Joanna is a teacher. She teaches at three local universities and a scholar and a writer and a Buddhist. When I woke up this morning, many of you were already sitting here, having begun your practice. As, I think, many a morning when I wake up, I'll be sitting here.

[01:00]

Sometimes I make it to join you. And what struck me this morning, what flew into my mind was gratitude and the notion that you were doing that, just as you're sitting here now, out of compassion and out of generosity. There's a phrase in the sutras that is very frequent, Bahujana Sukhena, for the welfare of the many, for the sake of all beings on behalf of our world. And I believe that on some level that is why you practice here and why we are meeting here this morning.

[02:05]

Oh, we may think I'm doing it to get enlightened for myself. I'm doing it to resolve my samsaric hang-ups. I'm doing it to be free. But be that as it may, there is a level at which I believe if we are to really open to what is bringing us to practice and what takes place in practice. There is, at some level of a consciousness, the motivation is for the sake of our world. So I want to talk about that this morning. Bahujanas who came out for the welfare of the many and how that can sustain and irradiate and illumine our practice and continually pop up in surprise and with that gift of attention.

[03:21]

You know, that goes right back to why the Buddha taught You remember, perhaps, that after he sat under the Bodhi tree, after his enlightenment through that long vigil, when Gautama became Buddha, the awakened one, and he sat there in bliss watching the arising and falling away of the dharmas. He thought to himself, says the legend that grew up quite early, oh, what I have seen, what I have opened to, what has occurred to me, what has happened here. That's too subtle and too complex.

[04:27]

What words can clothe that? I'm paraphrasing. And if I try to tell people, and they didn't understand, I'm not paraphrasing. If I try to tell people and they don't understand, it will vex me. It will vex me. And so he was disinclined to go out and teach, say, the sutras and the very early accounts of the Vinaya. And then, according to the legend, the great god Brahma, apparently oblivious to the fact that the Buddha didn't teach whether there were gods or no gods, appeared and pleaded with Gautama Siddhartha, the Buddha, and said, Oh, this is a world of suffering. People are caught in ignorance They don't know who they are, and being caught in ignorance, they are driven by greeds and aversions.

[05:33]

They are caught, they are tangled together like muncher grass, they say. So please, out of compassion, teach. And the Buddha did. And that is what he sent his disciples, his followers, out, the same motivation. He said, go, teach for the sake of the many. Of course, notion of who you're doing it for alters as in the practice begin to journey into that realm where difference between self and other becomes questionable, problematic, full of mystery.

[06:46]

And it becomes not that easy to say what is doing the practice, and where self-interest seems to evaporate like a cloud, and is it self-interest or interest of the others? I remember when I was in Sri Lanka, sitting on a retreat, Kanthapura, And every day there was a roster, and I was in the women's hall, and women of surrounding villages, sometimes quite a distance, so they weren't surrounded, but from different villages, would come to bring us Dana, the gift of food for our midday meal. They would come early in the morning,

[07:52]

they would work all morning preparing and sometimes exquisite feasts of the coconut curries and the jambal and the wonderful pumpkin curry was one of my favorite. You can see that those thoughts were coming up in my mind. And but what blew me away was the experience all the more so since it's a very patriarchal society and I hadn't seen I'd seen monks being offered to but just women practitioners we would sit there on the bench in the dining room open-sided, just thatched roof, birds flying in and out and sitting there and the village women would come and they would offer us this food and they would offer it with such delight such celebration, such thankfulness, that their food, this meal was an expression of their thanksgiving, that we were taking the time to practice, to meditate,

[09:17]

So that's what flew into my mind this morning as I thought of these forms sitting in this room, of that kind of thankfulness that there is, and the knowledge that what happens with each moment of attention, each effort to be present, without our stories, without our scoldings and strivings and editorial comments and self-flagellation and blaming of others and being caught in that squirrel cage, to just try again and again and again to be present with that greatest gift of all, the gift to be present. and you get caught again so you make it again with the next breath to be there. Gratitude for that because these women knew, as I was feeling this morning as I was brushing my teeth, that with that effort it is being done by our world and for our world.

[10:36]

And by that practice, we wake up, want to wake up, allow an awakening to take place, and there's quite a bit of talk about what one wakes up from. Delusion. The three fetters that chase each other, Ignorance as to who we are, greed, aversion, delusion, grasping, hatred, just like in that very center of the Tibetan wheel of life. You may remember having seen it graphically with Mahakala holding in her claws and great fangs, peeling out over the top of this. the great wheel showing the different life forms, humans, animals, demons, asuras, devas.

