Good morning. So tomorrow is the 4th of July. So a day early, I will say, Happy Independence Day. Thanks. Or as a Buddhist, we could say, Happy Interdependence Day. So there are various ways in which this Buddhist practice we do here and these Buddhist forms we use here are pretty strange to us as Americans. But also I think there are many aspects of our culture which are quite congenial and receptive to Buddhism, which are gateways to our entering this kind of spiritual practice. Can you hear me okay back there? So, for example, our interest and sophistication in psychology is a kind of gateway to many people being interested in various Buddhist therapeutic techniques and psychological insights.

[01:19]

Also, I think there's a deep yearning for community in our culture. So the Buddhist experience of 2,500 years of spiritual community is of great interest to us, I think. And then for some who are interested in science and the cutting edge of the new physics and various other scientific realms, they find that Buddhist cosmology and Buddhist philosophy resonates with the newest discoveries in science. So there are many ways, I think, in which aspects of our culture entertain Buddhism and are gateways to Buddhism. I think one of the strongest is the American ideal of freedom, liberty and justice for all.

[02:24]

So we celebrate that this Fourth of July weekend. So the Declaration of Independence was dated the Fourth of July. and probably all of you know the sentence, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So the goal of Buddhist practice is liberation. I think there's a strong relationship there. So when Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha who lived about 2,500 years ago, when he was awakened, when he became the Buddha, he said, now I see that all sentient beings, without exception, have the Buddha nature.

[03:34]

And it's only because of their conditioning and confusion and ignorance that they do not realize it. Later in the 13th century, the founder of our branch of Zen practice in Japan, Dogen Zenji said, translated that as, all sentient beings completely are Buddha nature. So this is a kind of Buddhist declaration of independence. So what I want to discuss together with you today is the various meanings of freedom and liberation, and the relationship between the American sense of freedom, our ideal of freedom and liberty, and the Buddhist goal of liberation. So, I thought I'd start with one of my favorite American Dharma utterances.

[04:47]

The price of liberation is eternal vigilance. This is by Thomas Jefferson, the main author of the Declaration of Independence. The price of liberation is eternal vigilance. In some translations, you may see that as the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And I think this applies both to our political liberty, So Jefferson thought we maybe needed a revolution or at least to reform the government every 20 years. We have to watch for oppression in our society. But also I think in Buddhist liberation, eternal vigilance is very important. So when the Buddha was liberated, that did not mean that he kind of could check out and go back to the palace and live a life of privilege and take it easy.

[06:01]

And for American Zen students, when we get some sense of this Buddhist liberation, it doesn't mean that we can, you know, go back home and turn on the television and become couch potatoes. or come into this endo in the morning and close our eyes and doze off and become zafu potatoes. So both liberty and liberation are about maintaining eternal vigilance. Whether it's freedom from social oppression or personal oppression, freedom from corrupt governments or from our own corrupted psyches. The price of liberation is eternal vigilance. So another way to talk about this is in terms of independence and interdependence.

[07:07]

We could say that Buddhist teaching starts with the interdependence of all things. So actually, each of us is totally interconnected with the whole universe. So, Marty, could you hold up that piece of wood? Just hold it up. Yeah, so here's a piece of wood, and it's marking somebody's seat in our zendo, and yet it's totally connected to the sky, and the clouds, and the rain that rained on the tree, and the person who cut down the tree, and the miller, the mill workers who milled the tree, and the truckers who drove the pieces of wood, and somebody around here who beautifully calligraphed an old Japanese word on it, and somebody else who taped it on, and what did they have for breakfast, and where did that come from,

[08:21]

Take any one thing and trace it back and it connects up with everything. And because everything is totally interdependent, we have independence. Or maybe Buddhist teaching would say non-dependence. Non-dependence means that there is not a single thing to depend on. When we face any one thing, we face everything all together at once. So the image of this in Buddhism traditionally is a jeweled net. The whole universe is this vast net and at every interstice, every place where the meshes meet, there is a little jewel. and each jewel reflects the jewels around it, and each of those jewels reflects all the jewels around them, and so forth.

[09:24]

So that actually each jewel reflects everything, every jewel on the whole man. So maybe in America we could call it the jeweled internet. But any one thing, any particular teaching or any particular person, any particular job, any particular relationship, any one thing that we think we can hold on to, that we think exists separate, is also a matter of depending on all things. There's nothing that is separate. I have a friend who's worried about losing her job and actually she doesn't like her job. She thinks she needs it though to take care of the other things she likes to do in her life. So it becomes a kind of slavery to feel like you're depending on one thing, whatever it is.

[10:29]

And actually each of us has vast resources because we are all interconnected. So by not depending on any one thing, by acknowledging interdependence with all things, we see our connection to all beings. And that's how we find our own innate independence. We're actually all free individuals because we are connected up with everything. So eternal vigilance. Vigilance, we could say, is attention. Attention is the price of this liberation. We have to continue to pay attention. So the Buddha awakened and then paid a great deal of attention to sharing. How could he share this with all beings? And in this eternal vigilance, eternal means right now in Buddhism.

[11:38]

Every moment is eternal. So right now we have to be vigilant. Right now our liberation is a matter of paying attention to what is in front of us. Including paying attention to the ways we imagine that we can depend on some one particular thing as if it was fixed and reliable. So we actually do, we actually do imagine that we have things we depend on. And of course they are dependable to a certain extent, conditionally. And that's how we get up in the morning and get out the door and get into our car and whatever we do. We depend on many things. But also we must be able to let go of the things that we think are separate and dependable as separate things.

