our Dharma brother here, Peter Overton, who is a priest and a practice leader here at the Berkeley Zen Center. And he came to Berkeley Zen Center in 1969 and then went off to practice at Tassajara in San Francisco Zen Center. He was the Shuso of Tassajara. And then he returned to Berkeley in 1984 to raise Good morning. From time to time, I find myself in this seat. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? No? Can't hear me now? Hear me now? Okay, that's pretty good. I can't hear myself. Oh, I can sort of hear myself.

[01:06]

From time to time I find myself in this seat and usually I feel like, wow, this is different. But is it really so? I think it's good for me to keep that question in mind. This morning I would like to talk about a poem which has a great deal of meaning for me. It's a poem by Thich Nhat Hanh. And I first heard him read this at Tassajar in, I think, 1984. And I was really struck by this poem and have sort of had it with me ever since. And for some reason, on this occasion, it turned out that I wanted to talk about it. And I'd like to read it and then kind of, after that, kind of walk through it for a while.

[02:15]

Let's see. So. Please call me by my true names. Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow, because even today I still arrive. Look deeply. I arrive in every second to be a bud on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird with wings still fragile, learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone. I still arrive in order to laugh into hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that are alive. I am the mayfly, muddomorphosing on the surface of the river, and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time to eat the mayfly.

[03:24]

I am the frog swimming I am the 12-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate. And I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. I am a member of the Politburo with plenty of power in my hands. And I am the man who has to pay his debt of blood to my people, dying slowly in a forced labor camp. My joy is like spring. Please call me by my true names so that I can hear my cries and my laughs at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

[04:40]

Please call me by my true names so that I can wake up, so the door of my heart can be left So, this obviously, this poem has obviously arrived in the context of the catastrophe that we know of as Vietnam War, and he draws many strong images Even with the title, please call me by my true names, it's a kind of sweet heartfelt request.

[05:52]

But what is he talking about? Is there such a thing as false names? Do I have more than one name? Please call me by my true names. What's he requesting, really? So he starts off with this kind of question, request that we look a little more closely. Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow because even today I still arrive. He seems to be pointing to birth and death. Is the departure of something else? What is the something else? Death is the birth of something else.

[06:59]

What's that? Look deeply. I arrive in every second to be a bud on a spring branch, to be a tiny bird with wings still fragile. learning to sing in my new nest, to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower, to be a jewel hiding itself in the stem of one. He's talking about arrival as a sort of constant feature of our experience, of the arising of one phenomena after another. Often we talk about impermanence as Often we associate impermanence with passing away, or death, or things departing. But impermanence is also birth. Birth is an expression if something's changing now, it's all new now, it's okay, what's next? Impermanence means that there is a way of describing the kind of torrent, which is our

[08:06]

our experience of birth and death, of arrival, constant arrival. So what are we to do with this phenomenon of our life, this aspect of overwhelming impermanence? of the sort of constant flow. Sometimes it seems like things don't change very quickly, but when we look a little closer, we see that there's a lot going on. We arrive. Observing what's happening is an act of arrival, is part of co-creating the moment.

[09:16]

There's no me that observes separately. I still arrive in order to laugh and to cry, in order to fear and to hope. The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death of all that are alive." It brought to mind phrases which we are all familiar with in the Heart Sutra, Avalokiteshvara, while coursing deeply in the Prajnaparamita, where Dengxian says, after departing from his teacher and seeing his reflection in the water, something to the effect of, everywhere I go, I meet myself.

[10:46]

It is indeed me. I am not now it. In other words, I am not observing an it. I am experiencing phenomena as I observe them, as someone arrived in my consciousness of that. Observation arises with the observation. by all things, by the myriad things, to have myriad things come forward as part of your consciousness of that moment. I am the mayfly and I am rophosing on the surface of the river.

[11:47]

And I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time to eat the mayfly. I am the frog swimming happily in a clear pond, but I am also the grass snake who, approaching in silence, feeds itself on the frog." So there is continual transformation. Ah, life feeding on life. I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones. My legs as thin as bamboo sticks. And I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the 12-year-old girl, refugee.

[12:49]

seen. I am a member of the Bullet Bureau with plenty of power in my hands, and I am the man who has to pay his debt of blood to my people, dying slowly in a forced labor camp." This is where his teaching is very, very strict. This is the radical position. There is no room for being on the right side of the argument. If you try, you fall into confusion and doubt. If you blame one side, you surrender your power to transform consciousness and the world. So this is difficult because the way we understand the world, the narratives through which we understand the world, These narratives are shaped in a way which causes us to fall on one's into a kind of dualistic frame of mind.

[14:21]

So to hold our view of what's happening both inside us observe with full presence, not separate from observation, but with full presence of full understanding. You can also, Thich Nhat Hanh is a great one for making up gathas.

