I think this space must have elastic walls. We keep figuring out how to get more people in here. I wonder if I'm ever going to get used to that verse that we chant at the beginning of a lecture when I'm sitting in the seat. I always feel a little bit daunted by the uppity-ness of sitting in this seat hoping to speak the Tathagata's words. And I see staring at me from the wall in the back of the room a picture of Suzuki Roshi. So, I feel some comfort from his company and gratitude for his teaching and would like to offer whatever I can say this morning to you in the spirit of, if it's helpful, that's wonderful, and if it isn't, just let it go.

[01:08]

So, a group of us are in the middle of a weekend consideration of happiness and suffering, a little inquiry into happiness and suffering. So I'm actually speaking to that group of us and the rest of you are just eavesdropping. What I'd like to talk about this morning is on the theme of healing and happiness. It's just cover for all the same old things I seem to be talking about over and over again because it's what I keep thinking about, the same things over and over again. In particular, I'm still puzzling over and enjoying and wondering over the ancient practice of bare noting, or as the man who wrote the very helpful contemporary discourse on bare

[02:21]

noting, a book called Taming Your Gremlin by a man named Carson, talks about it as simply noticing. I want to encourage you to notice that the word simple is not the same as the word easy. In some ways, Zen practice is simple. The kind of meditation practice that we do is, from some standpoint, simple. I don't know that there's very many of us, if any of us, who would say it's easy. So what do we mean when we talk about suffering? Most of us do not mean suffering in the sense that Jesus meant suffering when he said, And suffer ye the little children. We don't usually think of suffering as that which we endure as much as suffering is that

[03:25]

which we'd like to get rid of, we'd like to have go away. And yet, suffering is such a great teacher. I've learned some of the most difficult and important lessons in my life out of what I would describe as suffering. In particular, what I want to consider with you this morning is a little bit about the kind of suffering that has to do with our experience of being wounded, feeling wounded or harmed. And I think that we can talk about this range of experience in terms of the physical, in terms of the emotional, in terms of the psychological, in terms of the spiritual bodies or body, these different aspects, that there are some ways of attending to and healing from wounds

[04:33]

and harming that are pretty similar in terms of the pattern in those various realms. So, I very much mean to talk about healing the wounds which are both within and without. So, this brings me to this practice of bare noting, of noticing, which amazes me because it seems to be the practice which leads to healing in and of itself, perhaps not completely but to a significant degree. At least that has been my experience in my own life and in being with other people as they try to find ways of healing themselves. Healing themselves or in my case healing myself from the destructive patterns that I learned

[05:39]

as a child and growing up and from the various and sundry situations that I managed to get myself into in the course of fifty-five years or I think it's actually fifty-four, not sure. I haven't counted lately. That as I have cultivated a capacity to pay attention to the detail of what I'm in the midst of, in particular, noticing very specific aspects of the situation, it is almost as though I need not do anything else. My willingness to be present with things as they are leads to some change, some resolution.

[06:44]

Although I notice that if I'm doing the noticing in hopes of change, somehow it doesn't quite work. I think that this is at least part of what Suzuki Roshi used to talk about when he would talk about sitting with no gaining idea. We were talking about this last night. If one is a musician and has one of those wonderful experiences where you're really playing the music, you and the instrument and the music and the environment, the audience, etc., it's all one piece. And then there's this thought that comes up, oh, I'm really doing this well. The whole thing comes to a crashing end. I think something like that happens when we set out to do some noticing, because if I just notice hard enough, this miserable situation will go away or end or whatever.

[07:47]

I don't think it works that way. What strikes me about my willingness to notice the detail of things as they are is that the consequences of that willingness to notice, the consequences of that noticing, seem to be remarkably penetrating and thoroughgoing. And that the more particular and specific I am, the more penetrating the effect of the noticing. Now, implicit in this, and this is, of course, what Taming Your Gremlin is about, is that noticing, simply noticing, means just that, means noticing without judgment, without reaction, without commentary, without editing, without any quality of criticism,

[08:49]

without the look or feel or tone of voice of judgment or reaction. Simply noticing. There's another aspect of the practice of noticing which has taken me a long time to recognize, but which I realize more and more is important. That is, particularly when I'm noticing some aspect of my behavior which I'm not thrilled with. Some aspect of my behavior which I wish was somebody else's behavior certainly wasn't mine, isn't part of the press package that I'd like to have put out. That the temptation is to notice and then slip very quickly into obsessing about it. Judgment shows right up. So that the noticing must, I would propose, be very light, very brief.

