So I think my subject today is yes and no. And I wanted to begin with a piece of a poem by Allen Ginsberg that he wrote in 1954. It's from a longer poem called Psalm. And this stanza goes like this. Yes, yes. That's what I wanted. I always wanted. I always wanted to return to the body where I was born.

[01:08]

I'll read that again. Yes, yes, that's what I wanted. I always wanted, I always wanted to return. I always wanted, I always wanted. You just can't get any respect. Yes, yes. That's what I wanted. I always wanted, I always wanted to return to the body where I was born. So that just sort of sets a tone. I don't know about other speakers here at Berkeley Zen Center and elsewhere, but Sometimes I really don't know until like the day before or later what it is I'm going to speak about.

[02:09]

Or sometimes I have an idea, you know, a week or two before and you go through all this kind of study and thinking and then just throw it out at the last minute. So what I want to talk about today I wasn't sure what my subject was until I guess on Thursday evening, Lori, my wife and I, gave a report back from our recent trip to India. And as I was looking at the slides, I saw a slide, we were teaching at a school. and I'll say a little more about that, but I saw a slide that with some stuff I had written on the board there talking about, we were teaching about the civil rights movement and also teaching about how one constructs a non-violent movement and

[03:23]

it came to me that there is a dimension of no that is required and that that no also has to go hand in hand with yes and that they function last weekend we had a study session with Sojin Roshi And we were studying this Tang Dynasty text, song, the Sando Kai, it's called in Japanese, or the merging of difference and sameness is one translation. And we were studying, Sojourn Roshi was teaching from Suzuki Roshi's commentary on Sandokai.

[04:25]

And Suzuki Roshi comes up with this really interesting word talking about the relationship between difference and sameness, relative and absolute, black and white, and in a sense you could say yes and no. And the word that Suzuki Roshi makes up is interdependency. What? Independency. I'm sorry, independency. Right. Independency, which has the... it has... it contains dependent and also independent. So, this is... I will circle around to this again, but I think that this applies to what it was that came up for me as I was teaching in India and why I think it's relevant to our practice.

[05:29]

So, I should say a little about our time in India. I've been going there for the last four or five years in the winter for a few weeks. And now that our kids are, one is at college and the other is working in New York, they're gone from home, alas. It was an opportunity for Lori to actually travel with me. It's the first time we've gotten to do that in the last 22 years. And so I planned the trip. pretty carefully so she could have what I thought would be a good experience and it turned out to be. What I do in India, I've been building a relationship with a wider community of Indian Buddhists

[06:40]

is from what used to be called the untouchable sector of society. So below the caste system, which is very solid and deeply entrenched, you had groups of people, they're hereditary, and in the past they had hereditary occupations like sweeping the shit in the streets or cleaning up the bodies of animals that had died or various other things that were seen as impure and because of their supposed impurity they were seen as untouchable and this was a because of the rules around caste and their rigidity with which one does not marry outside one's caste, the caste that one is born into is the caste that one grows up with.

[07:58]

And this is only now beginning to shift. But it's it's still very deeply entrenched and there are really astonishing forms of oppression and violence that are imposed upon these communities. And these communities are not small. Once you start running the numbers, you see that this is roughly a third to a half of the population. So we're talking about maybe 400 million people. Linda's shaking her head. You think less. I think less but still a large number. It's a large number. At any rate, there is a Buddhist movement that dates from a Buddhist revival in the middle 1950s that was created by a remarkable

[09:04]

figure, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who himself was from an untouchable background. He was quite brilliant and managed to get amassed a quite astonishing number of degrees, including a PhD from Columbia in economics, a degree from the London School of Economics, a He was admitted to the bar in England. And he came back to India and became a very powerful advocate for the rights, legal and civil and cultural rights of these communities. And he advocated for them up until the end of his life, he also realized that it was the caste system which he felt was embedded in the tenets of Hinduism, which is kind of, it's hard to say what Hinduism is, there's not any one thing in the same way that there's not any one Buddhism.

