Well, welcome to the first class for aspects of practice in our discussion of the Paramitas. I wasn't one of the people who got together, as Jerry said, the seniors did, to divvy up which of the Paramitas they would take. But if I had, this would have been my choice. So this has worked out really well. And I thought as I tend to see the classes as something that's more informational and a little more scholarly than the way that we do lectures. So that's gonna be my orientation. If I take us too far off course, you'll start ho-humming or asking me other questions and we can correct. But I wanted to start the evening by giving a couple of examples of this paramita, sila paramita, the paramita of ethical conduct, to give a perspective.

[01:04]

I had, about six weeks ago now, I got a phone call when I was at work that my dog had been found hit on the freeway. And as things unfolded, it became evident that my dog walker had made several errors in judgment, some professional and some from a lack of understanding dogs. And what arose in me was an immediate response to go take care of my dog and to be kind to the dog walker. It was just so inherent. I didn't have a lot of questions about why, what the errors were, where the responsibility lay. I just knew that I had to take care of my dog and I knew someone who cared about what she did had made a terrible series of mistakes and that she would feel that deeply without any commentary from me.

[02:07]

And I realized, I was kind of surprised, those of you who've known me over time know I have a fairly reactive and judgmental mind as a kind of baseline. None of that came up. What came up was just what needed to be taken care of in the whole situation. And I realized that that was truly a manifestation of meditation practice and precept practice over a long period of time. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that if I get far enough along here. But I want to invite all of you to think a little bit about the workings of your own mind in situations where you're triggered, where the question of responsibility has come up for you. After all, this is an exploration for us of how we practice with the Paramitas and the examples in our own lives. This is a current one for me.

[03:09]

I also wanted to say that this last week I listened to two very wonderful podcasts. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I get really interesting information from them. Gil Fronsdale did a lovely talk a couple of weeks ago about climate action and he included a quote from J. Stephen Gould that said, you will only work to help and save that which you love. I thought that was quite a beautiful quote and really apt for the orientation of practice with this Paramita, that this Paramita and the transformation of how we work with precepts is to generate a heart of wanting to help, a heart of kindness and of love and of caring. You will only save, you will only respond to that which you love. And finally, maybe I'll save this one for later on in the talk because it'll come up.

[04:18]

So I think both Jerry and Ross have done, and Hozon in his talk, have done a little bit of background about the Paramitas. I thought I would weigh in and touch that lightly as well about where they come from. And, uh... Because I started in Theravadan practice, I have a particular relationship with the lists. In Buddhism, there are lots of lists of different qualities that go on that point. Actually, there are a lot of the same ones that get shuffled in different ways. Somehow it doesn't make sense, but this is one of the lists, although it's not one of the original Theravadan lists that go into making up the 37 awakenings, which are kind of the heart of Theravada teaching. Theravada, for those of you, many people know what that practice, it's the kind of one of the schools of the original

[05:21]

if you will, Buddhism, the original practice of Buddha. Sometimes it's called the School of the Elders. For shorthand, at some point we got used to calling it the Hinayana practice, but I think we tend to stay away from that because it's somewhat derogatory to use that term. That practice in shorthand, really in generalities, the Theravadan practice or the Hinayana practice is more about a purification of the mind. It's more of a practice that looks at the workings of mind and how to transform mind. We start with the personal, if you will, enlightenment or purification. The ground rule is that we have to get there first before we can actually be of help to others. Whereas in the Mahayana, we start with the impulse to generate altruism. We start with the vow, the Bodhisattva vow to move to alleviate suffering.