[09:55]

Just notice and go back to some specific aspect of physical sensation and breath. Don't start thinking about what you notice. If at all possible, minimize the naming which leads immediately to the editorial comment. Let one's attention rest very lightly on what one is noticing and return to home base. So as I'm noticing, noticing, that feature of this practice I'm beginning to see is quite important. In Thich Nhat Hanh's book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, which I think many of you know, there's a section early on in the book where he talks about the meditation that reveals and heals.

[10:59]

And I remember the first time I read his book and I noticed that little heading. And I was really struck by it because the sequence seems exactly right. If I can reveal to myself that I have a cut on my arm or that I feel some wound, some inner wound as a consequence of some experience I've had, the first step in the process of healing is noticing that I have that wound, that I have that cut on my arm or leg or a bruise on my shoulder. Because it's only when I notice that I have that bruise or that wound that I can then attend in whatever way is appropriate. It is only in noticing the wound that I can then clean it, get some disinfectant,

[12:02]

perhaps go get some stitches if that's necessary, put a bandage on or leave it open to the air, whatever is appropriate to the specific wounding or place of harming, whether it's on the arm or in the heart or in the spirit or in the mind. And I think for many of us we're a little afraid of doing that because we don't want to touch that which hurts. We don't want to look at it. It somehow might get bigger. So we turn away from or ignore or say, wound, I don't have a cut on my arm, what are you talking about? The blood that's dripped on your shoe is probably from your arm, not my arm. Whatever it is we do to turn away from ourselves in that way. And yet, in fact, when we finally can turn to whatever it is in ourselves that needs to be healed,

[13:12]

we discover that what we imagine is almost always far worse than the actual direct experience of things as they are. What I fear, when I keep it at a distance and keep it vague and general, looms like Mount Everest. And yet, when I turn around and attend to what I fear or am struggling with, in particular, in the moment, not in general, but in the moment, somehow the scale of what I'm working with in my experience becomes surprisingly manageable. So, there is in this process of revealing, this practice that Thich Nhat Hanh is referencing as revealing,

[14:14]

that has very specific characteristics. A radical kind of attending to, of listening deeply, of paying attention. And from that looking deeply into things as they are arises understanding. And it is out of our understanding things as they are that love and compassion arise. So, it's this sequence, this track, if you will, that I find Bear Noting leads me on to. There's another aspect of the meditation that reveals and heals, the process of it. That seems to be particularly crucial, which has to do with having a witness.

[15:24]

There seems to be some way in which having a witness in this process of healing is an important element in the healing process. And so, I think that having a teacher, having a friend, having a guide, having a group of people one does practices with, what we call in the Buddhist tradition a Sangha, the community of practitioners. What in twelve-step work is described as a sharing circle, where what we do with each other, one-on-one or one in a group, is listen and being listened to. And how much healing happens out of that kind of deep listening,

[16:28]

which has some very interesting characteristics about it. Again, listening which does not include in any way judgment or reacting. We say, oh, well, all I did was listen. But think for a moment about each of us, our experience of those situations when we have felt that someone really was listening to us, where we have the experience of being heard, and how much healing happens with that experience of being listened to. In recent studies of women who have breast cancer, the statistics for people who stay in long-term remission more than doubles for those people who are in a support group.

[17:33]

I haven't seen any formal studies, but I certainly know from the people that I know who have AIDS, that one of the practices that seems to make consistently a significant difference is to be part of a support group. A couple of weeks ago, some of us participated in a conference celebrating women in Buddhism. And I participated in a sharing circle, and then we together did a memorial service for aborted and miscarried fetuses. Thirty-two of us. And we began by sitting in a circle, each of us sewing a bib, or several bibs, as the case may be, for whatever being or beings we wanted to remember in this ceremony.

[18:44]

And we sat in a circle in silence, sewing, and our agreement was that anyone who wanted to speak could, but that there would be no comment, no judgment, no reaction, no helping. We would just listen. And so we sewed, and we listened to each other for an hour and a half. It was a very powerful experience. There were people in that circle who spoke of experiences that happened to them twenty, thirty, forty years ago, about which they had never spoken to anyone. We were, by and large, thirty-two people who had not known each other before,

[19:47]

and yet there was some sense of a kind of vessel within which it was safe to speak quite intimately about our experience, and to just place it in the center of the room. After an hour and a half of sitting and sewing and listening together in that way, we then went through a rather classical memorial service in the Buddhist tradition. We had an altar with a number of images, primarily of Jizo Bodhisattva, and one by one we stood in a circle, again, around the altar, and one by one each person put a bib or several bibs on a figure, offered incense, and then we all bowed together. And since that ceremony, I've been getting letters from people.

