I vow to face the truth that does the darkest words. Good morning. Good morning. I'd like to introduce Steve Stuckey. Many of you may know him. Steve's a long-time student at the San Francisco Zen Center. He lived at Greenbelch for many years. And he told me that for the last 10 or 12 years, he's been living in Mill Valley with two women and two cats. One of those women is my daughter. She's 14. Well, before I get into that, I should say good morning. It's always a treat for me to be here at the Berkeley Zen Dojo. And of course it's a treat to be in Berkeley.

[01:08]

I hear the sirens right now. I heard in the paper that something about People's Park recently again and I don't, I feel a little out of touch with that. I don't quite understand. Maybe someone after the lecture at tea who understands what's going on at People's Park would enlighten me about that. I come occasionally and just talk to Mel, but I don't often have the time to come and sit in the Zendo, so it's a wonderful space and wonderful people practicing here. So I feel that this place is a real treasure and it warms my heart to see people take good care of this place. at my house in Mill Valley on Monday nights.

[02:25]

We open the door and people come and sit us in. And then we have a discussion. And we have been talking about the Satipatthana Sutta, the establishment of mindfulness. sometimes is translated as the four foundations of mindfulness. So that's kind of a background for a point that I want to focus in on today. Maybe I need to fill in a little bit more. The four foundations of mindfulness are, first of all, what is mindfulness? Mindfulness is considered among practitioners of Buddha Dharma as one of the factors, one of the seven factors of enlightenment.

[03:32]

One of the seven factors that are characteristic of an awakened state of mind. I find that along with sitting zazen, which is a practice which gives people very good access to dharma practice. The practice of mindfulness is something that's very accessible because you can practice mindfulness in any situation. So what is mindfulness? Essentially, mindfulness is bringing attention to something. bringing awareness to this present moment of experience. Whatever it is that you're encountering or engaged with, whatever it is that arises in your consciousness, can become and properly is a focus of this attention, of your mindfulness.

[04:44]

Mindfulness means that you have an awareness of your relationship, your connection, with whatever it is, whether it's a thought, whether it's a person, whether it's a friend, whether it's just a bit of information. You have some relationship with it. Paying attention to that actually locates you and time and space. So in the Sariputana Sutta, the four areas that are called foundations are body, feeling, mind and objects of mind. So you can bring your attention to your body, bring your attention to your feelings, bring your attention to your mind, as in various states of mind, and understand various qualities of your mind at different times.

[05:58]

And you can bring your attention to objects of mind. Now, in the area of objects of mind, which is the last part of the Sariputana Sutta. The instructions include bringing your attention to your experience in the context of Buddhist teachings themselves. For example, you can use the Four Noble Truths as objects of mind that you bring your attention to. Bringing your attention to the Four Noble Truths can be helpful in locating yourself and in finding a way in which you can be healthy in your relationships.

[07:05]

I guess I can't assume that everyone knows Four Noble Truths because some of you could have just been coming here for the first time. So briefly, the Four Noble Truths come from early teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha who lived about 2,500 years ago. And the first Noble Truth is that there is dis-ease. there is suffering. And the second noble truth is that there are causes of suffering. And the third is that there is a cessation of suffering. In other words, if there are causes, things that create suffering, there is also the understanding that suffering is not the absolute condition of our lives, but suffering is a relative that comes and goes.

[08:20]

And the fourth Noble Truth is that there is a path, and it's called the Eightfold Path. And the Eightfold Path really should be understood not as sequential, as eight steps in a row, but as eight aspects, eight perspectives on the way we follow a path of liberation. So it gives you eight things to do. And they're called Right Understanding or Right View, Right Thought, Right Action, Right Speech, Right Livelihood, Right Concentration, Right Samadhi, and Right Mindfulness.

[09:32]

I want to talk about Right Thought This is number two, and I want to talk about a particular aspect of Right Thought, which is renunciation. Oh no, not renunciation. Renunciation means we have to give up something. Right thought and right renunciation are interesting to me. Not right renunciation, right thought and renunciation are interesting to me right now. Right thought is very important because Thoughts lead to actions.

