By the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Morning. I've had a cold so last couple of days so my voice may not be so strong. During Seshim, one of the topics that I talked about was friendliness or relations.

[01:10]

And one of the things, I think, in Zen practice that gets neglected, it's easy to be neglected, is relations. relationships, relations, not relationships, but relations. How we relate to each other and to people. And because we, Zen so much emphasizes prajna or wisdom. sometimes we don't understand how that applies to relations. So sometimes Zen people are referred to as zombies.

[02:17]

Zen students may act like zombies, but they have feelings. So it's a little different. But anyway, we shouldn't act like zombies because we have lots of feelings. And because we have feelings, we know that other people have feelings. And we're always dealing with feelings and emotions and so forth, and interaction. And in Buddhism, there's a whole area where we deal with, that deals with relations. And I always call it the Buddhist love formula. It's not really a formula, but it's a way of looking at love from a Buddhist point of view, and we studied this before.

[03:44]

It's not something new, but it's something that I think we need to bring up frequently and to remember. Do you remember when we studied the Brahma-viharas, the four abodes, the four viharas, the four unlimited places where we... from which we act. They're also called the divine abidings. They come from, actually, from the Hindu... They're very ancient. They come from the Hindu background of Buddhism. but they're very much a part of Theravada Buddhism and very much a part of, very much taught in Southern Buddhism.

[04:56]

And if you don't remember what they are, I'll refresh your memory. The four Brahmaviharas. The first one, is metta, or loving kindness, it's called. And, you know, there are meditations on these four, very elaborate meditations on these four, but I won't go into the meditations. I just want to describe them, because you can meditate on them in your own way. We don't have time to go into that but the first one is Metta. There's a Metta Sutra which you should know about. So Metta is loving kindness and it's how you extend yourself to everyone.

[06:08]

without partiality. In other words, we should always, when we meet people or have dealings with people or interaction, we should always be extending metta. And it just means goodwill or giving your best will to whoever you meet. And the counterfeit of metta or loving-kindness is greed or possessiveness or desire, actually.

[07:18]

So that means extending good will impartially without having any sort of desire in it or any kind of ulterior motive. We always have to look at our motives when we do something. Why am I doing this? If we have a motive, maybe we'll say, well, I'm doing this good thing now so that maybe later something good will come to me because of that. That's a kind of motive, a kind of desire. It's okay, but it's not really pure. It's okay to have a motive. And within our activities, we do have motives. If I do this for you, then maybe you'll do that for me.

[08:21]

If I'm kind to you, maybe you'll be kind to me. Something like that. But strictly speaking, pure metta is regardless of whether you do something for me, or regardless of whether anything comes back, it's just my practice to extend this love and kindness. And that's actually, if we know how to practice that, it's an actual practice. It's not just something you just think of once in a while, you know, but it's an actual, actually practice. And of course the enemy of loving-kindness is greed or desire, excuse me, hate or ill-will.

[09:26]

Hate or ill-will is the enemy of loving-kindness. This is a kind of classification. But it's interesting, we understand what the enemy is. It's more interesting just to look at, I think, the counterfeit. what's called the near enemy rather than the far enemy. Near enemy is something so close, looks the same, like cupidity, looks like love. But there's so much desire in it that you get mixed up, you know. If you have a relationship with someone, because of your desire, you invent. Your mind invents. reasons why you love someone. And then when the cupidity runs itself out, the cupidity energy runs itself out, you look at the person and say, well, I don't like them so much after all.

[10:32]

It's very easy to fool ourselves. Very easy to create an imaginary kind of love. So, in order to be really clear, we should know a person in many ways before we decide what kind of relationship we're going to have with them. And love, you know, we say hides many faults. You fall in love with someone, And you don't see their faults. Or you say, oh, that's OK. I can accept that. Or I didn't see the mole on their cheek. It's OK. But later on, after you have kind of worn off the high of the relationship, then you say, oh, jeez, that mole on their cheek is really pretty ugly.

