This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. What a full house today. Welcome, everybody. How many people are here for the first time? Great. Well, welcome. Welcome. And how many people are relatively new to practice, like let's say in the first year or so? Good. Well, welcome to all of you as well. This temple is called Beginner's Mind, so you have what we want. So keep coming around and staying here and helping us. My name is Cynthia Kier, and I'm a Zen priest and came through those very front doors myself. over a quarter of a century ago and have, to my good fortune, more or less been continuing to come through those doors.

[01:02]

And my deepest wish for everybody is that you find as much richness and wholehearted path to wholehearted living as I have been able to find. I want to take a moment to thank the Tonto for inviting me. I appreciate it so much, Rosalie. And, you know, I'm part of a group, a large affinity group called the Meditation in Recovery group that has a large practice here. We meet every Monday night in this room, and we've been doing so for a long time, over 13 years or something like that. And at the end of the evening, we always say... we really want to express our deepest gratitude to Zen Center for allowing us to have this room without asking for any rent or anything of us for that long of a period of time. And the unfortunate thing is that very few people from Zen Center are there on Monday nights.

[02:08]

So on behalf of the Meditation and Recovery Group, I want to personally say to all of the people who are residents here as well as the staff that make it possible, Thank you very much to Zen Center for supporting the Meditation and Recovery Group. We deeply appreciate it. So I have been hanging out with some good Dharma friends for a handful of weeks now in what is, for monks in the world, an intensive practice period. And during this period of time, we've had weekly classes and we've, you know, tried to amp our sitting and we've tried to do some mindful eating. And mostly what we've done is we've tried to explore this theme of wholehearted living. And the study, the teachings that we have been using in order to explore this have been the Eightfold Noble Path. So, you know, let's start with wholehearted living.

[03:14]

How many people here think that you're living your life wholeheartedly, as wholeheartedly as you'd like? Yeah. Okay, good. Good. All right. Put your hands up higher. We want to hang out with you and learn. Okay. Therein lies the rub, right? We want to live wholeheartedly. We want to fully, fully occupy the moments of our lives, and yet it's hard. It's hard for all kinds of reasons. You know, the definition of wholehearted that I came across that I liked so much was it is free from reserve or hesitation. Imagine living your life free from reserve and with confidence. you know, without any kind of hesitation. Sometimes I experience my life and my energy in a very staccato fashion, right, in terms of my engagement with life. What would this be like to just have a nice continuous flow? So I think that some of the problems around, that challenge the majority of us,

[04:21]

in this room and that we were looking at during this study time in terms of wholehearted living is that it is so easy for us to have our direct experience hijacked, right? It's just, it happens in a nanosecond and we don't even realize, oh my God, you know, it's like you drive across town, you start off at your house, you wind up at your destination, you don't remember any of the ride. Or you have a meal. and you order something in a restaurant, and then you look down and the plate is empty, and you don't remember deeply tasting it. So this is, I think, what the common experience is for many of us. And what intervenes that we can't have this direct access of our own lives and this direct experience? Well, a major factor is that, you know, many of us are just tyrannized by our habit energy. our habit energy, whether it is from the heart or whether it's from the head.

[05:24]

We just have this kind of rote way of being in the world in which part of it is that we set it up that way in order for things to have a feeling of safety for us, perhaps. But we very easily fall into patterns. Some of them might be positive, some of them might be negative, but there then becomes a roteness to life that doesn't allow us to access the freshness and the authenticity that exists as a potential in every single moment of our lives. And so, therefore, there's usually kind of a dull quality to it. The other element of this is that, you know, I don't want to put my problems on somebody else, but we do live in this society that is very, very motivated by speed, by acquisition, by fragmentation, right? And it's not one that necessarily encourages us to have whole experiences or genuine moments, you know, just the speed at which technology runs.

[06:30]

I know I work, and my daily life is a lot like, you know, racquetball or ping pong. It's this email, it's this phone call, it's this project, it's then trying to get other elements of my life, you know, done, if you will, lived, and hence there's a feeling of fragmentation. Some of you have this experience and feeling as well? Yeah. Okay. All right. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't alone here. And so that's kind of the sense, the sentiment, the feeling quality that we're left with with our lives. But... We then try to rectify the situation by either continuing to stay in our ignorance, and I mean that in the most positive way that we can talk about ignorance, which is to say not in a judgmental way, but we're just not aware, right? We're just living in darkness, not awake to both what our habit energies are as well as what the potential is.

