Good morning. Good morning. Can you hear me okay in here? Yes. Can you hear me out there in radio land okay? Good. Thank you. Well, we've had a wonderful summer. And now it's over. It's an overcast Saturday afternoon in Berkeley. Actually, it's quite comfortable and lovely. There's some moisture in the air. Maybe we're going to get some rain. So... borrowing a piece that Taigen Leighton sent around, just a couple of lines that he used in a talk from the Ehe Koroku, Dogen's extensive record, his brief dharma talks.

[01:28]

And this is an excerpt of an excerpt just to say, the family style of all Buddhas and ancestors who arouse the vow to save all living beings by removing suffering and providing joy. Save them by removing suffering and providing joy. So I think those efforts are based on the activity of faith and a kind of hope. Maybe not the usual kind that we kind of identify with optimism.

[02:30]

There's some reflection on this by the Czech statesman and playwright, Vaclav Havel, who says, hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but something makes sense. regardless of how it turns out. So in a broad sense, that's the subject for my talk this morning. I don't know about you all, but this is a hard couple of weeks. You know, in the midst of all the trouble on the world, which is always going on, We seem to be living through a particular node of suffering.

[03:42]

So I don't have to detail the numerous mass shootings. A Supreme Court ruling that once more allows the government to dictate the reproduction. the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, which is where my grandparents came from. This ongoing civil war in Burma and many wars and conflicts. And with that, we're also experiencing another spike of COVID. And this one seems to be striking For some reason, closer to home, it may be that it's a more infectious, maybe slightly less dangerous variant, but very infectious.

[04:51]

So the people in the sangha have come down with it. We found out yesterday that my sister in L.A. got it. the wedding reception for her son, which Lori and I were going to go to and we basically just decided not to a few days before. I'm glad we didn't go. And of course, beneath or above all these sorrows is the worsening climate emergency. which ultimately threatens life on land and sea. And these are the times that we live in. Brings to mind the, actually the apocryphal Chinese curse.

[05:59]

May you live in interesting times. Well, these are very interesting times, alas, you know. And these are the conditions of the Saha world. We've been talking about the Saha world off and on in the context of Lotus Sutra, which we've been studying. Saha translates, the Saha world is the world where Shakyamuni Buddha shows up. and where, according to the Lotus Sutra, he abides. And it's the world where is contingent upon endurance. It's contingent upon the circumstances of suffering. Suffering is the, it's about the essential

[07:02]

to our waking up, at least in this world. We don't want it, but we got it. Last night, Maria Hopper gave an excellent talk, basically my talk, and borrow a quotation that she read at the end from Thich Nhat Hanh. where he says, without suffering, you cannot grow. Without suffering, you cannot get peace. You cannot get the peace and joy you deserve. Please don't run away from your suffering. Embrace it and cherish it. Go to the Buddha, sit with him and show him your pain. he will show you ways that you can embrace your suffering and look deeply into it.

[08:08]

With understanding and compassion, you'll be able to heal the wounds in your heart and the wounds in the world. So these are very hopeful. Yeah. And in the Lotus Sutra, in the chapter 16 that we studied last week, this was on Thursday, in chapter 14, which is entitled Ease in Practice, it talks about how you practice in the troubled world. And the Buddha tells Manjushri that these practices consist of bodily actions, speech, thoughts, and vows.

[09:22]

These would be called the four practices of ease and bliss. I think it's perhaps where resonates with, or echoes, Dogon's explanation in Phukhan Zazengi, the Zazen instruction, where he says, the Zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It's simply the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. These are the same things. pose and bliss, which means a kind of tranquil stability in the midst of all of your activity. So in the Lotus Sutra, what these practices are characterized as practice without characteristics, which means

[10:33]

It's a kind of meditation in action that's not defined by posture or specific activity or rituals, but is the way one can be tranquil and stable and upright in the course of whatever one is doing through the day. When I came to Buddhist Peace Fellowship in 1991, there was a lot of talk about meditation in action, about actually that our meditation in engaged Buddhism was our activity. And that was, you know, that was very

[11:37]

It's kind of entrancing. But I came to feel it was really incomplete because it was, in a sense, discounting meditation in stillness. It was, you know, Arzaza in practice. And, you know, what I came to feel from, from watching activities and from listening to people and, and seeing what was unfolding is that meditation action. When you've really, when you are continuously cultivating this kind of steadiness, this stillness, this is what we're doing here. I think that We cultivate a quiet, mindful composure in our sitting and in our activities inside this room, in this big basketball court.

