Good morning. It's a wonderful, almost autumn yet? It's almost autumn. Autumnal morning here in Berkeley. It's nice of you to come in and hear a talk and share your thoughts. for a while here, before we go back into the day, back into the rush of other things that we do in our lives. I guess a month or two back, a surgeon gave a talk on metta, or loving kindness. Some of you were here, yes? I was listening to the tape. because I was really interested to hear what he might say.

[01:02]

And it was a wonderful talk and it was a very, it was a real kind of Zen approach to Metta. Kind of not talking about it in a kind of in a more traditional Theravada or earlier Buddhist context where you would do this set of practices. You would take metta as a kind of loving kindness, as a technique of meditation, and traditionally what you would do with that technique is you would cultivate loving kindness by first using yourself as the object of meditation to direct loving-kindness and warmth and support to yourself and then you would direct it to someone who was near and dear to you and then you would move to someone maybe that you knew just a little bit

[02:25]

but not very well. And then you would direct it, from your meditation, direct it to people that you didn't know or about whom you were neutral. And then you would get to those people or beings or parts of yourself that were a problem that you felt you were in some hostile relationship with or in some kind of place where you were stuck or there needed to be some resolution and where you didn't know what to do, but you would use that as your object of meditation. And that's a pretty traditional Theravada way of practicing. In Mel's talk, he talked about it as sort of arising, meta-arising from your meditation, and in the typical Zen fashion, we do this all at once, and we don't have any objects of meditation, and we don't have any meditational techniques except to pay attention to our breath and posture, and when thoughts arise, let them go.

[03:44]

basically a warm, loving, unconditional love, that kind of feeling just naturally arises with your practice. And we don't measure it out in any kind of system. or we don't pick and choose from among ourselves, those who are dear to us, those who are far, those who are an enemy. We just kind of do it all at once. Then there's something elegant and wonderful about that, and my experience is that it works. It really works. There's a transformation that happens with Zazen where people change and they can express that part of them, that deeply loving part of them that is actually already in our nature.

[05:11]

They come to that in practice. and for other people it doesn't work because there's too much other stuff in the way and that sometimes an approach in steps, an approach in a system might be more appropriate. So I was thinking about that because I've been thinking about Metta for a while and studying some of these different approaches and also trying them out myself, particularly with situations and people where there's a problem. And, you know, I find that sometimes it works. And for the ones that don't work,

[06:13]

can say, well, the verdict is not in yet. Another practice is the practice of patience, to wait for that, maybe that's going to come to fruition at some other time. But that practice of metta is part of a system, a kind of one of the early meditation systems, actually a system that predates Buddhism, that's called the Brahma-viharas or the divine or heavenly abodes. And it's a very simple set of, you can see it as a set of values or you can see it as a set of meditations. And the second one is karuna, or compassion.

[07:16]

And the third is mudita, or sympathetic joy. Joy that you would have when someone that you know or someone that you see is experiencing themselves something that is happy. or fulfilling or worthwhile and even if you're not yourself in a place of enjoyment, you experience that joy with them and you kind of reflect it back to them and are happy for their good fortune. So those three Metta, Karuna and Mudita are kind of aspects of each other. And then the fourth one of the Brahma-viharas is equanimity.

[08:23]

It's called upeka. And it's translated as equanimity or balance. it's a little different than the others. It's suffused with this kind of unconditioned love, but it's more difficult to call up and maybe a slightly more complicated practice. And what I was thinking in the last couple of weeks was there is a dire lack of equanimity in my life at the moment and maybe I should study this and not Because I knew I had this talk coming up, and not talk to you like I really get this and I really know and I'm going to tell you about it, but study it so that I can learn about it a bit more, so that I could cultivate it a little bit more in my daily life and talk about it, hear what you think, how it works for you.

