I don't know what to say. It's the truth. It's the type of person you're looking for. Can you hear me? No? Can't hear? Can you hear me now? Can you hear me? Is that any better? That any better?

[01:03]

I could project my voice. Let's see, is that any better? I should just... Oh. That's not great. I could project my voice. Sometimes I get a little bit attached to using speaker systems, and it's kind of nice, but... Okay. Oh. Are we back? Are we here? There's a little bit of a hum, right? Can we work with that? Can we have it over there? Are you with us? It's so far away. Okay. So, there we go. But turn my head.

[02:07]

If I talk to you, then we're okay. But if I talk to you... So... I'll talk to Kosha. Try not to look. So... I'm very happy to be at Tassajara, and there are many reasons I'm happy to be here. One of the reasons I'm happy to be here is I'm here with my son. I have a seven-year-old son, probably some of you have seen me with him. And this is the second time this summer that I spent time with him in a Buddhist monastery, a Buddhist meditation center. And it's been on my mind a little bit what it means to bring my son to a Buddhist temple and why it's important for me, what I have in mind in bringing him here. and what, if any, guidance or direction I can really give him as his father, and how to give him guidance and some of the teachings of the Buddha.

[03:20]

So at the seminar I remembered that the Buddha had a son, and It's very interesting. Most people, when they think about the Buddha and his family, remember that the Buddha left his family when his son was at the world, first day. And for the story goes, the Buddha went and made one last look at his son while his son and mother were sleeping, and then left town. And as far as his renunciate life, his seeking life, looking for enlightenment. which he did for six years. After six years, he attained his awakening. And then he made his way back. After his awakening, he made his way back to his hometown. And so by the time he reached home, his son was seven years old. Now, his wife, the mother, seemingly was still annoyed. and wouldn't come to see the Buddha.

[04:27]

But the son went to see him. Maybe the mother sent him. But maybe because she was still annoyed, she said to her son, when you see your father, ask him for your inheritance. Now, the Buddha was the son of a king, so the inheritance would have been somehow, you know, to be continued in a lower line. But the Buddha was now a non-Korean saint, giving up his clone to royalty. So he had nothing left to give. But as the story goes, the son, whose name was Rahula, went up to the Buddha and said to him, we have a very pleasant shadow. It's a very strange thing to say to your father, you haven't seen it at all. But the way I understand the story is that when you meet someone who's very honored, revered in the Indian setting, you have a special kind of language, a way of talking to them.

[05:31]

It's a way of, it's kind of like, you don't want to talk too directly about them or to them. So he's talking indirectly about his shadow. And he said, you know, you're really special. There's something really special about you. It's really pleasant to be with you. At which point the Buddha did something unusual, is he got up and walked away. That's the story. But if you read other situations where Buddha did a similar thing, the Buddha tended to get up in the upper way when people had become enamored with him. And somehow that was his response to being enamored, infatuated to his beauty or his charisma or whatever. And so his son followed him, and he said, please give me my inheritance. And so the Buddha turned to Shariputra, who was kind of like this right-hand man, right-hand monk, and he said, ordain him. So Rahula was ordained at the age seven as a novice monk.

[06:36]

What that meant is that even though the Buddha had left his family and wasn't part of the son's life, the first seven years of the son's life, for the rest of his son's growing up, the Buddha was under the care of his father. And so, in a sense, the Buddha was the primary parent, because the mother was no longer with him. I don't know if she kind of discards from the story, as far as I know. And so then we could ask, what kind of parent was the Buddha? How did he father his own son? Now, we don't have a lot of surviving records of this, And it seems that the historical interest in these kind of stories, the interest in these kind of stories was not so great on the part of those people who saved the records of the Buddha's life and his teachings. But we can see in Vedana and his teachings some events that occur in relationship to his son. In particular, there are three discourses where the Buddha is specifically teaching his son.

[07:44]

And what's interesting about these three discourses is that they represent three different periods or ages in his son's growing up. And so you can see that the Buddhist is giving teachings that are appropriate for each age, for each phase of his son's growing up. In a sense, you can say that Fort Woodard was recognizing a developmental model for how children grow up. They grow up developmentally in Sturgis. But the Woodard also had a developmental model for adults also engaged in the Buddhist path. And it also turns out that these three discourses represent the three divisions of classic Buddhist training, which is sila, samadhi, and prajna, which is virtue, or ethics, the training in ethics, the training in meditation and inner development, and then the training in wisdom and liberation. So two trainings.

