Thank you. OK.

[01:28]

The rest will be easy. So it's very nice to be here. Nice to see new friends and old friends. Not that you guys are that old, but wonderful to see Steve and Ed, old Zen comrades of many, many years. And Luminous Owl, the former Luminous Owl. What's your current Kokyo, great name, Kokyo. Well, I guess tonight I'm going to talk about suffering. Suffering is my topic. Everybody can hear okay? Everybody's comfortable? Everybody's happy? Okay, maybe I'll just do it the old-fashioned way, like that, all right? Okay. So I want to talk about suffering tonight.

[02:32]

And I'll start from the beginning. What exactly is suffering? On the most obvious level, we all would understand that suffering is some kind of pain, some kind of trouble, something unpleasant, something we don't like, something we don't want. suffering seems to be the opposite of happiness. Wouldn't you say? I think we all would agree. Now, to me, one of the most astonishing facts of human life is that most people commonly think that it's possible to minimize or even eliminate suffering from our lives. I think the general idea is that since suffering is so bad and so unpleasant, that the thing to do, should suffering ever arise, and I think the concept is that if we're lucky enough, if we're careful enough, probably it won't arise, but should it ever happen to arise, the thing to do is to avoid it at all costs, to push it away, cover it up,

[03:54]

think pleasant thoughts, don't dwell on it, move on, and so forth. This is, I think, makes perfect sense. It's the commonplace understanding. Go forward with your life. Don't dwell on your suffering. Don't let the suffering stop you from the things that you want to do and need to do in your lifetime. And if you will only use this strategy, you will have a positive life. Now to me, this is an absolutely astonishing idea. I'm really flabbergasted by such a notion. The idea that there's a sort of manageable amount of suffering and that you can somehow get past it and go on to more positive things, to me this seems like an incredible idea from my perspective. Because I think that the closer you look,

[04:55]

the more acute your observation of human life is, the more suffering you see. Anxiety is suffering. Not getting what you want is suffering. Being irritated, being angry is suffering. Having to put up with stuff you don't like. is suffering. Knowing that one day, even though you really don't want to, you're going to have to die. And that this fact, whether it's conscious or unconscious, is with you most of the time. This is also suffering. Fear is suffering. Knowing you could lose what you think you have is suffering.

[06:04]

Being ashamed is suffering. Feeling disrespected is suffering. Feeling unloved is suffering. Feeling loved but not quite enough is suffering. Feeling loved but not in the right way is suffering. Feeling loved but not by the right person is suffering. Feeling lonely, bewildered. It's too cold is suffering. It's too hot is also suffering. Traffic, bad traffic jams is suffering. Having to wait in line and the person at the front of the line is very slow and seems to be obsessed with her own problems to the extent that the line is not moving is suffering. So I think you... get the idea suffering is not rare it's actually pretty pervasive and it's a daily experience if you actually pay attention to what's really going on the experience of suffering is pretty common and even if you don't pay attention to it and try not to notice it it's there anyway and it's registering on your psyche and it's conditioning your life even if

[07:23]

you have a very positive outlook, and as far as you're concerned, there's not much suffering. Still, the suffering is there, it's registering in your life, and it's conditioning the way you're living. So the idea, which I think is perennial in the human heart, the idea that suffering is a minor problem that can be overcome with a positive attitude is to me the greatest of all human self-deceptions. Maybe partly the problem is this word that I'm using here, suffering, which sounds so drastic and makes it sound like a rare occurrence. As I'm sure most of you know, this idea of suffering is central in Buddhist thought and practice. And the word used in Buddhism is a Pali word, dukkha, which is most often translated as suffering.

[08:34]

But various translators have tinkered with it and tried to do better, and some have translated it as dissatisfaction or unsatisfactoriness. And one important translator translates it simply as stress. And in fact, all these attempts at translations are all slightly off. The word dukkha, I think, is ultimately not a translatable word. It refers to the psychological experience which sometimes is conscious and most often is not conscious. The psychological experience that we have based on a very profound fact about life, about time, about existence. The simple reality that everything is impermanent. And because impermanent, ultimately ungraspable, ultimately unknowable, unfindable, unseeable, unhavable, non-possessable.

