Well, it's wonderful to be here. This seems to be working, yes? I was actually going to... I wonder if you wouldn't mind, those of you who are kind of at the back, if you move your chairs up, and from the person on the tan, you could sit on one of the empty spots up here, because you feel so far away back there. Yeah, you can, you can... Right, that's great. It just feels a little more familial this way. Thank you. So... It's just a wonderful treat for me to be sitting here giving, leading this morning sitting, this women's sitting for half a day. And this is my home temple.

[01:02]

I started practicing here. I became a member of Berkeley Zen Center in 1976. So I've been coming here ever since. And I have become part of Another sangha as well, Norman Fisher's Everyday Sangha is a sangha that I'm a part of, but I'm completely still a part of Berkeley Zen Center. And so mostly I just come here on Saturdays, but I feel that this is very much my home. So I feel lucky to be able to share this half a day with you all. Thank you so much for being here. So these are really challenging times we're in. I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been feeling an extra amount of anxiety about state of the world.

[02:08]

So, you know, with our political situation and election coming, with new news about the rapid effects of climate change and now with the coronavirus, we have so many things to cause us worry. And so it's really good to have a chance to come together and find how can we be grounded in our practice and how can we support each other in meeting this world that we're in and being open to what's going on and still staying strong in ourselves and trusting ourselves. And also, what does it have to do with being a woman? How can we as women support each other? So there are lots of questions to think about and that I was thinking about as I was preparing to be with you today and to talk.

[03:16]

And as far as that, I just want to say quickly about the part about us coming together as women in a women's session. Now I would say people identified as women, self-identified women. I remember a time when it was a really big struggle to get the first women sashine at Berkeley Zen Center. We had to really fight for it. And it seemed, well, why would you want to do that? Everything's open to everybody. Now we don't have to fight for it. That's great. And women are in this Sangha, women are tremendously respected. Women are running the Sangha along with the men. And so it's not a concern in the Zen Center itself that I know of, but in our world, it still is. And as women in our world, we still

[04:19]

are not quite, we don't quite have complete respect, equal respect. Can you believe that the Congress of the United States still hasn't been able to pass the Equal Rights Amendment that was proposed, I don't know, 30 years ago or something? What is that? Oh no, we haven't really been able to decide yet to do this thing. So anyway, this is not a political talk, but that's not about politics so much as about the culture that we live in. there's still ways in which we feel ourselves. We have to find our voices and be strong with our own voices. And so, today I want to talk about a particular quality today, which is virya. And that's a Sanskrit word which means, it's translated in many different ways, but it means enthusiastic energy, zeal, joyful effort, vigor, women vigor, vitality, courage even.

[05:38]

It's a kind of strength and power, a loving power, I see it as. This quality, virya, is one of the six paramitas. You don't need to worry about what they all are. I can tell you what they are. There are six virtues that are known as the qualities of a bodhisattva. And a bodhisattva is one who works, dedicates herself to ending all suffering for all beings, and who continues to take rebirth on this earth until all suffering is overcome. So, these six paramitas, or perfections is the translation,

[06:41]

which is kind of an odd word, I think of them as virtues, are to be cultivated by a Bodhisattva and all of us. And anyone of us who has ever wanted to alleviate somebody else's suffering has a good strong foot on the Bodhisattva path. There we are. We want to do that. So we can all cultivate these virtues. So the virtues are generosity, morality, patience, joyful effort or virya, meditation and wisdom. These days I think joyful effort is my favorite one because I'm, I mean it's not good to play favorites with these Buddhist lists, but it's one I like to focus on right now and I focused on other ones at other times. It's sometimes helpful to choose something and apply yourself to it in your practice. Okay, I think for the next couple of months I'm really going to focus on generosity or I'm really going to focus on

[07:48]

wisdom or whatever, but anyway, I've been focusing on joyful effort or joyful energy or enthusiastic energy. I like the enthusiasm in it. And I also like the translation zeal, because it's a nice short word. So it's good for women in particular, I think, to foster this and find this quality in ourselves. And it's good for people getting older and feeling weaker. The reason that I am interested in it is that as I get older, and I'm now 77, so I'm not young anymore, I have to admit that, I don't have as much physical strength, but the thing that I really want to share with you is that this quality virya is not dependent on, it's not about muscle power at all.

[08:52]

And the etymology of it is kind of annoying to say the least. Our word virility comes from the root virya. um manliness and linda has who many of you know who's a in the sangha and she's a sanskrit scholar among other things and she told me well not only did vilja mean manliness originally in Sanskrit it meant semen so oh my gosh so it's really it really is a gendered word so we as women we can't claim to have semen but we have ova and we have um anyway we we can reclaim virility for ourselves and we can reclaim let's ungender the word and let it be a quality for all people all people can have this this kind of joyful effort And luckily, most people don't really even know that it meant semen, so we don't have to tell them.

