As you may have noticed when you drove in—some of you drove in here, most of you drove in here at some point—there’s a sign at the top of the road where there’s a turn off from the highway to turn into this valley.  There’s a sign there, and I think the sign says
Green Gulch Farm; so, anyway, we call this place Green Gulch Farm.  It used to be called Green Gulch Ranch when there was cattle being raised here.  But then we switched from cattle to vegetables and changed the name to farm, and then, at a certain point in addition to Green Gulch Farm, it’s also called Zen Center.  Does it say Zen Center up there?  Does it also say Wheelwright Center?  That’s a big sign out there.
    Wheelwright Center refers to the conference facility in this valley named after the former owner of this valley whose name was George Wheelwright.  He was a rancher; he liked to raise cattle.  Then when you turn the corner, there’s another sign, I think, and that says Green Dragon Zen Temple, right?  Is there another sign that says that?  So this place is called several things.  
    So today I thought I might talk about the Zen part— the Zen Center part, or the Zen Temple part.  Since it’s called a Zen Center, what’s Zen?  Well, nobody knows what it is.  You may know something about it.  But sometimes they say Zen has something to do with meditation, that it has to do with Truth.  Or it has to do with meditations that help us understand the truth: conventional truth and ultimate truth.  And this year we’ve been emphasizing meditation because this is a Zen Center.  We’ve been emphasizing meditations of the Zen type, which are particularly concerned with meditations which realize the ultimate truth, meditations which are devoted to realizing Buddhahood.  
    Today I thought I might give some background.  I don’t know if it’s background but anyway I might tell you some stories about what might be the background of what we call Zen meditation or Buddhist meditation.  And I guess I’d like to say at the beginning that I’m just going to tell you stories that I’ve heard, and I can’t even remember what exactly I’ve heard so I’m telling you as best as I can remember what I’ve heard.  One story I’ve heard was that in Babylon, they thought of or believed in a divine reality, or a divine being, that was transcendent—up on the hill, above us.  And I heard that in Egypt people thought of or believed in a divinity which was in us.  I heard that.  I don’t know if it’s true; I’m talking about Egypt and Babylon a long time ago.  Is there still a town called Babylon?  Is there a Babylon in Iraq? I guess you don’t know.  Yes, there is?  Yeah.  Anyway, we know there’s still Egypt, but Egypt is mostly Islam now, but I’m talking about thousands of years ago, way back before Buddhism.  
    In the Indus Valley civilization— that is sort of the area around where Babylon was— the dominant sentiment as to the Divine was that the Divine was transcendent.  Transcending the world of suffering.  That Indus Valley culture is the culture that spread into the Indian subcontinent. I heard that about 1500 years BC some Arian people from North of India invaded India after the Indus culture was falling apart. These Arian people called the Vedic people, or the people of Vedic culture, (often said to be a culture rather than a civilization), invaded a dead civilization.  Their religious tradition was based on a kind of drug technology; the drug they used we often call Soma, a mushroom.  They used it; they ate it; and they had a technology of how to eat it; and when they ate it, they saw something which they couldn’t see when they didn’t take the drug.  They saw a shining world, full of shining beings.
    The people who administered this mushroom we now call Shamans.  Access to this drug experience gave people visions of how things worked, and somehow they had some magical power.  They used these things to gain magical power, and they even came to think, came to feel, that they could see how the world worked and, after a while, that they could control and influence the shining beings, these gods and goddesses that they had access to through these drugs.  
    After these invaders took over India, India became gradually a place that was originally the home of a religion of transcendence; a religion which was about getting in contact with a divine force that transcends the world.  It also became a country where the priest class of the dominant culture—the Vedic culture— was concerned with an immanent, or inherent, nature of how things worked.  
    The religious opportunities were on one side the instatic mediations (instatic means ‘in the body’) which were meditations which led to the realization of a transcendent deity.  And [on the other side] the ecstatic trances which gave access to the magical power of the universe, and offered the opportunity of human beings to actually be able to influence the way the world worked.  
    One side, the side of transcendence, was concerned with purity and freedom from pollution. So these meditations were having to do with withdrawing from sensory input, withdrawing from the sensory world of sensation, withdrawing into an instatic trance. And in that trance process, in that type of meditation, one could become more and more pure of sensory input.  And more and more, one would become like a transcendent being oneself.  A being which transcends the world, you could gradually become through personal, meditational withdrawal from the world.  
