This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I live here at Green Gold's Farm with my wife, Sarah, and my baby boy, Frank, who's a pretty great kid. Now, if you all have seen him around, we should put him up here. I could go take my nap and he could sit up here and receive your love the way that he's been receiving the love of pretty much everybody at Green Gulch for the last year or so. One of the remarkable things about... having a little baby is that I don't, I have the experience of not wishing, really even for a moment, that he was different than how he is.

[01:07]

He's just, he's just great how he is. I sometimes wish he was, you know, I'm sometimes sad when he's unhappy. And I have this feeling like, oh, I wish you weren't sad. But I never think you should change You're sadness. You're at fault. He's completely acceptable. So I say that's remarkable because as some people who know me will willingly attest, I have a fairly established habit of wishing that things were different. It really covers heaven and earth, as we say in Zen. For really the most minor things, you know, what's for lunch is frequent.

[02:10]

The way someone hit the bell or didn't hit the bell. And it extends from there to the grave injustices. not just in this little valley, but in this world. Always wishing that things were different. Wishing, too, of beings, wishing that they were happy and fulfilled. Feeling that beings are suffering, are unhappy and unfulfilled, and really wishing that was different. wishing that they were happy and fulfilled and free from the suffering and the causes of suffering. So we talk a lot about acceptance in Buddhism, and that is what I want to talk about today.

[03:15]

But whenever we do, I think it's important that we acknowledge this other side, the importance of that wish for a better world. that seeing the condition, seeing how things are in a way, we really naturally give rise to this wish for the well-being of others. And that wish, in a way, is at the root of our practice. If we didn't have that wish for a better world, for a better self, we wouldn't be engaging in the practice. So Buddhism says, you know, accept everything just as it is. but we're only interested in Buddhism because we know secretly that we may get a little better for it and maybe the world will get a little better for it. So I feel we need to acknowledge and energize our wish for a better world and a better self.

[04:23]

But while we do, at the same time, we need to notice that behind that, behind every wish for a different world or a better world, a different me, a different you, there's this deep underlying assumption that the world could actually be different than it is. And I think it's important that we question that assumption. I think the Buddha invites us to question that assumption. In part because that assumption that things don't actually have to be the way they are really undermines our work for a better world. Our work for a better world isn't helped by our rejection of the present world. We think it does.

[05:28]

We think, well, if I didn't wish things were different, then I wouldn't help. But actually, when we help based on wishing things were different, based on wishing things weren't happening, our rejection of present reality kind of contaminates our helpfulness. It encodes this rejection into the kind of... of the change that we're making happen, when we're coming from a place of hatred, when we're coming from a place of rejecting the world, I think the Buddhist teaching is pretty clear that that turns out not to be so helpful. That actually undermines this wish to benefit beings. Instead, the great vehicle of Buddhism teaches that from the ground of accepting the world just as it is, from that solid basis of opening to and appreciating the world in its perfect suchness, then our beneficial action naturally emerges, emerges grounded, settled in the world as it is.

[06:54]

So then stopping, renouncing this wish for things to be better isn't to turn away from our vow to help, isn't to turn away from our kind heart, but is really a turning towards it. Because I want to help the world, I need to first accept this is the situation. It is thus. It is so. So from this compassion, we examine and study this basic Buddhist truth that things can't be any other way than exactly how they are now. We can't have our life in some other way than we have it right now. This very simple fact that's at the core of the Dharma and that has really vast implications for how we

[07:57]

and how we meet the world. We can't separate our life from what's happening in our life. So whatever's happening in your life, that's you. That's your life. Whatever's happening in my life is me, is my life. We can't say that we could have our life somehow without... what's happening in our life. We have no life apart from what's happening. We have this image, you know, this idea that I'm over here, my life is over here on the one side, my kind of pure life. And then all the details that I could kind of take or leave about my life are on the other side. But Buddhism is really clear that that's not so.

[09:02]

There's not a pure life or some pure self floating around out there without the precise details that that life finds itself in. So the details of our life really is all there is. What's happening, the circumstances of my life are what gives me life. And I don't have any other life apart from that. That's the core, really, of Buddhist teaching, in my view. I owe my existence to everything else. I don't have an existence, and then I could pick and choose. Yeah, I could eliminate some things, but I'd still basically have me and my existence. Everything together gives me life. And I can't speak of my life in isolation or apart from that. Our life is exactly the conditions that make it up. So this is the Buddha's teaching.