[09:45]

This is actually the way things are. And we think the opposite. We think that we can know or possess our lives, our loves, our identities, our possessions. And the sad fact is that we cannot. And the gap between this stark reality and the commonplace approach to life in the human family, that little gap there is called dukkha. It's an experience of basic anxiety or frustration and it is endemic to human consciousness itself. It's at the center of our human experience.

[10:49]

So suffering, in other words, is not some extra adventitious issue that may or may not arise, and probably if we're really careful and we have good insurance policies and so on, it won't happen. It's actually built into the nature of the human experience. Dukkha is actually every moment, every experience of our lives is colored by it. Not just the things that we would say are terrible or awful or suffering, but every moment. In fact, on a deep level, loss and pain and suffering is really built in to the nature of our consciousness. So let's take a moment and actually examine this for ourselves in our own experience. So let's, if you would, return your awareness to your body as you're sitting here now.

[11:56]

If you can, sit up a little more straight with more awareness of your posture in sitting. Bring your attention to your breathing. Feel the breath coming in. Feel the breath going out. And see if you can pay really close attention to each and every breath, being with the whole of the inhale and with the whole of the exhale. And now pay particularly close attention to the exhale, especially to the end of the exhale, when the exhale sort of comes to a conclusion and the next inhale begins.

[13:28]

And see if you can catch that exact moment, precise moment, It's no longer exhale, but now it's inhale. Maybe you can feel that the closer you look, the more elusive it is.

[14:36]

And now notice whatever thoughts or feelings would come into your mind. And see if you can grab hold of a thought and make it stay there. Not repeat the thought. again but make the thought stay there or the sensation or the feeling a little hard to do.

[15:44]

You can't be sure what it even means to make something remain. To tell where something ends and something else begins. So this is always how it is. We're always breathing. We're always thinking and feeling and having sensations. none of these things can be exactly discerned in the way that we think they can. And the thing is that if you're sitting in meditation, as we are now, you can experience this with equanimity, and it's very peaceful. It doesn't feel like something painful or unpleasant at all. And that's one of the great advantages of meditation practice, that in meditation practice you can experience dukkha with equanimity so it's a great thing you know if you have strong suffering to sit down in meditation it's really helpful it can be helpful depending on the circumstances and so on somewhere Zuki Roshi says you know a real Zen student is one who has sat down in the middle of terrible suffering and pain

[17:13]

And if you do that, usually there's some equanimity, even if the source of the pain and suffering is still present. Because meditation has that great advantage. It brings kind of acceptance and equanimity. And in meditation, you're not striving to eliminate the sensation or thought or situation that you're contemplating but rather simply to receive it with equanimity and then you might say dukkha is no longer dukkha if you receive it with equanimity then impermanence is really not painful or difficult it's just life coming and going and actually it's quite peaceful and even very beautiful In daily life, in the swirl of activity and desire, we lunge forward and force action.

[18:30]

We don't live with equanimity. We grasp things that aren't really there. We operate in the world that we want rather than the world that's there. And underneath our daily consciousness is always this anxiety, this fear, this immense longing that somehow we know the world is not what we think it is. Even though it might not be conscious, somewhere within us there is the dread of knowing this is so. dukkha is the basic fact of our lives. And at the very end of a life, when dukkha finally becomes absolutely inescapable, our whole lifetime of denial of dukkha comes forward one way or the other.

[19:46]

And at that time, we will have no choice but to grapple with it directly. Better off starting a little earlier. So I'm, as always, completely delighted to be here at Tassajara. Those of you who are living here now, maybe you already could sense that even after you leave Tassara, it's a place where everyone leaves, even after many years go by, it will be engraved on your heart and you'll feel as if you never left. And when you come back, it will always be as if it was just yesterday. that you lived here. So, for me, it's a pleasure always to come back.

