Congratulations! First, I want to express my appreciation for taking these three days, which for everyone else is kind of a holiday.

[01:08]

It is a holiday. And sitting zazen, sitting sushin, I think that shows some real sincere effort. And I also feel that he said that in this Sashim, these three days, was the one Sashim that there wouldn't be any coming and going. And it's really made a difference in the feeling that we've all just been here. Actually, I'm the only one that came and went. But you were pretty good. It made a difference and I'm glad that we could do it. Usually we don't have a sashin in the summertime.

[02:13]

One reason is because it's hot and it's not so comfortable sitting for a long time when it's real hot. So we usually have our sashimis in the fall and the winter and the spring. But it seems to be okay. I want to talk a little bit and then I want to see if you have anything you want to say. in order to discuss what I'm going to talk about. You probably want to discuss what I'm going to talk about. Yesterday we ended by talking about what love is. And so I want to talk a little bit about that again. In Buddhism, of course, there's no one expression for love.

[03:35]

But we talk about it in various ways. And we break it down into its parts in order to talk about it. And the Brahma-Viharas is the old ancient stereotype for talking about love. So we talk about love as loving-kindness and compassion and sympathetic joy and equanimity. as an aspect of love. Since they don't use the term, the concept, love like we use it, I just say that. I say these are the four aspects of love.

[04:41]

That's my definition, but it is. And these four ways of expressing love are non-clinging, ways of non-clinging. So that usually we think of love in a possessive way. But in Buddhism, love is, the aspects of love are expressed in a non-possessive way. So that love is a non-possessive expression rather than a possessive one. So, in loving-kindness, where you direct your attention to the well-being of someone or others, or yourself, it's not on the basis of self-interest.

[05:47]

Loving-kindness is a practice. In Buddhism it's a practice and it's non-discriminating, non-discriminatory practice. So loving-kindness is not something that you bring up, but it's something that you develop in yourself as a universal kind of principle, so that whatever you meet If you have that principle within you all the time working, then whatever you meet receives that loving-kindness indiscriminately. So indiscriminate loving-kindness or non-discriminated loving-kindness is

[06:54]

actually the basis. Kindness or love. You see loving-kindness is the kind of translation, but netta, love or kindness or loving-kindness or well-intentioned feelings. So it's more of an attitude or state of mind than an idea, or it's not even emotional necessarily or mental. It's just a way of being. And the same goes for compassion. Compassion is to be sympathetic to others, the suffering of others. Passion, strictly speaking, means suffering. And we apply it to our emotions.

[07:59]

We apply passion usually to our sexual emotions or feelings associated with desire, emotions which come up with desire, arise with desire. We call those passionate emotions. But if you look at it carefully, you see that there is suffering attached to it, or not attached, but suffering associated with those emotions which are possessive. So, compassion means with sympathy for people suffering, whatever that may be. But strictly speaking, in the Hinayana viewpoint, you feel compassion for people who are missing the way.

[09:12]

You don't feel so much compassion for them because they're not getting the TV sets they want. Mahayana view is you feel compassion for people even though they can't get their TV set. But, and suffering, but sympathetic joy is another side. And that's the side where you put aside jealousy and envy. And you can appreciate someone else's accomplishment or good fortune or place in life or whatever befalls somebody that's beneficial or good for them.

[10:16]

We feel good with them. feeling sympathetically with them. But usually, you know, or quite often, when someone gets something that we wanted, we feel, we may say, oh, wonderful, but we feel, oh, you dirty rat. So, to really have that, be that open and Selfless. And then equanimity means that however things come, you don't discriminate. That's very difficult. You don't let that, no matter what comes,

[11:19]

and how effective you keep an even mind. And actually you don't fall into love or hate. Not falling into love or hate is maybe what you could call true love. Completely disinterested. kind of disinterested. That's the hardest. But since the whole point of Buddhism is to attain selflessness, you have these difficult tasks to work with or difficult standards to come up to.

[12:29]

So, the highest kind of love is really disinterested love for not self-interested love, and non-discriminating, I won't say indiscriminate, that sounds too uncontrolled, but non-discriminating love, which is a kind of way of being rather than a rather than a feeling or an emotion or an idea. And then we have all the gradations of love. I love you and you love me and let's go out on a date.

[13:44]

We have a crush on somebody or we like somebody because they do something and we don't like somebody or we hate somebody because they do something we don't like. Hate is also a form of love, actually. It's just love turned around. These are also forms of love, but they're lower forms because they're involved with our feelings and our emotions and our discriminating attitude. But the lower forms are what people usually think of as love. I've talked to people about love, you know, and when I mention non-discriminating love, they don't think that that's love at all. They think, well, that's not love. That's something else. Love is when you're in love with somebody or, you know, it involves self-interest. That's the usual idea about what love is.

