Well, I wanted to talk this morning. I'll start off by telling you how I put this little talk together. I find I need structure, and I don't have too many questions, usually, to talk about. So what I did is I have a book of lists, Buddhist lists, and I looked through the lists of fours, and I found a lot of very interesting lists, a lot of interesting fours, a lot of different things. And it seemed to me that that wasn't a bad way to do it, to just take a few of the little lists, the little categories, whatever you want to call it, that Buddhists have put together over the centuries, kind of stick them together and talk about something that's been bothering me a little bit. As most of you know, I mention every time I sit up here, I take the Santa Cruz Comic News, that's my newspaper. And they had another cartoon that kind of got me the other day. It was a little picture of three panels.

[01:04]

And it was the globe in each panel. You know, just the Earth, the planet Earth sitting down there. And then there was a question. It was like a questionnaire. It had a little box to check. And it said, what should be the goal of our space program? And the first one said, exploration. And the next one said, experimentation and had a picture of the space shuttle up there. And then the third one showed the Earth with kind of things puffing out all over it, beer cans and everything else, and it said evacuation. And sometimes I think it feels like that to us, you know. I think we get worried about the way our world is and what's been happening to it and what continues to happen to it and what can happen to us. And of course, that can also be a metaphor for our lives, too. I think sometimes we'd like to evacuate our lives. And Buddhism has talked about this. I mean, this is what Buddhism is about, you know, is your life. And so the first thing I want to talk about, the first set of four, sometimes it's only a set of three.

[02:11]

It's called the Four or the Three Marks of Conditioned Existence. And these are impermanence, suffering, no self, and impurity. Impurity is the one that's sometimes on, sometimes not. So I don't really intend to talk about impurity. I'll leave that for the purists. But these marks of the conditioned existence, or just the four marks of existence, are pretty important. Most of us have chanted the Heart Sutra in English, and so you're going to hear a lot of phrases here that you chant in the Heart Sutra. For example, the opposite of the four marks of conditioned existence or the what you want to call the four perverted views and what they are is looking at existence but seeing it in a perverted manner, seeing it backwards or something so that when people see impermanence they mistake that for permanence and when they see suffering they really think they're at ease and they think they have a self and

[03:23]

When they see impurity, they think they're really looking at beauty or purity. And this actually did happen in some of the old Buddhist schools with beauty. They began to meditate on ugliness. They would go to graveyards and meditate on corpses and things like this. And after a while, they began to get it all backwards. And they were talking about the beauty. Beauty is really ugliness, and ugliness is really beauty. And it got all messed up. We don't need to get quite that bad, you know. We can be careful. But those are the four perverted views. It's just to find in existence, as it really is, to find it to be just the opposite of what it is. So many times people think they're happy when they're really, really having an awful time. And this is, I think, one of the reasons why a lot of us chase things for much of our life and then suddenly come to the conclusion that, oh yeah, I'm dissatisfied with my life. I'm not too happy, you know. And I think that's the reason that most of us come to this practice, is some dissatisfaction with our lives.

[04:28]

When you look at the three marks of conditioned existence, impermanence, suffering, and no-self, take suffering first. And suffering breaks down into three kinds, basically. Ordinary suffering, which is the kind we know about, which is the kind pain, illness, old age, death, bad situations of any kind that just causes to feel unhappy, feel pain. That's ordinary suffering. Most of us know about that, I think. I don't think there's anybody here that doesn't know about that. And then the second kind is what is called suffering produced by change. And this kind of suffering is what we usually think of as happiness. We didn't leave that out, you know, in suffering, which is called dukkha. in Sanskrit. When we're happy, we're really happy. You know, we can have joy in this life. We all know that too.

[05:31]

We are happy. But if we look deeply into it, we realize that someday that happiness or that joy or whatever the situation is going to end. We're not going to have anymore and we want to hang on to it. And so we sort of taint that joy with our worries about this change that's coming when we won't have anymore. So we try to hang on to it and we get desperate and then it's not so happy anymore. Then it's just desperate. So this is the other kind of suffering that we have. It's a suffering that comes even though we have happy moments. There's no doubt about that. We can be very happy and we can have joy. Most of the time, somewhere along the line, we realize it's going to end and it makes us sad. So that's the second kind of suffering. And the third kind is the suffering which comes from conditioned states. And this is the one that we don't know too much about. Those first two are pretty obvious to us. I think most of us know about that. And conditioned states, this is the same as the five skandhas.

