I vow to face the truth of the Tathāgata's words. Good morning. Well, this morning I would like to talk about fear. I think this is something that lingers on all of our minds and kind of It paints our lives in different ways, unless you're very fortunate. I'll start, there's a, I was looking around in this kind of archive of lectures by Suzuki Roshi and there are bits and pieces here and there and this was to start with something that he said in a session in 1968 and the student said, Roshi, what should I do about the fear that causes small mind or limited mind?

[01:09]

And Suzuki Roshi said, fear looks like something which will cover your entire being, but if you wait and if you watch it, watch the fear, watch yourself, So I use that sort of as a jumping off point. You may find resonance there or you may, as I might be inclined to want to argue with that. But there's an unmistakable truth in it. So the reason this comes to mind, some of you know that about a month ago I went to Burma. and to the Thai-Burma border, to the settlement areas there. I was leading a very small witness delegation, ostensibly under the aegis of Buddhist Peace Fellowship, but it really was pretty diverse, very small, there were only four of us.

[02:21]

And we went to Rangoon for about six days. Then we went back to Bangkok and then drove to Mae Sot, which is on the Thai-Burma border. It's a kind of wild west town that's largely Burmese. Out of 100,000 people, 80,000 of them are Burmese, and probably 75,000 of those are what we would call here illegal aliens. So they're in a very precarious position. Anyway, tomorrow, actually tomorrow evening, I will be talking about reporting back from that trip in some detail with slides and discussion about what's going on in a more particular way in Burma, which I think most of you recall

[03:23]

went through a real uprising of democracy that was led by monks towards the end of September, which was pretty brutally suppressed. And we went there with several purposes. One was just to witness what was going on because what we understood was that despite the the military junta's assertion that things are returning to normal. we didn't think that they were, and in fact they're not. And again, we'll talk more about that tomorrow. And also to convey to monks and to activists and to people very quietly that there are people in the West who care about them. And to open up some channels for direct humanitarian support and also for discussion.

[04:28]

And in all those things we were more or less successful. The more part means we actually did those things and the less part means the regime still stands and people live in fear. And so that's kind of the jumping off point. The kind of fear that one experiences there pervasive and it's not a coincidence that Aung San Suu Kyi, who is the leader of of the democracy movement in Burma. This is a pretty astonishing woman who is the daughter of General Aung San Suu Kyi, who is sort of the patriotic hero of the first independent state of Burma in the 1940s.

[05:33]

Aung San Suu Kyi's book, which came out soon after she won the Nobel Peace Prize, is called Freedom from Fear. because that is what she saw as the pervasive and distorting characteristic that was warping the society that she lived in. And just to say she's been under very close house arrest for 13 of the last 17 years and continues. to be so. We thought blithely we would drive by her house. We got two blocks on either side of this street, which is actually a pretty major street that she lives on. There are barbed wire, barricades, military vehicles blocking the street, so this house arrest is not just a nominal thing.

[06:37]

I thought I would read you something from what she wrote in an essay that's called Freedom from Fear. Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property, of means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom. condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant, or futile the small daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the innervating miasma of fear.

[07:52]

Yet even under the most crushing state machinery, courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man. So this is looking at fear in the context of a whole society, a social structure that that is based on it. But I think that it's important for us to look at that, to see how that functions in our life as social beings. At the same time, and this is what she does elsewhere in this essay, to look at how this functions, how fear, the mechanism of it, functions within us. Where are we caught? Where can we find freedom ourselves?

[08:58]

How this actually is an essential part of our Zen practice or any spiritual practice. I think for the sake of some transparency, I should probably own that according to some characterological systems, I am a fear point. That's what comes up for me as a kind of shaping emotion. If you've studied the Enneagram, have some of you studied the Enneagram? I'm a six on the Enneagram, a point that I share with Woody Allen, if that gives you any insight. But this is really essential in our practice.

[10:05]

This is in the middle of the heart suture, which we chant every day. There's a line which really resonates with me. It says, without any hindrances, no fears exist. When you're freed from the hindrances of greed, anger, and delusion, then ipso facto, you're freed from fear. and it's also true in the traditional way of looking at the perfections of the bodhisattva the paramitas which we studied this fall the first paramita of dana or giving or generosity the usually or often that's broken down as it's giving the giving of the Dharma, and then giving of fearlessness.