[11:53]

And in the very center of it, there are always chasing each other, snake, rooster, pig chasing each other, representing the ignorance, the craving, the hatred, that chase each other because they impel each other. Once we forget who we are, once we think that we're separate selves that need to be protected, advanced, punished, improved, made good, then that impels the need to feed that self and craving and then that impels the need to defend that self from onslaught and misunderstanding and attack. this or that wheel. I teach systems theory this fall at a seminary at Graduate Theological Union, and I was using that to illustrate a perfect illustration of a positive feedback loop, a deviation amplifying causal circuit, otherwise known as a vicious circle.

[13:10]

What's great about feedback loops or vicious circles is with the whole teaching that the Buddha gave about teacher samuppada, dependent co-arising, is all you need to do is pull out one piece. It doesn't matter where you start. You can start anywhere. Watch your aversions. Watch your greed. Watch your notions of self. And then it can begin to unravel. So there's been in the teachings to which I was exposed, particularly in this time as the Dharma comes to the West, quite a bit of attention as to what we seek freedom from in practice, what we awaken from. I think that we're called to make a little more

[14:16]

there's room for more work in thinking about what we awaken to. And what we awaken to, the images for that, the terms like shunyata, which is emptiness, but I'm talking about a positive side of that. It's very hard to image shunyata, emptiness. But sunyata, always in the scriptures, is paired with purma, full. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master and monk and poet, has brought forward the term, he's given us in our time the term, inter-being. That's what we wake up to. We wake up to our inter-being with all life-forms, with all beings. we wake up to our inter-existence, our co-arising with all life-forms.

[15:36]

We wake up into, using another Buddhist image, the jeweled net of Indra, where at each node of the net in this vision of reality, very much like the holographic vision of the universe, each being is a jewel reflecting the other jewels. Reflecting the other jewels, reflecting, catching the reflections back and forth so that the whole is contained in each part. We wake up to the fact that we are our world. Oh, our world is waiting for us to know that. There's great suffering because We as a people do not know that yet, but we're waking up to it. And we're finding that moral sermons are not sufficient, that exhortations and altruism is not sufficient. That's why the Dharma is needed so in this time. Because we need, whether we call ourselves Buddhists or not, all our brothers and sisters and we need to wake up to our interbeing.

[16:47]

that we are our world, that the world is our body. I do not plead with you for example. It wouldn't occur to me to plead with you to refrain from sawing off your leg. Don't saw off your leg, don't cut off your leg. That's an act of self-destruction and it shows an unhealthy personality and so forth and so on. It wouldn't occur to me or to you because your leg is part of your body. Well, so are the trees in the Amazonian rainforest. They are our external lungs. In our time we wake up to the fact that the world is our body. And whether they're the figures, our fellow humans, are standing homeless in doorways of downtown Oakland, are being shot by the arms we give the Contras.

[17:54]

We can hold them in our hearts as ourselves. We co-arise together. They are our body, too. And because they are, because we are jewels in the net of Indra, we suffer for our world. And I believe that that is one reason we come to practice at some level. We are beings that are capable of suffering with our world. That is very good news. The literal meaning of to suffer with is compassion.

[19:02]

That is the Maha Karuna. And so said that scripture I cited, the Buddha went forth to teach and he went forth for 40 years. He went forth and he walked the highways and byways of his land out of that Maha Karuna. out of that compassion, the compassion in which you sit, we sit here today, sitting for our world. Bhojanasukhe, for the sake of the many. And because compassion is seen as so key in motivating the journey to the gates of nirvana.

[20:12]

It's said that nothing else will get us there. We can have all the smarts and all the diligence and all the application and good habits, pure thoughts, without compassion. Compassion is the fuel that will get us there. And so the notion of bodhicitta has become seen as key. Bodhicitta, the motivation to win enlightenment. And that the practice for breeding that motivation, that's almost an initial practice that came in at the start of the Mahayana, was a practice to encourage compassion, to enhance our capacity to feel compassion.