[11:42]

I don't like the way she walked, really." Something like that. Pretty soon you're down to just seeing the person as they are, without your own desire creating some kind of imagery. And this is the big problem between men and women. How to love women, how as a man you can extend loving-kindness to women impartially, or as a woman you can extend loving-kindness to men impartially. That's a big challenge, how to not let it get mixed up with your desire or your emotions. And it's something we have to practice all the time, constantly. And especially someone like me, who has to relate to lots of women, lots of men, and to actually have desire come up, and be able to not create a fantasy, or not take up a fantasy,

[13:09]

And to be able to relate from a pretty pure standpoint, that has to be at the basis of the practice, so we don't get ourself mixed up in our goodwill. you cause a lot of trouble and you go down in flames. The next one is compassion or karuna. Compassion, strictly speaking, means to identify with someone suffering. or to suffer with someone.

[14:23]

But not to suffer that other person's suffering. That's kind of an interesting point. You suffer with someone. When you suffer with someone, you suffer your own suffering. But you can't suffer another person's suffering. You can't step into another person's shoes. You can only sympathize with that other person. It's like you can't take over another person's karma. What happens to another person will happen to them, and what happens to you will happen to you. But we have a sympathetic understanding with people. and which leads us to help them in any way we can, because of our sympathy. But compassion, sympathy is a kind of compassion, but compassion is a little bigger than sympathy.

[15:26]

In the Theravada system, compassion, the counterfeit of compassion, is when we feel sorry for people who don't get what they want in a material sense. You know, if John doesn't get his Mercedes, we feel sympathy, but we don't feel compassion. And if Mary doesn't make $100,000 a year. We feel... I mean, you don't feel anything. But, you know, for the people in El Salvador, we feel compassion. And for people who don't see what's making their suffering, we feel compassion.

[16:36]

So this is what compassion means in Buddhism, mainly based on the suffering that people have because of their ignorance, or because of their lack of ability to change their lives in some way. Of course, the far enemy of compassion is when we cause suffering to people. Anything that causes real suffering is the enemy of compassion. And the third one is sometimes called gladness, but it's more usually called sympathetic joy.

[17:49]

Murita. Sympathetic joy is to be able to enjoy other people's happiness or feel sympathetic with other people's happiness. Of course, its enemy would be jealousy or envy or something like that. So it's freedom from envy, freedom from competition, competitive feeling. And if something good happens to somebody, we feel good with them, for them. rejoice in their good fortune, even if it's someone who we don't like particularly.

[18:51]

That's the hard part, even if it's someone we don't like. But that's hard to do. And the kind of counterfeit of sympathetic joy is Joy when somebody gets some toy or something nice in the material realm. So in the Theravada system, this sympathetic joy is more for extending toward people's real welfare, true welfare. in a fundamental sense. If you realize your essence of mind, we feel sympathetic joy for you.

[19:53]

If you make some progress in a spiritual sense, we rejoice in your progress. But I would not begrudge you saying, wonderful if you've got your new automobile or stereo set, something like that. But strictly speaking, it doesn't apply to that. It applies to real welfare, real progress. That's in its purest sense. So you must realize we're speaking here of these things in their purest sense. But we should also be able to come down a little bit and enjoy people's impure success and joy.

[21:03]

And the fourth one is upekka, or equanimity, it's called. Equanimity means to see things impartially, to have a balanced view, and to be able to see everything every situation as it is impartially, and to be able to decide something from the point of view of impartiality. Now, the counterfeit of impartiality is indifference. It doesn't mean to be indifferent, but It means to not be partial, not to be influenced by anything other than what's really present in the situation.

[22:24]

It's maybe the most difficult thing to do, but it's the basis for all other decisions. And in our meditation, in zazen, maybe impartiality is one of the strongest factors present in zazen. And maybe that's why people think of Zen students as zombies sometimes, because they have a kind of aloofness or impartiality. feeling. But when it turns into indifference, then it's a big problem.

[23:28]

And it's the thing that we have to be most careful about. It's kind of easy to walk out of Zazen or Sashin, you know. see something happening and you just kind of have a kind of indifference to it because you've been practicing impartiality. And if you're not used to practicing loving-kindness or compassion, then you won't respond, maybe, immediately. You know, you just look at it, you're kind of indifferent. It's one of the problems that we have to be very careful about. If you see something happening that's not so good, you should respond to it.

