Good morning. I wanted to talk today about the third jewel, Sangha practice, practice of compassion. Buddha is the first jewel, Dharma is the second jewel, Sangha is the third jewel. For some time now, in the Monday evening class, as well as the little classes that we've been having right after Zazen in the morning from 7 to 7.30, we've been reading about the Wheel of Becoming and talking about the Wheel and talking about dependent origination. And the wheel is the Buddhist description of who we are, what this thing we call self is.

[01:01]

There's a thangka that is a picture of the wheel in the community room that you may have noticed, and there are many pictures of it around. At the center of the wheel is the cock and the snake and the rooster, greed, hate, and delusion. And then the sections that go out towards the perimeter, there are six sections, pie-shaped sections, and each section represents one of the realms of existence, one of the styles of defensiveness, that we are tumbling through moment by moment and life by life from heaven, self-absorption of heaven to the overt anger of hell and all the states between. And then the rim of the wheel is made up of the twelve links that form the process of dependent origination.

[02:13]

The links that begin with ignorance and go on to our thoughts and our consciousness and our body and mind and our senses. And so it's a complicated but very intricate systematic portrayal of who we are. how we are just this bundle of circumstance, this bundle of circumstance that is partly conditioned by our senses and partly conditioned by what's coming up. And moment after moment, we're just existence after existence after existence. Of course, the major delusion is that we are somebody and we want something. And so the wheel describes the wisdom of understanding, the wisdom that we just have to work at all the time, all the time.

[03:20]

And as we've been studying this wheel, our emphasis has been more on self, what is self and what isn't self, and more on our practice in the cushion. And we haven't been talking so much about the interdependent aspect of the wheel. What the wheel teaches us is that as we go, as we are just existence from moment to moment to moment, so we are depending on everything. So we are depending on each other. So there's no individual existence. So that our whole life is concerned with meeting and meeting and meeting and meeting. Dogen talks about this from a slightly different perspective, very succinctly in the Genjo Koan. It's a very famous quote.

[04:24]

And he puts our enormous situation into five lines very clearly. To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by all things. When actualized by all things, your body and mind and the body and mind of others drop away. No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues endlessly. To study the Buddha way is to study the self. So we study the self. What isn't the self? We study how We arise and go and we study what we cling to.

[05:30]

We study the patterns that we cling to and the habits, the formations. And we sit and we watch them and we move around in relation to other people and we see them come up. To study the self is to forget the self. As our study of the self becomes more accurate, and more clear, and more habitual in this way, we begin to be able, little by little, to let go. To see it, to have a choice, and to let go. To forget the self is to be realized by all things. When we imagine that we are somebody, then we move forward and we move to grasp, to control, to do whatever we think we have to do.

[06:34]

But as we're able to forget in this sense of wisdom, when we are able to forget ourselves, then we can allow the world to come towards us as it is, without the distortion that we habitually place on it, without the projections that we're always coloring it with. When actualized by all things, your body and mind and the body and mind of others drop away. When we are able to move freely, the boundaries drop off, the boundaries between us and the world drop off and we have choice and we have freedom and we have compassion. Somebody said recently that enlightenment is just the ability to help everyone without any hindrance, without any hindrances coming up for ourselves.

[07:49]

No trace of realization remains and this no trace continues forever. And this no trace is compassion. The compassion that just arises when we meet somebody else completely and intimately. The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara with all his, her eyes on all his, her hands that is just able exactly to meet every situation. and leaves nothing behind, no sense of helping, being helped, just is there. So this is the way of compassion, our understanding based on wisdom, our understanding that we have no self, that we all are just this interrelated moving pattern of existences. Our understanding of this is manifested in compassion.

[08:57]

Compassion is the acting out of it. And so this is what This is what we help each other do. And this is the way we find out about each other and we find out about ourselves. We can sit in our cushions comfortably or painfully for a long time and then we get up and we learn a lot of things by sitting in our cushions. But then we get up and we begin to face each other and we begin to find what we didn't learn in our cushions. And when people come to practice, often the exciting part is Buddha and Dharma, the teaching and the teacher. And that's the exciting part. And it is. And usually the romance, the romance of coming to practice is located first in the Buddha and the Dharma. But then as you practice for some time, you begin to see how necessary it is to practice together.

[10:04]

and how blind a solitary practice can be. Even years and years of a solitary practice can leave big holes. So, we need to help each other. And often we sink back into our delusions just come up again and again and we try and we fail and we try and we fail and we're always looking for connection and looking for meaning and sometimes we feel very alone and very unconnected and that's that are not having really understood in an experienced way, not understood in our hearts, not understanding yet the interdependence that we live in.

