This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Before I came into the hall, into the Zendo, someone said to me, there's not very many people here today. So I was expecting a very small group and instead the whole room was just filled so I'm very happy to see everyone. I wanna talk about some things today that are not so easy to talk about and that I'm right in the middle of working on myself. and reflecting on and practicing with and consulting with others and talking about this practice point that's essential, I think, to our lives and also very difficult to settle with.

[01:18]

And there's a tendency to turn away from it. And what I want to bring up is forgiveness and and repentance. And I want to put those, clarify what I mean when I'm talking about forgiveness and repentance, the practices, these practices, and also connect that with our Zazen practice and our vows to live awake and aware. And because I'm in the middle of it myself, I'm not sure exactly. I think I'm going to be working out with you my practice and clarifying some things for me right as I speak. So we'll see what happens. This evening is the evening before the Jewish New Year era.

[02:23]

That means evening Rosh Hashanah ahead of the year. time of year in right around September, not exactly this exact date. Every year is a celebration of the harvest and also the beginning of the new year. And whether one practices in the Jewish faith or not, it does feel like the new year. The school year begins again. We're back from hopefully restorative vacations and we start afresh And I was brought up Jewish, and this time of year, I remember we'd start school, and then, you know, like the next week, we'd get to get out of school again to go to synagogue for the High Holy Days, which is always fun. But for me, there's a lot of family memories that come up

[03:24]

being together with family. The music is particularly beautiful, music connected with these holidays, and also tasting for the sweet year, apples dipped in honey, which we used to do. So my parents are no longer living, and just as we all know, when the yearly anniversaries and yearly Seasons come around, various memories come up very strongly, and I'm kind of tasting that right now. Ten days after the new year is the Day of Atonement, and this is a day that is devoted to looking at one's actions and atoning, becoming at one again if one has been... separated from one's intention of how you want to live.

[04:29]

So that particular holiday is kind of a serious, has a serious feeling. There's fasting and so forth. So in alignment with that, this talk about repentance and forgiveness, it seems to be in alignment with that holiday as well. So these questions of how do we respond when harm has been done to us, where we experience that we have been harmed, or where we see that others have been harmed, other individuals or people, animals and plants have been harmed, how do we respond to this? And then how do we respond when we see that we have harmed ourself or others through our actions of body, speech, and mind. This is a big question.

[05:33]

How do we respond? And I think there's a kind of rush to sometimes forgiveness or some pressure. We should forgive. And not so much in Buddhism, but in other faiths, forgiveness is a very, very important tenant or important practice to be forgiven and to forgive others. To be, I think, if there is a religion where there's a God who's in judgment on our actions, then we want to be forgiven. It's imperative that we're forgiven because the consequences are dire if we're not forgiven. So there's asking for forgiveness, wanting forgiveness, needing to be forgiven.

[06:40]

And in Buddhism, forgiveness is not held up in the same way. And I think this is delicate to talk about because, and maybe it's not so clear until we have an interfaith discussion about what is forgiveness, what's the background of forgiveness, what's the importance of forgiveness. And in Buddhism, there's other practices that maybe when you put them all together feels like what we think of as forgiveness or looks like forgiveness, but it's not really based on asking for others to forgive us or a god or a priest to intercede for us or the victim of our actions that we've harmed or for them to forgive us. In the Buddhist context,

[07:42]

our actions of body, speech, and mind, the consequences of our actions, our actions, this is karma. Karma means action. So the actions of our body, speech, and mind have consequences. And those consequences cannot be kind of averted or made to disappear by the forgiveness of someone else or even, you know, some high, or the Buddha or something. Those consequences of our actions need to be thoroughly understood, accepted, and chewed on, you know. We have to do the work That comes along with those actions.

[08:45]

We have to avow them. So forgiveness and absolving ourselves of the consequences of our actions don't actually come together. It skips over a very important part, which is our own work that we need to do. So there's two things in Buddhism that are necessary, are important, and those are, one word is, these are taken together, they may look like forgiveness. One is abhaya, which is fearlessness. So if we have forgiveness, in the face of someone who has wronged us, who has harmed us, if we can give fearlessness, meaning they do not have to be afraid of your retaliation or harming them or getting back at them or making them pay or something like that.