[10:29]

But he felt that certain of the social and religious rules that he saw within Hinduism were never going to allow for a kind of mobility and equality. And in the late 1930s he said, I was born Hindu but I will not die Hindu. he began to do a systematic investigation of all of the world religions and to make a long story short he came to the conclusion that Buddhism would be the most appropriate choice for his communities to take up because he saw it He saw in Buddhism a founding of rationality, of clear experience, of equality, and all of the principles that he believed would be best for himself and for his communities.

[11:48]

And so, in 1956, as he was still quite ill, he was ill and he probably didn't have long to live, he converted to Buddhism in Nagpur, the city that we were visiting most of our time, in front of 400,000 people. And then he turned around and actually gave the three refuges and the precepts to all of those who were present. And he began with that a Buddhist revival that continues to this day. Now, I can talk about this endlessly and I won't, but we're friends with people over there with a movement in India that has been really developing and propagating this Buddhism that was shaped by Dr. M.Bedkar.

[12:57]

And one of the places that I'm really deeply committed to is a school in Nagpur. Nagpur is in Maharashtra and it's kind of like the geographic so I guess the highways, they radiate from that. But at any rate, there's a large Dalit or ex-untouchable community there and our friends have built a school that's called the Nagarjuna Training Institute or Nagaloka and Nagarjuna was one of the great philosophical teachers of early Buddhism, a real pivotal figure between early Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism, but at any rate this school is a wonderful place and that's where I've been going for the last number of years and teaching there and just being with the students and also raising money

[14:20]

Quite a number of you have given small or large amounts of money which support students there. It cost about $300 a year with food and room and board to support a student. And we've been able to raise a significant amount of money. The students are about age 18 to 22, 23, so they're roughly the age of my own children, and they are really bright, really alive, and what we kind of discovered, because one of the things we did, in the morning we would teach a session, and in the afternoon we would we had sessions where we collected life stories which were in the midst of transcribing and there are about 80 students who are there for a year, they meditate twice a day, so the first thing that happens is they are taught very strong basic meditation, mindfulness of breathing, metta,

[15:44]

And first they're led and then after a couple of months they learn to, they lead their own meditation. And the men and women meditate in separate halls. They try to be careful about teenage sexual energy. It's hard to contain. And it's important. It's not like, you know, going to Berkeley High or something. Most of these young people come from, almost actually all of them, come from rural backgrounds, from either villages or not sizable towns. They don't tend to come from the cities. At Naga Loka there have been students from 25 states. in India. So they're from all over India. And while they might all be designated from scheduled or ex-untouchable groups, there's a tremendous variety in what those groups, what their backgrounds are.

[17:02]

But what's unified is the difficulty for them to acquire education. the difficulty in finding jobs, the difficulty, particularly since they come from villages, in really overcoming what is most conservative and limiting about a rural background. So when they come here, when they come to Nagpur, to the schools, really a feeling of freedom, and there's great joy among them. You can see that, those of you who saw the photographs, you can see that joy in their faces. So, what I had thought about teaching this year was to do a week on the history of, in America, the history of slavery.

[18:08]

and the history of race and to talk about the civil rights movement as a parallel history to that of question of caste and untouchability in India. And this was really eye-opening to them. They didn't hadn't really known about this. And it was interesting, as Lori pointed out, the first question, the question that came up on the first day was, so how did you end up having Barack Obama as president? And that was actually a great question. I mean, that actually set the course for what does an unfolding freedom look like?

[19:19]

So one of the things I think on the last of the next to last day, I was talking about what a non-violent movement looked like in the late 1950s, early 1960s, in the civil rights movement, which was largely in the South, not entirely. So as I was thinking about it, I realized, well, there was a very important component of saying no. No to segregation, no to oppression, no to economic limitation, no to educational limitations, no to the status quo of a kind of cultural violence.