[11:07]

This is one of the essential offerings that we offer, that Bodhisattvas offer to us, that we as Bodhisattvas offer to ourselves and all the sentient beings of our mind and to others. So I'd like to investigate it a little bit on a kind of practice level. How does this work? What is this mechanism? Aung San Suu Kyi listed various kinds of fears and there are other Buddhist lists. Often you'll find in the early sutras there are five basic fears that are listed. The fear of losing one's mind, the fear of public speaking or public humiliation, the fear of losing one's reputation, the fear of losing one's livelihood, and

[12:20]

naturally the fear of death. So these are all manifestations of something. What is that? What is that? What flows through or beneath that? So we can investigate this in different ways. when I investigate my own fear, and I should say, this is also why I've been thinking about this, we were scared there. And we knew nothing much was gonna happen, but when we were in Burma, we were watched. We thought, oh, we can get in under the radar. But we realized right from the start that there is no under the radar. So, we felt ourselves watched.

[13:25]

There are places where we went where we would be in a monastery. In one place, we were in a monastery. We were in an orphanage, actually, orphanage, a monastic orphanage, which is a This is part of the core education system in Burma. And there were 500 kids who were very, very poor. And we wanted to come. We had donations to make, but we also didn't want to come empty-handed. So we brought a packet of ramen for everybody. We had like 10 cartons of ramen, which was really appreciated. And of course, all I could think was, well, but this is just one meal. And while we were giving these out to the kids, the military intelligence evidently, we didn't see them and somebody, our driver told us later, had followed us in and wanted to know what were we doing there. And fortunately, giving ramen to children was not illegal on that particular day.

[14:35]

But people would, in public places, people would come up and ask us questions that went quite beyond the normal kind of questions that you would ask a tourist. Beyond just, hi, where are you from? But also like, how long are you going to be here? Where have you been? Who do you know? This is not the usual stuff. And we also knew that whatever we were experiencing was really just so small compared to the circumstance of people who had to live there. So, it's a condition of mind and I would say there are things to be afraid of. As they say, even paranoids have enemies.

[15:39]

There are real things to be afraid of in that society. There are real things to be afraid of in this society, depending upon what color you are, what class you are, what circumstance you're in. So those are important to be aware of, but in order to be really clear about that fear, it helps to investigate the condition of our mind, how easily we move into what I think Aung San Suu Kyi really accurately depicts as the miasma of fear. I see it as a kind of cloudy coloration of thought or mind that shapes or distorts what it is that I may be thinking or feeling.

[16:44]

So that's one thing to investigate. You can also investigate it as a It's important, I think, to investigate the physical aspects of it. And this is part of our practice. This is what we're doing. Both those come back to Zazen or can be investigated, whether directly or indirectly, within Zazen. Within Zazen, we're working with our mind and we're working with our body. When I the other day something came up that caused some anxiety and fear in me and I looked at it pretty carefully and I felt like it was, first it was located in my stomach and it was a very, I wouldn't say it was a tightness, it was a kind of swimming

[17:54]

unsettled quality, very unsteady. And then as my thought got more specific about it, then that feeling actually moved up to a kind of tightness in my chest. And I just basically what I did, I did what Suzuki Roshi was saying. I watched it. I watched myself. And as I could breathe, that was loosening. The fear was loosening, and I could feel that with each breath, but I had to work through this tightening. I had to make sure that my posture was stable so that my stomach and lower body was open, so it wasn't constricted, so that my chest area was open, so that my breathing could flow.

[19:04]

And then the third place that I located is someplace, I don't know, it's like about an inch in here. And this is all, you know, this is all very subjective. But then our whole life is subjective. this is another modality of practice. This is something that we can be doing as we're sitting upright in zazen is experiencing every thought, every sensation, every emotional cloud that arises. If it's just a passing cloud, let it go. If it's something that really has a strong, sticky quality, then you actually have to pay attention to it.

