I vow to taste the truth of the Tathāgata's words. Good morning. Good morning. It's my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Alan Sanaki. He's familiar to many here, but some of you don't know him so well, so I'll just say a few words about where he's coming from. He's the tanto here at Berkeley Zen Center, which is the head of practice. He is originally from New York, grew up in Brooklyn and Manhattan suburbs. studied literature at Columbia University and eventually made his way out to Berkeley and started living and practicing at the Berkley Zen Center, I believe, in the early 80s. He was ordained as a priest in 1989 and was married the same year to Lori, who many of you also know. He was a shuso or head of practice for a practice period in the early 90s and then received Dharma transmission in 1998. His dharma name is Hozan Kushiki, which is dharma, mountain, form, and emptiness.

[01:06]

And in recent years, he's been executive director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and he also has a passion for music, and specifically bluegrass, and is in a band called Bluegrass Intentions, which I believe is playing in an event, which you can learn about on the bulletin board. Thank you, Malcolm, for stopping. Before I launch in, a couple things. First, just to let people know, next Saturday morning we're having our Buddha's birthday celebration, and you'll hear more about that, I think, after the talk. But just, I really wanted to encourage you to come, bring your kids. The kids this year are going to present the story of the Buddha and sing a song, and I'm really looking forward to it.

[02:08]

It should be really nice. And the second thing is that also will be the first Saturday that Sojin Roshi is back. Baika and Doug Reiner and I went down to Tassajara yesterday to participate in our friend Greg Fain's Shuso ceremony. Shuso is the head monk or the head student. And it's a real kind of milestone event in the life of a practitioner. And some of you know Greg from here. And he did a wonderful job full of Greg, if that's meaningful to you. It was really enjoyable, and it was great to see the whole spirit of the practice period down there, and Sojin really enjoying it, so we'll be glad to have him back. Every year or so,

[03:09]

Sochen Roshi will be giving a wonderful lecture on some koan from the Blue Cliff Record or the Book of Serenity, or he'll be talking about the factors of enlightenment and at the end of the lecture, in the question and answer period, someone will raise their hand and say, how come you never talk about love? which is incredibly irritating to him. Because his general response, I've heard him do this several times, his general response is, that's all I talk about. And one can understand his frustration and sometimes we have to go at it perhaps directly. So I thought I would talk about love in the context of our practice today.

[04:17]

And it occurs to me, by the time I get to the end of this lecture, you may well be thinking, what's love got to do with it? But that's for you, not for me. So love takes many forms in different languages and in different traditions. Somewhere I read in Sanskrit, there are 96 words for love, which may be like the apocryphal number of words for snow that the Eskimos have. In English, we have one sort of one size fits all word. In Buddhism, There's lots of different manifestations of love, but they're all expressions of the Buddha's love, Buddha's non-dualistic love. One common formulation is the Brahma-viharas, or the four divine abodes, which is metta, or loving-kindness, karuna, compassion,

[05:33]

Mudita, which is sympathetic joy. Thank you. I heard that. I actually had it written down here, but I wasn't looking. And Upeka, which is equanimity. All of these are expressions of love. But for most of us, I think, our concepts of love And our conditioning around love comes from, we see it through a Western lens, through the lens that's been, through the way of a mind that's been formed by, at least for most of us, and I don't want to generalize for everybody here, possibly not, but for most of us, through a lens that's been shaped by centuries of Western so-called civilization. And unfortunately, I think that that is pervading the world.

[06:38]

And so for there, we might go back to words that the Greeks had for love. And I'm sort of going to take off from there. There are three forms that are commonly identified. The first is what we mean when we say we're in love. It's the form of love that's associated with the word eros. It's romantic love and sexual love or aesthetic love. I think Plato speaks of this as the yearning of the soul to be in the realm of gods. And of course, this is really the dominant expression of our culture.

[07:46]

If you just look at the movies or the novels or TV or advertising, you know, they're all They all tout romantic love as the kind of be-all and end-all. And if you look around at the forms of expression that we have, there are very few movies or novels that somehow take a chunk out of our ordinary life. There's got to be some drama, a drama of life and death, a drama of love, whereas most of our lives are just this kind of quotidian expression of wave-like motion. Love factors in there in very important ways, but maybe not in dramatic ways. So, eros is one form of love.

