I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. I get to introduce my speaker this morning. He's Peter Overton. Great to bring back this to you. Many of you are probably very familiar already with Peter, but for those of you that aren't, he's been around the Zen community for a long time. Started sitting in 1970 on Dwight Way with Sojin. He spent a good deal of time at Tassajara and Washuso in the early 80s. After he left Tassajara, interestingly, he took his baking skills to acne Peter. He works as a real estate appraiser and is the father of two kids who are 19 and 20 or 21.

[01:01]

And he's currently the board president here at PCC. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I'll just... I guess I'll just start. After the Buddha... Can everybody hear me? Is this thing working? Okay. After the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree for seven days and had a profound awakening, we're told that he didn't immediately feel moved to say anything about it. And then later, having met up with five ascetics who had been his companions during the previous years and who had abandoned him after he had decided to take rest and sustenance, He was moved by compassion for them to speak.

[02:06]

And this first teaching, he uttered and expounded, is what we know as the Four Noble Truths. The fact that our life is subject to... Our day-to-day life is characterized by impermanence. has an illusory nature and the way in which we suffer from that as a result of those conditions and the reality of Third, the reality of liberation from that suffering. And fourth, the means by which we find that liberation, the path. And that's known as the Eightfold Path, which is divided into right view, right intention, and the category of wisdom, and, say, a category of virtue, right speech, right action, right livelihood. And in meditation, right effort, mindfulness, and right concentration.

[03:11]

And this morning I'd like to explore one aspect of this known as right speech. I've been learning a lot about right speech in the last year, well, six months or so, and partially as a result of learning something about an approach developed by Marshall Rosenberg known as nonviolent communication. And I know some of you are perhaps familiar with that work, and I just want to acknowledge that background before I get into this. I think it's first best to reflect a little bit on the meaning of this usage of the word right, because as soon as we say it, we're thinking about what might be wrong. The Sanskrit word for right speech, sama-vaka, vaka meaning speech, and sama meaning more like complete, whole, or perfect.

[04:17]

Not so much something that evokes a contrast with imperfect, but something that points to your intention. That right speech doesn't point to correctness so much as a complete and whole intention to communicate. It's a little bit more like the honorific right. You know, we might refer to Sojin as the right reverend whitesman. Probably not, the wrong reverend whitesman, so. You can forget I said that. But also, Chogyam Trungpa liked to He liked to say that maybe the meaning is more akin to our colloquial expression, right on. That it gets it completely.

[05:20]

That nothing is left out and it is appropriate and timely. So, in the Pali Sutras, right speech is defined as I had to borrow these glasses from Mel now that I'm not working as well as I thought. But yeah, there we are. As defined initially in negative terms, in terms of the things that we do that separate us from others, such as, in other words, light speech is described as abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, abstaining from abusive speech, abstaining from idle chatter, And the wonderful thing about these lists, you know, is that you can expand on them. We can bring them up to date. We can add blaming, labeling, diagnosing, guilt-tripping. You know, we abstain from these things.

[06:23]

That's, in a sense, a kind of a definition of right speech. But further stated more in the positive terms, which is a way, a guide to us and how we connect with others, is There we are. There's a short sutta. It's called the Vaka Sutta. I think it's probably the shortest one. I can read two-thirds of it in two sentences here. The Buddha says, monks, a statement endowed with five factors is well-spoken, not ill-spoken. It is blameless and unfaulted by knowledgeable people. Which five? It is spoken at the right time. It is spoken in truth. It is spoken affectionately. It is spoken beneficially. And it is spoken with a mind of goodwill. So, I've been thinking an awful lot about this, and my take on right speech at the moment is that it is whole and complete, and includes the act of understanding by the listener.

[07:44]

It's a little bit like that question, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it, it didn't happen. If the person you're speaking to doesn't get it, has right speech occurred? So I'd like to push the envelope a little bit in that direction here. And I'd also like to say that this teaching applies equally to how we speak to ourselves. I'd like to invite all of you to think about the last time you made some really embarrassing and stupid error, or just felt so ugh about something you did or said, and how you spoke to yourself, and how how you might have chosen to an approach which was truthful, compassionate, and beneficial with a mind of goodwill in that moment when you backed your car into your neighbor's fence or spoke harshly to your child as you were trying to get them out the door.

