paying homage to Shakyamuni Buddha again, or aligning with Shakyamuni Buddha, tuning in Shakyamuni Buddha, recalling what he said he was paying attention to, Moment by moment he was paying attention to his experience.

[01:58]

And the way he attended to his experience, his way became clearer and clearer, more and more firm and steady, flexible and bright. more and more clearly he could see what was happening. Finally, he turned his attention to what he called this great mass of pain.

[04:08]

He turned his thoughts in such a way that he thought, he thought, this is pain as it really is. This is the origination of pain as it really is. This is the cessation of pain. This is the path to the cessation of pain as it really is. These are the outflows or the defiled ways of dealing with pain and other experiences This is the origination of the outflows. This is the end of the outflows. This is the path to the end of the outflows.

[05:54]

Thinking thus, he said, my mind was liberated and there was the thought, it is liberated this is the end of suffering. My work is done. The work of this life is done. This is one way, he put it, And he on other occasions gave a more detailed description of the same experience. He said that when he directed his attention to the great mass of pain, when he directed his attention to the outflows of his mind,

[09:34]

He was concentrated. His mind was imperturbable when he turned it towards these topics. So that when the mind turned towards these topics, it was a quiet, stable mind. So it could meet the topics, the pain and the origination of pain. It could meet them in the best possible way. In other words, it could meet things as they were actually coming to be. It could meet things He could participate in the dependent core arising of things.

[10:45]

He could meet pain as pain was actually coming to be at that moment. So he could see how pain originates. This mind could see how pain is born. So he discovered the great principle of his teaching, which he called Pratijasamukhpada, dependent co-arising, which is basically, when there is this, then there is that. When this exists, then that exists. When there is not this, there is not the arising of that. When there is a ceasing of this, there is a ceasing of that. When the mind is settled onto itself,

[12:02]

and writing closely and intimately with its functioning, then it can participate in this dependently co-arising world and understand it. And his main issue in all this was this great mass of pain and liberation from this great mass of pain. So it was very important to him that he could apply this clarity and steadiness in relating with this great mass of pain. so that he could be intimate, so that his mind could be intimate with the birth, with the arising of this great mass of pain, and his mind could be intimate with the cessation of this great mass of pain.

[13:14]

So last yesterday I said, only you can settle and care for your pain. Other beings are part of the conditions for the dependent co-arising of your pain. Other beings are conditions for the dependently co-arisen disappearance of your pain. When beings give you food and warmth and kindness, when they express appreciation for you in a certain way, this can be often a condition for the dependent core rising of pleasure.

[14:29]

When beings insult you and take your food away and attack you, then this might be the dependent, the conditions for the dependent core rising of pain. But whatever beings do, they can't take care of your pain. Only you can do that. They can't settle into your pain. Only you can do that. Even Buddha cannot settle into your pain for you. Buddha wouldn't want to either. Buddha's busy settling into her own pain. Totally devoted to caring for her own pain. And rooting for you hoping that you will be able to do your work.

[15:34]

Only you can prevent forest fires. And if we don't settle into and care for our own pain, we are a potential forest fire. We are dangerous beings if we don't care for and pay attention to and settle into our own discomfort. I feel a little uncomfortable when I read certain popular books and they call Shakyamuni Buddha pessimistic. I feel a little defensive of him.

[16:44]

He wasn't always pessimistic. Maybe he was never pessimistic. Maybe he was just realistic. But whether he was pessimistic or realistic, he was an optimist for some period of time. When he was young, he was an optimist. He said, when I was at my dad's house, I was very, very comfortable. They had everything set up to make me very comfortable, and I was. But then, as you may have heard, somehow there was a security leak. And he saw through the cracks in the lovely walls of his palace. some unlovely things.

