Good morning. I'd like to introduce Alan Sanofi. This is something new for us as far as introducing speakers who are known to most of the community, but it was a good idea to introduce those people to those people who maybe are here for the first time. Alan is one of the practice leaders here at Berkeley Zen Center and resides here with his wife years. Outside the gate, he is also the National Coordinator of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. And inside the gate, he is the coordinator of classes. So we have classes here at Zen Center. Al supervises to make sure that they are implemented. So I'd like to warm welcome to our long-time practitioner. Thank you. Good morning, Bodhisattvas. We just had the our monthly Bodhisattva ceremony, which is a venerable ceremony.

[01:08]

It might be one of the oldest ongoing rituals in the world, since it dates back at least as far as the Buddha's time, which is more than 2,500 years ago, and probably ceremonies like this where people take precepts, make vows about their lives, I would imagine it predates the Buddha's time. But in this ceremony, we make an act of confession, we pay homage to the ancestors, we take refuge, in the Buddha and in the teaching and in the community. We take the Bodhisattva vows to save all sentient beings and we take the Bodhisattva precepts which are the rules, the system by which we intend to live our lives.

[02:17]

So thereby having transformed this assembly into kind of a conscious assembly of bodhisattvas, it seems appropriate to address you as bodhisattvas. There's a story that I have from Robert Aikenroshi, whose first teacher was Nyogen Sensaki, who was a Zen teacher here from, I guess, the 1930s on in the United States, who taught very quietly and had a kind of floating zendo. And that was how Senzaki used to greet all of his students when he would have an assembly, when he gave his weekly talks. He would bodhisattvas, like people would say, ladies and gentlemen. That was his way of acknowledging each of us as enlightened beings, as beings who already have the Buddha nature.

[03:34]

Every being has the Buddha nature, has the nature of complete connection to each other person and all other life. But I also think it was his way of acknowledging that not only do we have that nature, but we have a responsibility for transmitting it. So we're not only enlightened beings, but we're enlightening beings. So we have this kind of, we have to reflect our own true nature, our own enlightened nature and nature of interdependence and complete connection, we have to be, in order to live fully, be expressing it and be transmitting it. We do that with our Zazen.

[04:40]

We do that in a lot of ways and that's what I'd like to talk about today. And that responsibility, that's what turns the ceremony that we just had a bit. You know, originally it was a precept ceremony. It was a way for monks and nuns to kind of check themselves and check each other with a myriad of rules that they still have to live by. There are something like 260 rules that a Theravada monk has to follow and about 325 that the nuns have to follow. And they would sit down and actually the ceremony that they would do, which would be twice a month at the time of the new moon,

[05:49]

and the time of the full moon would be to recite all of those precepts. It takes a while. They would sit in a circle and they would recite them. And if there were any of the precepts, some of them were minor and some of them quite major, and if there were any of the precepts that they hadn't kept during that two week or so period, before they sat down in the circle, they would have to make an act of confession to one of their company, or if it had been a major act, they would have to address an assembly of the Sangha, and that assembly would make some kind of decision about what would be appropriate for this monk or nun to be, to continue in the circle of community, in the circle of the Sangha.

[06:57]

But it was very much related to their, it was related to their interrelationship with each other, but it was about, in a certain way you could see it about rules, and what were what we're about here, if we take our bodhisattva vows responsibly, that these rules are just the ground for all of our action in the world, for our action that we do every day, for how we do our jobs, how we relate and act with our friends and family, how we meet the various circumstances that we see in the world. So it's a large responsibility. I've been reading recently from one of the sutras that we study here, the Vimalakirti Sutra, and there is a short series of verses that describe the bodhisattva's responsibility.