[06:33]

Once again, you know, you chant the Heart Sutra all the time, and in there we talk about the five skandhas. Or maybe we don't say it. Yeah, we do. Avalokiteshvara, you know, meditating on the five skandhas, he saw that they were empty. And the five skandhas are also enumerated in the Heart Sutra. I think this will, you know, ring a bell with most of you. Form. Yeah, that's one. That's the first one. And feelings, perceptions, formations, although it's mental formations, to give it its whole name, and consciousness. And what this is, very basically, is the four elements. Form, the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. And if you want to, if you're really scientific about all this, you can substitute the periodic table of elements for that if you like. But basically, you know, the four elements, material, this stuff, and the five sense organs, you know, the ones we, you know, sight.

[07:35]

Well, sense organs are not sight. Sense organs are eyes, nose, tongue, touch, and hearing. And the objects of those. In other words, sound, color, that sort of thing. That's what form is. So that's the first part of conditioned state. That's the first skanda. And the second one is feelings. And feelings can be either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. And those, of course, are the feelings that come through the eye, ear, nose, tongue, touch, and the mind. We have really six, according to Buddhism. We add the mind at this point. The mind is that which generates thoughts. So the object of the mind is thoughts. So it's the faculty of mind and the contact with those visible forms of thoughts that causes these feelings of pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral.

[08:36]

And then perceptions, which is contact with the world through the six faculties, the actual contact, we perceive something. If we see the candle, we realize the candle is yellow. That's perception. It's the yellow of the candle. And then we have mental formations. This is samskara in Sanskrit. It's a word. And what it means is together makers. It's kind of an interesting word, together makers. These are the six internal faculties and their six objects, both internal, you know, physical and mental. And so, what this is, mental formations are active dispositions, tendencies, impulses, volitions, strivings, those kinds of things. You know, attention, will, energy, desire, hate, conceit, an idea of self. These things all come from mental formations.

[09:38]

These are your ideas. And this is the place where karma takes place. We don't want to talk about that today. We can help it because that's a whole subject by itself. But this is where karma happens. This is where volitional activity begins, is in mental formations. And then finally is consciousness. That's the fifth skanda. And this is the response or reaction based on the six faculties. It implies a separation between subject and object and between object and object. I mean, this is all implicit in consciousness. But it's awareness only. No recognition in the sense that, you know, you hear a musical note or you see a color. That's up to perception. Perception sees yellow or hears high C. But consciousness is just aware. Something that doesn't name it, doesn't worry about it in that sense. So these five skandhas make up what we call ourselves. This is the I that we all identify with.

[10:42]

And these various skandhas, these various facets, whatever you want to call these things, change from time to time. They're always changing, constantly changing. And so there really is no permanent self in that sense because it's always changing. There are always these heaps. That's what skandhas also translates as, is heaps. And we're taking a little bit out of the heap all the time, you know, making something we call I. And then we put a little bit back in the heap and we take something else. We're doing this all the time. So there really is no self that continues from moment to moment. But yet we have some continuity in our lives. And so the way we look at that is, again, to look at a flame and say that the flame that's burning now is not the flame that was burning when we lit the candle, but it's not different either. It can be both. It is both. This is probably where it gets most difficult in Buddhism, is that Buddhism is a dialectic and it just says that it's going to do away with the law of contradiction.

[11:55]

You know, that's the one that says, if A is A, then A cannot be non-A. Well, Buddhism doesn't say that at all. In Buddhism, A is A and A is also non-A. And that's what we sit with quite a bit, I think. So what I wanted to do with these skandhas was, you know, to give you some background. This is all very, very basic fundamental Buddhism. And I think probably, you know, to one degree or another, everybody here is familiar with that. So that there really is no self. We really are impermanent. And in a very real way, we're suffering. Even though we're not suffering constantly, it comes close sometimes. Some people suffer a lot, some people don't suffer so much, but everybody suffers. And some of the, well one of the things that, I also saw another cartoon, it was a week for having cartoons of the Earth, there was another cartoon there and it showed this, again the planet Earth,

[13:02]

They had a caption over the top that said, human pranks. And then it had a bubble coming off it, you know, a speech bubble. And it said, hey, let's see how many people we can get on this thing before we wreck it. Yeah. And we seem to be doing that pretty well. And that's what's been bothering me, you know, is just that sort of thing. What are we doing? We're wrecking the place we live. We're really fouling our nest. And this bothers me. I don't like it particularly. I don't like to see it happen. and buddhism talks about this and it says where people people do these things that don't look too good you know that that seem to uh... mess themselves up comes from what what's called thirst and thirst uh... comes from a number of places it comes from desire for sense pleasure for wealth for power it also comes from ideas ideals views opinions theories conceptions and beliefs that is You know, everything we do, everything all of us do every day, all these things.