[12:42]

It's an illusion. We have to let go of our crutches. One side of this freedom is non-attachment, we talk about in Buddhism. Or, as the American song goes, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. The Japanese Zen master, Uchiyama Roshi, says, gain is delusion, loss is enlightenment. When we think we've got something, that's a delusion. When we can let it go, when we can lose it, when we can be willing to surrender that to the vast, jeweled internet, that's an awakening. That's liberation. And it's not easy. So the American ideal of democracy, of liberty and justice for all, I think particularly resonates with the Zen teaching we do here and what's called universal vehicle Buddhism, or Mahayana, which Zen is part of.

[13:56]

So in early Buddhism, they had the ideal of personal liberation. if I can only purify my own attachments, if I can only be free from my desires, that will be liberation. And then as Buddhism evolved and the universal vehicle was expounded, this includes this sense of personal liberation. We study our own perceptions and how it is to just sit there on our cushions and what comes up and what happens in our own body and mind, and really study this closely, eternally vigilant right now. And we see how we make up this process of alienation from the world, how we estrange ourselves by seeing self and other, and we study this process very closely.

[15:01]

This is the work of eternal vigilance. So this is freedom from this fundamental ignorance, this fundamental confusion that Buddha spoke of as he awakened. And the universal vehicle goes further to see that we can't really be liberated, we can't be truly liberated if others down the block are suffering. So it's not just a matter of if I can clear up my own psyche then I'll be happy and free and that'll be it. We see that there are others around us and they affect us and actually we're totally connected with them. So it has to be liberty and justice for all. Justice and liberation for all. So when the Declaration of Independence was written and during the

[16:04]

the war to free the colonies from King George and the British oppression. Benjamin Franklin got up and said, if we don't stand together, we will hang alone. So he thought that all the colonies had to get together and stand up together. And for us, as Buddhist practitioners, each morning we sit upright together, facing the whole universe. facing the fact that we create suffering by imagining we're separate from someone down the block. Imagine that we are hanging alone. So there's freedom from, freedom from colonization by governments or by our own confusion and ignorance and our own psychology. And there's also freedom for,

[17:05]

There's freedom to do something, to help others, to help all beings, to share whatever it is we have to share, to develop whatever it is we have that is satisfying for ourselves and for everyone. So freedom is not escape. We can't escape from our situation. I think there's an idea of freedom that was popular when I was growing up back in the 60s of just kind of running away from the problems and escape into some other way of being. And it doesn't really work. We have to acknowledge our karma. We have to accept our dharma position. We have to accept who we are and where we are and what we're doing and really be there with eternal vigilance right now.

[18:10]

Liberty and liberation doesn't happen in some ideal place. It doesn't happen in some other place up in the sky. So we are always in some particular time and place. And we have to see ourselves and we have to see others in that context. So the Buddha lived in a particular time and place. Thomas Jefferson lived in a particular time and place. And now most of us are aware that Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. This is a very interesting problem for us. It's hard not to make some judgment about that. So I'm not a historian, but this week I've been reading up on some of the things about Thomas Jefferson and about that period. So when the American founding fathers said that all men are created equal, it meant that.

[19:22]

Women weren't included. They couldn't vote. And also, not all men were included, of course. There was slavery. And even not all free men were included. One had to own a certain amount of property. One had to own a certain amount of land before one was included in the rights of the Constitution or in the rights to vote. And I've heard that actually the group that was drafting the declaration originally had written life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. And Thomas Jefferson insisted on changing it to the pursuit of happiness. So we have to see a particular context in which things are done. But also we can't escape from the consequences of a particular time and place.

[20:23]

We have to face the consequences of a particular time and place. Freedom is not a matter of escaping responsibilities. So we all know that we live in a very violent society. And I feel like that's the consequences of this particular karma, this particular history of slavery and of near genocide of the people who lived here before the colonies, the Native Americans. It's interesting, the Constitution I understand was based in some large part anyway on the confederation of the Iroquois nation. Benjamin Franklin and some others studied this and actually used parts of this Native American political system from the Iroquois to draft our Constitution. And yet Benjamin Franklin himself later spoke of the Native Americans as an obstacle to the progress of the United States.

[21:32]

So I've been reading a lot about Thomas Jefferson this week. He spoke highly of the Native Americans and actually studied the different tribes that he could find out about and actually wrote dictionaries of some of their languages. He was quite interested. And yet he helped to develop the Louisiana Purchase and spread the United States westward. And he thought that the Native Americans needed to learn agriculture, and that was that they'd be better off that way. So it's interesting to look at someone, and I feel like partly speaking on this Fourth of July weekend, I want to celebrate Thomas Jefferson and other of our American forefathers who, in some way, represent something that resonates with our Buddhist practice. Jefferson also vowed eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the human mind.

[22:40]

This was his personal vow, and it feels to me very close to our Bodhisattva vow, very related to that, to our vow to save all beings. Reading his letters, they're very impressive. He had quite an active mind. He was interested in many things and quite accomplished in many things as an architect and a scientist. And he wrote about religion, and as a Zen student, feel very related to him in terms of his inquiry into the divine and his questions and concerns. These wonderful letters he wrote to John Adams later in his life. And he was very, very insistent on religious freedom and religious tolerance and accepting all forms of religion on his

[23:43]

the epitaph he wrote for his own tombstone. He didn't mention that he was president of the United States. He talked about writing a declaration of independence and writing an article of religious tolerance for the state of Virginia. This was important to him. Many years ago now, I went and visited Monticello, and it's quite impressive. He invented all these gadgets. In some of the Mahayana Sutras, they also talk about the bodhisattva activity, being involved in doing things that help people, whatever it is, making inventions. Wendy tells me that he was quite an accomplished gardener also, that he had a very scientific attitude towards farming and gardening and really understood each thing that happened on his plantation in terms of the whole ecology of the area and was really aware in that kind of way.

