The Bodhisattva Chaplaincy

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Good morning, bodhisattvas. So when I held up the flower, was anyone enlightened? Good. All right. So good morning, bodhisattvas. That greeting is, uh, the greeting that one of the early Zen teachers in America, Nyogen Senzaki, is the way he regularly met his Zen group, which I think he called mentor garden, like kindergarten. I'm not quite sure what that meant to him, but, His greeting was to acknowledge everyone's Bodhisattva nature, that everyone of us is on the Bodhisattva path and everyone of us is also a Bodhisattva.

[01:14]

So that's the, That's part of the subject of my talk is like, how do we do this? How do we be Bodhisattvas? How do we waken to the nature that's within us? And how does it manifest in the world? I've came back about a week ago from about two weeks in Santa Fe at the Upaya Zen Center, which is a wonderful place. I've been teaching for the last four or five years now in the core faculty of the Upaya Zen Center's chaplaincy training program. You know, I'm not a chaplain. I've got no certificates. I've got no credentials.

[02:18]

You know, but I've had the opportunity to work in prisons, to work with people who are dying, to work with people who are ill, to work with myself, and to be involved in various aspects of engaged Buddhism. And so it's been a great, opportunity and privilege over the last years to be partnering with Roshi Joan Halifax at Opiah in the chaplaincy program. And I will say, I'll say a little more, I'll say more about chaplaincy, but I also, if you want to know about the program, there in the back of the room is one of the people in the program, Mary Cecile, could you raise your hand? Yeah, so she's been doing this for a while.

[03:19]

It's a two-year program, and she can tell you about it from the inside out, and I can tell you about it from one side. So you can talk to her after the lecture. A lot of it, being a bodhisattva, being in a path of service, which is one's practice, comes back to a principle in my mind that, or a set of principles that begins with what Suzuki Roshi spoke of in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, actually Beginner's Mind, where he says, in the Beginner's Mind, we have, there are many possibilities, and the Expert's Mind, there are few, which means, when you come into this room for the first time, and you've not been here before,

[04:39]

You don't know what the hell is going on. And all of these different possibilities, questions, everything is coming up in your mind. And this is the fruitful place in which we can discover ourselves. And then as we get older and we've been there a lot, there's a lot of people, there are newer people here and there are a lot of people who've been here for a long time. We think we know what we're doing. And this is really a problem. This is the expert's mind. Suzuki Roshi talks about this. He says, in Japan, we have the phrase shoshin, which means beginner's mind. The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner's mind, or rather, to maintain that attitude of being a beginner, to maintain the fact that we don't know.

[05:50]

He says, suppose you recite the Prajnaparamita only once. It might be a very good recitation. But what would happen if you recited it twice, three times, four times, or more? You might easily lose your original attitude towards it. And we see this again and again. It's like, we have service every day. We had service this morning. We always chant the, the Heart Sutra in English and sometimes in Japanese. And for those of us who've been here for a while, it's like, oh, we were doing it well. Oh, we were doing it badly. our discriminative mind, our critical mind kicks in and we're trying to decide, oh, is this the way, is this the right way to do it? Oh, I'm doing it the right way, but they're doing it the wrong way.

[06:54]

Why aren't they doing it right? So this is the critical mind, which is the death of beginner's mind. At the same time, we can't suspend our critical mind. It's just, can we hold it really lightly? Can we hold it respecting that everybody in the room is doing their best to chant the Prajnaparamita Sutra? Suzuki Roshi says the same thing will happen in your other Zen practices. For a while you will keep your beginner's mind, but if you continue to practice one, two, three years or more, although you may improve some, which is very subjective and

[08:02]

questionable notion, this notion of improvement, you are liable to lose the limitless meaning of original mind. And I would say that this principle of beginner's mind, this principle of not knowing, this principle of respecting each person's effort right then in what is happening in this room is true, not just in this room, not just with our Zen practice, but it's true about our entire life. So beginners, the principle of beginner's mind applies to our relationships, our marriages, the relations that we have with our workmates, our family, God forbid, our teachers, and ourselves.

[09:23]

How do we apply it? How do we apply beginner's mind? The attitude of our Zen teachers, our historical teachers, is very clear about this. There's a wonderful case, and I know I've spoken about this from different angles many times over the last few years, and I probably quoted this case. This is case 20 from the Book of Serenity, the Book of Equanimity. Zen Master Thich Trang asked Pha Yen, what have you been doing? What is your journey? And Pha Yen said, I've been going around on pilgrimage.