[17:54]

He saw some wrinkled skin on an old person's face. He saw people becoming decrepit and weak, having difficulty walking. He saw the beginnings, middle and end of slurred speech. He saw people losing their memory and not even knowing it. He saw people degenerating in body and mind and being upset about it. He saw these things, and when he saw them, he was not comfortable. He was uncomfortable.

[18:56]

And he even realized that this might happen to him. And even though he knew it might happen to him, he still found it unattractive and almost perhaps disgusting to see it in these others. And not only that, not only did he find it repugnant, repulsive and disgusting, but he was especially ashamed of himself for feeling that way. Because he noticed that ordinary people on the street had more tolerance for this obnoxious material than he did, being more used to it. So he was on many, many fronts feeling uncomfortable And the more he thought about it, the bigger the mass of ill became, until it was a very big mass of pain for him. And he deeply wanted to find some way to become free of it, because he also saw that this was not just a one-time shot.

[20:07]

that this pain, this massive pain, would appear again and again and again without end. And every end of it would just be the beginning of another cycle. He really wanted... He suspected and really wanted to be free of it. And he said, actually, that he found the freedom of it. And the freedom of it seems to be very closely related to how you respond to it. He found a way of being with the pain which showed him freedom from the pain. for liberation is not less of love, but an increase of love beyond desire.

[21:49]

I can't cite that Shakyamuni Buddha said that he loved his pain, but I feel that he found a loving way to be with his pain. This is called great compassion, it's to be with the pain without desire, is to be intimate with the pain without desire, beyond desire. He wanted to be free of the pain, but he found a way just to be clearly present with it as it came to be. This was his way of settling and caring for his pain. He brought himself to his pain without the slightest metaphysical concern.

[23:45]

He met his pain without the slightest penchant for construction. he met his pain without the slightest impulse to console. There was no difference, there was no sameness between his mind and this pain. just steady, clear, alert, honest awareness of experience as it was arising.

[24:57]

And he could see, this is pain. And therefore he could see, when there is this, then there is pain. When this exists, pain exists. When this arises, pain arises. He could see. And he said that he talked to himself about this somewhat, that he said to himself at one point in the night, in the morning, after he settled a number of other issues in the universe, he came to his final concern, his ultimate concern. What is this pain?

[26:04]

And he asked himself, he thought, what is it? When there is what, will there be pain? What is it that arises such that there will be pain? There will be old age. There will be sickness and disease and grief and lamentation and crying out and agony on and on forever. What is it that's there that causes that, that is the source of that? And he answered himself. He said, birth is the condition for all this And then he said, well, what is it that exists such that there will be birth? What is it that arises with the arising of birth?

[27:10]

He said, becoming, coming into being is the condition for birth. And what is the condition for coming into being? What is the condition for coming into being, for something coming into being? What is the condition for that?" And he said, he saw, he answered, grasping is the condition for something coming into being. And what is the condition? What is the, if there's this, then there's that, of grasping? And he saw. Craving, thirst, is the condition for grasping.

[28:10]

And what is the condition for thirst? Feeling is the condition for thirst. And what is the condition for feeling? Contact is the condition for feeling. And what is the condition for contact? Six sense doors are the condition. And what is the condition for six sense doors? Mind and body. And what is the condition for mind and body? discriminating consciousness. And what is the condition for discriminating consciousness? Karmic formation. And what is the condition for karmic formation? Ignorance. And what is the condition for ignorance? Old age, sickness, lamentation, misery and death. He said he thought he went through this on the very night of the great moment of history when he was awakened.

[29:24]

He spent his time thinking like this. This was thousands of years ago. Maybe today this kind of talk isn't appropriate. But that's what he said he was talking to himself about and thinking about that night. And he called this Meditation on Dependent Co-Arising in the Positive Reverse Direction. Then he did it in the Positive Forward Direction. And he said, well, what is it that Karma Formation depends on? He said, oh, it depends on ignorance. And what is it that consciousness depends on? Depends on karmic formations. And he worked his way around in the positive direction, the clockwise direction, around the cycle of birth and death.