[08:17]

Just an excerpt from that is about what we do. what our responsibility is to our troubled world. So the Bodhisattva, during the short eons of swords, they meditate on love, introducing to non-violence hundreds of millions of living beings. In the middle of great battles, they remain impartial to both sides. For Bodhisattvas of great strength, delight in reconciliation of conflict. in order to help the living beings they voluntarily descend into the hells which are attached to all conceivable buddha fields to all the inconceivable buddha fields, sorry in order to help the living beings they voluntarily descend into the hells which are attached to all the inconceivable buddha fields so that's a big responsibility and

[09:23]

it feels overwhelming at times. And when it's overwhelming, because it's overwhelming, which it is, that's one of the reasons that sometimes we come here and we just sit down. And we sit in the middle of our sorrow, We sit in the middle of our own suffering. We sit in the middle of the suffering that exists around us and we create a sense of peace and begin the process of transforming ourselves and others. How we do that there are many pathways to doing it.

[10:27]

What I'd like to lay out this morning is just briefly from an essay by one of our ancestors, Dogen Zenji. That's him up there in that chair. He's often spoken of from this seat or that seat and often studied by us. He was a Japanese priest who went to China and brought back the Dharma as he understood it, and his tradition has come to us person by person down to this very day. So, soon after he got back from China to Japan, he wrote this fascicle which is called the Bodhisattva's Four Methods of Guidance and he wrote it for his lay practitioners, which was unusual.

[11:33]

Later in life he sort of focused in on training monks and nuns, but earlier on he had a wide lay community and he wrote this and this is quite among the most sort of social of his It talks about relations between nations, between rulers and people within families, and it lays out quite succinctly the kind of technique of a bodhisattva, what skillful means a bodhisattva uses and how a bodhisattva engages with those around her. Another way I think of this, though, just as we think of ourselves as enlightened beings and enlightening beings, I think about these four methods of guidance as not just kind of a way that we can guide those around us, but it's also the way that the bodhisattvas, and we're surrounded by them here in this room,

[12:57]

and they are surrounding us in this room. All the bodhisattvas, the cosmic bodhisattvas, the bodhisattvas who are walking down Russell Street, unbeknownst to us right now, this is the way that those bodhisattvas are guiding us. So, we guide by these methods. and we are guided, we allow ourselves to be moved and changed, transformed by these methods. And I think that, well let me, the four methods are very, they're very basic, they're things that everyone has thought about. The first method is guidance, is rather giving.

[14:01]

Giving is maybe the essential action of these four that flows through all of them. So it's giving. The second method of guidance is kind speech. And the third method of guidance is called beneficial action, and the fourth method is called identity action, or you could also translate that as cooperation. And in a sense, if giving is the essential action of this list, identity action or cooperation is maybe the spirit that flows through all of it. in each of these. So giving kind speech, beneficial action, identity action or cooperation, it's hard for the sake of convenience, Dogen separates these out and we can see some separate

[15:15]

qualities to each but it's also clear as he's writing that they interpenetrate each other quite fully and you can't really separate them out because speech is a kind of action and it's also a way of giving and giving without words can sometimes be a form of speech. So we don't need to make these distinctions so clearly. But what they're all about is about changing the way we live, changing the way we think, changing the way we act. In order to do that we have to transform ourselves. So Dogen says somewhere in the middle of this fascicle, the mind of a sentient being is difficult to change.

[16:19]

You should keep on changing the minds of sentient beings from the first moment they have one particle, means from the first moment that they're alive, from the first moment that they take up any kind of activity or thought, to the moment that they attain the way, which means to the moment that they attain, that they understand and can live within their Buddha nature and perhaps live without creating any kind of negative repercussions. But even beyond that, we keep trying to change their minds, we keep trying to change their understanding of what's around them, the way that they look at the world, so that that way becomes fully complete, that it leaves nothing out. So it's about, this is about transforming the way people think, and it's about transforming the way we think.

[17:32]

We're not different from those around us. And in order to act in a way that's harmonious with the world, we have to make sure that we're in harmony with ourselves. So I thought I would talk briefly about these four methods of guidance, and then leave some time that we can talk about it together. First one, as I said, is giving. which takes several forms. Giving, essentially as he lays it out, means non-greed or not coveting anything. And it also means giving away material help or support, giving things to people in need.