    On the other side, there was the possibility of out of body meditation.  But ‘out of body’ means not so much withdrawal from the body but withdrawal from the limits of the body and engagement in the world—— a state of being that was totally in the phenomenal world, an ecstatic meditation where one entered into the actual working of the phenomenal world and could have power there and freedom.  So one side sought freedom from suffering through sensory withdrawal and abstract meditation, and the other sought freedom through a way of being in the phenomenal world such that you had infinite maneuverability so that you could respond in a way that promoted liberation in the world.  
    These two traditions were actually living together in India prior to the appearance of the historical founder of the tradition called Buddhism.  By the time Buddha was born in the 6th or 7th Century BCE, the drug use in the tradition of meditation of the Vedic culture (which originally used drugs to induce states of trance and to have access to magical power) had gradually disappeared. Instead of using drugs to access this magical power they used incantations and verbal formulae which the meditator would use to gain access to this world of inner divinity and inner magical power.  
    There was a priest class named after the reality of that realm, Brahman.  The Brahmans were the priests who negotiated access to the power of the inner reality.  And the power of the priest class was also associated with a caste system and with the power of the state.  So the orthodox religion of the Indian world at the time of the Buddha was the Vedic religion which has all kinds of wonderful teachings in the Upanishads about how to meditate in such a way as to gain access to magical and ultimately political power.  
    But still within India there was the less dominant tradition (according to this story) of the instatic withdrawal from the world.  The political, social, and religious domination was not so oppressive that there couldn’t be any rebellion against this dominant system, so there was, and the rebellion took the form of non-caste system priests——yogis who left the world and wandered all over India. These people were not part of the caste system in a sense; they were not Brahmans. If they had been Brahmans, they had left their caste; and if they had been warrior class, they had left their warrior class.  
    The Buddha was actually a member of the warrior class and he left it to become a wanderer.  The Buddha, according to himself, practiced a wide variety of these disciplines, and at a certain point he attained what we call nirvana. He also attained enlightenment.  Nirvana and enlightenment are somewhat different terms.  Nirvana has to do with peace and quiet: when one attains nirvana one attains peace and quiet—— profound, unshakeable, reliable peace and quiet no matter what’s happening; a blissful state where nothing arises nor ceases, where nothing comes or goes; a state that transcends the world.  The Buddha attained this. And this is the transcendent side.
    But Buddha also attained unsurpassed complete perfect enlightenment.  And that’s not necessarily peaceful and quiet.  Or noisy and warlike.  It is, actually, a revelation of the way things actually are.  By understanding the way things actually are, one can have nirvana if one wishes. And the Buddha did wish, so the Buddha attained nirvana.  But also the Buddha didn’t attach to nirvana and gave it away to many disciples.  The Buddha could maneuver in the world and did, and while the Buddha was maneuvering, the Buddha sat and walked and ate and slept and taught and handled difficulties, and experienced attempted assassinations upon himself.  
    After the Buddha died the tradition was left with some question of: well what do we do now? And we’re still sort of trying to juggle the question of what’s the most important thing that happened in Buddha’s life? Was it this peaceful, calm, blissful state of transcendence of the world, of being in a place where there’s no arising nor ceasing, no birth and no death? Or was it that he attained enlightenment so that he could see and understand everything, that he could see and understand every person that she met and see what they needed in order to become free?  Which was most important?  Which was the center of gravity of the tradition?
    In some sense, you could say that the polarity there between the transcendent reality and the immanent reality, the inherent reality, is also the duality between purity and power, between personal purity and freedom from the world, and power that comes with understanding how things work. Which is it? Or is it actually that the two parts are inseparable?  I guess I’m of the opinion that the fact that these appear over and over again throughout the world means that they are both part of the story of the religious tradition of Buddhism and we need to know about both, and we need to understand both to have the full range of knowledge within the tradition of Zen. We need to understand how Zen fits into this picture.  
    The Zen school is part of a tradition within Buddhism called the Mahayana. Literally, Maha means ‘great’, ‘vast’, but also means ‘a summary.’  Yana means ‘vehicle’.  It’s the vast vehicle, the all-inclusive, universal vehicle that includes all beings, and it’s also kind of a summary of all the different types of meditation.  There’s another tradition within Buddhism which is called the individual vehicle, and it has to do with how an individual can understand reality enough to attain nirvana.  The Mahayana is concerned with how an individual can understand enough to be a Buddha, and a Buddha is a kind of being that understands that there is no individual.  That [understanding] is also necessary to obtain Nirvana, but the Buddha also has the understanding of how all things work and therefore has great skill to teach all beings.