[24:39]

should be able to respond. If someone talks to you, you should be able to respond. And I think that a kind of pre-training, a basis of training, should include these four factors. In a Buddhist country, people would, even if people don't study Buddhism, Buddhism is so infused into the part of the culture that people understand these things. But still, this is not strictly a Buddhist kind of understanding. Christians understand exactly the same thing.

[25:41]

And if you're brought up in a Christian country, we should understand the same things, or a Jewish country, or whatever. Just basic. It's not particularly Buddhist. I think that these Four Brahma-viharas are really just basic modes of understanding and conduct that are basic to wherever you're brought up. I may be wrong. Maybe equanimity is not so stressed. Maybe the way they're stressed or the way they're presented is not exactly the same, but the essence is the same, the basis is the same. But before we study Zen, we should already know these things.

[26:52]

But they're not easy to practice. They're very difficult to practice. because of our desire and various emotions which tend to stay in and away. But if we consciously practice, really consciously practice, then if you're practicing loving-kindness and desire comes up, then you can see that. You can see what's coming up in your mind and you have a way of practicing with it. Or if you see people in distress, you know, and various feelings come up, you know how to practice with that. You know what to do with it. And we should

[28:15]

know what these factors are. I mean, you know, we're dealing with them constantly. We deal with them all the time, but we don't deal with them as categories. So it's kind of helpful to see them as categories, so that you can focus on them. So I think it's a good idea for everyone to remember, to memorize these categories, and what their counterfeits are. Counterfeit is called, that's my word, in the Visuddhimagga it's called near enemy. The thing that tries to take over, but it's very close, so close, and tries to take over. Called the near enemy. And the far enemy is its opposite. I mean, it's usually obvious, much more obvious.

[29:20]

You don't have to think about it so much. But what you really have to be careful, most careful about is its near enemy or counterfeit, the thing that looks like it, but is very dangerous. If you know how to extend meta to everyone that you meet, you find that your life changes a lot. You find that people respond to your unguardedness, and they become unguarded. And even at some risk, you may do it. You may extend it. Sometimes just walking down the street without having any kind of motive in mind.

[30:25]

You just say hello to somebody. If you don't do that, you can try it. Just walking down the street and some black person walks by and says hello. But there are definite meditations on these four. And the meditations are very elaborate. And you start out extending. The meditations are pretty much the same for all four categories. But they are different. But basically the same. And for metta, you begin by extending loving feelings and thoughts of loving kindness to yourself until you feel that you can do that.

[31:36]

You may not be able to do it. You may not be able to feel good about yourself. But before you can feel good toward someone else, you should be able to feel good about yourself. You should have the same feeling for yourself as you do for others. So if you feel good about yourself, then you can also feel good about other people, whether or not they're really bad, or whether or not they're harmful to you or others. You can still have a basic feeling of goodness toward them. So the first one is to extend feelings of love or goodwill toward yourself, and to be able to just sit in that feeling. And when you've settled on that feeling, then you can extend that feeling to a friend, someone that you know or like.

[32:46]

That's pretty easy. Maybe easier than extending it to yourself. But then when you can do that, then you extend it to someone who is indifferent, or you're indifferent to. Someone you don't have any feeling of good or bad, or any particular feeling about. So you can just extend that feeling to that person. And then when you can do that, then you extend to someone that you don't like, someone that maybe you hate, someone that you really feel bad about. You should start with someone's easy and gradually work up to the more difficult ones. That's what it's recommended. Start out with the easy ones and work up to the difficult ones until you can completely open yourself It's called eliminating the barriers.

[33:54]

And then you do the same with compassion, except that the order is a little different. And then you do the same with sympathetic joy, and the same with equanimity with Pekka. The Brahma-viharas appear in a most elaborate form in the Visuddhimagga, but there are other places where it's a little more abridged. But this definitely should be our practice. And it really balances out our wisdom practice, sāsic practice.

[35:09]

It's... This is like maybe the Avalokiteśvara side of our practice, whereas the other side is the Manjushri side.

[35:22]

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