[11:07]

So, I want to talk a little bit about how our Sangha practice here at Berkeley has developed. When we began, Years back at White Way, we had a little sangha there, and it was very much a family practice. And Mel was the daddy, and there were some people that lived there, and maybe six or five or six or seven people who lived in the building. And then most people just came. It had often as many as 20 people sitting a session, sometimes less. The feeling then was much more that you would just come and practice and go and that there was even some danger of having too much community within the Sangha because people might begin to come and practice Zen in order to have a social life rather than to practice Zen and that that would be wrong.

[12:16]

And then, little by little, it began to change. We just became more of a sangha and began to set sessions together. And some people would come and say, this is a cold place. And that would make us think. And so we tried to have some groups, some large groups. We would sit in a circle in the living room and kind of fumble towards more of a community process. And then when we moved here, a great deal happened. Somehow just having to come up with what at first seemed an impossibly large sum of money brought us together in a certain way that we'd never been. It did something to our organization. I remember the first open meeting we had here in the upstairs front apartment. There must have been 30 people.

[13:24]

We'd never had an open meeting like that. And I was facilitating it, and the facilitator had been nothing in the past. I mean, everybody just talked and the facilitator just sat back. And in this meeting, Everybody had a lot at stake, you know, the building was new, where was the money going to come from? And all of a sudden there was chaos in the meeting, just chaos. People wanted to talk and there were no rules and there was no order and it was a frightening kind of confusion. And after the meeting people rushed up to me and asked if I'd ever looked at Robert's rules of order. I did a lot of homework between that and the next meeting. And we were a very different group of people. So since that, and that was 78, so that was 10 years ago, I think. So since that time, we've done a lot of work on the Sangha.

[14:27]

We've made big efforts in rationalizing the process and developing the practice committee and the role of the board, and we rewrote the bylaws, and we thrashed through a lot. So we reorganized administratively. But then the question always comes, where are we as a group? and how do we work together as a very complex organism. There are about nine or ten people who live here, residents, and then Alan just figured out there are about 50 active, dual-paying members between one sort and another, 50, 60, who live in the outside, who participate at various levels. We're a very complex group of people. And we always need to think and wonder about how we're doing together. I've just finished reading The Different Drum, a book by Scott Peck, which about six different people told me I should read.

[15:38]

Scott Peck has a very interesting description of four stages that a community goes through as it builds itself into a body that has some cohesion. The first stage he calls pseudo-community. It's kind of, you know, the instant chocolate pudding that everybody gets together and it's terrific. There are no differences. It feels wonderful. You hug each other, you know, and it's just a little kind of gem miracle. But the trouble is it doesn't have much lasting power. And when differences arise, the effort is just not to recognize them. And usually there's a certain amount of dribbling out of negative negativity. You know, people talk amongst themselves about problems and difficulties, but it's not brought up.

[16:43]

It's not brought into the open. And then there's a tendency for it just to get dull because there's not much at the heart of it. And then the next stage he calls chaos. Out of that, the frustration begins to build because we can't get along with each other very long without some difficulty, some frustration, some animosity, some of the realities of our life. And so chaos erupts. and in the stage of chaos, people have their own positions and people have their own attitudes about what they want to happen and what they think should happen, their own prejudices, their own agendas. And there's a whole scene of these being, these different agendas and businesses being

[17:49]

just kind of shuffled around like a shuffleboard game and they bounce off each other and there can be quite a lot of heat and yet nothing seems to happen. It's not a particularly creative or constructive moment or time. It just seems to go on in a rather tiring way. And then comes the critical stage where at this point of chaos, a community can fall back into organization or it can move ahead into emptiness. And falling back into organization is a pretty common sequence where after the chaos, we agree, all right, now there are rules, and we'll follow the rules, and all this energy gets somehow misplaced or redirected into rather small details of living, like how the gamassio should be made, how strong the coffee should be, who keeps the keys, you know.

[19:04]

I think we've all been in meetings where there's been a great deal of passion over issues that clearly are not that deserving of passion and yet that's where we are together. And so it's this kind of, the fall back into organization is kind of a safe one. But progress, group progress, depends on entering the stage of what Scott Peck calls emptiness. It means being able to really let go of... Individuals have to really let go of their agendas, have to let go of their prejudices, which are often as unconscious as they are conscious, have to let go of everything that they're bringing into the meeting. And, you know, that's pretty hard for us. Someone who's observing that this group, for instance, is so well educated.