[09:49]

So that's what I've been doing for the last couple of weeks. in the spare moments. Those are the moments where I can pretend that I have some equanimity. What's been going on is we moved our house, where I've been living for nine years, from this house to the one in front, which seems like It's only 30 feet. And for some reason, it was terrible. I think because I thought we were moving to a bigger place, and it turned out it was actually smaller once all the boxes got there. And because in order to do this, everything had to go in boxes.

[10:50]

And in order to put it in boxes, you had to look at it all. And to look at it all means calling up your life for the last nine years, and once you start digging around in the attic, you're seeing your life, whatever you've carried with you, whatever made it from the East Coast to here, you have to look at that too. Like, I found report cards from nursery school, first grade, second grade, that said things about me that I felt were unfair and untrue. And said other things about me that were frighteningly accurate, you know, 43 years later, which is kind of deflating. Other things like my grandfather's college diploma. I guess I'm supposed to keep that. And other things that I don't really need.

[11:55]

And you begin to think, well, are you going to arrange your house so that there's room for all this stuff? Or are you going to arrange your life so that you can live in a spacious way? I'm sure that some of you know these questions. And that's just one of the things. My daughter started kindergarten, which is wonderful. It's a step more into life for her. And the school situation, it's a public school right around here. It's Malcolm X School, which the notion of her going to a school called Malcolm X. That's pretty amazing. They didn't have Malcolm X schools when I was growing up, but I'm really glad that she goes there. But it's also turning her over to society, putting her in the hands of something that we have less control over, and trusting her

[12:57]

but fearing for her, and not just for her, but going to the school and seeing a schoolyard full of shining kids and knowing that regardless of what I do, some of them will not make it. Some of them will endure irreparable harm, have endured it already perhaps, and some of them will emerge whole and shining and it's a very diverse school and all the kids are beautiful looking at them and you know that they won't stay that way and that was really painful to experience that. I mean I left the school with tears rolling down my cheeks and I couldn't quite tell you why, I had to think about it a while.

[14:03]

So that's just the family aspect. There's work, there's a lot of things going on and it's very hard to find my balance and I think a lot of us have this difficulty in what seems like an ever-accelerating world. So I've been thinking, again, that I should look more into this practice of equanimity and see how it works for us here, what we learn in the laboratory of practice, in this safe container of zendo, where equanimity is actually kind of the beginning and ending of the practice. Now when we do Zazen instruction, some of you probably had Zazen instruction today.

[15:18]

The first thing one of the first things that we tell you when once you've gotten through the preliminaries and you're sitting down and you're taught how to follow your breath or count your breath. And when you count your breath, which is a practice you might use for the rest of your life, we count from one to ten on the exhalations and very often you don't get past two or three. You know, you think, I'm really doing good here. I'm really learning how to meditate and how to keep my concentration. And you get to two. And you're off someplace. And so the instruction, which is the instruction on equanimity, is to, wherever you are, whatever you're thinking about, hearing, seeing, tasting, touching, let it go, come back, and then let go of whatever additional judgment that might arise from how far you counted.

[16:44]

Did you get to two? Did you get to ten? The point is, Who cares? And why care? So, right from the beginning, we're teaching this practice of letting go and this practice of equanimity in our zazen. I'll come back to that in a minute. So, upeka, or equanimity, means balance. It means being unperturbed. Literally, my understanding is that it means to overlook. And the implication, it means to overlook that which doesn't concern us. And that's a tricky thing for us. In a Theravada context,

[17:48]

ultimately what doesn't concern you is anything having to do with a notion of being. And so this Brahma-vihara, the practice of the Brahma-viharas is sometimes looked down on a little because it begins with loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and the first object of your meditation is yourself. Well, literally speaking, the thrust of most of the Theravada practice is basically negation of self. So if you have a practice that begins with reinforcing self, then it must be a lesser practice. But we don't have that problem in Zen because we're not really making any conclusive judgments about whether there's a self or there isn't a self.