[21:14]

Right there, right at the start. I do a lot of work. I teach and I do workshops in this country, around this country and around the world. Sometimes with Buddhists but mostly outside the Buddhist movement. With people of all backgrounds and religions and no religions on what are the spiritual resources that are there for us. What are the tools, psychological and spiritual tools for being able to be free, to release our power, to heal our world? And I use there again and again that great gift of that practice, bodhicitta practice, and I'd like to share it with you. I'd like to share two Buddhist practices that I have adapted to work with

[22:19]

in the wider world. One will be this bodhichitta practice and the other will be the flip side of that, the great ball of merit. Now one of the things that inhibits people from experiencing their own innate compassion is fear of pain. Because it hurts, see? And we have, culturally, been conditioned to think that we are separate selves that are kind of fragile and small and we may be if pain can shatter us. So this bodhicitta practice which I call breathing through, is very good to help people realize that we are not separate, we're part of a vast web, flexible, pliant, and pain may hurt, but it won't break us.

[23:32]

And indeed, it can transform into something else, okay? So, I call it breathing through. And I say to folks, okay, here we sit down now, it doesn't matter if you've meditated or not before, but just sit straight, get your backbone in a kind of in line, and now breathe out. And because there's been tension, you've been coming to this workshop and you may be a little nervous, that's okay, just, but breathe out, breathe out the tension. And now watch the breath, just, you don't need to breathe any special way, long or slow, meaningfully, just breathe, see, and watch the breath. At any point, you can, the sensations, become hyper-aware of the sensations, that nose, throat, rising of the abdomen. And I tell them to close their eyes so that, because this involves visualization.

[24:36]

And notice, you watch that breath, that you're not deciding whether to breathe in or out each time. It's not an act of volition. Notice how it happens by itself. See? It's like you're being breathed. It's like life is breathing you. Just like it's breathing everyone else in this room. Just like life is breathing all the beings in this city this morning. And breathing all the beings in this state and on this vast continent on Turtle Island. And how it's breathing our fellow beings whether they're rich or poor in positions of poverty or great power. It's breathing Ronald Reagan right now and Mikhail Gorbachev right now being breathed like us.

[25:54]

So it's like we're in a vast web, a living, breathing web of life. Now see if you can visualize that breath like a stream. See if you can picture it like a ribbon of air coming up through your nose, down through your throat, into your lungs. And now take that ribbon of air and take it right through your heart. Imagine it going through your heart. Picture a hole, an opening in your heart. so that it can come out and go right back out again, see? So that the stream of air is like a loop connecting you with the web of life. If you can picture that, fine. If you can't, that's fine too. And now, the next step in this is to let arise in your mind

[27:05]

in your mind's eye, images, images of the suffering of beings in our world. Let them be as concrete as possible. Brothers and sisters sitting in prisons, in refugee camps, in hospitals, in hospices, our fellow beings in war rooms and school rooms and barracks, standing in lines, unemployment lines, soup lines, waiting for a piece of paper, for a job, for an exit, for a go, to come, for a place, maybe even a Partial image will come, hands around a bar, feet running through rubble down the street and hiding in a doorway.

[28:14]

So we don't have to invent these images. They're there once we lower our defenses against the pain of our world. They're ready there and as they come up and let them include also, we open also to the suffering of our fellow beings who are of other species, our brothers and sisters who swim the seas and fly the air of this beautiful and ailing planet. And as those images come up for us, what we do is we breathe that pain in on that ribbon of air like a substance, like a dark substance. We breathe it in, we take it right in. We breathe it in through the nose, down through the throat, take it through the lungs, and we take it through the heart. And don't hold on to it. Let it flow out the heart, back out through that opening, back out into the healing resources of the web of life itself.

[29:23]

And if what comes up for you is nothing, just a blankness, just a grayness or numbness, breathe that through too on that stream of air, because that is part of what it is like to be alive in our world today. Breathe that through. And if what comes up for you is not the pain of others, but your own personal pain, in any form of an abandonment or abuse or disappointment or fear, anxiety or failure, it makes no difference, you breathe that through too because that is part of the pain of our world. Now we'll have a little silence in which we'll do this and if in that time You feel any discomfort in the chest area or pressure around the heart, as if it would break.

[30:34]

Remember that the heart isn't a kind of thing that breaks. But even if it were, they say that the heart that breaks open can hold the whole universe. So now we'll Do the breathing through for a few minutes. Okay. You can keep breathing as I talk because our time is short now and there's some things to be said.

[32:12]

See, the first motion when faced with pain is to let it, not to try to fix it, but to take it through the heart, let it pass through the heart. See, we get the idea that we need to be able to make the pain go away, and when we don't know how to do that, then we hold it at bay. And we're only stuck with what we hold off. We're only stuck with what we resist. But when... Whether we're reading the paper, whether we're in an argument, Whether we be holding the anger of the townspeople out at Concord Naval Weapons Base, whether we're looking at the smog layer over the bay, just to be with it, that great gift of presence, let it take, take it through the heart.