[18:35]

And it means giving the teaching. We sit here often hearing the teaching, we sit here chanting and bowing, living with the teaching, and that's one of the fundamental things that we can give and are given. And beyond that It also means giving fearlessness. So non-greed is the first, that's where actually Dogen begins. He says, giving means non-greed. It is to give away unneeded belongings to someone you don't know. It's to offer flowers blooming on a distant mountain to the Buddha.

[19:38]

Or again, to offer treasures you had in a former life to sentient beings. It means you give yourself to yourself and you give others to others. How do you do that? How do you give yourself to yourself? And I think that in a way, for most of us, we have to begin by giving ourself to ourself before we can help others give themselves to themselves. And I think that's, again, the work of Zazen. is just giving ourselves to ourselves that so many times we're in here and we're facing this white wall and we're facing various walls within ourselves and written large on those walls is I don't like it and it might be I don't like what's going on

[21:00]

in my life, I don't like what I feel in my legs, I don't like what I think I'm going to have for dinner, I don't like what I have to put up with at my job, and in each of those we're creating a separation between ourself and something that we want to put outside ourself. So the way we give ourself to ourself here is we recognize that there's nothing written on that wall, or there's nothing written on the wall that can't be washed away or set aside, so that we're just seeing whatever is coming up. We see that part of us that we don't like. We don't say that we want to get rid of this.

[22:07]

We say, well, this is who I am right now. This is what I'm sitting with right now. And silently, without any action, we bow to it. we go on, we return to our active sitting but accepting exactly who we are at that moment that's to me what means giving yourself to yourself and that reflects in this quality of fearlessness because that's where we start giving it away that fearlessness is what we give to others. We have to give it to ourselves, but we give it to others by allowing them to see us standing up in the midst of our own suffering, in the midst of despair.

[23:12]

Any one of us, I imagine any one of us here in this room, could easily tell a story of great suffering that's very close to us right now. And if we told that story, many of us, most of us, other people in this room, would be quite astonished at the courage that we're expressing by telling the story, and by living our lives and by coming here to share ourselves. Even if the sharing is silent, it still is expressing this fearlessness or this courage and this willingness to accept whatever is going on in your life, whether it's suffering, whether it is suffering with illness,

[24:18]

or with problems in your family or with your children or more social kinds of problems in the world that we see and we don't know what to do with but that are not outside us, we carry that around and our willingness to meet that and our willingness to go on with our lives and hold that question of what to do is the way we express fearlessness, and it's the way we teach to each other. And I think that that to me is the most important thing that we can give, the most important way that we can be bodhisattvas and give. Kind speech is the next method of guidance, and Kind speech to me means telling the truth in a way that leads to right action, which is not always, sometimes some of us who have a kind of drivenly honest righteous character feel like the truth is the truth and you're either telling it or you're not.

[25:49]

And often the truth is not particularly helpful. It is true, or it might be true, but it may not be useful. Sometimes it's true and you have to stand, whether it's pleasant or not to other people around you, you have to stand up and take the consequences for what you say. But very often we're kind of in this grayer area where we really have to consider not just the true facts of what we may be saying, but also, is it useful for another person or other people to hear it? Is it useful for ourselves to say it? And how are we communicating? How are we saying this? What Dogen says, which I like a lot, says, in the secular world, there is the custom of asking after someone's health.

[27:08]

In Buddhism, there is the phrase, please treasure yourself. And the respectful address to seniors May I ask how old you are? It's kind speech to speak to sentient beings as you would to a child. So please treasure yourself means that you value those that you're speaking with as much as you would like to value yourself, as much as you would like them to value you. is the way we speak to a child, the way we try. Sometimes it doesn't come off this way in my house. We try to speak with kindness and we try to speak in a measured way that's direct without speaking down or being patronizing.