[10:07]

And it's a teaching. We call it a teaching because it's not... Because we don't know it already. It's something we have to hear and learn. Basically, we are ingrained. We've trained so... deeply, so diligently, in this habit of separating my life from everything that's happening in my life. I could stay the same, but everything in my life could somehow change. So the fact that my life completely relies on everything just as it is, is an expression of the Buddha's teaching, the Buddha's truth of interdependence. this truth of interdependence or dependent co-arising, you can see that's really the basis of Buddhism and that all of the teachings, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single Buddhist teaching that isn't some kind of elaboration on this theme of interdependence.

[11:23]

So the teachings on emptiness, of course, are just the other side of interdependence, because everything relies completely on everything else. Nothing can be separated out and said to exist in its own. Nothing has a self-nature. It's just created by other things. It's also the classical Buddhist teaching of the 12-fold chain of causation, this image of how things come into being based on one another. also an elaboration of interdependence. And even the compassion teachings. I think, well, interdependence is wisdom side, but actually all of the Buddhist teachings of compassion are based on this interdependence, this inherent kind of mutual togetherness that allows us to affect one another and allows us to feel for one another. But the teachings on interdependence that I want to briefly raise today come out of the Huayen, or Flower Ornament School of Buddhism, that flourished in China from around the seventh, ninth centuries.

[12:41]

That's a school of Buddhism based on a wonderful and thick sutra called the Avatamsaka, or Flower Ornament Sutra. It makes a good flower press. It's over a thousand thin pages long, and it's said to the tradition is that the Buddha spoke this sutra from his awakening, from the awakened mind, from his awakening, he kind of spit out the sutra. It then took a while for people to write it down, a few hundred years after the Buddha. But the tradition is clear that it's not... The Buddha didn't sort of... The Buddha is speaking as precisely as possible in the sutra

[13:52]

the contents of his own awakened mind. And those contents reflect this kind of bright and infinite and infinitely connected and infinitely reflecting universe or universe of universes. In the sutra, there's the sense that each thing is completely contained in everything else and contains everything else. So the classic description of the structure and also the teaching of the sutra and of the school that teaches interdependence is the image of Indra's net. And the Zen and YM scholar Francis Cook has, I think, a very clear description of Indra's net, which is completely reflected in the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Hawaiian school.

[15:01]

So he says, Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each eye of the net. And since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glimmering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.

[16:05]

Everything, everything in the infinite, infinite universe containing everything else and being contained in everything else. So the great philosophers, thinkers, practitioners of Hawaiian Buddhism worked out, followed through some of the logic, some of the implications of this kind of view of radical interconnectedness. and created a kind of Buddhist philosophy that's based on totality, that's based on this sense of wholeness, of the universe as one totality, one thoroughly integrated whole in which the part and the whole are working completely together, inseparably. Everything in this totality supports, everything supports

[17:12]

and nothing obstructs this totality. So they have a vast corpus of teachings on the implications of Indra's net. One of their contributions, one of their teachings that I want to bring up today that I maybe most value was to point out that the other side of interdependence is... inter-causality. So this is the teaching that for those of us who are immersed in Buddhism or ecology, you know, we hear interdependence. We think, yeah, yeah, I know. Interdependence. Inter-causality is just the other side of the same thing, is just a sharper way of saying the same thing. It's not just that each thing depends on everything else, but that each thing causes everything else.

[18:17]

So interdependence to me sounds something like everything needs everything. For me, it has these kind of straight lines, is the feeling. I'm dependent on my parents, and my parents needed some food, And the food they ate depended on the sun and the rain. And all of these things are dependent. But it doesn't always strike me in that teaching that, you know, the ant crawling across the floor, I'm completely dependent on that. The unkind word or kind word that I overhear, completely dependent on that. war and earthquakes, all the terrible things of our world, we're completely dependent on. In my kind of immersion in interdependence as a kind of slogan, I sometimes can lose my appreciation of this.