[20:51]

But unfortunately, I'm here for a very quick trip, and I have to leave tomorrow. I feel like I just got here, and now I have to go already. And I was supposed to be here for the weekend, and then Sunday evening, I was going to be joined, as I am every year, by my dear friend and colleague, Rabbi Alan Liu, and we were going to do what we always do, have a week-long Jewish meditation retreat where we always have lots of fun and singing and praying and meditating together. And we put this on the calendar about a year ago. But it was not meant to be. On January the 12th, he was at a meditation retreat out for a walk and he fell down on the ground and died and we lost our our dear friend and we lost this beautiful annual Jewish meditation retreat that was really wonderful so I thought tonight I would

[22:14]

quote from his book, because one of his books talks about suffering. And since that's my topic, I thought, he's not here, but maybe he can give the lecture for me anyway. That's the great advantage of writing, or nowadays, audiophiles. You can speak even when you're dead. It's wonderful. So this is from his book, Be Still and Get Going, a Jewish meditation practice for real life. It's a wonderful book. So this is the second chapter. It's about suffering. And now it's going to be a little funny. I'm going to now read for you my friend Rabbi Liu's discussion.

[23:15]

of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. So why should I say anything about it when I can read what he says? So he begins, most of us, I think, tend to think of the spiritual path in terms of the high points. A birth, a death, that moment of transcendence we felt during a great storm or standing by a waterfall or viewing a sunset on a trip to the mountains. But the truth is, neither thunderbolts nor visions of pink clouds are the primary engine of the spiritual quest. Suffering is. Certainly, Buddhism recognizes this. The problem of suffering is central to both Buddhist theology and practice. Although it's debatable whether there's such a thing as Buddhist theology, but anyway. The most fundamental doctrine in Buddhism is the Four Noble Truths.

[24:20]

The first noble truth is that suffering is endemic to human existence. To be human is to experience suffering. Nor do you have to be a Buddhist to recognize this truth. Whenever I present this idea to Jewish groups, there is at first a wave of recognition, heads nodding as people all over the room acknowledge that suffering has certainly been central to their own lives, followed closely by sighs of relief and the almost audible thought, thank God it's not just me. And you know, this is one of the most commonplace things. It's a strange thing, but everybody thinks that secretly, you know, they're really in a pickle and they're suffering a lot and their life is a real wreck. And everybody else is fine. So it's a little embarrassing to be the only one who's a wreck.

[25:24]

So you never even mention it. People go through their entire lives with this sort of secret feeling. And they never mention it to anybody ever because it's such a shameful thing to be the only one on the planet who is a mess. And I often tell the story. It was one of the... you know, beautiful moments in my own life when I had just this experience. Because I was just like that. I thought, you know... Of course, it's not that simple, because then sometimes you think, well, that's not really true. But then other times you think, yeah, it really is true. So it's not, you know, it goes back and forth. But I was at a time when I was convinced this was really true. And I remember I was living all by myself in some second growth redwood forest in Northern California up by Eureka in the days when you didn't have to work.

[26:24]

So I didn't work. So I had time to contemplate my miserable situation. And I remember reading a book about Buddhism, and I was in a... I probably told you this story before, because it was such a wonderful moment in my life that I tell about it all the time. It was a simple thing. I was sitting there in a clearing in this redwood forest, and I remember there was a stump of a tree there, and there was a huckleberry plant growing out of the stump of this tree. And because it was a little clearing, there was a shaft of sunlight shining down on the huckleberries, which was so bright red, you know, in the sunlight. And I was reading in this book, you know, like the first noble truth of Buddhism is that all conditioned existence is suffering. And all of a sudden I thought, it's not just me? This is the general case?

[27:32]

And this was a tremendous liberation. I don't think I've ever had as relieving a moment as that. So that's what he's saying here. When he tells this to Jewish audiences, they all say, wow, thank God for the Buddhists. Birth is problematic. Aging is hard. Dying is also hard to bear, begins one classical formulation of the Four Noble Truths. But that is only the beginning of the bad news. Sorrow, pain, anger, grief, and despair are all both inevitable and oppressive. Having to put up with the things we dislike is painful, but no less than being apart from the things that we do like. Not getting what we want is extremely unpleasant, but not nearly as unpleasant as getting what we want and discovering that it's a great disappointment.

