Okay, did you all hear what I said before? I don't need this, do I? Can you hear me now? Okay. So, Thanksgiving is an American holiday, and I think we should take it on as a Buddhist holiday, too. Thanksgiving is, after all, the practice of liberation. So Thanksgiving is celebrated in various ways in maybe every culture. Thanksgiving comes at harvest time. So this has always been my favorite holiday. When I was a kid, it was a time for family and where I lived back east, maybe there was a little snow, but I wasn't tired of it yet, like I would be by February. And it's a time for special foods. kind of ceremonial foods. But most of all it's a time for gratitude.

[01:05]

So I want to talk first of all about gratitude. So gratitude has to do with remembering what it is we have to be grateful for. So we all have many things to be grateful for. Sometimes they're big things. Sometimes they're just walking outside and feeling the rain or seeing a flower or just walking down the road or looking at the sky or meeting a friend or seeing a child playing. Gratitude is really about everyday things, even though also we have sometimes bigger things to be grateful for. Gratitude has to do with a sense of wonder. a sense of appreciation for our life and for what is good in our life. It has to do with awe, this sense of wonder.

[02:12]

We wonder about where this gratitude comes from. We wonder about the good things and the bad things. Gratitude is a mystery. friend, Brother David Steindl-Rasp wrote a book called Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer. And I would say that gratefulness is also the heart of all spiritual practice. Zazen is about gratitude also. And I'll even go so far as to say Suzuki Roshi used to talk about finding the most important thing. So today I'll say that Thanksgiving is the most important thing. So even when we're suffering, even when we're in difficult situations, even when terrible things happen, we can remember the things that we do have to be grateful for.

[03:15]

Just to be able to come and sit in the Green Gold Zendo on a Sunday morning, we can be grateful for. So when, what's that book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, even when bad things happen, sometimes we can find something, some gift in there. But there are times when we're not suffering. There are times when things are going pretty smoothly and everything's okay and our life is kind of working, more or less. I think gratitude at that time is about being grateful, but also that gratitude is about remembering the suffering right in the middle of being grateful. We remember, um, Oh, I'm healthy. I'm not sick today. I have my health today. And when we're sick, we feel like sometimes like we'll never get over this. This is just going on and on. And, um, so to remember, to be, to be grateful is to remember the suffering, remember our own suffering,

[04:23]

and to remember the people who are now suffering, who maybe don't have much to be grateful for, or can't remember that they have things to be grateful for. So this word Thanksgiving is, thinking about it this week, is kind of a wonderful word, because it's about gratitude, but it also has the other side, thanks. Gratitude is thanks, it has the other side of giving. So I don't think we can talk about gratitude without talking about giving and generosity. When we're truly grateful, when we remember what we have to be grateful for, naturally we give. We can't help but give. So generosity giving is the first paramita in Buddhist practice, the first transcendent practice, the first perfection is generosity or giving, the basic practice in a sense.

[05:39]

It's the first practice and it's also the last practice. There's giving and ethical conduct, patience, energy and enthusiasm, meditation or concentration, and then wisdom or insight. And then it goes back to giving because our wisdom informs our giving. When we have the insight, when we appreciate our life, when we're grateful, automatically we give. So Again, just to be grateful for inhale and exhale. Just to be able to, just to be grateful to have the life we have with all of its problems, with all of its confusion. Somehow we chose this life.

[06:41]

And there's something wonderful, something mysterious, something awesome about being just who you are. So that's the gratitude I'm talking about. But this gratitude and giving, there's this mutuality about thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is we're thankful, so we give. Or we give thanks. So giving is also about mutuality. Giving is about giving and receiving. Giving is about generosity, is about recognizing, practicing with our interconnectedness and our interdependency and the fact that we're actually all connected, very connected, intimately connected in so many ways we can't find the end of them. So, thanksgiving is also about healing.