[07:34]

And so how we tend to live our lives, I think, is kind of on the surface of it, trying to embody lots of different strategies. I'll get a new job. I'll get a new partner. I'll lose weight. I'll go to the gym. I'll get a new car. I'll go on a vacation. I'll move into Zen Center. You know, they're all... I'll become a Zen priest. Anything can be a strategy, right? Absolutely anything can be a strategy. So what our practice allows us to do, the invitation of our practice is to actually turn toward our suffering, our state of being, the sense of chronic dissatisfaction, to turn toward it and to look at it deeply and to try to penetrate that suffering and transform it so that we can actually reacquire what we already have, which is our true self and our true lives. So how we have gone about this process is that we have been looking at the Four Noble Truths, specifically the Eightfold Path.

[08:43]

So how many people are not familiar with the Four Noble Truths? Okay, I'll give a quick rundown. So... You know, the first thing I want to say is that this is the first talk that the Buddha gave, and it's also the last talk that the Buddha gave. So I think it must have held some importance in his mind. The first truth is that there is suffering. I'm glad you're all sitting down, right? Otherwise that would have been a newsflash. The second is that there are causes of suffering. And sometimes these causes are so bold and so prominent. And now I'm speaking from my perspective in terms of meditation and recovery. When you are an active addict without the benefit of recovery, usually the consequences of your suffering and your addiction are undeniable. They're really pretty undeniable. I personally think that's a benefit, but not everyone would agree with me. So to actually see that there are causes, and these causes usually revolve around our craving, our constant thirst, or the fact that in the face of certain dharma, we just can't align ourselves with the truth of it, be that impermanence, be that no self, be that even suffering.

[10:10]

it's actually very helpful to look at our suffering and to acknowledge it as a starting place with truthfulness and then start to move through it. And then the third noble truth is if Zen Buddhism had a Mormon tabernacle choir, this would be the moment at which the sound of song would come up and it would be, Bodhisattva, hallelujah. There is cessation to suffering. That is the really good news of Buddhist practice. And, you know, not unlike what we experience, those of us who are in recovery, when we can't see the changes that come about as a result of new behaviors, but other people, we can see it in other people, or other people reflect it back to us. A very similar dynamic happens in practice, where we can't always see and feel these changes that are going on, but nonetheless, we can see them in our fellow Sangha mates, and we can look into mirrors that our Sangha mates hold up to us.

[11:13]

and see that we are changing in ways that are beneficial. And then the fourth noble truth is really what my Dharma friends and I concentrated on, which was looking at the Eightfold Noble Path. The Buddha said a couple of things about this Eightfold Noble Path. He said it was the way to really realizing the middle way. So for most of you, you recall that the Buddha actually, at least the mythology of the Buddha's life is that he was born into a royal family, and his father wanted to protect him from any suffering whatsoever. And he had a whiff of suffering, and he decided he wanted to explore it, and he also wanted to pursue an authentic life. And so he jumped the palace walls, in pursuit of trying to find out what is the meaning of suffering, what is the meaning of life. Most of us, on the other hand, are standing on the outside of the palace, wanting to jump the wall into it, right, with all of our strategies.

[12:19]

So the Buddha offers us a counterintuitive type of model for living. And so he proceeded to spend the next six to eight years engaged in a lot of practices that were designed to bring about this discovery of the truth, including many that were very detrimental to the body, the practices of extreme asceticism. And ultimately when he woke up, what he woke up to was the fact that neither extreme is... really the way to go. Living in the palace with having complete material life joy and satisfaction is not the way to go. You know, eating one grain of rice is not sustainable and not the way to go. And so this is where he started to talk about the truth of the middle way. And that set of dualism... That dualistic idea of the palace and complete asceticism is something that he applied to absolutely everything. And this is what the middle way ultimately leads us to, and this is what the practice of the Eightfold Noble Path leads us to, which is to an understanding that we live, I think it might be human nature, we are prone to dualistic thinking.

[13:34]

Right, wrong, black, white, good, bad. She's giving a good talk. It's really boring. Whatever it is. This is how we live. I asked a group I was with last night to just think about your day. Think about your morning. How many times have you gone through this already yourself? Breakfast was good. Breakfast was bad. That phone call was good. That phone call was bad. I'm going to do this later tonight. This will be good. Something else is bad. We're just always splitting our lives up. This supports and reinforces this feeling of fragmentation that we experience, which I think also results into a feeling of kind of alienation with our lives. We don't have that feeling of continuity and smoothness. But what the Eightfold Noble Path does is it starts first and foremost with right view. And with right view, there are a couple of invitations in the teaching of right view.