[28:16]

But it's just that communicates how we're feeling so that they know how we are feeling. Not that we're communicating an idea, but just that we're communicating from where we are in that moment. Where are we present? What feeling is coming up with us so that my daughter or son can know it? And sometimes, the way we communicate with the child is with a great shout. Because that is what's called for. Because they need to be brought up short. to awareness about something that is dangerous. And in that sense, that's kind speech as well. So there are various modes of communication. But beneath those modes of communication is always, how are you with yourself? If you have given yourself to yourself,

[29:20]

then naturally you're going to be communicating with kind speech. What Dogen says is, you should know that kind speech arises from kind mind, and kind mind from the seed of compassionate mind. You should ponder the fact that kind speech is not just praising the merits of others. It has the power to turn the destiny of nations. You know, if we consider things that we have seen in the world, we can see places where kind speech has turned the destiny of nations. And we can see places where thoughtless and brutal speech has done nothing but harm. And as Bodhisattvas, we make our choice. we take our choice about how we want to express ourselves and what the effect of that is going to be.

[30:23]

Beneficial action includes giving and includes speaking and it also includes listening. And I think of this again as something that very much At the center of this is our Zazen practice, which is a practice of harmonizing ourselves. We do that sitting here and we also recognize that Zazen is not confined to any particular posture or any particular location. or any particular state of mind. So beneficial action that expresses that is what we learn in Zazen about not separating ourselves from others.

[31:34]

It's making no distinction between self and others. But Dogen says, you should benefit friend and enemy alike you should benefit self and others alike. If you have this mind, even beneficial action for the sake of grasses, trees, wind and water is spontaneous and unremitting. So how do we act in the world, whether it's through action or giving or speaking, without accruing something to ourselves without making this distinction between ourselves and someone else. And that's really hard and sometimes we can't do it. So if I act in a way to, well, say we

[32:42]

we've been regularly cooking meals at the men's shelter and that's beneficial action that helps the people we serve to live a life where they can respect themselves and just it allows them to not walk around hungry. It's very hard to to settle yourself when you're walking around hungry. So it's beneficial action in a lot of different respects. I don't have to spell that out. And sometimes when we're acting that way, we do think about what accrues to us. We think, I'm good. This is a good thing to be doing and we're proud of ourselves and we're proud of our community. That's just naturally arising.

[33:47]

So I don't feel beneficial action is not so much that you can't repress those things. They come up. But in the process of changing yourself, in the process of transformation, in the process of zazen, in carrying your zazen all through the world, you watch that feeling as it comes up you notice it and you say well there it is you know this is uh what we talk about is self-cleaning you know this is my my egoistic small self arising and you say well here you are today you know and you you bow and you go back to your action because your action is still beneficial no matter what motivation you may ascribe to it yourself it's still helping sentient beings and so you can make this effort to set aside to bow to that

[35:10]

feeling of pride or arrogance, whatever comes up, say, well, this is the way I am. And gradually, you get a lot quicker at seeing it. And you find that it kind of falls away. The more quickly you can identify it, the less you're caught by it, and the more your action becomes fully beneficial. Fully beneficial means not just serving someone, but it also means transforming yourself as well. So that there is not, that's where there's no distinction between self and other. You know, that when you're serving a meal, you're just giving that meal, and there's joy for the person who's receiving it, and there's the joy of giving it. Joy without pride or without arrogance. So finally, the fourth method of guidance is identity action.

[36:16]

And I think that this is the spirit that flows through all of these methods and it's the spirit that we cultivate in our lives. Identity action I like the idea of identity action in another translation. It's translated as cooperation, which has its own kind of usefulness and clarity. But identity action kind of makes me think a bit more. Identity action is the way, when we hear about the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, Avalokiteshvara, she takes the form of anyone that she meets. She takes whatever form is necessary or is appropriate for helping a person to transform themselves.

