Sunday Lecture

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the have more like
may we have more like
is it possible
i'm living demonstration of old age sickness and death
it begins with the average
i site change
they are ah
okay
now maybe between the kindness of my glasses and holding paper right upload soft came up to say what i'm doing good morning

this weekend my dharma my brother like port who is here from minnesota and i are engaged with a group us
followers of the way
in this case the way of inquiry about anger and possibilities for in the transformation of anger has a spiritual path we have an gathered together since friday evening
so i would like to suggest to those of you who are here just for and this morning that you might think of yourselves as is dropping on a conversation which has been going on for a while
and i hope that i can say something for and this group of us who are looking into anger and in fact all of the afflicted assumptions
and thinking about and considering and practicing various ways of meeting these emotions that arise and the states of mind that are the consequence i'm hoping that i may be able to say something by way of the continuation of our inquiry
it is also have some huge
those of you who are here for this morning
i would like to this morning and talk about a practice of the cultivation of transcending patience the quality of patience as
does not coexist with anger or in fact any of the effective emotions particularly in there more intense aspects
you want me to speak louder i can hear kind of ring so i was holding back so do you make me louder or do i speak louder

right tell me if this is not loud enough please

you may have to holler since you don't have a microphone
the text or teaching which has been the source of inspiration and guidance for me for a long time not the only text certainly but the primary text has been the teaching by the great practitioner
or philosopher meditator monk whose name is shanti deva who lived in north india in the eighth century and was a monk at milan the university
and his great teaching has been translated into english
translated by stephen batchelor and is a text i would recommend to all of you i have found it to continuously inspiring sometimes puzzling
shanti david talks about three different kinds of practice he really is separating out three ways into the cultivation of a patient's excuse me
that we might consider together this morning
the first kind of patience and he presents is called that cultivation of our ability to endure suffering
i think that this particular quality of patients called forbearance or enduring of our sufferings can be easily misunderstood
so let me see if i can say a little bit about it that will be
helpful
first let me just say the
three focuses or aspects of cultivating patients that shanti david talks about her this first one the second he describes as definitively thinking about the dharma
that is the teachings about the way things are the truth
and the third is to not practice retaliation
we all know about that impulse for retaliation don't wait
so i'd like to talk about these three ways into the cultivation of
patients
one of the things that chante davao points out but of course comes up for us from many sources of wisdom
is that
we have a certain kind of comfort with what is familiar
so one of the ideas is that if we practice patience we will become familiar with patients
and if we become familiar with patients our capacity for patients is extended expanded
so there there is this idea of practicing this quality of mind which has the effect of transcendence
being able to move beyond the small cramping container of anger for example
he says once we become familiar with something it can be accomplished without difficulty
a couple of times during this weekend i've fought of and spoken the words of heraclitus
one of the fragments from heraclitus where he says dogs bark at strangers
and i think we do to that is
dogs bark at those whom they do not know
and i think that's true for most of us as well
and of course it's curious isn't it that sometimes we bark at or have a kind of pulling away some aversion to what is unfamiliar even if what is unfamiliar may be very good for us may be wholesome may bring us to somehow
happiness
so i think it's current very useful to pay attention to how much of our experience in the world how much of what we respond to has as much to do with whether it's familiar or not
and that we aren't necessarily responding to what we find wholesome or unwholesome what makes us happy or sad
there may be some correlation there but there may not be
in cultivating pack patients with our sufferings
shanti deva and many great teachers
propose that it's very useful if we can begin with small sufferings
saving the vine talks and his work about how to be with death and dying he talks about practicing picking up a five pound weights as a way of getting ready for the fifty and hundred and five hundred pound weights had come to us whether we want them or not
like some terminal illness or some catastrophe with someone we love
so we begin with cultivating our ability to be patient with
discomforts being a little too warm or a little too cold
when we practice sitting meditation we are of course exploring our capacity
cultivating our capacity to sit still even when our legs begin to hurt or the lower back begins to hurt
the neves begin to hurt
and we have the opportunity to see what the response in our particular mind stream is when discomfort arises when we have that direct encounter with what is unpleasant or difficult
and we can in fact discover and cultivate and expand our capacity to sit quietly with a calm mind
when where
warmer than we would like to be or colder than we would like to be or when our legs are hurting