[14:35]

Let me also say that when we say right, We don't mean it in a dualistic way as opposed to wrong. Right from the Pali word of sama means completeness, comprehensiveness, proper, as opposed to right or wrong. So don't put pressure on yourself. And so right view is really having an understanding that is comprehensive. Comprehensive in the sense of both knowing yourself as well as knowing and understanding what the Dharma is and knowing how the Dharma operates in your own life. So, you know, we spent a fair amount of time in our study really looking at, you know, what are the things we need to pay attention to in ourselves? Many of us, and I suffered from this for years and years, well, let's make it decades, many of us don't even realize we have a point of view. It is so finely ingrained and we are so habituated to it that we think it's right.

[15:41]

We don't think it's a point of view. We just think, oh, that's my idea. It's right. That's how Teresa is. There's no view there. That's just the truth and the deep reality. So right away we put ourselves at a deficit because we're locked into a dualistic idea and thought, right? So what right view invites us to do... is first and foremost take a backward step, as does all of practice, and to say, you know, what's going on here? What could be my point of view? What is it that I'm bringing to the situation? And for many of us, and this is particularly true for those of us who suffer from addiction, we really get to look very deeply at the causes and conditions of our karma. But this is true for anybody. And addictions are bountiful. We don't have a market on them just in the realm of 12-step work. So we look at our karma and we look at the karma of the people that we have been born to because their karma flows through to us.

[16:48]

And then we look at how we respond as beings growing up in that crucible and then what becomes our karma. and then the karma that we create out of that karma. And so the way that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about it in his book about the 52 verses, which is a way of understanding our mind... Is there a chirping or is that this thing? Okay, good. I am so glad that's a shared experience right now. That's a little too much understanding of my mind. Okay. Beautiful sound though, okay. So the way that Thich Nhat Hanh talks about it is that we all are storehouses of seeds and all the seeds that are in vast consciousness we all have within us and we have the potential to potentiate any of these seeds. Seeds for wholesomeness, seeds for unwholesomeness. So what we must do in terms of establishing right view is really understand what seeds we're already...

[17:54]

are in our storehouse and what seeds we tend to activate more often than not. And until we have that, we will simply just be ignorant. That's all. We won't be aware of what the drivers are in terms of how we experience our lives and how we co-create our lives with other people. And so the other image that he uses, which I think is really useful, is, you know, which seeds do you water? if there's something about Buddhist practice that resonates with you, and at the core of it, there's this vow to do no harm, if that resonates with you, if you have a desire to be awake, then you water the seeds that are going to be in support of that type of a pursuit, right? But first you have to have an understanding of what these seeds are. Then the second thing, and I'm going to spend a little bit of time on right view, just because, as Buddha and other teachers have said, it really is the foundation to all of the Eightfold Noble Path.

[19:00]

So the second piece of establishing right view, your own experience and understanding how you have a point of view, and then the second piece is really understanding the Dharma. What are the teachings of the Dharma? I mean, that's why we're all here, right? There's something about the Dharma that draws us, that resonates with us. These teachings of impermanence, of no self, of suffering, of the Four Noble Truths, the cessation of suffering, there's something that draws us. So we look at the Dharma in the context of the Dharma as a big D, those teachings that the Buddha... passed on to us. And then equally important is to look at the Dharma in perhaps the small d point of fashion, which is how does that Dharma play out in your life? Is the Dharma playing out in your life? Do you see impermanence? Do you see suffering? Do you have an experience of no self?

[20:03]

So we dove a little bit deeper, and this is something I just want to spend a little bit of time on too, which is, you know, the... We articulate this next piece I'm going to talk about as the two truths. The truth that we are simultaneously living in experience that includes an ultimate and absolute truth where there is no separation, where we are all part of a vast field of consciousness. The metaphor that's often used is the ocean. And then there's simultaneously what's going on is the relative truth, the phenomenal truth. The fact is that if you hit the person sitting next to you, you would feel a real person. You'd feel real form. You'd probably get a reaction. And so both of these truths are going on at the same time. But what happens to many of us is that we get locked in just the truth and the understanding of the relative world.

[21:09]

And that's where we tend to hang out. And that's where we do all the strategizing to protect our separate selves and try and jump over, around, cut out our suffering, etc. Whereas if we take this backward step and take a really wide view, then what we get to experience is what is equally our birthright, our Buddha nature, which is part and parcel of this vast, endless consciousness. beginningless beginning, endless ending, beginningless ending, endless beginning. You know, that's the territory that we're in. And I say those words, and yet we know, those of you who have a regular practice or sitzazam with any regularity, meditate however you do, we know that this experience, which is what we long for in our lives, is beyond articulation. The epiphanies that we have when we're in meditation cannot be easily articulated.