[13:02]

And then we take it we take this stable mind into the world. So I think that the way to embrace this that we do, and we're coming into Sejin, in Sejin, we encounter suffering in a variety of ways. We can encounter it by painful legs or other parts of our body in the obsessive loop of certain kinds of thinking, of the doubts about why am I here? Can I do this? This is all part of the package of Sashin.

[14:08]

And I think often when we persist, particularly through a multi-day Sashin, you come to another place. You do come of stability and joy and appreciation. I think that's where my hope abides. That's where my faith abides. So, oh gosh. You know, last year, I gave a class on the three doors of liberation. We've talked about hopelessness as the third door of aimlessness, wishlessness, hopelessness as the third door of liberation.

[15:18]

That's true. And that's important. And that's one side. So that that hopelessness or wishlessness is the Sanskrit word is a pranahita. And. That means literally not to put something in front of yourself of pursuit. It's a way of pointing you to the fact that what you're looking for is actually right in front of you. It's actually within you. everything that you're looking for is right here and now, even if it doesn't seem so. And this is something that the Lotus Sutra also speaks of in a section that, in a verse section, we didn't look at on Thursday.

[16:20]

Also, I think it's from chapter 16 actually. So, begins with A description of the way the world usually appears to us. And then how it appears to the Buddha. The world. Right here. So the verse is. When beings see the eon ending. And ravaged by great fire. My land is peaceful and secure. Always filled. The gods play celestial drums and Mandarava flowers are scattered on the Buddha and the great assembly. My pure land is not destroyed, but the multitudes see it burned entirely, terrified and miserable.

[17:25]

So these are, these are kind of the, the different ways we can see our world. And so, this idea of hope, the grant that hopelessness is a practice. Hopelessness in the, I think, in the sense that Václav Havel was saying, not as optimism, but actually as doing what seems appropriate, doing what seems right, and seeing how it turns out. And this is sort of a common perspective of many of the that I attend to inside Buddhism and in the wider world.

[18:34]

Yesterday, I had ordered a book and arrived, and this is kind of why I'm giving this talk. I haven't had a chance to read the book yet. I'm really good at reading titles and some of the blurbs on the back, you know, and the introduction. But the book is called Radical Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by a guy named Jonathan Lear. And it begins with a reflection from history of Native Americans, from the destruction of the Crow people in the West. And I think I'll say more about this in future talks that shortly before he died, Plenty Coup, the last donation told his story up to a certain point.

[19:48]

When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing happened. He writes, well, So this is the point facing the end of one's way of life that brings us in confrontation with what is hope for us. The vulnerability of our life affects us all. And we are all enmeshed in a so-called civilization that is not looking so promising right now. So how do we live with that vulnerability?

[20:51]

Evidently, plenty coup by dreaming. And in that dream, He had a vision, and that vision was not attached to following, to resisting the seemingly inevitable forces of change, or to following exactly the traditional ways. So this is in line with other other people, and with what I've been thinking. Roshi Joan Halifax asked this question in a talk she gave, she says, what does it mean to hope in our fragile and fraught world?

[21:57]

And she comes to the proposition of what If wise hope is sourced in the heart of imagination and surprise. Despair and futility are not viable options in our world today. Well, they're not viable options, but sometimes they're inevitable and we have to live what we have to endure. But she says wise hope means that we open ourselves to what we do not know. So this is... not knowing, the first of the three tenets that Bernie Glassman took, bearing witness, an appropriate response. We open ourselves to not knowing and act from a place of astonishment. Roshi Joan Halpax says, I believe in hope.

[23:04]

appears through our courage to be in the field of radical uncertainty and in the space of adaptivity to things as they are. It's when we look deeply and courageously that we realize that we don't know what will happen. This is when wise hope comes alone in this groundless landscape between improbability and possibility. in this groundless landscape of imagination. And from this groundlessness, the imperative passes up. Some years ago, I was searching my own writing in reflection. And I found a piece, I did a sort of a dialogue with Rebecca Solnit at Upaya, I don't know, five years ago or so.

[24:19]

And we were kind of the different positions. Rebecca was advocating for hope and I was advocating for hopelessness. And actually, you can find that the whole thing is on his video. It's on YouTube. It was very interesting. And she's great. I have. And I think that in the time that's passed, I've sort of come more to I've come to embrace her position. It's not that I was rejecting it. I think we were just we were just looking at two sides of the coin. But I've. more in that direction, in her direction than kind of hunkering down in hopelessness. So, in a transcription, I talked about, you know, Sochenroshi or Zazen, like being, like being a flaw, a frog

[25:32]

sitting on a rock by a pond and just sitting there with open eyes, which we have in Zazen. And, you know, like a fly comes by and goes, zoop! He flicks out his tongue and has lunch. So, what I wrote was, your view has to be quite wide to see a fly coming from an... Your mind has to be open and receptive. That's, that's the mind that we cultivate in Zazen. And I think we really have, it really helps us to cultivate it in Zazen if we're to take and we need that now. So I was On the hopelessness side, it's interesting, what I read was this afternoon, driving up to Upaya with some friends, we stopped at a house in Bernalillo.