[20:27]

All of these things demanded a saying no, no to delusion. And then as I was talking what I realized was The reason that this movement was successful, to the extent that it was successful, is that it also said yes. It said yes to community. It said yes to connection. It said yes to building alliances. It said yes to I would say, if you want, the dimension of enlightenment. And so, you know, in a sense, this is really directly relevant to our practice.

[21:35]

If you think about every day we we chant the Heart Sutra and it's very evident, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no form, no feelings, no sensations, no, [...] no. is Avalokitesvara practicing deeply Prajnaparamita. So the context of these no's is yes, yes to practice, yes to that kind of determination, yes to what is positive, and that

[22:38]

sets of context for negation, which is not, they're not really, we think of yes and no as opposites. But they're not necessarily opposites, they're actually different sets of conditions and different responses that create a whole. So, you know, if you If you have, say, a movement or an activity which is just saying no, then, in a certain way, the life is drained out of it. One no does not sustain us. It is necessary. It's necessary to distinguish

[23:40]

what is delusion, what is unwholesome, what is destructive, and to say no to that, to cut that off. But if that's all that you, if you only have no, you're not completely alive. And so you have to say yes to something. But of course, if all you're doing is saying yes, then you have no discerning ability. If all you're doing is saying yes, your thought processes, your actions, everything is pretty mushy. And you can't live that way either.

[24:48]

So no is not enough. The realm of no is not enough. And the realm of yes is not enough. In our practice, we come in here and we sit down and we face the wall so we're saying no to in a sense saying no for this time to the outside world or to aspects of the outside world we're saying we're limiting our sensory input turn it around and facing the wall. If we're facing the wall in a sense we're also saying no to a kind of fear, because if we're facing the wall we actually have to trust.

[26:02]

We're saying yes to trust, no to fear. Yes to trust, we have to trust that we are safe without you know anxiously looking around and we are by saying no to kind of the ordinary stimulations of our life as we walk into the to ourselves. We're saying yes, as in the poem, when we turn around and face the wall, we're enacting the fact that I always wanted to return to the body where I was born. And so as we face the wall, we're actually saying yes to ourselves. And this is a radical

[27:07]

wonderful act, and we don't stay there. We also, then, at the end of the period or the end of the session, we walk through that door, holding on to our mindfulness as best we can, depending on how deeply rooted it is, and go forth into the world, but knowing something about ourselves. It's interesting, this word I was researching today and I've been thinking about mindfulness in terms of yes and no. The word in Pali that's translated as mindfulness is sati and in Sanskrit it's smirti. Is that the pronunciation?

[28:08]

Yes, Smriti. Smriti. Yeah. Anyway. And something I was reading today says, well, mindfulness is not really a great translation of it. We translate it as right mindfulness, usually. But it also contains in its envelope of meaning something like recollection. and remembrance. So it's remembering where I am, recollecting all of the factors that are arising in my mind in any given moment. So what occurs to me, I really like this term, right remembrance. So remembering is like saying yes to what is arising.

[29:12]

But it also seems to me that in order to say yes to what is arising, there's a dimension of saying no. So in any given moment, is there, I'm sort of asking this as a rhetorical question, along with right remembering is there such a thing as right forgetting? In order to remember one thing by applying our attention to that, do we turn our attention away from something? I raise that as a question. I don't necessarily have the answer, but We do this in, so we just had the Bodhisattva ceremony.

[30:17]

And we recite the precepts. We recite just the great precepts, is that correct? It's the prohibitory, the temporary precepts. Right. When we have other ceremonies, so those precepts... You can call them the grave or prohibitory precepts, and that is the no dimension. That's the dimension. I vow not to kill. But then we also have but. We vow to. That's the other side.

[31:20]

Yes, that's where I was going. Small minds run in the same gutter. So when we do ceremonies, we actually always, we have what we call the clear mind precepts, which is both the prohibitory and the affirmative version of those precepts. So a follower of the Buddha does not kill, but protects life. A follower of the Buddha does not steal, but honors the gift not yet given. So for each of these ten precepts, we have one aspect of it that says no, and the other aspect that says yes. That's not exactly the opposite of the no. It's something that fills it out more completely.