[10:27]

So you've been going around from teacher to teacher and Buddhist site to Buddhist site. And Thich Sangh said, what do you expect to get from pilgrimage? What's the point of that? And Phi Yen said, I don't know. I don't know. Unless you could, I don't know. I think about in terms of acting, it's like different line readings of that. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But it all boils down to the same thing. And Thich Trang said, not knowing is most intimate. That place of doubt, of really inquiring about where am I at this moment is the place where we can really manifest our Zen mind, where we can really be bodhisattvas, where we can really be open.

[11:48]

And that's the point of It's practice of, it's training of chaplaincy that we're working in. So, what I like about the program that I'm teaching in that upaya is that it's based in practice. The day begins and often ends with zazen. everything returns to Zazen. And that's part of the training. And this is very unusual in a chaplaincy training program, which is often, you know, kind of working on this competency and that competency and writing papers. But our training begins and ends in practice. It begins with us, begins and ends with us sitting together with each other, just as we're doing here. and facing ourselves, each of us facing ourselves together.

[12:59]

And it's a way, it begins and ends with us bearing witness, if you will, to ourselves. And this is the mind that we carry into the various particular activities that we undertake. which is looking at meaning, suffering in a variety of ways with this mind of not knowing. It's like, what's going on here? So we see this in chaplaincy, in the context of hospitals and hospice, You can find it in prisons. You can find it in the military. You can find it in street ministry, serving the homeless, feeding homeless people.

[14:02]

There are people in our program who have been working with undocumented immigrant children who've been coming into Arizona and New Mexico from Mexico without any parents, without any jobs, without any education, really fleeing for their lives. There are also people who have been, there's a woman who's been working in Europe where there's a flood of refugees from Syria and other places in the Middle East that have been coming into Europe and just how do you help them? One of our students has been, his work is to be involved with people who have been in gangs and in prison gangs and

[15:11]

in order to make their way into more mainstream life, they gotta do something about all the tattoos that they have. So he's developed a tattoo removal program. And there are various ways, however we can use our imagination about helping our world and about respecting the people that we encounter, that is an aspect of chaplaincy. One of my teachers, a Thai Buddhist philosopher who's been, he's been here quite a bit in Berkeley. It's not for a number of years. His name is Sulok Sivaraksa. And what he calls his practice is Buddhism with a small B. And I think that applies for the kind of training that we're doing in chaplaincy.

[16:31]

It's like there's a bunch of Buddhists doing this, but they're not proselytizing Buddhism. we're trying to extract what are the principles by which we meet people that derive or arise from our Buddhist practice, but shall we say, don't smell of religion. It's like you don't have to, you don't have to buy into the ideas of Buddhism in order to receive help or in order to help people. It's just what is essentially human. And this practice, I think, is to treat everybody as equal.

[17:35]

So when I say good morning Bodhisattvas, I would say this, I could say it anywhere I am because we all are manifestations of Bodhisattva path. We're manifestations of the Bodhisattva and Buddha nature. And so that is what we do. That's what we're cultivating here in this room, but the real test is not how deep or how good or whatever that means. Is our meditation here in this room? How chill are you as you're facing the wall? It's really, are you working with yourself in such a way that in all of the aspects of our lives, we can meet people respectfully.

[18:39]

As Sogen Roshi has said often, and this has been a core teaching for me, he said, don't treat anyone or anything like an object. So we we encounter everybody with recognition for what their true nature is, what their potentiality is, and if you're not treating them like an object, then the flip side of that, because there's always a flip side, is we are looking at them subjectively, which means not separate from oneself. We're looking at each being as part of ourselves, as a manifestation of ourselves.

[19:47]

So what happens in their lives directly is an intimate manifestation of what happens in my life and vice versa. So because I wish to be respected, and also because I wish to treat myself with respect, I treat this person that I'm meeting with respectfully. Because clearly that's what that person wishes also. So maybe now is the moment for the song. So I've been developing a repertoire of Buddhist songs.

[20:48]

This has been kind of at the center of this repertoire. And it teaches this practice of respect. Many of you have heard this before. This song was written by Greg Fane and Ben Gustin at Tassajara a while ago, maybe 15 years ago. I've recorded it and other people have, a few of us have played it or sung it. And it's drawn from Chapter 20 of the Lotus Sutra, which is the chapter about the bodhisattva never disparage, or the bodhisattva never despise. It's got a chorus, and the chorus has the message that's kind of the core of this lecture. So I'll sing the verse, and I'll sing the chorus once, and then hopefully I'll encourage you to sing it again.