[10:37]

Thoughts lead to speaking. Thoughts are often what we identify with as even ourselves. We often think that we are our thoughts. We often think that if we can think the right thing, Actually, we don't often think that. We sometimes catch ourselves in a train of thought in which we think that if we can just follow this train of thought, we will get satisfaction. We will somehow be happy. So what is right thought? There are some traditional descriptions of what is right thought and one of them is renunciation.

[11:42]

Renunciation is sometimes understood as this significant turning of your life. Turning your life from a life which gets you into trouble to a life which is freeing, to a life which is liberating. You might say, turning from a life which is grasping at things to turning to a life which is creative and non-materialistic, a life which is unified. I'll come back to renunciation. Another traditional description of right thought is that right thought is not harmful.

[12:45]

So you might examine your thinking and see if your thinking falls into some vein in which it leads to harm, whether it leads to harm for yourself, whether it leads to harm for someone else. It's important to see what happens with your thinking in order to even understand what thought is harmful. But you can, if you're cultivating right thought, you can cultivate a thought which is compassionate and generous. So that's another description of right thought. Right thought is compassionate. Just as I was leaving Mel's office to come to give the talk, I saw on his desk a piece of paper, and across the top it said, sex in the forbidden zone.

[14:23]

And I know that refers to a book written by, is it Peter Rudder? Peter Rudder, who is a therapist, I haven't read the book, but I heard him talk, and I know there has been for some time considerable discussion about the relationship of teacher and student. or doctor and patient. And it actually has to do with an imbalance of power in relationships. And it has to do with the fact that in our culture, we have historically a big division between genders.

[15:31]

So when Fran introduced me today, She said, he lives with two women and two cats. I don't know what she thought, but we make a distinction between men and women. If I live with two women, well, who are these women and what's the relationship? I say, one is my daughter immediately, and the other is my wife, that immediately may put your mind a little bit at ease. If I say they're both my wives, you might have a little problem. And I might too. When we say two cats, you may not find that to be so unusual. And actually, it's not as important to me whether the cats are male or female.

[16:37]

It turns out that one's a female and one's a male. The female's already been spayed and the male won't be a male much longer. He's just a kitten. But I just point that out because we have a gender division in the species. When we look at cats, well, of course, it makes a big difference to cats if they're male or female, right? At certain times, but it doesn't make as much difference to us. Because this is so embedded in our culture, it's very difficult to see. And it's very difficult to see how our actions may, and our thoughts, may lead to harmful actions. And it's because we are human and we are caught in our own tendency to grab and identify, it's very difficult for us to see what our thought, even to see what our thought content is.

[17:58]

It's very difficult for us to see thoughts that we're so used to that we just assume that this is the way things really are. It's very difficult then for us to see what is truly helpful and what is truly compassionate compared to what might be troublesome, leading to pain and more confusion. How are we doing out there? Right now, I'm thinking, it's hard to come in and give a talk where I haven't seen you all for a long time. And I know some people here are Zen students of many, many years, and other people are pretty new.

[19:02]

After I finish talking, I'd like to leave time for discussion. So if you have any questions, come up. Keep them in mind. But if there's some question that you don't understand something that I said, feel free to just raise your hand. We can clarify things as we go along. Now in the context of right thought, I want to bring up one other point of view, and that that from the Mahayana point of view, or from the Zen school point of view, right thought has to do with vow and intention. In other words, right thought has to do with your basic direction. What is it that you're really committed to? What is it that you really care about?

[20:08]

What is it that is most profound Or as we sometimes say, what is your innermost request? So from this point of view, right thought becomes what we call the Bodhisattva vow, which is to live for the benefit of all beings. and benefit in the sense of helping all beings to come to complete awakening, complete spiritual maturity. I want to mention a practice here. In the context of intention,

[21:12]

How do we create intention? Or where do we find our intention? You might be pretty unclear about your intention. What is it that you're trying to do in your life? Why try to do anything? Is it your life? Where did this life come from? And who is it that is living it out? Do you feel that it's pretty much a setup? Do you feel that it's something you have to just kind of plod through? Do you feel that it's very frustrating because there are things that you really deserve or you're supposed to have and you don't have them? Are you afraid of what's around the corner?