[14:07]

This is where our problem comes from. I don't think there's anything new to anybody. I think everybody realizes that if people are grasping for power all the time, they tend to mess stuff up. You know, I mean, Beirut is a pretty good example of that. You know, there's hardly anything left of it. Everybody wants power and they're shooting guns all over the place. And when they get the power, there's not gonna be anything left there. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but that's a pretty good example of thirst. I looked at these lists of four, and there were the four bodily ties and the four clingings. I'd never seen these before. This was kind of fun to look through these. I don't think these are too important, but they give you an idea of some of the things that Buddhists have been looking at, some of the aspects they look at thirst from. One thing that's common to both bodily ties and the four clingings is adherence to rites and ceremonies.

[15:08]

It's fine to come and bow, but try to be aware of what you're doing. Don't get sucked into it. Try and see what you're doing at all times. Pay attention. I thought that was really good. It showed up in both places. The only thing that showed up in both the lists Another thing that showed up in the four bodily ties was ill will And also something I put down as a dogmatism which they were talking about narrow views Considering that you have the truth and this is it. I've got the truth and nobody else has got it That's that's not a not a such a hot thing to feel and covetousness that was another one And the four clingings, besides rites and ceremonies, were false views, the theory that we have a soul, and sense desire again. This really comes from ignorance, which is really at the root of all our problems.

[16:13]

This is thirst or ignorance, pretty much the same thing. One comes from the other. we came back to four wrong causes of action which were anger, delusion, fear, and desire. And that does seem to cover the whole ground. It's like three poisons. Ignorance, malice, and greed. All these lists. We have all these lists. I love them. I'm getting so I really like lists. You always hear them when I come up here, don't you? They're pretty handy. But they point. They point. And the same words pop up in all the lists all the time. They either pop up as Positive or negative either yes or no, so kind of interesting Well having gone through all this stuff that was negative and figuring out that maybe one of the reasons why The world was ready for evacuation or thought it was Was because of thirst and because we really didn't understand ourselves, you know, basically it's what it comes down to We really don't know about the five skandhas.

[17:15]

We really don't know truth. We really don't know what's happening And so our lives are a bit of a mess. And the reason I went through all this stuff was simply to remind myself about what we really are and what really happens and why we do what we do sometimes. And then on the other side of it, you know, found some more lists of four. And there were the four means of accomplishment. And these I thought were pretty important. One was will. Second one was effort. thought and reason. And I think those seem to be right in the order that you would pick them up in. You have to have the will to want to change, usually yourself. You have to start with yourself, the will to change yourself or something else. You have to put some effort into it. You have to think about what you're doing or it's fruitless effort. And then you have to bring your reason to bear because that's something we can use and it's a gift we have.

[18:17]

And reason is limited, but it's still a pretty good tool. And then they had the four resolves, which I liked. And these were the resolve to truth, the resolve to liberality, the resolve to peace, and the resolve to wisdom. And those seem like pretty good things to strive for, you know, truth, liberality, peace, and wisdom. And these are things that I think, as far as I know, every religion teaches those. And then, finally, there were the four social laws, which I'd never seen before either. There's really a lot of fours in here, you know. One was almsgiving, which goes along with liberality and the resolves. And another one was kind speech, which would be kind of peace, wouldn't it? Helpful conduct, which, as I understood it, meant individually, you know. Help people, help animals, help trees, help plants, help rocks, just helpful conduct.

[19:22]

Try to be helpful. And then finally was mutual service. And this was interesting because these four social laws, I could only find them as a footnote in the Lotus Sutra. I can't find them anywhere. I don't know where they came from. But they're just a footnote in the Lotus Sutra. And so mutual service, the fourth one, I didn't really understand what that was. Didn't tell me what that was. So what I did there is I figured that had something to do with the group, with the sangha, you know? So I went to the dictionary and I looked at that, and it said mutual, the first definition was directed by each toward the other or others, having the same feelings shared in common. The second part of mutual was characterized by intimacy. And the third one was of or relating to a plan whereby the members of an organization share in the profits and expenses. And at first I thought, well, it's not that one. And then I thought more and I said, no, that's all right.