[09:59]

This is a gift, a baya, this gift of fearlessness, which is also working on our own harboring. ill will and our own holding to anger and and those kinds of emotions that are painful for us if we can offer fearlessness meaning we will not retaliate this is it's not exactly forgiveness we're not saying I forgive you but we're offering fearlessness And another offering you could say is called Kama. This is in Pali, which means earth. It's a word that means earth. And the meaning of it is that we are like the earth, grounded, solid. We are there and ready for someone else to confess to us or acknowledge their actions and

[11:04]

And we can receive that. We can hear this is what the person has done, that they've said that, that they are sorry, maybe are trying to make amends. And we act as the earth and where everything can be placed in the earth. It doesn't reject anything. So that kind of heart, mind of the earth that opens to someone's true expression and confession of what they've done to harm us or to harm another. So to be able to listen to that, to be able to stand that actually sometimes, to be able to say, I hear you and I hear that you want to be acknowledge that you avow these actions.

[12:05]

So abhaya, fearlessness, and kama may look like what we think of as forgiveness, you know, being willing to not get back at someone and hurt them back, tit for tat, and also to be able to hear their true, sincere apologies, if those are forthcoming. So those are two things in Buddhism that are really important. The word repentance, I think for some people there's a kind of distaste or something to that word. And of course there's other words that are associated like penitentiary and so forth. But the word repentance... The re means to respond, and the penitent part, penitent, comes from a word that means to be sorry.

[13:08]

That's all. It's very simple. Repentance is the response that we make when we feel sorry, when we're sorry, truly sorry. And so it's very simple, repentance. I think to feel remorse, and remorse means to chew again, morsel, to chew over something again. So to be able to look at our actions and chew them, and to feel remorse at our actions of body, speech, and mind, and to feel sincerely sorry. And out of that will come... kind of naturally the vow of, and I don't want to act that way again. I do not want to do these actions again. I see, I actually feel sorry, sincerely.

[14:13]

I see what I've done through actions of speech, actions of body, and actions of thinking. and I do not wish to act that way again. So right within repentance is vow. It's almost one thing, you might say, one energy of vowing and repenting, repenting and vowing. The difficulty sometimes we have, and that I have, I admit, with people is... when I actually feel they are not sorry, they haven't yet seen the consequences of their actions, and they may want to be forgiven or may want things to get back to normal without having done the work of responding to being sorry, what one does when you feel sorry and you want to respond.

[15:15]

Somehow there's a skipping over of that, can be. And if so, it is premature and actually not so beneficial to forgive. And I think this is where this delicacy around forgiving, where it's very important to be clear, has the person done the work they need to do? Because if we leap to forgiveness too soon, it really short-circuits the inner work that someone needs to do to see the situation they have caused, to see their own delusions, their own self-clinging, their own greed, hate, and delusion, you might say. So forgiving too soon, it doesn't help anyone, actually.

[16:23]

We may not feel settled ourselves because we've maybe skipped over something, and the person themselves hasn't been able to taste, to chew, and swallow, and digest, and change thereby. So another word that is contrition, and in looking up contrition today, to be contrite means humbled by, it says guilt, and repentant for one's actions. Humbled, I think I want to get back to guilt in a moment because I think guilt doesn't have very much, is not so useful, I don't think, for our practice. But this word humbled, humbled, close to the ground, and contrite comes from the root that means to rub or to grind.

[17:29]

And the word means to be kind of broken, broken down in spirit. This is contrite, to actually feel broken by... or that we've been really affected strongly enough that we're, you know, ground down by seeing that our actions have been harmful to others. So contrite is a very interesting word, broken in spirit, and it comes from this rubbing or grinding or boring, boring into something. And attrition comes from that, as well as trite, which means kind of worn away by use. You know, trite sayings or trite writing is, you know, kind of stale, but worn away.

[18:31]

So contrition and repentance, I actually want to reclaim those words as useful ways to look at our own lives. So in our practice every day here at San Francisco Zen Center Temples, for the last... We didn't start doing this, but for the last 20 years at least, we have been reciting every morning the... formal repentance verses, verse, followed by taking refuge. So it's repentance and vow actually together as a daily practice.