[19:03]

Basically, what we're encouraged to do is not to attach to either of those ideas. overlooking what doesn't concern us. In order to overlook what doesn't concern us, we have to figure out sometimes what does concern us. So it's a tricky translation. I prefer the idea of just balance or equanimity. And in a way, I prefer the other, kind of another way of construing, overlooking, which is just looking over, or bearing witness, is taking the time, having the patience and calmness to look at everything that comes our way, not to get pulled by it,

[20:20]

or not to get pushed out of your seat or out of your place in life or your place in meditation but to look it over and be calm and also be warm about it that that these Brahma-viharas have, I think that they have metta bracketing one side and equanimity bracketing the other, is not an accident that, you know, there's this idea of the near enemy. you know, the distortion of a quality or a practice that's very close to it and throws it off.

[21:29]

So the near enemy of metta is, or loving-kindness, is just affection, attachment. And the near enemy of Equanimity is indifference or just kind of cold dullness. So they balance each other, they need each other. What you're talking about is not a cold looking over, but is one that's infused with warmth and unconditional caring. So what do we do with this?

[22:35]

How do we work with this? Our lives are... most of our lives are vibrating or swinging wildly. Some of us are fortunate to have balanced lives that are harmonious, but a lot, the human condition and our habits don't create that so much. We have to create that harmony. So, we find our mind swinging between extremes. Sometimes I feel dizzy. Sometimes I feel, oh my feet are really on the ground. Literally, I can feel them. I can feel my toes either directly on the ground or through the soles of my shoes really touching it.

[23:44]

sometimes I feel peaceful and happy and sometimes I am just awash with anger or self-righteousness. You know, that's just, those are just things that came to me thinking about this talk, you know. Your particular circumstances, joys and sorrows might be different, but the range of human experiences is not so widely different. A lot of what I've been reading, I've been reading this very technical kind of compendium of meditation techniques called with a lot of pages and print that makes my eyes ache these days, and ideas that are really hard to follow.

[24:58]

But it was written more than a thousand years ago. It was written about 1,500 years ago. And the kinds of problems that people have I mean, they don't have problems with their cars or with their computers and those things, but the categorization of emotions, of difficulty, it's the same. It hasn't changed much. So we feel like there's something consistent about the difficulties that human beings have. So mine, my particular set are particular to me, and yours to you. But if we sat down and talked to them, we'd find a lot of common ground. So I have all these feelings, and I want everything to be just so. Or it doesn't seem that way.

[26:12]

Alexander, my son, my one-year-old son, was up much of the night, last night, coughing. I felt terrible for his coughing. I really couldn't stand hearing it. But I couldn't do anything about it. I felt also bad. I couldn't help, there's some kernel of anger that he was keeping me up. Me, he's keeping me up. I have to sleep, because I have to get up for Zazen, and I have to do all this. I couldn't do anything about that either. we want to control these things and it doesn't work. I'd like the war in Bosnia to end now.

[27:15]

I'd like there not to have to be any more bombing. I'd like people who have managed at other points in time to live in harmony to be able to find a way to live in harmony again. I'd like I'd like neighbors down the block there not to have to live in a plague of drugs and in circumstances where they may have nothing to look forward to in life. I'd like that to end now. you know, this is actually part of metta practice. And the fact is, these things aren't going to happen, not right away. So the question which comes to equanimity is, first of all, for me, since I'm thinking, can I accept that?

[28:24]

And then, one wonders what would have to shift so that people, other people, could accept the pains and the joys of their own life. So equanimity is this, as we cultivate it, is this kind of pure unshakable evenness of mind. Really, it helps us to be present to whatever comes to us. But not present in a passive way. It's an active awareness. It's not distanced. It's there.

[29:26]

And this is what I said, it's bearing witness to all the life that surrounds and pervades us without thinking that anything needs to be happening in one particular fixed way. This is really difficult. I think that's why they call it bearing witness because when you witness When you witness your own suffering, when you witness those who are close to you suffering, when you witness suffering around Berkeley or around California or around the world, you have to bear it, endure it in some way. You have to create a space in your heart that's big enough to encompass it.

