Good morning. It's a beautiful, crisp, very clear autumn morning here in Berkeley. And I'm happy to be here with you. We're having our one day sitting that is the end of our aspects of practice period. We've had a wonderful month delving into stories from the hidden lamp, the stories from 25 centuries of awakened women. And I'm going to speak from that today. But just to really appreciate the energy that these awakened women awakened in us over the last month.

[01:00]

It was really, it was quite palpable in our classes and talks and just the energy in which we put ourselves forward into the practice. So very inspiring. I'm sorry, it's over today, whatever that means, over. You know, it's like, to mark this is over is like the story of catching a fish and then painting a mark on the side of your boat so you can remember where it was that you caught the fish. we can we can keep going. I'd like to read a story that has its origins here at Berkley's End Center.

[02:00]

It's in the in the book it's called Mailey Scott Meets Loneliness and I'll I can talk about that a bit but let me read you the story This is an actual occurrence that happened and was shared with the authors, I think, of the, the editors of the Pidden Lamp. So very simple story. Crying in despair, an earnest student asked her teacher, Seisho Meili Scott, I've worked so hard to transform this crippling loneliness. I can neither shake it nor live with it. Can you help me?" Holding the student in a steady gaze and offering her confident smile, Maile ended the conversation with, please don't ever think anything is out of place.

[03:10]

I'll read it again. Crying in despair, an earnest student asked her teacher, Seisho Bailey Scott, I've worked so hard to transform this crippling loneliness. I can neither shake it nor live with it. Can you help me? Holding the student in a steady gaze and offering her a confident smile, Mali ended the conversation with, please don't ever think anything is out of place. In the book, the Commentary is by Diane Musho Hamilton, who's a good friend. She's a teacher at Two Arrows Zen Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. She's in the White Plum lineage. And her commentary delves into the question of loneliness.

[04:23]

which was of course the question that the student brought up. I'd like to reframe that a little. And I think that one of the things about working with as in Koan or a teaching is that the teaching is for you. The teaching is for me. It's not confined to the particular words or circumstances of the story that's relevant. It's not irrelevant. It's quite relevant, the circumstances, but how one reads a case The fundamental question is, what resonates with each of our, with your circumstance, with my circumstance?

[05:34]

And so I'll talk about that. But I'd like to, you know, in a classic Kesho Zen lecture, The teacher offers a kind of context about the protagonist of the case or protagonists. And I'd like to say a little about Meili. There's quite a few people in the Zendo, I would say maybe a third to half of us knew Meili and maybe quite a few of you didn't. Uh, but she was, uh, she really grew up in Zen practice here at Berkeley Zen Center. Uh, and was really a fixture. Uh, she was here virtually every day, often twice a day, uh, and lived nearby up on Ashby.

[06:43]

Uh, She worked as a psychologist and social worker. She raised, I think, three children. And like many of us, I think she came to Zen practice with the essential question of, what am I doing here in the world? When I came, She was one of the people that was already well-established as a practitioner here. If I look around the room, I'm always noticing the people who were who were actually well established in practice before I arrived. And those are people that I looked up to.

[07:45]

Those are people that I do look up to. And Maile was somebody that I looked up to. She carried herself as an elder. And she had a kind of uprightness and clarity to her nature that was quite striking. I found something that I had written in 2011, which was 10 years after her death. I wrote a kind of a blog piece remembering her. And in there, it said, Meili was like a tree, feet firmly on the ground, graying head and smile, reaching towards the sky.

[08:53]

at Berkeley Zen Center, at Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and in other circles of life, I relied on Meili for unsentimental clarity and heart. As a Dharma sister, she was always willing to listen fully, to challenge assumptions, even her own, and to point again and again to the strength of Zazen. She was an exemplar for women practitioners who were coming into their own Zen strength here. And in life and death, she showed us a way to bear the unbearable. So over time, in practice, We worked together very closely.