[37:20]

If you have to speak a certain language, you speak that language. If you have to dress a certain way, you dress that way. Beneath that, it means recognizing things in yourself. A few weeks ago, Meili and I did a retreat at Chukoji Zen Center. It was for people who were interested in doing engaged Buddhist work. And we sort of moved in and out of discussion and zazen. And one of the women who was there was telling about work that she did in Thailand with prostitutes. And she went there to do that work, and she found that she couldn't do it. She just, something was wrong.

[38:33]

And she wasn't able to kind of make the connection. And in the period that followed that, that she went home, what she saw was missing was this identity action, was looking at her own life, looking in this case at her own sexuality, and seeing ways that she had used it in the past that were very uncomfortable and things that she didn't want to look at in herself. That as long as she kept that apart from herself, she was not able to relate to these women. And I think that if you just talk about prostitution, the ways you can look at yourself

[39:40]

at your own sexuality, you can look at the way things in yourself that might lead you to, where's the pimp in you? Where's the customer in you? Where are all these parts that you must identify if they're there? They're not always there. I'm not saying that everyone has each of these, but you need to look very deeply, each of us needs to look very deeply at this potentiality in ourselves if we're really going to connect in the way that a bodhisattva needs to connect. And that calls for a kind of scrupulous honesty. This is also the way we give ourself to ourselves.

[40:42]

It's the spirit with which we give ourselves away. So this is the, I feel like this is the moving spirit. This is how you benefit friend and enemy alike by not making such a distinction, by actually putting yourself in the place of someone that you might consider an enemy or an opponent and try to understand what their feeling of self-interest might be, and then reflecting on what your feeling of self-interest might be. Now, this is not work that we so much do. You know, we don't do this sitting on our cushions facing the wall. But, again, it is deeply moved by that process of sitting and facing and letting everything drop away.

[41:46]

And when you let everything drop away, you are able to show light, throw light into various dark and really uncomfortable corners of yourself. And if you can do that, if you can, so the first part of identity action is really identifying with yourself. It's really knowing what's there. really knowing where those corners are, really knowing where that grief and sadness are, knowing what you want to turn away from, and accepting that. You accept that as it comes up in Tatha, and then maybe later you reflect on it. But as you know that, then you can turn to others and identify with them. give to them, speak to them kindly, act towards them in a kindly way, because their suffering is, in essence, no different than yours.

[42:49]

It's much the same. And I think that that is very much the process that we discover in Zazen. And the process that we discover when we talk with our Dharma friends, who are speaking the same language from the same process of self-examination. And the more we do that, the more we see that we can have this conversation with anyone. And when we have this conversation with anyone, we see across cultures, across gender, across races, we have our distinctions and we have our unity. And we bow to the distinctions and we embrace them. And we also embrace the unity that we have in just having this Buddha nature, having this essential, identical nature. So I think I'll stop there, leave there a few minutes for questions and discussion.

[43:59]

Thank you. At the beginning, you talked about changing And then you also use the word transformation. Right. How does one change someone else's mind? Or is that referring to changing one's own mind? Both. How does one change someone else's mind because I can see in myself that it is and struggle with it.

[45:05]

But trying to change somebody else's mind, as I have been encountering, is almost practically impossible. Well, that's because we're tough-minded. I think the beginning place, and I can't tell you how to do this, because there's techniques, I suppose, but they're not particularly useful. The fact is that you have to change your own mind first. You have to be working on that, or you have to do it simultaneously. The simultaneous part comes when you're in discussion, and if you're practicing Bodhisattva's identity action, then as you're in discussion, even as you're coming to loggerheads, you see the other person, and you back away. from, you don't back away from the truth, but you back away from being positional, being locked.

[46:12]

But you have to be able to see yourself. And you have to grant, if in fact I am able to change someone as pig-headed and habituated as myself, then there is also the possibility that other people can change. If I can affect the way I behave and speak, because I'm a tough case, then maybe I can be of help to someone else. That's how I see it. I have two questions, maybe they're related. Following up on Maria's question, isn't it kind of arrogant to want to or think you can change someone else even if it's for what you think of as a wonderful outcome?