[08:47]

The first discourse, the tradition says, occurred when Rahula was either seven or eleven, somewhere in that age range, relatively young still. And we understand, as you go through the discourse, that what happened before the discourse began, before this event is recorded, was young Rahula has told a lie. Looking at so unusual for a young kid. So the Buddha that evening, walks over to where the Buddha is staying. And as is the custom, when someone comes, a guest comes, especially if the other guest comes to where you are, in a country where people walk barefoot and it's very dusty, is you give them a bottle of water so you can wash their feet. So we're going to give the bottle of water to the Buddha. We'll wash his feet. And then the widow sat down and held that little water, that bowl that still had a little bit of water in it.

[09:54]

And then he said to Rahula, do you see how little water was left in this bowl? And Rahula said, yes. That is someone who is not ashamed of telling a deliberate lie. The value of the spiritual life is as little as the little water left in this bowl. So I imagine that Tohulu at this point gulps. He's been caught, well-handed, or caught. And then the Buddha throws the water away and he says, he shows the empty bowl and he says, the value of the spiritual life of someone who deliberately lies is thrown away like I've thrown away this water. And then he turns the bowl upside down. And he says, the value of the spiritual life of someone who tells a deliberate lie is turned upside down like a spoil.

[11:01]

And then, in the lesson, he really made the point. So he takes the veil, and it's clearly empty over there. He says, see how this veil is empty? In the same way, the spiritual life of someone who tells a deliberate lie is empty. So he really made a point about the value of the purpose of not lying directly. And then it goes on to say that anyone who is not ashamed of telling a deliberate lie is capable of breaking any transgression, breaking any precepts. Yet lying and truthfulness is so fundamental to spiritual life or to life that transgressing means this one thing of not lying sets up the possibility for someone doing other things, other transgressions. Well, when I read this part of the story, I'm reminded that Bela was raised in a warrior caste. He wasn't exactly in the warrior caste.

[12:06]

And there was a noble tradition, as in many countries, of the advocate of warriors. And they have a certain level of, I don't know if pride is a right word, but a certain level of dignity, of pride, of uprightness, that's very important. Your honor, your code of your honor is very, very important for such people. And I think the Buddha, during trying to stress the importance of not lying, of being ethical to a son, was not doing it to diminish the life of the son, but really to try to enhance it, to develop it, and to support him during being an upright, in a sense, upright, honorable person. Then the Buddha went on and said, what's the purpose of a mirror? There's kind of an example, maybe a child can understand. What's the purpose of a mirror? And the Buddha said, it's for reflection.

[13:11]

And the Buddha said, in the same way, before we do anything, whether we're going to speak it, do it, or think it, we should reflect about what you're about to do. You should reflect, think about it, whether this is going to just for the benefit or any affliction of yourself or others or both. And if it's gonna cause the afflictions, if it's gonna cause harm for anybody else, then don't do it. If anybody said, if you are doing something, if I am doing something, you should also be reflecting, you should also be mindful. And you reflect in this way, while I'm doing this, is this going to cause harm to anyone, including yourself, or is it going to be for the benefit of self and others? If it's going to cause harm for anyone, then stop doing it.

[14:14]

And then you said, after we've done something, we should reflect about what you just did. So before, during, and after your acts, you should kind of be mindful and reflective about what you've done. And after you've done something, you should also consider, based now on the evidence and the results, is this done for the benefit or for the harm of yourself or for others? And if it's for, if it caused harm, then we need to go out and confess it. to a teacher or someone, a fellow practitioner in the monastic life. You need to confess it, not just simply recognize it for yourself, but you need to do something about it, which is called confession. You say it. There's something very powerful about confession, that acknowledgement to someone else helps us to step aside or disidentify from what we've done.

[15:21]

It kind of reinforces what we're doing. Yes, I don't really like what I've done. I don't stand behind it, and I'm going to try to do better in the future. So in this first discourse, when his son was young, the Buddha was trying to pass on ethical values. And Rahula became a teenager, and maybe 14. And in this story, Rahula and the Buddha are going out for alms. The masters go out every morning to get the alms from the village. And so they're setting out, and Rehura's in front and Rehura's behind. And Rehura had a thought. And that thought was even manifested in how he carried himself. It was basically something like this, that...