    I heard this phrase once, and it was actually applying to—of all things— Mormonism, but I thought it relates to Buddhism too: that in the individual vehicle, the ‘unit of salvation’ is the individual, whereas in the Mahayana, the ‘unit of exaltation’ is the community.  Buddhas are those who understand how the community can be exalted, how the community can be lifted up and made to realize its divinity.  By community we mean the whole community.  The Mahayana is about how to lift the entire community up to realize its full potential, which is its full potential of life.  Of course the Mahayana, by lifting up the entire community, would also lift up the entire community of those who have attained individual liberation; they would be completely included in the whole project.   
    In the program of an individual person becoming purer and purer—morally and spiritually more and more pure until the person is so pure that they’re free from all kinds of karma that they’ve committed, past actions, and they have enough insight to understand that all the things that cause them personal suffering are illusions——that process of purification of the individual vehicle is the path to nirvana. And Buddha took that path, among other things that Buddha took. The other path again is the path of uplifting the entire community of beings into Buddhahood, and that path includes many, many kinds of meditation, one of them being Zen, and among Zen there are many types, but anyway Zen is included within this comprehensive community uplifting project.  
    The center of gravity of this program of universal communal enlightenment and realization of full potential looks something like this: the key ingredient of it, the foundation of it, is compassion.  The foundation of the earlier understanding of Buddhism which led to realization of total peace and quiet and total contentment for the person was ‘purify the person’.  Get that person so pure that they realize nirvana.  The Mahayana was not any longer about purifying the person.  It was about compassion.  And once again, this compassion completely embraces all beings who take the path of nirvana, too; they are not excluded from this compassion even though they don’t need it very much because they’re free of suffering.  You still have compassion for them because you still realize that they could become Buddha, which is not just nirvana.  
    So the foundation of this Mahayana movement is compassion. So the foundation of Zen meditation is compassion.  The word compassion does appear very clearly in the early presentation or the early understanding of Buddhism within the context of the individual realizing nirvana.  Compassion is part of that practice but it is not the main thing.  For example, the practitioners of the individual vehicle practice what is called the Four Divine Abodes. They meditate on loving kindness, compassion, joy in other people’s good qualities, and equanimity.  They meditate on these four dimensions, these four topics.  So compassion is part of the meditation of the individual path to liberation.  But in Mahayana, in the communal liberation project, compassion is not just one element, it is the ground.  It is the earth.  It is the feeling, the spirit, which we never, never lose touch with.  Everything must be harmonized with compassion.  
    So I might not get much further in this talk, but I want to just mention parenthetically that the Zen school—the tradition of Zen within this overall tradition which is founded on compassion—is a tradition which should always be looked at in terms of: are the inner meditations and the outer activities of the Zen practitioner in harmony with great compassion?  Because that should always be their ground.  
    You can start the process of the exaltation of the entire world by contemplating compassion.  It can be started by contemplation of compassion.  This is a little out of order cause I’m not ready to talk about Zen; I want you to understand the basic, the mother of Zen, first.  I want you to understand the mother of Zen before you meet the daughter of the mother of Zen. The mother of Zen is the Mahayana; Zen is one of the Mahayana’s daughters, and she’s quite a daughter. So much so that you might not even be able to tell that she is the mother of great compassion, because sometimes she does weird things like say, “Well I’m not Zen anyway.”  Now was that compassionate?  
    I just said that if you want to ground yourself in the mother of Mahayana, contemplate compassion. If you go to a Zen Center and you try to contemplate compassion, you might have a good time contemplating compassion. But it’s possible that you would go see a Zen teacher and tell this teacher that you’re contemplating compassion, and that teacher might say, “You’re totally mis-oriented. You’re incorrectly oriented.” They might say that to you.  
