I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Zen Center and thank you for coming this Saturday. So, my name is Jeffrey Schneider.

[01:12]

I would like to start by saying that because many of you, of course, don't know me and I don't know many of you. I imagine that some of you will be here at Zen Center for your first time today. If that's so, could you raise your hands? I'm just curious how many of you are. Okay, great. And some of you have had meditation instruction today? Yeah? Okay, great. Good. Well, welcome. So, first of all, I want to say thank you to Christina Zitanto who invited me to speak today. I am, as always, honored to be able to address the assembly. So, usually when I give a lecture these days, I ask Michael what I should lecture about. And I do this for a couple of reasons. One, because, well, right now he's leading the practice period. And two, because he often has ideas that are better than mine. And three, because when I lecture on somebody else's topic,

[02:16]

it's almost always something that I wouldn't think about lecturing on myself. And therefore, it sort of stretches me. It makes me think about things I wouldn't normally think about. And so that's very useful. You know, in monastic practice, for instance, we give ourselves over to a schedule, which is something we wouldn't normally think about doing. Very rarely on our own do we think about getting up before 5 o'clock and, you know, going down to the basement. And, you know, this is pretty good. This is actually a good thing to do because if I take suggestions, if I practice with a schedule that is suggested to me by somebody else, what I'm effectively doing is practicing beyond the realm of my own preference, my own personality and my own neurosis, hopefully. So anyhow, before I came over today at home, I offered a stick of incense at my altar

[03:24]

and I prayed to get out of my own way to speak the Dharma and that somebody in the assembly today would find something that I said of use. So you might be the lucky one. You never know. Kind of like, you know, the door prize. And, you know, it might be suggested that as Buddhists we don't pray. I think it would be more accurate to say that as a Buddhist, my prayer is a complete action in itself. It doesn't require that I believe that there is somebody hearing it. It is enough to make the prayer. There's a famous koan, a famous Zen story, and I can't remember the whole thing, but, you know, the earnest young monk, I'm imagining some of this, comes up to the wise old master and says, you know, this long question, blah, [...] probably ending with, and what is Buddha? And the teacher says, it is enough to have raised the question, bow and withdraw.

[04:28]

So it's kind of like that with our prayer, you know. It is enough to have raised the question, it is enough to have made the request, bow and withdraw. So what Michael asked me to speak about today was inspiration, the role of inspiration in practice. And so this is not something that I think about a great deal or thought about a great deal, so it required me to do a little thinking. And of course, as you will know, I'm sure all of you, or most of you at least, that the word inspiration comes from the word to breathe. So we are inspired, we breathe, respiration, that sort of thing. It's pretty common knowledge. So I looked it up in my dictionary and some of the definitions that I found were inspire, I looked up inspire, the verb, to breathe or blow into, to infuse with life by breathing into, sort of like we find in Genesis, right?

[05:33]

God makes Adam out of a bunch of dust and breathes life into him. To be guided by divine or supernatural inspiration and to exert an animating or exalting influence on. So I'd like to examine some of the various understandings of inspiration. First of all, I'd like to examine what inspiration is not in Buddhist understanding. And what it is not is divine or supernatural intervention. So in Buddhism, in the scriptures, there is often talk of the gods. But interestingly enough, the gods are portrayed in rather more radiant circumstances than we are, but they are also subject to karma, they are not eternal, they have not created the world,

[06:33]

and they don't really have all that much to do with us. And anyhow, in order to achieve final awakening, the teaching is we need to be born into the human realm. You know, the long-lived gods are much too caught up in the pleasures of the deva realms in order to practice. So what we are given in this human birth is enough suffering to get us going and not too much that we can't do anything else but suffer. So in general, you know, the idea of the supernatural is not so much found in Buddhism as it is in the West. You know, in the West we have inherited a long tradition, going back at least as far as the Greeks and certainly beyond that, of dualism, you know, flesh and spirit, light and dark, good and evil. You know, it's bedded in our basic assumptions about the world, whether we make it explicit or not.