[06:25]

And so it makes sense, the six paramitas and the way in which we study them is prajna paramitas really are the heart of how we generate the mind that wants to respond to and help others. So we all know now that the meaning of paramitas, the meaning of param is to go to the other side like a boat or a raft. You might ask yourself the other side of what? Is it the other side of our suffering? Is it to safety? Or really it's beyond our separateness. It's really not to get safe anywhere because we know there is no such thing, but to go beyond the sense of our separateness. Just kind of jump through some of this. So,

[07:34]

In the Mahayana, we talk about the Prajna Paramitas. Prajna is the name for wisdom. Wisdom, the great wisdom texts are the foundations of the Mahayana practice, the practice of which the Soto Zen School is one. The idea of this wisdom is a clear seeing that we are not separate, that we don't have a separate permanent self, and that each moment is co-created and ever-changing and unrepeatable, which includes who we are and how we are is not fixed, is always changing, has the potential for change. And we act out of that place. And so each of the paramitas are seen through that eye. So it's an evolution from a self-centered perspective.

[08:42]

not seeing from the cocoon of self or our point of view, but from this reality that's co-created moment by moment, ever-changing, and that there's nothing that's really ours. There's nothing that's really me or I. The heart of Paramita practice is also the Bodhisattva vow to save all beings. In a way, it said the story of Quan Yin. Quan Yin is the bodhisattva that sees with a thousand eyes on each of her thousand or his thousand hands. But actually, it's more than that. The answer in that koan that this refers to is that's kind of right. It's about 80% right. But actually, the eyes are all throughout. It's a way of understanding that's beyond what you can see with normal eyes, beyond the way in which we think of seeing.

[09:51]

It's that our response comes fully out of ourselves, not out of some perception like we might receive through any of our particular senses. And the paramitas, which are the perfections, are of course not to be perfect, but to train ourselves to be better, to see in responding that we, knowing that we perceive through our senses and how we conceptualize anything is limited. That's really the best we can hope for, is to continually refine and understand that we don't know, we don't know, we don't know, keep asking, that everything we see is provisional. And slowly, slowly, steadily, we cultivate what Norman Fisher says to use our imagination. The world we create with our minds is beyond our own minds, this world of imagination.

[10:58]

I think this is kind of like the seeing with our whole body to perceive the senses in the world. Norman says to see without seeing and to hear with all your senses. I think perhaps the activity of the imagination is the intuition. For me, this kind of creativity is really something that's not cognitive. It's not the imagination kind of gives you the idea, or at least it gives you some sense that the world could be otherwise. But the intuition opens you up to the mystery of what you don't know that's beyond anything that you can come up with. And that's the kind of activity of the Paramitas, I think. To do this, we have to get out of the way. I think the function of intuition, not our own creation as we think of imagination, that's something that arises when we're out of the way of what's really happening.

[12:05]

Diane Rizzuto talks about deep hope. She describes this function not as a noun, but as a verb, an activity of co-creation. deep and beyond our ordinary thinking could aspire and to hope to, our deepest wish, something more than we perhaps could even imagine happening. And Dale writes, I'm kind of giving you the pointers to all of the really wonderful and different texts that we have in our bibliography. I particularly like Dale Wright because it's a little scholarly and kind of classic as well as he's a really wise practitioner. He's a true practitioner. It says the Paramitas reassure us. that Paramita practice has no finish line.

[13:12]

Isn't that good? There's nothing to get perfect, right? We don't finish anything. It's a continual activity of creation. that the world, for that the world would extinguish creativity and enlargement and imagination so we can co-extend our awareness and understanding endlessly because of course reality is based on endless moments of interaction. How wonderful, how very big and mysterious the world is. So here we come. First, I'll stop there for a minute. I think that's all ground that's been covered in a couple of the other lectures, but please feel free at any point to raise your hand and add something. Please, Ross. Yeah, thank you.

[14:46]

I think it's a gross generalization to say that the practice of the elders is a practice that says, first and foremost, you have to get your act together before you can do anything. It's obvious that the practice of examination of mind and very sincere evaluation of mind states that come up in meditation. create, just naturally create a heart that wants to, activity that wants to be of service. It's a natural outgrowth. And in Mahayana practice, it's very clear that if we sat around having nice ideas about how we wanted to help people, but we actually didn't spend time sitting and examining sitting in meditation in an active way where we were noticing what was coming up and noticing the mind states and how they affect our activity, we wouldn't be able to behave in a compassionate way.