[47:17]

And what if you want to give something to somebody or something and they don't want it? Right. Yeah, I think it's arrogant. It's often arrogant. But sometimes, you know, you have to act in what you, sometimes you act, it's an emergency case. And, you know, you're just there, this category Rosh used to talk about emergency case, like there, you don't think about it. You just, you just act. But That's why I think before you act to transform, how can you act to transform somebody else's mind? Yeah, there's great danger of arrogance, so you have to really uncover every particle of that for yourself and look at your motivation.

[48:22]

Sometimes you will find that it's not entirely clear, but it's largely clear, and you'll take that risk. What your motivation is, you know, and you'll take a risk, you'll take a leap knowing that even though I don't completely understand this, I've looked hard and I've looked long and I feel that my motivation is, I trust it. So it calls for a lot of trust, it calls for a lot of trust in oneself. As for someone not being ready to accept a gift, I'm sure that all of us have had that experience. Then you just take it and you set it aside for another time. When they're ready to accept and when you're ready to give without an expectation, If you're ready to give it and you have no expectation of getting anything back, then you can just give it.

[49:27]

If you don't care whether they accept or reject it in terms of how you feel, then just give it and let the results unfold. This is in one of the large meditation text, the Vasudhimagga, it goes through all these techniques of conflict resolution. And the last one, when all else fails, give a gift. But what if that person doesn't like this gift? Just do it. But you have to do it without any attachment to what the result is. That's where we really have to know ourselves. And if you're not ready to do it, then set it aside and wait. Based on our interrelatedness, this changing yourself changes other people.

[50:32]

And one example of that is surely that for me, when I'm very different, when I'm with different individuals, I find myself a whole different person. It feels that way. I think that's right. Yeah, I mean we still have our habitual track running and gradually that can change also. But it can change by looking at how malleable and ephemeral are so-called personalities. I think that's really right. We have time for one or two more. Joe? Yeah, on the receiving end of that positive way, haven't been trying to change me, or haven't been trying to fix me or do anything like that, but have been fully grounded in their own selves, and that's where the benefit has come.

[51:43]

Yeah, I wasn't advocating, I hope I should be clear, I wasn't advocating going out and changing people. That's not the thrust of this, but that's where Dogen, this is what Dogen said. He said that a mind of sentient being is very difficult to change and what he's trying to change here, this is the Bodhisattva's vow. We vow to save all sentient beings. What he's trying to do is bring everyone to realization. That's what that means. You know, when we think of change, we generally, somewhere in the corner, it's like thinking, you want them to be like me. And that, you know, I don't think that's what you were saying, but I think what you're saying is how Bodhisattva actually works transformation. I'm kind of echoing what he just said, that when we transform the world by transforming

[52:45]

I'm thinking about how you brought up children and how we deal with children and that kind of speech. And I'm thinking about some of the children that I have worked with. physical restraining. Sitting on top of the kids, not straight jackets or anything like that, just a physical person-to-person thing. And how I'm trying to think about what that, how I'm going to stop perking to that. And how I know that there were times when I did that, when there was real level of kindness,

[53:55]

That's not the case. But I also know that even in the times of loving kindness, there was a certain, there was something, a fierceness that was required for me. A loving fierceness that was required. And I wonder how that fits into what you talked about today. Dogen's not talking about fierceness, but he was quite fierce. If you read many of his other writings, I think that's a quality that we have to have. That's part of our deepest nature, but it needs to be kind. It gets so distorted in this society that we have to be very, very wary of it. But if we've been If we understand ourselves well, if we understand our motivation, then we have to honor that fierce side and be toughened and be a kind of warrior for our own true nature and for what's helpful.

[55:22]

I think it's there. It's there, it's why Manjushri carries a sword. It's why all of the, there's so many, in the Mahayana tradition, there are protectors, guardians, demons, that are, we bow to them as part of our nature. But they are, They've been well tested. They're not that part of our nature gone out of control. They're very controlled, very careful. And, you know, there are a lot of stories and archetypes about that.

[56:05]

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