This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to those of you in the room. And welcome to everyone out in Zoom land. I can't see you. but I can feel you. My name is Gengyoko Rinsho Tim Wicks, and how's the sound, okay? Yeah, good. I currently serve City Center, which is the building that you're in, as Tanto, and Tanto means head of practice. I've just finished my first month in the job.

[01:01]

Before I begin, I would like to thank Abiding Abbot Mako Vocal, who is now down at Tassajara, which is our mountain monastery, looking after the monks there and to the place. I'd like to thank Central Abbot David Zimmerman and Ryushinpo Haloroshi, who's leading the practice period that we're sort of on the final stretch of. We're going to start our final seshin, which is a period of intense meditation for a week, next weekend. So the title of this talk is Virya, or Energy. And in our practice period that Paul is leading, Paul is teaching the Genjo Koan, which is a seminal work of Ehei Dogen, who was our 13th century founder in Japan.

[02:16]

The Genjo Koan, along with the Paramitas in our type of Buddhism that we practice here, Mahayana Buddhism, There are six paramitas or perfections. Paramita translates usually as perfection. They're trainings. I prefer the word trainings. There's six trainings, and they are generosity is the first one, and morality, patience, energy, which is the one that I'm going to talk about today, concentration, and wisdom. And I want to focus on energy, the training of energy, because it's my favorite, and we're not supposed to have favorites, preferences. It just causes more suffering, and I can verify that. I have lots of suffering because of my preferences, but I do have a preference when it comes to the paramitas.

[03:19]

And I really like energy, partly because it's been very mysterious to me. But also, it's one of the favorites of my teacher, who I've neglected to thank, Rinso Ed Satterson, for his patience and kindness and tolerance of being my teacher. So virya, or energy, is the middle one. It comes in the middle. You've got generosity and morality and patience are the first three. And then energy is the third one. And it's sometimes taught that generosity, morality, and patience are easier for people who are kind of newer to practice. And the last three are for really more advanced practitioners. I don't know if that's true, but it's sometimes taught that way. And certainly energy, virya, is a subtle practice because you're dealing with something that is not seen.

[04:27]

And it's a very internal experience. Actually, I guess really all of them are. Paul was pointing out that recently, in recent years, virya has been translated as enthusiasm or enthusiastic practice or joyful efforts. And this, of course, you know, is to encourage those of us who come to practice with deep suffering. But there's a shadow side to the perfection of energy. which for me has been very fruitful in investigating and which I think is very important to take part in. And I'll speak more about that in a minute. So traditionally, Buddhism focuses on the hindrances or the obstacles to awakening. And in dealing with the hindrances, The Paramitas, and specifically Virya, when it's taught, talks about the opposites and cultivating the opposites of the hindrances.

[05:35]

And Shantideva, who's the 8th century Indian monk, most known for his work called The Way of the Bodhisattva, writes in the book that we think he wrote afterwards, after the... the way of the Bodhisattva, the Bodhikaryavatara. He writes when, so this is his book on the Paramitas, and he, I've written it down right here, he translates virya as vigor. And I quote, what is vigor, he asks, the endeavor to do what is skillful. What is its antithesis called? Sloth. clinging to what is vile, despondency, and self-contempt. Sloth comes from idleness, sleep, the longing to rely on others, and apathy for the suffering of the world.

[06:38]

So here, Shantideva ties the perfection of energy into skillful means, which is what we as Buddhists are always doing, because... That's the way that the bodhisattva lives in the world, meeting the conditions of life in a skillful way, hopefully. And this is the reason for the paramitas in the first place. These are trainings in how to end suffering for the self and for others. And Shantideva provides dramatic direction for how to counter these hindrances in developing skillful means of vigor when he says... The capacity for desire, perseverance, delight, and letting go leads to the fulfillment of the needs of living beings. Out of the fear of suffering and while meditating on the praises, one should create desire. Uprooting the opposite in this way, one should endeavor to increase one's exertion through the capacities of desire,

[07:50]

pride, delight, giving up, dedication and control. And if that's not dramatic enough for you, he talks about addiction here, encouraging it. One should be addicted solely to the task that one is undertaking. One should become intoxicated by that task, insatiable, like someone hankering for the pleasure and the fruit of love play. So these are dramatic illustrations of what it is that needs to be undertaken in the perfection of vigor and dramatic mechanisms for perfecting the discipline of energy. We read, of course, especially in early Buddhist canon, about a desire being at the root of clinging and that... that which causes our suffering in the first place. But I love Buddhism because you can find contradictions all over the place.