[15:26]

He encouraged us all to do this while we were at Dasanara together, at that time when I was there. we all struggle with what appear to be these kind of internal contradictions between our intention, the way we manifest our presence, and our habitual choices, the things that we go to for refuge because they always seem to have worked well in the past. that we had not turned over, that we don't have full choice about, or we tell ourselves we don't have full choice about.

[16:31]

So I encourage you to think in terms of those things, and to find compassion for both the person you name who needs your help, and the person you admire and celebrate, that person also needs compassion. My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life. My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans." I think he's talking about our naturally occurring awakened state of mind.

[17:50]

calm yet alert, ready without anxiety. This is where all of human existence kind of springs to life out of something not so special, just ordinary, so ordinary you don't notice. Please call me by my true names, so that I can hear all my cries and laughs at once, so I can see that my joy and pain are one." So now we hear his request again. In some sense, perhaps this is a request for help, a cry for help to help me see that I am all these people that I perceive in the world, that they are not something other than me, that I am actually seeing myself.

[19:14]

Help me grasp that, that I am seeing myself as I observe my friends and people I don't know, the grass and the trees. Please call me by my true names so that I can wake up and so the door of my heart can be left open, the door of compassion." So he wants to take it a step further, to just to wake up Wake up to notice what it is.

[20:20]

So that you can play too. This has turned out to be rather short. What would you like? Ross. Thank you. In thinking about the pirate and identifying with the pirate, is it recognizing that sometimes we are greedy and we've been greedy and objectified people in the past? Is it as simple as that or is it something more literal that it's more of a stretch of identifying with this person? Well, I think it's both of those things. and seeing how much that person wants to love but can't quite know it, but even in not knowing it, seeing how much that person wants to love.

[21:44]

No, I'm still with the pirate. He used the thing that when he says, not yet able to love, implies that the reason people do evil things is because they have not, they're on some level of being evolved that doesn't allow them to to understand what they're doing, that in some future time or life he is going to be more awake? Well, you can understand it in that way, and I don't think it's wrong to understand it that way at all. I also think, again, of looking to that person, that that awakening could occur at any moment. that the energies are within that person for that birth, that awakening, that change to happen.

[23:06]

We don't know. At that moment, it wasn't there. Yeah. Yeah. You said at the beginning that it came out for you for some reason. to read this poem and talk about it, and you read it with such feeling. That was a great gift to us. And I'm wondering if there's, I'm just curious, is there something that did make you come to this poem today? I think it sort of has to do with understanding, well, I'm just of much lame vilification, innuendo, and lies. I'm not being judgmental. I'll have to think on that. Thank you.

[24:25]

Thank you. It's a wonderful poem, and I did not know it, and now I do. To me, the poem is about the unspeakably perfect balance that we always miss seeing. The unity of the prey with the predator, and the unity of the hero with the beggar. I'm reminded of a very recent experience. I went to see a documentary that's been made about Bill Wilson, the founder of AA. And one of the things that's talked about quite a bit in that film is the difficulty he had in his later years with feeling excluded from the fellowship of that community because they had put him on a pedestal. And what a hard time he had with that. We tend not to think of our heroes as needy because it's much more convenient for us.

[25:30]

But that, too, is part of that perfect balance. So thank you. Sue. Thank you, Peter. I've traveled a long way with this poem. And having you repeat it, it's really a profound experience. And I keep seeing things. this, to see into the heart of the pirate, and when I notice, it gives me the opportunity to notice the thoughts, which is, I completely am uninterested and unwilling to have any connection to that pirate, you know, so what does that do about separating myself from me? And that's why, that's where I'm going with this, I cut myself off from me somehow, There's not anything I can really do to change the pirate or the situation, that's the way it is. All I can do at the moment is notice how much I want to be separate from that, dismiss him and erase him forever.

[26:42]

And I can't do that, but what that does Peter, thank you very much. It's a favorite poem, and you've opened it up to a deeper level for me. My question with this poem, and I think maybe he points to it in the last stanza, is what experience do you have or teaching do you think he has about how to really be able to open ourselves completely to the enormity of both the joy of life and the suffering of life? including the suffering that goes along with that, that we have within ourselves, the seed for all of that. Yeah. We sometimes want to, we have this wish for, you know, if I could just be open to what's going on in a way that we actually miss something. That it can sometimes prompt us to kind of skip over what's right in front of us.

[27:47]

thought is to, and Thich Nhat Hanh approaches things this way, he brings us these juxtapositions of this and that, which have associations, but then he also points us to look very carefully at one thing, and in that one thing that will open everything. So I would say the practice of opening with presence is characterized by staying very, very close. Yes? I just have an observation about the poem, which is that It's much easier to have compassion for the snake than it is for the pirate.