[30:31]

Backwards and forwards, with the dependence of this, you have that. He did that. Then he did it negatively. What is it that if it ceases, there is the ceasing of old age, sickness and death? If there's ceasing of birth, there will be the ceasing of old age and sickness and death, misery, lamentation and so on. And in the same way he worked his way in the reverse order around the cycle of samsara, seeing with the cessation of this, there will be the cessation of that. And then he worked around in the positive direction of the cessation of this, that there will be the cessation of that. In this way he got it pretty clear to himself. Sometimes later he told the story in short version and just said that he asked himself, what is the cause of suffering?

[31:42]

Old age, sickness and death. And he just went straight to craving is the cause. Other times, And what's the cause of craving? Ignorance. The three-point answer instead of the full twelve-point answer. Some other times when he asked himself, when he told the story to his students, he did a different three-point answer. He said, what is the cause of all this pain? Grasping. What is the cause of grasping? Ignorance. Sometimes he did a five-point answer, sometimes he did a seven-point answer. Depends on who he was talking to. He could do more than a 12-point answer too if you want to, but anyway, 12 is the full thing.

[32:50]

And if you look on the bulletin board under the schedule there, you have a daily schedule, you know, Zazen at these different times, all right? zazen, kin hin, zazen, service, soji, breakfast. There's also another schedule there is ignorance, karmic formations, consciousness. That's in our schedule. That's a schedule of samsara to parallel the schedule for the sashin. You might follow both of those this week if you like. And there's also a picture underneath the schedule too, showing you... sort of a Tibetan pictorial version of samsara. So craving or thirst is a condition for grasping. So here we are, we've got a mass of pain on our hands, and in response to that pain, there could be, of all things, you know, what is the condition for the pain?

[34:19]

the very thing you might respond to it with, namely craving. You might crave for the pain to go away. So you've got the cause of it right there in response to it. Very handy. I wonder how it happened. It's kind of a coincidence, huh? How funny it is that you would respond to the pain in the way that might be the condition for it. Isn't that funny? Whereas if you didn't respond to the pain in that way of craving that it would end, or being thirsty for its end, then the condition for it wouldn't be there. Isn't that an amazing coincidence? I mean, that that might be the case? And you could actually go and check it out. Now, one manifestation, a suburban manifestation of this main thing, this craving around pain, is a kind of unsteadiness.

[35:29]

When you start craving, you start vibrating and so on. So part of the neighborhood around this craving is unsteadiness of vision. You've got the pain, right? And you're not really settled with it. They're kind of jiggling around the pain. Now, it's okay for various thoughts to come up around the pain. Even the Buddha had thoughts around the pain. There was the pain and the Buddha thought. Well, what is this? What should we do about this? Where is this coming from? Blah, blah. But before he talked about that stuff, before he asked himself those questions, he first of all... got really settled. It wasn't that there wasn't pain there. He was in pain. The mass of pain was there. Even after he got totally cooled out and completely calm and settled and clear and bright, he was in really good shape mentally and physically because he had so thoroughly settled into his discomfort.

[36:35]

Still, however, his discomfort was great mass. It wasn't like his subtleness got rid of the discomfort. It just got rid of the wiggling and messing around and restlessness. He was not restless anymore. He was settled with his anxiety. Then he started talking about it. Then he started to examine it. He would have been alright if he did it before, and maybe he did to some extent in an earlier part of his life, but he didn't come up with any good answers until he settled with it, until he stopped moving. Then when he was settled and he started asking questions, he got answers. It's kind of like this pain is...

[37:37]

It's kind of like, maybe it's like, I don't know what to say it is, but anyway, it's kind of like it's something that's waiting to see if we're settled before it tells us the answer to our life's questions. Because when we're settled, you know, we're taking responsibility for our situation in a very important way. And then we would be responsible persons, a person you could convey this important message to about the nature of human existence. Oh, there's somebody who's like really interested in pain. Well, maybe we'd actually tell that person about what pain is. Not only are they interested in it, but they aren't interested in how to exploit it. how to get rid of it, how to deny it, how to reject it, how to destroy it.