[30:33]

entirely. And you do that keeping your eyes wide open. This is not easy to do. And it takes, it actually takes an effort to do it. But it occurs to me that that equanimity, it's not this outside quality that we... it's not like this pure platonic kind of notion that, you know, like some ball from outer space comes down and lands and, you know, envelops us in this warm light. It actually

[31:35]

already exists within us. And the fact of the matter is that we live amid wonderful and terrible things all the time, every day, every minute. And if we didn't already have equanimity, they would be completely unendurable. How could you endure some of the things that you know are going on in the world? And, in fact, some people can't endure it. Some people Some people are raw nerves and don't have kinds of resources that allow them to accept what comes.

[32:52]

Now, of course, there's a lot of other things we do to keep ourselves, you know, to keep ourselves protected from the sufferings of the world. For all of us there are areas where we're numb or shut down or where we just don't want to hear it. That's true. But I'd like you to consider that mixed in there with all of these negative judgments that we come to have about ourselves, there is also already equanimity. You can't cultivate something that is not already within you. And the notion of the Buddha Dharma is that your nature

[34:03]

your realized nature, your connection to all life and all beings is already there. And I think this is looking at yourself in a generous and warm way, considering that you already have a real seed of equanimity to water and nourish, that might be a useful way to live and practice. And a way to accept that and look at it gives you a little more equanimity, gives you a little encouragement and allows you to more easily practice loving kindness with yourself.

[35:06]

So again I come back to how we do this in Zazen. In Theravada there are all these steps and practices and I'd be happy to show you this path of purification sometime if you want to see it. But in Zen we don't really pay attention to anything like steps or stages, we just sort of leap out into the middle of the ocean. We don't dip our toes in this kind of calm waters by the beach. So, in each moment of Zazen, we are finding a balance. We're finding it, we're losing it. We're always losing it. And then we're finding it again, and losing it. also need to remember that balance is not a static thing.

[36:30]

If you see a scale, it always tends to be swinging just slightly. If our lives are static, we're dead. That's the only time that it's static. Our lives are always swinging in one direction or another. And that's what we study in the laboratory of Zazen. We study how we find that balance in our body as we're sitting, how we find it in our breath, just with the coming and going of each breath. I think of this thing that Susan Moon's Tofu Roshi book, there's advice on breast counting that some of you may know.

[37:38]

And it says, when you count your breasts, do this for the whole period of zazen. And usually you have the same number of exhalations as you do of inhalations. And if you don't at the end of the period, then take a few of whatever you need to balance it out. You need to catch up. Which is sort of an always real statement. I think it's like the funniest idea. But in fact, it doesn't work that way. For every breath we take in, we let one out. There's this balance each time. And that we live finding that balance. And we look for it in our mind as well. We try to find this comfortable, easy place where we're doing what we intend to do.

[38:40]

We fall away from it. We then renew our effort and climb back up and find our balance again. And we let go of any idea of success or failure. Now, this is also, success or failure is also really, it's worth looking at. Failure in particular is worth looking at. I heard a talk by Thai Buddhists whom some of you may have seen here, Sulak Subaraksa, and he began his talk in a challenging way, saying, look at the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh. Complete failures. They have failed to take care of the people of their countries.

[39:42]

They have failed to liberate Tibet. They have failed to liberate Vietnam. Is there anyone here who thinks of them as failures, in that failure, which is real, and in that failure people have died. And yet, tempered by that failure, the Dharma has been transmitted. It's been transmitted to us, it's been transmitted and deepened even within their own countries where people are suffering, and it's given a real life to Dharma. How coming out of that failure might not have at all the same richness, their teaching might not have the same richness or impact if they had been successful.

