It's nice to see all of you here. It seems a little loud. Can you hear in the back now? Is that okay? Before I get started, just to say that in a few weeks, we will be beginning our fall aspects of practice period. And that is a month-long practice period where we will deal with basics of our Zen practice. And this year, we're doing something a little differently. We'll have, for the first time, a shuso, or a head student, for aspects of practice. And that will be Catherine Cascade. And she'll be taking the head student seat if she consents to it, which we will not know until the moment when she is asked. and I'll be leading it in cooperation and collaboration with the other senior students and we will be studying a wonderful writing of Dogen's

[01:11]

called Guidelines for Practicing the Way or Gakudo Yojinshu which covers very basic points of Zen practice and there'll be classes and teas and breakfasts with the shuso and talks and dozen instruction. So we invite everybody to participate and it's usually very energetic It's a way of intensifying your practice and committing yourself for this period of time. And we sort of stay more with the basics than we do in the spring practice period, which is a little longer. So just to let you know that that's happening. Today, there are a number of things I've been thinking about. I guess the title of this talk is, The World is What You Make It.

[02:15]

There's a wonderful song, which I'm not going to sing to you, I've been debating this back and forth. Anybody know of the Irish singer Paul Brady? Nobody in this room. He's a mega star in Ireland and he is just an incredible singer and songwriter and this is a song, it's a song of his And the course is just very simple. The world is what you make it. The world is what you make it, baby. The world is what you make it. And then one of the verses that I like a lot is, don't start to hit me, don't start to hit me with your no-can-do. And then there's a refrain. Bluesin', losin', workin' up an attitude. Clean up them windows, let the sun shine through. There ain't no happy time without no pain. Heartbreak, new date, move on up the alleyway. Pick up the pieces, hit the road again.

[03:19]

The world is what you make it. So for anybody who wants to, now, I don't know if this is confession or mistake or what, but if you want to see a great performance of this song, it's on my Facebook page. I just posted it last night. I found a Paul Brady recording on YouTube and posted it. It's really fantastic. Anyway, I've been thinking about this a lot in light of what we've been studying. The retreat that we had, the study retreat that we had with Sojin Roshi an old Chinese poem, the Hokyo Zamai, or the Precious Mirror Samadhi, which is also very related to, we chant that here, and very related to an earlier poem, about 60-70 years earlier from Chinese that we chant, which is the Sando Kai, or the Harmonious Song of Difference and Sameness.

[04:36]

So a lot of you were at that study, I'm not going to repeat it, but I was struck by this, keep coming back to this question of however you want to frame it, the song, we'll go back to song, the song of difference and sameness. I made a list of these various ways that you could frame, this is what's known as the two truths in Buddhism. In Zen we often talk of our practice as not one, not two, which is itself a kind of conundrum. These two truths, you can call them the absolute and the relative, or the dark and the light, You can call it emptiness in form, stillness, activity, nirvana, samsara, host, guest, upright and inclined, essence and phenomenon, oneness, difference, ocean, wave.

[05:59]

That's a really useful one, ocean, wave. So there are various words that we use, because we work in words, to express this. Now I must say, I've always remembered, I don't remember a lot from college, I don't know how many of you do, but I remember a professor who said this, there are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide things in two, and those who don't. Right, anyway, two kinds of people in the world, those who divide things in two and those who don't. And just think about that for a while until your brain melts down. However, something that Sojin Roshi said a month or two ago, I forget the context, whether it was a Saturday lecture or on a Monday question and answer.

[07:00]

he was also speaking to, he was answering a question about the two truths. And he said, this was the formulation, truth one, if you like, is the truth of things, as Suzuki Roshi put it, things as it is, or things as they are. And truth two was how you feel about them. That was, I don't know, when I taught this to Sojin, that didn't seem an extraordinary formulation to him. I said, where did it come from? And he's like, well, you know, This is just what I was thinking at the time. Is there some citation? Is there a source for this? Because it seemed to me an extraordinary formulation that really worked to unpack reality.

[08:11]

So the truth of things as they are, reality as it is. And then the truth of how you feel about them. how you feel about the life that you lead, how you feel about the circumstances that you're in. And I had never heard, I searched, I did not find that formulation in quite that way anyplace. But I think it really hits the mark. The question is, how do you live? How do you practice? What do you do right as you're sitting in the midst of that in Zazen? How do you live your life in the midst of that? And it struck me that... So when we talk about these two truths, if we think about it as not one, not two, then necessarily we understand them as interpenetrating each other.

[09:17]

The reality of things shapes how we feel about them. The reality of things includes how we feel about them. And how we feel about them creates the reality. Got that? That make sense? So that is, the world is what you make it. Don't try to hit me with your no-can-do. Losing, losing, working up an attitude. So that attitude is where we go from how we feel. Once we feel something, once we have an idea, and this is not feeling in the technical Abhidhamma Buddhist way, it's feeling like, it's feeling in the sense that we make up a story about how things are.

[10:23]

and we attach to it. And once we attach to it, then we project it into the world and into the future, and lo and behold, it becomes reality, whether we like it or not. So, this is what I mean by the world is what you make it, where what intersected with this for me was thinking just being really disturbed by what I see going on in this country. what I see that's emerged, it's emerged very sharply around the healthcare debate.