[19:33]

And this practice can be daily for any person. This is done in a group, but one can do it on their own or do it before bed at night. But some daily... towards our actions, karmic actions, voluntary actions of body, speech, and mind, and reflecting on those actions. So this is called a formal, this is formal repentance, and there's also something called formless, or the repentance of In Japanese, there's ji-sange, which means this formal repentance, and then ri-sange, or formless repentance. And I'll come back to the formless repentance in a minute.

[20:33]

So for the... formal repentance. It comes from a practice, ancient practice during the Buddha's time when the monks and nans and lay people would get together on the new moon and the full moon and there were teachings that were given and also a reciting of the guidelines for living together in harmony that had been created over time just by human beings living together, finding out what contributes to peacefulness and what contributes to disharmony and choosing those things which contribute to peace as part of the guidelines of living together. And those would be recited and it was a chance for someone who had not been observing those guidelines to step forward and avow their actions in the practice of confession, which is a practice that is an ancient practice in Buddhist life to come forth and bring to another person or a group your actions that you feel are not in alignment with your deepest understanding of reality and your deepest understanding of how you want to live.

[22:10]

So this ancient practice on the new and the full moon, we have to this day. We have an abbreviated version on the full moon, which is a public ceremony. Anyone can come to that. And it's a chance to fully acknowledge in an upright way our actions and not to be absolved somehow. but to bring awareness, consciousness, and our own vows to, as I said, not live or do those things again. So this word guilt that we have and that so plagues us often, in Buddhism there isn't A word guilt, actually, or there's the word guilt. But in terms of practice, there isn't a word in Tibet for the word guilt.

[23:17]

There's a meaning such as, I see the actions that I have done. They have not been conducive to peace and happiness, and I will not do them again. There's a word for that. It's kind of a long... definition for some word. But it's not about guilt. It's about I see, I'm aware, and I vow to not act in that way again. So when we get caught up in guilt, oh, I'm such a terrible person. Oh, how bad I am. Oh, dear, oh, dear. I think that also keeps us from fully avowing and avowing, meaning acknowledging and admitting. and vowing not to practice in that way, which has a positive, uplifting, fresh quality to it. And that can be every morning when we do this particular chant, this verse, which starts out, this is the formal practice of repentance, or the response to being sorry, as all human beings say,

[24:31]

Our actions were limited in our understanding, and we do things that do not have positive consequences. So the verse is, All my ancient twisted karma, from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born of body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. It was very simple, really. My ancient twisted, some people don't like the word twisted, but it means meandering and turning and entangled, you know, not twisted like perverted in some way, the way we sometimes use the word twisted, but just very tangled, you know. My ancient tangled up, twisted, karma or voluntary actions.

[25:34]

From beginning, let's read hate and delusion. This is, you know, we can't even, we don't know when it started, this attachment to self and egocentric activity. We don't know when it began, and that's not the important thing, but we avow it. And it comes in three ways, body, speech, and mind. And we acknowledge it completely. I now fully avow. And in that avowing, even though it's not said exactly, there is, I let go of that and I take up my life freshly. So this is the formal... And so when we are in contact with people who we feel have difficulty in avowing due to their own

[26:54]

psychological disposition, their own fears of loss, of loss of reputation, loss of love, loss of all the things that we care about, you know, have difficulty in saying, yes, these are actions that I have done. I think the avowing without the, it's called repentance, the response to feeling sorry, when there isn't the sincere sorry-ness, and you can't legislate that. You can't make somebody feel something, right? And how it is that someone doesn't feel sorry through their own karmic life, their own karmic formations and imprints. and fears, and we can't legislate that.

[28:00]

And so to feel that someone is unable to accept their actions and avow them and admit them, this is extremely painful. And it almost feels like, and there is nothing to be done. What is there to be done? I think this is a question I have. You know, each of us has a world of how we understand things and the effect things have on us. And if someone can't feel that or see that, how do we help them to see that? How do we stay in our own, not be swayed by, well, I guess if they don't see it, then maybe it doesn't exist, which can happen. where we feel like, gee, maybe we can't trust ourselves if someone sees things so differently.

[29:03]

So this is very difficult, very difficult for me and for others. And it's very delicate in that we have to look at our own practice in the midst of this. And the two practices for us And these also may look like forgiveness when it's not actually forgiving. One is releasing our own anger and resentment towards another person or many other people. Because that can be very harmful for ourselves. It can eat away at us, literally, a kind of gnawing quality and boiling. broiling, burning quality to our lives that's in our hearts. And it doesn't affect the other person one way or the other or the other people, whoever it's about.