whenever i think about this practice of enduring are suffering i very quickly come to remembering the tenth verse in chanted a this chapter on patients or he says why be unhappy about what i can do something about it
and why be unhappy about what i cannot do something about
those of you who know the serenity prayer
can hear the heart of it in this quote
and of course we get into trouble because we often do not know what we can do something about
we often are busy trying to do something about someone else's behavior which we cannot do something about instead of paying attention to our own mind stream our own behavior which of course we can do something about
there's the cracks around it
so when i'm sitting
am i in a situation where i can do something about my aching legs
well i've walked in here voluntarily
and i have agreed to sit as quietly as i can
somewhere during the period of meditation comes the question for some of us should i move isn't a right to move
for me
they might come and hit me i've heard there's a stick somewhere i don't see it but i bet they have one somewhere maybe they'll kick me out
this is not the path for cultivating patients
this is the path for cultivating worldly desires
praise and fame fear of censure
what will they think of me is taking me away from what is the range of my capacity for sitting quietly and calmly that is authentic
and i may be someone inexperienced and so it may be that for me to move after five or ten minutes to quietly adjust my posture is what is appropriate and what fits for me
and in time i discover that i have a capacity to sit still with physical discomfort that isn't quite what it was a month ago or a year ago
and so i developed my capacity for patients with this fairly minor level of discomfort i begin to discover that i have a capacity for stillness and equity money in the face of discomfort that i didn't know i had

we have one way in the summer when we're in the mountains and the mosquitoes are swirling around we can put on bug off or whatever we can wear a long-sleeved shirt
but then there will always be that one
creative mosquito who finds his way or her way perhaps to skin and bites
do i
react scratching until it's a bleeding sore gets infected
i could consider this insect bite my opportunity for cultivating some patients
his holiness the dalai lama is a hard core practitioner in this department
he actually walks around with his arms bear in mosquito land
and offers his arm to the mosquitoes but i think many of us are not yet ready for that practice
i think very often when we hear a teaching like this we immediately go to a practice that is too much we're not yet at the point where what we take on being patient with the suffering that we
experience with some big enemy may not be a place to start
in fact it isn't the place to start a place to start is with what is small and what is doable
and to be as kindly and gentle and generous with ourselves as we enter into this cultivation of patients as we can me
in other words to include practicing patience with ourselves
we have this weekend been doing
mindfulness practice which includes letting ourselves be present first with the breath and then present with what is so with respect to emotion arising and falling
for example anger
going through a five step practice that is about the transformation of that emotion rising and falling rising and falling ryzen
that leads to disturbed unhappy state of mind
this practice is very effective for old anger and anger which arises in the moment
the cultivation of patients in the way that trendy deva and other great teachers talk about patience is more the preparation of the ground which is not so friendly to the afflicted emotions
this is more that cultivation of the mind which will lead us to be free of anger
but of course even in doing our practice where we are attending to present with noticing identifying naming what is so which may be disturbing or unpleasant there will very quickly be a call
lol to be patient with ourselves because the process of being able to do this practice to have the practice begin to be in us enough so that we can do it increasingly in the moment not trust after after the fact
we get discouraged we think why can't i do this i can i do this more effectively why can't i do this the way the teacher said i shouldn't be able to ah here is the moment for being patient with how slow we may be

i have a
as some of you know i love to find dharma teachings in books and magazines and newspapers and wherever that don't have the b word on
so my dharma text to these days is the december twenty eighth january fourth double issue of the new yorker magazine
and in fact during a session a seven-day retreat at some of us did just after christmas and through new year's we used the letters in remembrance of william shawn that are in this issue as the source of some of the focus for our return
eat the first time i read these letters i wept with joy
and appreciation for william shawn
these letters were written in remembrance of him by many of the people who worked with him particularly riders during the thirty five years that he was at the new yorker magazine
and in many of the letters he is quoted and so you begin after a few pages of reading these letters you begin to have a sense of what kind of person he was
and in reading these letters i had a sense of him as the kind of person that buddhism aspires to cultivate the kind of person that the world enjoys having around because we feel better when we're around certain people

i want to read a section from a letter by john mcphee in which he quotes william shawn
with what i have come to feel is one of the great
exhortations to the cultivation of patients
and i quote
he referring to william shawn
or as everyone called him mr sean
there's a rather formal person
he understood the disjunct kinship of creative work every kind of creative work and time the most concise summation of it i've ever heard was seven words he said just before closing my first profile and sending it off to
press it was nineteen sixty five and i was a new young writer and he did not interest new young writers
to any extent whatever to other editors he got the new ones started by himself
so there we were hours at a session discussing reverse pivots and back door plays and the role of left-handed comma in the architect tonics of basketball while the new yorker hurtled towards its
deadline
i finally had to ask him how can you afford to use so much time and go into so many deep things in such detail when this whole enterprise is yours to keep together he said
as long as it takes
as a part-time writing teacher i have offered these words to a generation of students if they are writers they will never forget them
and i would propose that as practitioners of the cultivation of patience
we will not forget that either
anyway this edition of the new yorker has some piss teachings in it and i recommend it to you

