Today, like almost every day, I feel a great suffering all around me. This sense of suffering isn't a monolithic thing. It pulses and sort of goes up and down, but it's quite similar day to day, hour to hour. This week, for many people, perhaps they feel or are more in touch with suffering than usual. Perhaps this week the people of the world are a little bit more than usual wondering how can we live, what's the way to live with so much suffering, with so many people in such intense misery and fear and physical and emotional distress and loss.

[01:40]

and a fear of more loss. How can we live? What is the appropriate mode of life for us under such painful circumstances? Maybe some of you also wonder about that, are wondering about that, and I don't want to answer the question for you.

[03:01]

of what is the appropriate response, what is the appropriate way to live, when we start to feel the universal suffering which all living beings are connected to and can feel. But the the practice and the teaching of, you know, Zen, or what we call the universal vehicle of the Buddha way, that way of practice which is concerned with how to support and carry all beings in this world of suffering, how to carry them all to freedom from this suffering, this path, this traditional path, has a response, has a suggestion about how to proceed in a world like this, where people are

[04:30]

capable of being cruel to each other in almost inconceivable ways. And so the suggestion of this great vehicle is in very simple form, is that the way to The way to work, the way to live in order to respond appropriately to this suffering has three basic aspects. One is compassion. The other is the wish, the intention, to attain complete understanding of reality.

[05:40]

In other words, enlightenment for the welfare of all beings. And the third is the realization of that intention, the actual realization of correct understanding of what's going on here. Compassion, the wish to realize perfect understanding for the welfare of others, and the realization of that intention. you can speak of those three aspects of this practice and teaching of how to live in the world of suffering.

[06:42]

Compassion is first. It's the foundation of the movement to help all beings. And it has an element of empathy. It has an element of suffering. In other words, compassion is connected to suffering. One feels suffering, oneself, and one feels it, and one feels it and feels it and feels it, and one gradually notices that others are feeling it. And just feeling this and feeling this, one is finally able to actually feel a wish arising

[07:54]

that others and oneself would be free. One actually wishes that people would be free of this suffering. This is the basis of Buddhahood. This is the root of the whole practice of Zen. And when one wishes, one may wish that oneself and one's friends would be free of suffering. This is compassion. But the compassion which is the basis of the Mahayana, of the great vehicle, is a compassion which includes every single living being. And then not only including all of them, but actually wishing to work and devote one's life to help them be free.

[09:05]

This is called great compassion. This again is the root of the whole practice, the foundation. This compassion can blossom, it can bloom, it can flower in the form of not only wishing that all beings would be free of suffering, not only wishing and being willing to work to that end, but even taking on the incredible, almost, I shouldn't say incredible, but the almost inconceivably great wish and intention to achieve Buddhahood so that one would be able to completely help others.

[10:10]

This thought can arise in a person. compassion sets the ground, sets the basis for this to arise. And I guess, from knowing a lot of you, that many of you feel compassion and actually feel compassion for all beings. Or at least you're working on it. And some people I know who actually do feel great compassion, they tell me that this aspiration to achieve, to realize Buddhahood in order to help people has not yet bloomed in their heart. They do have a steady feeling of compassion, but they do not yet feel that they really are intending to achieve enlightenment

[11:20]

it seems too lofty." They say. And I say, okay. But even if it seems too lofty for you to feel that it's arisen in your heart, if you do feel compassion, perhaps you could at least think about it. Think about the possibility of this mind of enlightenment arising in your life, in your heart, in your mind, in your body. Just think about it every now and then. If you're willing to feel compassion and actually be willing to feel compassion, be willing to feel compassion all the time, every breath.

[12:25]

And willing to, along with that compassion, every breath, devote your life to the welfare of all beings. It's not that big a deal to add on thinking of attaining Buddhahood. Even if you don't feel like you really are committed to it, just to consider it is not that big an additional thought. And some teachers of this path speak in a way, you know, that sounds like we should work hard to set up the possibility for this thought to arise. And I don't disagree with that, but I just want to mention that I don't think we make this thing happen by our own human power, that we make this thought arise.

[13:40]

I'm more of the persuasion that this thought arises in a communion between the practitioner, the suffering practitioner, the compassionate practitioner, and Buddha, [...] and all the Buddhas in communion with you and me. Still, the Buddhas send the message, please think about compassion all the time. But they can't cause us to think about it all the time. And we can't cause ourselves to think about it all the time. But together it can happen.

[14:44]

Together it can happen in one moment. and then in another. How does it happen that I'm even talking about this now? It's not by my willpower that I'm talking to you because you aren't here by my own willpower and I wouldn't be talking like this if you weren't here. Somehow it's happened that we have assembled And I'm sitting here, and these words are coming out. I don't know how this is happening, but I think it's Buddha working together with all of us that's bringing up this issue of compassion and the aspiration to attain Buddhahood. in order to help all beings, most skillfully, most energetically.