[21:50]

You'll have a couple more chances. There's a book called the Lotus Sutra You really ought to know about A holy book that has the power To remove all fear and doubt And this book tells the story of a man Who means the world to me He could just as well have been a woman, Except for male hegemony. So they call him the Bodhisattva never disparaged, The Bodhisattva never despised. And I'm making it my life's ambition, To see the world through his poor eyes. I will never disparage you, or kick you at odds. You know it, sing it. If you only know your weaknesses, I'll only know your strengths.

[22:56]

I would never despise you, or put you down in any way. Because it's clear to me, I can plainly see, you'll be the moon of some day. I love you. Now the Bodhisattva never disparaging, Lived countless Kalpas in the past. That's a very long time ago. In the time of the Count of Kudarma, And he was something of a now-caste, Because the monks and nuns of his time, They were goaded for their arrogance and vanity. These were the folks who exercised great power and authority. But my boy, he never concerned himself if they treated him like a freak. He just bowed to everybody equally, and these are the words he'd speak. Mr. Morris, I will never disparage you, or keep you out of my sight.

[24:00]

Where you only see weaknesses, I only see restraints. I would never despise you, or put you down in any way. Because it's clear to me, I can plainly see, Very good. You can sing it. I don't have to sing it. I love you. He never read or recited the scriptures much, He only liked to practice respect. But the monks and nuns of his time, You know, they didn't treat him like you might expect. Instead they cursed him, and they reviled him, And they wished that he would go. Because they all had self-esteem issues, Like everybody else I know. So they beat him and pelted him with clubs and stones, And tried to drive him away.

[25:02]

But he'd just run off to a safe distance And never turn around again I would never despise you or keep you at arm's length Where you only see your weaknesses, I only see your strength I would never despise you or put you down I love you." And so it went on for years and years. Till our hero he shed no tears, Nor did he ever wonder, what's the use? Until he came to the end of his natural lifespan, He lay down fixin' to die.

[26:05]

And he heard the holy Lotus Sutra, Bein' preached up in the sky, And his life was extended for millions of years, He's livin' to this day. And in the pages of the Lotus Sutra, I would never disparage you, or call you out on blame. Where you only see your weaknesses, I only see your strengths. I would never despise you, down in any way. Because it's clear to me I can claim that C would be included someday. Yes, it's clear to me I can claim I love you. Thank you.

[27:12]

So that's, in a way, chaplaincy. To meet everyone with respect. Sometimes, in this song, his peers were insulting and abusive to him. But in many cases, the people that you encounter, both in the formal context of chaplaincy and in the informal context in which we are chaplains in the world, people just need you to see them. They need to be, we need, I need, to encounter in these difficult times a non-anxious presence. Sometimes that means somebody who just will stand across from me and bow.

[28:16]

Sometimes it means somebody who will just offer some help. The derivation of the word chaplain is quite interesting. Does anyone know it? Has anyone? Mary Cecile probably knows it, but it evolves from the kind of vision and experience that occurred for Saint Martin of Tours, who was an early Christian saint. He lived in the fourth century, in what was then France. And also there's a, his shrine in France is a, it's a stopping point on the pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostela. A couple of you have done this, right?

[29:21]

The pilgrimage? Sue, you did it, right? Yeah. Did you stop there? Anyway, so the story is that he was Roman. He was in the Roman army. Later, he found his duty in the army incompatible with his Christian faith, and he became a very early conscientious objector. But while he was in the army, in the middle of winter, he came on a beggar who had almost no clothes. And what he took was he took his cloak, his chapella, and He did a very interesting thing. He took his sword and he cut it in half and he gave half to this ill-clad beggar and he kept half for himself because he needed it.

[30:31]

So this is a really, it's an interesting principle that he didn't give away everything. He kept what he needed for himself to survive to have some capacity to carry on his faith, but he gave half of it to this beggar. And that night, evidently, as the story goes, he dreamed of Jesus who was wearing the half cloak that he had given away. And he heard Jesus say to the other angels, Martin closed me with this robe. And in another version, when he awoke, he saw that his cloak had been restored to wholeness. And he was very young at this time, he was 18.

