bitterness. And I think the ground of that was fear. Although she never expressed to me once that she was afraid. She never expressed that she was interested in...

[18:27]

taking steps to find out how to work with cancer. Mostly she wanted it to be taken away from her. And I believe that this is often not maybe as extreme as that particular instance, but this is often our approach. We want our difficulties to be taken away from us and we want more of what's really good. And this, this like training with adverse conditions to walk on the path of awakening is telling us find that middle ground between being completely discouraged by our lives, completely frustrated with our lives and completely looking for some way out and see if we can bring a mind of awareness like an awake mind, an open mind, a flexible mind to that situation.

[19:31]

Slogan number 11. So that's slogan number 11. When the world is filled with evil, transform all mishaps to the path of bodhi. Slogan number 12 is drive all blames into one. This is also a relative bodhicitta slogan. It's working with compassion. And it's working with compassion for ourselves and recognizing that we are often motivated by our habitual energy and our ego, our habitual energy, is always, there's a lot of self-talk going on. It's usually directing us to find somewhere else to blame, someone else, somewhere else, some other situation.

[20:40]

And this isn't saying to us, everything is my fault, as in me, this person, I'm the cause, because that also is a, What it's saying is that our personalities have this idea of kind of getting out, being the center of attention and trying to find space for ourselves. And we do that often through habitual energy. And this drive all blames into one is an instruction. To remember that our ego is leading us in a certain direction and to look into that. To instead of locating blame out, to locating blame with our habitual energy and with our ego. And to say, hey, wait a sec.

[21:43]

I'm not going to lay my troubles on anybody else. I'm going to... see if there's something I can do about it, which then leads back to the first slogan. Here we have a situation. Is there a way that we can move into a path of awakening? And even more simply, one can look at, like, it's very easy for us always to say, that person's to blame. That person's to blame. And Could we say more often, it's my way of looking at things, it's my way of working with things that's causing this difficulty, and is there a different way that I can approach it? So there's something that's very workable about doing it that way. It's taking a situation that's frustrated and saying, hey, wait a sec, is there a way that I can turn this situation so I can affect change?

[22:49]

And I can see it in a different light. And that's one of these things I think that's more difficult because we often feel a lot of relief when somebody else is taking the blame. But that is also giving up our own power. So this is a way of acknowledging that we have power in a situation and we can do something about every situation we're in. if only changing our attitude about that. I don't want to get into trouble with anybody by saying that there aren't bad situations that people shouldn't be in or that they're trapped in terrible situations. And still, I understand that this slogan allows us even through very straightforward ways to acknowledge that in any situation we can develop the idea that there are things we can do to change it rather than always having to imagine that there's an external thing that's going to change our lives for us.

[24:04]

So I'm afraid one of the things that is true about this format is that I'm only touching on some of these things and I'm not giving an adequate explanation. So there's a lot of danger in misinterpreting, which is slogan number 52, by the way, don't misinterpret. So I'm encouraging you to read more about these slogans and to study them so you get a fuller picture of what what's happening here. And I'm a little hesitant about leading people astray or not having a full picture. Number 12 or number 13 is be grateful to everyone. And this has been one of the slogans that I've worked a lot with over the years. There are a couple of ways

[25:10]

initially or immediately to look at this. One is that when we're born, we're completely helpless. And so even if you come from a difficult home, even if you don't have a good relationship with your parents, even if you don't like your family, something happened when you were small that allowed you to be fed and to grow up. And even if it's only a tiny, tiny kernel of gratitude around that situation, this slogan is suggesting that we develop that slogan, that we feel gratitude, that we look at what is... how people have contributed to our lives in a positive way rather than focusing on the ways that we've been mistreated.

[26:11]

At Zen Center, our meal chant is, one can say, it moves along with this slogan, which we say at the beginning of the chant, we reflect on the effort that brought us this food and consider how it comes to us. So all the food we eat, people have worked to grow that food. Very few people in the city grow their own food. So it can be really good as part of this reflection to think about how you're getting nourishment, how you're participating with this cycle of... receiving things, possessions, goods, that people in stores support you, people farmers support you, people in textile mills, people growing cotton, people melting down pot bottles so you can have polyester fleece.