[20:23]

That's not bad, you know. That's not bad. A sangha like this really is a plan whereby we share the profits and expenses, you know. We're sharing the good times and we're sharing the bad times. And also it goes along with the second one. We do this sometimes in a very intimate manner. And in fact, if you're a resident of Berkeley Zen Center, you know what that really means. But we do this, you know, we do this all the time. We share, we share our ups and we share our downs. We share it all together and we do this in a very intimate manner. And we direct ourselves toward each other, you know, and everybody else directs themselves back. Everybody, it's this big web of people. So mutual service is just that, I think. Since I couldn't find a real definition for it, I sort of made up my own. And I think that's what it is. Helpful conduct, you do that all by yourself, you know. Mutual service, it's between everybody.

[21:24]

Maybe the hospice over at Zen Center is a good idea of that. Because everything I heard about that place is, if you give your time over there to the people that are dying, what they give you back is far more than you've ever given them. So maybe that's real mutual service. But there's other kinds too. It's just like Lori coming in and carrying the incense. That's mutual service. It's like All of us being here. Well, those were a lot of the fours. And then I wound up where I seem to wind up quite often. And it's a place I really, really like. These are the four Brahma Baharas, the four sublime abidings or abodes. And these are talked about a lot. And actually, they don't appear in the sutras any place. They apparently came from Hinduism. or brahmanism and they were incorporated and so they kind of just sort of slid into buddhism but they occupy a very very central place to it now, a very important place anyway and the four sublime abodes are metta, loving kindness karuna, compassion mudita, sympathetic joy and upekha, equanimity

[22:47]

This two, they all happen simultaneously, just like many of the other lists. You can't really separate them. But these also take place in a sequence. There is a logical sequence to these. You must feel loving kindness before you can feel compassion. You must feel loving kindness for yourself before you can love others. Once you do that, then you can feel compassion. You can feel compassion for yourself. You can feel compassion for others. And when you feel compassion, the interesting thing about compassion is that compassion is feeling other people's sorrows. Feeling those sorrows with people. And, you know, that's pretty easy to do, really. I mean, we see people all the time. I mean, my goodness, you know, just look on the street out here. You see people wheeling shopping carts. You see people sleeping on parks, you see people taking drugs, people selling drugs, people shooting people taking drugs, all kinds of things going on out here.

[23:57]

And it's pretty easy to feel, you know, a lot of compassion for those people. It's really, really easy to see their suffering. But if we do that, you know, if we just dwell in compassion, pretty easy to become very pessimistic, pretty depressed, you know. We can just start to sink into a hole. And then you get into that lovely place, you know, the ain't it awful syndrome. You know how people always say, oh, ain't it awful? I saw it less and less. I go, yeah, but, you know, ain't it awful? I saw it less and less. And they always try and top each other. And it gets worse and worse and worse. And pretty soon, you really don't feel too good. So, you know, that's why we go to the next one, which is mudita, which is sympathetic joy. This means to take pleasure, to take real pleasure in other people's joy, other people's pleasures, the good things that happen to people, to really take some real pleasure in the fact that somebody else just got something very nice. And if we can do all these things, then we begin to feel a little more equitable because we begin to see the true nature of things.

[25:04]

We begin to act in accord with what we really are and with the way everything really is. And so then we have some equanimity. Then we begin to feel a little more settled, a little more centered. But there's some dangers here. Because the four Brahma Baharas have near enemies and far enemies. And the far enemies are pretty easy. Loving kindness, metta, the far enemy of loving kindness is hate. It's the opposite of it, right? So the far enemy is hate. That's pretty easy to see. But the near enemy of loving kindness is affection. That's not so easy to see. And in fact, When people are given in the Vipassana tradition, when people do their meditations on loving-kindness, on metta, they are told to meditate first, usually they're told to meditate first on somebody of the same sex.

[26:09]

Because it's very easy to get metta and affection, romantic love, something like that, all mixed up together. That's not what it is. Metta is undifferentiated love. It's the kind of love that moves mountains. Not the kind just between two people, but between all of us. Once again, mutual. It's that kind of love. Very big. Not little love. Big, big love. Unconditioned. Wide. No boundaries. Big love. So, don't get it confused with affection. Or just, you know, Romantic love which is nice, but is not meta And of course, it's easy not to get it mixed up with hate. At least I hope it is And the second one Karuna or compassion The far enemy of that is cruelty or contempt causing people to suffer and just just being cruel. That's that's obvious You know far enemy compassion Instead of feeling with people's sorrows you actually try to make them worse or even start them

[27:17]

And the near enemy is pity. Pity is not compassion. Don't get it mixed up. Compassion is really feeling that person's sorrow with them. Really feeling sorry for them. Not pitying them. Because pitying, when you pity, there's a subject and an object. There's an inferior and a superior position. That's not what compassion's all about. There's no inferior, superior. Right here. Right here. Always right here. And mudita, sympathetic joy, the obvious, well, I don't know if this is so obvious, but the far enemy of sympathetic joy is jealousy or envy. I mean, everything's obvious once you say it, right? The far enemy of mudita is jealousy or envy. And the near enemy of sympathetic joy is sort of where we're we're happy about somebody's greed that's been satisfied. You know, our brother-in-law just got a Mercedes, or, you know, one of our kids buys a house, or goodness knows, somebody gets something like that.