[15:56]

So there's a great deal of... There's, if you will, a starting orientation in one direction or along one path. There's more weighted in one direction with the Hinayana practice and it's weighted more in the other direction or another emphasis. But as I think you brought up in your talk, the famous saying of Suzuki Roshis or Sojins, I don't know which, that we do Hinayana practice with a Mahayana mind. So that's the idea of that, I think. Yes, Ron, please. Yeah, they also have skillful means in that list, don't they?

[17:00]

Yeah. So yes, please, Hazan. The distinction is even more blurred because I've had many discussions with Mahayana practitioners from Zen traditions in Japan and China and from Tibetan traditions who basically say in order to, so we're talking about until you had opened yourself.

[18:07]

So, you know, you have these contradictions, and I've heard today practitioners say, well, you can't work in the world, you know, until you have really experienced enlightenment. So, you should just say, there's a lot of ambiguity in these schools, and so they're not so clear. you know, in their sort of decisive methodology or decisive depictment of... Thank you very much. Yeah, and you'll hear in my comments that I think I read ethics as being a foundational part, a real foundational part for practice to begin with, that without morality, without some compass to point you in a direction, some value set, it's very hard to even know how to practice.

[19:10]

So let's talk about sila prajna paramita. So sila is actually translated as peaceful coolness or calm, peaceful coolness. So that makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? That there's a certain kind of evenness, a certain kind of evenness that goes into being able to live in an ethical way. where our opinions and judgments are not on fire. And it just comes up to me to say, I remember when I had a very difficult decision to make many years ago about whether or not to keep a pregnancy, I spent a month, twice a day sitting, practicing with equanimity, which is a peaceful and coolness kind of practice in order to make the best judgment that I could about what to do.

[20:17]

That's my way of touching into this practice as a practice of being even. The original Buddhism and Theravadan Buddhism, ethics is actually considered one of the three foundations, one of the three baskets of the Tripitaka. There's meditation, there's the scriptures and there's the Vinaya or ethical practice. And so this has been considered one of the essential components from the very beginning. And although we say that generosity is the first of the paramitas, I think of generosity as opening the heart and setting an attitude of connection and selflessness. However, it's sila, which is considered the foundational practice for a deep examination of our intentions.

[21:24]

That's why I think this is celebrated in such a wonderful way to begin our practice period, to see how our intentions impact our actions and create our behavior going forward. That's the basis of the conduct of our life. So wise and compassionate life as a Buddhist really is based on ethics or morality. So you might think, well, ethics raises a lot of questions about right and wrong and good and bad and control, and we can get quite attached to the notion of these. A lot of resistance when people begin to study the precepts. We'll touch on precepts very lightly tonight. The question comes up, is there a right or wrong way to practice? And as we find when we study precepts and as we practice, it's really through the eye of wisdom that we understand that there is no absolute right or wrong.

[22:26]

There's no way to say in a proscriptive way what's right or wrong. That it's very situational and dependent on many different factors. Akin Roshi likes to talk about the valence between precepts and our vow in practice. So the precepts are a code of ethical conduct and the vow is what is, if you will, the brightness or the the granting aspect of it, it's the aspirational aspect, the aspect that helps us to use our imagination to have that hope or aspiration that's much larger and we set our preset practice, if you will, in the midst of that. Precepts do on the face seem to be restrictive or prohibitive and have a sharp edge, but vow is universal, upholding and intimate with our intention to practice.

[23:35]

So seen from the view of vow, precepts or moral conduct are not a commandment, but a light on the path. There are steps to development in the practice or the cultivation of ethical conduct. First, there's usually looking at avoiding or not doing what we don't want to do. And that begins to open our heart to what we do want to do. And finally, we turn to joyfully responding from the basis of not harming and doing good. I think my first call to practice actually was It was in the walk-in clinic and the emergency room at Highland, which at that point in time was a big room that was divided by paper curtains and people would queue up for hours to wait to get in. This was back in the 80s. And I was freshly out of residency and working my first job there.