[09:11]

Now, I think I just want to kind of break, unpack this slowly. So we'll start with the concept of truth. It's kind of a biggie. But from the standpoint of speech, communication, and right speech, there's no such thing as wrong speech. And we know our own truth. But from the standpoint of communication, there's this other element of what truth is beneficial, what truth is pleasant to hear, what truth is actually going to be able to communicate, what truth can actually be communicated. So there's a couple of different things that you can usually talk about without getting into too much trouble. And one of those is You know, an observation or a statement of an observable fact, you know, I heard you say you didn't like your ice cream.

[10:29]

That's usually not too controversial because the other person probably heard themselves say the same thing. Or they could see that that was not mixed up with a sort of analysis. It was not mixed up with, um, uh, uh, when I heard you getting angry with me, uh, right there. Well, you're saying something about something you've heard, but you've also got an analysis communicated at the same time. And so the person doesn't really know what you're talking about. In fact, they didn't get angry. They were just, you know, making, playing what they felt. So, or probably what they might think. So, to be able to say something clearly, and this is not so easy, if you think about it, it's not so easy to say something very clearly, which is just the facts, and nothing but the facts, and not, I mean, your opinions and evaluations and analyses are fine, but when you mix them up with stating what the facts are,

[11:45]

we quickly get into trouble with the person we're speaking with, because they want to undo the analysis. They can agree with the facts, but not so much the analysis. That's more of a matter of discussion, perhaps. The other thing that you can often say, which often can be offered as some sort of acceptable truth, is a statement of how you're feeling. when people actually just say what their feelings are, it's usually pretty clear that they're speaking some kind of truth. There's lots of cues we have when people speak to us, and you can kind of tell when it's pretty hard to lie about your feelings and really be believed. So that's not so controversial either. However, that often, and this is the tricky part, You know, we all know about I statements, you know, I feel that you're making fun of me.

[12:51]

Things like that. This is the hard part, which is to say just what you feel and not start to, and what's underneath a statement like I feel that you're making fun of me is an attempt to have the other person take responsibility for your feelings. I'm feeling this because, you know, there's some important thing that matters to me that, you know, either, you know, what someone said made me feel really happy or it made me feel angry or discouraged, but it was what was in me that gave rise to that feeling. And of course, what somebody did may have stimulated me in a certain way, but what was in me was those conditions that gave rise to that feeling. And so, you can actually decide that you do not have to make other people responsible for your feelings.

[14:01]

You can liberate your friends from the responsibility for your feelings. And likewise, you don't have to take responsibility for theirs either. That's their, they can own all that. So feelings and so on can be completely owner-operated. They do not require somebody else to make them happen. So You can do this with everybody, and we can start at the bottom with the President of the United States. And when you get to your children and your spouse or partner or your teacher, then you will find out what this is really like to do. But being able to own your stuff, your feelings, your reality of what's going on

[15:10]

is pleasant to hear, isn't it? Having someone speak to you about something important in which they are not asking you, not implying you that it's your fault, or you were the cause of their happiness, or so on and so forth. That is pleasant to hear, that they really felt great when you did that, because it was so important to them. That's good to hear. That's the difference, for instance, between sympathy and empathy. Empathy allows everybody to stay in their own place and have their feelings. And for you to recognize that in other people, sympathy is to try and encourage, you know, I, you know, it's a little more, there's a little more of a blending of emerging, which may not, which may get you into a little bit of trouble. Oh yeah, I'd like to talk about, this phrase came to my mind this morning as I was trying to put this into an outline.

[16:23]

Oh yeah. So, this is the hard part. What we want to do is create a story about, you know, it's populated with feelings and thoughts. We create a story about what's going on out here. when we could look to ourselves to see how it is that we are creating that. How it is that we are giving rise to our happiness or suffering. What are the conditions in us that are giving rise to that? And what we done, like for instance, the phrase came to mind, the building blocks of anger. You know, there's a feeling, some kind of unpleasant feeling, and then very quickly, there's a thought. I, this is wrong.

[17:26]

I shouldn't have to, I shouldn't, they shouldn't be doing this to me. This is unfair. So some judgment takes place, and then the story starts to unfold. They really should not have put their fence there. That was their fault. That's why I backed into it. And it goes from there. I mean, you can just build it up. You can do it. Or you can take your anger as a signal that something in you is giving rise to a really strong feeling that things aren't working for you. And what could that be? You can ask yourself. So, move on. Speaking affectionately and with a mind of goodwill. Again, this is about making an empathetic connection with somebody rather than trying to sympathize.