i think in the cultivation of patients with suffering i just my own but with others one of the things we may begin to discover is how particularly with that suffering which we cannot do something about
cause suffering of fading a one's eyesight for example
there is a way in which if i fight against what is so my suffering increases
and so as i cultivate patience i begin to discover that at least i'm not adding insult to injury if you will
for anyone who has ever had the experience of chronic pain of one sort or another an opportunity if you will to explore one's relationship to pain we very quickly discover how the kind of fighting or ten
lansing up or resistance to pain simply makes it worse
and how paradoxically when we turn towards physical pain when we begin to be interested in the detail of it when we begin to do a kind of inquiry about exactly what am i experiencing in this moment
when we begin to discover our ability to describe the pain not in language which is loaded with coaching about how to react but use words like physical discomfort rather than pain we can move to description which helps us discover more
more accurately what's actually going on
and we developed some patients
we begin to see how much were afraid of what might happen
rather than what is happening right now in this moment
and the more we do this cultivation and patients with our own suffering the more we will be able to do that in keeping company with others as well
and out of this practice arises the capacity for compassion
the second kind of patients has to do with what trendy david calls thinking about the dharma
one of the central teachings in the bodhidharma is the description of
the law of causation
that things don't just drop from the sky
remember this story about chicken little
we sometimes think where did this suffering come from it just happened
the dharma teachings suggest that
whatever happens has causes and conditions
another way of talking about the law causation is to also notice that actions have consequences for example
and i know for myself asking myself when i'm in a situation where i have some deep discomfort
or i have some difficult situation or i'm angry with someone or they are angry with me
if i ask myself what are the causes of and conditions that have led to this particular situation just asking myself that question alone begins to open up a landscape in a way it helps me begin to see more clearly what's going on
and i'm much less likely than to rush to blaming and judging and shame

i've noticed that the teachings a dharma teaching about the impermanent nature of everything that whatever arises passes away
has been particularly helpful especially when i'm in the midst of the suffering of some afflicted state of mind or emotion
to remember or at least intellectually remember even this will not stick around
we of course suffer because what we like what we want doesn't stay and what we don't like stays too long
but after a while after we have done meditations on considering arcs in out of our experience this description of the way things are and have come to some certainty about the truth of the teachings on impermanence those teachings can be a sore
source of patients

one of the central teachings in buddhism and the maybe the central teaching in buddhism the teaching which is both challenging and difficult and
primary is the teaching on the emptiness of inherent self existence and the other side of that teaching and other aspect if you will which may be somewhat easier for us to begin to understand is the teaching on interdependent
and in fact if we do meditations on interdependence which many of us do for example before we eat a meal
which we can do whenever we get dressed in the morning and we ask ourselves where did this robe come from
what are all the factors and elements all the beings work and activity and lives that have come forth in the form of kloss and sewing and being taught about how to sew so that i now have this row which i'm wearing
so i can over some period of time begin to have a direct experience of interdependence and again this teaching on the nature of existence
can help me be
more patient when i come up against
the suffering that arises
so often from a version or attachment or possessiveness