[20:10]

Give it that attention, take care of it in that way. So that's another dimension that, that's another aspect of our zazen practice, a way of doing it. I find it fear has a really interesting quality when I think about what it is and it's what one in one of these other pieces from Suzuki Roshi there's something he has a really unique way of speaking and because his English was not so idiomatically correct sometimes it's perfect you know because he's not He's just freer because he's not caught in the patterns of idiom language that we have. in one of the Zazen instructions that we have from Zen Master Dogen that we come back to again and again, in his Zazen instruction when they're asking what should I, when he's saying what you should do with your mind in Zazen, he says think not thinking and then how do you think

[21:39]

So this is a conundrum, right? It's like you can't quite get your mind around it. Maybe you can. I've never managed to to be able to somehow hold in mind what that meaning is. Suzuki Roshi's translation of that in this particular section on fear, he says, and I think this is relevant, the fear he said, instead of think not think he says, think the unthinkable. There's something to me that's just really, you know, it just really cuts through. Think the unthinkable. Now, that may be actually more penetrable than not thinking, but there's something about it that acknowledges in the way he uses the words itself that we can't get our mind around it.

[22:48]

We can't get our mind around the things that we fear. Can you think that? Can you just hold that? Can I? And in that holding, let something move. So that holding is in the present. It's not a tight holding, it's a moment by moment holding. And what I notice when I look at myself, when I look at the things that I'm afraid of, and you can check this out yourself, it's very interesting because what happens is they flip back and forth between the future and the past. Between something I'm afraid, invariably a fear is about I'm afraid of something that's going to happen.

[23:54]

And the reason I'm afraid of something that's going to happen is because of some idea I have about something that did happen often in the past, or that I have some reference to, whether it's in my personal experience or in literature or something I've read or something I've heard about or some story that I know from a friend or from history. notice in this moving and I see them flip it flips back really quickly future past future past you know and it skips over the present completely the present doesn't seem to enter and that's exactly in Zazen. That's exactly where we have to enter in practice.

[24:56]

That's exactly the point of Buddhism. So, to me, this is how, these are just, I'm just saying, these are points to practice with. And I think that this point is somewhat different in our Mahayana practice than in early Buddhism. I went to look at fear, which is spoken of in early Buddhism. You find it in the Dhammapada. collection of the Buddha's pretty early teachings that are that are aphoristic and what he says in the Dhammapada, I'll condense a bit, his verses, from what's loved is born grief, from what's loved is born fear,

[26:09]

there's no grief, so how fear? And then he goes on in four or five verses, from delight, from sensuality, from craving is born grief, from craving is born fear. For one freed from craving, there's no grief, so how fear? And that is a a radical perspective that calls for a kind of radical cooling of our mind and our thoughts. And I don't dismiss this because when I'm burning hot I need to cool. but I want to look at the same time and I think this is the point of Suzuki Roshi's teaching and a lot of Zen and Mahayana teaching.

[27:21]

I want to look right within those emotions. So I may not want, I may not see, I'm trying to look at practice as not being freed from love, or freed from delight, or freed from sensuality, or freed from craving, but free in it. How can we be free in it? How can we be free actually in the middle of our fear? So I keep coming back to this question of, what am I afraid of? I don't know if many of you are familiar with the writing of David Loy.

[28:25]

David Loy is a, I don't know, he's, I don't know if he's a philosopher or he's a philosophy teacher. He's a Zen Buddhist who had, he's a teacher or was authorized to teach in the Sambokkyodan, sort of offshoot of our Soto tradition. But he's done, he's looked at this question really closely and what he finds is that what we're afraid of is and this is of course just one perspective what we're really afraid of is that we're not real we're afraid that our existence is

[29:28]

groundless or that our existence is, to get back to the unthinkable, unthinkable. We can't figure it out and we have this fear that we're not real. We also have a fear that we're not going to be real or that we're going to cease to exist as if in some concrete way that we can pin down we do now, and that his social analysis of this is that much of what we do in the world is an attempt to ground this existence that is essentially groundless and this groundlessness is this is just another way of of talking about self as buddhism has done it's not that there is no self it's just that it's unthinkable you can't get your mind around what it is so in traditional buddhism they talk about the three marks of

[30:51]

that existence is impermanent, which is that things change all the time, that existence is non-self, that there is no self that you can get to the bottom of. It's like peeling off the layers of a bamboo plant and you get to the middle and it's empty. and yet there really is bamboo, it's strong, it's flexible. And the third mark, and this is pretty interesting, the third mark traditionally is, so things are impermanent, non-self, and dukkha, or unsatisfactory, or unpleasant, or flawed, or suffering. And in the Mahayana, I think it's in the Nirvana Sutra, it gets turned around.