[16:22]

You know, Raghula was the son of the Buddha. The Buddha was supposed to be a very beautiful man, a very striking person, both in terms of his charisma, his presence, his purity, but also physically. Even before he was enlightened, people were struck by kind of his presence and who he was, his visage. And Raghula was walking right behind the Buddha. Like, you know, I kind of look like him. You know, maybe he kind of puffed up his chest a little bit and kind of like, you know, kind of pride and kind of, I'm also kind of like, kind of sane. And so the Buddha stopped and turned around and said to Rahula, don't be very physical. Don't be very physical characteristic. Every form, every rupa, should be understood or viewed in the following way.

[17:25]

That this is not mine. This is not who I am. This is not the self. Not rule myself or mine. And the rupa says, only physical form And the Buddha says, no. No feelings, no perceptions, no mental formations, no mental life, intentions, dispositions. Consciousness should not be seen as blind, as who I am, and that this is me, this is myself. And at which point, when Buddha decides, says to himself, it is not appropriate for me to go out with the Buddha in arms today since I've just been admonished.

[18:31]

So the Buddha caught him. He noticed that he was having these proud thoughts about how he looked, his good appearance. The Buddha didn't have any zits that day, so things were going well for him. So, you know. And so, feeling admonished, the Buddha just went home. And he sat under a tree. And then the story continues. But I want to back up to these three things the Buddha said. Don't see things as moving myself and knowing. This represents two very important forms of clinging or grasping that Buddhism is made to be an antidote for. And the first is the clinging or grasping to possession. The point is, this is mine. When we do that with our possessions, we do it to aspects of ourselves. This is mine. This is my here, this is my clothes, this is my possessions.

[19:35]

And the movement of mind, movement of possessions, is a very interesting one because there is only a construct of the mind. It's an activity of the mind, something we do with our mind. If all of us left here this evening in different shoes than we came with, our shoes wouldn't care. Caring has to do with our duals and not with our mind. So there's something in the tendency that grasps onto this as mind, which can cause a lot of suffering. There's a beautiful story of Suzuki Roshi. and there's a picture of this, just as he was saying this, a little bit with a pair of glasses, a little bit like this, and he says, these are not my glasses, but you know about my tired eyes, so you let me use them. Conventionally, we'd say it was his glasses, but he wasn't seeing them this morning. The second craving is a craving of conceit.

[20:39]

And conceit has to do with comparing ourselves to others. This is who I am. I'm a role in some way or other. When I was 13, the summer of 1967, I lived in Italy, a small provincial town in Italy. And I'll tell you, I was the coolest kid in town. I had the longest hair, and I had blue jeans. And I felt pretty hot, came uptown, with, you know, expatriates in the middle of the low and strutting around. And then the end of the summer, end of summer of 67, I went back to Los Angeles. And unbeknownst to me, a lot had happened in California in 67, that summer. And when I went back to school, I did not have the longest hair in town anymore. In fact, my hair was really short compared to what I had from over the summer. And I spent a lot of time trying to pull in my hair so it would get longer. And I was having blue jeans. Just having blue jeans was boring. And my friends, they had taken their blue jeans and put them in the washing machine 30 times with bleach.

[21:45]

And some people put their jeans off in the roads. Their cars would drive over them. And everything tonight can be torn up and worn out and And suddenly, I was not so cool anymore. And the other thing that happened was that I had crossed the Atlantic and I was comparing myself to different people. It was in the comparison that I felt great or down. It turns out a lot of suffering in the sense of self has to do with comparative thinking. Comparing ourselves to others. Comparing, you know, all kinds of things. Anything that I have, pure beings have a great capacity to compare. evaluate themselves in relationship to other people and ideals and stuff. A lot of suffering around that. So as we were telling with some of them, imagine telling a 14 year old, don't bother comparing yourself to others. That's pretty good. We listen. And then the third grasping is the grasping on abuse.

[22:47]

And this is where you have a view about what the nature of the self is. Conceit has to do with something that's unique with you. A view of self has to do with your kind of philosophical, universal idea that this is what it means to be a self. So the self is pure consciousness, is a view. Or the self, all selves, are inherently sinful. That's a view. Or that selves, or all selves, inherently are good, or pure. It's a view. So some kind of philosophical view. So people tend to grasp to views like that also. And some people really need and want security of knowing something that's a view about the fundamental, true, universal aspect of the self. And the Buddha said, don't take any of these things as the lost self. So the Buddha's taking away a lot of the things that a teenager spends a lot of time concerned about. Really myself and knowing.