[15:57]

Buddhists don't make this happen. We don't make this happen. It happens in communion with the Buddha. And practicing compassion invites the Buddha to come into the world of duality where we suffer and commune with us and this thought of enlightenment can arise. The daring the daring aspiration can arise. And then it's not just that we wish, but we also then actually say at some point in the presence of someone else who has said,

[17:20]

at some point, in the presence of someone who wants to set at some point, I actually commit myself and vow to live this life. I vow to discipline myself to realize this way. And then we don't just wish it and say it and make a commitment in the face of another who has made this commitment in the face of another back all the way to the Buddhas before there were Buddhas. But then we also practice many practices or one practice, so that there will be realization. And the practice doesn't, I don't think, causes the realization, but there's no realization of enlightenment without the practice.

[18:29]

This is... a proposal of how to live in this world, compassion, the aspiration to achieve enlightenment to help other people and plants and animals, and the practice which is necessary for its realization. And the practice includes trying to make ourselves available to develop compassion and to have this aspiration arise. But once it's arisen, then the practice goes forward from there again.

[19:49]

Okay. So what's the practice? The practice is sometimes described as having two aspects. One aspect is called the means or the method And the means are things like giving, generosity, careful, conscientious, ethical, awareness and practice, patience, enthusiasm, and

[21:16]

stabilization of body and mind, or concentration. That's one way to talk about the methods. And what's the other one? Did I say? Hmm? What? No, I guess I just said one. So one is means. Okay? It includes giving, concentration, and so on. The other one is Wisdom. So the practice is means and wisdom. What's wisdom? Wisdom for those who are into attaining Buddhahood. The wisdom is the wisdom, well, I could say it's the wisdom of emptiness, but another way to put it is it is Yeah, the wisdom of emptiness.

[22:21]

Or it's the meaning of emptiness. So what's emptiness? Emptiness is ultimate truth about the way things actually are. That's the practice of one who is on the path to become a Buddha, means and wisdom. Okay? What's the means? Do you remember? Generosity, ethics, patience, concentration, enthusiasm. Okay, that's the means. What's the wisdom? It's the meaning of emptiness, the realization of emptiness. They go together.

[23:27]

Would it be possible for someone to really understand emptiness without the means? No. But you could have some understanding, some wisdom of emptiness without the means. But it wouldn't be Buddhahood. And you can have means without wisdom. And those are good behaviors or good methods, but they would be a little off because of not having understanding of what they are. The two together are Buddhahood, or are the practices which culminate in Buddhahood. So the means, I guess today I'd just like to mention one of them a little bit, because that one I feel is particularly helpful to develop

[24:51]

and compassion. So even if you don't yet feel this aspiration to attain, to realize — attain, by the way, means to touch — even if you don't feel the aspiration to attain or realize Buddhahood yet, if you're willing to practice patience, that will help you be at the place where Buddha can get together with you and it can happen. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the means of patience. Patience is very closely related to wisdom. And patience is very closely related to enlightenment. Matter of fact, in one text it says, patience is the primary condition for enlightenment.

[26:01]

Of course, patience is third on that list. First comes giving and then precepts. If you don't give yourself to the practice, then you can't practice anything. If you don't think the practice is worth giving your energy to, you're not going to be able to practice giving or patience. So giving really is, in a sense, first of the practices, that you give your life to learning how to be compassionate and how to help beings. And next, before next, giving is a very, when done in the spirit of this path, giving has the quality of being joyful. Giving which is not joyful is not this type of giving. Like, For example, some of us have been sending money to the U.S.

[27:24]

government recently. Or about to in the next day or so. And this, we're in a sense, we're giving this money to them. Now some of us may feel it's being coerced out of us. And we only give it because we think we'll go to jail if we don't. But that kind of giving, handing over your money to the government If it's not joyful, it isn't giving. Giving in this case is you are very, very happy when this material or this effort goes. Not even goes, just happens, when the giving happens. But still, even when you're giving and feeling very joyful, you still have to be careful afterwards. It's possible to be very, very happy. It's possible to, like, I don't know what, like, drive up to the toll booth, you know, at the Golden Gate Bridge, and you might pay for the person behind you, you know.

[28:37]

You might even pay for all the people behind you for the next ten minutes. and feel so happy at this gift that you drive off and run into another car. You can become so excited at giving that you fall on your face. So after giving, you have to be really, and after successfully arousing a joyful thought of how wonderful it is to give to the other, with no expectation of getting anything. It's even more joyful. And feeling this joy, then you have to be careful because you're potentially a little intoxicated by giving. You have to watch your step very carefully. For example, you have to watch your mouth, which might tell somebody what you just did.

[29:39]

and try to impress somebody at what a great, generous person you are. That would be perhaps a big mistake to try to get somebody to think well of you and capitalize and get something back from your joy of giving. Or the other possibility is perhaps you look back and the person in the toll who took your toll, who took your $500 that you paid for all those people to get through free, you notice that the toll gate person put the money in his back pocket and started collecting money from the people. Okay? You got really happy at making the gift but then the gift didn't work out the way you thought it was going to and nobody got through for free.

[30:41]

And somebody else got your money. So you got to be very careful after that joyful experience that you don't regret that the money didn't go where you wanted it to. And that you shift then from joy into hatred. So right after Patience is to be careful. And then even though you're careful, still things don't necessarily go the way you expect it in this world. So then comes the one that I wanted to mention, and that's patience, which is the way we deal with the actual bite and the actual acuteness and chronicness of the pain we feel. So patience is how we are able to actually sit on the seat where Buddha sits.