[31:36]

And then he left the rest of his life, he led the rest of his life in this response to his religious calling. And then, of course, the way things work in the modern world was that there was a relic of his half-cloak, and it got enshrined in an abbey near Tours. And during the Middle Ages, this supposed relic, the French kings carried it with them into battle. I don't think this is what he had in mind, but this is the way our world works. And the word chaplain derives from that. From what? From chapel, from cloak. Yes. And the places where...

[32:38]

There were small churches that were home, temporary homes to this cloak and they were called capella. So that's where we have the word chapel. But it means a cloth or a cloak. So he met this beggar with respect. When you're a chaplain, I feel like when you're a Buddhist practitioner, if you see the Buddha nature in everyone, if you can really see that, then you meet everyone's respect, as in the song. But in order to do this, there are a couple things that we need to be able to do. So in the program that we're working on, it's a two-year program. And in a very broad way, not in a strictly programmatic way, we talk about inner chaplaincy and outer chaplaincy, even though we know from all of our Zen teachers, there's no inside and there's no outside.

[33:59]

And yet, provisionally, functionally, we can deal with these as integral aspects. The first year of this program is something that we're calling inter-chaplaincy, which means recognizing and including and beginning to work with one's own shadow areas, the unfinished aspects of one's character or personality, the fears I have, the aversions I might feel towards myself, towards others, and so on. The tool that we have here, one tool that we have here is zazen. When we sit and face the wall, Invariably, we face these really difficult spots.

[35:05]

You know, we might face boredom, we might face pain, we might face like, the question, what am I doing here? What is this good for? All of this, we sit and we don't move. We sit and we, you know, when those thoughts come up, my, what I've been instructed to do and what I do is like, okay, I return to my posture and I check the points of my posture and alignment and I return to my breath and I turn my mind from those difficult thoughts to an activity that I know how to do. And then maybe I notice, okay, having done that, What's the power of these thoughts at this moment? And to look into that in the context of our sitting practice and our lives, to look into the nature of impermanence, that what I feel at any given moment is very real, very compelling.

[36:13]

Gotta do something about it now. Well, maybe not. Maybe if I stay with it, If I readjust, if I realign myself, I see that that urgency, that notion of truth softens. And sometimes it does. And sometimes the seed is planted very deeply and it's just something I have to work with again and again in my life. So, We have Zazen to work with it in this program, and we have Sashin, and in the chaplaincy program, we also do various, sort of have various sort of systematic approaches and small group work and writing and stuff like that.

[37:13]

And then, as the program evolves, we have what we might call outer chaplaincy, which is to be a non-anxious presence. It is to actualize the Bodhisattva vow to awaken with all beings, not to turn away from anyone, not to abandon anyone, And we have different approaches for doing that. To see each being as ourselves, as in some of the teachings, to see each being that we counter as having been our mother, our father, our sister, our brother, and to respect them on that basis, because they're part of us. And this process, I think, that the,

[38:20]

The approach that I like that has come up in the chaplaincy program has been what my Dharma brother, Fleet Mall, calls coming alongside. Fleet Mall is an interesting guy. He was arrested as a drug kingpin. in the 80s, and he had been a very, very close student of Chogyong Trungpa Rinpoche, and he had also simultaneously been a cocaine and marijuana dealer, going back and forth between Central America. And he, you know, he had this idea he could sustain both lives, and it didn't work. And he spent 14 years in federal prison. He was going to flee and Trungpa said to him, don't move, take.

[39:27]

what you're about to get and see how you work with it. And Fleet, really, really smart guy. But at that point, really caught in this delusion. He went to federal prison in Missouri. And while he was in prison, He just practiced really hard. He finished his initial practices, his bowing and chanting practices, by cleaning out a closet in the prison that he was in. And also while he was in prison, he decided that there was a need, he saw there was a need for aides, hospice. and he started a hospice organization in his prison and it became a national prison hospice entity that continues to this day. So Fleet is also one of the teachers in our program and he's an old friend of mine at this point.

[40:31]

And he has this idea of coming alongside as you, it's a kind of sailing metaphor or boating mariners metaphor. It's like, You come alongside and you travel alongside. That's, you know, it's not merging. It's not kind of mushing together myself and yourself. It's really in line with, there's a similar expression that in our family, Kobinchino Roshi, who was a, came to the United States as an assistant for Suzuki Roshi, a very unusual guy himself. He once told his students that compassion is the activity of walking with another side by side. Not too fast, not too slow, same speed.