[31:55]

The three marks are impermanence, non-self, and nirvana. Why is it, and this is the question that David Loy asks, and this is the question that I ask myself, why does impermanence, the realization of impermanence, the experience of things changing, notion of self that I cannot get my mind around and why that doesn't necessarily create circumstances that are scary. For one who goes really directly to the heart of the matter, there's great freedom. Hence nirvana. So David Loy talks about our search for a ground in this is really a quite reasonable search for security.

[33:12]

And this also, I'm moving around to the social, we'll get to that maybe a little anyway. So he says he finds two ways to approach our need for security in this quotation. The first way is more dualistic. I try to manipulate the world in order to fixate my situation, including my own self, my own sense of who I am. The second way is more non-dual. greater openness to the world is possible because that world is perceived as less threatening and more welcoming, so my own boundaries can be more permeable. The best terms, and this is, again, I'm continuing with quotation, the best terms I can think of for these two modes of being are fear and love. Notice that, despite the tension between them in our lives, they are not antitheses in the way that good, evil, rich, poor, and high, low are.

[34:25]

The meaning of each is not the opposite of the other. The choice between these two most basic modes of being in the world, or the proportion between them, is the basic challenge that confronts each of us as we mature. so how do we practice with this here in this endo what i would like to suggest is can you see can i see fear and any kind of afflictive emotion has life energy itself as a manifestation of being alive.

[35:37]

There's a wonderful quotation I did bring from Chogyam Trungpa who talks about basically talks about the virtue of panic. Now, that's really hard to find some virtue in, but he talks about it as a complete openness. Can you feel that energy or that openness right in the middle of a difficult emotion, right in the middle of fear, right in the middle of anger, also right in the middle of joy of excitement can you appreciate that as the very fact of being fully alive and fully functioning because in reality that's what it is and that's why you know you we all know and some of there may be

[36:48]

people in this room who seek the thrill of various kinds of fear. I mean, a lot of our entertainments are based on that. We like it because we like it in controlled doses, you know, but sometimes even not so controlled because in an intuitive way, we realize that we're completely alive in that moment. So that's, it's worth reflecting on. I'm aware of the time And I want to leave a little time for question and answer.

[37:51]

It's a hard topic. When I come back to the situation of Burma, when I come back to the situation of the sufferings that I see all around the world, it's hard to deny that there are things to be afraid of. At the same time, I want to know how to break the cycle. I mean, what I see in Burma, and you see this in systems of oppression, what's going on in in Burma is that the general, the military junta, is afraid. They project that fear onto the people.

[38:58]

They project violence onto the people. The people become afraid and you then have a seemingly perfect feedback loop. But their people who are determined to break that cycle. There's a line from a sermon of Dr. Martin Luther King where he says something like, well, if I hit you and you hit me and I hit you and you hit me, this continues forever. And then he says, somewhere, someone, has to have a little sense and stop the system of reciprocal violence. So Aung San Suu Kyi says, saints, it has been said, are the sinners who go on trying. So free people are the oppressed who go on trying and who in the process make themselves fit to bear the responsibility and uphold the disciplines which will maintain a free society.

[40:12]

a people who would build a nation in which strong democratic institutions are firmly established as a guarantee against state-induced power, must first learn to liberate their own minds from apathy and fear." I would say from passivity, from just going along. So this is obviously not something that applies just to Burma, you know, it applies here in our country, it applies in our families, it applies in ourselves, in the community of beings that inhabit just each single body. To look at what it is we are afraid of and, if you will, to be saintly by persisting and trying.

[41:24]

And this is, I think, why the example of the monks, as the example of many nonviolent movements, is so compelling. They were walking down the street chanting the Metta Sutta, chanting the Sutra of Love and Kindness, and that helped them be free from fear, even from talking to them, even right in the middle of fear. So right in the middle of every strong emotion we have, can we find freedom? Can we find it as we're sitting and use that as a touchstone and move into our lives moment by moment in just that way? I'm aware of what time it is.