[31:48]

Sit on the seat of enlightenment. Take our seat. Where? Here. Always here. In the middle of suffering. Each of us is in the middle of suffering of the world. Each of us has all the suffering in the world all around us. And this centrally located seat, which each of us has, is where Buddha sits. As a matter of fact, it's where Buddha is sitting right now. Buddha is sitting right now where you are. All over the room, with each person, Buddha is sitting. But are we sitting at our seat? Are we open to being where we are? Are we open to our own suffering? Patience is how we can take our seat in the middle of our suffering. Is this hard?

[33:02]

Most people have a hard time taking their seat in their life. And especially since you take it one moment and then everything gets rearranged and you have to find it again. But those who are willing to take their own seat in this world, this provides the means to realize Buddhahood, this sitting here. Bodhisattvas do not find pain delightful. Bodhisattvas, in other words, those who are intending to become Buddhas, do not find pain joyful. They don't like or dislike pain. What they find joyful is to be open to the pain. What's joyful is not to be afraid of the pain.

[34:05]

What's joyful is to be able to take your seat in the middle of it and not eventually learn how to not be restless or wiggle. to sit and settle. And then you can see. But first we have to sit and settle on this very rough and turbulent experience. And part of the turbulence is that sometimes it's not so rough. And then it's rough. And then it's not.

[35:08]

Once we stop resisting, stop wiggling, stop fighting the pain, and settle down, all the energy that we usually use, which is considerable, which we usually use to avoid being here, is then available to be enthusiastic about being even more patient to be enthusiastic about giving, to be enthusiastic about practicing careful observation of all ethical precepts, and to be enthusiastic about the next practice of concentration, to be enthusiastic about not only being present here and settled, but even settling

[36:16]

completely to become completely settled and stabilized. I think my experience is that people who come to Zen Center are pretty generous. I'm impressed by the generosity and pretty compassionate and care about, really do care about other living beings. And a lot of Zen Center members and students and guests are very careful about what they do and very ethical. But I really find many people are not patient, have trouble actually. What's this for? The second one. Is this for somebody's? Who's is it?

[37:21]

Oh. Should I? So nobody needs this? Is Nina looking for this? Not even. So how was that song, Robin, that was without practice? And somebody, Cindy, gave these to me. She thought this would help. Help what? I don't know. Protect me from the bright lights of stardom.

[38:24]

From the glitter. Oops. Where's Cindy? Is she here? Are these yours, Cindy? Thanks. Is there something you'd like to discuss? Yes? Patience. You were saying so many of us have our biggest difficulty with patience. I think for me, it's multifaceted. Part of it, it's un-American to be patient. You should be doing something to fix it. It's possible to fix it.

[39:31]

If you're an American, you believe it's possible to fix it. Right. So it's like fixing it. It seems like fixing it doesn't go with patience. And the other half is finally understanding, for me anyway, that I had semantics perhaps. To me, patience sort of meant waiting for something to end, waiting for your wife to stop shopping and come back and do what you want her to do. Right. Where, when I think of... Can you hear her? Can you hear her? Okay, good. Yes. When I think of it as forbearance, semantically, it's more useful for me. That patience implies that something will come to an end. And I'm sort of just putting the pause button on my image. Is forbearance, in fact, useful...

[40:32]

I think forbearance is a synonym for patience. Yeah, patience is not liking the pain or disliking the pain, and patience is not a technique for reducing the pain. Patience is a way to settle down wherever you are, well, particularly when you're in pain. And it's not just to forbear for forbearance sake, it's to forbear for the sake of not wasting energy running away from what's happening. Not wasting, you know, and there's many, many ways to waste energy running away from what's happening. Drugging ourselves, distracting ourselves by various kinds of activities, all those things we do, or just complaining and fighting and denial, all that energy we expend to basically try to get away from what's happening.

[41:49]

So, patience makes it so we can actually sit down and then we have our life available to us to then go to work to benefit beings. And if something can be so-called fixed, well, fine. Why not? It's fun to fix things, isn't it? But if you're not at your seat and you're fixing things, you're missing your life. Not to mention that since you're resisting what's happening, you can't see straight, so you may not actually be fixing things. You may be actually causing, setting up a disaster. Who knows? You don't, because you're not there. So patience is like, you know, getting to where you are so that you can start getting ready to see what's going on and to see how you can actually participate in a beneficial way

[43:01]

And so forbearance maybe for you is a better word, closer to the point of it. Okay? Yes. Yes. Well, the whole issue of, like, feeling pain, it feels, you know, really counterculture. You know, train when you're very young. Don't go there. Don't go to the pain? Yeah, don't go there. So I just think about other cultures where I've been handed workshop I'm now doing with Soma on greed, you know, where there's support in the community. If somebody dies, the person close to them is allowed to completely fall apart for days and days and days if necessary while everyone else is there supporting them and being in that being. And in our culture, you know, we've isolated so much and we've made it costly.