[41:33]

So this to me is also our practice. When we're sitting in the zendo, we sit side by side, and even though there's no deliberative motion, it's like we're walking side by side. And in that sense, each of us is acknowledging the presence of the other. And this is the chaplain's job is just It's not to preach. It's not to problem solve. Elements of that may arise, but it's just to be present. And any of us can be a chaplain to anyone in any circumstances in our life. I've said when I was in the hospital 15 years ago, for quite a while with a very dangerous infection.

[42:38]

And a lot of people came and visited and sat with me. And there were some people, they were not necessarily Buddhists. They were not necessarily the people who were closest to me in my life. There were some people, surprising people, and I remember them vividly. and I know who they are, I could tell you their names, who just came to the room and they just could, they could be there without wanting anything for themselves, without wanting anything from me. and we just could set each other at ease. It's an extraordinary quality, but it's also a quality that one can learn and cultivate. It's not something that you're born with. You may be born with it. If you're born with it, great, but one can learn it.

[43:42]

One can learn just to be present with those who are suffering and need, not to be How can I say not to be caught by their suffering in such a way that your energy is transmitted to that person, or your anxiety is transmitted to that person? So we're learning this. We learn this in our interactions. We learn this, hopefully, from our teachers. We learn this from ourselves as we encounter ourselves. to come alongside. As Dogen says in one of his teachings, in the context of generosity, he says, we give ourself to ourself and we give others to others. This is the heart of our practice.

[44:47]

It's not about finding something that we might be able to recognize as enlightenment. It's not about being the good student, being smart. It's just about being truly human, able to be generous to ourselves, able to be generous to others, and also able to receive so that that cycle of giving is always in motion of giving and receiving. We give and we receive. We breathe out and we breathe in. Breathe out and we breathe in. I believe that's the way I would wish to live. And that's what I want to share with you this morning.

[45:52]

So we have a few minutes. It's running a little late, but I'll take a few questions or comments. Yeah, Penelope. I was trained in another program, an interfaith program, as a chaplain. in the program, even those of us who thought we were really good deep listeners. Yeah, and you might have been. It's really hard to get ourselves out of the way. And yet that's, I think that's at the heart of what we're trying to do here, not just in some kind of program.

[46:54]

Yeah. It is a respectful, I mean, the deep listening in that way is full respect. Yeah, thank you. Judy. I think it behooves us to keep looking to study, this is where, to the first principle of not knowing, which is something Penelope was talking about, you know, it's like Thich Nhat Hanh says, suffering is not enough, not knowing is not enough. You actually, we need to understand the lenses through which we're looking at the world.

[47:55]

And I think part of the, I'd like to think that part of the practice is doing that, but not necessarily. Because if we're in a circumstance of privilege, then we need other help, other tools. We need to be listening to and learning from what's going on. And we need, if we're really in relationship with the person that we're walking, that we think we're walking alongside of, we have to have the ability and there has to be the trust between us to ask, how am I doing? Is this working for you? And so we're constantly making that inquiry. And it's very tricky. It's very difficult in this world where uh, in this country where there's so many privileges that accrue by virtue of race, by virtue of gender, by virtue of economic status education.

[49:05]

Uh, so I just, I try never to take it for granted and I know that I'm failing again and again. So, uh, and I wanna be a bodhisattva, which means I want to keep opening, which is a lifelong learning process. Yeah. Last Saturday, Sochin gave us a definition of evil, which resonated with me. Oh, what was that? It was finding pleasure, experiencing pleasure in others' suffering, which made sense to me. Is that like schadenfreude? myself included, have people in our lives who, I mean, we could all experience evil in ourselves and see it in others, but some people that I know engage in a pattern of it, and it's almost like digging a groove.

[50:17]

Yeah, well it is. And so my question is, have a pattern like that going on. How do we engage without taking care of ourselves? Yeah, I mean I think that's very hard and I'm not sure that that definition covers it according to my way of thinking, but I have to think about that. And I think that one of the approaches that we have in this training program that we're doing is about building social resilience, you know, that is not something that one just cultivates or plants in oneself. It actually has to be cultivated socially. So, you know, the Buddha says, basically you should avoid people whose motivations are unwholesome.