[30:11]

It's not affecting them or changing them or helping to have them see a different situation. But it does affect us in a very strong way. So to be able to release resentments and release anger and not leap to forgiveness, I think that's beside the point actually. But for our own sake, our own practice life and our own peace in our hearts, how do we release harboring ill will without dropping clarity about what happened what continues to happen and our sense of what's in alignment with our deepest understanding. So along with releasing our own anger and resentment, then there's, which also is not harboring ill will, the second point is

[31:24]

to somehow find some place in our hearts where we have, we don't have ill will, but we have good will and compassion for the other person. So we release, and I think the two go together, we release the resentment and anger and at the same time find some possibility of compassion and non-ill will towards the person who has harmed us. This doesn't leap over the harm, doesn't condone it, doesn't deny it, doesn't diminish it or make light of it, but for our own, and I think this might be one of the hardest points is, to touch into some kind of goodwill or compassion, wanting, having loving kindness, wanting the best for this person.

[32:34]

And even in talking about it, I can feel, when I'm thinking about a certain situation, a kind of hardness of, what is that? Resentment or anger, but how could you act in that way? And that little hard pebble, you know, or boulder or stone, you know, that's, to me that's unnecessary, you know, it doesn't actually, it's not conducive for liberation, it's not conducive for peace. And how do we respond to that? understanding that it's there, touching it, feeling what that feels like, and without somehow changing the story of what you feel is actually true.

[33:41]

So this is, to me, very advanced practice, maybe. You know, I can feel... but maybe not so advanced. Maybe when I think of it as advanced, and in some situations it would be greatly advanced. I mean, hearing some stories that His Holiness the Dalai Lama tells of people in prison, Tibetans in prison who, you know, under terrible, unspeakable actions that were perpetrated, you know, one person told His Holiness, at one point he had some fear, that he would lose his compassion towards the guards, towards the Chinese. That was his biggest fear, that he would lose his bodhisattva vow, actually, of wanting all beings to receive benefit, to live for the benefit of others.

[34:49]

That was the fear of this monk. So to me, that's very inspiring, deeply inspiring, and brings me back to my situation or more everyday situation of the daily receiving of, what do we receive? Insult. people who don't have our best interests in mind, people whose actions are based on what they want for themselves, and our actions too, and looking at our own actions based on beginningless greed, hate, and delusion. Those are the three poisons. And the delusion in the greed, hate, and delusion is our belief that we are separate people

[35:53]

And so then we need to get things and push things away, greed and hate. So releasing ourselves from resentment and ill will and anger and also finding loving kindness, compassion for others. And I think compassion is a really important word because it's a horizontal, I think one of the dangers in forgiveness is that we take the higher moral ground. Oh, I forgive you, which is somehow like this. I'm, you know, I can rise above these things and forgive. So we have to be very careful that there's not that laced in our forgiveness. So compassion, the gift of compassion is a kind of horizontal suffering with another and understanding the suffering with awareness, understanding their suffering, which produced conditions for the actions that they took.

[37:19]

To understand that, to have full awareness of that, I think is important. And that might look like forgiveness, actually, but it's not bringing ourselves above anyone in our wonderful spiritual practice. So the other kind of repentance, the one I mentioned was our formal repentance, And the other repentance is called formless repentance. And formless repentance, or ri-sange, so this formless is ri, the Japanese character ri is like the absolute, and ji is the relative, or ri might be universal reality of all existence, and the ji-sange

[38:22]

of the formal repentance is our conventional life together. So the formalist repentance, this is a verse from the Samantabhadra Sutra. Samantabhadra is the bodhisattva who is called the shining bodhisattva, the bodhisattva of practice bodhisattva, shining practice. And Samantabhadra made many, many vows And this comes from the Samantabhadra Sutra called the Formless Repentance or the Repentance of True Reality. The ocean of all karmic hindrances arises solely from delusive thoughts. If you wish to make repentance, sit in upright posture and be mindful of the true reality. All misdemeanors, like frost and dew, are melted away in the sun of wisdom.