[20:50]

I certainly know how that experience affected me, and I'm struck by the similarity in what I'm reading in the letters that people have been writing about what it was like to do that ceremony, and to find a way to finally have some resolution and some closure. I would say that we had every argument, pro and con, about abortion present in the stories that we heard in that circle. It was pretty interesting. In Japan, this kind of practice of doing a memorial service for a family, or if not for the family, for the woman who has gone through an abortion or a miscarriage, is quite widespread. It's kind of emerged as a practice from the grassroots in the last 25 or so years.

[22:00]

Abortion is very widely practiced in Japan as the primary means of birth control. And there is an enormous amount of grief, sickness, dis-ease that's not just mental or emotional, and so there has come to be some request to do ceremonies like this. It's actually rather controversial because there are some people who say, well, it's just priests making money on the grief of innocent people. And there's probably some truth to that in some instances. But there's something about this practice that strikes a chord for people or it wouldn't continue to be done. And what strikes me about it is that to do a memorial service, for example, if one has had an abortion, means actually acknowledging what has happened,

[23:05]

bare noting again. And I find it very interesting to see that there is a kind of healing that comes with our willingness to notice what has actually happened, all of it, that does not seem to occur when we turn away from what has happened. That there is something that happens around an abortion or a miscarriage in noting that there has been a dying, a life has come to an end, that allows some resolution, some work which has been hanging there unattended to. It's pretty interesting. In talking about this ceremony, which I seem to be doing a lot,

[24:11]

it's caught my attention pretty intensely. Someone told me the other day that in the Soviet Union it is common for a woman, by the time she reaches the age of menopause, to have had thirteen abortions. Pretty amazing, isn't it? So this issue, which is such a difficult one, around which we have such intense, polarized, screaming and yelling here in this country, is an issue which affects a lot of us all over the world. I bring it up because I think it's something we need to look at, but I also bring it up because my experience, as I've been doing more and more of these memorial services, is that here it is again. Here is again a specific instance of how healing arises

[25:15]

out of our willingness to pay attention to the detail of things as they are. I think that the heart of Zen practice, in particular the heart of Zen sitting, Zazen practice, has to do with cultivating our capacity to hang out with ourselves moment by moment, to be present with things as they are. And most of us don't realize that it's a fairly radical thing to do. We're so practiced at picking and choosing. I'm going to hang out with what's pleasant. I'm going to try to avoid what's unpleasant. If I have a headache, I'm going to quickly take an aspirin. And if we do Zazen, after a while we begin to notice

[26:15]

that there's a place of being present with things as they are, without quickly rushing to change them. Just staying present, noticing, attending in specific detail, cultivating our capacity to have home base be the detail of our physical posture and our breath. And out of practicing in this way every day, we cultivate our capacity to be present in this way in the rest of our lives, and eventually to be present in the lives of others in the same way. Yesterday I got a letter from Wendy Johnson, whom many of you know as the head of the garden here,

[27:18]

who is in France studying with Thich Nhat Hanh and pruning the plum trees at Plum Village. She said, my felco clippers and the plum trees are both doing well. She sent me something I want to read to you. It's having to do with the practice of evoking the name of the Bodhisattva. In particular, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Avalokiteshvara. The emanation of Avalokiteshvara in Tibet is known as Tara. Twenty-one different forms of Tara. A female Bodhisattva, or Kuan Yin in China, or Japan.

[28:24]

Jizo is a compassion Bodhisattva. All these various articulations, manifestations of compassion have in common this quality of being hearers of the cries of the world. Adepts at listening. The Bodhisattva Manjusri, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom. We have a wonderful figure of Manjusri, of the Wisdom Bodhisattva in the meditation hall. He is the Bodhisattva who shows us the path of looking deeply into things as they are. And the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra, the Shining Practice Bodhisattva, is the one who shows us about putting into action compassion and wisdom.

[29:30]

So, here is the practice of evoking the name of the Bodhisattva. We evoke your name, Avalokiteshvara. We aspire to learn your way, which is to listen, in order to lessen the suffering in the world. You know how to listen to the suffering in the world. We evoke your name in order to understand. We evoke your name in order to practice listening with all our attention and open-heartedness. We shall sit and listen without any prejudice. We shall sit and listen without judging and without reacting. We shall practice listening in order to understand. We shall practice listening so attentively that we are able to hear what the other is saying and also what is left unsaid. We know that just by listening deeply

[30:41]

we already alleviate a great deal of the pain and suffering of the other. Ever since I opened Wendy's letter and I received this page, I've been reading that over and over to myself. Some of you know I have a very old dog whose name is Maisie, who has been my dear friend and companion for 17 years and who for some months now has not been able to move from the waist down. As the vet says, she has great joie de vivre from the waist up and from the waist down she is dead as a doornail except that she still does all the body functioning. So I have this bedridden invalid with fur. And she sometimes has difficult nights