[44:07]

Like, you have to go to therapy in order to feel that pain, and that costs a lot of money. Well, it's okay. It's okay to spend money to feel pain. Whatever it costs, it's worth it. And if it supports some psychotherapist, fine. But, you know, it's so tragic. It's like, if we could all get together and feel pain together, for each other, and feel the pain, like, Yeah, well, I think getting together and all of us feeling pain together and encouraging each other to feel pain and feel compassion, that's fine. But that doesn't mean we eliminate private interviews. Sometimes it's nice to do it just with one person. Hmm? I think yes.

[45:14]

It would be nice if we allowed people to feel pain. When we see someone suffering, it would be nice if we would let them feel what they're feeling and not feel that they should stop feeling that and distract them from it and tell them that it's bothering you that they're suffering, so why don't they smile? I think that would be good. You could still say to somebody, you know, are you okay? Can I help? And they might say, yeah, you're helping. You're helping me. That's enough. I mean, I'm suffering and you're here and that's good. Thank you. So sometimes asking somebody how they feel helps them feel it more. Sometimes they're suffering but they don't They don't know it. And when you say, how are you feeling, then they know better, so you can assist them.

[46:14]

That's right. But I think that usually happens one-to-one. Usually you don't have a whole bunch of people asking a person how they feel. So one-on-one interactions are very supportive. And if people don't have anybody, it is sort of sad if people don't have a lot of people doing that, so they have to get a professional. Rozzy, come here. Come here. Come here, Rozzy. She's scared. She's afraid of children. Can you hear the children? Or she can really hear them. Those little high-pitched voices chattering away, which we think are so cute.

[47:18]

She thinks those are her attackers. I guess kids beat her up or something. It's okay, Rosie. It's all right. It's okay. It's all right. Anything else you'd like to discuss? Yes? How come you get that? How come I get to have a dog? I don't know. Well, my wife's hairdresser had, you know, this dog would live with my wife's hairdresser, and then he got cancer. And she said to him when he was in the hospital, if he would like us to take care of the dog for a little while while he was in the hospital, that we'd be happy to do it.

[48:24]

And he said, oh, that'd be great. She'd love it out there in And so I asked the staff if she'd come out for a couple of weeks, and they said okay. And so she came, and then he died. So then we asked the staff if she could stay, and they said okay. So here she is. And it isn't exactly that I have a dog. It's more like the dog has me. This dog does give to me a great deal. She gives me her suffering. She gives me her vitality. She gives me her mystery, her uniqueness, her unpredictability, her dynamite energy. She gives it all to me. But I have to work hard to take care of her.

[49:26]

I have to take ticks off. I have to clean up dog hair. I have to feed her, I have to worry about her, I have to comfort her a lot. Today I've been comforting her a lot. She's been very frightened today about something, kind of quivery. So she kind of has me more than I have her, but she also has many other people here too. A whole community is supporting this little animal. What she gives us is she gives us something to love, which is a great gift. She just lets us love her. Like, I remember about, well, I don't know, quite a few years ago, a woman from, I can't remember where she's from, I think she's from Thailand or Cambodia or someplace like that. Anyway, a Chinese, ethnically Chinese person from Cambodia came, and she wanted to become a nun, Buddhist nun.

[50:29]

And she came to America to become ordained as a Buddhist nun by the abbot of the city of 10,000 Buddhas. But when she got there and they saw she had cancer, they wouldn't ordain her. And so she was in General Hospital, and some of our members met her there. So somehow I went to visit her over there. And I don't know how it happened, but anyway, I said, well, would you like to come and live at Zen Center? And she said, oh, yes, I'd love to live at Zen Center. So I went back to Zen Center and I asked again the staff, is it okay if she comes and lives here? And they said, fine. And she came and lived at Zen Center. And she was a young woman. I don't know how old she was, maybe 20, in her 20s, I think. And she had really severe growths on her. And

[51:33]

Anyway, like one of the growths was like sticking out the top of her head, like the size of a large, like a goose egg sticking straight up, you know, maybe four inches off the top of her head, and so on, and other kinds of things all over her body coming out in various places like that. And she came to Zen Center, and then sometimes she would come downstairs to the dining room and, you know, come to a, not exactly eat, but she just would come to a meal. And one time she came in, you know, in her wheelchair, and someone said to me, she just comes here, you know, so we can love her. Because, you know, you could love her. It's all you could do. Couldn't do anything about the cancer. So she would just come in there, we would love her, and then she'd go back to her room. She kept wanting to get ordained. So then... So then finally, the abbot of... I wasn't the abbot at the time, but the abbot of Zen Center suggested that I ordain her.

[52:42]

So I came to her room and ordained her as a priest and gave her the Buddhist precepts. And it was like, you know, I would say, now, Lei Hong, you know, how's her name, Lei Hong, which means spring breeze in Chinese. Say, now, repeat after me. And she'd say, okay. And then I would say, I take refuge in Buddha. And, you know, and she'd say, I take refuge in Buddha. And then she'd pass out. And I'd say, Now, Lai Hong, she said, hmm, I take refuge in Dharma. She said, I take refuge in Dharma. And then she'd pass out. And I'd wake her up again. We did the precepts that way. So she got ordained as a priest. And the next day she died. She got what she wanted. So anyway, this daughter's like that.