[28:27]

That's not exactly what it is. Not just being satisfied that somebody's been greedy and satisfied, but more than that, being satisfied that somebody has really had a joyous occasion in their life. We just had a couple of weddings around here. and that is a very good time, you know, for sympathetic joy. It was pretty easy to do. It was a great time. There's also time for greed, a lot of food, but mostly the sympathetic joy is what we're, you know, we want to kind of pay attention to that. When we come down to upeka, equanimity, The far enemy of equanimity is resentment, greed, something like that, you know, whatever the opposite of equanimity would be for you. I mean, however you think of that, you know, scattered, whatever it is, but usually some sort of resentment or greed.

[29:33]

It's very similar to the opposite of sympathetic joy, but something that is, you know, stirring you up at any rate. And the near enemy of equanimity Again, the near enemies are really hard to spot. They're the dangerous ones. The near enemy is indifference. We can't mistake, or we shouldn't mistake indifference for equanimity. If we really don't care what happens to somebody, that is not equanimity. If we really don't care what happens to the planet, that is not equanimity. That's just indifference. And that's not what we're looking for. Equanimity, all of these All these brahmaviharas, very active. Very active. Not just, oh, you know, I don't care. Quite the opposite. Care very much. Really active. And equanimity is dwelling in that center place. Why do you act? It doesn't mean passivity at all. But this is important. And equanimity actually has a couple of characteristics to it.

[30:42]

One of them is that there's equality of all beings. We recognize, if we really have equanimity, we recognize that we all are just those heaps of the five skandhas. And in that sense, we're non-existent. Obviously we're here, you know, I can pinch myself and I know I'm here. But when I look at myself from the perspective of the five skandhas, then there isn't a whole lot to pinch. because it moves too quick, it's gone all the time. It's here all the time, too, but it's gone all the time, too. And we also realize, this helps us a little bit with equanimity, and it's also where indifference comes from if we're not careful, is that the way people are is basically due to karma, the fruits of prior actions, not just their own,

[31:43]

but also the worlds. There's all kinds of different karma of a pocket, which is the fruits of karma. Karma is just the volitional act itself. But the fruits of all this karma is what makes each one of us what we are too. It influences what we are. And so when we see that, if we really see that, we realize that it's okay. It doesn't mean we don't act about things we do. And this is why we come to a practice. Sometimes everything is so unsatisfactory that we'd like to cut off or learn how to cut off the kind of karma, the volitional acts, which will cause our lives to be worse later on, cause and effect. It can be right now, you know, we just say something dumb to somebody and they cry or they punch us in the nose. or they never speak to us again. That's pretty obvious fruit, you know, of a volitional action. You decided to speak and decided to say what you said. That's pretty straightforward action.

[32:44]

So we see that people, to some extent anyway, people have put themselves where they are. Have to be careful about this because we can come very indifferent and become sort of fatalistic about it all. And it's not like that at all. We have control of our lives. in a very real sense. So we can cut off these volitional actions. We can do things about that. So somebody paraphrased the four Brahma-Viharas. I found this, this is lovely. You remember now, it's loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. And what they said here is, may beings be happy, How unhappy beings are. Rejoice with those beings. Just beings. I kind of like that. That's a really nice little line, you know, a nice little verse.

[33:46]

I think I can remember that if I couldn't remember the four Brahmaviharas and all the other stuff that goes with them. But just to remember that. May beings be happy. How unhappy beings are. Rejoice with those beings. Just beings. Nothing special, just beings. So, you know, looking at all of this, looking at the four Brahma-Viharas, which give me a, you know, a way to act in my life. And thinking about the world the way it is, all the rest of it, it gives me an entrance. You know, there's a lot of ways that you can look at your actions. You know, there's the precepts, you know, we have 16 Bodhisattva precepts, which we take occasionally. There's the Eightfold Noble Path. There's a million different ways that you can look at yourself and look at how you can act in the world. And I just put these together. Some of these are very familiar, some of them I've never seen before, and maybe you haven't either, I don't know.