[22:14]

This is why I'm so admiring of people like Dogen, who actually made such a great effort to try to explain and to bring the absolute through, down through his own experience, into ways that we can... perhaps understand, to encourage us. It's very, very hard. But if you believe this, if you believe that you are part and parcel of this vast consciousness, then what I think right view also encompasses is that we have the opportunity to not get stuck just in phenomenal world, just in relative world. At any point in time, just even through our breathing, stop right now, just take a long, deep breath into your belly. Stop listening to me and have your own direct life. That's what we have access to at any moment. We just forget. We're just habituated not to remember, not to be there.

[23:16]

But the right view, complete view, says just as much as we are 80% water, We're at least 80% consciousness. And we need to make sure that we feed ourselves that which really nourishes us. That's where the action is in terms of fulfillment and wholeheartedness. So this is Right View. And it really is, it allows us to access our deepest and truest self. One way that... It's described in a poem by Rilke, and he says, Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner, what is it? If not intensified sky hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming. So this potentially is a place that we could say is our zip code.

[24:17]

This is where we could live. And when we live there, when we have access to it, it's not like we get stuck there and hung out there. That would just be getting caught off in another duality that we would call bliss or something like that. But when we have access to it and we can bring it forward into the experience of our everyday lives, we get a sense of spaciousness. We get a sense of ease. And we get a chance to remember who is our deepest, truest self. And how do we really, really want to live? As opposed to feeling just kind of battered by, you know, the events of our daily life. And that allows us to have a more qualitative experience. And in that space, that allows us to really step into the moments of our lives with our full heart, to be really present to everything. So the other, many other elements of the... the Eightfold Noble Path. But in the aggregation, what I think happens if we take this kind of technology that Buddha offered us, the first two of right intention and right view are clustered into a category that's called wisdom.

[25:29]

So this is our responsibility to take a look deeply into the causes and conditions of our lives and to just keep looking. Just keep looking, just keep paying attention, trying to be awake and aware. And then the next three clusters, three noble path cluster around what's called ethical conduct, right? And this is right action, right speech, right? which some being out there is struggling with at this very moment, and right livelihood. Now, this is a really juicy area. I wish I had more time to go into it because I assume most of you work in some sort of a place and where you work, you're practicing and you're bringing your practice and you're in a space where most people don't practice. And isn't that very, very challenging? And how do we do that? Well, that's another lecture, but good luck. I'm there with you all the time, Monday through Friday. But I think what the opportunity is, is that if we align with this intention to access this type of life and be in as much close connection with our truest, deepest self, then we will...

[26:47]

feel ultimately like we want to bring it with us even to work. And even under very challenging circumstances, we'll be able to bring pieces of it and maybe even give somebody a glimpse of some sort of a different reaction to a difficult situation as opposed to just feeding more, you know, putting more gas on a fire of reactivity. What if you were to say nothing in your workplace or say, yes, I agree, that's right. You know, lots of different tactics. So there's wisdom in the first cluster. There is this developing ethical conduct, which is really starting to know yourself and your habit energy well enough so that you can exercise restraint when you need to. Oh, Cynthia, do not say that. Do not say that now. And then when it is appropriate to cultivate and to bring forward other pieces of ourself that are underdeveloped. and in a wholesome way. The Eightfold Noble Path has as a kind of a theme two words, kusala and akusala, wholesomeness and unwholesomeness.

[27:54]

If we want to live in alignment with what the Buddha and these Buddhist teachings tell us about having a life of awakened life where we do no harm, then we really want to spend more time in the wholesome way. cultivating, learning how to cultivate wholesome and skillful reactions to the world. And then the final cluster of the Eightfold Noble Path is really mental training or development. And these are right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Oh, good, I've got some help. So... How I kind of digest this eightfold noble path when all is said and done is we wake up in the arena of wisdom, right view, and right intention. We wake up to the truth of the Dharma, we see ourselves, and then right intention says, yes, I want to live there.

[28:59]

I want to have a life of intentionality. We talk about this in recovery from the perspective of... practicing these principles in all of our affairs, which is overwhelming. It's a huge request. In the context of Buddhist practice, we talk about taking the precepts to do no harm. So the key thing to remember is that we don't do them perfectly, we don't do them all the time, but what is really, really useful is that we wake up long enough to remember to return when we invariably make mistakes and slip. And when we do that, to please be kind and gentle and compassionate with ourselves, because it's hard to be a human, and it's hard to live in this world. And especially for those of us who do not live in practice centers like this, where we get lots of good reinforcement, and I am one of the people that's living out there in the practice center of my life, and We're working, we're the salmon swimming upstream, right? We're practicing with those people who don't practice. So we do the best we can with as much consistency as we possibly can.