[09:58]

Uh, we were, we shared the seat that I sit in now. Uh, we shared that seat. We were, well, we weren't both sitting at the same time. We traded it back and forth. Uh, we were both, uh, we were co-tantos, uh, here, uh, taking that position as, as a new position. And then, uh, we had Dharma transmission together at Tassajara. And right after, really, as the transmission was complete, Meili just had this illumination. First of all, she had this illumination. She was just so joyous on the transmission, which was something that At earlier points, I think she was quite skeptical about, but it freed her.

[11:03]

And what she decided to do was to move to Arcata, California, where she had been teaching for maybe eight or 10 years on a very part-time basis. And she decided she'd move up there and really establish a Zen center on sort of our model and our tradition. And she did that. She and the community found some land. She bought a house. She built a zendo. She very quickly became a beloved teacher there. And then she got sick and died. She was only there for about two and a half years, I think. Yeah, that's right. Because we were transmitted in 98 and she died in May of 2001. And Sochin, Roshi, and Mary Mosine and I were with her and the community that week before she died and when she died.

[12:19]

And it was too soon. It was a painful loss and I think it was a loss to the wider Buddhist community loss of a really creative and sort of pioneering woman practitioner. And I still miss her. But along with that seat, what we shared also was a passion for social justice and social change. So in those years, I was the executive director of Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and she was on the board for quite a while. But I also just watched her in whatever community setting

[13:24]

She found herself, there are things we have, some of you have cooked for the Berkeley Men's Shelter. Well, she started that. A number of us have worked out at the women's prison, the Federal Corrections Institute in Dublin. And that was also something that she started. She very regularly went out to protest and sit on the tracks or by the tracks at the Concord Naval Weapons Station. I think she was doing that in the early 80s even before I came here. She did that with great regularity and sort of planted a Buddhist flag for this kind of social action, civil disobedience.

[14:36]

She was arrested many times and always came back for more. So this is some sense of who Meili was. And we recognize, we remember her several times a week. We chant this metta prayer. You're familiar with that? That was her her gloss on the Metta Sutta. And at the end, I just want to read these lines because I think they give you another side from what the story is in this book.

[15:38]

So if the message of the case is, please don't ever think anything is out of place, then how do we understand these lines by the same person, these words from the same person? May I continually cultivate the ground of peace for myself and others and persist mindful and dedicated to this work independent of results. May I know that my peace and the world's peace are not separate. That our peace in the world is a result of our work for justice. May all beings be well, happy and peaceful. I will say that the J word justice is very rarely spoken in Buddha Dharma.

[16:43]

but it's part of our Dharma as far as I'm concerned. And it means the image that we have coming out of the Western tradition of justice is a robed Greek figure woman, a woman blindfolded holding a scale. and so it's an attempt the blindfolded part is so one is not prejudiced by one's preconceptions or by what we might call unconscious bias to treat everyone equally and the scale to me the The intention of justice is to bring things into balance.

[17:51]

So I want to return to this story. The context given here is loneliness. And the difficult response that Mealy offers is please don't ever think anything is out of place. I don't feel, for me, I have to say, when I read this first, the loneliness just, that just struck me like an ice pick. It's interesting, the fundamental The fundamental nature of my life right now is not particularly lonely, but I feel like I spent whole decades wandering in that wilderness.

[19:03]

I'll never forget it. I'll never not be able to access that or feel my heart open to people who are experiencing that and that's the beautiful commentary by Musho goes to that and to her own experience of that and of letting that loneliness in But what resonates to me in these words is something wider that includes loneliness, but it includes the entire territory of suffering, particularly the sufferings that seem unbearable and that seem not to have

[20:21]

It's like you walk, for some reason the image that's coming up to me right now is like, you know, there are these box canyons in the desert areas of the West where there's sort of one way in and there's no way out. And I think of this, I'm talking about the unbearable like that, like you enter this canyon And there's no way out. And for some reason, the door back or the entryway, the passage is blocked. And I think that that's, to me, that's what resonates with me about what Meili was saying. Please don't ever think anything is out of place. That's a big problem for us.