[22:17]

It's interesting having a 14-year-old daughter because she just graduated from eighth grade where she was one of the bigger people. The little sixth graders were, well, they're just little sixth graders. But eighth graders feel pretty important in middle school. But now it's the summer before she begins high school, and she's talked about being afraid. She doesn't know what's gonna happen. It's a whole new scene. She's gonna be one of the little kids. She doesn't exactly like that. She doesn't like that at all, I think. She knows she has to go through something. She's been talking about rites of passage. In fact, she gave a talk at her eighth grade graduation, and her theme was rites of passage.

[23:29]

So she has a sense of a path, that she has to somehow find her path, but it's not always her choice. A lot of it is just set up. Here's what you do. Eighth grade, ninth grade. So the bodhisattva, the intention of a bodhisattva, someone who is willing in the midst of all this stuff to actually dedicate their life to the benefit of all beings may be pretty difficult for you to appreciate. Or you may think, well, this is something that I have to do in order to get enlightenment, so maybe it's worth it.

[24:37]

When I talk about renunciation, I think people immediately feel, and I felt for a long time, resistance to giving up something that I thought that I had. And renunciation is usually understood in that ordinary sense. Well, you've got to give up things that you like. In fact, Buddha's early practice before he became the Buddha was partially an experiment with a kind of renunciation in which he gave up physical pleasure. He gave up not only physical pleasure, he gave up ordinary physical well-being. did what are called austere practices.

[25:40]

Didn't eat. So people often think of renunciation in that light. Well, we're giving up things that we actually need. And we feel like, well, it's like, okay, we'll make a deal. We'll give this up if we somehow get some benefit. I'll give this up if I get to be at least considered virtuous. But renunciation is not meant to be a punishment. It's simply meant as some corrective, some restraint on our tendencies that get us into get us into trouble in our own personal life, and get us into trouble as a larger community, or sangha, or vast, dynamic, interconnected universe.

[26:56]

I recently read a very good expression of that, which I wrote down. And the person who expressed it this way is a woman who's a Buddhist nun, lives in Nova Scotia. Her name is Pema Chodron. She's in the Tibetan Kagyu lineage, and she had part of one of her talks published in Tricycle Magazine. Are you all familiar with Tricycle Magazine? Tricycle Magazine is pretty new. The first issue just came out recently. But it's very promising. It's a Buddhist quarterly published by Helen Torkoff and Rick Fields. Tricycle Magazine may be on your newsstand, or it may not, but you can probably find someone in this room who has a copy.

[28:16]

It's a quarterly. It looks like it could be a very good Buddhist publication. Here's what Pema says about renunciation, which is an important practice to her. Renunciation is realizing that our nostalgia for wanting to stay in a protected, limited, petty world is insane. Once you begin to get the feeling of how big the world is and how vast our potential for experiencing life is, then you really begin to understand renunciation. So I'd like to suggest to you that you consider renunciation in that radical light.

[29:18]

That all the things that you have nostalgia for, maybe even people's part, can be limiting. And can be denying you your own whole existence. So renunciation is actually properly understood as giving up the things that bind you, giving up your shackles. And in the sense of right thought, that means giving up thoughts that diminish you, giving up thoughts that diminish your friends, giving up thoughts that diminish your enemies, giving up thoughts that diminish any aspect of your experience.

[30:31]

It also means giving up thoughts that exaggerate or thoughts in which you may prefer to look a little bit better than you really do. You may want to present yourself in a way that isn't quite accurate because you're embarrassed. So realizing what Pema is saying is realizing that hanging on to things is fundamentally insane, fundamentally unhealthy, is the key to seeing what you want to renounce, what you want to let go of. Time is flying.