[24:47]

I think he'd be interested in what we're doing at Green Gulch Farm. He thought of that working with the soil, being on the land was very important to democracy. So having said all that though, he was a slaveholder. He thought it was an evil that should be eradicated and actually worked to do that, but yet he didn't free his own slaves until his will on his deathbed. So again, I'm not a historian. Probably some of you know a lot more about this than I do. And maybe in the discussion after the lecture, if you have other stories about Thomas Jefferson or other examples of people from American history who you think of as exemplifying something that resonates with Buddhist practice, please share that with us. By the way, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, when he visited Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's house, he joked that he must have been Thomas Jefferson in a previous incarnation.

[26:03]

So we don't elect our presidents in that same way. So today, looking back and trying to be inspired by those who've gone before us in this kind of spiritual practice, we have to look at the particular time and place. Today there are people who criticize Shakyamuni Buddha also because he founded an order of nuns as well as an order of monks, but only reluctantly after quite a bit of persistent questioning from his stepmother who was leader of one of the first order of nuns. the nuns were definitely subordinate to the monks in the original Buddhist order. So people today, American Buddhists today, criticize that sometimes.

[27:09]

And certainly we might feel that there's some problem with that, but then we have to see the context of where he lived also, the society in northern India at that time, 2,500 years ago. So it was quite radical. to start a Buddhist order and accept women at all, and he accepted outcasts also, and he stated quite clearly that it was definitely possible for women and outcasts and anybody to awaken, equally possible. So this was extremely radical on that time. And yet still we maybe have some criticism. But I wonder how we will be judged in 200 years or in 2,500 years, what things that we take for granted today or things that we protest against today will people look back and wonder, how could they have done that? The pollution and the problems with the environment and all the wars and watching people on television butcher each other and not knowing what to do and all the nuclear waste piling up.

[28:23]

Anyway, we should be a little humble about looking back and judging, I think. So I want to go back to this pursuit of happiness. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Because I feel like thinking about this freedom, this idea of freedom, and the Buddhist sense of liberation, that maybe what Buddhism has to offer to us as Americans today, maybe the most important area has to do with how we understand what is happiness, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So, Happiness is not just material accumulation, consumerism, the pursuit of property. Still, that's part of the American dream.

[29:27]

What's that bumper sticker, whoever dies with the most toys wins? So what Buddhism teaches about happiness has to do with things like sympathetic joy, to be really happy when somebody else has something good happen to them. It's not always easy to really be joyful, to be really sympathetic and really, even if something that you wanted comes to somebody else and you don't have it, to really be sympathetically joyful. This is one basic idea of happiness in Buddhism. or to be content with one's own situation, to be content with what one has, not to need so much, to be grateful, to have gratitude for the everyday wonders that we do have, whatever our situation is, just to be alive and to be grateful for that.

[30:36]

And in this end practice we do, happiness has to do with just uprightly facing our own life, Whatever it is, whatever comes up, keep sitting. You don't have to move. You don't have to be shaken or reactive to the situations that come up. Whether you're sitting in the zendo or whatever you're doing, to respond uprightly. We say that this upright posture is the gateway of repose and bliss. gateway of peace and freedom. So with this eternal vigilance, with this attention right now, we can give ourselves the time and the space to be at liberty, to enjoy our lives, to appreciate what we do have in front of us.

[31:44]

to see what it is that we can do that will be helpful. So I'd like to close by reading a writing about liberation by another great American patriot. who was also a great yogi. So this is Henry David Thoreau talking about leaving his monastery at Walden Pond to reenter the marketplace. I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route and make a beaten track for ourselves.

[32:50]

I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond side. And though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true I fear that others may have fallen into it and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men, and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty then must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity. I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world. for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. So, happy 4th of July.

[33:55]

May our intentions or anything else? I'd like to respond to what you said about judging people by their past. It's quite true. If you look at anyone from the past, and just by the standards of what you consider it might be today or right now, So there are a lot of people in the past who, living in a context of slavery or whatever, that we don't appreciate, that we

[34:56]

a poor now that also protested against it. I mean, Jefferson actually tried to get rid of slavery. I don't know if I mentioned it, but he was responsible for abolishing the importation of slaves from Africa during his presidency. I meant to mention it. So he actually did some things, but he still kept the slaves. So I don't know, he may have felt like there was no way. I think from the reading I was doing, it seemed like he felt that there was no way to just let them go without them having some bad consequences, I don't know. It's hard to judge, as you say, from here what the real context was then. Yeah, he talks to me, there was one passage where he talked about what would happen if slaves were just suddenly freed and how they wouldn't. Actually, he mentioned an experiment that happened somewhere in Virginia where One doesn't know everything that was involved, but where some slaves were freed, and it ended up that they needed to have someone with them to do the work anyway.

[36:23]

He said this was the result of their disconditioning, he said, of being used to working, to thinking of labor that way. So it's hard to tell from here, as you say. One can imagine the things that we take for granted now that will be abhorrent 200 or 2,500 years from now. That's an interesting exercise. Yes? You spoke about vigilance. Vigilance you said means attention. Attention seems to me to the circumstances and to my own self. the way I react to the circumstances around me. Now, when one first becomes aware of some kind of process of spiritual growth, one is not enlightened at that point.

[37:26]

There is the machinery of the ego beginning to observe. It seems to me that the beginning of the process of paying attention, or self-preservation, or vigilance, occurs within the realm of the ego. The ego begins to observe itself. And this sounds to me very neurotic. It sounds like self-consciousness, and criticism, and judgmental, and all this. As opposed to what is ordinarily maintained here or focused here, as spiritual self-observation or vigilance. Could you please explain what kind of process is this? Very good question. So he asked about vigilance and what is the nature of vigilance or attention and how it seems like if the self is paying attention to the self that it becomes this neurotic process as opposed to something that is liberating.