[53:46]

She's just here. And I don't really feel I have her. People say, is that your dog? I say, well, that's actually my dog. But I'm one of her people that takes care of her. I'm her father figure, I think. But she's not my dog, really. You're welcome. I took her to Tassara. She did her first practice period. And she had a great time. Yes. Is there anything particularly you'd like me to say about it? Any aspect you'd like me to bring up? Patience is confusing.

[54:57]

It's so hard to be patient. Yes. Yes. It's almost like being a different person from who you are. Yeah, I think that... that patience is not natural for people. Like I was saying to some people yesterday, I saw this movie called Armistead, and in the movie, the person who was, the character who was playing the part of John Quincy Adams said that he feels that freedom is a natural state of humans. And I don't think it's a natural state myself. I think what's natural, actually, is to be in bondage. Either be in bondage as the slave owner or as the slave. That's natural. But it's possible to be free.

[56:03]

And when human beings see that it's possible, some of them will do what it takes to become free. And I think impatience is quite a natural... natural response for us. But we can learn to be patient, but it is hard for people to learn. Very hard. But you can't be a Buddha without practicing patience. That's the Buddhist line. You need to be patient in order to be a Buddha. In some ways, I would say, just say this, this may not be true, but I kind of feel it is true in a sense, that even almost the greatest pain we've ever known is not as difficult to be patient with as reality. Reality is more shocking and more difficult to face and not cringe from

[57:11]

than the greatest pain that we've known. Because, like for example, a mother giving birth to a child goes through great pain, but she still gets to, you know, usually continue to live. And she's built to do anything to promote this life. And other things, we will go through great pain if we think it's going to perpetuate our existence. But the truth is that we don't actually even exist the way we think we do. We aren't independent. And to see the truth of interdependence, to really see it directly and take it in, is a very big shock to us, because what we are actually cannot be grasped. And to face that we can't grasp ourselves is more difficult than almost any pain that we can grasp. So that's why patience is so important to not only take our seat, but to develop the tolerance for a reality which we can't use and grasp and buy or sell or avoid or hold on to.

[58:26]

But that reality makes us free when we see it. So patience is very difficult for us, but we must practice it if we really want to help people. And if you can be patient, you can go see someone else who is suffering, and you can show them that they can be patient and that they can settle down in the middle of their suffering and they can become free. If you can't be patient, then you spread the word of impatience and we got enough of it. To some extent, this horrible situation we have is very much due to impatience, people being impatient with each other. Yes? It goes a long way. I was in a discussion and I was saying that you're following something. Yes, it's horrible.

[59:30]

And the response when I got to the dinner table was that I was wrong. It's wrong to do nothing. That by doing something while these people are suffering, it's picking the higher load. And I said, but I still feel wrong. and those people are suffering. So then the question was to me, so what should we do? And I said, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. But one of the things one can do is one can get closer and closer to the situation. So what's happening there has been compared to the Holocaust. that we're seeing the makings of a Holocaust right under our nose, so we shouldn't just sit by and let it happen. So if something like that is happening, we should definitely get close to it.

[60:37]

We should get intimate with the situation so that it doesn't happen as much as we can. So now we know and we shouldn't forget until we know that the situation has been made safe again. We should, by all possible means, become intimate with the situation. But bombing doesn't necessarily get us intimate. So how can we get intimate with the situation? How can the world, with all the people in it, who care about these people there and want to protect these people, how can the world get closer and closer and closer? What would closeness be? War is not necessarily... the real intimacy between people. War is getting too intimate in a certain way. It's getting more intimate than people want you to get. But how can we get close in such a way that people welcome us to come and interact with them? This is much more complicated, but we should do that.

[61:43]

Those of us who care should make efforts in that direction. How can we do that? We don't know, but we should try. So we should get close to the situation. We shouldn't be too far from it. And so it's easy to say, okay, we'll get close just by flying over there and dropping bombs. That's close. But I'm talking about much closer than I'm talking about actually bringing our human face into confrontation with other human faces and looking at them. And it's dangerous for us. But it's dangerous anyway. Now we've got other kinds of danger. Maybe airplanes are going to come flying at us pretty soon. So it doesn't mean you don't respond when you're patient. It just means that you're responding from being present rather than responding from restlessness. And you could even be responding from understanding your relationship with this other side.

[62:44]

You might do something really helpful really disarming. The Buddha was able, and other sages of many persuasions in the history of the world, have been able to disarm people by love. Is that hard? Yeah. But it really works. And, you know, the person's not just disarmed for the moment. They sometimes stay disarmed for a long time because they voluntarily put him down. They were converted. So the wisdom side is to see accurately. The means are modes of attraction. Giving and ethics and patience and enthusiasm and concentration are ways of attracting people. They're ways of attracting yourself to your life.

[63:46]

And there are ways of attracting people to practice. People are converted by patient, loving, careful, enthusiastic, present people. They drop their hate when they see this, if it's strong enough. People can't keep hating in the face of love indefinitely. They break down. They drop their hate. So can you bring love to that situation somehow? Can we do that? And easy for me to say, but anyway, I still said it. Yes.