[23:50]

And you might feel like you're a therapist, you know, and might be horrified. Should a young teenager kind of be acquiring a sense of identity and self, and that's so much part of growing up. What's interesting in the second half of the discourse, where the Buddha says, oh no, I'll tell you the rest of the story. So, the Buddha, as you remember, felt admonished, and so he sat under a tree. And Shaliputra saw him sitting there and said to Rahula, you should meditate, and meditate following the Vat, the Vat meditation. And seemingly, the Buddha had never gotten any instruction in meditation before, because when the Buddha came back later in the day, the Buddha went to the Buddha and said, Dad, how do I meditate on the breath? How do I do that? So the Buddha then proceeded to give instructions. The first thing they did was to create for a sign an image, kind of like a visualization perhaps, an image of how to hold yourself when you're going to meditate.

[25:04]

So, you know, sometimes we give meditation instruction, don't have your image, imagine yourself like a mountain, really stable and firm and strong, or sometimes imagine your mind like a still alpine lake. People use images like that to help kind of get this mood or this... So the Buddha gave his son five images for how to create a level of equanimity or acceptance or balance, non-relativity, for doing his meditation practice. The first was, he said, establish your meditation, love the earth, direct the earth, a great big earth, solid earth, because the earth is not troubled by the pleasant and unpleasant things that people do to it. Economism do very much. If people spit on the earth, the earth doesn't mind. People pee on the earth, the earth doesn't mind. Establish yourself like the earth that is untroubled by the pleasant and unpleasant things that come.

[26:13]

And one will be like, that's the ballooning. It's a very solid foundation for the meditation practice. And it will be like for series to get an image. Each of them gets lighter and lighter, more spacious. But those are the firm foundation of the earth. And then it says, establish yourself in meditation like you are. Like water is untroubled by the pleasant, unpleasant things that come. So, like your mind will have water, the pleasant, unpleasant things won't trouble you and won't stick in your mind. Establish your meditation like fire. Westerns are saying, establish your meditation like air. You can throw all kinds of things in the air and the air doesn't mind. And learn establishing meditation like space. Even while you're more spacious than the air. We say sometimes, let thoughts be like clouds drifting in endless sky.

[27:20]

Kind of very spacious, open, expansive. Let your mind be that way. So whatever happens in meditation, pleasant or unpleasant, it's like it is drift through, like it's in great space to hold it. So that is Buddha's first instructions in meditation for us all. Then he went on and gave him turban to practice loving-kindness meditation, the practice of developing a friendly good will. Then he gave him a couple of other instructions, and then he proceeded to give his son instructions in breath meditation. Those of you who know about this tradition, he taught him 16 stages of breath meditation, the anapanasati. And some of the key elements of anapanasati, this particular way of using the breath, is you use your breath meditation, get concentrated, and develop joy, delight, happiness, rapture, behavior, being, as you do this meditation. And that's part of the stepping stone to deeper and deeper meditations, to go through a phase of meditation with a tremendous feeling of well-being.

[28:29]

So that is what the Buddha offered to his teenage son as an alternative to really myself and learning. Instead of self-deriving and creating a strong sense of self, he offered the Buddha to create a strong inner life where there's a strong sense of inner well-being, strong capacity of equanimity and balance. These real good qualities inside develop those. That's what we should be doing. So then the next discourse, when Rahula was about 20, the Buddha spent his teenage years in training. And in fact, the Buddha called Rahula the foremost of those who train. So he got pretty serious about his training. He was a monk, he trained hard. At some point, the Buddha discerned that his son was ready to receive the deepest teaching. God was ready to kind of let his wisdom eye open, the eye of awakening.

[29:35]

And so he took his son, he said, come with me. And while they were living in the woods, they invited his son deeper into the woods, into the forest, to a grove, they still have the name of the grove, called Blind Man's Grove, where there would be cell trees, these huge trees, majestic trees that they have in India, Now, truths that Babila said once, if truths were people, saw truths would be unliked. He had such high respect for these particular truths. And they're huge truths. And they had these, what do they call these ridges that stick out the sides? They could come down the ground and they're called? What? They're a little bit different. What? Petruses. Right? Petruses that stick out the ground, kind of like rares coming out. And so there are two kinds of the woods, and there's huge trees, like birdie redwoods, and there are grove trees. You can imagine, it's very important where he took him, the natural setting.

