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. Morning, everybody. I'm going to gallery view so I can see you all. Some of you. Some familiar faces. who I have not seen before, welcome. Can you all hear me? Thank you. I'm just going through the five pages of participants. It's a different way of looking through the room, which we can't share at this point.

[01:02]

with our bodies. We are all very individual ways, all and everyone affected by what is going on in this world. these days. And we also all know that it's going to last for some time. And so I want to start with a poem by Pablo Neruda today, and it's called Keeping Quiet. But before we do that, I would like to invite you to really listen to your body and sit in a way that you feel the most supported so that you don't have to strain your body, that you can just listen with your whole body without having it work.

[02:23]

And while this is going on, just shift and do whatever your body... tells you to do, get the cushion, another pillow, or move, or feel free to do that. That's one of the advantages to be not all in one room physically. We don't disturb each other, we can move. Keeping quiet by Pablo Neruda. Now, now, oh, excuse me. my spouse interesting my spouse Marsha is clearing her voice helping me she's sitting here being my only physical audience thank you now

[03:31]

Now we will... I mute myself for a moment. Let's try again. Now we will count to 12. and we will all keep still. For once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language. Let's stop for one second and not move our arms so much. It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines. We would all be together in a sudden, Strangeness. Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales.

[04:38]

And the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands. Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victory with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing. What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. Life is what it is about. I want no truck with death. If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.

[05:48]

Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive. Now I'll count up to 12 and you keep quiet and I will go. This teaching aims to relieve suffering. And it aims to relieve the suffering we create.

[06:53]

It can't relieve the suffering that comes with living a life, with being born, breaking a leg, losing a friend or a partner or anybody. and getting old if we don't die early and eventually die. These are facts we cannot change. These come with being alive in this world. But what we are facing today, the inequality, inequity, Injustice, the threat from the coronavirus pandemic, and the climate, they are consequences of human actions.

[07:58]

And they're all interconnected. They're not independent events. And that is the kind of suffering Buddhism talks about that we can alleviate, we can free ourselves from, we can be free from, but we can only be free from together with everybody else's freedom. We can't be individually free from it. Because we are intricately and inseparably interconnected with every individual. being on this planet. With every human being, with every plant, with every animal, with the Earth, the planet, the stars, the lakes, the mountains, the rivers. With everything. And Reb Anderson used to say years ago in a lecture, you,

[09:08]

You are 100% responsible for everything that's going on in this world. And we didn't have a video camera who captures the reactions of the people, and he said that it was quiet for a while. And I could see my mind spinning, well, no, that can't be. How could I be? And so on. And then he said, and so... is everyone in this world. Every one of us is 100% responsible. So, what does Buddhism offer us to deal with that, to deal with that responsibility to take it on, to understand it, to deal with all the suffering that is now so tangible and visible.

[10:22]

We have more time to see it, feel it, wonder about it, because our ways of moving about, as Neruda says, moving our arms about and moving everything forward is limited by thinking, do I need to leave the house? Am I allowed to leave the house? If you live in congregate living situation, you have to not only look out for your own, You have to look out for the well-being of everyone in your community. And we all live in congregate living on this planet. So, you know, you can say, well, a sangha or an eldest nursing home needs that more.

[11:28]

But we all live in congregate living on this planet. So we all have the same responsibility that when we go out, How we behave, whether we wear a mask, whether we hold physical distance affects everybody. And it's our 100% responsibility. Churgyan Trungpa in his book, Training the Mind, which is an instruction in Tibetan instruction in essentially cultivating a selfless attitude and a selfless mind. He says, in the introduction, the basic Mahayana vision is to work for the benefit of others and create a situation that will benefit others.

[12:29]

Therefore, you take the attitude... that you are willing to dedicate yourself to others. When you take that attitude, you begin to realize that others are more important than yourself. So some of us who have children experience that attitude. That suddenly there is this baby and you feel absolutely responsible for its well-being and its well-being becomes the center of your life. And that doesn't only happen to people who have children. It's just with children, it often comes just with it, with the baby and not for every mother or father either. And for some others who don't have children, it comes some other way.