[39:25]

So this is called the formless repentance. And basically the formless repentance is understanding the ocean of karmic hindrances or hindrances based on these actions. And these are not just unwholesome actions, but wholesome actions as well. Both positive and negative karmic actions are based on a belief that I, as a separate being, do good and bad things. This is karma based on this understanding. So the ocean of all the karmic hindrances arise from delusive thoughts, this main delusive thought or ignorance of the reality of how we actually exist in. impermanence and with no abiding self, separate self. So then, if you wish to make repentance, if you wish to respond to, you know, that you are sincerely sorry for harm caused by both good and bad actions, you don't know, sometimes you do something with full

[40:44]

positive motivation, but it doesn't work out. Actually, people are hurt. So this is all the karmic actions. If you wish to make repentance, sit in upright posture and be mindful of the true reality. This is sit in our upright posture. This is sit zazen. This is practice zazen. All misdemeanors like frost and dew are melted away in the sun of wisdom. So in our Zazen practice, maybe the most simple, the most simple Zazen practice, and there may be other practices that people do, concentration practices, following the breath, these kinds of things, but the most simple is to sit upright, Sit upright in correct bodily posture, meaning a posture that neither leans forward nor backward.

[41:47]

Sit completely upright in body and mind. And be mindful of the true reality. And just be aware. Just sit upright and be aware. And all the true reality is right there. You don't have to go somewhere else or be someone else or get rid of anything, in the midst of our delusive thoughts and our hindrances and our limited understanding, we can sit upright in the midst of our life, in the midst of the true reality of our life and be present and live it out right there. Sitting upright means we don't push anything away in hatred or in aversion, and we don't grab a hold of things, hold on to things.

[42:51]

We allow things to come and go in impermanence with no abiding self, and we sit upright. And in this practice, all misdemeanors, it says, are... like frost and dew melted away, melted away in the sun of wisdom. So as we're sitting, not only sitting, but living our life, all our daily activities, you could say, can be zazen in action as we sit upright, taking that form of sitting upright as the formless repentance where whatever is happening, we avow it, and don't push it away or grab it. We let it go in a deep, deep practice and simple practice of letting each moment completely be what it is in awareness.

[43:55]

And we can see that delusions are impermanent and lack abiding self. What we call delusions and what we call enlightenment in sitting upright in zazen are, as the teaching says, delusions and enlightenment are non-dual. You don't first get rid of your delusions so that then you will wake up. We wake up in the middle of seeing that our delusions are impermanent, and have no substantialness. They frost and dew, like frost and dew in the sun of wisdom, seeing that they, in wisdom, we see that delusions, when we see delusions like this, that is our waking up. We don't have to get rid of them first and do a whole bunch of stuff and be different.

[45:05]

we wake up in the middle of our delusion, sitting upright on our cushion. This is the formless repentance. And in our zazen, one Zen master, Uchiyama Roshi, says, zazen is vow and repentance. Not, you know, our zazen is completely vow and completely repentance. Not one, first we... Repent and then we vow. But vow and repentance is upright sitting and this formless repentance or the repentance of true reality. So we need both. You know, we need the form, the form, moral form, repentance, either with another person or with a group to avow our actions and And make vows to live, to make changes, and to be aware of our actions in a new and deeper way, ever deepening.

[46:15]

Because delusions are inexhaustible, our practice is inexhaustible. Our vow is inexhaustible and endless. So this endless practice of vowing and repenting as one zazen. So there's a saying, before the donkeys leave, the horses arrive. Usually we want that old donkey to go, you know, stubborn and makes those funny noises and won't move. And we want the sleek, wonderful horse to come in and carry us away. But the horse will come before the donkey leaves. In fact, the horse and the donkey are... good friends, you know. They work together. So if we catch ourselves wanting the donkey to go so that something else will happen, it will never go.

[47:16]

When we accept our delusions and our limited life and vow in the midst of this, there's the horse, you know. So my job, you know, is not skipping over, condoning, or making light of actions that have consequences either in my own life, my own actions of body, speech, and mind, or someone else's, and at the exact same time, not harboring ill will, resentments, and anger but opening. So this is a tall order.

[48:23]

I think it's a tall order and it's a lifetime, it's a lifetime work. Thank you very much for your attention. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[49:00]

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