[28:38]

it turns out that it's not what we thought it would be. Or, it is what we thought it would be, but now the fear of losing it is much stronger than any pleasure we might derive from having finally achieved it. In short, our experience is irredeemably unsatisfactory. And the second noble truth tells us why. We inevitably experience life as suffering, as unsatisfactory, because we are afflicted with an inherent desire to have things be otherwise. No particular state is inherently afflictive. A physical or mental state only becomes so when we wish it to be some other state. If we have a pain in our leg or in our back, and I think he's probably talking here about meditation, practice, the poor guy, he had lots of different pains in meditation over the years. If we have such a pain, it only becomes suffering by virtue of the wish not to have that pain.

[29:56]

This may be a perfectly reasonable wish, but it's not a necessary one. We might just as easily choose to see the sensation in our leg as just that, as a sensation. in which case we would not experience it as suffering. Our life consists of an endless procession of sensations, thoughts, impulses, feelings. It is only our desire to hold on to some of them and to get rid of others that causes us to suffer. Yet we do desire these things and we suffer as a consequence. I was mentioning earlier, the equanimity. You could sit with difficulty with equanimity, and that's exactly what equanimity is. Sitting, being with something without a desire to either hold on to it or push it away. That is what equanimity means. You just accept what's there in that moment. And if you can sit with equanimity, be with something with equanimity, then it's not suffering anymore.

[31:03]

So far, the news from the front has been pretty grim. Both suffering and the desire that causes it seem to be inescapable components of existence. But the third noble truth brings us some good news. The desire that creates the sense in our psyche that all our experience is somehow unsatisfactory can be eliminated, leading to the sensation of suffering. And the way to the annihilation of desire is the fourth noble truth, which consists of the Eightfold Path. if we practice right view right intention right speech right action right livelihood right effort right mindfulness and right concentration our desire and consequently our suffering will be extinguished isn't this a wonderfully simple plan of action I guess he's joking but before we break out the champagne and begin to celebrate our liberation from suffering.

[32:09]

It should be noted that there have been dozens of schools and styles of Buddhism over the past 2500 years and no two of them have agreed exactly what constitutes right view, right intention, right action and so forth. So apparently it isn't as simple as it seems. And even if that weren't true and we could be very clear about what all those things mean and how to go about them, it still would not be so easy. actually, and it would take some doing. Nevertheless, there is a consensus among most Buddhists that meditation is an important and possibly an essential element of this path. After all, if the problem is dissatisfaction with our experience, then meditation, which tends to make our experience considerably more satisfactory, because it makes it easier to have equanimity, would logically point to a solution.

[33:12]

In meditation, our experience is more vibrant, richer, more alive, and our desire to have things be otherwise is therefore diminished. In ordinary life, when something happens and you don't like it, and you decide that it should be otherwise, kind of running around doing things to make that so, you don't really experience how painful it is, this wish, that something which actually is there not be there. You're sitting there on the meditation cushion and the pain of that is so apparent to you immediately that you realize that, and you know, especially if you're living in a monastery and meditation is many periods of meditation, there's no escape, you realize Well, the only thing to do is be present with equanimity. It's my only salvation here. And little by little you learn. Then he goes on to bring up a different subject.

[34:19]

The amelioration of suffering is not the central imperative of Judaism. The central imperative of Judaism, I believe, is to recognize and manifest the sacred in everything we do and encounter in the world. While this in no way conflicts with the idea of ameliorating suffering, in fact, I think that we can safely assume that if we realized the sacred in the moment, we would be rather less inclined to wish that it were some other moment. Still, it's not the same thing. Yet, even if the problem of suffering is not the central concern of Jewish religion, sacred literature, it certainly occupies a prominent place in it. In fact, the very first story we tell as a people is about a man and a woman who had everything they could possibly want but whose desire for the one thing they could not have thrust them into a world of suffering and death.