[38:33]

And what's the difference? Or if this is an early stage, or if this neurotic process could be a stage towards enlightenment, a pre-enlightenment stage. Yeah, okay, so the question of stage is put aside for a second. I think the practice of vigilance that I was trying to point to We could say attention. I think vigilance also means to witness, to stand vigil. So it's not a matter of criticizing or judging or fixing even. It's just watching. And it's not watching the self. So you talked about being self-conscious. And that might come in, be part of it. And actually, of course, we all have various neuroses that we're dealing with when we're talking about freeing ourselves from conditioning.

[39:38]

So that's the place where we're actually working, right? But I guess I feel like this attention is something that's not, it's not separating oneself from others. One watches, one sits, you know, the model for this is the zazen we do, although of course it's something that then we take with us in all postures, in all places, but more or less, the ideal is that that's part of how we live in the world. So to bear witness to what's coming up, to watch without trying to fix things, without trying to change things. So this is a problem when we bring the therapeutic model into Zen practice, because sometimes there are things that we need to fix. I mean, practically speaking, if you can fix it, please do. But more fundamental is just to watch without, as you say, the judgment, without just to bear witness without trying to do anything about it.

[40:43]

This pursuit of property is very subtle, actually. There's this sense of not just material accumulation, but we, when we enter spiritual practice, we want, it's been called spiritual materialism, but we want to develop ourselves. We want to become better people. We want to become more spiritual. We want to become better meditators, whatever. And we're trying to improve and fix things. in a way there's nothing wrong with that, that's natural but that's just another one of the phenomenon that we bear witness to basically just to don't just do something, sit there just be there, watch what comes up and there's something there's some process that's quite healing that many of us experience that comes up with that so It's kind of endless. It's an eternal visual. It's not something that you do for some period of time and then you get to some other stage.

[41:45]

It's actually the way that we practice awakening. It's not some practice to get to someplace else that's called awakening. It's like being awake. It's like seeing, as I sit here, how is my breath and being aware of the sounds and people talking and myself talking and responding to you and just to be with whatever it is that's happening fully, to really fully bear witness. So, I don't know if that responds to your question. I see what you're saying, but I understand that I just can't do it. Well, I can't do it either, but one can allow it to do itself. So when there's an eye trying to do something, that's the problem, right? Then there's something out there that we're trying to, you know, fix or we're trying to manipulate or there's some... that's the split. That's exactly the place where our confusion comes up.

[42:48]

And it's not that we should get rid of that. It's that we should really bear witness to it, be vigilant, watch that we continue to imagine that you're different from me, and of course you are in some way, but also we're totally intimately internetted. So how to get comfortable, how to find your seat in this way of just watching all these discriminations coming up. It's not that I do it, it's that this is actually the way things are. and we bear witness to what that is and watch it and see how we imagine that there's something that we can do. I find myself there's nothing I can do about it. Right. It just happens. Good. And I have no say about it. It hits me sometimes when it feels like there's a silence in the midst of all the noise.

[43:51]

And some other times there's just a bunch of fears, and I need fear. Okay, but you're making some judgment that one of those is good and one of those is bad, or that you'd like, you know, you'd rather have the silence or the whatever than the fears, you know. But actually you have to be there with all of it, actually. And that's... So, it's not that I can do something about it, but, you know, it's possible to put oneself in the place of... sitting down on the cushion and being there and bearing witness, being vigilant. I have found out that I can actually do something about it and only screw it up when it's happening right. That's the only thing I can really do. And the important thing is to keep watching how that's what you do. So it's not about getting rid of that. It's about really becoming very, very, very familiar with how you screw it up, how you imagine yourself separate. Sometimes it happens, it happens just spontaneously.

[44:53]

And it seems to be blissful and very, very cozy and comfortable. And all of a sudden something pays attention to it. And then, boom, instantly goes away. Yeah, so that's called letting go. So we return to, you know, there are techniques to help. We return to posture, we return to inhale and exhale. You know, when we're sitting on our cushion. And you can return to your breathing when you're in the middle of whatever, walking down the street, working at your job. So there are things that can help us return to letting go of whatever the delusion is that we're in the middle of, and then watch it come up again. But the practice is being vigilant, becoming very familiar, witnessing how it works. And then there's some other space that we can... Good question. So I'm hoping that somebody will have other American dharma heroes to share with us or other things about Tom Jefferson or anything.

[45:57]

of the architecture. to the culture that would emerge from that. Well said, yes. There's some space here and here, and there's some cushions up front for those of you in the back who would like to use them. Yeah, so Bruce mentioned Walt Whitman, and I actually was looking for a quote in Whitman. I ended up going to Thoreau instead, but I was looking at the Song of the Broadaxe, which you mentioned, which is wonderful, or the Song of the Open Road, and also the Song of the Broadaxe, I like. and push some of myself.

[47:49]

Yeah, there's a lot in there about the American sense of freedom. Of course, Thoreau is involved with Simplify. Being down the road from your woods, yes, we should definitely mention China. Yeah, so that's right, the love of nature. So there's this interesting thing though, you mentioned the Song of the Open Road, there's this sense of freedom that we have as Americans that has to do with the new frontier, you know, leaving Europe. So there's a sense in which I feel there's a little tinge of escaping, you know, escaping from something. And at times we need to escape from some things. But Jefferson, for example, wrote about how all Americans should be agriculturalists. We should let Europeans be the artisans and manufacturers, and that that would be the ideal democracy.