[64:50]

When I think of all the great social movements that happened, like the civil rights movement, it would have been as it is described. Yes. Maybe it will still be the same. Maybe South Africa will still be a part of it. Maybe it will still be a focused white union. Because unions are not patient. They fight. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. I think I should be patient with somebody. If there's something to me that I think I give the wrong message, they should walk all over me and give the message to the book. Is it all right to be a bully? And I worry that I'm And maybe I'm taking the wrong thing because I'm weak. Yeah, right. Yeah, well, you say maybe the civil rights movement wouldn't have been successful if people were more patient.

[65:58]

But it might have been more successful if they were patient. It might have been much more successful if they were patient. I can't really say, it's just words off my mouth, but I can say that maybe it would be more successful. And in some ways the civil rights movement happened, but my friend, did it work? Did it really work? Some people don't think so. It has accomplished certain things, but then after the laws are made, people find other ways to get around it because they weren't really converted. They weren't really converted to actually love these other people that they were trying to exclude from their life. And maybe if there was more patience, these people would have been converted rather than just being legally restrained. I don't know. Okay? I really don't know. But actually, I'm betting on that patience is more effective than impatience. I'm betting on that. That's my bet. with this life.

[67:00]

Here's one life put down on patience. Here I am. Okay? And that's my bet, is that it's more effective. Martin Luther King cared about his people. He didn't like oppression. Okay? And Martin Luther King was not always non-violent. He started out being very impatient. He had an arsenal in his basement. But then guess what happened? His house got blown up. Fortunately, he and his family were not home. But he realized at that time something, that fighting back with guns and stuff, that that way of impatience leads to him getting bombed. And he switched and became whatever you want to say, So I don't know if he would have been more successful if he got his army going than he was, but he was converted to nonviolence.

[68:08]

People are naturally easily violent. You don't have to teach little boys to pick up hammers and bop each other on the head. They figure it out very easily what to do with those hammers and to put it on dogs and other little kids. You teach them about how it hurts the other kids and gradually they lay off for a while. Little girls tend to get it to sort of learn and not forget it and start doing it again later. But anyway, I'm betting on that. If you're not sure, then I would suggest you keep talking to me and other people who are betting on patience until you're convinced because part of the thing about practice is that we have doubts about it. And so if we have doubts that the practice of patience is effective, we should discuss it with practitioners and consult the scriptures and reason about it, you know, debate until we're convinced. Then when you're convinced, pretty much, then you still have to, like, learn how to do it, which is really hard.

[69:09]

But the Buddha was a strong guy. He was a warrior. He grew up in a war. He wasn't in the priestly class. He was of the warrior class, and he was an excellent charioteer, horseback rider, and archer. He was a good warrior, and he was going to be like a general when he grew up, a king, a military king. That's the kind of upbringing he had. But he saw where all that goes. It goes to suffering. That's where it all winds up. And he switched. And when he was a Buddha, he was still a powerful person. A lot of energy coming through him. But instead of killing a people, he converted murderers. He met murderers with his skill and broke them down in their murdering ways and converted them to... He actually converted a mass murderer to be a sage. So the proposal is you can learn how to be patient to such an extent that you can convert a violent person with your patience.

[70:23]

And your patience is part of the way you're fearless. That you know that even if people put pain on you, you can live through it or you can die peacefully in it. So, like, and then you can convert people, right? So, like, what is it, a story, a warrior comes to a Zen master, you know, and he says to the Zen master, he says, can you wait a second? I'll be right with you, Sam. He says to the Zen master, teach me Buddhism. I want to know what's the difference between heaven and hell." And the Zen teacher says, "'Teach you Buddhism?

[71:26]

You vicious warrior. You could never learn Buddhism. You're filled with hate. You have no ability to ever have compassion or wisdom. Get out of here." The warrior says, who do you think you are? I'll show you. He raised his sword. And the Zen teacher said, this is hell. And the man broke down in tears and said, thank you. I'm so grateful. I understand now. And the Zen teacher said, this is heaven. It takes patience to be able to help and convert murderers. It takes courage. Courage comes from patience. It takes enthusiasm, courage.

[72:28]

I'm convinced. Are you? Sam? The hardest thing in the practice for me? I think the hardest thing in the practice is... Well, I think patience is the hardest thing. But there are some other ones that are pretty close. Like, the precepts are really hard too. Like to be careful not to ever steal, and to be careful not to lie, and to be careful not to kill, and to be careful not to intoxicate myself or others, and to be careful not to misuse sexuality.

[73:39]

and to be careful not to say anything unkind or slandering or bad about anybody else, and to be careful to not praise myself and to make myself look better than other people, and to not be possessive, and to not be angry. These are very hard for me to really do those. That's the precepts. That's the ethics part. Enthusiasm I don't have so much problem with. I'm very enthusiastic. And I'm a little bit patient. I've sat through, you know, a lot of pain in a lot of ways. But my sitting through that pain, you know, I really feel many people helped me sit through that pain. I wouldn't have been able to do it if you weren't all surrounding me. I had no way to get out because you were in front of me and behind...you know, I couldn't get away. And he just kept pounding on me and pounding on me until I stopped running away pretty much.