    Now let’s just take a minute before we consider what happened to that person who got that remark. Was this statement compassionate? Here’s this nice person who’s trying to contemplate compassion, like, maybe you.  When you heard about this great movement of saving this whole universe is founded on compassion, and compassion is developed by contemplating it, does that seem reasonable? That this person is trying to contemplate compassion and they go to this Zen Center and this Zen person says, “You’re really off track here, kid.”  Was that compassionate? And I would think, let’s check to see: did that help the person to practice contemplation of compassion?  Let’s say it did.  Maybe they said, “What do you mean I’m mis-oriented, or disoriented,” and the teacher may say, “You’re not actually contemplating compassion.  You’re just dreaming of contemplating compassion.  You’re not facing your suffering.  Did you notice that it increased during this conversation?”  
    And the person might say, “Well, that’s just because you’re being mean to me.” And the teacher might say, “Well, yeah.  But why am I being mean to you? I’m being mean to you because you have this very limited idea of what suffering was that you were contemplating.  You were dreaming of contemplating suffering as a way of contemplating compassion.  I’m trying to show you something more.”  
    And let’s say the person said, “Well thank you very much, I see what you mean; yeah, I had this really limited view of suffering. I wasn’t even open to the suffering of what it’s like when somebody questions me about meditating on compassion. Thank you [for] your comments, I feel much more open to suffering now.  I see it is actually much more pervasive than I thought.  Actually that was really good what you did; you did a very compassionate thing; you totally opened me. I now see the suffering actually touching everything.”  
    So according to this story, this teacher was really compassionate.  This teacher was really skillful. This teacher could see this person was trying to meditate on compassion but had a very narrow view of it.  This teacher could see that, and this teacher had the skill to open this person’s heart, and this person was ready, and it happened.  So, in this story, the Zen teacher gets “Yes. That was compassion. This somewhat rude thing you said was actually compassionate, and this person will be happy to sign an affidavit to that effect.”  
    You just moved from contemplating compassion, which means part of contemplating compassion means contemplating suffering, which means contemplate your feeling of suffering, contemplate your sense of other people’s suffering. Contemplate it until you start to see that this suffering—and therefore this compassion—touches everything.  It touches everything—every moment it touches everything—your caring about everything.  You care about everything. You care about everybody.  And then you meditate about caring about everybody. You contemplate, you think about caring about everybody.
    You think about that and maybe you notice in the process that you don’t care about everybody.  Part of contemplating about carrying about everybody is to notice when you don’t.  And then you confess that you don’t’.  And you confess it to yourself, and you confess it to your teacher, the one or ones who are helping you contemplate compassion.  For all, for everybody, for everything.  Compassion for the poor and compassion for the rich. Compassion for the Democrats and compassion for the Republicans. And that of course is a great sticking point for many Mahayana devotees.  
(Turn tape over)
    They want Mahayana but to leave aside certain political categories.  “Of course, there are exceptions to the rule.”  No, noooo, no exceptions.  Of course we make exceptions but none of these exceptions are approved by the central mother of the Mayahana. She makes no exceptions, no one is excluded because we’re talking about uplifting the entire mass of the living to Buddhahood.  This is the basis.  And, it gets to be a point, a point is arrived at in this process where one feels that all living beings, all living beings, are dear to you, are as dear to you as the dearest is to you.  Of course there’s differences, but they’re all dear to you.  First of all, we’re imagining this possibility; second of all, we say, perhaps, “I’m not there yet,” but of course we keep this on the horizon that everyone would be as dear to us as, for example, our only child.  
    So the first part is like the dearness, and then of course it follows that we want this dear one to be free of pain. We don’t want any scratches on the dear one, not even a scratch, not to mention a major fracture, not to mention major suffering.  If we did a little poll of the inhabitants of Zen Centers, which are supposed to be founded on compassion, if you asked the individual practitioner, some of them might say, “I have not yet reached the point yet where all beings, all living beings are completely dear to me. I have not got there yet. But I’m not worried because I’ve only been at the Zen Center for 15 minutes.  I assume that in a few years, I’ll be there.”
    Then if you interview some people who have been here a few years, some of them might say  ‘Well, I thought I’d be there by now but I haven’t quite gotten there. However, there are more people I feel dearly towards than I used to.  I’ve increased about 70 percent. But there’s still 30 percent left and that includes quite a few people.  And you talk to some people who have been here longer and they say, “Well, I’ve got to 80%. And then you talk to some people who are just abut ready to die,” and they say 97%, and you talk to people who are closer to dying, and they say “it’s 99.9.”  And then you talk to someone who’s really right there, and they say, “It’s 100%; unfortunately I’m going to die now”.  So we have this prime candidate for the Mahayana, but you know, “Bye-bye.  Although I’m leaving, I do recommend getting to this point as soon as possible.”  
