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 morning. Is everyone comfortable? Welcome this fun Saturday. morning when I'm going to talk about the honorable Buddhist topics of discouragement and so on. So I would actually like to speak about those topics that we often don't speak about because they're too difficult, such as disappointment, frustration, and so on. Because it's a lot easier to reject those topics than it is to actually speak about them, face them, and work with them.

[01:10]

And particularly when there's an element in the situation that makes it really easy to set the blame outside. I don't know if you've ever been in that situation. Probably not. Probably I'm the only one. But that's what we're here for. And that's what the Buddha decided to work with in his life. And just for... Well, I think, who's here for the first time? Okay, you probably know what disappointment is, right? It's those of us who have been here longer that might not remember what it's supposed to feel like. So the people who are here for the first time, please give me a reality check because I've been here for over 40 years. And I might not get it. So in my experience before I came here and since, disappointment is a feeling of dissatisfaction or letdown when I have expectations, whether they're

[02:27]

whether they're selfish, whether they're noble, whether they're artistic, professional, whatever sort of social, whatever sort of expectations there might be. And when, you know, I have the expectations, I cherish them, and then through one circumstance or another, they fail to be met. with the people who are here for the first time, please give me a reality check on that. Is that... Yes? Thank you. You know, because Suzuki Roshi said, Zen mind, beginner's mind. You know, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are a few. So, who knows? You know, I might have spouted dogma if I... hadn't had that reality check.

[03:30]

And that's my vulnerability as, you know, someone who's, you know, authorized or teaching or whatever. And as I understand it, and I do, disappointment gives rise to stress. And when it's prolonged, especially if the expectations are high or if we're kind of, congenitally or by discipline, if we're optimists. It can give rise to serious conditions like immune failure, like when we despair or when we wish for even reasonable things like affection or support in our lives, things that should be reasonable. And so if we don't get those... It's not just something that we can easily overcome, but there's something that actually has an impact on us that we have to bear or work through.

[04:36]

And so I was trying to remember how, in my experience, my expectations and my disappointments come about. And I was thinking maybe... They have something to do with my concerns, what I'm interested in, what I need, what I'm concerned about, such as gain and loss, like gaining things and losing things, praise and blame, like if people think I'm great or if they think I'm un-great, pleasure and pain, So if I'm actually enjoying my life or if it hurts, happiness and unhappiness, if I'm pleased or displeased with all of the tones that that includes.

[05:39]

And I was wondering where I had heard those phrases, what teaching that related to. And I remembered two important texts that I had read and memorized at some point in my practice. So they're named in Nagarjuna's letter to a friend, the 29th verse. And he, Nagarjuna, who was one of our ancestors in this lineage, had a friend named King Surabhibhadra. And he, he, This was in the second or third century. First or second century? It was a long time ago. But it's timeless. And he wrote, you who know the world, take gain and loss of bliss and pain, or kind words and abuse of praise and blame.

[06:44]

These eight mundane concerns, make them the same. and don't disturb your mind. Make them the same doesn't mean that there is no such thing as gain or loss or pleasure or pain or whatever. It means that the way you meet them, the way you respond to them has continuity and that you don't fall into states of woe, which is really hard, especially when gain or loss is real, like if somebody actually gets the job and you don't. or if someone gets respect and you don't, you meaning you or me, or us, we, people, normal people. And then I also remembered a text that I've studied with for a very long time. It's the Eight Stanzas for Mind Training. which is not usually considered to be a Zen text, but has been a very important text in my life.

[07:51]

And I've been working with it since I heard that His Holiness the Dalai Lama recites it in the morning. Would you like to hear it? You want to hear it? So it goes. I don't remember who translated this, whose translation this particular one is, because it's lost in... years of my life. I can't remember. I'm sorry. So the verse is by a geshi of the Kadampa school named Langritangpa. And it goes, with determination to accomplish the highest welfare for all sentient beings who surpass even a wish-granting jam. I will learn to hold them supremely dear. Whenever I associate with others, I will learn to think of myself as the lowest among all and respectfully hold others to be supreme from the very depths of my heart.

[09:03]

In all actions, I will learn to search into my mind And as soon as an afflictive emotion arises, endangering myself and others, I will firmly face and avert it. I will learn to cherish beings of bad nature and those pressed by strong sins and sufferings as if I had found a precious treasure very difficult to find. when others out of jealousy treat me badly with abuse, slander, and so on, I will learn to take all loss and offer the victory to them. When one who I had benefited with great hope unreasonably hurts me very badly, I will learn to view that person

[10:10]

as an excellent spiritual guide. In short, I will learn to offer to everyone, without exception, all help and happiness, both directly and indirectly, and respectfully take upon myself all harm and suffering of my mothers. In short, I'll learn to keep all these practices undefiled by the stains of the eight worldly conceptions and by understanding all phenomena as like illusions be released from the bondage of attachment. So, it's pretty heavy. But also light and ink. But I... So I just said this quickly and you've skimmed it.