[51:21]

And the fact of the matter is, in our society, we can't really do that. So we have to look, and this is also one of the visions of this program, is that it's a wonderful thing to be a chaplain, or a hospice chaplain, say. Evil, I think, is fairly rare. But greed, hatred, and delusion are garden variety experiences. And that if you're working within a hospital system, or you're working within a prison, or you're working within military, you're working within a system of suffering. You're working within a system where greed, hate, and delusion are embedded in the system. And so as good a person as you are, you're going to get, you're going to encounter the system as well.

[52:24]

As wonderful as your work may be with somebody directly that you're working with, you know, you're in the middle of nurses and doctors and all kinds of technicians who themselves have all this pressure on them and they are suffering. So you're going to be suffering too. So social resilience is something that we have to build in ourselves. And as for the problem of kind of overt evil, that's a bigger question, or it's a difficult question, but the garden variety, evil and suffering that we experience, all of us know about this. Maybe a couple more, Sue. This is a more literal question, but what is a chaplain actually, and does it mean Right, so Wikipedia says, which of course is the source of all true wisdom, right?

[53:48]

Traditionally, a chaplain, a cleric such as a minister, priest, pastor, rabbi, or imam, or a lay representative of religious tradition attached to a secular institution such as a hospital, prison, military unit, school, police department, fire department, university, or private chapel. Originally, the word chaplain referred to representatives of the Christian faith. It is now applied to people of other religions or philosophical traditions, such as chaplains serving within the military forces, etc. In recent times, laypeople – even, God forbid, laypeople – have received professional training in chaplaincy. and we have multi-faith and secular and so on. So that's definition. It's basically someone working within an usually institutional setting. So now, some people in our program are going to, are intending to go on to professional chaplaincy, and there's a number of other requirements in order to do that, which are too tedious for me to explain here.

[54:57]

But some have some quite remarkable and creative manifestations of chaplaincy. You know, basically, in certain ways, sort of stealth chaplains within systems that they work. One, I'm thinking of a woman who is an environmental scientist and she was studying this because she discovered that environmental scientists are, as a group, suffer deeply because they're just sort of presenting the science and they know they're not the juggernaut of environmental decay is just moving forward. So what are they doing? And they have a lot of despair, and that's true in other circumstances. So sometimes yes, sometimes no. Yeah, Tamar. We were speaking about the process of chaplaincy being able to listen to someone. Yeah. And I know we practice that when we face the wall.

[55:59]

because we listen to ourselves, and obviously we all just practice that towards you, but when do you see us, and when and how do you see us practicing that towards each other? I mean, are we just supposed to fall into that naturally because we've sat facing the wall? No, that's not the way it works, unfortunately. So how do we bring that practice into our relationship? Well, we can learn something from encountering ourselves. And I think that there are various training modalities that help us. Some people are natural listeners, but there are also various approaches, nonviolent communication, different very particular listening modalities in which one, and in order to develop that, one practices it. You know, you practice listening in groups, you practice listening in dyads, you practice active listening, which is being able to tell the person that you're listening to what you've heard.

[57:05]

You know, more subtle kind of approaches of affirming to people that you're listening. And so I think it's a training. I think there are various trainings. I don't think it's, Zazen does not float all boats, but it's the place that I return to, and once I do, I can see how it infuses and how useful it is to these other modalities, but it still sort of behooves me to learn them. One more. respond to that. I think sitting is a very potent method for learning how to listen, not just a sort of general help. First of all, because it's a practice of attention, most of us don't have enough, including me, attention to listen well.

[58:15]

But we practice learning about attention and distraction, and first we intimately listen to ourselves. which is hard. We learn what distraction and attention are, and then we can listen to others. That wasn't the question, but that's what I want to say now. But that was your answer. Thank you. John, last one. I wanted to say also that coming out of Zazen and listening in that situation, respond together in unison, which requires really sensitive listening. So in our practice we have that further engagement beyond looking at the wall. Well, this reminds me of one, yeah, that's right, but when you use the word service, there's an ambiguity there. We go directly into our service, our liturgy, but there's a quotation that I heard a couple years ago from Bernie Glassman, who was one of the teachers in the program, who quoted the Japanese, one of the founders of Buddhism in Japan, Kobo Daishi,

[59:29]

And I've been really trying to track this quotation down, and whether it's apocryphal or not, I haven't found it, but the quotation, every time I look for, do a Google search, it keeps coming back to Bernie, so I don't, so I, he may have made it up. Anyway, he says, Kobo Daishi says that the depth of one's enlightenment is measured by the depth of one's service to others. So that's where we will end. Thank you.

[60:06]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