[21:31]

What does it mean in a week when mail bombs are sent to democratic politicians and supporters? When a guy in Kentucky tries to break into an African-American Baptist church and failing that, he goes to the nearby Kroger's market across the street and kills two black people for no reason. When we have these killings in synagogue in Pittsburgh, And then yesterday there was a shooting in a yoga studio in Tallahassee where two people were killed and four wounded.

[22:40]

The perpetrator had a history of violent assaults on women. I realized as I was doing my vows that what I'd What I wish I had done was to write down all the victims' names so that, just so that we could call them forth. So please don't think, don't ever think anything is out of place, but it is. And I think what Meili was speaking of, there's another Zen admonition that we hear, we hear it literally. We used to hear it, not so much here, but in other places I've been.

[23:43]

If you're sitting Zazen and the pain in your legs is really fierce and you shift your legs, somebody would say, don't move. Uh, and really that's a, uh, that's an attitude we can have towards our life. And I've often had to ask people who were facing these difficult situations, Encourage them, don't move. For me, there's an operative word. And there's a moment when these things are said. The operative word is now.

[24:47]

So I hear what Meili was saying as, it's interesting, please don't ever, ever think anything is out of place now. When I say don't move, I say, don't move now so that you can really feel what's going on in your body. and in your mind and in your life. And there will be a time to move. If you can sit with your painful legs, the bell will ring. You're not being condemned for eternity to being tied up in that position. although it can feel like eternity.

[25:57]

One minute can feel like eternity. To say nothing is out of place now is really to allow you the space not to know what's going on and to Just observe. I meant to look this up. I think it's in the control chapter of Zen Mind Beginner's Mind where Suzuki Roshi talks about everything always changing against an unchanging background. Is that right? Does anyone remember? But he describes reality as that way. I feel that Meili was speaking to the student about that moment, because right at that moment of

[27:19]

terrible emotionality and fear. Uh, and that sense of crippling loneliness, of course, uh, what we want is for things to be different from how we perceive them to be. And again, We come back to the question of now. I'm sitting with my teacher, I'm sitting with my friend, and one of us is having great difficulty, whether it's loneliness or illness or fear or frustration or wanting to jump out of our skin at the present political and social climate in this country.

[28:27]

When I go to that, then I'm turning away from the person who is in front of me. And between us in that moment, nothing is out of place. I, for me, when I entered this story, that's what I feel Meili was saying. She was offering, nothing is out of place right now in this moment. Here we are. And that that's a teaching that you can use to meet each moment. Each moment is complete. And that completeness is the background that Suzuki Roshi is speaking of, the unchanging background.

[29:34]

But the conditions of our life, the conditions of our society, things change and we have to do things about them. And within that, we're meeting each moment with nothing out of place, even though it's really uncomfortable. You know, there's a There's an interesting, the ambiguity of this particular story is here is, are two people in an intimate relationship in that moment. And one is weeping with loneliness.

[30:39]

If we're caught in the vigor of our emotions, we can forget what's actually right in front of us. We can devalue it. And it may be the very thing that we need. So I was thinking about this story. So last week I went for a Monday to Thursday. Some of us have organized what we call an election session. And there's a group in Hanford, California, in the central sort of agricultural area of the Central Valley and a group in Carson City and a number of people from Berkeley who've been doing this.

[32:01]

And I'm not going to get into the politics of it, but Liz was there. I missed you. Penelope was there. I can't see if there's anyone else. But there's a lot, a bunch of our friends are there in both places. And I had to keep it, part of me really wanted to be there and I wanted to be with friends who are doing this work. The work is mostly, the core of it is going around house to house and getting, encouraging people to vote. Encouraging to vote for a particular candidate, but it's really essentially you want them to vote. This is hard for me to just knock on doors cold.

[33:09]

It's not my strong suit. But sometimes you have wonderful experiences and sometimes you actually have really difficult, painful experiences. And we had a Dharma talk. So basically the context of this also is we set it up like a session. We sit every morning. We have oriochi breakfast, oriochi dinner. We sit in the evening. We have work to take care of the place that we're living. And where I was was a beautiful walnut farm, just way out of town. It was really a lovely atmosphere and a nice old rambling house. But this going from house to house is not my strong suit. And, you know, what I felt was that I was at a place.