[11:11]

And anyway, the essence of the subject is learning to care about people and put their benefit at a very high priority. Everyone's benefit. To pay attention to what's going on and the thoroughness of one's the way one meets the world events that one sees of as outside herself. And how to take difficulties and turn them into Dharma gates and the context, what my intention is towards all beings, how I want to see them, and towards my whole life. So I'll read it or recite it one more time just so that you can hear it and you can also hear the directions that our minds go when faced with such a practice because there's a shadow side to this practice as well as there is to every practice.

[12:20]

And I, you know, can you hear it? So can you hear the transcending nature of this verse? And can you understand what it would do to you if both good and bad, if you practiced it without, you know, just like if you gulped it down whole, okay? So listen, with both minds, the big one and the small one. With a determination to accomplish the highest welfare for all sentient beings who surpass even a wish-granting gem, I will learn to hold them supremely Whenever I associate with others, I will learn to think of myself as the lowest among all and respectfully hold others to be supreme from the very depths of my heart.

[13:28]

In all actions, I will learn to search inside my mind. and as soon as an afflictive emotion arises, endangering myself and others, I will firmly face and avert it. I will learn to cherish beings of bad nature and those pressed by strong sins and sufferings, as if I had found a precious treasure very difficult to find. When others, out of jealousy, treat me badly with abuse, slander, and so on, I will learn to take all loss and offer the victory to them. When one whom I had benefited with great hope unreasonably hurts me very badly, I will learn to see that person as an excellent spiritual right.

[14:34]

In short, I will learn to offer to everyone without exception all help and happiness, directly and indirectly, and respectfully take upon myself the harm and suffering of my mothers. I will learn to keep all these practices undefiled by the stains of the eight worldly conceptions. And by understanding all phenomena as like illusion, be released from the bondage of attachment. So you feel it brings up very things, especially, you know, for me as a person with disability, who's from a refugee family, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know, what is it to offer the victory to them? What is it to cherish beings of bad nature? What sorts of trouble could I get into, cherishing beings of bad nature and, you know, seeing people who treat me badly as excellent spiritual guides and so on.

[15:50]

Okay? How am I, you know, if I do this, how am I going to handle the problems that face me in my life other than just letting go and acting as if they didn't exist? Okay. This is an important question. But the beauty of the teaching comes in the relationship between our big mind and our small mind. Not in this teaching as some set of rules to abide by. If we abide by those rules without question, we will condone all sorts of things that we should not condone So I thought, oh, this is about me.

[16:52]

This teaching is about me. How am I going to work with it? I don't know if you know this about me, but in the past, since 2008, for the past seven years, I've been practicing with injury impairments from two very severe accidents. In the first one, a wall from a construction site fell on me while I was putting a quarter into a parking meter. As my twin sister said, that'll teach you to pay for parking. You know, and in the second one, I was still slow from the first one, so I was kind of making my sort of crutchy way across the street, and a guy in an SUV took the turn quickly, and I did a full stunt flip and drag along the pavement with the way humans are not designed for that.

[17:55]

Let's just say that. But suddenly I was a person with disability. And my life was completely different. And I didn't realize that the injury impairments would be the least my issues, and that the social... Sequela, you know, such as not really being fluent in English and losing my languages because I couldn't sustain the attention and not being able to speak for more than a couple minutes on the phone and add numbers and stuff like that, drive and so on. You know, and a lot of these things have improved in certain ways. I'm more fungal in my life because functional recovery is It's possible to live in the new situation long enough to have ways to actually live. But it's had an enormous impact on my life, and even now, you know, that my organic recovery has gone...

[19:10]

to the point where it can only inch further. It can't make leaps and bounds anymore, my physical recovery. But my functional recovery continues. But recovery doesn't necessarily mean being able to do more and more things. It has its own meaning, and I have to find out what that is. And also it means that I'm kind of bicultural. I live in the culture of disability in America, as well as the mainstream American culture and the other cultures that I live in kind of ethnically and by way of my family. So multicultural, I guess, in one body. But everybody is this way to a certain extent. And some people really, this is really huge in our lives. So there are overriding personal and professional factors in my life, including the social and community aspects of practicing with these injury impairments that have a huge impact on my practice and on the community, because I'm a 40-year practitioner here.