[24:43]

And I remember so clearly being in the room with an older man and getting called out for a phone call. I had a long distance relationship with a girlfriend up in Idaho and it was a complicated and not easy relationship. And I took the phone call and I'm sure I came back exasperated at that point in time. And I walked back in to continue evaluating this fella who had waited his hours out in the waiting room for me. And he said to me, you were just fine when you left. You're not now. And that was my wake up. I so appreciate that Bodhisattva because I was appalled that I was in a role to be of help and I was adding to someone's misery. So before I knew anything about Buddhism, it was that ethical, it was seeing that kind of ethical difficulty and violation that got me looking on the path.

[25:49]

So the first step is to avoid doing what we don't want to do and recognizing what it is. I was thinking about these three steps. Learning is like when you learn to do anything, to play music, to learn to dance, to learn a motor skill, to learn to practice medicine. First, you learn the things you're not supposed to do. You kind of learn how to do the basics and you make a lot of mistakes. And then you kind of know how to do it and you get a little bit of a flow. And then finally, you can be creative. Finally, you don't even have to think about making mistakes or not, or how to finger or place your feet, or really actually how to think through a differential diagnosis on a patient. Sometimes you just know, you can just see, you can just intuit. It's that way with mastery of everything, anything.

[26:52]

And I think that's the way we work with the practice of ethics, is that we study ourselves and our mind and the way that we We see things the way we miss things, the way we don't behave in the way that we would like to. And then we orient towards what we want to do, how we want to. create life, how we want to be kind in our speech and the way we want to be encouraging. And after a while, it just becomes more and more intuitive. And we continue to see the places of our holding. We continue to see the places where we have judgment or ideas or miss what's happening. You can only see as far as your eye of Dharma can reach. And so there's always a place that you don't see. But it becomes more and more natural to go deeply and to see, more and more natural to move towards responding from the place of kindness and wanting to help because of the study of ethical practice.

[28:08]

I'll go into that a little bit more in a second. So just a little bit of background on the ethical code to backtrack here for a second. So in Buddha's time when he originally practiced with his monks and nuns, there weren't any precepts originally. There weren't any rules. He was the example and people were encouraged by him. But as the community grew and there were more people, Little things would come up, and so rules would be developed in response to that. That was the beginning of the Vinaya. Situation at a time and situation at a time, until at some point there were 227 rules for men and 311 for women in the Theravadan communities. And in China and Korea, there are actually even more, 253 and 340 plus, respectively.

[29:17]

These days, we're a little bit more, we're a little simpler. In many forms of retreat practice in Theravadin community, when you go for a retreat practice, you'll take usually five, you can take eight, but you usually take five straightforward precepts or vows as part of it. Do not, to not steal, to not, kill, to not misuse sexuality, to not use intoxicants, and to not speak falsely are the mainstays. In our Soto Zen practice, we have 13 precepts, the basis of our ethical code. Now we all study those when we get lay ordained and I'm not going to do more than hover over them very briefly. But I do want to highlight a couple of things.

[30:22]

Dogen Zenji, in his great wisdom, added the refuges as a beginning to our precepts practice. It's really very beautiful. He sets the spirit of bodhicitta. He sets the spirit of the mind that wants to awaken, and that's the very beginning of our moral practice as Soto Zen practitioners. This is the bright heart and mind that comes to practice. It's our touchstone and our life preserver when we're adrift in confusion and turmoil in our life circumstances, or when we begin to think our practice or feel our practice is a little flabby. We haven't been coming to this end of so often, or maybe we just find that our sitting lacks a little vitality. We take refuge. We take refuge in Buddha. which is our enlightened nature. The fact that we are Buddha nature and so is everyone else. Boy, right there, what a relief.

