I vow to taste the truth of the Tathāgata's words. Thank you.

[01:16]

Good morning. Well, what I would like to talk with you about today is love. If someone were to ask me, David, what is your dharma? I would say something like this, if you ask me right now. I would say in practice, it's giving. In practice, it's giving, the kind of giving we know of as a practice, a perfection practice, which, as you know, is a complex practice, very many-layered.

[02:39]

If I were to say, if you said, what is your practice? I might also say, well, in the light of day, it's desire. Wanting. Longing. Grief. and in the darkness, bliss. Mostly what I want to talk about today is desire, which is really bound up with love, sometimes inextricably. we live in a realm of desire that is according to Buddhist, traditional Buddhist thinking, that's actually the name of the realm we live in, something like that, the realm of desire.

[04:00]

So, and if we examine our own lives, we can see that this is so, that we're filled with desire. sometimes filled to overflowing with desire, and there's hardly a moment without desire. In fact, desire is tantamount to life, life to desire. Where there's no desire, you'd say it's not alive. In a way, Buddhism doesn't seem so friendly to desire. We get the sense that we'd be better off without it.

[05:09]

It's, in certain circumstances anyway, the root of suffering. And so, some people, some Buddhists, as well as others, try to get rid of desire in order to get rid of suffering, to cut off suffering at its root. our practice and the Buddha's practice, as far as we know, was characterized by a great deal of restraint. Probably when he first began teaching, there were really no rules, special rules for him and his followers, but later on a set of rules developed. And most of them are in the form of don't do it. You know, be careful.

[06:13]

Be very watchful, very mindful. Restrain yourself. That's the feeling. Why this is true exactly, I don't know. I mean, I could speculate about why it's so, but if you look at the culture in which Buddhism originated, there was restraint to be sure. In fact, probably the Buddha took on many of the rules that were in place in the society that he moved in. But there was also a tremendous amount of passionate expression in the culture in which the Buddha taught. For example, in

[07:15]

sacred dance, there was a cast of women, devadasis, who were married to the god of the temple. And they didn't have husbands in the ordinary sense, although they had lovers. And they owned land and could have money. and it was a matriarchal lineage. And the dancing, wow. You could say that erotic love was the template for love in general and love bringing you to the divine in particular. So you probably noticed in our services, some of you know very well, there's a lot of going back and forth here.

[08:24]

We do some chanting and then the priest comes around, goes up to the altar, comes around, comes back. These dancers do the same thing. If you see a performance of this kind of dance, it's back and forth. They come forward, they go back. there's this alignment of certain kinds of forms and practices between the Indian culture and religion, which we now call Hinduism, and some of the Buddhist forms. But the expression of love, passionate expression of love, is pretty limited. You have to look hard for it to find it in Buddhism. Anyway, that's puzzling to me. I don't quite understand it. I think, though, that what happened is that, in a way, love, particularly erotic love, went underground in Buddhism.

[09:53]

It's actually there, not so much the erotic aspects, but passion, love between two human beings. For example, in our Zen tradition, there's a great emphasis placed on the lineage of teachers from Shakyamuni Buddha down to Mel Weitzman. It's an unbroken line of relationships. And I think, you know, as I look at some of Dogen's writing about transmission, that is the process of passing this dharma from one teacher to the next, there really is a language of love in there.

[10:57]

I don't know whether he felt quite restrained when he expressed it, but it comes through in a few places. For example, when he speaks of his receipt of transmission, his transmission with Ru Jing, his Chinese teacher, He talks about it as face-to-face transmission. So we use that term a lot, face-to-face transmission. It's characteristic of our school to emphasize that. But he doesn't just face-to-face. He uses expressions like face-to-face, finger-to-finger, eye-to-eye, face-to-face. He talks about the teacher In this case, I think he's talking about Shakyamuni seeing his own reflection in Mahakasyapa's, the pupil of his eye.

[12:11]

He sees himself in his pupil's eye and the pupil sees himself in his teacher's eye. It's very intimate, very intimate. in describing his transmission. He says, he talks about the first time I went to see my teacher, the old Buddha, Rujing. And he says, and my teacher for the first time saw me. you know, this is some kind of special language. I don't know exactly what he meant, but again, it's very intimate. It bespeaks a sense of tremendous closeness, and it's a little hard to imagine that it's entirely a kind of disembodied or abstract spiritual closeness between the two men.