[14:52]

There's nothing wrong, you know, if you have a friend and you love that friend, that's wonderful. You know, you may love that friend because of the wonderful things that they do. And we all do that. So it's not wrong. But to get to the bottom of love and the bottom of our life and good fundamental meaning. We have to be able to see it all the way down to the bottom. The love you have for your friend may be completely non-discriminating. No matter what your friend does, you still love that person because you can't do otherwise.

[15:59]

and you may argue with your husband or your wife, you know, like cats and dogs, but that doesn't mean that you don't love that person. As a matter of fact, if you don't argue, sometimes... I remember there's an old Hasidic story that I read once about this great rabbi who was arguing with his wife. He always argued with his wife. As a matter of fact, their whole life was nothing but this great uproar. And one time this little old man came and he said, you're this great rabbi. He said, how come you're always arguing with your wife like that? How come there's always this tremendous uproar? He came in the middle of a fight. There was this tremendous uproar and he says, sit down. He said, can't you see that that the Divine Presence is communicating with itself?

[17:08]

Interesting story. So there's a lot of love and passion as well. Passionate love is, of course, love. But for a Buddhist, we we need to know to get below those layers. Love is like passion or desire. Desire is like fire.

[18:19]

It is fire, actually. We've refined our fire making down to we can light a fire with a match. That's pretty refined. We do that. We use matches because they're convenient and also you can be careful with them. If you light the match just right, you can light a candle or whatever. It's pretty safe. And we have a candle up here, you know, and it's pretty fake. We light that with a match and it has this nice light. But if we took a newspaper and lit it on fire and put it up there on the altar, you'd really get scared, you know. But we do that all the time, you know.

[19:22]

We take this dry material and we And we light this fire with it, and we run around because it's a great bright light, you know, and it's wonderful and spectacular. But we run around, when we do that, we run around in misery, you know, because of burning up everything. And our passions are like that. We light these tremendous fires because they're really hot and spectacular. But after the fire gets lit, we don't know how to put it out because it's too big. So how you control a fire is really how we practice. Suzuki Roshi, I remember, not only him, but it's an old story in Buddhism, using the lamp The kerosene lamp is an example of how to take care of our life.

[20:25]

To know how to contain the fire and to make it, turn it up so that it makes just the right kind of light. And we're always adjusting it. Constantly adjusting it for that little valve. You turn it up or you turn it down. If you leave it up, you know, it smokes up the lamp, makes it all black. So you have to constantly adjust it. And he says, we have to constantly adjust our kerosene lamp. We're always creating something smoky with it, and stinking. Smoky and stinking. If you turn it up too high, then it stinks of kerosene. So we all have this problem. You know, you have it, and I have it. And it's the problem of controlling this fire. And you've been burned, and I've been burned, and we've burned other people, and we'll continue to do it.

[21:41]

But, at the same time, if we really investigate love, and try to get beyond our feelings to see what it is. And to practice non-discrimination in love, we can really develop that side of ourselves. So, passionate love is one side of love. It's one part of love. And it's a part that we usually like to put over here and not talk about too much, because it's hard to talk about it. But it doesn't mean we can't talk about love and see it in a pretty clear light, in a cool way, actually.

[22:48]

So Buddhists, you know, are always trying to cool it. You know, how to keep it just the right temperature so that everything works. Maybe you have some thoughts or questions. Well, there's a lot of little questions in there.

[24:29]

There's a lot of implications. There's no control. What is there to control? And you've been sitting there in that seat for almost three days. And what's kept you there? I didn't have any other place to go. Anyway, control, you know, is another whole subject. Actually, when everything is perfectly under control, there's nothing to control.

[25:31]

But until it is, then you have to make adjustments, and that's called control. And Tom makes adjustments, but there's no Tom. But if you say that there's no Tom means that there's no body there, that's not what we mean by there's no Tom or no self. The self that's there is the no-self. You want to take away Tom. You can't take away Tom. Tom is controlling the situation, or the situation is controlling Tom. Do you want to control the situation or do you want the situation to control you?

[26:36]

I mean, quite often we want the situation to control us. Well, let's talk about one specific thing. Which should we talk about? For me, the problem is not so much the heat of the fire, but the source of the heat.