[42:31]

I just want to take a few minutes and just take a couple questions and we can continue. I think it's raining, so we'll probably have tea in the community room. And of course, we can talk more directly about Burma tomorrow night. But if you have some thoughts or questions, please. Yeah. I have a hereditary and chronic heart condition which has almost killed me twice.

[43:39]

I don't want to die. I probably will. But the anticipation of that is a very different experience than being in the middle of an actual crisis. In the middle of the crisis, deal with it. That's what's going on. That's very present. If I'm having chest pains, which I'm fine actually, I go to the gym six days a week, and this may kill me or something else may sooner or later, but I really do try to take care of it. That's what I do. I try to take care of it. I try to keep on and not get caught in the worry, but since I'm a fear type, I worry.

[44:43]

You know, so it's like again and again, it's not like I'm, I claim no enlightenment or liberation, but I have to find the liberation moment by moment when that anxiety arises and I'm very well aware that whatever the anxiety is, is nothing like what will arise in a moment of crisis when that's where you are, you're right there. Does that help? Yeah. Linda? focusing on your own inner transformation, you really can't take care of the social and political urgency and crisis of the world.

[45:53]

Do you want to say something about it? Did I say that? No, I didn't say you said it. You did not say that at all. But I'm talking about a conversation that I'm in in my life quite a lot, and also with myself, about the balance or the relationship and actually acting to deal with social and political realities such as you described in Burma? Well, to quote hippie wisdom man, what goes around comes around. You know, if I'm meeting situations that are political without balance, I'm just going to create imbalance and I know this, you know, I see it, you know, I see this in repercussions of my social life.

[46:53]

I wouldn't say my political life, but you know, in interactions here at the Zen Center in, you know, in terms of positions. If I have some emotional stuff going on and I'm meeting with somebody and that's what I'm projecting on that stuff, then lo and behold, that's what I get back. I wouldn't make any grand prescription about this, but I would want to engage. I am actually engaged with somebody on the Burma border about this, who on our last night was advocating assassination. And basically, we just listened to him. It was somebody that I liked. And it was coming from a place of real pain. And it wasn't about contradicting him.

[47:55]

It was like, I'm listening. And I wrote him an email saying, well, can we continue to talk about this? And yesterday, he wrote me an email back. And so I think we can continue to talk about this. Now I may not convince him and I doubt he's going to convince me, but if we can be in dialogue, we can look at something other than just the external projection of what we wish to see. I don't think there's any way but actually to meet that circumstance personally with your own balance and try to transmit that. One more maybe. Ross. Let me just find it, just so we're really on the same page here.

[49:14]

Fear looks like something which will cover your entire being, but if you wait, and if you watch it, watch the fear, watch yourself, there will not be any more fear. Is your experience of that immutable truth something you've experienced in your practice, or do you have faith in Siddhuti Roshi? Right. So why do we persist? It's got to be true to what he or she is saying.

[50:18]

Right, and that I don't advocate at all. So I have two kinds of responses for that. The first response is very practical, that when I practice mindfulness I moment in a moment I can watch fears dissolve and I think that's what he's saying he said there will not be any more fear he doesn't say I mean we don't if you were in dialogue you say you could take it further but he doesn't say you will never be afraid anymore now some buddhist teachings do do say that but he's not saying that there so given whatever our karma or character is, whatever mine is, there's certain patterns that I fall back into again and again, and each time I have to practice mindfulness with them, and that I have faith in.

[51:27]

So maybe it's the returning to that that happens more often in our practice versus these long periods of time where we just kind of forget that there is that immutable truth. That's right. And also by returning again and again, you, you really develop confidence that this is not real. It does not say it's unreal or has no grounding, but it's like, this is impermanent. So literally by practicing mindfulness, this is why I was saying, but looking at the cloud-like condition of your mind, looking at your body, what you're experiencing the act of looking releases your fixation from whatever that object is that fixation may come back an hour later you know but the more you practice this as a as a real tool of life the more freedom you find moment by moment in your life so it's not like you're not going to have afflictive emotions but you can become much more adept

[52:36]

at working with them. This is what Aung San Suu Kyi says. Saints are sinners who go on trying. So let's keep trying. Thank you very much. Means are numberless.

[52:57]

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