[08:49]

The second form of love is philia, which is intimate affection between close friends. It's reciprocal warmth and communication. We're all really familiar with this. We find it in the workplace. We find it with our friends that we hang out with. And if we look at that, we see that there's a strong, there's often a strong conditional aspect to this. We can fall out of, we can fall into conflict or out of this filial not filial, filial love that depending upon how we're getting along with somebody, what we feel they may have done to us or we want to do to them.

[09:55]

So there's a lot of conditionality in there. This kind of love might also, well, they're all conditional. So the third kind of love is what the Greeks called agape. And it's love that seeks nothing for itself, that wants nothing in return. This is really Bodhisattva's love. God's love, Christ's love. It's really at the heart of those, the Brahma-Viharas that I mentioned, they are all different manifestations of this kind of love, love of Agape.

[11:01]

And it's quite different than the others, and I'll come back to it in the context of the Bodhisattva's great love. But I think that in all these kinds of love there are three factors maybe that seem common to each of them. If a common quality which is turning towards. In all of these kinds of love, we turn towards another. And this is why, in looking at the Buddhist precepts, there's

[12:03]

an interpretation that says that the precepts around sexuality are less dire than the precepts around hatred, because hatred is pushing away, cutting off, and in sexuality, even in its most distorted forms, even when it has aspects of violence, there is an impulse of turning towards. So that's a common quality. There's a common hazard that each of these forms may fall prey to. The common hazard is what we often talk about here as gaining idea, wanting something for oneself.

[13:14]

Lately, Lori and I have been talking about this a lot. It's applicable to my life in different ways, and I'm sure that each of us can find ways that it applies. So this hazard is the dream of self-fulfillment, that we all have this dream that sometimes arises, that we can get caught in. It's not just in the realm of love, it also may be in the realm of work or in the realm of participation in some project or some endeavor or even in an expression, an artistic expression, writing or singing or acting or dancing.

[14:20]

Its heart, I think, is in relationship. It's this dream of self-fulfillment where we are thinking of ourselves first. And when we think of ourselves first, we turn the other into an object. There's a book that, I may have mentioned a couple of books this morning. It's a book that I like a lot. It's called A General Theory of Love. Some of you may have read it. Loving is distinct from in-love.

[15:28]

Loving is mutuality. Loving is synchronous attunement and modulation. As such, adult love depends critically upon knowing the other. In-love demands only the brief acquaintance necessary to establish an emotional genre but does not demand that the book of the beloved soul be perused from preface to epilogue. Loving derives from intimacy the prolonged and detailed surveillance of a foreign soul. You can't do that and cultivate the dream of self-fulfillment simultaneously. You can flip back and forth, as we all do. Nobody's pure. None of our practices are pure, alas. None of our motivations are pure. So we move back and forth.

[16:31]

And I think in this sense, part of the practice when one encounters the dream of self-fulfillment is to see it and then wake up. So that's the common qualities is turning towards the common hazard is this dream of self-fulfillment and the common practice is the practice of profound acceptance. Yes. Whatever it is, yes. In the shuso ceremony last night, yesterday, Greg Fane was asked a couple of questions and he created a few interesting words to actually express this concept.

[17:36]

One is, the one I like was, you have to become an acceptatron. A mechanism for just accepting. But this acceptance is an expression of mutuality. You know, first of all, this also comes from this general theory of love. They lay out a theory of the structure of the brain. a kind of reptilian brain that keeps everything going, and developmentally an limbic brain, which is the mammalian brain, and then a neocortex, which is our thinking and conceptual brain. Whether this is strictly accurate, I'm not sure.

[18:38]

But in this acceptance, embedded in this is this deep sense of mutuality. So let me read this. With the effulgence of their new brain, mammals developed a capacity we call limbic resonance, a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other's inner states. It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face of another emotionally responsive creature a multi-layered experience. Instead of seeing a pair of eyes as two bespeckled buttons, when we look into the ocular portals to a limbic brain, our vision goes deep. The sensations multiply just as two mirrors placed in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections where depths recede into infinity.