[34:11]

This is not turf that I was familiar with. There's the voices in my head say, I don't want to be here. And I would just have to stop before each house and collect myself and tell myself, just as in the story, there's nothing missing right now. And when I bring myself to the door and ring the bell, something will happen. Actually, often nothing happens because nobody's home. But if there's somebody home, something will happen. And I have some ability to shape what that something is, how I meet it. So it reminds me after, for reasons that are beyond my understanding, a week after Meili died, I almost died.

[35:38]

I had got an infection which became septic and systemic. And I was in, I ended up in the emergency room and then the ICU for several days in the hospital for two weeks. I was in a lot of pain. And it was really unbearable. And I told Lori, I said, I don't think I can do this. And she said, you don't have any choice. And I said, so what do I do? And she said, you really have to just go breath by breath. And I said, I don't know how far I have to go before I lose any sense of humor, but what I said was, okay, breath by breath, but I'm going to groan on the out-breath.

[36:54]

Which I did. Actually, it was very satisfying. But breath by breath. And the moments creeped by. They just hardly moved at all. But it was a way she was turning me towards practice. In this story, when Meili says, please don't ever think anything is out of place, she's turning a student towards practice. And I just encourage you to keep that in mind. All of us are facing difficult situations of one kind or another. and we can help each other rely on practice. So before I open it up, I just want to say, I think it's okay that we're going to have for our noon ceremony, our noon service, which won't be long, a long service, we're going to dedicate

[38:08]

the service to the victims of the hate crimes that have taken place this week. And anyone who would like to stay or be here for the services is welcome to do that. It won't, it's just going to be A few words in the Heart Sutra and the Daya Sundarani. Yeah. For those who are lost, it's not going to be an elaborate memorial, but you're welcome to stay for that if you like. So we have a few minutes. Do you have any thoughts or any questions? Yeah, Eko. Someone was working in the garden one day, and many people were working, and they were kind of roughing up the flowers and kind of roughing things around, and someone came to me and said, can you please ask everyone to be more gentle with the plants? And out of a blue sky, I got this answer, which was, I trust the elephant charging through the jungle.

[39:13]

Now, I understand that the elephant charges through the jungle, you know, allowing the transformation and life of the jungle. When we see these terrible things happening, and you suggest Meili turns us toward practice, what would you say, how would you, how is it not out of place Where do we go with that? I really, I don't know where we go. I think what Meili is saying is see what's happening right now. You know, what's happening, what are you experiencing? And this is what Ellen Webb was talking about in teachings of Joko, Joko Beck.

[40:18]

you can go and you can, you can examine, explore what's going on in your body in reaction to these activities and then remain open. So I talked about that. I mentioned these peacemaker tenets, not knowing, uh, which is not knowing what the situation is really. And then bearing witness, seeing what the, uh, what takes place. And out of that, it can come quickly. It can come slowly. Uh, there's an appropriate response arises. In light of the things that have been happening in this country last week, and you know, I would say it's actually, and this is what I find myself channeling, Sojourn, it's always been happening.

[41:39]

There's nothing pure about American history or any history, but there seems like there's a kind of intensification now. It's because of that that I felt, okay, I have to go to Hanford. It's part of the motivation that keeps me walking. the streets and going door to door because, okay, here's something I can do. I'm also aware that maybe something I can do, but I have a sense of how it might be a benefit, but it's no guarantee. The benefit will also come with a deficit. but still in balance what appears to be beneficial to sentient beings. And this is also, this is what Mealy wrote in the method prayer.