[27:20]

People work towards... supporting us in the way we live and cultivating gratitude around those things is a very important practice of the Bodhisattva. We do not live in an isolated world. And even those people that live by themselves and grow their own food or have animals or live in far-flung places where they don't have neighbors, Their gratitude can be directed at the planet Earth. It can be directed at the stars in the sky. It can be directed at sunlight. So the idea is to cultivate this idea of compassion and gratitude. So openness, compassion, and gratitude for the... things that contribute to your life rather than always focusing on the drawbacks that you feel.

[28:28]

And again, this is putting energy into developing the mind of a bodhisattva, the mind of compassionate being, an awake being, as opposed to the mind of a closed, habitually driven individual. So it's striving to open. And the slogan, be grateful to everyone, having that pop into your mind over and over again, the point is to say, oh, I'm frustrated with that storekeeper. Oh, let me think about gratitude. So it's to remind us over and over again to come back to this idea of gratitude rather than frustration. I think the last Dharma talk, one of the things I said that I'd learned was that impatience often comes from not knowing the whole story. And I think in a way that can turn into a gratitude practice as well, because you're opening your mind to the fact that there are other possibilities that are happening to cause your impatience.

[29:41]

And to see that as a... an opening path, opening effort. This is also number 13, be grateful to everyone, is a relative bodhicitta slogan. So it's looking at compassion and the development of compassion. Number 14 is an absolute bodhicitta. So I kind of like how in this section we have three relative bodhicitta slogans in a row, working with our thoughts, working with our day-to-day post-meditation practice, developing the idea that everything is workable in our lives and that we're to blame for our own situation and we can make changes. or our minds affect how we perceive our own situation, I should say, and we can affect change.

[30:49]

And then this idea of be grateful to everyone is also relative bodhicitta cultivation practice around compassion. And then number 14, seeing confusion as the four khayas as unsurpassable shanita protection. This is, again, pulling us back into working with relative bodhicitta. So it's the sort of, I'm not going to say a lot about the slogan. I also confessed, I think, last Dharma talk that this is one of the slogans that I still, I keep reading about it. I keep on looking at different commentaries about it because there's a depth or breadth of it that I don't, I don't really understand, I would say. But what I do come back to is that there's a groundlessness about this confusion.

[31:59]

So we can see, seeing our confusion and acknowledging that it's not out there, but it's in here. protects us from our own habitual energy. And I'm realizing that I'm going to have to speed up a little bit. Number 15 is, again, a relative bodhicitta slogan, or it taps into that. Four practices are the best of methods. These four practices are accumulating merit, laying down evil deeds, offering to the... One could call them evil spirits. In one of the traditional Dharma books, they call them evil spirits, and then offering to the Dharma protectors.

[33:01]

So accumulating merit, I think this is a... This is a difficult, I have read that this is a difficult concept for Westerners often because we think of a tally board or a checklist. So I do something good, you get a check mark. You do something bad, you get a X. And this is, it doesn't really relate in that same way. Accumulating merit is more like you develop a positive attitude and that has repercussions that are exponential. So if you engage in a wholesome activity over and over and over again, that allows you to have a very wholesome affect, wholesome life. If you engage in unwholesome acts over and over again, that hinders you, and it acts as kind of...

[34:07]

Chains that bind. So this accumulating merit is really about over and over again, if we can engage in wholesome activity, we will engage in more wholesome activity. The second thing, laying down evil deeds, you can compare this to confession or repentance. And we do this at Zen Center all the time. We confess and repent, not in a Catholic way, not necessarily to a priest, not necessarily to shift blame, not because we need to get it off our chest, kind of. We confess because we want to acknowledge that we've done something that we're uncomfortable with, and we want to move forward.

[35:16]

So it's a way of working with our behaviors to say, hey, I did this thing. I don't want to do it anymore. I want to do something else. And sometimes saying that, working with it that way supports us in changing. So it's, again, working with the situation that exists and moving forward into saying with intention, I want to do something different. So that's this confession part. Offering to the latter two ritual offerings to evil spirits and ritual offerings to Dharma protectors. This has something to do, I think, for a lot of Buddhists with like bowing to an altar, working with energies around Tara or the Manjushri, the Bodhisattvas.