[27:46]

And when we talk about this, I always feel like there's something, there's a lot left out, because the Buddhist formula comes to us from a celibate tradition. What about this love here that I'm trying to deal with? And, you know, if you look, if you take the analogy of a teacher and student and a husband and wife, a teacher and student are attracted to each other because the teacher has some life and the student is attracted to it. And when we sit together, it's like we're all lighting our candles from that point. We pick somebody to marry, and that's usually a choice that's based on desire.

[28:51]

But we have to somehow turn that into something that transcends desire. Otherwise, when the desire runs out, then we have to find somebody else. And so, on the one hand, we have to We talk about the problems when we start with something that looks kind of pure, and then various things come up that look like they're violating it. Then in other kinds of relationships, we start with something that, from a Buddhist point of view, looks kind of impure, and we have to turn around and do something else with it. I don't know quite how to do it. I've been working a lot on it. The only thing I've come up with is just to always, when I can, make the choice not to ask for something and to give without expecting to get it.

[30:02]

Yeah. The thing about pure and impure, you know, it looks like Selflessness is pure and selfishness is impurity and we can divide them up that way but strictly speaking there's no pure or impure and we just call them pure and impure and the so-called impure feelings activities are also based on the pure activity, so that you can't really get hung up, you know, making a distinction between pure and impure.

[31:06]

But if you put it on the basis of suffering then some activities lead to liberation and some activities lead to suffering. And so we have to look at it on that basis. Selfless love leads to liberation for you and others, basically. And selfish love quite often leads to suffering, even though there's some liberation in it and some joy in it. And possessive love, whatever you possess, also possesses you in some way.

[32:12]

And that's the contract we make with people when we get married. I possess you and you possess me, you know. But it's not really possession. If it's done well, it's not possession. It's mutual... It should be mutual uplifting or something. But, you know, we do get bogged down. Yes? Well, I understand something about Tom. I guess I'm very aware of the Buddhist, or at least as we talk about it in the Sangha, emphasis on keeping the heat at the right level. And in contrast to that, having visited my sister, where she lives in an Anglican Benedictine convent, and the intensity there

[33:12]

And the passion there is very evident. There's something about, I think, Christianity does emphasize, well, agitate religious passion for God in a way which Buddhists don't. And yet, whatever that passion is, And I do think that we don't talk very much about the process of transformation, about how the selfish is turned into the unselfish. I mean, Susie Rocheson thinks about the manure in the garden, the weeds, appreciating the weeds. a very kind of... it's like we're always wearing gloves.

[34:21]

In the garden? No. In the Shanka, too. In what way? You mean just the... That... I think it's hard... It's... It's easier to express, I think for us it's easier to express the intensity in silence and in doing things the right way and that kind of realm. And that's good, but it's very careful. Well, I think we expressed it in other ways, too. I think that we do. But I appreciate what you're saying. You know, you don't, this desire or passion, you know, what desire that one has, you don't just squash it, right?

[35:30]

Do you feel that we squash it? No. I'm not sure we make the most of it though. I agree with you. I don't think we make the most of it either. We should be serving each other more, taking care of each other more, with more energy. It's a good idea. We use up so much of the energy just containing it. And I think, what I think about is that there's And that isn't true for everyone.

[36:44]

People come in different colors, right? Some people, as Dogen said, there are differences in human beings. Some are passionate. Some are more pragmatic. And for some people, it's easier to regulate the plane. And for other people, it's just harder. But on the other side, It seems to me that there's more potential there to appreciate the manure, too. You may be preferring that, but everything you said made me think of Dorothy, and I know that you wouldn't be able to appreciate it any more. You really know how to appreciate everything. Very glowing, as it was, except for things in the manure. You know, I don't have to answer that question.

[37:54]

That's part of why I went on with Buddhism, too. At times when I was in the cult of Christianity, but then at times when I had found myself, that Buddhism did not, that the Buddhist tradition does not have an obvious way of Well, anyway, it's a big subject.

[39:47]

It's 12 o'clock. Anybody want to say anything? One more person. Bill? The thing about practice, for me, is that it's always something you shape, make, and discover. Each moment is just rolling on. And so it's not that there's this liturgy inherited that defines and guides and predetermines how we behave, but rather it's what we do, what we are, how we are, You have to also remember that what I'm presenting is principles which, in order for us to manage our life in some way, we have to at least know about, think about.

[41:14]

I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just struck, it's a different, it's in me, but it's also out there. It's something about the Christian, Catholic, passionate place, all those colors and planes. Well, that's one expression. It's a very genuine and real ground.

[42:15]

It's not... The big flames are dangerous. Thank you for being kind.

[42:57]

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