[40:45]

But on the other hand, lives would have been saved. And the practice of equanimity calls us to look at both of these aspects. What are the failures or sorrows or pains in your own life or going back in your parents' lives, in your grandparents' lives, as far back as you can go? virtues and their failures create the moment that you are sitting here right now. Without that, you wouldn't be here. So, the practice of equanimity is trying to keep this in mind when you're particularly, when you're hurt,

[41:51]

or angry or in pain, to remember that you can't foresee what the outcomes or results are going to be. And so equanimity says stay present, stay with your, you know, don't try to deny that you are suffering, experience that suffering. But don't build anything on it, just experience it right now, and as it starts to slip away, which it will, let it go. And when something else comes, you accept that, and you accept that that's going to slip away again, so you let it go. And as you let it go, I think you can find that there's a kind of fearlessness that grows in your life.

[43:05]

It grows up really mingled with equanimity, mingled with your ability to accept without judging, without trying to to turn away, accept and bearing witness to what comes, you become disciplined to accept all kinds of things, extreme things, terrible things, wonderful things, and you meet them without any fear, without hesitation. You don't have to turn away from them. and you don't have to spend a lot of energy worrying about them in advance or ruling them in the past. We have plenty of things that concern us and plenty of things that are going to come, some of which will be wonderful and some of which will be really hard.

[44:17]

But why waste your time in fear, thinking about all that, when an unlimited present is right in front of us, if we'll stop and look at it? As I said, we don't look at it in a detached way, we look at it in a warm, friendly, welcoming way. The things that come to us, we greet them. In equanimity, we greet them as old friends, and as old friends run the gamut. You have friends that you're really glad to see, and friends that you're really glad to see but you're tired of after about 10 minutes. and friends who come at awkward moments and still we recognize that there's a connection.

[45:30]

We recognize that they're part of our lives and we welcome them. We give them the time that's appropriate and then they hopefully go on their way. We won't talk about the ones that stay for dinner but you know usually they do and we're sorry to see them go sometimes but we know my experience with old friends is that I begin a converse when I see them I begin a conversation that feels like there's been no gap in it even though it may be five or ten years since I've seen them last, that the connection is really strong. And you may not be thinking of them ceaselessly during that time, but when you're there with them, all the intimacy of connection comes up again.

[46:38]

And when it's time to go, sometimes, sadly, you see them go. And I think that that is the way we practice and live in equanimity. That's the way we greet our thoughts. That's the way we greet the people in our lives, the people that we live with, the people that we practice with, our families. And growing out from there, that's the way we meet the world, not with detachment. And not with, I'm not talking about accepting things in a passive way. There is work to do to make life safe for everyone. But we do that work without the driven quality that comes with being fixed on outcomes, being fixed on it turning out a certain way.

[47:42]

And when we fail, we consider that our failure might have other successes built into it, or to be born from it. And we continue again. And we continue again, sitting Zazen day after day, without knowing period after period, without really having a clue as to what the outcome is, but we're doing it together, we support each other in it, and we have some faith that there's good for all beings that arises out of it. when we feel we can't do it, we come back to breathing, we come back to our posture, and we just let this equanimity that's in us just arise easily and naturally and as warmly as we can.

[48:55]

So, I think I'll stop there. There's time for a few questions or comments. Well, I want to thank you for a really wonderful talk on, I think, transforming your failures in equanimity. And it gave me a lot to think about. And I guess knowing that you're I don't. That's why I said this. I'm driven. I have all these bad habits. But I'm trying to look at it. I'm trying to learn how to practice this. I had a question about your opinion on the utility of different meditation techniques and your experience with them.

[50:14]

You sort of started talking about that and then you didn't really say very much about it. Right. And you went into the equanimity. Right. Well, I think it's really important to settle your practice in in a very straightforward practice. People come here and some people find a home. And this practice is complete. It's got everything that you would need in it. And some people also have the kinds of minds that want to look at other things, and that's not all bad. I think it's really important to settle your practice and not to shop around, not to look for a lot of different practices.