[09:54]

Anyway, so you don't have to be a man to have virya, and we're going to have it, and we do have it. So I want to tell you some examples of enthusiastic effort or joyful energy. I want to tell you about a friend of mine who's a woman in her late 80s, and her name's Edith, and she's a painter, a wonderful painter. She lives in Berkeley, and a small group of us meet one morning a week to meditate at her house for half an hour in her living room. She's quite deaf. She doesn't get around. except with a rocker. She doesn't go very far from home base. But every Friday morning, some of us show up at her house at 7.30 and we sit and she's already there with her altar all lit.

[11:01]

She was a student of Darlene Cohen's, by the way. Anyway, she's got the altar lit and she's got she's sitting in her chair and she has her cat Amber on her lap and she's ready to go and she's She's completely, she looks at me when I come in with this luminous look of total energy, totally alive, totally present. And one morning I got a an email from her and said, no, I'm canceling sitting. No sitting this morning. I had a really bad fall in the bathroom last night and I cut my head and there was a lot of blood and I had to call 911 and I went to emergency and I got stitches. No sitting this morning. So then a week later, I showed up. She said, come on ahead. And there she was sitting in her chair. Her face looked a little, banged up to me, but she was sitting there with Amber on her lap, the altar was lit.

[12:05]

And I said, how are you? And she said, oh, I'm fine. And she looked at me with that same look, you know, nothing, nothing could stop that vitality in her. So that is, I find that so inspiring. And she's 87 or eight, I think. And she's just putting out that energy, putting out that joyful effort for others. Shantideva, some of you know of Shantideva's writing. He was an 8th century Indian Buddhist sage who wrote a text called Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, and it's a poem. It's a poem with 1,000 verses. And it's divided into six, well, it's divided into several sections, but there's six, more than six sections, I think, but there's one section devoted to each of the Paramitas.

[13:09]

And there's some wonderful verses from the section on enthusiastic effort. And this is one of my favorite verses from Shantideva that I want to share with you, which I have memorized. And every once in a while, I say it to myself just to cheer myself on. Mounted on the horse of Bodhicitta that puts to flight all mournful weariness, what lucid person could be in despair riding such a steed from joy to joy? This horse of Bodhicitta, Bodhicitta being the desire for awakening and the desire to help others to awakening and to relief from suffering. This is a great joy to ride on this horse. And we're going to the next one. Pretty soon we'll do it again. So that takes virya. That takes joyful effort to get on that horse and keep riding. And so what is that joy?

[14:12]

What makes it a joy? I just really have noticed this, that when I am able to completely give myself away to helping somebody else, when I let go of my restraint and hesitation, and there's a part of me that says, wait a minute, wait a minute, do I have time for this? I'm not sure if I have time right now. Or do I know how to do this? Am I strong enough? I don't know how to do this. shrinking back impulses, but when somebody needs help and it's somebody I care about and it's facing me or it's in my world, if I'm able to just throw all of those thoughts away and enter, then there's the most wonderful feeling of relief in me of not hesitating anymore. And okay, what happens will happen. I'm just going to throw myself into this and do my best.

[15:13]

And at least the back of my coat isn't caught on some hook in the door or something. I'm all here. So I can really give myself to this. So I think that feeling of joy, recognizing in yourself that feeling of joy is part of this kind of joyful effort that a bodhisattva makes. And it's really good to remind myself of that because when you're downhearted, I mean, it's an old truism that people have said forever who aren't Buddhists, you know, well, if you're depressed, go help somebody else or go volunteer or something. Well, there's so much truth in that, that it sounds like some... The joy in that piece of advice is kind of hidden if it's delivered in certain ways, but really,

[16:14]

It does turn out that if you go give yourself over to helping somebody else, there's a lot of joy there. But in the meantime, we need to take good care of ourselves. That's part of our job on this planet. And as human beings, we're responsible for taking as good care of ourselves as we can. And we do it for our own sakes, and we do it for the sakes of the people that we might be able to help, too, the people that we love. And it's actually the same sake. My sake and your sake is the same sake in the end. So we do that. And even though we do take good care of ourselves, even though I take my vitamins and I go to the gym and I try really hard to have a good diet and so on and get enough sleep, Still, things happen to you that make you get weak or sick.