[07:35]

And so there's always this sense, I think for many of us, that what is real is someplace else, and that we're trying to get through this in order to get what is real. But actually, in Buddhist teaching, reality is seamless and non-dual. You know, in a sense, it's all surface, like a Mobius strip. You know what a Mobius strip is? It's one of those long things, you give it a half turn and it's all surface. Now, some parts of this, of reality, may be turned away from us at any given moment, and we may be turned away from some part of reality at any given moment. But reality is of a whole. There is nothing of a fundamentally different nature in reality. There's no split between the real or the mundane and the supernatural. And I'd like to read just a little quotation that I very much enjoy.

[08:41]

This is from Dogen, Dogen's instruction to the head cook. And Dogen was a 13th century monk who is considered the founder of this lineage of Zen. He went to Japan as a very young man and studied there and had an awakening and returned to Japan to teach as a monk. And anyhow, so when he was in China, he had recently arrived there and he met a monk and they had a conversation and they didn't have time to talk, but some months later, Dogen was pleased to meet the monk again. And they had another conversation. He said, Dogen says, I was indeed happy to see him and received him cordially. We talked about various things and finally came to the matter he had touched upon aboard the ship concerning the practice and study of characters. Now in this translation it says characters, in other translations it says words, so bear that in mind.

[09:43]

He said, a person who studies characters must know just what characters are, and one intending to practice the way must understand what practice is. I asked him once again, what are characters? One, two, three, four, five, he said. What is practice? There is nothing in the world that is hidden. So this is a Buddhist understanding of the nature of our lives, that nothing is hidden. And I think sometimes our difficulty lies in looking for the secret, for the hidden meaning, and not paying attention, significant attention to what presents itself immediately before us. It's sort of a conspiracy theory of reality, if you know what I mean. And this is the function of the mind that sees the world as something to be acquired, found out, interrogated, until it renders up its supposed secrets. So we often, I think, torture our lives looking for a confession

[10:48]

when the truth of things is hidden in plain sight, sort of like the purloined letter. So in this sense, inspiration, spirit, spiritual, etc., is something that doesn't really apply to Buddhism, spirit, spiritual, what have you. Unfortunately, it's a word we're stuck with, because there's no other good way, in English at least, or in American, to describe what it is we're doing, particularly since so many people are allergic to the word and concept of religion. So to some extent, I think that sort of explains what inspiration in Buddhism is not. So I'd like to talk a little bit about my understanding of what inspiration might be. By what shall we be inspired? First of all, I think we are inspired initially by our suffering.

[11:50]

Whether our suffering is acute and dramatic, or whether it's an ongoing low-level dis-ease, it is always there. This is what is called the first noble truth of Buddhism. Buddha himself said, or we're told he said, what I teach is suffering and the end of suffering. However, in order to get to the end of suffering, of course, we have to see our suffering as it is. And we see our suffering as it is, and if we're lucky, we get a glimpse of our part in creating it. And this, of course, if we're lucky, can lead to the impulse to explore the means of ending it. When Buddha was talking about suffering, as I said, he wasn't necessarily talking about egregious, dramatic, traumatic, painful things all the time. He was talking about what happens when we try to attach to the nature of what we think is going to make us happy,

[12:52]

of what we can nail in place, as it were. Or I like to think about it, sometimes I think of my life as though it were a crossword puzzle. If I fill in all the blocks with the right letters, which will lead to the right words, then it will be done, and I'll be happy forever. This is what the Buddha meant by suffering. It's basically a delusion. But it seems to be a particularly persistent delusion, considering how often I certainly go for it, and I see people around me going for it. So each of us, I believe, is here because he or she has had at some point in our lives a moment of clarity about suffering and about the possibility of living a different sort of life which leads away from suffering and into something else that perhaps we can't even imagine. So this moment of clarity, if you like, is a moment of sort of stopping, of being halted in our tracks in some way

[13:56]

by the vision of a different life. And for some of us it can be quite traumatic. I was listening to a tape of somebody giving a lecture. Actually, some of you probably heard Vicky's way-seeking mind talk the other day when she was talking about coming to an abrupt realization that her life was not what she thought it was when she was in an automobile accident. So for some people it's something of a catastrophic nature that teaches us that our lives are different and we're sort of brought to a dead halt. And we get to see that things are quite different than we thought they were. And in that moment, if we're lucky enough or skillful enough or grateful enough to seize it or to let it seize us, we can see the possibility for something else, for a different sort of life, a different sort of behavior. So this is inspiration through our suffering. And I think we should be grateful for this recognition of suffering, otherwise we would not be inspired to investigate it thoroughly and rigorously.