[19:43]

Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition. This is what's being expressed in the Metta Sutta when in the line, just as a mother watches over and protects her only child, so should one cherish the whole world, suffusing love over it. So the link between mother and child is precisely this forge of limbic resonance where in between mother and child they are actually, and they talk about this a lot in the book, they're actually adjusting each other's metabolisms, their thought processes, their appetites,

[20:48]

their excretions, we have the ability to do that with each other as mammals. And I think that that's really, there's something intuitive and deep about this that is why we sit together in this room. When we sit together in this room, no matter what we bring into it, we're creating a new multi-embodied entity that is mutually regulating. So this is the practice and the acceptance is first of all we accept it by walking in the room by saying yes I'm going to come and do this and then we sit down next to someone whom we may

[21:53]

or may not know, and our expression of love is in accepting them right there, just as they are, and to sit there with them for the period of Zazen, or for the day, or the week. This is both a natural and a tricky thing to do. A month and a half ago, I was giving some talks on a fascicle of Dogen's. I think it was Colleen Bush who made a point from a book called Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It was very intriguing to me, but I didn't quite get it. She loaned me the book. And this, to me, is really how this mechanism works as a practice.

[23:06]

So the book talks about all kinds of intuitive thinking. In this particular chapter, speaking of improvisational theater, which I know very little about, and quoting an improvisational teacher named Keith Johnstone. So, improvisational theater, evidently there are very few rules. We might think of it as completely rule-less, but it's not rule-less. There's one really important rule, which is whatever is being offered to you in improvisation, you have to accept it. and do something with it. One of the most important of the rules that makes improv possible, for example, is the idea of agreement. The notion that a very simple way to create a story or humor is to have characters accept everything that happens to them.

[24:11]

So this is not blocking, but accepting. Accepting each offering. are a couple of improvisations as mentioned by this guy Keith Johnstone. A, I'm having trouble with my leg. B, I'm afraid I'll have to amputate. A, you can't do that, doctor. There's the block. You can't do that, doctor. B, why not? A, because I'm rather attached to it. which is kind of a clever wordplay. B, losing heart. Come on, man. A then says, I've got this gross on my arm too, doctor. So as an improvisation, this thing just goes flat. So then Johnstone says, well, try it again with agreement.

[25:13]

So A, argh! B, whatever is it? A, it's my leg, doctor. B, this looks nasty. I shall have to amputate. A, but it's the one you amputated last time, doctor. B, you mean, B, you mean you've got a pain in your wooden leg? A, yes, doctor. B, you know what this means, don't you? A, not Wormwood, Doctor. B, yes, we'll have to remove it before it spreads to the rest of you. Then, serendipitously, A's chair collapses. B, my God, it's spreading to the furniture.

[26:16]

So this is pretty good. This is how we live our lives. Our lives are complete improvisations. Our loving is complete improvisation. Our zazen is complete improvisation. Whatever we do, whatever is being offered to us, The challenge is, say yes. There's a wonderful passage from Chögyam Trungpa, who says the same thing. The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and to all people experiencing everything totally without mental reservations and blockages so that one never withdraws or centralizes onto oneself, so that one never becomes self-centered.

[27:32]

So this notion of blocking, I have to look at myself I'm really using this a lot and I'm looking at my relationship with Lori, my relationship with the kids. I just think, for example, Sylvie was home from vacation this weekend. She had a hard week because all of her friends were out of town and she had two crew practices a day. And on Wednesday, she really wanted to get together with her friend, but her friend lived in San Leandro. And I said, oh, how are you going to get there? And she said, well, you're going to drive me. And my first response, what came up, was wanting to block. And then I said, oh, and how are you going to get home? Well, you're going to pick me up. The desire to block got stronger. But because I'd been thinking about this, I just said, you know what?

[28:36]

I'm just going to turn towards this because I love her. And I don't want her to be home unhappy all day. And so I did. So I got in the car. I had to change a plan. And it was fine. I knew it was going to be fine. I knew that as soon as I got in the car, it was going to be fine. I knew that the real problem was the mental block that I put up. This is the impediment in our loving. This is the impediment in our lives that if we can just set aside as a practice, things will work much better. And this is where loving, calling saying yes, loving, loving in the sense of Agape, loving in the sense of not like, what's it gonna get for me if I drive Sylvie to San Leandro?