[30:37]

Because what the Buddha's gonna teach him has to do with identity, with self. And what a place, you know, your sense of self, who you are, the perspective of that, the context of it changes when you're in some really awesome place in nature. So that's where he took the son, coming to a still, quiet place. And then he proceeded to teach the son. He teaches, which I'm allowed to speak for three more minutes about. Someone who is well-trained in the time of the Buddha, practiced meditation a lot, he's let go of a lot. He's a monk, he's let go of a lot of attachments, a lot of things, a lot of people are preoccupied with, caught up with. He's letting go. He's let go of his idea of appearance, his idea of possessions, the idea of sexual relationships. There are a lot of things that he's let go of, and he's been able to do that. It's also developed to be able to concentrate very well.

[31:41]

So much so that Rahula could stare in the present moment very precisely. His mind wouldn't have to wander. Staring in the present moment very precisely means you stare in a place where contact happens with reality. The immediacy of contact with reality. If you're thinking about yesterday life and lost in yesterday and lost in tomorrow, abstractions and fantasy, you lose that place of contact. So the Buddha could still have that place of contact, which is one of the realest places we have, a place where we're gonna meet life in a real scene before we create abstract structures, abstract ideas of what it is we're contacting. So the Buddha has this ability. So the Buddha then guides him. It's kind of like a guided meditation. And he says, first he says, is your I permanent or impermanent?

[32:42]

And the Buddha says, the I is impermanent. Is the I reliable? And he says, no, not ultimately reliable. You know, your I is something about, you can lose an I. The I is not ultimately reliable, you can't rely on it. And the Buddha says, something which is impermanent subject to change, but someone which is unreliable, is it appropriate to take that thing as the soul, as the true essential self of who you are? Because if you observe an essential self, it's that it's permanent and it's reliable. So the world says, no, I can't take the I. Then the body says, what about the objects of what the I sees? It goes through the same kind of guided meditation. It's impermanent, it's unreliable. What about the perception that arises at the I? Same thing, you can't take that as a self. What about the consciousness that arises with seeing?

[33:46]

What about the thoughts? Everything connected and being really present from that experience in the I, you cannot find, you cannot take that, it's not possible to take that as a self. Then the Buddha does the same thing with all the sense doors. So that all the places we move in our life directly, All the different ways you might take that, to look at it, vihuras won't find a self there or a soul there. And that's, what it's doing is taking us to the whole empirical world, the world which you can directly experience. And the vihura that we come to, let's say it this way, so, when we go through this guided meditation for vihura, then vihura became disenchanted. It's a very important word in this early tradition of Buddhism. It's a good thing to be disenchanted because it means you've been enchanted or in a spell to begin with. It's disenchanted with all the things that you're taking as maybe your soil, as essential self, that those weren't really that.

[34:54]

As you've been disenchanted, his heart cooled, his passions opened to heart, his clinging, his drivenness of his heart, his craving of his heart, cooled, quieted down. And when the drivenness and the craving of his heart quieted down enough, because he wasn't going out in any more any kind of direction to reach and grasp and make something new to himself, then the discourse says, Gahula's heart, his mind, became liberated, became free. And the contrast here is between taking anything as a self and freedom that happens when we stop doing that. And for Salman who's let go of so many attachments, that can be sometimes the last, most tenuous attachment a person has, is attachment to the self. We might not use those words. And at that point, the guru's mind was liberated.

[35:56]

So ethics as a foundation, then samadhi, developing this inner life, this inner sense of well-being and stability, concentration, loving-kindness. And then with that as a foundation, having the capacity to have wisdom, to see clearly and deeply. And using the capacity to see clearly, to see something very profound about the deeply embedded human tendency to be attached to herself, becoming disenchanted with that movement of selfing, letting the heart cool of its passions, its clingings, and then at some point the heart or the mind releases itself. which is the experience or the tasting of liberation that Rahula had under the guidance of his father. And I try to imagine a more wonderful thing for a father to offer a son than an abortion.

[37:04]

If the Buddha had started a prince and then become a king, he could have lived on his own. Lots of wonderful palaces, chariots, all kinds of great things. But the Buddha didn't stay as a king. He discovered the possibility of freedom and liberation, very deep abiding peace. And to be able to give that kind of happiness and peace to your child must be one of the greatest things. So I bring my son to Tassajara with the hopes that all the mistakes I make as a parent, you'll know where to go. to run into them. So, thank you.

[37:55]

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