[36:22]

So seeing, again, wholesome energy is something we want to... bring into our lives, and seeing negative energy is something that we don't want to bring into our lives. And so this ritual offering, like at the beginning of a day saying, I do not want to, let's say we say, I do not want to swear today. I don't want to curse. To say that out loud, to say I want I would like support from all beings to not do this activity, to not curse today. That kind of witnessing sometimes supports our wholesome activity. So again, I could say so much about this and I think it'll come up again in small groups, it'll come up again in class time.

[37:25]

will cover this more specifically. So number 16 is whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation. And this slogan, again, is a slogan that's pointed to the relative bodhicitta world, to the world of the development of compassion, the development of the awakening mind. And what it's saying is, It's a reminder to us to not slip into habitual action. So if you are proceeding through your day and you're coming into some difficulty or you realize that you're acting in a habitual way, instead of following that track, a person stops and says, okay, I need to take a breath. I need to just take a breath. So it's like the instruction in Zazen.

[38:31]

When you realize that you're following a thought, come back to your body. So this is the same instruction. Whatever you meet, whatever is happening, if you find yourself going off and reacting in a way that you don't want to react, come back into the body, take a breath, stop, and then see if... you can move on in a different way. See if you don't have to support that habitual activity. So that was a lot. And I wonder if my approach of trying to touch on each of the points in... Each of the slogans in a point is not a good approach. So I rely on you to give feedback about this. I'm really interested in each of you getting a taste of these things and realizing that there's a practical application for all of these slogans.

[39:41]

And to be able to kind of, even if you don't remember anything I've said, to be able to think, oh yeah, I see that this is workable and I have a path forward into how to make that make sense in my own life. So that's the effort that I'm making. So thank you very much for your attention tonight. And I think there might be time for one or two questions and maybe I'll ask the host to support me by just, mentioning the name of the person that will ask the question. So thank you very much. And if I could have support from the host, that would be great. Thanks, Mary. I'll be Cotto again here. I'll be the voice for the host. Thank you, Cotto. Sure. If you'd like to raise your hand to offer a comment or a question, you can press the participants button and find the raised hand.

[40:49]

I see Malina D. Thank you. One of my questions Because like you said repeatedly, there's so much more information about each of these, and I've been really enjoying reading Pema Children and several other commentaries. And I'm kind of curious, in your perspective from having worked with them longer and probably read many of the different voices, if as you go along, maybe... make comments about if there are specific sources because I don't know just saying look up on the internet that feels a little scary to me anyway I'm just kind of curious who voice has really touched you especially maybe if specific slogans have resonated with certain teachers or writers would be helpful

[42:19]

to our independent research. Thank you very much for your question. I think what I do notice that a lot of people at Zen Center right now are reading Norman Fisher's book, and they're finding that very, very supportive. And he, I mean, Norman has so much background. He's a poet. His language is beautiful. So I think a lot of people are finding his commentary very helpful. I think one of the places that I found very helpful was a couple of years ago, Pema Chodron came out with their box of slogan cards. I think they're a second edition. So I have an older edition of hers that I've had for maybe 10 years. And I think she came out with a new edition that has slightly different translation on the back of each slogan. Those I think were very good and very, very helpful.

[43:22]

If you're looking for something particular to study in terms of like the slogan and the commentary, not too much information, but just like touching out on each one, that's a great place to start, I would think. I found them accessible. I found them not too theoretical. not too, um, historically Buddhist, you know, they're not, uh, uh, yeah, she tries to put them in everyday language that's very accessible. And I think that it's, they're, they're wonderful actually. Is that helpful? Yeah. I actually like a little deeper, but thank you for that. And I'll keep fishing. Okay. I can make one other suggestion if you'd like something a little deeper. I got a hold of this book, and it's The Practice of Lojong, Cultivating Compassion Through Training in the Mind.

[44:28]

And I can put that as a bibliography. You can't really see it. Well, I just got it, so thank you. That's a really good one as well. I've enjoyed that one a lot. And that, I... He has a slightly different approach. And so try that one out and you can get back to me about how you like that one. Thank you very much. So Koto, I think that brings us to 8.30. It does. For everyone, we'll close with the... Closing chant, that will appear in your chat box in just a moment. We'll give that a second to show up, and then we can chant together to close. And there it is. May our intention equally extend to every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's way.

[45:39]

Things are numberless, I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it. Thank you very much. Good night. Thank you. Good night, Nancy.

[47:10]

And Miles, of course. Good night, Miles. Good night, everybody else.

[47:28]

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