[08:52]

And even on the same page, or in this case, the same sentence, once again, the capacity for desire, perseverance, delight, and letting go leads to the fulfillment of the needs of living beings. So he's asking us to... Cultivate something which we know causes us problems, desire. Delight, which is a little bit questionable in some of the early Buddhist writings. And very importantly, letting go. So we have to both cultivate desire and let go, all in the same sentence right there. I just love it. So this leads to a passionate engagement with the training of energy required by a bodhisattva and the liberation of suffering. This may be helpful in building a conventional strength of energy, something akin to the sort of physical or athletic energy, which we do want to do, but energy is much broader than just this conventional countering of sloth.

[10:03]

And Shantideva gets close to this when he mentions despondency and self-contempt. which in our psychological age we know more about as depression and low self-esteem, something that I find so many people come to Zen practice as a main source of their suffering. And these, of course, are internal energies themselves, which have a massive effect on our external actions. So in the 1990s, scientists began to articulate something that they were beginning to call dark energy.

[11:10]

And more is unknown than is known about dark energy in Zen. We practice don't know minds, so we at least try anyway to become comfortable around not knowing. In fact, that's a place for us to train our energy in the area of not knowing. Normally, not knowing can feel unsteady. We want to know. We think that knowing provides stability because everything changes. because we understand that everything changes, there really is no real stability. And so we try to develop a curiosity around not knowing to meet the world as it arrives at us. Even though we don't know much about dark energy, we know that it is an activation of what was once just referred to as space. I used to think of outer space, where spaceships were,

[12:15]

as this sort of dead place that was probably kind of cold. But what the theory of dark energy, in what little we know about it anyway, gets across to me, is that it's an activation of that previously sort of dormant, vast space, and that it's actually energy. And so space was once very mysterious, now has got this very interesting energy about it. So in our Zen practice, our central activity, or you might say non-activity, is Zazen, where we face the wall. And we face the wall in part because Bodhidharma, our founder in China, faced the wall for nine famous years. But also, that's not the only reason we do it.

[13:19]

There's fewer distractions if you turn and face the wall when you're sitting. But we're not ignoring what's behind us. Over time, we begin to sharpen our awareness of the rest of the room. We're fine-tuning our consciousness of the other people we're sitting with. Someone may be slightly agitated. Crying is happening for someone. There's an energy that we pick up on that is mostly unseen, an energy Zazen trains us to sharpen our awareness of. There's an energy between us that comes from inside us, but it doesn't stop at our bodies. It penetrates us and reverberates back out into mingling with the energy of others. And... This is reflected to some extent in the metaphor from the Avatamsaka Sutra that Reverend Greg Fane, who spoke a week ago, referred to when he was giving a really glowing review to Reverend Lian Schutt's book on the Dharma of Anti-Racism.

[14:36]

And this is a very important book that I hope to work with with Leanne Schutt and will encourage others to in the coming months. But in the book, Reverend Leanne refers to Indra's net. And Indra's net is a net that instead of knots attaching all the little strings and ropes, it has jewels. And these jewels are us as individuals and And we reflect all the other jewels throughout space and time. And Reverend Lianne speaks about how in our self-centered individualistic culture, we focus on the jewels. But it's actually the space in between the jewels that needs to be cared for. Our energy doesn't begin and end inside our bodies.

[15:42]

It is passed through space and it has an effect on the energy outside of us and on the energy of others. And here, in this practice of anti-racism, we take responsibility for our conditioning. We become conscious of the causes and conditions and the effects of our internal energy and begin the process of transforming that energy and therefore transforming how it is. that it affects others. It's this transformation of energy by becoming conscious of the many states that energy has, having fine-tuned our perception that is the project of Virya Paramita. And a very important tool in this fine-tuning is called bodhicitta.