[18:33]

To say, for instance, seems like you're feeling such and such because, you know, it was really important to you that we make a connection today, that we see each other and enjoy this time together. And you're feeling really sad about the fact that I had to leave immediately and I couldn't come at the last minute. It's a kind of guess as to what the other person's feeling. We don't really want to say what they're feeling. We don't know what they're feeling. But we can make a guess. And when you do that, it allows the other person to understand that, well, maybe they Maybe they kind of get it. Maybe they understand what I'm feeling. Another useful way to

[19:38]

consider someone's actions that for instance might have upset you or your own actions that might have upset yourself is to think about what were the really good and sincere motivations and good and what were the good reasons and sincere motivations that I did that thing that was really unpleasant or that someone else spoke to me in that way that where I came away feeling angry. If you think about that, you can see that most of the time, well, pretty much all the time, there's something there. There's something that somebody was needing to do and something they needed that prompted them to act or speak in a certain way, which may may have led to some undesirable results, have been kind of costly, you know, they really didn't get what they wanted by speaking that way, but they were trying.

[20:43]

So that's another way of kind of unraveling the way in which, you know, the way in which we may be moved to speak in a way which is not affectionate or kind, is to understand, is to make that The ways of making an empathetic connection with people is maybe to express yourself by making a guess as to how they're feeling or to think about what it is that's what they're really trying to do. Now, when is speech beneficial? This often has something to do with timing. At the right time. Timing can be almost everything, as we know.

[21:43]

And sometimes it takes enormous patience just to find the right time to speak. Sometimes you've got to try again. We can't really usually expect or demand that communication takes place when we're trying to speak with people. But we can often, we just have to put ourselves out. If we want to communicate with folks, we just have to put ourselves out. And timing is an important aspect. In the Abhaya Sutta, the Buddha explains at some point about what are the criteria for what is worth saying. And among other things, I just wanted to quote this one. It said, in the case of the words that the Tathagata knows to be factual, true, beneficial, but unenduring and disagreeable to others, he has a sense of the proper time for saying them.

[22:47]

Why is that? Because the Tathagata has compassion for living beings. So there's this This is where I want to talk a little bit about the fact that there are times when we have something important to say that's useful and really quite beneficial to others, but which might provoke feelings that are unpleasant when we say it. It might stimulate those kinds of feelings, and we might know that ahead of time. And yet it's... It might not be true and kind and beneficial to keep silent. It might be best to seek that moment at which to speak and contribute that to the dialogue between yourself and your friends or your spouse and children.

[23:59]

that some of us, you know, fall on either side of this. Personally, I fall on the side of not saying what should be said. So this is important for me. Others of us can't keep our mouths shut. It's just important to say it, no matter what it is. I think in our community, we have a tendency to to emphasize harmony to the extent that we often don't make the effort to seek that time when it's right to say what's true and beneficial and pleasant to hear, although it may initially seem unpleasant. So I think that Keeping silent at the wrong time, not the right time, when it is time to speak, can be kind of a tragic loss of an opportunity to contribute to our mutual well-being.

[25:11]

It just reminds me a little bit that I've been feeling somewhat sad about what, you know, I mean, I have my own particular constellation of involvements here, so it's not really applicable to everybody, but sometimes feeling sad by what, because harmony within the Sangha has been really, really important to me, and I have not I've not recognized how important it is to me until I start to perceive some disharmony here and there, and finding myself somewhat willing to hold that, and yet recognizing how its importance to me comes from a sense that just doing what we're doing here, coming here and sitting, is just so hard.

[26:19]

And I just want us to harmoniously support each other. So that's a little aside. How are we doing? We're getting towards the end. How much time do we have? Twelve minutes. Okay, I'll hurry up. I'm not quite sure how to talk about this last piece, but it's often that we wish to ask each other to do things, to ask each other to be Doan, or ask each other for money, to help support our activities here, to ask your spouse to pass the salt, please. A variety of

[27:25]

requests. And this is where I feel that the teaching of the Pali Sutras blossoms into our understanding of the Bodhisattva Path, in which to give a gift without attachment brings the greatest joy. And what I want to pose here is a sort of question that, that being the case, is not the greatest gift that you can give somebody, a request for them to give to you something, either material or whatever commitment, to do something that they can do, they can actually do, that they'd be willing to do really out of the goodness of their heart, of their own free will.

[28:42]

And even if the answer is no, is it still not the greatest gift to give them that opportunity? How do we make a request where we're not attached to the outcome? Sometimes when we ask things of each other and the answer comes back no, that just makes somebody's day to be able to have made that request and to receive that no. Because the request was made purely The request was for a purely voluntary commitment or act with no strings attached. In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha explains why this is so important.