[13:33]

It's a human capacity that is independent of circumstances. So we don't need children. You don't need any particular circumstances to develop or have that attitude and realization. Then he goes on, because of that vision of Mahayana, because you adopt that attitude and because you actually find that others are more important. With all three of those together, you develop the Mahayana practice of developing and training the mind and of developing your compassionate heart. Buddhism also talks about reality in terms of like two inseparable parts to reality.

[14:53]

And one is that there is no inherent independent existence, that everything, and that's called often emptiness, that there is no, it's empty of inherent separate self. And the other reality, which is not a separate reality, is that we, as having a body, live in a reality where there are phenomena. There are trees, there are people, there are animals, there are plants, which we... have conventionally named as other people and given them names, and it appears to our senses as existing entities. But they are completely interdependent, and they can only be interdependent because there is no inherently separate self.

[16:03]

If there was an inherently fixed separate self, a baby would not be able to grow. It couldn't develop. It would be fixed. So everything continues to change. And that is hard for us humans to fully see and fully understand. integrate in our ways of acting and thinking and responding. Because we have a sense. I'm an individual. I know myself. But if I look at pictures, how I looked when I was 20 or 30 or 50 years younger, I looked quite different. I see friends and they, wow, they've gotten old. And then I think, what do they see when they see me?

[17:07]

So we get the delusion of having a very individual, fixed self. And so we also see others as fixed entities. As humans, You know, Buddhism also says to be born as a human is an incredibly rare and auspicious gift. Because I think only we humans can stand in the crosshair of, you could say, ultimate reality of emptiness and conventional reality or phenomenal reality. That's, I think, we human... have the capacity with our minds to be in the middle of both of them and hold the view of both of them.

[18:10]

So it doesn't mean because there's no independent existence that is fixed, or nothing is fixed, nothing matters, that would be nihilism, or because there is... If there is emptiness, then conventional reality I can dispense of its rules and needs. Excuse me, I'm going to turn off the sound for a moment. We have to take care of both realities. And that takes practice. takes consideration, takes time to inquire and explore what that means, and how to manifest that understanding and continue to manifest that understanding.

[19:16]

So there are some practices that Buddhism recommends that can help us. Just very practical actually. So for example, no blame. So in this situation with the climate change, with inequity, economic inequity, with racial injustice, with pandemic. Our minds want to have a solution. And the solution is either yes or no, or good or bad. And there are no fixed solutions. There are only... ways of what helps.

[20:26]

So what helps the situation to get better? It's not, there's no end stage. And that was so beautiful in Congressman John Lewis's last words he wrote, wanted to be read after he was died. He says, democracy is not It is an act. It is actions. It's not the state. We get to being democratic and then it's done. It's never done. And Gil Fransdale once said, The Buddhist practice is about helping things not to get worse.

[21:26]

Which then we have to actually study them. How are they exactly? And what's helping them not to get worse? And if we do that, we might find out how we can help them get a little bit better. So no blame. And I want to read what Pema Chodron says. She quotes one of her students, Jarvis Masters, who is at San Quentin on death row since how many years? Since he was a very young man. Since he was a very young man. So decades. Decades. And he wrote the book called Finding Freedom. So she quotes. And in that chapter, in that book, there's a chapter called Angry Faces. Jarvis has his TV on in his cell, but he doesn't have the sound on because he's using the light of the TV to read.

[22:32]

And every once in a while, he looks up at the screen, then yells to people down the cell block to ask what's happening. The first time, someone yells back. It's the Ku Klux Klan, Jarvis, and they're all yelling and complaining about how it's the blacks and the Jews who are responsible for all these problems. About half an hour later, he yells again. Hey, what's happening now? And a voice calls back. That's the Greenpeace, folks. They're demonstrating about the fact that the rivers are being polluted and the trees are being cut down and the animals are being hurt and our earth is being destroyed. Sometime later, he calls out the game. Now what's going on? And someone says, oh, Jarvis, that's the U.S. Senate. And that guy who's up there now talking, he's blaming the other guys, the other side.