[16:51]

Bodhicitta simply means the thought of enlightenment. And with the thought of enlightenment, just cultivating the possibility of enlightenment, comes faith and trust. In our lives today, we're conscious of many of the mistakes that have been made in the past. We're aware of slavery and our connection to it, the atrocities of war, just to name two. We observe violence of all kinds on a daily basis. We're only too aware of what Buddhism tells us, that everything changes. And... This can, like I've mentioned already, lend us a sense of instability. Bodhicitta provides courage within that instability. And the trust and faith that come from bodhicitta are grounded in courage.

[17:58]

And courage, practiced by one, can provide trust and stability in another. Finally, with bodhicitta, we understand this thought of enlightenment, that we are connected to all things throughout space and time. So my first practice was with a Vipassana teacher who was trained in Theravadan Buddhism. And Theravadan means the way of the elders. And it's thought, especially by Theravadans, to be the original Buddhism. Some historians have argued and tried to prove that actually Mahayana Buddhism was the first Buddhism, but I'm not going to get into all of this right now. That'll be something for another day. And when I was studying with this teacher, Theravadans I heard said that enlightenment was for sentient beings.

[19:07]

And we asked... My teacher, well, how small do you go? Because there's some microorganisms that you could sort of argue maybe are sentient, if you watch them being sentient in the world. How small do you go? And he asked one of his teachers, who said that sentient beings, for Theravadans, are determined by an organism that has a mother and a face. So there's self-dividing organisms that don't have mothers, so they're not included. There's organisms that I don't remember seeing. I'm sure I would have remembered them because they sound fascinating, who are so small they don't have faces. Anyway, this seemed very arbitrary to me, but at least was an attempt to define who is sentient and who is not sentient. But it was about the time I was coming here to city center and didn't really like all the bowing and stuff and all the robes and bells.

[20:17]

But I became committed to Mahayana Buddhism because it includes everything in awakening. You don't have to have a mother. You don't even have to have a face. You're included in awakening. And it's not just other beings. It's all phenomena throughout space and time. which includes rocks and air and space. In Zen, we try to care for everything that is in front of us, or at least that's what the training is. Watching me, I was raised by barbarians, and so I'm learning, but I'm still a ways to care for everything that's in front of me, but I'm trying to. I'm moving in that direction. We bow to our cushions. And we try to handle everything carefully. Because we're reminding ourselves that we're connected to all things. My energy does not end inside my body.

[21:23]

When I've picked up something and it's moving through space, the energy passes between us. We know now that everything is moving through space and time. Scientifically, we know this. Even rocks are made of atoms, and atoms are made of neutrons, protons, electrons, energy in physics. Energy is the essential element of all things, including, it appears, dark energy itself. Form and matter are energy. Energy as movement is is what constitutes all things. Modern physics has recognized nuclear energy, gravitational energy, chemical energy, static energy, elastic energy, just to name a few. The universe itself started from a sudden expansion of energy in the Big Bang.

[22:29]

Buddhism posits that all things inter-are. Nothing is fully independent from anything else. That energy surges through all phenomena, giving rise to things, bringing them into existence. They come into being and are transformed into something else. So, I want to end with... very simple practice. I have heard that Suzuki Roshi once said, just to be alive is enough. As bodhisattvas in training, we never lose contact with suffering. It's too ubiquitous.

[23:32]

But the human heart which beats while we're alive is vast. It can hold a lot of suffering. And practicing bodhicitta, which is profound gratitude, we fear how vast existence is. Just to be alive is an astonishing and inspiring experience in the vastness of the heart-mind because Eastern physiognomy doesn't separate the two like we do in the West. It's possible that with practice and the support of a community, it's best not to do this on your own, to hold both profound suffering and profound gratitude at the same time. Thank you all very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge.

[24:37]

And this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[24:56]

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