[15:00]

I often note that in my own life, something that I am aware is sort of in the background or sort of vaguely painful will at some point in my life sort of erupt into something that's acutely painful, kind of like a pimple, sort of a psychic pimple. And I realize that if it doesn't erupt, it just lies under the surface for a really long time, and it can for a very long time for some people, for some of us, all of our lives. So I've become grateful for my suffering, particularly when it gets to the point where I have to do something about it. We are also, or we can be, inspired both positively or negatively by other people, seeing others and identifying with them, searching out the inherent similarities rather than the obvious differences. So we can make this, if we choose, a practice, a very deliberate practice.

[16:03]

When we meet somebody, when we see somebody, when we hear somebody speak, we can make the decision that we are always going to look for what is similar between us. Even I have found, even if the story that the person is telling me is quite different from my experience, even if the person is quite different from who I am, if I pay attention, the emotional content is almost always the same. Everybody wants to be happy, and everybody wants to avoid suffering. So on that level, we're all pretty much the same. We're all pretty much the same anyway. We've got the same organs, we've got the same eyes, we all have livers and kidneys and stomachs and things like that. So it's not surprising that we're so similar in our emotional lives. One of the things that I often think about, and I looked this up to find out where it came from, so it was actually the quote is slightly different than I thought it was.

[17:04]

In the 16th century in England, a man named John Bradford was watching some criminals who had been convicted being led off to the scaffold. And his comment was, there but for the grace of God goes John Bradford, which of course has come down to us as, there but for the grace of God go I. Winston Churchill, speaking of one of his colleagues in government, said, there but for the grace of God goes God. I've always liked that. At any rate, John Bradford was right because he was later burned at the stake as a heretic. So he got a little bit of a reprieve. So leaving out the bit about the grace of God or translating it into terms that seem a little bit more familiar and comfortable to me, I can see that my life, in my life, it is only something like circumstance or luck or chance

[18:05]

or whatever separates me from the guy in the doorway on the street or the victim of disease or disaster. And sometimes that separation is not so much of kind but of time. It's not yet for me. I not yet have a debilitating disease. I am not yet disabled. I am not yet obviously dying. I am not yet in a place where I need somebody else to help me with the basic activities of life. Not yet. And we can also see in others, I believe, if we choose to look carefully, how uninformed choices can lead to the states of woe. You know, choices made as the result of generational karma, poverty, early trauma. You know, we talk about the cycle of ignorance and poverty. And people, as I said, everybody wants to be happy

[19:07]

and everybody wants to avoid suffering. And we all do the best we can to achieve those goals. The problem is that many of us, perhaps most of us even, are not given very good tools to achieve those goals. You know, people often like to, I'm sure nobody in this room, blame their parents for their suffering. But you know, if you think about it, if I think about it, I realize that if my parents had known how to have happy, fulfilling, creative lives, they probably would have done it and avoided the mistakes they made. And they probably would have shown me. It's not like they knew and they were holding out. It's like they did the best they could with what they had. And so are we all. So even some of us who have perhaps had access to education or more or less stable economic and family lives and the benefit of hearing the Dharma, even then we can still make choices which lead us into torment.