[19:25]

But intercausality really brings this home for me. These teachings are something like each thing alone, just each tiny thing has total causal power for everything, for each other thing. So any little thing that you can find in the world is completely 100% responsible for the arising of everything else. It made you. It is currently making you. It's causing the existence of everything. Radical teaching. Without each and everything, there's no world. So this insight comes out of really the Buddha's vision. It's a deeply intuitive, or you could say a kind of mystical view of the world that comes out of zazen, really, that comes out of meditation, comes out of the Buddha's meditation, seeing that the world isn't broken up in the ways that we break it up, but is completely a one...

[20:43]

self-supporting whole. And I think for me fundamentally the approach to this kind of thinking is a body approach, is to bring it into my meditation. But there is also this wonderful philosophy that's built up around it, this kind of logic that explains how these relationships can be. Just very briefly, one of the images used... in this Huayin teaching by the ancestor Fatsang, is to use the image of the rafter and the building. So you have a building and a rafter in the building. And you can see that the building would not be a building without the rafter. So you can say, from the point of view of the rafter, that it has... the causal power, it causes the building. But at the same time, the ancestor teaches, you can only call it a rafter because of the building that it's created.

[21:51]

So this one thing is responsible for the totality, it causes the totality, but it's also created, supported by the totality. So taking it one small step further, you can say that the rafter causes the roof tile because the rafter causes the building and without the building you couldn't speak of a roof tile. So in that sense each thing is directly causing each other thing. So how would I live? How would I live if I saw the world this way? If if we could open our minds and hearts to this world of inter-causality, of the total vitalness, the total necessity for every single arising thing.

[23:08]

One implication for me would be that there would be no alternative to accepting everything. If I really understood that I needed everything, there would be nothing that wasn't acceptable. Each thing, whether it's large or small, or good or evil, is completely precious and completely required. to give me life, to give anything life. So there wouldn't be anything that could be rejected. To find ground, you know, to live from a grounded place, we need to draw from the strength of totality. We need to draw our own ground from the complete ground of being. when we reject, when we pick and choose what our reality should be, it's becoming clear to me that all we're doing in that is cutting away, chipping away at our own ground.

[24:20]

We're rejecting the pieces that we need to give us ground. So then we're trying to find our ground in the world as it is, but we've excluded all these annoying parts so they don't count in the world. So then we can't place our roots in them. We can't find our ground in them. But if we understand that everything is completely necessary, that life could not be without every single aspect of life, then we might rethink this rejection. Also, I feel that if I really understood how vitally I need everything, then I would have no fear of anything. They're in that vision of mutual support, in that vision of totality. There's nothing that comes from outside to threaten any other thing. Everything is just supporting, just holding up every other thing.

[25:22]

So practicing this vision is to have total equanimity, total acceptance, and total fearlessness that's based on including everything. So some of us think that we can be still, that we can practice stillness without including everything. But actually, this radical inclusion is the only way to find stillness. If we're not including everything, then an interruption will come that will require us to leave our stillness. The only stillness, the only stability, the only ground is to include everything. So what is it that we're not including? What is it that I actually believe doesn't need to be here? That did not need to be here.

[26:26]

And can I see that I owe my life to that thing, that I have no life apart from that thing that I so desperately want to eliminate, annihilate. Internally and externally, every single thing gives me life. I have no life apart from it. So it also leads me to a place of no regret. I can see taking on this vision of that there would be no regret. I couldn't ask, well, what if that hadn't happened? If that hadn't happened, there would be no existence. Everything needs everything, just as it is. It's not like we could have it the same way with some key variables tweaked, like your personality. So I really, as I study these teachings, I feel that if I could take on even just this one insight, if I could understand that everything completely causes everything else, I could really fulfill all of these bodhisattva virtues and the Buddha way.

[27:50]

But it's hard. It's hard to see the world the way the Buddha sees it. And it's hard to accept everything just as it is. And again, I notice that I make it even harder, I feel like we make it even harder for ourselves by fearing that this radical acceptance of everything is complacency. If we accept the unacceptable, then we'll lose the will to change things. We won't act anymore. This idea that actually our compassionate action is based on resistance and rejection of reality. But as we open our eyes and look clearly, it becomes clear that rejection is not compassion. Inclusion is compassion. I think of the, for some reason I'm reminded of the excellent Buddhist t-shirt that says, worry is not preparation.