[31:45]

and sometimes she sleeps through the night. And when she has several difficult nights in a row I get pretty exasperated and cranky and worse from lack of sleep. So about two o'clock this morning she woke me up and I got out of bed absolutely furious because I was pretty tired. And I remembered this line, We aspire to learn your way which is to listen in order to lessen the suffering in the world. And I just got down on the floor and lay down next to her. Her bed was dry. She had eaten. She didn't want water. She'd had a pain pill. She was shaking. She was clearly in pain. And I lay down on the floor next to her and talked to her a little bit

[32:47]

but mostly I just lay down next to her. Stroked her nose for a few minutes and I just hung out with her. I sort of half dozed on my hands and knees with my butt up in the air. And after a while she went to sleep. And I went back to bed. And I thought, well, I'm going to regret this in the morning. Wrong. I woke up quite refreshed. And I was grateful for remembering about Avalokiteshvara's example about listening as an alternative to being outraged at missing an hour's sleep. Sometimes when we get sick

[34:03]

that sickness becomes our teacher and we learn how to do things that we haven't known how to do before. Sometimes sickness or limitation, physical limitation teaches us how to listen or be in the world in ways that lead to healing and to happiness. One of our friends has been telling us about how physical limitation, not being able to do everything very well and easily, coming to be dependent on others, that inevitable slowing down, that coming to meet helplessness, has introduced him to the world as a place filled with kind and loving people.

[35:06]

Let me read you what happens if we invoke Manjusri in Samantabhadra's name. We evoke your name, Manjusri. We aspire to learn your way, which is to be still and to look deeply into the heart of things and into the hearts of people. We shall practice looking with all our attention and open-heartedness. We shall practice looking with unprejudiced eyes. We shall practice looking without judging and without reacting. We shall practice looking deeply in order to be able to see and to understand what the roots of ill-being are in order to be able to see the impermanent and selfless nature of all that is. We shall practice your way, that is, to use the sword of understanding to cut through the bonds of suffering, thus freeing ourselves and other species from ill-being.

[36:20]

The sword of understanding. It's great. And with Samantabhadra, we evoke your name, Samantabhadra. We aspire to practice your aspiration to act with the eyes and heart of compassion. We vow in the morning to bring joy to someone and in the afternoon to lift from someone a feeling of sorrow. We know that the happiness of others is indeed our own happiness and we vow to practice joy on the path of service. We know that every word, every look, every action can bring happiness to another. We know that if we practice wholeheartedly then we ourselves may become an inexhaustible source of peace and joy for our loved ones and for all other species. So here we have this, for me, very inspiring, poetic

[37:28]

explication of the practice of remembering about listening, looking deeply, and action informed by this listening and looking deeply and the understanding that arises from this activity, this way of being. So healing in this sense, the healing that arises from looking into, noticing, attending to things as they are, is the ground from which happiness arises. Every once in a while I remember a film I saw many, many years ago by Luis Buñuel. Some of you may have seen it. There's a wonderful scene in the movie where

[38:29]

the hero, so-called, drags a grand piano with a dead donkey draped over the top of it through the rooms of the house in which he lives. He doesn't move very fast and it looks pretty dreadful. You know, he's hauling this enormous piano with this donkey draped over it like a kind of lace shawl, only it's, you know, a donkey. I don't know about you, but I know that there are certain sufferings in my life which I haul around behind me and it feels like I'm hauling my own grand piano with a dead donkey on the top. And what I love about this image is that it's so ludicrous, it's so outrageous that I can see all I have to do is just put it down.

[39:37]

I can't, however, put it down until I notice, look at that. I'm hauling a grand piano with a donkey on it. Amazing. I don't even have to say that I have to get the grand piano with the dead donkey on it out of the room. But I don't have to keep hauling it around behind me. Our friend Bob Thurman sometimes talks about unpacking a sutra or unpacking a teaching. What I want to propose is that we unpack our suitcases, our suffering suitcases. That means we put the suitcase down, we open the lid, we look at what's inside. We then have some opportunity to pick it up again

[40:45]

or just leave it sitting there on the floor. And I want to encourage all of us to practice noticing in the moment, in detail, because it's a way of arriving at that place of putting down the traces with which we haul the piano or putting down the suitcases. It's a way of coming to a place of healing. We don't have to get into an ambulance and drive off to the rescue. We don't have to do anything except be present in this very radical way. And I'm completely convinced out of my own experience and from being with other people who share with me in this practice

[41:47]

that this is the way to lead to happiness. To noticing the happiness we already have in some cases. So please, when the opportunity arises, call on Avalokiteshvara or Tara or Kuan Yin or Jizo or whoever to help you remember listening, noticing, being present without judgment or reaction. Just listening. Thank you very much. Avalokiteshvara May our intention

[42:44]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