[29:46]

You know, but it's just like, just saying yes. And out of that, something creative arises. When you say no, or when you, you know, when you say no, when you reject a person, when you put up a barrier, I'm not talking about a boundary. When you put up a barrier to keep them out, nothing creative will happen. It's not a creative action. It's a closing down action. Saying yes allows for creativity, even though what may arise may be not comfortable, and it may not be the outcome that you necessarily have in mind. but it's the teaching of all the great masters. It's the teaching of Gandhi in relation to the British.

[31:00]

It's the teaching of Martin Luther King in the heat of racial violence. It's the teaching of Christ when he taught, love your enemies, and when he proceeded to lower himself, to wash the feet of all the disciples at the Last Supper, even when he knew that some of them would deny him and one of them would betray him, he washed all of their feet. just saying yes to the circumstances that arise. And this is the Bodhisattva's great love. There's a wonderful passage in the Vimalakirti Sutra where Vimalakirti is talking about how he sees living beings as empty, as having no essential nature.

[32:02]

And then Manjusri, who's in dialogue with him here, says, noble sir, if a bodhisattva considers all living beings in such a way, how does he generate a great love towards them? Vimalakirti replied, Manjushri, when a bodhisattva considers all living beings in this way, he thinks, just as I have realized the Dharma, so should I teach it to living beings. The love that is peaceful because free of grasping, the love that is not feverish because free of passions, the love that accords with reality because it is equanimous in all three times. The love that is non-dual because it is neither involved with the external nor with the internal. And then he goes on, he says, thereby he generates the love that is firm, it's high resolve, unbreakable like a diamond.

[33:04]

The love that is giving, the love that is tolerant because it protects both self and others. The love that is effort because it takes responsibility for all living beings. The love that is happiness because it introduces living beings to the happiness of the Buddha. This is the love that selflessly just says yes. that says yes to all of the joyful and the difficult conditions of our life. And this is what we practice in Zazen. The practice of Zazen, of Shikantaza, is not excluding anything. Whatever arises in your mind, however pleasant or unpleasant,

[34:08]

In the moment of that arising, you accept it, you turn towards it, and you let it go. And you let that continuous flow of feelings and perceptions and sensations just go. You don't put a dam on that river. You just ride with them. and you say yes to whatever condition arises without saying, oh, this isn't Sazen, or this isn't practice. Even if really unpleasant and ugly thoughts arise, say, oh, this is my mind right now. OK. And turn towards it in a kind way, but in the way that also lets go.

[35:15]

And when we can do that here, in the laboratory of the zendo, just with our own breath and mind, then we have the first tools to be able to take this outside into our relationships, our interactions, the challenges that we have in the world, and act in just that same way towards it. So in that sense, there is no distinction between Zazen and our daily activity. And this is what we're hoping to cultivate, is this continuity. This continuity of acceptance. And it's not an acceptance that is devoid of discernment.

[36:22]

I want to be clear about that. It's not just becoming a puddle of you know, this puddle of yes, mush, you know, but ah, there's some rigor and challenge involved in it. But there's no separation. It's just this continuous practice from our breath, from our mind, into flowing into all the aspects of our life. And that's the Bodhisattva's great love. And that's the character of love All of these loves are interpenetrating. That's the character of love that you can find even in the love of Eros, in the love of Philia. That same quality can be there. It can be there as we cultivate it, as we settle our own minds into the

[37:27]

mind of the bodhisattva, we shape it to that diamond-like character. And that's our true aspiration, to wake up. So I think I'll stop there and leave time for some discussions, questions. And then I'm saying, maybe she's blocking too. With Sylvie or with Lori? Which one? With your wife, right? You said something about that you would take her to... Oh no, Sylvie, my daughter. Oh, I thought it was... It doesn't matter whether she was blocking. I don't think she was, but it doesn't matter. What matters to me is what I do.

[38:31]

If you start conditioning your responses on what another person is saying or doing, then you're caught in this dance of reciprocity. So the question is, how do you let go right there and have faith in the appropriateness of that? How do you know the difference between erecting a barrier and setting a boundary? You have to, I think you have to look very, I mean, this is just general, but I think you have to look very carefully and really consider, am I trying to cut things off? Am I trying to cut something off here?