[28:52]

That's, to me, it's second only to the Buddhist t-shirt that says, Buddhism... promises nothing, and delivers. It's another excellent T-shirt. But worry is not preparation. To me, it has a strong resonance with this idea that rejection isn't helpfulness. It's extra. Preparation is just preparation. Worry is worry. Compassionate, beneficial action is just compassionate, beneficial action. Rejection. And non-acceptance of reality isn't helpfulness. So instead, accepting reality, we naturally find a responsive heart. Who we are, these teachings of interconnection show that we are completely together.

[29:58]

So it's the most natural thing in the world. to reach out with a beneficial heart to others. It doesn't require us to have some kind of negative view of the world. On the contrary, accepting reality, finding our ground on the totality of being, planting our roots in the whole earth, not just in part of the earth. From there, naturally, we can respond to others. If we don't have this equanimity, this acceptance grounding our compassion, then what passes for compassion can seem more like despair, and what passes for love seems kind of like hatred. So this radical inclusion is hard enough. We don't need to add in this idea, this fear.

[31:01]

that if we really include, if we really accept, then we'll stop working to improve ourselves in our world. There's actually a kind of Buddhist heresy, which is always fun to come across because there aren't that many of them. Since Buddhism doesn't teach anything true, it's sort of no problem. But there's a couple sticking points, and one of them is called Buji Zen. or nothing matters, no matter Zen, which is this idea that... I don't know if anybody has ever actually had this idea, but everybody likes to criticize this idea, that if we would just... Since we just accept everything as it is, since everything... Since, you know, even my present delusion and unskillfulness and unkindness is... has total causal power for my life, since that gives me, since my delusion gives me my life, there's no need to practice waking up.

[32:10]

There's no need to practice kindness because my unkindness could not be different than it is. I just accept it. So that is a superficial view. of what it would be to actually accept the world. If we took on this view that the world was a place worth accepting, that each thing could be accepted as vital to everything else, especially whatever that piece is for you, that the world was fine without this thing, the world would be fine without this thing? To really see that from the Buddha's seat, from the Buddha's zazen, that's not so. There would be no world without that one piece or those several thousand pieces that you would like to reject.

[33:16]

So it's actually a big challenge to see the world in this way. It becomes ridiculous to say that, well, because Because I can accept everything, I don't need to practice. Because the fact is we don't accept everything. Most of the time we're fighting with everything. So when we hear you should accept everything, that can inspire our practice. That's a pointer to practice. It's not a reason not to practice. Precisely in order to include everything as it is, we bring forth our full effort to practice our way. It's not, oh, everything's included so I don't have to practice. It's everything's included, and I'm very confused on that point, so I really have to practice so that I stop cutting out my own ground, so that I stop standing outside of the world, so that I stop placing myself outside of the totality of being and identifying on behalf of totality the elements that it needs and the elements it doesn't need.

[34:24]

We have no ground, we have no position outside of reality to say what should be, what shouldn't be. We're completely enclosed, nourished in this circle, in this womb of existence, completely dependent on each piece and completely giving life to each piece. So Suzuki Roshi famously said that our practice is to accept everything as it is and to help each thing become its best. Or, of course, you're perfect as you are and you could use some improvement. So usually we're stuck on one side of that or the other. And usually it's the improvement side, I have to say. Usually it's, let me help you become your best because you're not. So these teachings unstick those of us who are stuck.

[35:30]

You know, I wish I could say that the world was perfect just as it is. I wish I could know that everything is okay, that I could look in the eyes of people whose lives are shattered in the many ways lives are shattered, and say this world is perfect as it is. But I don't think I can say that. I don't think we should say that. But I do think we can say and need to say that the world is perfectly how it is. Everything is in it together. And to truly open to any part of this world, we need to open to the whole. opening to each part, opening to the whole. From that ground, we can begin to transform ourselves and our world.

[36:36]

So thank you again for coming to Green Gulch. May our gathering here bring benefit and improve this. perfectly total world. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:32]

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