[07:47]

It heals this split we have. We see ourself and we see the world out there. And maybe we're happy to receive something from the world. And maybe sometimes we give something to the world or to some other person or to our friends. But we have this basic split. This is, in a sense, the Buddhist original sin. see ourselves separate from the world. We see ourselves inhabiting just this one cushion, this one body. And of course we are each unique individual particular, but also we're so interconnected, we're breathing the same air in this room. So when we see the world as separate from us, when we feel estranged, when we feel alienated, when we see the world as other, when we see the world as a bunch of dead objects to manipulate or to protect ourselves from being manipulated by, and when we see other people like that too, just a bunch of bodies sitting in chairs or whatever, that's the fundamental problem.

[09:00]

We see ourselves as separate. So giving, thanksgiving, is about healing that. Thanksgiving is about being grateful for our connection. Thanksgiving is about giving back to others and seeing the flow of self in others. So giving is also about giving to yourself. To be kind to yourself is the beginning of kindness and how to be truly kind to yourself. It doesn't mean being indulgent necessarily, but how to really take good care of yourself for everyone. This is Thanksgiving. So this, uh, generosity, this giving is a, is a pretty subtle art actually. Um, and to learn how to give, we have to learn how to receive. So sometimes it's very hard to receive.

[10:14]

Sometimes we don't feel worthy of receiving gifts. Sometimes we don't know, how do you say thank you? How do we, is that gift really for me? How do I use that gift? How do we receive the gifts that come to us? And how do we recognize the gifts that come to us even in difficult situations? Sometimes when somebody gives you a hard time, that's a great gift. That's how we learn about ourselves. That's how we develop. That's how we grow. Sometimes it's hard to see that it's a gift. So I want to talk about the, I said I would talk about Buddhist thanksgiving and American thanksgiving. And I want to talk about a traditional Zen practice of giving and then a traditional American practice of giving.

[11:14]

So in most, I guess in all Asian countries, monks do this practice of going on begging rounds. So when I was in the monastery in Japan, we did this practice. called Takuhatsu, holding up the bowl. And it's quite a wonderful practice. The monastery I was at in the southern island of Japan, we'd go out twice a month for two or three days to a town nearby or to the city, nearest city. And it's kind of like a sashin, like an all-day sitting, except that you're walking. and you're chanting the whole time. So it's like a sashim for your voice and your feet. And there's a particular form, a very particular form, kind of uniform. So you wear these robes, not the case of the rocks or the smaller one, and there's a particular way you kind of fold them up a little. And then there's this hat that you wear, this conical straw hat.

[12:18]

And the idea is that giving is anonymous. Receiving is anonymous, so the idea is that you can't see me, you just see Monk. And you carry the ball. Sometimes it's done standing at a public place like a train station or a bridge. Sometimes it's done walking a group of monks. And that's the way I did it. stop at each door and you're chanting all along, chanting Kanzeon, which we chant here in the morning, the chant to the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and you stand at the door and chant for, I forget, two or three chants, and then somebody comes and gives you something or not, and either way you bow. And because you're wearing this hat, you don't see them and they don't see you. Of course, the little kids like to look under the hat. And if they see a gaijin, an American doing this, it's really, they get real excited. But this is a very traditional practice in all Asian Buddhist cultures about giving and receiving.

[13:19]

So it's very humbling to just spend the whole day receiving from people. But that was actually all of the food we ate at that monastery came from what we received on those begging rounds. So the idea is that the lay people give material and good to the people who are doing this intense spiritual practice, and the monks give spiritual teaching. And there's this understanding of both of these functions as being very important, as being kind of pillars of Buddhist practice and teaching. And then if somebody does give you something, there's a chant that you do which says that giving material goods and giving spiritual practice are both giving, and it talks about the interdependence of those two. So in a sense, for the monks who are going out, doing this, receiving all day, walking and chanting, we're giving the opportunity for laypeople to give to us.