[30:03]

And then with this right view and right understanding, we then move into learning how to choose appropriate actions. And this is a great field of training. Speech is such a big piece of it, right? To try and say things that are wholesome and skillful as opposed to, you jerk. You know, you idiot. And then having had learning to work with how we implement in skillful ways and embody right action, we then have to think about how do we continuously try to stay in this state. And that's through mental concentration and development. And how I feel about that is it's kind of like learning how to have a posture. that I can trust, that will hold me through and carry me through all my days, that's always deeply informed by my desire to live an intentional life and to do no harm. So as I have a posture here in Zazen, as I go through life, I want to have that posture that just has a spirit of awakened quality to it and yet an openness and a relaxed quality so that I can always meet

[31:14]

the moments of my life, just as they authentically are. So my teacher used to say to me, you're just like me, you talk too much. It's called a left-handed compliment. And in essence, what happens to us when we are engaged in this process is we ultimately find a shift in our orientation in terms of how we live our lives. And we stop living our lives in a way that I call karmically, which is just reactively out of all of the seeds of our past and our habit energy. And then we start living it dharmically. with awareness and with intention. And the qualitative aspect of that in terms of the change that it makes in our daily experience really supports this feeling of living a life that is wholehearted. And the process is one of really finding alignment.

[32:17]

I want to just quickly read... What time am I supposed to stop? About 11. 11? Thank you very much. So... Just a little tip for those of you who, like me, travel a lot. The Shobo Genzo is a complete collection of Dogue and our founders. writings or a fairly comprehensive version. And there's a wonderful text by Kaz Tanahashi as the lead editor, but it's like this and it's kind of hard to travel with. And there is a PDF version from Shasta Abbey that I use on my laptop and my iPad when I travel and just makes it a little bit easier to navigate airports. a little lighter, too. So I want to just read a little bit from one of Dogen's fascicles, which I think speaks a little bit to this. And in Kaz's translation, he calls it Undivided Activity, Zenki.

[33:18]

And in the PDF from Shasta Abbey, it's called Unfunctioning Fully. Unfunctioning Fully. like on living fully, right? When we thoroughly explore what the great way of the Buddhas is, we find that it is liberation from delusion and letting our true self, true self, both in capitals, manifest to the full. Our true self revealing itself to the full is what it is and life is our true self revealing itself to the full. It is the operating of this true self and by this true self, What Dogen is talking about is our Buddha nature. This is what we wake up to and start to embody with right view, the fact that we all have Buddha nature. It's not something we have to go out and acquire. We so often think from a practice perspective, oh, I have to go on many retreats, I have to stop eating meat, I have to do all these different things.

[34:21]

No, we have to wake up to where we are and who we are, and the process is not one of acquisition, but it's really uncovering. genuinely who we already are. It is the operating of this true self that causes life to come about and causes death to come about. At the very moment when we fully manifest this functioning of our true self, it will not necessarily be something great or something small or the whole universe or some limited bit of it or something drawn out or something short and quick. Our life at this very moment is the true self in operation. So stop and see if you can believe that and feel it. Our life at this very moment is the true self, is Buddha nature in operation. That's the essence of right view. And the operating of our true self is our life at this very moment. Life is not something that comes and life is not something that goes.

[35:22]

Life is not something that reveals itself and life is not something that is accomplished. Rather, life is a displaying of one's Buddha nature to the full. So I think that this practice of what is requested and what is the invitation, perhaps a promise of the Eightfold Noble Path, is again not something that's easy, so we need to be patient with ourselves. But it is something that is truly possible. And as we work with it more and more, I think we cultivate the confidence of our practice. Maybe we start with the confidence of other people's practices. And we can reside more fully and more often in this zip code, which is our birthright. I'm reminded of a way that my teacher explained things, my teacher Darlene Cohen.

[36:23]

And she said, then when all is said and done, then we get to truly and deeply settle into the lives that we have, as opposed to the lives that we fantasize about, the lives that we wish that we had, the lives that we think we deserve, the lives that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. While we're missing the life that we actually have, right? We get to settle into the life that we really have. I came across a new poet recently, and so I'll wrap up by sharing this very brief poem of his. Maybe some of you know him. His name is James Broughton, I think. Has anyone heard of him? No? Okay, let me introduce him to you. So this is called This Is It, Number Two. This is it. This is really it. This is all there is. And it's perfect as it is. There is nowhere to go but here. There is nothing here but now.

[37:23]

There is nothing now but this. And this is it. This is really it. This is all there is. And it is perfect as it is. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge, 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 sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[38:04]

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