[20:08]

So we can learn or be inspired by the suffering of others as well as ourselves. And this, of course, this identity, this understanding of the identity of our own suffering and the suffering of others is what ultimately leads us to compassion. And it is from compassion that wisdom springs. I once heard the Dalai Lama say that many years ago when he was visiting here, and I was very confused. I thought it was the other way around. I do all this really hard work and I'd sit on my cushion and then I'd get enlightened and then I could be compassionate towards you guys from up here where I was no longer suffering. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. But wouldn't it be nice if it did? We can also be, of course, inspired positively by other people. And over 25 years ago in this room I heard someone say something that has sort of stayed with me for all that time. And what he said was, it is by observing the virtue of others that our own virtue grows.

[21:11]

It is by observing the virtue of others that our own virtue grows. I really like that. I'm really convinced that some of us have been here for a while and we've gone to lots and lots of Dharma talks and we've read lots of books on Buddhism and we've spent lots of time in the Zen Dojo, but actually I really believe that the way we learn is by single sentences. Every now and again somebody will say something that penetrates and we carry that in our heart as a way of learning. So, you know, if we cultivate our ability to see the virtue of others, we are by definition, of course, cultivating our own, because it is virtue that sees virtue. It is virtue that recognizes virtue. And it is our lack of virtue, my lack of virtue, that sees only the faults of others. We always have that choice. If we're attentive, we always have the choice of what we see, the virtue or the lack of virtue.

[22:12]

It's kind of like some people can go into a beautiful room that is clean and well-appointed and full of beautiful objects and the first thing that they'll notice is that, you know, on the far wall there's a picture that's askew, you know. Other people can go into a hovel and notice that on the table somebody has taken the care to put a jelly jar full of wildflowers on the table. You know, we cultivate what we see and we can make deliberate decisions about what we see. And also, you know, the virtue of others can inspire in us the desire to become more virtuous ourselves, especially people we really admire, you know, living, historical, or even fictional people. I really believe that fiction has a moral function in that way. You know, as I was thinking about this, and, you know, historical figures who inspire us to virtue, I was thinking about the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. And as a young man, he wrote sort of a list of,

[23:16]

sort of a pro and con list of his virtues and his lack of virtues and what he needed to cultivate. And at the bottom of it, someplace he put, be more humble, like Jesus and Socrates. And I like to think that maybe as an older man he realized the irony. But I've always sort of enjoyed that. So, you know, men and women of decency and courage and compassion can inspire us to take action, however limited our own lives. And in a sense, emulation, emulation of virtue, is what we're doing in zazen. We assume, to the best of our ability, the posture of enlightenment. The posture of enlightenment. Whether we are sitting on a chair, whether we're sitting on a cushion, whether we're sitting in perfect full lotus, whether we're sitting in the best we can do, we assume the posture of enlightenment.

[24:17]

We are emulating, we are inspired by the Buddhist example. And, you know, it's not only the people of great achievement, you know, the saints and the artists and the leaders and the creators who inspire us, but those who live humble and unacknowledged lives, and even those that the world considers as failures. As I was thinking of this, I was thinking of a poem I like very much by William Butler Yeats. The problem, of course, with reading William Butler Yeats is it's rather like trying to eat one peanut. However, I shall confine myself to a single poem. The name of it is To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat from any brazen throat, For how can you compete, being honor-bred, With one who, where it proves he lies, Were neither shamed in his own nor in his neighbor's eyes? Bred to a harder thing than triumph, Turn away and like a laughing string

[25:18]

Whereupon mad fingers play amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known that is most difficult. You know, to fail in the eyes of the world and to accept that with humility and decency and to live a life of compassion and decency, you know, is not so easy. You know, we all want the cash prizes, you know, what's behind door number three or, you know, the perfect bachelor or whatever they're doing on television these days. You know, another poem that I think of that's been very, very important to me over the years is one by a man named Cavafy who is an early 20th century Greek poet and it goes like this. For some people there comes the day when they must come out with the great yes or the great no. It is clear at once who has the yes in him and saying it he goes on to find honor strong in his conviction. He who refuses never repents

[26:20]

and yet that no, the right answer, defeats him the whole of his life. So can we find inspiration from people who have made the right answer which defeats them the whole of their life? Can we find inspiration in the economic failure who has said no to making the fast buck at the expense of others? Or to the person who says no to success built upon the backs of others? Or, you know, any of this. Can we find inspiration in the person who lives a quiet life with nothing to distinguish him or her obviously from their neighbor? So, you know, what is admirable and inspiring I think is not judgeable by objective standards. You know, by how much money, by how much fame, by the kind of car, where you live, etc., etc.