do
one of the teachings of buddha is that we all want happiness
i find that i am a little bit more patient with somebody that i'm feeling cranky with or even so called enemy if i can remind myself that even this jerk one's happiness
just like i do
so in the third territory of the cultivation of patients at changi david talks about where he talks about not engaging in retaliation
he puts forth a teaching that i think is quite challenging and wonderful
i always feel a little like a bug it's been pinned to the wall
he suggests that we use our so called enemy as our teacher
because of work course our so called enemy or enemies are the ones who give us the opportunity for cultivating patients
sort of throws them golf got one doesn't and
there's a wonderful story about the great teacher at the great master the great practitioner at tisha a bengali who took buddhism to the high mountains in himalayas to the land of snows who had
people very troublesome
and all of a teacher was particularly troublesome in the way he treated at asia
and all of the other disciples kept saying to artesia oh we must get rid of this person immediately
a teacher's response was
oh please do not say that this man is very kind to me he serves as my object of patients
without him could i ever practice this transcending perfection
the first time i heard this teaching who was in the winter nineteen eighty five eighty six when i went for the first time on a pilgrimage to north india to the places where the historical buddha lived and taught
i didn't really quite know what i was getting into i went with
my friend bob thurman
who had lived and studied and practiced in india often on over twenty years and knew exactly what he was getting me into we went to bodhgaya which is the site of shakyamuni buddha's enlightenment where his holiness the dalai lama was doing teachings
and as a prelude to the big initiation that he was doing he spent a week giving the teachings that i'm referring to hear from shaun teva
there were two hundred thousand people gathered in a very small village with no infrastructure
i mean none
it was in physical terms a trying circumstance and also extraordinary
there were some thirty thousand tibetans who had journeyed from tibet
gotten across the border in whatever way they could just walked out
stood in the back of flatbed trucks for a week in order to get to bodhgaya for these teachings and they were all planning on going back and remember of course it is where people coming from
they are land under the chinese regime where they were suffering extraordinary sufferings imprisonment and torture killing
many many sufferings
it came specifically on this long journey to hear his holiness give this teaching and initiation
and he directed his teaching specifically to those people present
and i remember listening to him say to them i want you to treat the chinese in power in our country
governing where you live
as you are a great teachers for the cultivation of patients
and he went into some great detail
and of course what i found so extraordinary was their readiness to take on that practice their willingness to say yes we understand that this is our opportunity for the cultivation of this great transcending perfection
it had a profound effect on me
if they could take on this practice of letting their enemy be their teacher
perhaps i might consider that as well
again my recommendation is that it would begin it would be useful would be skillful to begin with a lesser and to me
maybe start with a small irritating friend
and work up
you get your muscles in town
i remember one time some of you may remember also a few years ago when the tar tokyo was visiting us and he had a particularly troublesome translator
he was during that particular visit one of the things term for did was to give some teachings on the heart sutra which became forever inaccessible to all of us with very few exceptions because every evening during the lectures he and the translator spent most of their
time talking to each other in tibet in russia would give his teaching and then that the translator would argue with him about something he had been saying so out of an hour of to of teachings we might get five or ten minutes of spoken english which we may or may not have understood well
prior to that our group of us sat down and three week retreat when the same kind of thing was going on
from my standpoint this translator was a giant pain in the neck
because he was the obstacle to are being able to understand the teachings that you can feel were just there on the other side of this thick plate glass window
of course the most important teaching that was going on was term caches relationship with the translator
which i must admit i missed for some time
i then after the three week retreat in the week of teachings here then went for more punishment to hawaii for more of the saying
i got a very long experience of watching turtle goo and his translator do a version of what a tasha was doing with his disciple
i never saw this teacher lose his patience or his temper with this man
i saw him have great concern for his state of mind
concern for the suffering this person must be in
to be caught by his insistence that he knew the truth the true dharma
at some point someone in our retreat
who knew tibetan helped us understand that one of the problems was that room for kept talking about what kinds of practices we should do every day and the translator already had so much more to do than he could do that he was kind of freaked out at the possibility that he might have to do more and so he kept argh
ewing because he didn't want to hear about yet another practice he should be doing
and of course the true teaching was this continual expression of patience of listening
of being sympathetic to this other person what might be going on this person what might be the causes and conditions that lead to this person behaving in the way that he is

so in the process of taking the translator as his teacher
tara appreciate was also demonstrating
the possibilities with the practice of sympathetic understanding
very close integral factor in the cultivation of patients
how often have any of us discovered our patients with another person expanding when we find out what's going on for them
how many times do we feel impatient with someone until one way or another we find out their story
how often does impatience arise because i don't have all the information about what's going on
so this practice of taking my so called enemy asked my teacher gives me the possibility of cultivating patience sympathetic understanding
practicing my ability to not jump to conclusions
noticing when i have some assumptions about what and so which i may or may not have checked out
it's very rich
i remember some years ago a friend of mine was having a very hard time with her husband
when particularly sympathetic with her practice of meditation was i think he felt a little bit like there was a
a lover had come into her life because she kept disappearing he didn't know where upstairs to the attic where she'd made a little meditation room
and i suggested to her that she put his picture on her alter
she said do i have to
when i said well no of course you don't have to i just think it's a good idea
well right
this friend of mine lives in new york and after a month or six weeks she wrote me a letter and she said even without doing anything else just having a picture of my husband on the altar
presented me with the possibility of including his concerns and his fears and my practice
and slowly she said my mind softened
and i was able to be much more patient with his response to my meditation practice and to be more skillful about how i always doing what i was doing so that he could begin to relax and not feel like i would disappear
so out of her patients with the situation that had arisen between them of course came the possibility of working it out
in that process didn't happen very quickly but it did happen