[13:25]

It seems to be much more than that. To be seen, in that sense, is to be seen totally, which includes a personality and habits and so on. There's another place where Dogen is going to say goodbye to Ru Jing, who's in a sedan chair. and Rujing's about to go off, and Dogen comments on Rujing's verse called The Wind Bell. And he says, He's really laudatory, he loves the poem. And Rujing responds, he says, others have heard this poem too and also praised it, but you see something really special in the poem.

[14:28]

You're a special guy. And then they wave goodbye to each other. And I have this picture of Rujing waving to Dogen. I don't know, father, son, uncle, nephew, teacher, disciple. Maybe lovers in a way. I don't mean literally. I don't think physically. But in a sense. Well, there are few other places where love presents itself, appears,

[15:30]

even in our Zen tradition. Somewhere here it appears. Ikkyu is a Zen poet some of you may have read. and enjoyed. Ikkyu is famous for his blending, if you will, or non-separation of Dharma practice and commitment to practice and love, including erotic love, and the longing that goes with erotic love. He says, even if I were a god or a Buddha, you'd be on my mind. I sit beneath the lamp, a skinny monk chanting love songs. The fierce autumn wind nearly bowls me over, and my heart is choked with thick clouds.

[16:42]

There's no question here that this is a man who experiences feeling deeply. Love. Erotic love. Grief. He says, sexual love's attachment to pain is deeper than I can know. wind soothes my thoughts, this lust my ceaseless koan, impossibly happy. The poet Ryokan, whom you probably also know, at one time had a lover who was a beautiful young nun.

[17:51]

He was a man advanced in years, so we don't know the details of their love play, but here's some poems. wrote to one another. This is Taishin, the nun writing to Ryokan. Was it really you I saw? Or is this joy I still feel only a dream? Ryokan writes back to her. In this dream world, we doze and talk of dreams. Dream, dream on as much as you wish. Other religious traditions and poets give us more of this kind of language and imagery and feeling.

[19:05]

I'll restrain myself with respect to Rumi, whom I could read all day, but Here's one from Rumi that sort of cuts the other direction. Rumi had lots of love poems, right? Wonderful love poems. Here he says, someone who goes with half a loaf of bread to a small place that fits like a nest around him. Someone who wants no more, who's not himself longed for by anyone else. He is a letter to everyone. You open it. It says, live. I'd like to make the point that love and desire is a many-splendored thing, that it,

[20:42]

includes layers of meaning. I say layers, that's kind of a hierarchical way to put it. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that there are many kinds and objects of love that blend together. And a religious tradition which ignores or proscribes some of those, in our culture anyway, is probably at risk of an early demise or of not giving people everything they need, certainly, not addressing the whole person. We can say that in medieval monastic life, where men and women practiced separately, that maybe ignoring that side of life could work for a while, maybe for a few years, and early in practice, you know?

[21:48]

Anyway, we tend to emphasize restraint. It's appropriate for us to, even in our culture, because most of us are short on boundaries. and guidelines and so on. So the precepts which we use to guide our behavior are very helpful, very skillful. In fact, if we ignore the precepts, given our cultural biases, Zen tends to go crazy. I mean, early Zen, the interest in Zen early in America was the beat poets. That's when it first became popular, a rather unregulated group of people. And their interest was in perhaps altered states of consciousness and special things.

[22:49]

And they grew up to a large extent with DT Suzuki and Koan study and Satori experiences and so on. Not so much emphasis on how you live in a community and practice. So maybe not so much need or interest in rules and regulations or guidelines for behavior. And we found out in contemporary American practice that where the precepts are not emphasized, there's big trouble and pretty fast and sometimes very destructive when the power of a teacher in a teacher-student relationship and a lack of emphasis on regulated behavior are mixed up with sexuality and so on, you've got quite a brew.