[42:43]

may I continually cultivate the ground of peace for myself and others. So that's also part of the vow. Anyway, no instruction book. Yaroni. Yes, thank you, Osama. I just wanted to say that Meili was such a strong practitioner that I really feel like in that exchange, The non-verbal part, she's really giving the gift of herself and listening to this person and taking in what they're saying. And what should I say? I mean, this may sound sort of boo-boo, but that's the kind of feeling you got when you sat with her. Yeah, I think it's true and in some ways it was also

[44:00]

It was never exactly articulated by her as well. You know, I saw one of the things that I've done was, along with her friend Angie Boisevain, we kind of helped steer Arcada's end group for about 15 years after she died. And there is something about her quality of personhood, whatever. I don't know what's mysterious to me. You know, it's like nobody, it's so wild and wooly up there in Arcata, you know, it's people just, uh, People are really reluctant to follow rules or forms or be, you know, feel like they're regimented in any way. And she came and just without a lot of direction, things kind of constellated themselves around her and made a big impression on people's lives.

[45:38]

And she made a big impression on people's lives here. Yeah, well, there's so much I could say about her and about how she worked in Arcata, but it's another conversation. There's, Deb? It was a wonderful talk. Thank you. I didn't know Mayling at all, but her meta-prayer has been one that I've memorized and repeated very often.

[46:42]

What I hear, and this is just what I bring to this case, is much like the metta prayer, that there is nothing wrong with your feelings. Your feelings are not out of place. And also, hearkening to that last line in the metta prayer, or not quite the last line, but continually cultivating the ground for peace for myself, We have to keep working. Action is appropriate. We have to act. And yet, we don't know what the results are going to be. And our feelings, whether it's agitation, or tiredness, or fear, or loneliness, or pain, or peace in the moment, nothing's out of place. It just is what it is.

[47:44]

independent of results does not mean independent of your intention. So what we're taught again and again from the Buddha is do what is wholesome, not what is unwholesome. That sounds really good, except when you start thinking and you're not quite sure what's wholesome, you know, but what you don't know, whether your intention is your intention to, I would say, do what connects you with other people, not what divides you from other people. That's to me, the meaning of wholesome and unwholesome. And, um, We can know what our intention is, but it's good if we're actually learning, we need to also look not to the results, but to the impact.

[49:02]

And that's part of our the entering of not knowing. But what you do know, what you have some sense is what my intention is to connect, not to divide. It's to love, not to hate, and so forth. Yeah. I felt really frustrated by her response. I don't think, I feel frustrated by this You know, hearing something like that, I mean, it really takes me out of the moment. Then I start to feel like I have to preface whatever I'm feeling or experiencing or understanding about the Dharma with, you know, appending things. So I understand this and I understand this and I understand this and I'm still having this loneliness. Yes. I don't know. So I really feel like, I don't know, it's somehow

[50:07]

know if somebody had said that to me obviously I didn't know this person a lot of people in here did but I I just it makes me feel very you know what it's almost like her saying that feels out of place to me because I don't and and this is like a question I can tell, I, first of all, uh, I really, I hear that. And to the best of my understanding, this story was reported by the student as, as a, as a, as received turning words.

[51:14]

That's that person's story. What occurs to me is what's missing, if I can say this, is that this happened in the context of an intimate and long-term relationship of trust and mutual accountability between Meili and the student. Now, and so you're not experiencing that, but you might. if it was in that relational context, that's possible. But I want to say something else, which is Meili could be aloof. She could be stern.

[52:19]

And there was a tough and not warm side to her. You know, we have to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of our teachers as humans. And I think you are intuitively, there's something that you're picking up that has some meaning. But that's not the meaning that the person, the question is what do we do with it? And I'm suggesting one course, but you're actually suggesting something else, which I think is good. This is what we talked about before I left Hanford on Thursday. The discussion opened up about how difficult The canvassing was for quite a number of people there and how they felt anxiety and resistance.

[53:29]

Now, of course, there are some people who really thrive on it, but we can't pretend that the other side is not there. I think that's what I'm hearing. No. Right. Right. We know it implies that. And it's interesting because what was reported or recounted was this and not the other.

[54:34]

So that's very interesting. But the other part of the conversation one can imagine was building a whole relational structure and an empathic structure in that moment. And then the Zen teacher gives the zinger. I think I'm going to leave it there. Yeah.

[55:07]

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