[38:42]

They want to understand it thoroughly and be completely liberated from it. In other words, in a sense, they love everything, even pain. They love all manifestations of life, even pain, but they also want to be free of pain, and they also want to be free of every manifestation of life. but not through disrespect of any manifestation of life, but through ultimate, utmost respect for all manifestations of life, as it appears in terms of all living beings, but also as it appears in terms of one's own discomfort. Let's tell that person the secret of life and the secret of pain. namely that pain has a condition, and this is what it is. And this condition is closely related to disrespecting the pain. It's closely related to wiggling and trying to get away from it by more karma, by more human power.

[39:47]

Let's tell the people who love pain beyond desire the meaning of pain, which turns out to be also the door to the meaning of life. So, Buddha was told, And he was told that pain has conditions, therefore pain has no inherent existence, therefore it's possible to be free of it because it's not really ultimately something that we have to be driven by and be afraid of. we can have a creative, loving relationship even with the greatest pain.

[41:04]

So he saw a big pain, he saw its conditions, he saw its end, and he saw the path to its end or its releasing potential. I say the releasing potential of pain because pain is particularly helpful because we could have a state of bondage to pleasure. Even people in heavens, they have no negative sensation, but they suffer. because they're in bondage to pleasure. The opposite of freedom is obsession and compulsion.

[42:17]

So it turns out that the first breakthrough for Buddha and for most Buddhists, the place of breakthrough or first penetration is an understanding of pain. It's a particularly good testing ground because we tend to be so unstable around it. Whereas with pleasure, we sometimes are attached to it, but there's some stability there in our attachments. But with pain, we have trouble really being settled. So if you can settle with pain, see its cause, and become free, you have a chance to doing it with other things, like pleasure. So he did, and that's how he purified all these other kinds of outflows, more subtle ones. Each person has a particular manifestation of discomfort and pain, and each person is in charge of his or her own program of settling with pain.

[44:00]

Not only are you the only one who can take care of it and settle into it, but you're also the one who sets the program of settling. So you have to consider whether like today you're going to work really hard and very intensely at settling with your pain or whether you're going to work about two-thirds that much today but then be able to do it tomorrow too. So you might think, well, I don't feel ready to completely face all my pain today. If I did, I might do it today, but then I might take two or three years off afterwards. And I think it'd be better to be kind of like half-hearted today and half-hearted tomorrow and half-hearted the next day and half-hearted the next day, because I think I could be half-hearted even after Safshin's over.

[45:03]

But if I go all out for the next few days and then look back at this experience and say, well, that was really too much, so I'm not going to pay attention to my pain for a year, then that might, in the long run, not be a good idea. It might be better to just put a slight gradient on facing your pain, like maybe today I'll face 50% of it, tomorrow 55% or 51%. If you did that by the middle of the summer, you'd be up to 100%. And then you can just stay at 100% for the rest of your life. But then you'd sort of maybe feel, or maybe not even, maybe take longer than that, maybe go up one point of facing it and stay there for a week. It took Shakyamuni Buddha a long time to be able to all out face what was happening with him. They say many, many lifetimes before he could just like actually sit there and face it without moving.