[29:50]

I'll just read this. I'm not sure how it connects, so you're going to might have to connect the dots yourself. He says, so it is subhuti. The body of merit of those bodhisattvas that give a gift without being attached is not easy to measure. I think I'd better end there. I'm happy to hear anything that anybody has to say at this point. Ron. What's your experience when there's a contentious issue with e-mails? Ron's asking me this question because I recently told him that I was going to stop reading e-mails and writing them about contentious issues, which I love to do, but I suffer from it.

[30:54]

and I fear that others suffer from my own enthusiasm. I feel that my response in those circumstances, while it may be true, And it may be warm-hearted, but I question whether it's beneficial. And therefore, I'm choosing to refrain because I question whether it's beneficial. Well, when it seems to stimulate more controversy or... It's a mixed bag, of course.

[32:01]

But when it seems to stimulate more controversy and misunderstanding that needs to be sorted out before the beneficial aspects of further communication can be really appreciated, then there's, you know... Yeah, there can be a muddying of the water and then a lack of clarity can arise sometimes. So I'm trying to exercise some care because I felt I'm just as reactive as just anybody else when it comes to this medium. So I'm trying to make more direct connections with people over the phone or personally. Yes, Susan? I was thinking about the part in the beginning when you were saying how we can really take responsibility for our own emotions, that they're owner-operated.

[33:02]

It's a great phrase. But what about the times when, in the case of children or people who are disempowered in some way or other, where somebody else is really doing something that makes those people feel bad, Or, I mean, to take it to an ultimate extent, some prisoners being tortured or something like that, they're not obviously supposed to say to themselves, well, I'm responsible for my own emotions here. I wish I was going to die. I wish I could die, but that's just my responsibility to feel that. Or what about that? Well, taking responsibility, in the place where you take responsibility for your own feelings, that is the powerful position. no matter where you are. That is the only powerful position, no matter where you are. At the extreme end of things, in terms of responses, we can think of protecting others.

[34:12]

We can respond by protecting others, even by using force to protect others. But force becomes violence when force is happening to, when you are doing it to somebody else because it's their fault. I'm a little struggling with this a little bit, but, and I'm not sure I'm really connecting with what you asked, but, I think your question considers this interface between personal responsibility and protecting others.

[35:17]

Am I getting this or not? let's say I am a prisoner, and somebody wants information from me, and they're saying to me, they're flushing the Koran down the toilet, and they're saying your mother is a whore, etc., etc., saying all these things to me, do I still say to myself, I feel really bad, but this is my responsibility, These feelings are your feelings. You own them. And they are not the responsibility of somebody else. And that is the position in which, you know, they're responsible for their actions and their feelings. And it might be very difficult to empathize with a person who is behaving that way towards you.

[36:20]

It might be really hard. But in fact, you can you can be in your own body with your own feelings. Because when you give the responsibility for those feelings to somebody else, you're taking away, that's a giving of power to them. So it's not like, I don't have to say, oh, they don't have any responsibility. Yeah, they have responsibility. They have their own karma, but I have what I can do is just keep on working. Yeah, you have your own, you know, that the, um, you know, it's, it's, it's in those situations, the people who are acting, say on you are playing with the illusion that they can invade you and that they can control you. They can control your feelings. They can control everything. And it's very difficult.

[37:22]

This has been worked out to a science. And it's just terrible. But to the extent that we can, the most powerful position is I am responsible for who I am. Oh, Linda? You clarified it by the suit, but I'll just add that maybe the right speech, kind of speech in talking about this question is very delicate, but she may be reacting to was not to say anything that would make it seem like we can blame the victim. Yeah. I think you clarified that. Right. The victim is not, I mean, the person who's being hurt doesn't take responsibility

[38:26]

No. Yeah, yeah. I want to say something about email. Yeah. And you started on this point too. The problem with email, I found, and I'm really magnetic, is that one problem is that the abs is the disembodiment of it. So we all can say things that we actually wouldn't say if we were in front of a person. when we're on email and then regret it. And then realize we were just off balance. So that's why email can be evil. Well, there's an immediacy to it. But it is also, you don't have the information that you would have if you were talking to somebody. The information can be supplied by a warm body. Exactly. Just by its very presence. Recently I was talking to somebody about how I was going to have to say this hard thing to this person I'm working with. Yeah.

[39:36]

There was a question? Did you? I was trying myself this morning. I think it's time to end getting that message. Thank you very much. Beings are numberless.

[40:07]

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