[26:53]

And we had bought burritos, which we consumed with great gusto. And this group of people, who I didn't, were asking what I was going to talk about. I mentioned hope and hopelessness. One older gentleman pulled out a wrinkled slip of paper that he carried around in his wallet. It had a quotation on it from Father Oscar Romero, who was a late Catholic Archbishop of Salvador. He was a fierce advocate for his people, for liberation. And in March of 1980, He was assassinated by government agents while he was conducting mass at church. And several days later, when as many as 250,000 mourners gathered, his funeral itself was attacked by government death squads and they killed as many as 50 people.

[28:01]

I'd written, this is what he had on this slip of paper, If you need to feel hope, you're courting despair. And if you court despair, you'll stop working. So try to wean yourself from this need to have hope. Have faith instead. To do what you can and stop worrying about whether or not you are effective. Worry about what is possible to do, which is always greater. than you can imagine. Eating lunch, we talked about this. People asked, well, faith in what? I said, I think of faith as a verb. I think of faith as an activity, not as an abstract spiritual quality. Maybe, quote, having faith.

[29:07]

means to cultivate a vow. In Buddhist terms, the vow is something much greater than I can imagine. It's often greater than what I can imagine. Think about the Bodhisattva's vow, which we'll chant at the end of the lecture. That first vow, sentence beings are numberless, I vow to save them, is completely impossible. I don't think I can encompass that vow, but I carry it with me. It leads me. It sets an intention to keep working, to keep doing what I can. And even if my vow is vast and seemingly impossible,

[30:09]

It's a deeply hopeful principle. So it comes to the place where hopelessness and merge into one thing for me and they arise in practice. I think Rebecca had been speaking about hope in the dark. And Roshi Joan Halifax talks about fruitful darkness. So right in that darkness is where vow arises. And I think this is what we're talking about. when we practice in these times.

[31:12]

This is what Thich Nhat Hanh is talking about when he encourages us to embrace ourselves. And this is what we learn to do as we sit and practice. As we sit tazan, we encounter ourselves intimately. And sometimes there's light and joy, which is great. And sometimes it's hard. So in its own way, great, because it builds our ability to, it builds our capacity to expand and include everything. And also It encourages us to identify with the suffering that others experience and not to keep ourselves separate, not to think of anything as any activity as pure, but that that suffering is out there, but so is joy.

[32:27]

In a return to, you know, the that encouragement from Dogen, where he speaks of the Bodhisattva's vow to end suffering and to generate joy. And I believe that the joy that I've experienced in this practice is to all of us. experience this in ways, maybe not all the time, and not in ways necessarily that we can hold on to, but it shifts us. This is the faith that I have. I don't know where this faith comes from. When I came to the practice, I just felt, this is what I need to be doing.

[33:35]

And I couldn't exactly tell you why. It wasn't fun. It was hard. And I let some kind of faith carry me on. And partly, I think that that faith was really deepened by looking at the people around me in the Zendo. looking at people who've been practicing for already for quite a while, looking at Sojin, looking at others, just how they seem to move and interact with each other. And I felt like the faith was, yeah, I'd like to be like that. And the faith was that somehow this practice is what would lead me into that territory.

[34:40]

I do think also that I want to underscore the capacity to the receptivity that we have, which is part of the another way of speaking of including everything, but just being receptive to whatever arises. And that includes the act of imagination. That includes our dreams. Because we're not really going to think out of the crisis that we're in. I don't know what will happen. And some of us are of an age where we probably won't see a whole lot of, we won't see a lot of years and we can't see the future. But I think that these dreams and visions and imagination is what we have to actually really value.

[35:58]

And even if we see did see the old ways disappearing. The incredible creative capacity of each of us allows for new visions and new ways to arise. I can at least sustain what's important. And what's important is not necessarily our immediate ways of doing things or running our world. But what's important is also just ourselves from moment to moment how we relate to each other. And that is deeply precious. faith that the practice leads us in that direction.