[17:19]

You can get really sick from something. You can break a bone or whatever. Bad things can happen to you that make you weaker, and it's not your fault. It's not because you didn't take good care of yourself. And even if that's the case, it doesn't take away your joyful effort, your ability to have joyful effort. So good health is a leg up on joyful effort, but it's not a requisite. Joyful effort is, I think of it as a kind of life force, like qi in Chinese medicine. It's the vital force that is what a corpse doesn't have. That's what it is. Virya. So, I mean, I guess the corpse also isn't very generous and so on, but this particular paramita is notably lacking when you're dead.

[18:19]

So, if you're alive, there's some way that you can still have this. You can still put out this joyful effort. It's very tied to love, I think. There's a story about my son that I want to tell you. Well, anyway, I know the story if it's not written down in here. When he was, my younger son, Sandy, when he was five, he's now 49. It was Star Wars days and he was a huge Star Wars fan and there's a lot of talk in our house of, may the force be with you, may the force be with you. And Sandy was a very, and still is, a soulful guy and he was very soulful as a little kid.

[19:25]

And I remember One time, when he had a lightsaber, I'd gotten him this toy lightsaber that you turn a little switch on in this sort of sword-like shape that didn't have any sharp edges, came a light and started to glow. So anyway, one time he... I don't know what he had just done or felt, but he said, you know, when you love somebody, this light comes right out of your heart. It just comes straight out in a line, just like a lightsaber, and it touches the other person. And I always have thought of that since then. Sometimes I take courage from that. comment of his. And that's, I think that's virya. That's that joyful effort coming right out of your heart and touching another person. So it's very bound up with love. And love can motivate it, too, if you're feeling weak and you want to summon your joyful effort.

[20:28]

You can summon it in acts of love, thinking of somebody that you love or care about. That can help you have that strength, kind of like adrenaline in a certain way. Another thing about a comment that Shantideva makes about joyful effort that I think is important is that sometimes you have to take care of yourself and rest. And here's another verse. If impaired by weakness or fatigue, I'll lay the work aside, the better to resume it. I will leave the task when it's complete, all avid for the work that's next to come. So I'll lay the work aside, the better to resume it, and then I'll pick it up again and I will leave the task when it's complete. I'll avid for the work that's next to come. So he himself is saying, yeah, sometimes you get tired and you can give yourself a break.

[21:35]

You know, you have to rest sometimes. And that's part of it. That's part of keeping that ability to help alive. kind of like the story about Buddha under the Bodhi tree meditating and he had been starving to death and the young woman came and gave him some rice milk custard and he took it and it restored his strength and then he was able to awaken. So she helped him awaken. She was a Bodhisattva. riding on that horse of Bodhicitta, and she saw this man who was hungry and needed something to sustain his energy. So, if Buddha can pause for some rice custard, so can we. So, one of the things that... Oh, good, good.

[22:42]

I'm good. Thank you. One of the things that gives me a lot of joyful effort or feeling of vitality is being in the natural world. And I think a lot of people share that. There are different ways that each of us feels ourselves to be fully present and fully alive. And Zen practice also is always encouraging us to come into presence, be present in this moment. And that gives us energy, I believe. And for me, feeling the wetness of rain and the cold of wind or the warmth of sun on my skin, those things make me really feel alive and feel that vitality. And what doesn't, what leaks away my vitality is to do things where I'm not really present while I'm doing them, like planning and like doing email, where I'm not so much of my life, I'm thinking about something that I'm not actually doing yet.

[23:50]

Or maybe even something I already did, but more often it's something I haven't done yet. And we have to do a certain amount of that. Great, thank you.

[25:04]

That was done with great joyful effort. So, I was just saying how I am making a joyful effort now to try and spend as much of my time as possible thinking about doing the same thing that I'm thinking about. No, not to really do the things. I mean, things like cooking and going for a walk, eating. The everyday life things that we do are so wonderful in that we are called forth to be there to do them. And when we're interacting with people, that's true too. So just notice that in your own lives. Are you spending a lot of time sort of wandering about in some electronic imaginary land?

[26:10]

Or not necessarily electronic, just mental. And can you, can you, can I be here now engaging with an incredible opportunity for joyful interaction with others and with the environment around me. Another story about a joyful effort was when I was 70, I went on the Camino in Spain with a friend of mine who had organized a trip on this pilgrimage route for her 60th birthday and she had organized a very comfortable trip that included a bus accompanying about 20 of us and every day you could ride on the bus as much or as little as you needed and you could walk as much or as little as you wanted to. But unexpectedly, we planned it way ahead of time. I mean, I signed up to go, but then I had to have both knees replaced.