[35:22]

So you know about that story, right? Adam and Eve. So, yeah. Kabbalistic cosmology also expresses the idea that creation is fundamentally broken and that suffering is therefore inevitable. According to Lurianic Kabbalah, God originally existed as the Ein Sof, literally the endlessness, God's essential, undiluted nature. a vast and limitless emptiness so powerful and so charged with supernal energy that nothing could coexist with it. So there couldn't be a world. So, when God conceived of the brilliant idea of wishing to bring creation into existence, it was first necessary for God to remove God's self from a tiny dot

[36:26]

at the center of the Ain Self. So God kind of scoochied God Self up a little bit, squeezing back just one little spot in this endlessness. And this is actually a creation story that is exactly the myth that we all have now of the Big Bang. It's exactly the same idea. In one little spot of the universe gave rise to the entire cosmos. And that's what this is saying. The tiny dot became the creation as we know it. It burst out into the creation as we know it. And this process of self-removal is called tsimtsam, or contraction. And this was accomplished by means of kelim, vessels that carried the divine light out of this tiny speck at the center of the Ain Sof. But, as Tzimtzum unfolded, a cosmic catastrophe occurred. Do you know about all this?

[37:28]

It's interesting, no? Jewish cosmology. At the time that this happened, something went wrong. The divine light that had been withdrawn from this point was too much for the kelim, for the vessels. And they broke. Filling the universe with dangerous shards of devouring light. Because on the one hand, it's godly light, but on the other hand, it's godly light that cannot coexist with things. So it devours everything. So this caused a big problem in the universe. The universe now became full of danger, failure, suffering, and death. And the task of humanity and of all being... From the moment of that catastrophe forward became tikkun olam, the repair of the universe, the mending of the broken vessels and the restoration of the divine light to its rightful place.

[38:34]

So that's the human mission and also the mission of all of creation. Creation has that job. Anyway, I'm getting back around to the point of suffering. These three stories, or rather he is, I get mixed up sometimes between him and me. These three stories, the Four Noble Truths, the Garden of Eden, and the Breaking of the Vessels, and the basic skeletal structure upon which all three of them rest, have always raised a number of troubling questions for me. Is the universe essentially deficient and in need of improvement? Is God flawed? Why was this desire, which would prove to be our undoing, implanted in our souls in the first place? And how come God made defective vessels anyway? What, is God some kind of a screw-up that doesn't know how to do things? Like some apprentice vessel maker who doesn't know how to get the right alloy or something?

[39:35]

These are all troubling questions. Or, or, is there something about the process of healing? something about our human need to work through suffering and death, to have this job of mending a broken world? Is there something about this task that is both necessary and good? Is there something about the process of going beyond our desire to have things other than what they are that might in fact leave us better off than if we had not had that desire at all in the first place. The fall from Eden cast us out of paradise and thrust us into history. And maybe we shouldn't be trying to get back to paradise, because maybe we can't anyway.

[40:43]

Maybe we should see the advantage in being in history. Maybe there's something redemptive and necessary about the experience of living in a historical, time-bound world. As for the breaking of the vessels, the rabbis of the Talmud said that it is far better to have sinned and repented than never to have sinned at all. Kind of astonishing. He doesn't mention here that other rabbis took issue with that and they said, wait a minute, because the obvious thing, more sin? Better. More sin, more repentance. So let's all sin more. But another rabbi said, wait, [...] wait. I'm not so sure about that. He left that part out. Anyway, the majority opinion seems to be that it's better, that it's impossible not to sin, actually, is the idea. And so that's why it's good to sin and repent, because then we're stronger.

[41:45]

And they said it's just like a broken bone. Actually, a broken bone that gets broken in men's is stronger than a bone before it's broken, which apparently is a medical fact. A lot of these rabbis were also doctors, I guess. A lot of Jewish doctors, you know. So, all this raises more questions. Suffering may very well be inevitable, but can it also be useful? is the history we were thrust into after our fall from Eden not only inevitable, but also something we needed to go through, something that benefited us more than our remaining in a static paradise would have done. In a teaching that turns the four noble truths on their collective head, Rabbi Nachman, the great Hasidic master of the 18th century, seems to answer these questions in the affirmative.