[14:23]

So just to give is the point, just to give. without knowing who it is just to give is said to be very beneficial just to practice giving. And when I came back from living in Japan and lived at Green Gulch, I thought, gee, that would be wonderful to do that here. And I even tried to talk to people about going down to Mill Valley and marching around in our robes. Of course, we can't do that here. We don't have anything in our culture. We don't have any model of a beggar as, we don't have any model of a noble beggar in our culture. We have homeless people on the streets of San Rafael or San Francisco, and we try not to see them sometimes, or if we're kind, we maybe sometimes give them something. But I think giving would also be just to see them, and to see them as human beings. So actually the English word beggar I found out comes from a 13th century order of monks in Flanders, in Belgium and Holland, who were called the Beghards or something like that.

[15:44]

So apparently there was this tradition of spiritual mendicants in Europe too, at least till the end of the Middle Ages. So in Japanese temples, also lay people come and they put money on the altar. They just understand. They give to the temple. So here in America, though, we can't do that kind of practice of giving and receiving. So we have to learn other ways of practicing. Actually, a Japanese monk told me he tried to do it in Los Angeles. And I guess he wandered into the wrong neighborhood and got beat up. But he told me very calmly, well, I decided I just couldn't do it in America. So I think we need to find practices of giving and receiving. We need to find ways to, and of course, in our culture there are many practices of giving and receiving. There are many practices of charity and there's a,

[16:45]

There are soup kitchens and there are other people who take care of, try and help homeless people. There are hospices and so forth. There are many ways that that kind of giving is done. But to find ways in your own life to actually find a practice of giving and also of receiving, it's important to have both sides. So we haven't created the American Buddhist practices for this yet exactly. Maybe we're working on it. So that's about Buddhist Thanksgiving. I wanted to also talk about American Thanksgiving. So when I was a kid, we spent our summers on Cape Cod. So I went to Plymouth and Plymouth Rock a few times. And of course, you all know about the pilgrims and the supposed first Thanksgiving.

[17:47]

So I've been learning about what really happened. There's this wonderful book called Lies My Teacher Told Me. Some of you have read it, yeah. The rest of it is everything our textbooks left out about American history got wrong or something like that. So I've been reading about the real history of that. And I think we have to look at that. So when we have Thanksgiving and we recognize this as an American holiday, we have to recognize our karma. So the pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock, actually, there was a village there waiting for them. And this was a village of the native peoples there who had all been wiped out by a plague. So there were various illnesses, smallpox and measles and actual plague. that when the first Euro-Americans came, the Native Americans were really decimated by.

[18:53]

They think now maybe 90 to 95% in many places in this continent that the Native peoples were wiped out by disease. Made it easy for the U.S. cavalry. So, in a lot of ways, I think what the problems in our society have to do with this karma The problems in our environment have a lot to do with this karma that European Americans took the land. So it's a complicated history. It turns out that that movie, Dances with Wolves, that happened actually a fair amount. There were quite a few. It's important for us to hear that side of it too, that all along there were European Americans and African Americans who joined with the tribes and were accepted by the native tribes. And there were people in the cities back east who actually opposed the government policy all through the 19th century of exterminating basically the natives.

[20:04]

So it's a complicated history that a lot of us don't really know about. It's a long history. I'm very grateful I had the opportunity this last week to visit Mesa Verde in southern Colorado, which is a site of the Anasazi, the ancient ones, the ancestors of the Pueblo peoples. And they have these amazing cliff dwellings in the nooks and the cliffs and the system of canyons from the 1200s. same time that Dogen was writing in Japan. And up on the mesas there where they grew corn and squash and beans, they have relics going back to 500 of the pit houses and the different buildings that they had, the different little villages they had. So there was quite a culture going on long before the pilgrims landed. So I think on Thanksgiving, as European Americans, we can be grateful that there are still some Native Americans and that not all of that culture has been wiped out because it's still alive in places.

[21:22]

And I wanted to recommend for us to consider as American Buddhists a traditional Native American practice of giving and receiving, which is usually called Indian giving. So this name, Indian giving, we usually think of in a bad way. We think of that somebody gives you something and then wants it back. Isn't that the European-American understanding of that, Indian giving? But actually, there is, in the native peoples, many different practices, because there were many different native peoples. But there were many practices of giving that are very interesting. And they have to do with, Seeing gift not as something that I receive in a way to possess, but the gift is something that moves. The gift goes in a circle. The gift goes around. We give and then we give thanks and then we receive and give thanks by giving.