[74:43]

So I think patience and precepts and giving also. It's hard for me to really like give myself with no expectation to get anything back. That's also hard for me. With no expectation to get anything back, not the least bit manipulative, that's hard. So those first three are really hard for me, patience, precepts, and giving. Concentration and enthusiasm, I'm kind of like, that's my strong thing, easier for me. And wisdom, I don't know. I don't know about wisdom. It's not exactly hard, just I don't know how intimate I am with the truth. But I want to be more intimate. Yes. OK, Sam? I really appreciate hearing you talk about patience and feel really encouraged by what you say and hearing other people's patience.

[75:59]

The place that I start that something happens that's different than that is I don't feel that I can know, if I don't really know another person's suffering really intimately, especially oppression, I don't feel that I can have that, what's the appropriate thing for God. The patience, you know, in your response to him about social movements. Yes. My body is completely bearing that, my soul. Yeah. I can get advice to other people in that way. Uh-huh. Yeah. Well, that's a dilemma. Yeah. So I guess I'm giving advice before I'm perfect. And if you want to wait until you're perfect, hey, go ahead. Meantime, I'll keep talking and recommending the practice which I'm pretty convinced is good, even though I haven't mastered it.

[77:08]

And you can wait, and I'll wait for you until you've got it down before you say anything. But I appreciate the integrity of not recommending anything before you have mastered it completely. But I feel like if I wait to recommend patients until I'm perfect, who's going to be recommending it? I don't hear it recommended. All I know is many people coming to me who are impatient. It's obvious that that's their problem. So I say, hey, there's a practice just for you. I don't go out to tell people anything. I only talk, like I say, if you people weren't here, guess what? I don't talk like this. You know, when I'm not with the dog, I don't go around, oh, it's okay, baby. I'm just a, I'm a response machine, you know? When nobody, if a person comes to me and they're ranting and raving, you know, and they're saying basically, I dare you to say anything to me, I say, guess what?

[78:14]

I don't dare. I say, okay, here I am. But when they say, I'm suffering, [...] what can I do? I say, well, gee, guess what? There's a special practice just for you right now. It's going to be great. Guess what it is? It's patience. Here's how you do it. This can help you tolerate this pain and be settled and be okay even though you're still suffering. I don't put this, and that's Buddhism too. Buddha didn't run around telling everybody what to do. He made them ask three times. And that's one, maybe we should do that at Zen Center, but anyway, we don't. Of having the people come here on Sunday, the lecturers say, I really don't think you want me to talk. Oh, no, you don't. Oh, I don't believe it. Oh, okay, okay. Well, then I'd like to talk about patience, but I don't think you want me to talk about patience, so I'm not going to. I don't believe you.

[79:16]

You're going to resist it. Forget it. That's what Buddha did. He made people ask three times because he didn't want them to reject it. It's a good message, but not if they don't want to hear it. It has to be at the right time for them. They have to be up for it. So when oppressed people practice patience, they get strengthened. But it's a waste of time to tell them to practice patience if they don't want to hear the message. And it's actually worse to say it to them and have them reject it than not to say it at all. Because if they reject it, then later when they are open for it, they remember that they rejected it before, so it makes it harder to accept. So it's very important to recommend things to people when they're ready. The Buddha said, you know, in short, he said, don't say something if it's not true. If something's not true and it's not helpful and disagreeable to people, don't say it.

[80:18]

Okay? And then all those other permutations down to if it's helpful and true and doesn't upset people, then say it at the right time. Even when it satisfies all his requirements, he didn't necessarily say it until they were ready. So I think that... Come here, Rozzy. Come here. Okay? Yeah, I don't say this to people unless they ask. Yes. The gentleman in the back. I'm trying to distinguish between the oppression which is imposed by one group versus another, as opposed to the oppression which we impose on ourselves, and the mechanism of patience in that dynamic with respect to self-oppression. When does one perceive that patience has served its purpose? Well, that's it. When patience has served its purpose, you see. That's what patience does for you.

[81:19]

is it helps you settle down, and when it's done its purpose, then you can see. You know? Like you can see the problem. Before you practice patience, you've got a problem, but you can't exactly see because you're wiggling so much. When patience has served its purpose, as you say, the purpose it's served is that you have energy and vision. can come up in you. Then it's served its purpose. Then the patience isn't relevant anymore, in a way, because then you go to work on addressing and responding to the problem. And in the case of self-oppression, you start to have a little talk with yourself, maybe, and say, you know, I'd appreciate it if you'd consider dropping that kind of talk. I'd like to ask you to stop talking to me that way. You're talking to yourself, right? And then you might say, what kind of way would you like to talk? And say, well, I suggest you start talking more pleasantly and more kindly. OK. When you're patient with yourself or with somebody else, you can talk to them and actually ask them to do something, but not out of anger and disrespect.