[20:06]

We have so many therapists amongst us. We have so many people who have read a lot about therapy and really kind of know psychological process. It's very hard to drop what you know. And yet, when we don't do it and try to live together, It's very hard. So he suggests that one process, one of the stages that a group has to go through as they, in order to get to this emptiness phase, is everybody just has to say, I need to give up my need to control, my anxiety about the outcome. My need to talk too much. My need not to listen so well. My need to be comforted. You know, whatever in our hearts we know some of our pushiness is coming to.

[21:07]

And the whole process has to get back to the self. To where we are really coming from. And we have to be willing to go through a period of major confusion and bewilderment. I mean, when we give up what we know, what do we have, you know? And we're just sitting there and hearing this and this and this and not adding it up. Just being there, which is a pretty hard thing to do. And it means taking risks. It means taking a big risk and it means being vulnerable. And when we've done that, then we have community. When we've dropped all those things, then we have a place that feels safe. And we have a place where we can trust each other and a place where we can be vulnerable.

[22:15]

and where we can have differences, where we can have a kind of graceful fighting, where we can have differences but be able to hear what they are and to live with them. Somebody said that vulnerability is perhaps the real key to any community, not strength, not power, but the staying power of a community is based on vulnerability. Whether the people who are together can be vulnerable to each other. And it's observed in this book that really the only thing we have to give to each other are our wounds, our hurts. We can't, you know, we can give advice and consolation and all those things, but we really touch each other when we give each other the wounded part of us.

[23:29]

And that can only be done in a position of safety, where we feel safe and supported. So, where are we? I think any community that's as complicated as this one just goes through all those stages. back and forth. And you can see it from week to week. I mean, sometimes we're quite obviously stuck on the proportions of the Gamasyo. And sometimes we really are sharing the centers of our life with each other. So we go back and forth. And It's a long process. And it's a process which we go through in ourselves as well as in the group.

[24:35]

But I find this, and we go back, we go back to, oh, so many people say from time to time, I wish I knew where the power of this place lies. There's some people that have power. Can't figure out where it is. I don't have any, but some people have it. Or there's some people that feel on the inside, but I don't. Or everybody else knows the right way of doing things. You know, I think that we all, in a group, have those kinds of fears. that flicker up. And we just have them. And hopefully, insofar as we are a community, we can voice them. There recently was quite a wonderful celebration of Buddhist women over in the city.

[25:43]

It was four days of about 300 women meeting together. And it certainly had all the four elements from pseudo-community up to community. I mean, there was just all this wonderful instant energy. There was considerable disagreement. But an amazing feeling of trust and a very good process that just put nobody up. And it was very careful to keep the facilitating non-hierarchical. And I think that the main thrust from that was how much we need to look at the politics under the surface all the time. That there's always, in any group of people, there's some kind of hierarchy, there's some kind of leadership.

[26:50]

But we need really to keep our eyes, as Buddhist sanghas over the last 20 years, we've learned this lesson again and again, but we really need to know what the underside politics are and keep a focus on what's difficult to say and what's difficult to acknowledge. and keep the process right, keep working, working, working on the process. I think somehow women as a minority have become very passionate about process and the under-politics, because they've watched a lot. They've watched and not felt as active as they'd like to be.

[27:55]

And so I think we've acquired a certain skill, which we're bringing back. And the other thing from that meeting that I came away with was the wonderful gift that comes from speaking. When you feel safe in a group and you feel supported and you speak, you hear yourself say things that you didn't know were in you. You know, things just come out. that wouldn't come, they don't come when you're alone. But there's a certain voice that emerges with a very empowering feeling and a feeling of real authenticity and groundedness in other people, in a community. So I think that that's what we're working on. That's what we're fumbling on about. And we have little groups happen here.

[29:04]

And hopefully they'll keep happening. And we'll keep having different constellations so we can see each other in different ways. We just keep it bubbling. I'm also aware of talking about Sangha the week before we have nominations for the board. I think that this sangha doesn't tend, I think, my point of view, and others may see it differently, to have so much difficulty with power, with a kind of vertical hierarchy, which is inflexible and not relational. But I think that our danger lies more in a kind of just habit of being. that we're rather small, and we've been together for so many years, that we just fall into these ways of, this is the way the practice community meets, this is the way the board meets, and a certain impatience if it doesn't work out that way.