[48:54]

And he imagined someday when the country would become crowded, but it seemed pretty distant to him. But this thing about the frontier, I think, is interesting, too, in terms of Buddhist practice. Of course, we know that it was at the expense of the natives who had lots of frontier under their feet all the time. But I had this feeling of that part of our American ethos relating to something in Buddhism, which is this sense that Dogen talks about, about going beyond Buddha. So one doesn't reach some state of whatever awakening or enlightenment and then we're once finished. It's a constant process. There's no end to it. Buddha goes beyond Buddha. If you see the Buddha, kill the Buddha, you know. So there's that feeling of the work is endless. The work is as endless as there are such beings. So this is a very fundamental idea in Mahayana, in the universal vehicle. And it kind of matches up with this sense of the frontier of kind of exploring or going further, you know.

[49:59]

Strange new worlds where none have gone before and all that. Yes. Well, I just will relate a gentleman's story. Oh, good. Please. A number of years ago, when my daughter was in elementary school, she had a little reading on John Mayer that she had to do. And I picked it up, and I read it, and I never realized that he had strapped himself to the top of a tree during quite a violent storm. He strapped himself so that he was completely free to be buffeted throughout the night with this tree in the storm. I was fascinated by the lunar theater. But I never forgot that because there's a lot that we can take from that. This is definitely going beyond. I actually met somebody who had done that back in the early 70s, a guy who was a Vietnam vet and this was back in

[51:01]

hippie days and all that, but he had climbed up a tree and strapped himself to a palm tree in Florida when he knew a hurricane was coming, because he really wanted to experience it fully. He said it was pretty far out, and he was a pretty amazing guy. Yeah, that's wild. I didn't know John Muir had done that. Can I offer a recommendation? Please. I think an obvious one is Jack Kerouac. underscore in all of our practices, particularly Zen. Also, I have a question of sorts. When you were speaking about our context, how can you reconcile, in short, this gain through loss and being free in the context of what's this quintessential American disparity of not being material?

[52:14]

but having freedom from losing those things. In the context of pursuing liberty and justice for all, those become material things. So if we're turning everything material, how can we really be free? How can we have freedom Well, I'm not completely sure I have your question, but let me talk around it and we'll see. So there's this one thing which is just kind of materialist consumerism, trying to get more. Then there's this pursuit of liberty. Somebody was saying to me on the deck that pursuit actually, The colonial days also meant not something you pursue or chase after, but actually one's pursuits, one's practices, actually.

[53:18]

So, the sense of loss, well, one thing I don't want to say, though, is that we should kind of try to get rid of the material. I mean, we do live in the phenomenal, you know, where this happens is in some particular time and place, some particular physical context. A lot of Zen practice has to do with taking care of material things, material objects, very, very well. Really paying attention to the things of the world and really taking care of them. So it's not that we want to, not that we want to kind of ignore the material, but how do we treat it in a different way than trying to acquire it, trying to possess it? How do we So in Japan, they consider that objects have spirits. There are ghosts of teacups. There are spirits of microphones. You know, everything has its own spirit. And they think of them almost as they would have as human spirits or animal spirits.

[54:24]

So things have their function and one uses them and one takes good care of them. And that's different than trying to kind of, you know, collect them and put them on a shelf somewhere. So one loses the possession of them, you know. One is not possessed by them. It works both ways. One meets the things of the world, the material things of the world, and takes care of them. So if you have material goods, it's not that you should just go out and get rid of all of everything you have. It's how do you use them, how do you take care of them, And how do you see that the material objects of the world are also working for the benefit of all beings? I'm not sure if that's exactly where your question was at. Partially. I think just if you're living in a society which so wholeheartedly embraces, you know, having things, whether you consciously seek them or aspire to have many things, but just if you're so encumbered by the sense of materialism, how can you reconcile that with

[55:32]

embracing a sense of gain through loss or freedom through loss. That was a really great statement that you made. Well, it's not that you... it's also not that you try and acquire loss, you know. Right, but embracing, you know... It's just letting go. It's just letting go. So, if you think you've gained something, if you think you've got something and acquired something, you know, whether it's a physical thing or some idea or some system of beliefs or whatever, and you think you can rely on it, that's kind of dangerous. It's a delusion. That may be the delusion that you can operate with in your life for 20 years and it may be a wholesome delusion even. It's not that things of our life are bad, but to be able to let go, to be able to, in a relationship, not think that you have to give the thing that you want to give, but actually what is it that is really useful to give, to let go of your ideas about what it should be.

[56:40]

That letting go is really all of it. I think what makes what you're saying particularly challenging though is that when you take these wonderful ideals means having a car and it's very challenging to even if you don't again aspire to have those concrete things to not feel that Yeah, good Yes?

[58:12]

Yeah, I want to add something to what he's saying. I think part of what enlightenment means is the whole thing of hang on tight and let go quickly. That when you're in possession of something, really possess it, love it, and be with it, but know that the time's going to come when you're going to have to let it go. And that when that time comes, letting it go is in the rhythm Now, I want to make sure that I heard you right. You very quickly quoted Dogen, and didn't you say that Dogen said that all we are is food in nature? No, not exactly. So the original saying from the

[59:15]

our nirvana sutra is all sentient beings completely have buddha nature. And Dogen in his writing about buddha nature re-translated it to, well, one way to, we're talking about a Japanese translation of a Sanskrit text and trying to talk about that in English, so I'll try. All beings, whole being or wholly are, completely are, buddha nature it's not that there's some buddha nature we have even there in our it's very slippery the way our mind thinks the way languages not just we maybe have a sense of english as being particularly a dualistic language but even in chinese and japanese which are more ambiguous and somewhat less there's this inevitable thing of buddha nature well that's something that we can have so it's not that that's i think the point of it that Buddha nature is what we are, all beings are.