[51:19]

I'm drawn to doing some of these practices, but what I find is that I have to be really selective and careful. if I'm going to do something, I'll do it for a fixed period of time, I'll try, I'll see what it feels like, I'll see what feelings arise, but you start reading these meditation manuals, there are thousands of practices, and any one of which might be a wonderful door for one of us or another of us. I think if you're going to do that, do it in a very careful, kind of selective way. And I also think it's good to talk with someone about it, to talk with Mel. I mean, this might be anathema.

[52:24]

He might be really pissed off to hear me even saying this, but I don't think so. There are other other things to practice, but you have to keep your focus. And the way we do that is by having this very straightforward practice that you can do for the rest of your life, and it includes everything. So I don't know if that really answers your question. I think it does. But look at where your affinity is. If something really calls to you, then you might consider that, doing that for a while, seeing how that works. I think I remember correctly in the surgeon's talk that, didn't he say, well, we'll have to do this sometime, just the meta thing?

[53:26]

He actually did say that, yeah. So I think, he thinks it's a good thing. Right, I think so too. But somehow, you know, it's to be, I guess, a plant, somehow, to do that in humans. And I think Thich Nhat Hanh really incorporates in his teaching the Theravada, it seems to me, the loving-kindness He has modified it for various methods of turning his compassion directly, I think, towards oneself. A lot of his meditations are directed that way. And then outward also. It's a very interesting combination of ascending

[54:30]

teacher in a very strict tradition, who's incorporated some of these. Or maybe they're really there in the Vietnamese tradition. They're there. The Vietnamese tradition is very mixed. It's a really Theravada and Mahayana intertwined very thoroughly. But he seems to have really opened that. You know, Mel has been talking about this from the very beginning when I came here. He was lecture after lecture on the seven factors of enlightenment, on all of these Theravada kind of systems and formulas. Not so much as trying to teach a particular other practice, but I keep coming back to what, to his quotation of Suzuki Roshi saying, we have Theravada practice with, we have Hinayana practice with Mahayana mind.

[55:33]

And that's a very, it's actually kind of challenging, it's a challenging statement. So I think, you know, we need to explore that a bit further. And I think we can explore that with him and with ourselves. Maybe one more. Yeah, something that you touched upon briefly, but I think it's important. There have been a few, perhaps a few hundred people during the last several centuries or so that have been very excellent in something like composers or poets or scientists or something like that. These people have been extremely driven by their calling or by what they had to do. they were not being equanimous and they were not doing anything that we would consider goods in practice. What is your reaction to that? Should we therefore support that non-equanimity in some cases? Well, this is a really, this is a,

[56:44]

kind of really probing question, one that I've been working with. It comes to, and I don't have resolution on it, it comes to, there's an issue of realization or actualization of your, some of these artists say, or mostly I would deal with it in the realm of art, have an incredibly deep vision, and complete vision of life, or one aspect of life, or an aspect of their work. And it's very deep. And yet, they may not be good people. their characters may be skewed. And I'm not saying this across the board, I'm saying this from my experience.

[57:47]

I've met people, there are people who are my musical heroes, since I've been a musician for a long time, who I think are really distorted individuals. And I had a discussion with Akin Roshi about this, that he actually feels like there's some separation between character and understanding. So what you're talking about, I would say, is all in the realm of understanding or all in the realm of realization. And I think the whole person, you know, a whole person, if you're looking for, if you have a value on everyone's happiness, then you're looking for an integration of the two. Certainly they give great joy, these people often would give great joy to other beings, but their own lives may be very unhappy.

[58:56]

What we're trying to do here is do both this work of character development and understanding. we're trying to find out how is this integrated. So I think this is a discussion we can continue to have. That's just, you know, first thoughts on it. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoy the rest of this wonderful day.

[59:25]

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