[46:07]

So if we push ourselves too hard, we might go into reaction. Settling and taking good care of your discomfort such that you can do it like every day a little bit. So like you could say, now it's been quite a while since I've gone through a whole day without noticing that I had any pain. Do you know some people go through a whole day and they have no pain that whole day? They don't even notice in between the fixes that they were uncomfortable. They don't even notice that that's when they could tell when to take the next shot. don't even notice it who me in pain just pass me the needle shut up just give me the needle they don't even they don't notice it they're not conscious that they're driven by their unwillingness to care for their pain they do not notice the cruel things they do

[47:19]

The forest fires, they start because they can't face, they can't care for, they can't love their pain without desire. They don't notice it. There are people like that. Perhaps even some of you have gone through a day sometime without noticing that you had some anxiety. This is a day of not paying attention all day long. If at least once a day you could notice clearly, I'm an anxious person right now. This is anxiety. That's pretty good. If every day you would notice that. Now, if you could notice it five times a day, that would be better. If you could notice it several thousand times a day, that would be better. But if now you notice it once a day, And then you start practicing Zen and you notice all of a sudden a thousand times a day, you say, well, I'm not going to practice Zen anymore. That was really stupid. That really blew my fuses.

[48:22]

Well, don't do it that way then. Go from once a day to twice a day. But the Buddha, at the time of his enlightenment, he wasn't just thinking about the suffering a thousand times a day. It wasn't just a thousand. It was an incalculable number of moments that he felt his suffering. But he had worked up to that carefully over the years of training so he could like steadily face it, like just plain moment after moment feel it and not run away and settle and stay clear with it. Therefore, he could really understand it. And all he had to do was just turn his attention to it and study it. It was there all the time, ready for study. So I'm not suggesting that you force yourself into 100% intimacy and confrontation with your difficulty.

[49:26]

Rather, I'm suggesting that you carefully consider how much is reasonable, how much you're up for. Some days I'm enthusiastic about facing a certain amount of pain. But I wouldn't be enthusiastic about facing much more than that. Therefore, I take that into account. I may push myself a little bit into opening up a few dimensions. But again, I don't really do it that way either. I don't open myself up to suffering. I try to be open to how it gets opened by circumstances. And then again, as you meet the suffering, as you meet your pain, are you aware of how you handle it, how you care for it?

[50:30]

What's the way you touch it? What's the way you look at it? Is there some desire there? Is there some metaphysics there? Is there some consolation there? Is there some making it into this or making it into that? Watch how you handle it. Get in there and notice how you work with it. Where is it? Does it have rhythm? Does it have temperature? Does it have a texture? Does it have a sound? Does it have a color? And so on. What are eyes of compassion?

[52:40]

What are ears of compassion? What is a tongue of compassion? What is a nose of compassion? What is compassionate skin? What is a compassionate mind? What is the mind that responds to suffering? in this clear observing way which listens and looks with clear eyes of compassion. What is that? I guess I believe it. that it's someplace very close to each one of us, that each of us has these eyes of compassion within us right now to look out and see living beings, to observe them clearly, and to also turn that vision towards our own personal life.

[54:05]

During Sashin, I always feel uncomfortable if I don't talk about pain. It seems like I'm skipping over something. But sometimes I get so excited about talking about some other teachings that I don't bring up what I know is a concern of some of us. But this time I didn't skip over it. I'm happy. So I hope you all can take care of it because only you can take care of it. The rest of us need you to do that so you don't hurt us when we approach you with the possibility of increasing what you're into denial about. We don't want to be the one that reminds you of it if you haven't been taking care of it.

[55:58]

And if you have been taking care of it and we come and ask you to do something which is going to make it too much, then please tell us. We can say, well, later then, later, fine. You just go ahead and take care of it. That's fine. I didn't know. We didn't know. Do you understand? People have many requests to make of us, but they don't know that we're having such a hard time, so let them know if they're asking too much. Let me know if I'm asking too much. Am I asking for too much?

[57:03]

Am I asking for anything? Did you hear me ask for anything? Did I ask for anything? Hmm? Should I ask for something? Well, I'm going to ask myself anyway. Reb, would you please take good care of your suffering? Would you please be compassionate with with it and find a way to settle with it completely. Would you do that? I'll try. Yes, I'll try. I don't know if I'll be able to, but I'll try. I'll try to settle into that pain in my left hip joint. Thank you.

[58:16]

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