[60:19]

Yeah, that's sort of what I thought, the impression, yeah. And Buddha nature is not a thing, Buddha nature is just a description of... It's a being, it's a state of being. It's of this kind of basic openness that is available to us. Okay, so my question is, if that is who we are, then where does the conditioning come from? Where does this inertia of conditioning come from? my parents and their parents and their parents all were expressing their Buddha nature. And where does all this sort of ego, overbearing tyranny that we all deal with come from? Right, that's the fundamental question. Where does it come from? But even more fundamental, how do we face it? How do we... How does it reconcile itself with us all beings? Right. So, the other side of it, we are this openness and we have this many, many lifetimes, the Buddhists say, of this karma, you know, and we have a genetic karma from our parents and our biological ancestors and we have

[61:45]

Those of us who've plugged into a certain spiritual practice have a spiritual karma from, you know, various models and exemplars and the people who've passed on spiritual practice. And then as Americans and as growing up in a Christian culture, we have the karma of America and of Europe and, you know, the whole world. And yeah, so it goes, so the Buddhist way of talking about this is that we've lived innumerable lifetimes. And so we have these habits, these habitual ways of thinking, and they're passed on to us. And we can see it in terms of the way we know, in our culture we talk about psychological conditioning and the way that our parents' patterns are passed on to us. That's just a little part of it, but maybe we're more familiar with that aspect of it. So the point, though, is We have all that, and we have to face that.

[62:46]

And actually, it's not that we have to get rid of that. It's that right in the middle of that is the place of awakening. Right in the middle of that, to let go of those, to really become familiar with how we alienate ourselves from the world, how we imagine the other and the self, to really settle into seeing how our self operates in all those karmic realms, become really familiar with it, learn to let go of it, see how it comes up again, just to face it. And there's a way in which sometimes we can see then that sometimes we get pushed around by it. And maybe sometimes we can just see it and not react. Sometimes we can just, okay, there's that one again, let go. So that's part of the craft of it, I think. But there's also this saying in Mahayana, the fundamental affliction of ignorance is itself the wisdom and virtue of the Buddhas.

[63:51]

So Buddha appeared because there are confused beings. Buddha doesn't exist somewhere in this pure land where nobody's confused and nobody has problems. They wouldn't need Buddha. There's a story that Gary Snyder, you mentioned drama bums, tells about. A place where everybody was awakened. Everybody was completely enlightened except for one person. And this one person, you know, persevered and practiced very diligently and went through various austerities and worked very hard and saw that that wasn't doing it and sat down under a tree and eventually awoke and he was called the Buddha. So where we are in the particular time and place we are, in the particular situation we're in today, in this violent society that comes about from various causes, and we can look at some of them, and in the confusion of our own personal lives and in the confusion of our society, that's where we do

[65:06]

this practice. We wouldn't need to do it if we were on some desert island and, you know, we wouldn't be there anyway. Yeah? when that's really all there is, in some way. It's like, to be able to create, destroy consciousness, takes an awful lot of time. Eternal vigilance. Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know about this. I mean, there's so much emphasis on Don't ask me.

[66:10]

That's a good question, yeah. I think the point is that there's a point at which we can see that we're creating karma, that we're trying to get this, trying to get that. It could be good karma or bad karma. We're trying to save the world or we're trying to grab some of it or both. And at some point we can see that to just watch what's going on and then respond appropriately, we can kind of loosen up the way in which we're creating and destroying. There's still creating and destroying because our body is functioning and our stomachs are secreting juices and our brain is secreting thoughts and all these things go on. So we live in the physical world. also. But just to watch how we are creating karma and to how we do want this or that or the other and just to see how that process works and really become familiar with it.

[67:19]

To slow down enough some of the time in our busy life to give us the space to be able to not react, not follow our habits. You know the thing that Thoreau was talking about, about this route that we walk through the woods and you know if you think of any place think of any place from that you go to with some regularity from your house and think of the route you drive there and think of all the other routes you could go you know this is an example and how we think about things also we have particular synaptic routes about how we respond and react to certain situations and they get become ruts and sometimes that's okay some of them may be wholesome but to watch what those ruts are and to know that that's the rut you're doing. And then that gives you the possibility to actually, you know, take a different street. And it loosens up, though. Sure is.

[68:19]

It's not easy. The price of liberation is eternal vigilance. That's my motto for the day. Yes? What's this darker business? I'm sorry. I got riled when you mentioned Tibet and China. What are you saying about it? How do we interact with it? Or just people that have chosen the path? Coming to enlightenment with everybody, not just yourself. Some people that haven't chosen that path.

[69:22]

Do you just go by example? Well, I think we should do what we can to make the world better, you know. I mean, there are things we can do in our personal lives and in... I mean, I call it President Clinton numbers of times to ask him to support Tibet, one of the most favored nation. I mean, I called his office. And so I was quite disappointed, I have to say, at the way he took that. But this thing about darker paths, I want to come back to that. I think that part of this idea of a universal vehicle is that we don't have the one right path. We don't, in fact, how many people are in this room? We have that many different paths, you know? And Jefferson's actually a great exemplar of this. He talked a lot about religious tolerance and that there are many different ways. And he had his particular beliefs and his particular sense of what the divine was, but he was very clear and careful about not imposing that on others.

[70:26]

So the whole thing that we have in our culture about separation of church and state, actually he was very much involved in in uh... in that mode for our society and it's about it's not about that there's no church you know it's not about getting rid of the spiritual it's about seeing that we should not the state or even in ourselves our own judicial system should not impose things you know we can see uh... again it's You know, we do make judgments, and sometimes it's necessary to make judgments, but for somebody else, we don't always know what the right path is for them. Yeah, I know there's the whole political realm and we have to respond.