[34:52]

I don't know how many people here read lists, you know, that's the other thing. But I found also a definition of Soto Zen, And Sutta Zen has been described as the practice of repentance, meditation, moral training, and enlightenment. And I thought that was okay. Repentance, you just got through with that, you know, in the Bodhisattva ceremony. All my ancient twisted karma, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. That's repentance. Every one of us, you know, messes up. We can never get it right. It's one long mistake. We never get it right. But it's okay. It's okay. It's because that's the way we are. And we just repent and carry on. And the way we carry on is with meditation and moral training and enlightenment. And those are just parts of a process. We meditate. We sit in Zazen.

[35:53]

And as Dogen Zenji says, Just Sitsazen is enlightenment. So it's not something outside you. It's not something over there. Not something outside. It's not something far away from you. It's right here with you all the time. Sometimes a little closer. Sometimes a little more hidden. But it's with you all the time. It's important to remember this. And it's important to practice so that you can actualize that. This is the important thing. Because there was another little definition down there. Or a quotation. And I like to get these right. It says, life is the active expression of Buddha at work. Now that I like. Life is the active expression of Buddha at work. You know, so everywhere you go, you've got a little sign that says Buddha at work. You know, and you just put that right there and go down your manhole. It's very important, you know, that we always realize that we're Buddha. That we are enlightenment. And that we can act from that. But we need help. And so we sit Zazen, you know, we sit Zazen and at this point we center ourselves.

[37:01]

We learn things. We get some experience of what we are. We sit with all that stuff that comes up through our mind. We watch our mind move all over the place. Sometimes it doesn't move very much, you know. Some of those times it's really nice. It doesn't move anywhere. But most of the time it's zipping off the walls all over the place. I always think of pinball machines. You know, when I think of my mind, you put the ball and it goes all over and there's lights flashing and things making noise. That's the way my mind is at times. I'd be very surprised if yours isn't that way sometimes, too. I don't think I'm unique. They're the good things and the bad things. So, our centered life is going to originate or take its shape, from what we experience in Zazen, that's where we get centered, that's where we put ourselves together. But then we have to walk off our cushion, get up off our cushion and go someplace. And when we do that, that's really our life, and that's where it's taking place too.

[38:07]

We have to take that Zazen mind with us somehow if we can, and that's what's difficult. And that's why we have all of these lists, all of this Buddha Dharma comes down, you know, through thousands and thousands, a couple thousand years, to tell us, you know, these are some ways, folks, keep these things in your mind. Always, you know, always remember that little sign, Buddha at work, you know, your life is an active expression of that, you know, and that's important, it's very important, so that that way, if every once in a while If you start your morning, for example, the way we always tell people it would be a nice thing if they did, which is to start their morning by sitting Zazen, getting kind of centered for the day. And then during the day, try to remind yourself every once in a while to come back to your breath. Just come back to your breathing every once in a while. Remember you're doing it. And then if something comes up, you can remember some of these little things. Can I practice loving kindness in this situation? You know, the four social laws, which I have to go back for, you know, which were kind of like the Brahma-Viharas in certain ways.

[39:15]

Can I have kind speech? Can I have helpful conduct? Can I be of mutual service? Are we helping each other here? Are we all working together? And, you know, do I give alms? You know, at Berkeley, as you all know, we get plenty of opportunity to give alms. In fact, you know, More and more, that's one of the problems, more and more we have that opportunity everywhere. Even a little town I was born in, there are now people asking for handouts. And it's just, you know, it's never been like that that I know of. Maybe in the Great Depression, but that's, you know, that's a long time ago. A lot of opportunities for us to practice all this stuff. You know, most of the time we are knee-deep in opportunities to practice. And I said that once about Robert Aiken, he calls our practice a whetstone practice. Everything that comes up for us is a whetstone on which we can sharpen our practice. And my comment on that is we are knee-deep in whetstones most of the time. But that's okay.

[40:16]

That's okay. It's fine. I brought a couple of books. I'm still debating about this. The one book I don't think I need at all. When we go out in our life, things aren't easy. And they aren't cut and dried. And so when we talk about kind speech or loving kindness, we immediately think of being sweet, you know, being soft, being gentle. And for relaxation, I read mystery stories a lot. And there's a mystery story I just finished. which is about an alcoholic detective. It's in the hard-boiled school of mystery fiction. I love it. We won't get into a comparison of literary styles. This rather melodramatic incident in here caught me.