[32:23]

And this is, I think, what's essential about our practice. We have to be able to use the sword of wisdom, you know, when we come in here, for example, Please, as you're sitting facing the wall, don't use the time to plan your dinner menu, or what you have to do at work tomorrow. We try to set that aside, and that takes a conscious action. at least for me, maybe not for you. That thought comes up, I set it aside. Comes up again, I set it aside. And I attend to The actual setting aside is also part of the awareness, or of mindfulness if you were, to notice that's what's coming up.

[33:38]

I'm thinking about lunch, and well, okay, I'm thinking about lunch. Let's put that aside. How is my posture? How is my breathing? there's this no dimension and this yes dimension. In the Sandokai, it says light and darkness are a pair like the front and back foot in walking. In another translation it says light and darkness are a pair. Are light and darkness oppose each other, like front and back, foot and walking. It's a false kind of opposition. It's not really an opposition.

[34:39]

In our usual thinking, we think of light and darkness as opposite. We think of yes and no as opposite. But they're not. They actually create They're actually part of the inevitable whole, W-H-O-L-E. And this is what we are doing as we practice. We're simultaneously saying no and yes. As we work in the world, we're saying no and yes. Yes is incredibly important. If you knock on Sojong Roshi's door, he will say yes after he'll say it in Japanese. What do you really mean? No. Actually, it's more transcultural than that.

[35:40]

Actually, what he says is, Hai! And what he actually means is, Oi! He says yes, and this is a practice that I've heard you describe, and I've really tried to learn from you. He will say yes to interruptions, and very consciously set aside whatever work he's doing, email or writing, and direct his attention to the person who comes to the door. And this is not so easy, you know? It really isn't. But it's a practice. Can we do that practice as we're sitting here?

[36:43]

As we're sitting facing the wall. If a thought or a sensation knocks on the door can we say yes to it, turn our attention to it for the moment that is required, and then return to your posture, return to your breath. This is a profoundly creative opportunity. Suzuki Roshi's words about beginner's mind, in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few, reminds me of, again, this yes and no, if we're stuck on no, there's a power to it.

[37:55]

But it blocks something. If we follow yes, it has a creative potentiality. I was thinking, some of you may know, I spoke before on a book called Impro, by an acting teacher, Keith Johnstone. Wonderful book. he talks about the key principle of improvisation is to say yes to whatever, if you're in a dialogue or in some improvised stage setting, somebody offers you something, you take it and go, and go forward. And what Johnstone says, which reminded me of Suzuki Roshi, is there are people who prefer to say yes, and there are people who prefer to say no.

[39:08]

Those who say yes are rewarded by the adventures that they have. Those who say no are rewarded by the safety they attain. So this is a very non-judgmental proposition. And each of us has to find that balance of no and yes. We have to find it in our lives. We have to find it in our society. We have to find it in our practice. And we need each other's help to find that. We really need We need to be able to rely on ourselves, but we also need to remember that ourself is not just what's in this bag of skin. Ourself is this whole room. Ourself is our whole community, our whole society.

[40:13]

And so we look for wisdom wherever we can get it, and then we take our stand. Yes and no. So I'm going to stop there and leave some time for for questions. Peter? Addressing the question you had about what is the dimension of no in practicing mindfulness as we sit here, would you say that perhaps that dimension could be characterized as saying no to distraction and clinging? To clinging to the distraction, yes. Distractions are inevitable. The clinging tends to be more optional. I guess so, but I guess there's an element to the relationship to the distraction, which is to follow it. I don't know whether that's clinging or not, but anyway, yeah, that's what it is. Oh, yeah, OK. Yeah, actually, you're right.