[30:18]

And I am certainly as much involved in this habit as anybody. So I think it's so important for people really to step up and allow themselves to be nominated for the board and be willing to move into these positions. Last year, we, in a certain respect, didn't even have an election because there were only the number of people available to be nominated as there were open spaces. So, as a group, we're not terribly competitive about getting those positions of power. But when people aren't, when enough variety of people aren't on the board, then, you know, we set ourselves up for, well, I don't have any power, they do. So it's really important to step forward and be active.

[31:22]

And keep our system percolating. and to come to open meetings and have ideas for open meetings and so on and so forth. Well, I think that that's... I want to read one story in here, coming back to compassion, coming back to the practice of compassion. Knowing about organizations and doing our best with process and being in organizations is one aspect of compassion. And there's a nice story in here of another aspect. The story concerns a monastery that had fallen upon hard times.

[32:31]

Once a great order as a result of waves of anti-monastic persecution in the 17th and 18th centuries and the rise of secularism in the 19th, all its branch houses were lost. And it had become decimated to the extent that there were only five monks left in the decaying mother house. The abbot and four others, all over 70 in age. Clearly, it was a dying order. In the deep woods surrounding the monastery, there was a little hut that a rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for hermitage. I'm sorry, this story is called The Rabbi's Gift. Through their many years of prayer and contemplation, the old monks had become a bit psychic, and so they could always sense when the rabbi was in his hermitage. The rabbi is in the woods. The rabbi is in the woods again. They would whisper to each other. As he agonized over the imminent death of his order, it occurred to the abbot at one such time to visit the hermitage and ask the rabbi if by some possible chance he could offer any advice that might save the monastery.

[33:39]

The rabbi welcomed the abbot at his hut. But when the abbot explained the purpose of his visit, the rabbi could only commiserate with him. I know how it is, he exclaimed. The spirit has gone out of the people. It is the same in my town. Almost no one comes to the synagogue anymore. So the old abbot and the old rabbi wept together. Then they read parts of the Torah and quietly spoke of deep things. The time came when the abbot had to leave. They embraced each other. It has been a wonderful thing that we could meet after all these years, the abbot said, but I have still failed in my purpose for coming here. Is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice you can give me that would help me save my dying order? No, I'm sorry, the rabbi responded. I have no advice to give. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you. When the abbot returned to the monastery, his fellow monks gathered around him to ask, well, what did the rabbi say?

[34:48]

He couldn't help, the rabbi answered. We just wept and read the Torah together. The only thing he did say just as I was leaving, it was something cryptic, was that the Messiah is one of us. I don't know what he meant. In the days and weeks and months that followed, the old monks pondered this and wondered whether there was any possible significance to the rabbi's words. The Messiah is one of us? Could he possibly have meant one of us monks here at the monastery? If that's the case, which one? Do you suppose he meant the abbot? Yes, if he meant anybody, he probably meant Father Abbott. He has been our leader for more than a generation. On the other hand, he might have meant Brother Thomas. Certainly, Brother Thomas is a holy man. Everyone knows that Thomas is a man of light. Certainly, he could not have meant Brother Elrod. Elrod gets crotchety at times. But come to think of it, even though he was a thorn in people's sides, when you look back on it, Elrod is virtually always right, often very right.

[35:55]

Maybe the rabbi did mean Brother Elrod, but surely not Brother Philip. Philip is so passive, a real nobody. But then, almost mysteriously, he has a gift for somehow always being there when you need him. He just magically appears by your side. Maybe Philip is the Messiah. Of course the rabbi didn't mean me. He couldn't possibly have meant me. I'm just an ordinary person. Yet, supposing he did? Supposing I am the Messiah? Oh God, not me. I couldn't be that much for you, could I? As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect, on the off chance that one of them might be the Messiah. And on the off and off chance that each monk might himself be the Messiah, they began to treat themselves with extraordinary respect. Because the forest in which it was situated was beautiful, it so happened that people still occasionally came to visit the monastery to picnic on its tiny lawn, to wander along some of its paths, even now and then to go into the dilapidated chapel to meditate.

[37:10]

And as they did so, without even being conscious of it, they sensed this aura of extraordinary respect that now began to surround the five old monks and seemed to radiate out from them and permeate the atmosphere of the place. There was something strangely attractive, even compelling, about it. Hardly knowing why, they began to come back to the monastery more frequently to picnic, to play, to pray. They began to bring their friends to show them this special place, and then their friends brought their friends. And then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit the monastery started to talk more and more of the old monks, and after a while, one asked if he could join them, and then another, and then another. So within a few years, the monastery had once again become a thriving order, and thanks to the rabbi's gift, a vibrant center of light and spirituality in the realm. Thank you.

[38:14]

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