    Part of compassion is to feel compassion for ourselves who are not very far along in the practice of compassion.  So if you know there are just a couple of people on the planet that you feel are dear, I would suggest if somebody told me that or if I felt that way, I’d say, “Great that I feel that way toward two, that’s wonderful,” and I would forgive myself and I would forgive somebody else for excluding the remainder.  The fact that they feel that way about one person is wonderful.  And the fact that you could admit that that one person is yourself, that’s still great.  It’s great that you notice it, that you allow yourself to feel dearly towards yourself, and that you have the courage to admit it.  And if it’s more than one, great.  
    And that’s part of compassion to be patient with our current state of development which may seem really not very developed. But this is to appreciate that there is some love for beings there.  It starts with that; it doesn’t start with the fact that you don’t appreciate the other beings.  Now not appreciating other beings, the pain of that, having compassion for the pain of that, that’s where it starts. If we feel sorry for those that hate everybody, if we really sincerely feel sorry for people that hate people because we also see that a lot of people who hate people also feel like a lot of people hate them. That’s the pattern, right? So it’s a very unhappy situation to not love all beings.  And it’s a very happy situation to love all beings.
    So we work at that, and work at that, and work at that, and work at that, and play at that, and forgive ourselves for not working at it, and work and work and play and play and so on.  And this is the foundation of Mahayana; this is the foundation of Zen meditation. And it happens sometimes, it happens that in the midst of all this compassion work, this—oh, I don’t know what it is— this big love surge comes so great and so strong that there’s this wish to become Buddha. To really become Buddha so that you can actually carry out the work of helping all these beings that you so dearly appreciate.  
Okay?
    I mean, you can tell, I think, that is just a little snippet of a big meditation practice called Contemplating Compassion until it really likes to take over and spread and spread and have no limits, and then you really want to do the best for everybody.  And after that, the practice starts— the regular meditation starts.  And that meditation practice takes the form of practicing the transcendent activity of giving. And the transcendent activity of ethical discipline, and the transcendent activity of patience and the transcendent activity of enthusiastic passion for the work of compassion and the work of the Boddhisattva, the Mahayana devotee.  And the meditation, the concentration practices and the wisdom practices.  
    So those are the practices which we take on, on the basis of this compassion. The first five of those that I mentioned— the giving, ethical discipline, patience, enthusiasm, and concentration practices—those five are not just those five but are those five going beyond themselves, having no limit.  For example the practice of giving: when it goes beyond itself, we say the Three Wheels are purified.  Giving has three wheels: one wheel is the giver, one wheel is the receiver, and another wheel is the gift.  So they become purified in the process so that we understand that these three are interdependent and there is not one separate from the other.  That giver, receiver and gift are inseparable; none of them stand by themselves; they’re all just interdependent and ungraspable.  That’s when giving becomes a transcendent activity of the compassionate being.  
    And so on, each one of these practices go beyond themselves; that’s why we need wisdom to go with these compassion practices.  And for the wisdom we need the compassion practices and for the compassion practices we need wisdom.  So these skillful means of giving, patience, and ethical discipline are clarified by wisdom, and wisdom, in order to be a living wisdom has to be practicing these activities.  And wisdom is developed from practicing these activities, and in particular wisdom is developed from practicing the fifth of those, the meditations, the concentrations.  
    And to finish the story, wisdom meditation has these two sides: one side takes us back to the side of withdrawing from sensory input, and the other side has to do with insight into the way the world works.  So going back to the beginning of these basic polarities of the process of realizing enlightenment and religious freedom, their functioning again in the Mahayana meditation in the form of practices which withdraw from sensory input and realize calm and peace and quiet; and practices which enter into the world and see how things work and realize insight.  So the purity and peace, again, are united in the meditation practice with insight into how the world works.  The calm, peace and quiet of nirvana is united with a way of being in the world that educates all beings to the way of freedom.  
    And Zen meditation in particular emphasizes the ways of being in the world that realize freedom, which realize the workings of liberation with all beings.  But they’re not strictly walled off from these other ways and they can use the whole field of practices.  All the different aspects of Zen meditation must be grounded the way all the schools of Mahayana are grounded in compassion.