[27:14]

six months before the trip to Spain, and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to go, but I had the knee replacement, and I said to my friend, you know, I may not be able to walk very much on this trip. Do you think I can still come six months after my knee replacement? And she said, oh, you know, you can walk the whole Camino on the bus if you want to. Well, I didn't want to do that, but I went, and by the time, I worked really hard on my exercises, and I did pretty well, and they're horrible exercises, and I can't say that the effort to do them was really all that joyful, but I did them, and I was motivated, and by the time I went, I was walking about a mile at a stretch, which isn't that far, but anyway, we set forth on the Camino, and the first day, I walked two miles, and I was kind of at the end of the group always, which was fine. Everybody kind of walked at their own pace.

[28:16]

But the first day, this young woman who was a guide accompanied me very kindly. So that was exciting. And during the course of the time we were there, I ended up the last day I walked seven miles. And that was really great. And I was so pleased to have been able to do that. It wasn't just the miles, it was the being part of this. pilgrimage of people who are walking in a different spirit and people walking for dedicating their walk to somebody they loved or somebody who was ill or somebody who had died or to the healing of a relationship. There was a very contemplative spirit to it and we walked in silence almost all the time. And one day I was walking with my friend Melody. She stayed to walk in the back with me. And this really, we were walking across fields of cut hay and there was this golden stubble everywhere.

[29:24]

It was just beautiful, punctuated by hay bales. And this huge storm came up. It was just enormous, sudden rainstorm and the sky was completely black with clouds and the rain came tearing down. It was windy and cold and lashing at us. It was the kind of rain that comes horizontally. at you and we put on our plastic ponchos over our little packs and and just kept going and it was it was hard and And this feeling, we just were walking and walking and somehow this feeling came over me of just being in almost a trance. I was so much there. I wasn't anywhere else. I wasn't, I didn't have a chance to think, why did he come on this stupid pilgrimage? What was I thinking about? No, nothing like that. There was no room for that because I just was putting one foot in front of the other until it became a kind of exhilarating experience. And at one point I had to pee and there are other people occasionally coming on along the road.

[30:29]

So anyway, I went out and came with me and I went behind one of these hay bales out in the field. and managed it in the blowing wind with my poncho whipping around me. It was quite a task to get the right layers down in order to be able to pee, but somehow I managed it and pulled everything up again. And Melody was kind of standing there shielding me from the wind. And then we continued on our way and after a while the rain stopped and we got to the next spot and had our lunch with everybody else. And it was just such a great experience of finding this source of joyful energy in me that just came forth to help me. So it's a kind of dialectic, you call it up, but it's there waiting for you too. Then I wanted to, well, I wanted to play you something on my computer.

[31:36]

And I think I'll, I don't know how well it's gonna work, but first I'll tell you about what it is. And one of my great heroes in life is a woman was a woman named Fannie Lou Hamer, who some of you know of perhaps, and she was active in the civil rights movement. She was from Mississippi and I was lucky enough to be able to go there in the 60s and work on voter registration. while she was a leader in the movement. And she had worked picking cotton all her life. She was from a very, very poor family. And she had terrible health problems. And she had been arrested and jailed. And when she tried to register to vote, she had all these awful things happen to her. And she was so brave. And she was so vibrant.

[32:36]

And she was kind of unstoppable. She and she was a wonderful singer. She had a great voice and she would lead us in songs and her kind of signature song was this little light of mine. I'm going to let it shine, which has always been. a favorite song of mine, which I think of as virya. What is that but virya? This little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine. So it doesn't have to be that you're a hero of the civil rights movement, but it can be any of us can have that spirit. And it is very connected to courage. And so I want to try and see if I can play just a part of this recording of her singing. What was that? That wasn't my... Oh, oh, good. I was afraid it was my cell phone doing something weird again.

[33:37]

I'm sorry about that. Anyway, yeah, I'm not... as much in control of these devices as I would like to be. Okay, so let's see what happens. I've already set it to the middle of the song so we could hear the last couple of verses. And I was just thinking that I could put this closer to the speaker. Maybe if I just lean forward. All in the jailhouse. You can sing. I'm gonna let it shine, this little light of mine.

[34:44]

I'm gonna let it shine, let it shine, let it shine, let it shine. So, great song. We've got that light. That would have been in, I don't know when she made the recording, but I was there in 1964, summer of 64. And I heard her sing that song a number of times. She's amazing. She was very short and wide and just like a rock of courage and strength. She went to Washington. To the Democratic Convention, speaking of Democratic Convention. To be a delegate from Mississippi from the Freedom Democratic Party. But she didn't get seated at the convention, which wasn't a surprise.

[35:45]

But anyway. So. I want to have some time for talking. And I want to ask you all about, well, any thoughts or questions or responses you have, but also what about times in your own life where you felt this sense of your joyful energy coming up and coming forth, when you felt this lightsaber coming out of your heart, experiences you might have had with this.

[36:30]

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