[71:28]

So we actually have some great exemplars. Martin Luther King is another great American Buddhist from this point of view. Excuse me. And you know the whole model that Gandhi left us. So there are those kind of tools that are available now. There are also the tools of the democratic system that come to us from the ballot box and representative government and checks and balances and the judicial system and all of these have problems that we know about very well. But I think that being witnessing, being vigilant, means to witness ourselves in our own spiritual practice and to try and be informed as best we can, the media being what it is with what's going on in the world, and not to get thrown around by it. Sometimes there's nothing one can do. And sometimes one can do something, and then one should. That seems to me. Yes. I'm sorry.

[72:31]

Yeah, that's a good one. She said that the tip of, make sure I got that right. My freedom ends at the tip of someone else's nose. Yes. We're all connected. Yes. A good example of what the gentleman was talking about, in my mind, is the Dalai Lama who works tirelessly internationally in a political realm in regards to Tibet, but also works towards growing compassion for the Tibetan youth. Yeah, that's the extraordinary thing about the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans. And this thing that's happened recently where it seems like our government is not putting up opposition so much anymore to the Chinese rule in Tibet, or at least it seems that way. I've heard this very sad thing that the young Tibetans now are wondering, well, should we continue to follow the Dalai Lama in his non-violence? And it's understandable. And they look at the PLO and Yasser Arafat and say, well, maybe that's what we have to do.

[73:42]

So I think that's happening actually for some young Tibetans and it's very sad and it's understandable. But there are many examples amongst the Tibetan Buddhist teachers of stories I've heard of Tibetan Lama recounting what he witnessed of how his co-practitioners were slaughtered in his monastery and then crying for the Chinese and the karma that they will get. So what's going to happen to China you know, we should free China too. China should free China. So we know the karma that's come to us from the slaughter of Native Americans, from slavery and the way blacks were treated. So that's part of what we're dealing with in our society. So the Chinese will have to deal with this somehow. So one can see that, and Jefferson actually wrote about what slavery did to the slave owners and how it was, how terrible it was in terms of what it did to the slave owners. and uh... so to see to see karma in a wide sense well it's part of it i don't main reason i don't know i mean there's lots and lots of aspects of of this but certainly we can see how our country grew from one people taking the land of another people

[75:11]

and from one people enslaving another people. And what does that, you know, how does that affect what our unconscious assumptions are? Or conscious. Or conscious. Our right to keep and bear weapons ties directly to those two things. That's right, the right to bear arms was where the frontiersmen to protect themselves from the savage Indians. And some of the Indians were probably pretty brutal and of course we know that some of them had very good cause to be upset about things. So, yeah, this is part of the fabric of our national karma. So, I think, you know, this being July 4th, we should celebrate the things that are really rich in our national tradition, that support our practice, actually. And we should also see the problems, and, well, what can we do? And it's not always easy, but if you do see something to do, please do it. Yes? In Christianity, since I was a child, It's being done to you.

[76:20]

How does that align with the Buddhist way? How does that align itself? So the question is, how does turning the other cheek, how is that reflected in Buddhism? Do we know what it means to turn the other cheek? Well, what came up for me when you asked the question was Gandhi's response, which is not submitting, it's not passive, but in a way it's turning the other cheek. again bearing witness, being vigilant, demonstrating what the nature of the event is by persistently putting yourself in that place where this person is forced to strike the cheek. So that's really a hard path. But anyway, that's, I don't know, particularly in Buddhist doctrine.

[77:25]

Well, there's that story about that A warrior came in and marched into the monastery. He was a pretty famous guy. All the other monks split for the hills because they knew he was coming down. The warrior marched in and he said, Do you know who I am? I could run you through with this sword. The master looked him in the face and said, Do you know who I am? I could allow you to run. The lawyer was wise enough to know that he met his match, he bowed, and he walked out of the place and left him alone. Great. Thank you. Great story. Yes. Yes. I have an idea about that from Aikido, and that would be that what we teach is never attack your attacker. That when you're attacked, That was me when you said about crying for the Chinese, that was like sympathetic pain and sympathetic joy.

[78:38]

Right. That was the completion. Right. Yeah. To see that for the Tibetans, these amazing Tibetan beings, to see that the Chinese are not separate from them, even as they're killing their friends, it's very powerful. Yes? Yes. Well said, yes.

[80:08]

So, freedom, he said, freedom from fear. I think it's more freedom to be with one's fears. So, what you were saying, I resonated with it in terms of how I would put it is to be upright with your fear. So, to face fear, not to be driven away by fear. And Yeah, so as you say, even the birds are working with their own freedom and lack of freedom, their own fear and their own being willing to be wholeheartedly there with their fear. They're motivated by their fears, as most of us are, although we tend to put our fears Yeah, to be free you have to take your fears out of the closet and kind of embrace them, you know, be with them.

[81:13]

I was also, my chance to get in a dill online, when you mentioned the birds, are birds free from the chains of the sky? There's something... When I am feeling a great deal of anxiety, or fear, or I want to lash out, or I feel like I can't take myself, at the same moment I know that I can take it over, but in the moment I can't always do better. And I've seen He is totally patient, compassionate, and with me.

[82:24]

And I have never experienced that. And I so much wish I could have those qualities of his patience and tolerance. But you're studying that right now by appreciating it in him. without trying to grab them or hold on to them or get those qualities, just by studying those qualities, at some point you'll see them arising in you. to acknowledge that within myself and have that person still be able to give so much to me.

[83:29]

And I look at him and think, I can't... that he can give back to me. I can't give back to myself like that. That's, I think, the important point about compassion is to learn to be compassionate to oneself. So, Or if you're giving yourself a hard time, it's hard to be really compassionate to others. So being compassionate to yourself means allowing others to give you compassion, learning how to receive compassion. It's very hard, it's a real study. And, yeah, please continue. Yes. Zoe. with your question, I'm just overwhelmed by the picture of how violence begets violence. Even though you come at me with some sort of attack, you know, I'm going to then react to it, but when one does that millions of times, finally, you know, we get the picture that, wait a minute, I'm just doing more of this.