[37:07]

So I'm going to stop there and you may have questions or thoughts and I'll look in the room and also I can if you raise your hand digitally that would be and I can call on people in that in that digital space. Let me get the participants up. Any questions on Lori? I was reminded of this little known quote from Dr. King. Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would be destroyed, I would still plant my apple tree. But we see what we're doing here more imaginatively as something like planting trees.

[38:10]

And even if we got the message that nuclear war started, we would just continue to come here and plant these trees with no sense of... Could you hear that at all online? Yes? Oh, good. That makes sense to me. Because planting trees is also something, it's not just an individual action, it affects the entire environment. And we need to do what bends towards life. And so we do that even in the face of loss. Thank you.

[39:14]

Gary? Yeah, I was reading last night the paramitas because there was stuff going on the listserv, and it's funny that, you know, your talk kind of points to inclusivity, which what Technogon defines as the second half paramita. The third, I think. the shanti yeah okay right yeah yeah what we usually translate is as patients yeah i just thought what just thought i'd bring that up and but you talked about inclusive yes and suzuki roshi i'm trying to sort of which also translated uh shanti very similarly to take not on What? There's one online. No, I see that, yes.

[40:17]

Let me take one from online, which is Ryushan. Thank you, Hosan. I think you've covered a wide range of aspects that are really important and close to my heart. Can you hear me? Is she unmuted? Can you hear me? Yes. Oh, this is the last night, I think, right? Somehow you're unmuted, but we can't hear you. People online can hear me, but you can't hear me. Can't hear you. You can hear her? Yeah, the BCC. Wait a second. It may be my fault. Speak again to see if this works. Can you hear me now, Hozon? Ah, yes. Okay. All right. Thank you. Let there be hearing. Let there be sound. Let there be light. Chirp, chirp.

[41:18]

Yeah. So thank you very much for your talk. I appreciated some of the turns that you took with it, which were intimate to my experiences. I loved what Laurie said about planting trees, because for me, part of that is that we. It's so important to stay close to what our vow and our intention is in practice. And if we allow circumstances to cut ourselves off from that, then we really lose our way. So even if the world is going to be annihilated tomorrow, planting trees is an expression of our hope for life, as you say, an expression of what matters to us. And along those lines, just I'm throwing out a couple of thoughts for your reflections and comments. Along those lines also, I very much appreciate that hope and faith are very deeply connected.

[42:21]

Faith is, as people know, kind of a complicated word. And for those of us in this culture, I relate to the idea also of trust and confidence. Trust that rises out of sitting zazen. And even those of us who have no idea why we wind up in the zendo and why it's so meaningful to us, we have an experience of something settled that we recognize and we have confidence or trust in that. So the... Go on. The Eloda Sutra tends to point at something out. source of that faith, but I think ultimately it arises from inside of us and that's where we find our hope in our life is part of this greater working on things. Okay, that's a lot in there.

[43:22]

I have two thoughts. First that my feeling is that this Our understanding comes from the interaction of inside and outside, so-called outside, that still some mysterious way, we have to bring ourselves to this place and we have to sit down and do this practice. And there's an inner motivation that has done that. That's what we call way-seeking mind. And there's the outer... support from the community from the buddhas and bodhisattvas uh and so i i see it as a meeting and also just i think you know uh i should use the word confidence a lot uh i think more than he he he did from time to time teach about faith but i think the faith was was rooted in this

[44:37]

this confidence and the confidence was in the practice. So I don't see any great distinction there. It's kind of just the way we use language and what we emphasize. But thank you. I see Sandeep. Hi, can you hear me? You can. Oh, okay. I was trying to prepare. I was putting my little thoughts together in the chat. Oh, we'll put your big thoughts together. Okay. I'll turn organic. Anyhow, thank you for your talk. I also wanted to thank Gary for mentioning because I'm such a visual person and what came to mind when he said those words was... almost like we're all blind spotting for one another in a community and whenever we do that we're just kind of helping to hold multiple perspectives and balance and view and that lets in and a deep part of me kind of gets excited about that because maybe that light will finally sprout a deeply buried seed and who knows like how beautiful that flower will be um and while you were talking also I

[46:01]

Envision deeper and deeper and sprouting a beautiful yellow plum blossom. So I have hope and a part of me is in gratitude. I was born into the Punjabi Sikh community because I was kind of always brought up with the beauty of community. It's uplifting and helps us to kind of be upright as we navigate the suffering of this world. One of the key messages is to always be in a state of buoyant optimism. And it almost is like you're riding the, you know, it's going to get hard a lot of the time, but you're in it together. It's all the same message and it all takes me home. So thank you for that. Thank you, Cindy. Needs no further response on my part, I don't think.