[31:45]

I wanted to bring in another aspect. Briefly, just another image. Old Zen saying, this comes from Dogen quoting another Chinese Zen teacher. in his fascicle called Body-Mind-Study-of-the-Way-Shinjin, Gakudo. The lotus leaf is perfectly round, round as a mirror. The tip of the horse chestnut is exceedingly sharp, sharp as a gimlet. And then Dogen says, although the mind may be round as a mirror, it is bits and pieces.

[32:47]

Although the mind may be sharp as a gimbet, it is bits and pieces. What he means by bits and pieces is that moment by moment we realize our life. It's not something out there. It's in the small details, moment by moment. He calls this straightforward mind. So right thought and straightforward mind are one. Characteristic of straightforward mind, round or mirror-like, This is an image of space. So in your practice of mindfulness or in your meditation practice, you'll find some sense of spaciousness.

[33:52]

Spaciousness, wide field. You've got room. You let go of the blinders, narrowing your vision, let go of your tunnel vision, you have space. So this is a characteristic of straightforward mind or some fresh, fresh mind. Mind like a gimlet. A gimlet is an awl, a pointed tool. Originally kind of a little old drill with a little handle. So there's a feeling of this capacity of our mind to penetrate and enter in. So this can be intuitive. If you develop this capacity, if you're aware of this capacity, and at the same time you cultivate spacious capacity, wide open mind, then you're using your whole capacity

[35:07]

and you can begin to see right thought, you can begin to see the consequences of your thoughts as it leads to action, as it leads to saying something. So when you have fundamentally the intention of benefiting beings, And you keep finding that in yourself. Benefiting beings doesn't mean you deny yourself. You begin with yourself. You take care of yourself. And then you extend it. And you stop and do the zazen and cultivate the mind that has focus and the mind that has the space. Then you can begin to see What is right thought? And I think you can even begin to bring it into very, very loaded situations.

[36:27]

As you're clearer and stronger, you can bring it into loaded situations, such as the dynamics of sexual relationships. I was just mentioning in the past. I want to mention two practices in this regard. One is that you find some way to start your day with right intention, right thought. For me, it's been helpful to have a little card on my altar that says, I vow to live for the benefit of all beings. So when I offer incense in the morning, oh yes, I remember. No matter what else I have to do today, okay, busy agenda, but still, fundamentally, there's this contact with intention to fundamentally be beneficial.

[37:35]

It sounds maybe kind of corny, maybe kind of obvious, but it's helpful to me because I'm the kind of person that needs that reminder. You may find you have some other way of expressing it, but you need to do that regularly, every day. And then throughout the day, find a way, well how can in this situation, how can I be beneficial? Secondly, that you recognize that we have what we call an interdependent relationship. I'm not myself without you. You're not yourself without me and other friends. And so to know what right thought is, we need to listen to each other. I think a fundamental problem in situations where somebody is getting hurt, being abused, being denied their full potential, is that there's a lack of listening.

[38:58]

Somebody isn't listening. And somebody isn't experiencing being hurt. So it's part of the spacious mind is to listen. Don't always expect that the answer is coming from the gimlet point mind. Sometimes the answer is coming from over here, very quiet. Or sometimes the question that is the edge that we need to pay attention to is coming from someone else. One other thing about having a 14-year-old daughter is that when I do something stupid, or when I think something stupid and then I say something stupid, she says, duh, Dad. And I know, oh yeah.

[40:00]

So, any questions or comments? Yeah, that's the sense of renunciation in which there's a divided experience. There's that over there, that thing. But even if it's very close right here, even in our thinking, if we identify it as a thing, it's already somewhat separate. division in our awareness.

[41:12]

There's that thing and there's me. To renounce it does not mean to try to get rid of it or push it further away. Renounce it means to let go of any particular preference that we have about it. Okay, so if it's So if it's, do you have an example, something in mind? When you're thinking of that? Could be anything, I would say something like a renouncing violence. I push it away, I renounce it, and I give some cleanness to it in that process. Renouncing violence, well violence is a concept, but say renouncing, say you have a tendency to be violent. Say I have a tendency to hurt someone. or I have a feeling of anger or ill will. Now, to renounce that feeling, or to renounce ill will, or to renounce anger, or to renounce some violent action that comes from that, is not to say that I don't have it.