[23:39]

the other political party, for all the financial difficulty this country is in. Jarvis starts laughing and he calls down. I've learned something here tonight. Sometimes they're wearing Klan outfits, sometimes they're wearing Greenpeace outfits, and sometimes they're wearing suits and ties. but they all have the same angry faces. So no blame, not blaming. It's a distraction. It's creating more division. And it's not helping the situation. The other thing Buddhism talks about and the practice is about, you know, in our tradition, the Soto Zen tradition, and in many of these traditions, we have meditation practice.

[25:16]

That is the practice of sitting still with just your life or in the midst of just this body, this life, this moment. And the basic instruction is not to grasp anything that is appearing in your realm of experience. Not grasping thoughts, not spinning stories, not grasping feelings, digging in with them, spinning stories around them, not grasping sounds, just let everything be as it arises. And when we practice that, when we become more adept at just being present with what is arising in whichever way it is arising, we can start seeing that it arises.

[26:31]

and it disappears, is replaced by something else. That is also creating us our capacity or enhancing our capacity to be patient, which is space giving, which is the capacity to not immediately move when something is uncomfortable. When the intensity of a feeling is uncomfortable or the quality of a sound is uncomfortable or, you know, when I became, I was the Eno at Tassahara and on my first day at Tassahara in the winter is very cold and that time we didn't have heating in the Zendo. After Zazen, the first morning as Eno, I stood there while everybody was filing out. And some people waited to leave and then came to me.

[27:36]

And on one side, somebody came and said, would you please make us close the windows? I'm freezing cold. And the next person who came to my other ear said, I'm too hot. Can we keep the windows open longer? I had stereo input from two very different experiences of people. all of us immediately would like to change that. We would either like to close the windows or to open the windows. Which is keeping us in a very small place where we always have to immediately look for our own comfort and don't understand that When it's cold, it's just cold. And when it's hot, it's just hot. We live in such... It was also interesting because all the little housing places we had at Tassavara at that time when I started going in 88, and it was even more rugged before then.

[28:52]

So I, you know, I was already in a more comfortable basically comfortable time at Tassajara. We had absolutely no heating. And what was interesting too, we had one stove in the dining room, and that was the only place where there was heat. So, and the hot springs, so bathhouse, get the hot, go in the plunge and heat up, but only during, I think, once a day. So what was interesting to realize is that the body has the capacity to adapt to that, which we have untrained our body because we have heated rooms outside. It's freezing. We're in heated rooms. Then we go out and then go, we shiver. Our body have regulation mechanisms that, like animals, that adapt to the circumstances that we have untrained ourselves.

[29:57]

So meditation, in some ways, is helping us by the instruction to just abide within the experience that's arising. Relax in the experience that's arising. To learn that we haven't. much more bandwidth than we think. And that what we think we can't stand actually becomes something quite irrelevant because the more important things are not covered up by just running around maintaining creature comfort. And when we can stay still, it's like what Neruda says in his poem, we might walk together and might find out things that we can't find out as long as we move about the whole time.

[31:18]

The other thing that Buddhism talks about and that I think really goes back to we are all 100% responsible, each single one of us, for what's going on and how the world is today, to the degree we can see it, is that nothing is lost in the universe and that there is also the law of cause and effect. And that is an incredible empowerment that Buddhism kind of points to, that in the morning, before service, we usually do the chant of repentance, and we say, all my ancient twisted karma or all my ancient twisted actions of body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. A little more elaborate, the chant.

[32:27]

But our thoughts have an impact on the world. Their energy, their energy that spreads out to the universe. What we say, our words, are energy beings that spread unhinged to the whole universe. Our actions create energy fields that permeate the whole universe. So Dogen says, I can't remember in which classical, he says, our actions affect the whole earth and the entire sky. Not perceived by ourselves, it is so. It's also paraphrased. And when we start understanding that, We also have an antidote to being or maybe feeling completely overwhelmed by the immense suffering that is so tangible and visible.

[33:40]

It has always been in the world, but we get a more tangible and more perceivable view and feeling for it in this time, which I think is a big gift. that we can see because it's always been like that. We didn't have a better time before. We maybe had, but innumerable people didn't. So we get to really, it gets closer to us and we get to see it. And to understand that if we can't leave the house, if we don't see how we can directly impact something, We can do practices of loving kindness, sending out wishes to all beings. We can look, is there a small thing we can do to not make the climate crisis more strong?