[47:09]

Yes, Preston. Thinking about the principle of not knowing and appropriate response. I think it was the Father Romero quote about urging us to think in terms of what's effective, but rather what's possible. I'm wondering what you make of that. And like, uh, I think about all these political crises that we're in on the one hand, I see the value and yeah, not, not knowing what the future holds and, and really seeing the limits of our thinking mind. But then I also see the value of what kinds of political action might be strategic or effective.

[48:11]

So how do you think about these things? Well, I don't so much think, I guess to some degree, I think that was possible. I think I put more emphasis on what is beneficial. You know, what is, how do we connect? What do our, actually do our activities lead towards connection or do they lead towards division? And that's kind of the criterion that I use. And, you know, what I'm, in thinking about this talk and thinking about how I've been feeling the last few weeks, It's not, I don't want to discount the role of thinking because everything is thinking in a certain way.

[49:15]

But there's some, I've got to keep my eyes and mind open to some imaginative connecting leap. a leap that will, you know, lead towards connection with people rather than division with people. And I think that, you know, I just would encourage everyone to do that, to keep your minds open to what is going to build our human community or our community of beings. start thinking about what the divisions are, you can really think yourself into a corner. And I'm not immune from doing that. But I think that the encouragement, this is something that the Buddha talks about in the Kalama Sutta, one of the Pali Suttas, when he talks about, you know, don't take something as truth because I said it or because

[50:32]

you know, some wise person said it or you read it in a book, look at does it serve to connect people? It's kind of, to me, the prime directive. And I think it's very much akin to the Bodhisattva vow. And it's hard because then we have to translate that into sort of granular activity. And to me, that cycle of not knowing, bearing witness, an appropriate response, once you come to the appropriate response, then you have to, you just keep going around and you have to, we have to be constantly adapting our activities and adjusting them according to what we see, how we see them playing out.

[51:37]

But I guess I'm trying to cultivate, I have faith in the practice, and I'm trying to cultivate the hope based on that, even in the face of these forces that feel like they're very weighty. So thank you, Susan. I mean, a word that kept coming up during your talk for me is the long view. And somehow, to me, the long view is different than hope because it's not really hope for something. It involves more, I don't know, mystery for lack of sense. It seems really connected to not knowing. Yeah. And it seems to... just when you said those three things, that sort of long view helps us circle back and continue in that way. I just wonder what you think of that. Well, I often talk about, you know, and I've had to learn, I've learned to just to cultivate the long view.

[52:52]

And it's hard because the immediacy of Suffering can wash us. And we just don't have access to the long view, but it's helpful to take the long view, the long view of our practice, the long view of our community, the long view of our nation. I think that's really gets to a place where we're actually, we have to reflect on the nature of time. You know, that what's long and what's short are completely relative to our perception. So take the long view internally. It's really internally shifting one's clock. You know, the clock that you apply to your days in your life and just...

[53:57]

looking at it in a longer context. I really believe in that. Thank you. That really connected is something somebody said earlier too about planting trees because when you plant something, you have no idea what's going to happen to it based on the conditions that are always changing. But you plant something with that long view. Right. You plant a tree and it may not bear fruit for 70 years. You plant it. There's, in that act of planting, there's faith. There's faith in the natural arising of things. And I think that's part of what I think motivates us here. So last question, Mary Beth. It's just a comment from the chat box. Oh, okay. It's from Linda Hess. She says the word confidence parses to come with the day's faith.

[54:58]

Ah. Thank you very much. That's right. That's right. I should have applied my Latin, but Linda did it. Thank you. So thank you all. And just, oh yeah. So Monday morning, we're going to have a Shosan ceremony, which is a sort of Dharma inquiry. No, I hesitate. Is everyone invited to that? It's online. It's online. So it's all online. So you're welcome to come and I will be engaged. It's at 7.30. Yes, it is at 7.30. And is there, what's happening at 6 o'clock? There'll be Zazen at 6 o'clock. Yeah, here. And then we'll be we'll have the Shosan from 7.30.

[55:59]

And so it's a Dharma question and answer that we usually have in the course of the practice period. Hold on. I wonder if maybe might you review the form for people who've never... No, that'll get done. Yeah. It's, you know, it's just bring a question, you know, and also then we're also beginning Sashin on Wednesday. And I think our signups, I'm not sure that there's openings, but you can certainly, you can come to Zazen because the link is going to be open. So make your own schedule if you're not formally doing Sashin. And of course, all the lectures as usual will be open at 10.15. With that, I wish you a good day. and a good weekend, and we'll see you soon.

[57:14]

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