[41:20]

I wasn't expecting it. The writer surprised me. He's a good writer, this guy. This alcoholic detective has, he's in New York, and he's wandered out to, out in the streets, and a mugger across him on the street, and he's got a knife. And so our detective, being hard-boiled, takes the knife away from him. And he knocks the guy down, and the guy's laying on the ground, and he's in some pain, but he's not all beaten up or anything. He's just, you know, he's just sort of made quiet. And then the detective bends down to him as he's laying there and he says, and this is in an alley, this man's laying on his back in an alley. The detective gets down and he says, I got down on one knee. I picked up his right hand and my left hand and put my face close to his. His eyes were wide and he was frightened. And I was glad because I wanted him to be frightened. I wanted him to know just what fear was and just how it felt.

[42:24]

I said, Listen to me. These are hard, tough streets, and you're not hard enough or tough enough. You better get a straight job because you can't make it out here. You're too soft for it. You think it's easy out here, but it's harder than you ever knew. And now's your chance to learn it." I bent the fingers of his right hand back, one at a time, until they broke. Just the four fingers. I left his thumb alone. He didn't scream or anything. I suppose the terror blocked the pain. I took his knife along with me and dropped it in the first sewer I came to. Now that's pretty melodramatic and that doesn't seem much like kind action or loving kindness or much else. But when I read this, because the writer surprised me, see what I expected was that this guy was out looking for a fight, the detective, and he'd catch the mugger and just beat him up. And he'd leave this heap in the alley. But he didn't do that. Just use enough force to get the guy down and then he did what I just read you.

[43:26]

And I thought about that, you know, and it stayed with me. And the more I thought about that, the more I thought of, you know, this to me, to me, seems like real Bodhisattva way. Because here's a man with a knife who is just what he says, you know, obviously not tough enough. This guy just, you know, took his knife away from him. But he's out there doing these things. He's not happy. He's obviously, you know, to be a mugger, you can't, I don't know if there's happy muggers. I suppose there might be, but I, I rather doubt it. It seems like kind of a tough way to live and to get that hostile, you know, to be that hostile, I think is pretty good case for suffering, right? So here's a man that perhaps, just perhaps, we don't know this, you know, but we can, we can suppose just perhaps, That guy now has got four broken fingers on his right hand. He can't hold anything. He's got to hit people with his left hand or stab them with his left hand. He's right-handed, I assume. He's out of a job.

[44:29]

He's out of a job for a while. And he's learned something, maybe. Maybe he's learned that this isn't really the way he wants to be. Maybe he doesn't really want to do this. Maybe he'll do something else. Maybe he'll go to work in a car wash. I don't know. Maybe he'll go back to college. Goodness knows. There are all kinds of strange things that happen. This can be real Bodhisattva action. It doesn't have to always be sweet and lovely. Sometimes it takes the form of a blow or a yell. So... I also don't want you to get the idea you go around beating people up and saying you're a wonderful Bodhisattva. That isn't it either. But, you know, in our lives nothing is ever really simple. Sometimes, sometimes it's simple. Somebody comes up in the street and says, can I have a quarter? You can give him a quarter. Pretty simple. Or you don't give him a quarter. That's simple too. But we have to watch. Everything changes. Not only are we impermanent, everything's impermanent. The situation is impermanent, too. Situations change all the time.

[45:30]

So what's appropriate in this situation may not be appropriate in the next situation. That's really common. I'll tell you a story about myself, too. I hate to confess things in public, but I will anyway. Little things, just little things. To be aware of little things I think is important. I went downtown yesterday. I was trying to find something to talk about today. I always scramble for these things. It's really difficult. As I got down to downtown Berkeley by the BART station, there was a guy with a clipboard and some papers on a clipboard. I was in a hurry. I walked down. I just wanted to get out of the house for a bit. I had just a couple of things to do. I was in a hurry. I don't want anybody messing with me. So as I came down, the guy said, you registered to vote, sir? And I said, no. Oh, that's a big lie. That's a big lie. The first thing I do when I move is go down and register to vote. First thing I do, you know, it's right on my list. I get this little checklist. Big lie right off the top. No, I don't either.

[46:32]

I'm not registered to vote. And this guy, all I really said was, no. And he went, well, I can register you. And I said, no. And I kept going. And I thought to myself, I went, why? I said, oh, you jerk. You know, look at that. You just lied to the guy. You just lied. Look at that. You lied, you know? But what are you doing? You lied to the man just to save time. Why couldn't you? By then, of course, I was by him. Instead of saying, are you registered to vote? I should have said, yes, but I don't want to sign your petition. I'm in a hurry. Or what would have been better was, yes, what have you got? I wasn't in that big a hurry. And it could have been something really good. It probably was. Most of the petitions around here I find are OK, and I do sign most of them. But I said, no. And I walked by, and I went over to the bank, and I did what I had to do. And I thought about that, and then I started walking back. And he was talking to somebody else, who was giving him the same kind of routine. Poor guy. And I walked by, and I thought, I should really go tell this guy that I lied to him.