[11:30]

And I see it, it's logical. There's a biological, as someone said to me, there's a biological existential fear that we have clinging to life. It's not necessarily reality, it's the reaction that we have, but there's something that's In a sense, it might be in a neurological or mammalian sense or perhaps even animal sense, we have that as a very deeply imprinted habit or reaction, but that's not necessarily the truth. Oh, that was something I meant to say. The truth of how you feel about it, how you feel about it is not necessarily the truth. Right? Do you understand the distinction? It's just how you feel about it. Then you make it a truth. So this is what I see in, you know, in the rhetoric that's been going on.

[12:35]

You have, it's just extraordinary. What I read in the paper, you have the deathers, the people who think that Obama has created death panels. You have the birthers, the people who believe that Obama is not really an American citizen, not born here. You have the tenthers, who believe that the Tenth Amendment prohibits regulations and spending programs. You have the teabaggers, which is another movement, sending Obama teabags to remind him of the Boston Tea Party. You know, you have the Oath Keepers, which is another right-wing movement who think that they have the right to rebel because Obama has violated his oath of office. You have all this bullshit that becomes reality for people and then is shaping the reality, is shaping the world that we're living in.

[13:47]

So you have these incredible simultaneous formulations where our first African-American president who is, by virtue of birth and race alone, becomes this fantastic field for projection. He's being called a communist. He's being called simultaneously a communist, a fascist, and a racist. I'm not going to go into the politics of that, but I wanted to lay it out because it conditions our world. It is also expressive, not of those guys' worlds, but of my world, of your world. how do you do this, even if you're not doing exactly that kind of pigeonholing. So in the last couple weeks I've been, many of you know I'm involved in a lot of interfaith social action, different kinds of activities.

[14:59]

So I'm part of a program at the San Francisco Foundation called the Faiths Initiative, a faith program, which is an interfaith, very diverse, really great group of people, and we were trying to do our strategic plan for 2010, and everybody agrees that the immediate thing is to work on health care. And these are mostly clergy people. I think I'm the only Buddhist, but otherwise it's diverse, various kinds of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and some people who work in social services from a religious basis, but some people who lead congregations. And it was very interesting, they just understandably want to come up with strategy and policy to bring about a meaningful health care bill.

[16:04]

But everything that they were doing was about social policy. It's like, how do we convince? How do we argue? How do we get people to come down on our side? And I said, it occurred to me as I was listening that we have a really unusual opportunity as people who minister, as people who give talks, as people who preach, which is to... what's underneath all this stuff, this birthers and deathers and tenthers and all that shit, is fear. Can we talk about fear in our congregations? Can we talk about fear, and I wasn't even saying self-clinging, I wasn't framing it in Buddhist terms, which we could analyze very deeply, and I'll talk about, I will analyze it some more as we go along.

[17:16]

But this is the way that religious people get to interact in intimacy with people in their communities, and it was really interesting. It happened both there and also I'm on the executive committee of something called the California People of Faith working against the death penalty. I went to a meeting of that about a week later, same thing. How do we defeat the other side? And again, I brought up, well, can we talk about fear? Can we talk about what is really the characteristic and reactive element that moves people in the direction towards these really punitive and small-minded solutions.

[18:19]

In many ways it's fear. It's fear for their safety. It's fear for their lives. It's fear for the lives of their children, their parents. And this is not actually really hard to understand. But can we address it as fear? Can we understand there's this basis? And in both cases, what was really interesting to me was that the instant reaction was very positive, you know, oh, good idea, you know, a lot of heads nodding, and a lot of support for this as an insight, and within about a minute and a half, right back to strategizing us and them. No traction at all. So I've really been thinking about this. And I just figured, okay, well, let's start. I'm going to be giving this talk.

[19:21]

Let's start here. You know, this is how do we talk about the fact that the world is what we make it, and that how do we live in a way that is truly free from the inside out and not conditioned by fear. I've been working, we chant this all the time, you know, every day we chant the heart sutra, right? Every day we chant the Heart Sutra, we say, and with nothing to attain, bodhisattva depends on prajñāpāramitā, on the perfection of wisdom, and one's mind is no hindrance. Without any hindrance, no fears exist. One's mind is no hindrance means we're not

[20:23]

we're not deluded by greed hatred and delusion and all of the we're not pulled away by them and all of the really particular manifestations of that that are quite numerous. How do we not worry about that? How do we not have anxiety about the small things of life and the very large things of our life itself. At the study retreat, Sogen Roshi said two things kind of similar. We were talking about this suffering, this anxiety, this kind of formless unsettledness and ache, which in the text we were working from, word vexation, which is actually a really good word, and he said, your vexation is your treasure.

[21:38]

This is what we've been given to work with, what we've been given, the very thing, if you're able to stop and look at, if I'm able to stop and look at what I'm afraid of, just to pause sit, breathe, not allow it to move me around, then I actually have the opportunity to transform. To transform it, hence, to remake the world. But I remake the world from the inside out, beginning here. I want to read a couple other quotations. Some of you know I've been working on Burma issues for quite a while. There's a wonderful analysis of Aung San Suu Kyi.

[22:48]

People know of Aung San Suu Kyi? who's the leader of the Burmese Democracy Movement. In 1990, she gave this talk called Freedom from Fear. It's actually a Buddhist analysis. But let me read this, because it goes to a really interesting place. It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it. and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. Most Burmese are familiar with the four agati, the four kinds of corruption. Chandagati, corruption induced by desire, is deviation from the right path in pursuit of bribes or for the sake of those one loves. Dosagati is taking the wrong path despite

[23:50]

those against whom one bears ill-will.

[23:53]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