[20:30]

And I was looking for a way to even bring these up. I didn't want to bring them up in a weird or very personal way. in a Dharma talk. I want to bring them up as a gate for practice. And so I was looking for inspiration. And what I want to recommend to you, if you want to read it, is a viral email that was written by a UC Berkeley math lecturer named Alexander Coward in 2013. Has anyone besides me read and been inspired by this email? What was happening was that there was a strike at UC Berkeley. And he made the decision to teach his classes anyway. And so I followed his excellent example in his email where he wrote to his students telling them why he was going to teach the next day. So anyway, I wrote my own letter that's completely based in form on his letter because it was so amazing.

[21:38]

I really encourage you to read it because there's nothing better than someone who really thinks about his or her life and what it means in the context of the difficulties and issues that we are faced with. What's really important to us and how are we going to live from here? So he said, I want to let you know that I'm not going to stay away tomorrow. I'm going to come in. And that's where his email starts. So here's mine. I want to let you know that given the Dharma gate of these difficulties that I have, that I will not be withdrawing from the practice. Or the practice here. Which means that I will be making a bodily statement that refuge in the triple treasures is the most important thing in my life. specifically in this lineage and in this community.

[22:43]

I know that other people with similar issues approach them differently, sometimes by making a decision to move on. But because of my intention, I will continue to be here and will make myself available to answer personal questions individually. The motivation for this approach is simple in me. Human suffering is still here. The path as expressed by this lineage is my way to address it. The urgency of these factors in my life only increases my desire to live and be lived for the benefit of all beings, and specifically in this particular way. And now, Tonto Rosalie Curtis whose name means peaceful heart, so the way in, is leading a practice period of several weeks in which we focus on this intention, on what is this intention or what is this big vow that we all have and how do we express it.

[23:57]

But everyone has an intention. Both Those who are here for the first time and those such as my Dharma sister Blanche who's in health rehab from half hip replacement now. Those like Blanche who have made it their lifetime vow to express it. Great matter of birth and death is too urgent. The state of the planet and our lives too urgently in need of our help. for me to absent myself or give up on my life, to abandon my or to lose faith in my community and my practice. But as a sangha, you, we, other people besides me, don't carry the responsibility either for the disabilities that arise from my impairments or the handicaps that arise from the social and cultural issues

[25:06]

lack of understanding of disability accommodation. And you should not bear the impact that would arise from my physical or emotional absence. So this is my personal discernment. It's not a general judgment about what people should do. Everyone has to discern his or her own response to the conditions of life, individual life, interpersonal life, institutional life, cultural life. We all have to discern what is the appropriate response. And I believe that communities and institutions that include a variety of responses are healthy and create a healthy world. So anyway, in my approach, in my way of approaching this talk, I could be wrong.

[26:08]

You know, I'm just as limited as anybody else by my own habits of perception, by my own limitations. So using my own personal impairments as a dharmagate, I think it's worth reflecting on the relationship between sangha. Sangha is the community of practitioners. Sangha means together. So in all of its limitations, in all of its opportunity, and one's own personal training. So anyway, speaking of personal issues has the risk of sidetracking a conversation or a Dharma talk from its main purpose, which is to study the truth or the teaching. So there's that risk. So please don't fall into that risk. If I'm making a mistake, please know it. So whatever our strategy about divulging private matters in public, sometimes personal events sit front and center in a way that has an impact on our lives, on our communities, on ourselves as examples, and so on.

[27:23]

And it's in that spirit that I offer this. So at that time, we have to acknowledge those differences or those situations and bring them into social and institutional and cultural life of the community in a conscious way. So we have to swim in the waves of dissonance and difficulty to find wetness of harmony and of awakening. So that means that as a Sangha we can't avoid our personal differences, our personal dissonances. and how they play out. We have to actually look at them and bring them home in our own practice. But it's not just in the Sangha. Here in San Francisco, life is getting really, really hard. The average rent I read this morning is now over $4.25,000 a month. There are thousands of people moving in and out.

[28:29]

The streets are crowded. You know, people on phones and thinking about other things, that's become the norm. So it's more dangerous to cross the street. There's almost 100% chance of our experiencing the kind of earthquake that just flattened Kathmandu in our lifetimes, some of our lifetimes. And there's a big chance that almonds and broccoli and lettuce, and all of the food we grow is going to become, and it supplies a third of the nation, will become so expensive that a lot of us can't afford it. You know? There are nuclear bombs, genetic variations, like from our genetic experiments, and terrorism, and immigration issues, and the aging of the baby boomers, and sexting, and privacy, inflation. There's so much to worry about every day.