[41:15]

Thoughts are inevitable. feelings are inevitable. They are just going to keep coming up as long as we're alive. And there is nothing necessarily negative about them. But getting stuck to them, that's the clinging part. It's creating a narrative or just being caught in our minds or our bodies by that. And I think this is, again, to go back to the Ginsberg poem, this was in his really deep Buddhist period, quite early, and he was really yearning to let go of this kind of petty preoccupations and return to his body. He saw that as a path of open and freedom.

[42:22]

Thank you for your talk. I've always loved that metaphor in Sandokai, the front and back foot walking. But I hadn't thought of it until this morning about how the front foot isn't always the front foot. It becomes the back foot. So in fact, it only works if that's true, if there's an impermanence between the front and back. And so that's what makes the opposing energy actually work in walking and so adding impermanence or dynamism to the no and yes, how yes becomes no, how does it flow in that and how that works as well as an opposition. Yeah, and with the front and back foot you really can't say one is yes and one is no. you know, that doesn't work, or one is light and one is dark, if you think about your back foot, you know, we're pushing off.

[43:28]

So the energy is constantly, is constantly re-establishing itself and re-balancing itself. Back there, yes, I don't know your name. A phrase keeps coming back to me from a poem written by Wallace Stevens called Sunny Morning. And it's, death is the mother of beauty. And I think this is somehow related to yes and no. Could you speak to that? Could you say a little more about that line and what it means to you? It's in the context of a poem in which a woman is meditating about Sunday morning. She's sitting at home enjoying her morning, a cup of coffee in the sunset, but feeling guilty that she's not in church. So in the course of her inner dialogue about this, she comes to the realization that why should she not enjoy what is happening right now?

[44:33]

And so she comes to the realization that in fact, this idea of heaven in Judeo-Christian type background actually does not have image. the seed of death. There's some sort of permanent thing that occurs that does not allow for the experience of beauty, because it doesn't have the juxtaposition of death in it. So I think there's this counterbalancing notion of yes and no embedded in there somewhere. That's great. I think you just unpacked it. Now I'm going to go back and read the poem. I have a volume of Wallace Stevens right next to my bed. Did you want to say something, Linda, about that? Yeah. That poem ends with one of the most exquisite descriptions of the natural world you'll ever read anywhere, of evening and of swallows falling from the sky. It's a beautiful description of the way in which the transitory nature of everything is also the beauty of everything.

[45:44]

And also Wallace Stevens wrote a poem whose first line is, after the final no there comes a yes. Which is another exquisite poem which I'm going to send to you like the second I get home. Yeah, well what I would say, and this, I think this is, I feel like I understand this in the context of you can understand in the context of our practice in which we're dying and being reborn breath by breath and then of course we're also all dying as well and we're also all beautiful as we are living right now even as we slant towards death. There's something that makes that, I think this is what you're saying, there's something so precious in that activity and I think that that's also one of the things that's really inspiring about encountering these young people in India and people within various kinds of movements is that they actually risk their lives.

[47:08]

And they are working exactly with that kind of dynamic, and that's what makes it all that much more precious. This is just really off the top of my head, but really, thank you for that. Jean? Thank you very much. I loved your talk. And I thought about the tendency not to want to move from one to the other, from the yes to the no and back, the resistance to change generally. I'm old enough to even very well remember LP records. And I suddenly, listening to you and thinking about it, got this image of listening to the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth and having the needle stick so that the same measure is repeating over and over and over. And it ain't good. One of the things that I remember about those records is, after a while, it's like

[48:17]

That's actually your memory of that piece. I have it. [...] I have it don't know mind, and yes and no get birthed too. Right. I think that the don't know mind is the pregnant potentiality. It allows for you to move one way or the other when all of the conditions are right for yes and no to be birthed. So that's, yeah, maybe that's the third piece that we should really consider.

[49:24]

It's late and I think I will be doing a question and answer after we have tea for a few minutes. I'd like to thank you all and it's great to be here with you.

[49:39]

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