even those we love the most dearly arise even for a moment as a kind of enemy and source of irritation
not doing what we want them to do the source of our unhappiness
so whatever situation or person arises in our lives where we have this kind of response of difficulty
we can see as are a great opportunity
i find that it helps a little too
let ourselves be amused by the kind of vice were willingly putting ourselves into when will you take on this practice because it is a challenge
we're not used to reacting responding to the so called enemy in this way
when we're driving in someone tries to cut in front of us
so often we think i step on the accelerator i'm not gonna let that person get away with that
and so we don't notice what the cost is in terms of our state of mind
we could be a little patient with that person who is in such a hurry that they somehow feel they need to get in front of me
well i really get to my destination that much later if i sleep

i think that
one of the difficulties with the kinds of practices i'm talking about is that it's very easy for us to misunderstand
and to think oh this means i should put up with all suffering
i should just endure with a long face
when i call hair shirt practice
for some of us we think oh i guess i'm going to learn how to be a good doormat
and i don't think that's at all what this tradition is talking about
so i want to reiterate again the practice of remembering chapter six verse ten
why be unhappy about what i can do something about
and why be unhappy about what i cannot do something about
there's one last practice and then i'd like to stop because
this is long enough for any one person to be speaking
that has to do with
the practice practice with
what kind of antidote practice for jeff jealousy and resentment
and that is the practice called rejoicing in the success of others
here's another place where your enemies will be a great help
because it's of course pretty easy isn't it to rejoice in the success of those we love
but what about rejoicing in the success of that jerk that create put for their
someone the other day told me about someone very dear to him
who has a very hard time whenever she thinks somebody is getting away with something
and so she sees the so-called success of others very often as a kind of getting away with something
it isn't fair
very often those kinds of responses come up because we don't see that the actions that the consequences for someone's actions we don't see those consequences we don't realize that sometimes the consequences
of our actions may not arise for a very long time so we get caught
we we get caught by wanting that person to get their do right now when i can see it and enjoy it
this is not wholesome for our own state of mind
and can become a habit can be something we we we get so used to that it becomes the dominant mode and in fact my friend in telling me about this person he loves very much was describing to me someone who's state of mind was dominated by
a sense of
not wanting to let anyone get away with anything

so i have found for myself practicing rejoicing in the success of others even when i have to clench my teeth and go through the motions
very helpful
in the process of doing that practice particularly when i have some aversion to joining at some resistance to doing it helps may say where i'm holding on to some negative state of mind
and if i'm patient i will in time loosen my grip on whatever that afflicted state of mind is that i've been holding onto
here's one last letter in this collection if i can find it quick quickly i'd like to close with it because it sir

guess i'd like to close with this passage
when mr sean was removed this is after thirty five years and magazine when mr sean was removed by the new yorkers than fairly new owner he was hurt and hurt badly
but in his usual reasonable manner he seemed to be trying to understand the owners action
as time went on he would say he was trying not to feel bitter bitterness serves no purpose and it corrodes the soul he would often say
once he gave me a sheet of paper on which he had just typed a few sentences i read the following i have never experienced or even permitted myself to contemplate a vindictive action i would rather carry around pain
aim or disappointment or even the residue of bitterness for the balance of my life than to entertain a moment's vengeful thought
this remains but that little is far too much for me
the truth is i cannot bear it
if i cannot love my enemies i cannot breathe
so these teachings on the cultivation of patients can help us come to say come to understand
what the afflicted states of mind are costing us

the answer which the teaching brings his exhortation to watch with patient fortitude the way in which the process of undergoing experience actually takes place
for through the practice of careful observation we may come to see what is actually going on
and based upon that understanding began to find a way beyond the round of experience to a mode of living within our experience that produces enduring happiness

so
please explore
examine be curious about allow
the possibility of the cultivation of patience
and the subsequent arising of joy and happiness
i'd like to close this morning and with a vs dedication in particular my practice these days has been to dedicate the energy v virtue and merit that arises from whatever practices i'm do
doing to the well-being of a baby who was born a week ago we can a half ago
during the birth process he did not have any oxygen for seven minutes so he is very badly damaged and for that baby and his mother and father it is a time of great travail
his mother lived and practiced here for some time and is very dear to many of us in so we feel the suffering of these three beings quite deeply and i would like to dedicate our practices this morning to the well-being of these three beings
things in particular but also to all beings including ourselves
have a virtue and merit of our practices laid all beings to have happiness and the causes of happiness
to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering
to know that sacred happiness which is devoid of suffering
to cultivate equanimity without too much aversion or too much attachment
and to live believing in the equality of all that lives