[47:34]

But he was so busy with the other fellow, who was also probably lying to him, that I thought, no. I'm just going to ignore this whole thing. So I compounded the error even more. I don't know what the fruits of that action are going to be. I mean, I'm repenting it. I repented it then. I repent it now. And I'm confessing it, as a matter of fact. You've all got it now. You're all sharing it with me, right? Be of mutual service to me. But how about the man who had the clipboard? Now, what is he going to think? He's standing there, and what he's getting on the street is all these people coming by saying, Now I'm going to register to vote. Now I don't want to sign your petition. Go away." Or just ignoring him. And the man is going to sit there and he's going to think, geez, nobody votes. Nobody even registers. They don't care. What am I doing here? I can give this guy a terrific case, or help give this guy a terrific case of depression and a lot of other things. And having been a petition carrier myself in my time, I realize that that can happen to one. So I felt pretty bad about that. But the thing I felt OK about was the fact that immediately I did that.

[48:40]

Immediately I was a jerk. I caught it. Caught what I did. I didn't fix it, but at least I caught it. And that seems like a first step. If you're really a jerk, if you're going to lie, if you're going to do some dumb thing, try and catch yourself at it. And then either try and make amends, or at least try not to do it again. Or cut it down if you can. And the more we all do that, the better our lives get. The better our lives get, I think the better the people around us lives get. At least that's been my experience. That when I feel okay, the people around me tend to feel better. When the people around me feel okay, then I tend to feel a little better too. But you know, when everybody's walking around with a sour face, it's kind of hard to walk around with a big sappy smile. You can try that though, because it works. Sometimes if you smile a lot, The other people start to smile too. That's really an interesting, that's an interesting practice.

[49:42]

So basically what I came back to after all of my cartoons with the world falling apart was that, yeah, the world may be falling apart. The world is changing too. But, you know, if I keep, just keep working at it, keep my practice going, pay attention to what I'm doing, you know, don't let myself get knocked off center too far, don't do dumb things any more than I can help. And if other people do the same things, you know, if we all do that, we all try to support each other, we all give each other this help and this support, then, you know, the world's changing. It doesn't, it's not irrevocable, you know, that it's going to change one way or the other. It's just changing. And so maybe we can get it to change some of the ways that are a little bit, we think, maybe a little bit better. I don't know. Anyway, that's the kind of, you know, that's the kind of comfort that I took from my own research, because it started out from just saying, God, ain't it awful? It is. It is. It's awful. But maybe it won't stay that way.

[50:45]

And it might get worse. We might be an evolutionary experiment that's failed, and we don't know it yet. But if that's the case, then that's the case, too. These are some pretty good ways in for our everyday life, just our regular life, how to practice. Our practice isn't only here. It isn't here. It's everywhere. I'll read that quotation one more time. I kind of like it. In fact, I like both of them. I like both of them. I'll read you both of them again. The four Brahma Baharas, you know, are, May beings be happy. How unhappy beings are. Rejoice with those beings. Just beings. That's pretty good, you know, if you can remember that. Metta, you know, loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, equanimity. And then finally, Life is the active expression of Buddha at work. That's great. I really like that. And if any of you go around breaking people's fingers and saying that that's the Bodhisattva way, and I told you so, I'm going to deny it.

[51:49]

I won't let you do that. Do we have time for anything else? Any comments or what have you? Briefly? Good. I wouldn't want too many big ones, so a brief one is fine. Bob? That's human doings. Yes. what you feel, you say to someone else.

[52:55]

And you tell them, I told you about this story about a snake who goes to a blind man and says, ah, tell me how to become enlightened. And the man says, no, that doesn't make sense. He says, well, first of all, I don't know what to do. So, an owl comes along and starts to attack the snake. And the snake gets mad and says nothing. And the owl bites off half the snake's head. And then the swan comes by. And he says, what happened to you? He says, well, he told me to be a little compassionate. And when the owls came along, he said, be compassionate and nothing will happen to you. But I would say, I told you not to bite me, I didn't tell you not to kiss me.

[54:00]

That's not bad. Any of the rest of you doings want to hiss? Okay. Thank you. We need her.

[54:23]

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