[29:34]

And some of these are personal issues. Cultural, racial imbalance. just the 1%, just all of it. Life is suffering has never been more true or immediate than it is now. And so anyway, this is obvious, and I'm sorry to disturb you on Saturday morning of a long weekend when you really want to go out and have a picnic or whatever. But... It's so easy to become bored or overwhelmed, you know, when we're faced with the level of stuff that arises in the world and in our lives. But that makes resolving the problem of human suffering each of our personal problem, you know, if we take it that way. So along with the issues, this group is among the best equipped people in the world.

[30:36]

to address human suffering. You know, we have the resources. We have this whole huge building full of good stuff, like teachers and community and books and, you know, just all sorts of stuff. Flower petals. I mean, where do you find flower petals? There's flower petals in a bowl that you could just, you know, Buddhas and, you know, there's all this stuff. And so at no time in the world has there ever been a confluence of spiritual resources that's so vital and so complete. Like even maybe in North India a thousand years ago when the North Indian schools and all the religions were coming together to discuss human suffering, or in Tang Dynasty China.

[31:37]

But these opportunities are rare. This room is full of the resources that we need to address it. The problems of the world change the specifics of suffering, but the responsibility for each of us to deal with suffering at a personal level and find our human and healing response to it, that problem does not change. And because of the complexity of the issues, whatever a personal response, enacting it has a huge cost, huge impact, huge risk, and some of the benefits are years or even generations in the future. So we all have to learn how to dedicate our lives for the benefit of all beings. So that's... It's important. So how can we build a foundation that's stable and strong, that doesn't become compromised even when we face the magnitude, the real magnitude of our suffering?

[32:47]

So we need to acknowledge that there's always something. That's another way to say the first noble truth. There's always something. And some of these things are really big somethings. And it's an origin for it in our expectations and in the disappointment. Expectations or even expectations at a human level. Oh, you know, people should understand my difference. They should. In an ideal world to be safe, if people knew me, they would know... They would know that in order to be safe, I... Dot, dot, dot. Okay? So when those things get disappointed, like, for instance, you know, I have to spend all my money on health care or something and don't have any left over for retirement or even, you know, rent.

[33:47]

You know? So there's always something. And the world should understand that when one has a disability, it's expensive. It's not just inconvenient, it's expensive. And there's social things that happen with it. Anyway, we need to plug ourselves into the refuge of wholesome practices, concentration and continuity with the immediacy and the miraculousness of our deepest life. Anyway, I also want to say that Everyone who lives and works at San Francisco Zen Center and everyone who comes and sits here or even comes to lecture is a volunteer. We all are giving up something. Like, even if you just came for this lecture, you gave up part of Saturday morning to look at something that might be important for your life.

[34:50]

But people who live and work here give up a lot. to do that. Sometimes, let's say if you want to go and practice in a monastery, sometimes a person gives up the opportunity for promotion at work or something else that's really important. There's always these balances that are occurring. But the other side of that renunciation is that It means that everyone here, even if you just gave up a morning, but if you gave up a lifetime of a certain sort of advantage or whatever, it means that someplace there's a belief in the capacity of all beings to wake up. And that we've given whatever it is in the service of that faith or that belief.

[35:52]

of the impossibility. So your being here for a morning or for 20 years or 50 years or whatever is not selfish. You're not navel-gazing. You know? It's for everyone. And the Sangha's renunciation and your intention is an investment in you. so that you personally, so that we personally can resolve human suffering in this body, in this mind, both generally and also specifically right now in life. So that's why I'm not withdrawing or leaving or giving up. Your practice and my practice is important, not just for you, not just for me, but for everyone. And it takes a lifetime. together for us to realize it. So I just want to, I know it's probably time to go, but what I want to say is just one little footnote of something that you might be interested in, which is that about 100 Buddhist teachers went to Washington, D.C.

[37:12]

and Here's some of their pictures, which I'll have in the dining room later. These are all people that some of us know and love. Okay? And I also printed out and brought Hozan Alan Sanaki, my Dharma brother Alan's, report on the event in Washington, D.C., statement on racial injustice from Buddhist teachers and leaders in the United States, and the time to act is now a Buddhist declaration on climate change. So I just want to leave you with the question of, you know, disappointment is a way to go, but it's not going to solve our issues. To simply stop there. Although we have to start there, we can't stop there. What do you feel called to address as part of the suffering in your own life?

[38:22]

And what do you feel called to, what resources do you feel called to find? And what do you feel called to give up as less important than that? So I just want to leave you with that question and wish you the best of long weekends and let's remember Memorial Day for people who announced life and time and connection and sometimes limbs and health, psychological, physical, whatever, so that we could have physical peace in this country. And whether politically they're the same as us or different from us, that does not matter. But that's what I want to remember when I'm faced with disappointment or difficulty of any sort.

[39:27]

So please take care of yourself this weekend and for the rest of our lives together. And I look forward to walking with you. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:00]

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