[39:33]

Or is my motivation wholesome? And the other thing you can do is ask your friends. We're not alone. We're not alone in this life. We're not alone in this practice. And the biggest mistake we can make, I really believe this, is to make difficult decisions unilaterally. when you don't have to. If you're really alone, there ain't nobody to turn to, but if there's someone to turn to, work with that person as well. See what they think. If your car broke down or you had appointments and you couldn't have taken Sylvie to San Leandro, how would you have said yes? Answer yes.

[40:36]

I just would have said, I'm really sorry. I would love to. I'm really sorry. I want, you know, I would want to take you. But I can't do that right now, and I hope you know that. And there's enough love between us that that actually happened this morning. This morning I left to take her to crew practice, and then she said, well, how am I going to get home from practice? I said, well, I can't really help you with that because I'm giving this talk. And she knows that I would have wanted to, and she actually did find her way home. But it's, you know, show them, just to express your caring, whether you can do something or not. That may be the best you can do. The best you can do is maybe listen to someone's need, you know, and say, I would meet this if in any way I could.

[41:41]

Ed? I really like the idea of saying yes, and also saying yes, I think, internally, and then having choice whether or not to act on that. So that you're not acting, just because you're saying yes, inside, does not mean that you're taking the next step. saying yes internally. And you can say yes internally and then decide not to act on that. But it seems to me it's an important distinction in that we're saying yes to our experience. I think that's true, and this is again where our Zazen practice, you don't do anything about anything that happens in Zazen, right?

[42:51]

I hope. You just let it happen, Gavin. And I think part of what, I'm not, really talking so much about the practical world in the sense that you're laying it out. I love this thing from improvisational theater, this notion that to create an improvisation that works, you have to accept something. So then you have to figure out, how do I accept it? And it can go countless ways, but to improvise our lives with that principle in mind, I think is very harmonious with the practice that we have. Linda? You talked about Western delusions about love, but you referred to our obsession with romantic love, but of course that's not just Western, that's found all over the place.

[44:05]

But I was just thinking, do you think that the romantic or sexual love is almost automatically delusional? Or since there's so much intense importance given to it in many cultures, could it possibly have some particular power to release selfless love? Absolutely. Absolutely. I don't think there's any question about it. Oh, there's a good one.

[45:10]

Yeah, that's really good. That's also quite harmonious with our practice, I think. Yeah. How could you say yes to an old friend who has become self-absorbed? It's too, I can't say. I'd really have to be in that position. I've been in that position. And I think, gotta take the really long view. And sometimes you may have to distance yourself. And sometimes all that you might be able to do is be kind to them in the limited interactions that you have. and look for your opening. I mean, I had a relationship like this that went on for 12 years of that, and it was very painful. And then something moved, and now we're friends and collaborate again.

[46:18]

I mean, I was lucky. It didn't necessarily happen that way, because you don't control everything. You can only control what you can do. And then you have to have some faith in the workings of the universe that that person will also be able to wake up a little. They may or may not. So one more, I think, or maybe one more after Eric. I don't want Eric to have the last word. I'm scared. Yeah, I don't know.

[47:36]

Who's that, Charlie? Go ahead. I think that's a really good answer. Yeah, no, I do. I mean, what I was coming to before you said that was, I honestly think it's fear of women. Which is, that's patriarchy. It's fear of sexuality. It's fear of the enormity of emotions and feelings that are released. That's what I suspect. We don't really know. So, one more, Ann, and then that's it.

[48:40]

If, as so many cultures do, you make women into the unclean, then it's very hard to see a lot of good coming. Women, all of the negative feelings about sex tend to put on women in both the cultures that Buddhism arose out of and in the West. that would appear to me to be a bit of an impediment. You only see things like romantic love when your view of women is a little different. Yeah. I could go into even in Japanese Buddhism, there's this whole, there are these oaths and mantras and documents about menstruation. And I think this is an element in a lot of traditional cultures. And it boils down to fear of the real organic power that women have.

[49:42]

So let's stop there, I guess. Thank you very much. My wife's coming back today, so I don't want to go to church.

[49:56]

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