[31:27]

What a connection. We take refuge in Dharma, which is the ultimate. Dharma is used in a lot of different ways, but here it means the ultimate truth or reality. The world and how it functions is so very much bigger than we have any idea any imagination, any hope. It's beyond Norman's imagination, beyond Diane's deep hope. It's the source of Sojin's intuitive activity. And Sangha. the whole body of community living by vow, conscious or unconscious, everyone doing their best and together we co-create and respond. We take refuge in that intention that we share. I even take refuge in the fact that everyone, even people that I, who aren't practitioners, whose speech and conduct I can't

[32:30]

always abide by are themselves Buddha nature. They are themselves my Sangha and in their own way are looking to create wholeness. Next in the line of precepts are the pure precepts. And just to touch lightly on these, they are basically the guideline for how we practice with ethical practice. Do no harm. I vow to refrain from evil. Let me examine my conduct in terms of am I creating harm in these situations? Do all that is good. Let me examine my conduct about how I want to move forward to create life, to be affirming, to be nourishing, to be nurturing. How do I do that in this situation? to live and be lived for the benefit of all beings.

[33:33]

One paraphrase my first teacher, May Lee Scott, used. So to throw myself in completely to the whole works, the total dynamic functioning of life and respond in that way. That's how we practice with the precepts and there are the pure precepts, the basic guidelines for how we act. The other ten precepts that we use in the Soto Zen are the three grave precepts. Does that mean we should stop and take a break? Yeah, let me just, thank you. Thank you very much. Let me, that will be a good point. So let me just take another, not even five minutes. So I meant to grab, meant to grab the Bodhisattva ceremony cards. It's almost full moon. Did you notice that tonight? It's almost full moon.

[34:34]

And so we get to do the Bodhisattva ceremony on Saturday, probably. So we know these usually in a more prohibitive way is how we originally think about the grave precepts, not to kill, not to steal, not to encourage, not to engage in sexual misuse sexuality, not to sell or trade alcoholic beverages, not to broadcast misdeeds or faults of others, not to praise self and speak ill of others, not to be stingy or encourage others to do so, not to harbor ill will, not to speak ill of Buddha, Dharma, or Sangha. But we also have another side to those. And maybe someone can pull out the Bodhisattva cards and remind us all since I didn't write those down. Not to kill but to affirm life.

[35:34]

Not to steal but to see the gift not yet given. Not to misuse sexuality but to cherish the intimacy, to be faithful in relationships. Thank you. I'm going to number four. That's what I said. Sure. Yeah, these are a little different in order, sure. Oh, I'm sorry, it's not on there. I'm sorry. Oh, it's not, okay, well, so much for my, so much my memory.

[36:36]

But you get the point here. That's right. Actually, I feel like Diane Rizzuto, although she condenses them, she condenses hers into eight. I actually really like her positive framing of things to take up the way of speaking truthfully. So instead of pointing at avoiding false speech, to take up the way of speaking truthfully. take up the way instead of not finding fault with others, I take up the way of speaking of others with openness and possibility. Instead of not putting oneself above others, I take up the way of meeting others on equal ground. Instead of not using intoxicants, I take up the way of cultivating a clear mind. I take up the way of taking only what is freely given and given freely all that I can.

[37:59]

I take up the way of engaging in intimacy respectfully and with an open heart. I take up the way of letting go of anger. That's more direct. Anger is stickier. I take up the way of supporting life. So I think the precepts, in a way, are a little easier for us with our Western mind to work with, to see, to emphasize the positivity. We emphasize the negative. Sometimes we get caught up on our own shortcomings and feel like we can't live up to them because, of course, we're always going to mess up. Of course, we're always going to... Some of us will buy a leather pair of shoes. Some of us will eat meat. Some of us will step on a worm instead of twisting one's ankle when we were walking down the street.

[39:02]

You know, it goes on. There are always ways that we fall short, so if we can shift the emphasis to how can I most in this circumstance be nurturing? How can I see the possibility in this circumstance? It's so much more encouraging and so much more possible and so much more heart-opening for us. This is Diane Rossetto. She's on our reading list, and I'll say she started in the Zendo many, many years ago before she began to study with Joko Beck and leads her own group in Oakland. That would be a good enough place to take a break. Yes, thank you.

[39:51]

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