[33:23]

You know, during the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson used to say, don't bring me a problem unless you bring me the solution to. That's the trap. We hold off responding to our world, even being present to our world, thinking that we have to have a solution first. That's backwards. We take the world through our heart first. And then, naked of defensiveness, we can be open to that great co-arising of all beings, that great inner being out of which creative response comes. Compassion. Compassion that dances with wisdom. Now, thank you, in the moments that are left, I want to just give you the other side of the coin of compassion.

[34:39]

Because that too allows us to be for the sake of our beings and for the sake of our world. One of the things I love most about the Buddha Dharma is that it perceives and names the flip side of compassion. The tradition out of which, into which I was born and raised, the Christian tradition, does talk about compassion, but it doesn't have that other side, which is the third abode of the Buddha. Compassion is suffering with the suffering of others. Then we get the other side, mudita, which is joy in the joy of others, power in the power of others. In my systems theory course, I explain that in terms of system synergy.

[35:42]

You can teach the Dharma in many ways. To the extent that we allow ourselves to open to the pain of all beings, we can open also to their joy and to their great resources of courage and wisdom, of ingenuity and patience that are there for us in the great co-arising web of life. And that is very good news because not one of us Well, I can't say that. I know that I don't have what it takes by myself. I don't have sufficient compassion, smarts, patience, ingenuity. I don't even care enough to do what must be done for the healing of our world. But I don't have to, because those resources arise, arise out of our interbeing.

[36:49]

And so, one of the practices of the Dharma tradition that helps me remember that, I offer to you now. It comes from the Perfection of Wisdom, Prajnaparamita Ashtasastrika, of the 8,000 verses. That was the beginning, also the very beginning of the Mahayana tradition. All right. You ready? This is from the sixth chapter and it's called Meditation of Jubilation and Transformation. So I give it to you almost verbatim from the text. The Bodhisattva, this is Bodhisattva training, sits there. The Bodhisattva visualizes now, calls out before her, his mind's eye, fellow beings, all the beings in this room, all the beings in Berkeley, Oakland, the Bay Area, North America, South America, the continents of this world, all the beings, rich and poor, sick and well.

[38:12]

Just picture them, see what images come to mind. There are lots and lots and lots. and our fellow beings of other species too. And now, looking out over these vast multitudes with her, with his mind's eye, the Bodhisattva, now extends that vision back through time, looking as seeing the beings, all beings, human and non-human, that have ever lived, almost like successive mountain ranges disappearing into different layers through the mist, each peopled with people, people on long marches, people on battlefields, people in huts, people in forests, people in savannas, people on islands, people in boats, people... and all the beings that ever lived. And now the Bodhisattva, having opened her, his mind's eye and great boundless heart to the presence of all these beings, calls to mind that in each life, in each one of these lives, there was at least one act of merit.

[39:34]

There was at least one gesture of love, movement of generosity, joy and service. There was at least one heroic act of caring, of healing, of giving, of rescuing, even as the scriptures say, by a mother snake to a baby snake. In each of these lives there was that capacity to be and for others and to give. So what the Bodhisattva does is look at all these deeds of merit and sweep them together. So let's do it with our hands. Sweep them up. Sweep them into a pile. Sweep them into a pile. And now, as the scripture says, the Bodhisattva pats them into a ball, makes a great ball.

[40:43]

great ball of merit. And the Bodhisattva weighs that ball in her hands, in his hands. And the Bodhisattva beholds it in jubilation and thanksgiving because the Bodhisattva knows that no act of goodness or courage is ever lost. It is a present and ever resource for us all. the nobility of a Martin Luther King, the humanity of a Mahatma Gandhi, the guts of a Dorothy Day. They're all there and countless others. They are there, a present and always resource in the jeweled net of Indra, in the co-arising of all beings in our inner being. And knowing that, the Bodhisattva takes that ball, you got it now?

[41:47]

Takes that ball and turns it over into the healing of our world. There are many ways to turn that over. The word is parinamana. Many ways to turn over the gifts of all beings. Those gifts are part of what brings you to practice. And you can turn them over as you go out into the world every day. Every moment, letting the courage of a Gandhi, the love of a Jesus, the great compassion of Gautama and Ananda and Sariputra and Magala just move through you, see?

[42:49]

And I like that because that means we don't have to be good or self-righteous. Just let it through. Thank you very much.

[43:01]

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