[23:57]

And people can get drunk on it pretty fast. So there's been a kind of, in a way, a reaction against that sort of unregulated, you might call, what was originally beat Zen. a lot of rules got put into place fast, and in fact, there even got to be a sort of, and I think still is, kind of a puritanical feeling to our Zen practice and to some other similar practices in reaction to that, kind of going from one extreme to another extreme, which risks, of course, repression. ignoring important aspects of us and our lives. So a question I think I'm raising is, how do we find the middle path with respect to love, passion, erotic love, love in all its forms?

[25:06]

How do we not leave out some of the most powerful forces at play in our lives. How do we address them in our practice in a way that actually utilizes that force? I mean, one way to address it, of course, is to just say no, you know, to suppress it. That's the path to hell, and you need to take this path, and that's what religious life is. Well, that's not gonna work in most of our Zen centers. So I think we need to find creative ways to bring passion and love, including erotic love, back into the temple, to acknowledge it, to salute it,

[26:08]

to use it, to enjoy it, and not to be overwhelmed by it, particularly in ways that are harmful to people. Another poem by Rumi. The mystery does not get clearer by repeating the question, nor is it bought with going to amazing places.

[27:19]

Until you've kept your eyes and your wanting still for 50 years, you don't begin to cross over from confusion. The other side, we might say, same roomie. Well, maybe a different roomie, but roomie nevertheless. Also roomie. If you don't have a woman that lives with you, why aren't you looking? If you have one, why aren't you satisfied? You have no resistance to your friend. Why don't you become the friend? If the flute is too quiet to say, teach it manners. Someone's holding you back, break it off.

[28:22]

You sit here for days saying, this is strange business. You're the strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you. but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine. You're some weird kind of gold that wants to stay melted in the furnace so that you don't have to be coins. Say one in your lonesome house. Loving two is hiding inside yourself. You've gotten drunk on so many kinds of wine. Taste this. It won't make you wild. It's fire. Give up if you don't understand by this time that your living is firewood. This wave of talking builds. Better we should not speak of it, but let it grow within. I think I'll stop there.

[29:35]

Do you have some comments or questions? Please, Anne. Buddha's teaching, it seems to me, stresses the need to transcend the small self. And that to me is kind of a touchstone for how to interpret the precepts and how to behave. what one is doing is in some way gratifying or feeding the small self, then Buddha, it seems to me, is suggesting that's not a good idea, that's not good practice, and that what our practice teaches is to recognize the self's desires and then let go of them and have more of a merging with the large self in a way that transcends the desires of the small self.

[30:54]

And I'm not sure that I heard that. And it seems to me that it's a little dangerous to particularly people in positions of authority who start thinking, well, it's okay for me to indulge the desires of my small self. That's disaster. Well, if I may respond, first of all, I would suggest that we should very carefully examine what it means to transcend the small self. There's a feeling in it, even though someone might argue, oh, this is not so, there's a feeling of wanting to catapult oneself over the small self and get into a better game. And I would suggest that that path is strewn with wreckage.

[31:56]

Transcendence is a tricky term to use. It's used very cautiously in Buddhism, typically. Secondly, you know, to, play with feeling, love, is fire. It is fire. It can be very destructive. It's also heat, energy. That is, it can power things. Recognizing that fires are dangerous, We don't throw out all the firewood, get it out of the house because it doesn't belong there. It's too dangerous. We don't transcend it either.

[33:00]

We use it in a contained way with a lot of skill and care. Someone else? Peter. It occurred to me, and maybe you can comment on this, life, that living within the realm of desire is in fact where we are, that is sort of the, that's what we're doing. make our work with that visible, say, in our formal practice or in our community life?

[34:18]

Do you understand what I'm trying to do? Well, I think so, but I don't know. I mean, I think it's a tremendous challenge how to how to incorporate this vast area of our lives, you could say our whole life, into a practice that seems to be dominated by restraint. But that itself, the notion of restraint may be a narrow understanding of our practice. But still, how do we fill our practice with the kind of energy that we've been talking about. Right, and I guess maybe what I'm concerned with is the kind of bias that you've referred to a little bit about how maybe what we think we're doing is something outside of that realm in which we actually live.