[22:24]

So I think one way that term Indian giving came, one of the kind of ceremonies they had Native people would get together and smoke a pipe and some Englishman came and was invited to such a ceremony and they gave him the pipe because he passed the pipe around. And he said, oh boy, look at this. I'm going to take this home and put it in a museum in England or whatever. And then sometime later some people came to have a smoke with him and they wanted the pipe. And he thought, what's this about? They gave it to me. So this is where the idea of Indian giving came from. But actually, the giving is about passing the gift. We can't actually hold a gift. We can't actually receive a gift without passing it along. There's another practice up the coast in the Northwest called potlatch, which

[23:31]

Before the European Americans came anyway, it was about just when something good happens, giving away a lot. So wealth was measured, status was measured, not by how much one had, not by how much one possessed, but by how much one gave. And there's this other interesting practice in, there's some islands near New Guinea where they do this practice where literally the gifts go in a circle. There's this ring of islands. And so at least the traditional practice, there were necklaces that were passed around the island counterclockwise. And you had somebody who gave you these shell necklaces and who you gave to on the next island. And going counterclockwise, there were these bracelets made of shell that went around. And sometimes these things would take 10 years to go around the circle of islands. But it was a ceremonial way of giving and of receiving and passing the gift along. So there are lots of traditional practices like this.

[24:35]

Just this morning, somebody, one of the residents here told me she worked for a while on a reservation, an Indian reservation, and said she never met any people who were so grateful. They were always praising. And they had very little, she said, to be grateful for. but they just lived by praising, by being grateful. So this kind of giving, when we see the gift as moving, this is not giving, this is not consumerism. We don't get something and try and acquire the latest toy or fashion. We get something and we give it back. It's not a business deal. We don't necessarily give back what we got. And nobody cares. You don't have to measure the value on some scale. So all of this is about thanksgiving.

[25:44]

All of this is about gratitude. How do we express our gratitude for being alive, for having the life we have? How do we give back? How do we share what is good in our life? So when we give, we give up ourself, we give up our grasping, we open our hand and just give. And then we get something back and we don't know what that will be. But it's our way of expressing our thanksgiving and expressing our love to the world without knowing what will come back to us. So just to sit here together and enjoy the air, to hear the sound of the wind.

[27:02]

So this way we do of sitting is gratitude and it's also giving. We give of ourselves by just sitting, being willing to sit upright in the middle of our life, enjoying our breathing, enjoying or not enjoying our thoughts and feelings as they wander through our minds and hearts. So even how do we learn to be thankful in the midst of distraction or fear or anxiety? How do we learn to be kind to ourselves and see that there's some gift there if we can just let, let ourselves be here, remain upright in the middle of it. So this is also a kind of giving.

[28:27]

When we come together in this room and sit together, we are each giving all the other people, uh, our encouragement, you know, and our support. Thanksgiving is not something you can do by yourself just as us and is not something you can do by yourself. Even if you're sitting alone in your room, everybody is there. When we're in Thanksgiving, we're in this web of connectedness. So this talk is sponsored by Buddha. And Jizo Bodhisattva, the Earth Store Bodhisattva, who gives by going to hell and hanging out with the beings there. being kind to them, and Manjushri, up on the main altar, the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, who sits still and sees all the delusions and cuts through them all, and encourages everybody else to do that.

[29:37]

And this talk is also sponsored by the sounds of the bird, the sounds of the waves on Muir Beach, and flowers and wind. So all of those of us who sit up here sometimes and try and say something about the Dharma, about the spiritual practice, we are grateful because we've been given something. We've been given the opportunity to find this practice, and so we're just trying to pass this along somehow. So they call this giving a Dharma talk. But actually, we're all Indian givers. Thank you. Happy Thanksgiving.

[30:29]

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