[27:22]

And, you know, it's certainly not judgeable I believe by the skewed and warped standards of our culture in which acquisition is everything and one is judged by what one can acquire and keep pretty much regardless of the way it's acquired. So we are also, I believe, inspired or can be if we choose, by the Dharma, by the teaching, by the Buddhist teaching. And this happens in various ways, how we come to study Dharma. I know that for me one of the things that happened is that when I first became interested in Buddhism I would read things, you know, Buddhist literature and go, yes, that's the way I see the world and nobody's ever explained it to me that way before. You know, it was like a shock of recognition. I remember as a very young child, probably ten or less, standing outside of our house

[28:23]

and looking at the house and realizing, oh, there's no such thing as a house. You know, there's just boards and bricks and glass and screws and nails and furniture and we just call it a house, you know. And it's true, of course, but, you know, it was like, wow. And then later on when I read about dependent arising and the lack of substantial self and the lack of ongoing concrete entities in the world, which is what Buddhism talks about, of course, I went, ooh, wow, you know. So I was inspired. I was inspired by somebody who talked about the world the way I saw it. And, you know, it's funny how we're inspired. I remember once when I was about in seventh grade, I was looking through the encyclopedia and I saw the article on Buddhism and there was a picture of a monk sitting in meditation and I thought, that's what I want to be when I grow up. LAUGHTER You know, most kids want to be baseball players or cowboys.

[29:27]

And then I looked at it and I thought, oh, I can't do that, I'm not Asian. LAUGHTER But I was inspired, you know, and it awoke in me, it inspired in me an aspiration that ultimately came to fruit in my life today. And, you know, sometimes the Dharma teaches us in pictures, in images, and sometimes it teaches us in words. Sometimes we can be inspired by its rationality or its moral beauty or the range of its vision and healing, the range of its vision of healing and awakening. You know, during this practice period, many of us are studying the Lotus Sutra, and the Lotus Sutra is sort of famous in Buddhist literature as having this vast vision of sort of universal salvation, you know, something very beautiful and inspiring, you know. And, you know, sometimes the Dharma comes to us in images, in art.

[30:28]

You know, the image of the Buddha, which I've noticed over the past many years, is that even among non-Buddhists, people who have never described themselves as Buddhists, it's very popular. You know, you look through the Architectural Digest and you see pictures of Buddhas in people's houses, or you see little Buddhas everywhere, little Buddhas everywhere. And it's rather nice, you know. So whether people know what it represents or whether they have, you know, word one about, you know, the Four Noble Truths or what have you, you know, there's something in the image of a human being at rest within himself and available to others that's incredibly inspiring, you know, whatever your religious tradition might be or even whatever your non-religious tradition might be. So these images speak to our own potential and we can be inspired by them in that way. And, you know, the world itself inspires us to change our lives

[31:32]

if we look closely through the lens of the teaching. There's a saying, and I can't remember and I forgot to look it up, but it's, you know, in some of the Zen literature that says, all inanimate things teach the Dharma. All inanimate things teach the Dharma. And what this means, or one of the things it means, of course, is that all inanimate things, as all animate things, are governed by the law of cause and effect. You know, things happen because of cause and effect. And because of this, if we examine this deeply, we can come to realize that our lives are not simply the random mess they sometimes seem and we are not the hapless victims of a malevolent universe. You know, if we pay attention, you know, with a sense of experiment, we will learn how much we have to do with shaping our own lives. You know, this is karma, this is the law of karma, this is the law of cause and effect. And so it goes to, it stands to reason, of course, that if we can mess up our own lives through our actions, through cause and effect,

[32:35]

there should be some hope of recreating our lives in a finer mold through those same actions. So we can take lessons from the world of cause and effect. Of course, unfortunately, the lessons that we are given are the ones we almost always least want to learn. You know, at least I found it works that way. So anyhow, you know, the last thing I want to say, or close to the last thing, is that finally our great source of inspiration is zazen itself, meditation itself, because literally inspiration is zazen, zazen is inspiration. Breathing in, breathing out, breathing in and breathing out. You know, we are inspired as we stay with the in-breath and the out-breath. You know, the mind rides the breath. We tend the breath. And together in the meditation hall, we literally conspire together. We breathe together, conspire.