[42:48]

And here's a quotation from the Rebbe. The strength of a person's desire is brought about by the impediments that happen to him or her. So when a person needs to do something, needs to, a hindrance will always arise in the path. And this hindrance is for the sake of the desire. By means of the hindrance. She will have greater desire to do this thing that she needs to do than she would have had had there been no such obstacle. For whenever a person is prevented from doing something, his or her desire to do it becomes that much stronger. So it is that obstacles are placed in the way of a person who needs to do something so that his desire to do it will be increased. And I think Rabbi Nachman here is speaking. very much from his own experience because he had many, many obstacles in his life.

[43:55]

Many, many obstacles, inner and outer obstacles. This is especially true in matters of holiness because the more important the thing desired, the greater the obstacles that are presented. Interesting, huh? Consequently, when a person experiences many obstacles to the realization of some holy task, he should realize that this shows the importance of the task. And this is the general rule. Every obstacle is presented only for the sake of increasing desire so that once a person has a great desire to do something, he will carry it out. Potential will become actual. So according to the Rebbe then, there is an inevitable relationship between our desire for a thing and the obstacle that stands in our way.

[44:56]

If we didn't want a thing, we wouldn't see what was preventing us from obtaining it as an obstacle. Although in Buddhism, the existence of God is not acknowledged or denied, God, at least the God of Rebbe Nachman, seems to have a pretty good idea of how the Four Noble Truths operate. Desire causes suffering, but suffering also causes desire. If we desire that which we don't have, then suffering, in the form of an impediment to what we want, will only make us desire it more. So suffering and desire are not inherent defects in the universe, nor God's mistakes. Rather, they are divine instruments. And Rabbi Nachman sees this use in suffering. It can awaken us to the spiritual path... and quicken our resolve to remain on it as well. Indeed, suffering can often be an awakening to the way things really are and a pathway to a clearer vision of our lives.

[46:08]

So I think that often happens that way. Exactly that which we never wanted to see happen, which we feared and hoped we could escape, when it happens, it opens us to a whole new life. So I think all these different thoughts and teachings make it clear to us that suffering is not a simple matter of something unpleasant to be avoided. Suffering is really pungent and pivotal in human life. Whatever your religious point of view or non-religious point of view, I think it's obvious to all of us that life can be powerfully meaningful to us, full of...

[47:17]

vibrancy and resonance and depth or not. And we are built to search for that meaning and that depth and that power. And when it's missing, we become numb or bitter or brutal. or sick in a thousand different ways. But when those things happen, the suffering that comes from them can either reduce us to meaninglessness and despair, or it can force us to seek a spiritual task

[48:19]

like Rabbi Nachman speaks about, and to pour our life's energy into that task exactly in proportion to the suffering. So the question of suffering is a very deep human question. It certainly is one of the greatest of all human challenges and the greatest human opportunity. There's no way around it. To stave it off and avoid it as long as possible, from my perspective, is not a great strategy. That we really all should think about this and see how can we turn toward this in our life that's most challenging and most rewarding. So that's my talk about suffering.

[49:24]

What time are we supposed to go to bed? Is it time to go? 9.20. Oh, late. So we stop. We have to go to bed. Anyway. I would say that... I hope I didn't make anybody too depressed or anything. You all right? I wasn't trying to make you depressed. Everybody all right? Cheerful or not? Yes. Well, I'll just leave you with this thought. If what I've said here, and not only what I've said, but what you've sensed from being at this place where the practice of the ancient way of the Buddha pervades the atmosphere, if you've been somehow touched inside by this, the simplest thing that you can do to bring this into your life in some real way is to sit in silence for 20 or 30 minutes

[50:47]

Every day. Just that alone. With some sense of vision and commitment. And your life will be radically changed for the better, I think. And this is irrespective. You don't have to be a Buddhist. You can be Jewish or Catholic or Muslim or scientific materialist or humanist or juggler, jack of all trades, whatever you are. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Because this is human. This is human. So, think about that. You've probably all received basic instruction in sitting. So, thank you for listening. And thanks especially to the residents of Tassajara for taking care of this place and keeping it going. It's amazing that

[51:48]

year after year, decade after decade, people turn up to keep this going. So thanks, all of you, each and every one of you. Take care of yourselves.

[52:12]

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