[35:29]

You can see it on the cushion. We need to recognize that or religious. Yeah, so to accept the whole of life, the whole human being, with both its sublime aspects, but its kind of sticky aspects as well. And actually to be able to celebrate what is, we talk about we're interested in what is, and I think it's fair to say that's the heart of our practice is to be with what is. But what is? If we leave out a lot, that doesn't quite seem like it ought to be the what is we should focus on to be religious people.

[36:39]

I think it's a big problem. I know it's a big problem. Yes. But it seems to be that in the way that you're using the word love, how do you understand the dynamic of clinging or attachment or the lack thereof and the word love? Yes, well, here's what I'd say. I don't take this to be a completely adequate answer to your question, but it's something like this.

[37:41]

In this process of carefully teasing apart one kind of love from another, and then having this additional notion of clinging, in other words, as we get more and more and more technical about it, What happens is just like in science, you get closer and closer and closer to seeing the basic element and it's not there. So I think we might, while we want to be clear about different forms of love, different expressions of love, different motivations, different involvements of the self and the whole, all those considerations are valid, we can get sucked into that, where we forget that actually all of this stuff is energy, including the most tacky forms of expressions of love.

[38:59]

not something wholly apart from the desire for wholeness, for union. In other words, another way to put that is, we can make a hierarchy, and we can have divine love way up there at the top, or we can turn it around and say that love of the divine is the basis, and all the others are, in a sense, offshoots with different causes and conditions at work in each of those cases. But we should not try to tease these apart so carefully that we make them into separate entities, as though they had nothing to do with each other, so that in a Bharatanatyam performance South Indian temple dancing. There's this flickering back and forth between the love of the young girl for her lover who won't look at her today or something like that.

[40:12]

She's missing him and the dancer enacts straight ahead human wanting. but it flickers between that and love of the divine, of Krishna. There's not a solid wedge driven in between them, and the one is sort of pulled out of the temple, and the other allowed to be there. They're both there. So it's, we might benefit from a somewhat more holistic attitude towards emotion. Yes, the woman in the back. Yes, you still have your hand in the air. Yes, David, I want to thank you for your talk. I think you were tremendously courageous.

[41:16]

This, the whole thing about love, you know, you read from Rumi, who is a Sufi, but he is also in the tradition of the Bhakti practitioners. That's right. And I appreciate the fact that you're bringing this up, because I think that this is a practice that, from the outside, is very broad. People from the outside look at them as practitioners. it's very important that we look at that. And it's not something, I've been coming here for over 13 years, and it's not something that I've heard expressed here before. And it is dangerous, I mean, you know, because people can misinterpret what you're saying. And that's why I think you're very brave to bring it up, and I really appreciate it, it's a beautiful talk, thank you. Thanks. Denise?

[42:20]

In the practice of Buddhism, One of the things that I've been reflecting on is... I do think that was one place where I just don't fall in line. I think it was a simple way of saying, and he does say this later in different ways, that the most important thing you can do in this lifetime is become enlightened. And so he was trying to, this very sort of maybe, I say gross,

[43:24]

He was trying to divert them from that reality, from that direction. In addition, I'm not familiar with these exact passages, but he eventually says that this whole world is bliss. When we look at Zen practice, Zen practice is a state beyond thinking. the transmission of the flower, and all of that teaching is a state beyond thinking. So somewhere in the state of love, love and transmission of the Dharma, that's the greatest gift, the greatest love you can possibly give someone. It's beyond any kind of erotic love. Now that doesn't mean that erotic love isn't part of all love and isn't part of the great realms of

[44:31]

excluded. And yet, transmission of the Dharma is absolutely, I think, at least in my mind, it is a contestable winner of all the greatest loves that you can transmit. So I think that one of the things that can happen in Zen practice, depending on what school you're in, I've been in a couple, is that you can get into this place where you're thinking about and to feel our body, that's beyond thinking.

[45:40]

And to be present in this moment, that is beyond thinking. Yeah, well, beyond, another one of those tricky words like transcendence. Does beyond mean doesn't include? Or does it mean I've leapt over something? Or is it now complete? but each thought. Is it time to end? Thank you. Beans are numberless.

[46:34]

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