[33:37]

That's what that means. So our breath is our life, and in meditation, we do nothing more than simply allow the breath in our lives to be as they are. Suzuki Roshi, the founder of this temple, has this to say. When we practice zazen, our mind always follows our breathing. When we inhale, the air comes into the inner world. When we exhale, the air goes to the outer world. The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say inner world or outer world, but actually there is just one whole world. In this limitless world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air comes in and goes out, like someone passing through a swinging door. If you think, I breathe, the I is extra. There is no you to say I. What we call I is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves. That is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement,

[34:38]

there is nothing, no I, no world, no mind, no body, just a swinging door. So when we practice zazen, all that exists is the movement of the breathing. But we are aware of this movement. You should not be absent-minded. But to be aware of the movement does not mean to be aware of your small self, but rather of your universal nature or Buddha nature. This kind of awareness is very important because we are usually so one-sided. Our usual understanding of life is dualistic, you and I, this and that, good and bad. But actually these discriminations are themselves the awareness of the universal existence. You means to be aware of the universe in the form of you, and I means to be aware of it in the form of I. You and I are just swinging doors. This kind of understanding is necessary. This should not even be called understanding. It is actually the true experience of life through zen practice. When we truly become ourselves, we just become a swinging door,

[35:38]

and we are purely independent of and at the same time dependent upon everything. Without air we cannot breathe. Each one of us is in the midst of myriads of worlds. We are in the center of the world always, moment after moment. So we are completely dependent and independent. If you have this kind of experience, this kind of existence, you have absolute independence. You will not be bothered by anything. So when you practice zazen, your mind should be concentrated on your breathing. This kind of activity is the fundamental activity of the universal being. Without this experience, this practice, it is impossible to attain absolute freedom. So this is all I had prepared, and I was going to stop here, and I will stop in just a moment. But yesterday I was talking to Michael, and he asked me if I had prepared the lecture, and I said yes. And I said, well, you know, inspiration is kind of interesting, and it's a little bit of a hard thing to think about. And he said, well, why don't you just say what you're inspired by? I said, well, too late.

[36:39]

I've already written the lecture. So I do want to just end with some of the things I'm inspired by. You know, first of all, I'm inspired by all of you. I'm inspired of all of you who come on a Saturday morning when you could be doing so many other things to share the Dharma with each other and with me, and to come and perhaps sit with us and to search into your own lives. I'm very inspired by that, and I'm very grateful for that. You know, I'm always inspired when I go down to the zendo in the morning by the people who get up before dawn and sit together. You know, I'm inspired by my friends who are in recovery, because when I look around those rooms, I see incredible courage and incredible openness and incredible willingness to change. You know, and I'm inspired by everybody, if I notice, if I train myself to notice, who are living lives of decency and compassion

[37:41]

without expectation of reward. You know, and I'm also very inspired by Michael. Your... constant kindness and patience. And because it's the Memorial Day weekend, you know, I want to say that I'm also inspired very much... by all those men and women who have put their bodies between their loved ones in the desolation of the war, even when, as it is more often than not the case, they've been dying only to protect the lives and investments of the class that doesn't care.

[38:43]

They don't care about them. This does not take away from their achievement or their sacrifice. So, that really is all I have to say, except I do want to thank you all for being here. And if I have said anything that is of use to you, if you got the door prize, please accept it with my gratitude. And if you didn't hear anything, well, there's another lecture next week. And maybe the person who's lecturing next week will be able to say something that informs you. So, thank you all for coming. And that's all.

[39:30]

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