[42:29]

It's not to push it away. just to recognize it and say, okay, this is really a feeling that I have, okay. This is a tendency that I have. And I could see that if I played this out, I'd be capable of hurting someone. Or I see this person over here is doing that. They're acting out of some conception of real dividedness. And so they're venting their, ill will or anger on this other person, not realizing how they're hurting themselves. So renouncing it is not to say that violence is something separate from my experience. It's to say, I'm just going to let go of any particular trouble I have with it, so that I can see it

[43:30]

just as it is. That means seeing my own tendency or seeing someone else's tendency. Just seeing it as it is. Then, you take, in the context of beneficial action, you find some healing response to pain, to anger. So there's a number of levels here. We can say, okay, I am going to renounce violent actions. That's very good in that sense. Renounce some specifically troublesome tendency that you have. Or I'm going to renounce, give up my habit of smoking. I'm going to renounce, give up my tendency to think of, for men, to think of women as sex objects, okay?

[44:41]

Now that just means that you're telling yourself, okay, at this point I have some tendency and this is the way in which I'm going to work with it. This is a reminder. Is what you're saying then that when one attempts to... angry response, and I'm letting go of it, not letting it bother me.

[45:51]

Is that the overcoming of that duality? Did I make any sense of that? Yeah. Overcoming the duality is really completely penetrating what that is, a tendency. It's not just as easy as saying, oh, I'm going to let go of it or I'm not going to let that bother me. If you say, I'm not going to let it bother you, you have to be a little careful because you may be trying to push it away and deny that it is you. To say that it's you doesn't mean that it's all of you. To say, oh, I have a tendency, I'm feeling angry, doesn't mean that that's all I am. But it's just acknowledging this is, in this moment, this is what's happening. But then it means to let go of anything that tends to further entangle you.

[46:56]

And that can be a positive or negative thing. I can say, okay, I'm feeling angry. I don't like it. And I begin to have an inner battle over the fact that I felt angry. So it's letting go of that inner battle. Feeling angry? I'm simply feeling angry. Feeling angry next moment? Moment after moment, this is a practice. What's happening next moment? Oh, anger changing, heating up. How intense is it getting? Very tense, okay, so if you stay right with it, it'll change. Pretty soon, anger subsides. What happens next? This is really being in touch with the information, your experience, information that you receive moment by moment. If you can do that, then you don't need to have so many big rules about what to do. Because what to do is very clear, because you're there in the present situation.

[48:03]

But if you can't do that, and you get carried away, by your tendency, your habit. You need some rule, something to stop you before you run off the road, or really hurt yourself, hurt somebody. Yeah? So are you saying the main thing is not to be afraid of it, so that you can see what it is in the context of reality, and just see that it's just a Not to be afraid of it. Well, if I say don't be afraid of it, what happens when you are? Then you might start attacking it, or start making something big out of it, that you're getting involved with it, instead of seeing that it's just a wave that will pass, Mindfulness is like being afraid of something that I don't see it for what it is, as easily.

[49:12]

Exactly, right. So, when you know that, say, I know, okay, when I'm afraid of something and I don't see it as it is, that in itself is mindfulness. That in itself is a factor of enlightenment. And you should know that you're on the right track, just to say, okay, now I want to see it as it is. That's the catalyst you need, or that's the edge that you can then take a look at. But you can't see it effectively if you're spinning around in reaction. You do have to stop, sit Zazen, or just stop what you were going to say in a rush of either fear or anger or whatever. And take a look, okay? Wait for the right thought. Wait for a clearer mind, okay?

[50:16]

Do the best you can. So fear, yeah. You see fear, you have to acknowledge fear. But that's a good pointer as to where we have our edge or where the knot is we need to bring some careful, mindful attention. seconds in each of the waves. Good point.

[51:22]

I'm being told we're out of time. And of course, that kind of question is exactly what then you need to follow up on in detail, and each person's situation is different. So, maybe we can talk a little bit of tea. Thank you all very much for your kind attention.

[51:50]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