[84:39]

What really brought me to that was your comment about the violence from the frontier, with the Indians and then to keep the slaves under control. And finally, we have that acted out in Somalia, where we brought all of our weapons. And the idea of that karma from combating the Indians, instead of doing the kind of dance that you were talking about in Aikido, for the good of all, is now acting itself out You can't see any connection, but there it is. You know, a child in Somalia who's getting killed is the end result of our frontier. Our attitude to our frontier. I'm just overwhelmed with that picture of violence begetting violence. We have to stop it somewhere. Thinking along those lines, I can see that for Dalai Lama's way, that's the only way that there is. We must go in that way.

[85:39]

Yeah, and we have a lot of studying to do just to study this karma and how it works and how we react against it, as you're saying. We react to violence in certain ways and we get angry. How to stay upright in the middle of it and just study it and just be with it and respond when we can. It's a difficult, long study. There's an aspect of I'd like to mention a little bit about, refer to the thirst for community that our society has and the tradition of the Buddhist community and there's this way of understanding what Sangha is about that I think is really beautiful in response to that, that what the Buddha did when he set up the Buddhist order and how it's maintained itself throughout the history of Asia is to set up some example of something outside or counter or other than the usual karma of the world. So the Sangha of all of us, the Sangha of the community of people trying to witness, trying to be vigilant, is this kind of force that exists that can help us, you know, and it operates century after century to help soften the effects of this karma and actually it does make changes.

[87:05]

So there's a way in which our being together, our coming together, and practicing together, and looking at these questions together, exists as a force that can help. I believe that. Also in the sense that we're aware of others, the whole Sangha, of the whole Earth. Yes. It's not just me when I'm attacked. emotionally, verbally, physically, I think, well, I'll just defend myself this moment, this once. But it's not. There is no just this once. It's for all of us. When I react, it's everything forever. Yes. I've just been thinking a lot about what you were saying, and also in light of the imagery that you said in your talk about the net, the jeweled net, and how we're all connected. And at times I find it very difficult because I tend to do things go through me instead of around me.

[88:12]

And it's hard for me to embrace the pain that one person may do to someone else or one country does to someone else or, you know, how do we maintain the essence of friendship and goodness and love and care and relationships and self-awareness at the same time holding and embracing human suffering and enslavement and the breakage of families and it's very hard for me to hold on to and violence and media and you know all that stuff it's so hard for me to see that this is a net but some most of the time it feels like there's so many gaps and and the bridges haven't been made yet in understanding one another and holding each other's hands and helping us. All of us get through this. Yeah, that's the problem. That's the fundamental problem is that we don't see the connections.

[89:14]

We don't make the connections. It's not just seeing. It's actually being there in the connection. And so the world is fragmented. This is the base, you know, and we see this in our own... in the middle of our own meditation when we see how we make up subject and object, but then it gets played out in the world in this way of nations against nations, and peoples against peoples, and enemies, and wars. But still, I mean, the Chinese and the Tibetans are intimately connected. And so how do we stay with it? There's the process of our own personal practice, and there's the process of the world's practice, and they're connected. And again, it's the motto, eternal vigilance, just staying with it, watching it, sitting up brightly in the middle of it. And the more people in the world witness to the gaps, the more we see that those gaps are illusions that we've made up.

[90:15]

And looking at our own time, we see all these terrible things happening, and we see positive things happening. We see peace breaking out, and we see Russia changing, and we see South Africa and the Palestinians and Israel talking together instead of fighting. So there's this tremendous mix of terrible things and healing and it's this dance and the more we're all witnessing to it, we can see the way that there's healing. But it's very slow. I don't see the dance leading a lot, just to have and to have not. And I've been living a lot of my life in areas and countries where there are head-nots? Yes. People don't have these? Yes. And I don't know what to say. There's something among these people which I find very clear, very honest.

[91:19]

What surprised me was that It's a great paradox. The moment you come to this country, you cannot share here. So this isolation and this ego-holding is incredible. Holding on to my stuff, my toys, then there are these gaps. So I'm not sure where we start to change. Okay, they'll be open, they're vigilant. And then you also share, yes. Yes. So I think it's together with the vigilances and the watching is that naturally, you know, you see somebody who needs something that you have, you give it. You know, it's not even, you don't have to think about it. You just respond. So, you know, this is one little act of kindness. It's just like a little seed and we need lots of seeds. Yes. To me it always brings me back to myself and the first step in changing behavior.

[92:22]

Right. Right. Right. So practice means to be practiced at something. So to continue to practice awakening is to continue to practice watching how we're not awake, actually. I just wanted to share, I just returned from Washington, D.C. Your talk was really relevant for me. I wanted to take my 23-year-old son to show him what you're talking about, the positive and the negative. I wanted him to see the Holocaust Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial. But we also got to get up in the gallery in the Senate and help represent our government.

[93:28]

And we just get to walk in. And we got to go into the White House. It's just witnessing. I don't know how to tie that all together, but it's like I really wanted to be a witness and to share this as a positive and to say, beware. This could happen in our country. This could happen in Germany. All those names in the memorial, and we see ourselves in this memorial. Each name stands for a person. It was a very rich experience. You're reminding me that I actually left something out. So one of the things that was very important to Jefferson about democracy was education. He was very concerned about education. The third thing that he put on his tombstone was that he was the founder of the University of Virginia, and he was very concerned about how do we educate So that's actually a very important part of this. That's actually what we've been talking about. How do we educate ourselves? How do we educate each other?

[94:28]

How do we educate people who think they have to kill each other? So that's actually the work in a way. We can see it as watching and vigilance, but one side of that is education. How do we share our sense of things? How do we help others see? So actually,

[94:46]

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