[82:29]

So they listen to you. And the same talking to yourself. You can talk to yourself respectfully. But if you're talking to me, or if I'm talking to you, and I'm talking to you in a disrespectful way, and that, of course, hurts you. It really hurts us to be talked to disrespectfully. It's okay, Roz. It's okay. It really hurts us to be talked to disrespectfully. It really hurts us. And if we can be patient, we can talk to the person who's talking to us disrespectfully respectfully. Mm-hmm. And they notice that we're talking to them respectfully. We're very sensitive to being talked to respectfully and disrespectfully. We're sensitive to both of those. So when you talk to somebody who's being disrespectful to you respectfully, they notice it usually. And they respect you for that because they think that's a good thing for you to do to them. So they listen to you. And then you maybe say, you know, I would appreciate it if you would do this for me, blah, blah, blah.

[83:32]

And they listen to you. They might not be able to do it, but they're listening anyway. And they respect you. But you usually can't talk like that to the person until you're patient with your pain. It's hard to actually be skewered by somebody and then sort of say, ah, may I make a suggestion to you? But you can actually do it if you settle with it. Right in the middle of the pain, You can actually talk clearly out of patience rather than out of anger. And it has a lot of integrity and authority because you're actually practicing patience at that time. That's when you can convert somebody from being disrespectful to being respectful. Let's see, is this dog telling me that I should leave? No. Four more minutes, Rozzy. Okay? I don't know who is next. So you can be next.

[84:36]

I think that normal animal reaction to pain is to either try to get away from it or eliminate the source of it. Normal animal reaction. don't act like that because they can't move away from pain a lot of times. They have pain. But animals, we human beings, generally speaking, we move away from pain if we can. And if we can't get away from it or eliminate it, we have ways of trying to distract ourselves from it. So like our anxiety, we can't get away from. You can't like move across the street and get away from your anxiety. You can't actually even push somebody away and get away from your anxiety because they might come back. So our basic anxiety is unavoidable. I mean, really unavoidable. We can only distract ourselves from it or numb ourselves to it. And when human beings found out about a way to numb themselves to their anxiety, they were very happy to find it.

[85:46]

Alcohol was a great discovery for humans. So you take enough alcohol, you don't feel so anxious. This is the normal animal thing to do. Get away from it or turn it off. Quite natural. What's unnatural is to be free of the anxiety. And freedom is based on patience with it. Because if you can practice patience with the anxiety, you can see how it happens. When you see how it happens, you see it happens because you don't understand. When you see that you don't understand, you can practice understanding. When you practice understanding, you can become free of anxiety, not by numbing, but by seeing the truth. That's the great proposal of the Buddha. And by the way, ladies and gentlemen, I've said this many times, The Buddha was anxious before the Buddha was Buddha.

[86:55]

Before Buddha was Buddha, Buddha was just like us. Buddha was anxious just like we are. But the Buddha faced the anxiety, became intimate with it, understood it, and became free of it. He said, I used to be anxious, and I'm not anymore because I understand the truth. So it gets back to correcting our perception about something. Yes, it gets back to the nature of perception. We misperceive. We don't understand the way things really are. Therefore, we suffer. We suffer, and the basic suffering is anxiety. We have all kinds of other ones, but that's the basic one. And it's because we think we're separate. We think there's like me and them. And they're a lot bigger than me.

[87:59]

It's the whole universe against me. There's me and the universe. This is a dangerous situation. What if the universe doesn't like me today? it's not really fair. But if I'm not separate from the universe, which is reality, and the universe isn't separate from me, which is reality, if all beings aren't separate from my mind, and all Buddhas are not separate from my mind, then when I really understand that, my anxiety doesn't function anymore. And then I can really get close to these dangerous situations and bring my understanding and my compassion to beings who are suffering, because I'm not afraid for myself anymore. I'm not worried about what's going to happen to me. This is the great possibility that Buddhism is putting forward. Can you believe it? Can you try it?

[89:01]

Does it make sense to you? And if it doesn't make sense, Let's talk about it until it does make sense. That's a normal part of the practice is to discuss it with practitioners until you're convinced. Bring up your questions. Read the scriptures. Argue, argue, argue until you see that it's actually quite sensible. It's quite sensible. And I'm happy to see, as I've been telling some people at Tassajara, that I've got this wonderful psychology book about which starts out at sort of the beginning of saying that until recently, The study of the self was considered to be non-scientific, inaccessible to scientific procedures. But now, quite recently, there's a breakthrough in psychology and neurology and biopsychology and psychobiology and neuropsychobiology and neurology and evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology. All these different disciplines are coming together to form an interdisciplinary study of the self.

[90:07]

And so, you know, we can study, we can understand what the self really is. And it turns out that the self is not something that exists by itself. It's something that is born of relationship and continues to be nothing other than a way of relating. There is no isolated self. It's an illusion, but we have that illusion. It's unscientific, not artistic, and unenlightened. But the interdependent self, we do have interdependent self. It's just that interdependent self is not anything by itself. That self is actually reality, and that self isn't anxious. So it's lunchtime. And thank you for your patience, Roz. She had a hard time.

[91:11]

She was afraid of many things, but she didn't attack anything. Good girl. So please be patient with this situation and try to be helpful.

[91:23]

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