[34:42]

How do we use energy? How do we use plastic? They're small things and they have a big effect. So not to think, oh, because it's so small, it doesn't count. It counts, it's 100% impact of the smallest thing. And so I want to also say, you know, we, I think most of us probably, or a lot of us, have been really touched and are touched and impressed by the life and how his life manifested of Congressman John Lewis, how to the last moment of his life he was committed to working peacefully

[35:53]

for the benefit of all beings. Not just the black people, for all beings. But he came from his very specific place. And I think that's the other thing. It's not because we're all one in emptiness or interconnectedness. We are also completely 100% individuals. And no other person can take your step and make your decision take a breath for you. They're both true at the same time. So he came from his very individual place, but saw how connected it was to human dignity throughout the planet. Even though it had a particular shape, a particular form of suffering in this society, he also didn't lose sight, or in his vision, he saw That it's human dignity, not just dignity for single groups, but general human dignity that is at stake and that is harmed by harming individual entities.

[37:11]

We are all harmed. Whether we know it or not, whether we live in a protected environment where we don't see and feel the harm, we are... So he says, and you've probably all heard it and read it, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life, you inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great American story. When you used your power to make a difference in our society, millions of people, motivated simply by human compassion, laid down the burdens of division. Around the country and the world, you set aside race, class, age, language, and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.

[38:15]

That's why I had to visit Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that after many years of silent witness, the truth is still marching on. If we are to survive, so that's further down, As one unified nation, he says, nation, and I would like to say, if we are to survive as one unified world, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that could kill, rob, oppress, exploit humans, animals, nature, the planet. So these are my words. He said, but so readily takes root in our hearts that could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best.

[39:27]

But I think it's whatever we rob, kill, oppress, exploit is what we have to look at. And for that being still, not moving, being quiet, sitting still, whether it be Zazen or by a tree or in your favorite chair is so helpful to start seeing what is it that makes me want to hit back, to oppress, to squash because I feel slighted or hurt and to not go there, to stay with the feeling and not with what it compels me to immediately do, to alleviate the discomfort. And then he says, and I think that's really what we have to do also as Buddhists.

[40:32]

We can't just sit around. I mean, there are very few people who are full monks and nuns that their job is to meditate for the whole world, and that's all they do. And all others of us, most of us, we meditate, and then we have, we leave the cushion, And are we able to bring what we cultivated in the quiet meditation into our everyday activities? Tending to the kids, to the gardens, to the dogs, to work. But we have to have a moral obligation to stand up, speak up, and speak out. And each generation, he says, and I would say also each person, must do its part to help build what we call the beloved community, a nation and a world society at peace with itself.

[41:44]

And it can only be at peace with itself if it's at peace with everything that it comprises. People, animals. nature, the universe. So, it's coming to a close for today. But what I would like to send you off with is really to understand that what you think, what we think, what I think, What I run in my head affects the entire world and the entire sky. What I say affects the whole universe. What I do, actions with my body, affects the entire universe.

[42:53]

So we all have it in our hands. To be the change we want to see in the world to speak with Gandhi. And that that power is wherever you are is with you. And it's big power that nobody can take from you. And that's our responsibility. That is the future. With these things we create our future. own future and the future for all of us. And we always have the opportunity. It's not like, oh, I missed this one or the next one. Dharma gates are boundless. Every moment is the next opportunity to bring your intention to it, to stop revengeful thinking or blaming or falling into despair.

[43:55]

to just go to your intention. Nothing is lost and there's always a next opportunity. So don't think, oh, I missed it, now I should give up. And I'll end with Neruda's poem again one more time. Keeping quiet. Now we will count to 12 and we will all keep still. For once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language. Let's stop for one second and not move our arms so much. It would be an exotic moment. Without rush, without engines, we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.

[45:05]

Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales, and the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands. Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, Wars with fire, victory with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade doing nothing. What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. Life is what it is about. I want no truck with death. If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.

[46:19]

Perhaps the earth can teach us as we when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive. Now I'll count up to 12 and you keep quiet and I will go. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[47:07]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_98.12