[28:56]

I have much more neutral feelings about the snake, because the snake is a predator. Yeah. I understand what you mean. Yes. One of you two. I don't know which one. Yeah. I am also talking about that pirate. It's painful to care. I'm just wondering if in Zen Buddhism, I'm new to this, although I'm Japanese, but I'm just wondering if there's any point where we say that this is like universally accepted justice, the principle of that, that we have to sort of forge through. And what I'm thinking right now is Next Sunday, Monday, is Hiroshima Day. And some of us Japanese, mostly women in Berkeley, are beginning to self-organize.

[29:59]

And we'll be having a demonstration, rally, and gathering, first in front of the Japanese consulate. Then we'll all walk to PG headquarters building, demanding the cessation, the shutdown, all the Japanese nuclear power plants and the two California power plants, but one is in preparation, with their right now, but anyway, there are two of them in California on the fault line. So when things like that comes, you know, I feel as if I have a dualistic mind, but I really like to have the inner balance and peace. and going toward more and more compassion to see the working of another power. So you're taking action. Right. But I was reading that after the Japanese relocation camps that people are sent, Japanese who are even born here, American citizens,

[31:17]

And then after they came back, I was reading that amongst those Japanese who are Christians are more likely to stand up and say that we should get together and demand a type of reparation. But the Buddhist are the last. So I want to ask you, is your question about I'm wondering if your question is about how to act from the heart without falling into dualistic mind. That's a very good question. That's the question you have to be holding in mind as you act. And as far as compassion goes, You stay connected with your own heart, and from there, you can figure out how to connect with the heart of someone else, who might seem to be on the other side.

[32:23]

But you've got to stay with yourself, and stay close. Thank you. Yes, Ken? First of all, when we that we all, without any exception whatsoever, have all the same components. So there's nothing weird about, oh, how could somebody be like that? There's nothing anybody ever did, including mass murderers, and you name it, that is not in us, that we haven't felt that way for a second, whatever. It's a matter of what are the circumstances and how did things build up and so on. So there's that, that we're not distant with anything. But on the other hand, to get to this woman's concern, this has nothing to do with how we act.

[33:37]

frame of mind, or something like this, we see that this pirate, or this Politburo person, or the arms merchant, are completely understandable. There's nothing weird about it. And yet, If you're a frog, you could understand the snake's position. Nevertheless, you're going to try to get away when the snake comes after you. That's all. Yeah. As long as we don't forget that it's all inside us, then we'll know how to act. And when we forget that, Yes, Lisa.

[34:43]

I'm fascinated by our ability to identify with the pirate, but the deep inability to come to grips with the arms merchant, and the next couple of layers beyond that, the corporate state, which is a person. Who said you? Because I think we are deeply entering into some sort of interconnection, not only between all of us in the room, but everyone, human, and all species, and all everything of creation. is at the mercy of some kind of thing that we have created that we do not understand. It's inside ourselves.

[35:45]

If you say we're at the mercy of it, it's something inside ourselves. I want to know how everybody here who has any economic dealings in this country could ever unwind I'm struggling to try to understand what I cannot understand. I think it's really... I should take a step backward and say, I found this poem so profound that I hardly want to talk about it right now, because it's still resonant. And I really don't want to sound like I'm trying to step aside from it. But to know the true names of what we are a part of, I think is requiring of us as a species something that we have never had to do.

[36:54]

And it is extremely hard, slippery, whatever. As soon as we can name it, whatever it is that you're thinking about, we're naming part of ourselves. I don't know how I take responsibility for the Israeli settler and for the arms merchant and for the people who are creating artificial life and for the people in Iran who are building a kind of separation. You can act. You don't know how.

[37:59]

You don't know how to act, but you can act. And I think what this poem is saying to me is that action is possible when I don't say this is outside of me. When I say, okay, this is mine. I can act. Laurie? Thinking about what Ken was saying, it seems like the reason why we're not doing what the Pirates are doing or the Archbishop right now is because of conditions, but those are not our conditions. And so, that's how we can act, because we understand that we can influence conditions, and that conditions are what is So even though this thing seems really solid, this whatever, corporate or whatever, things are changing all the time and that will end. One way or another, that will not last forever either.

[39:00]

And we have to study, don't we have to just keep studying conditions and seeing how they affect us? What makes me, that's kind of what you're saying, what makes me feel separate is you're laying for what makes other people able to do things out of the sense of separateness. And so, let's all act as much as we can to influence conditions in another, you know, in the way that we want to. Yeah, in a way we influence conditions both internal and external. Yes, Sue? Well, I don't know about Lisa, but it seems like, yes we do. The poem is saying we have the odd empire in us. And as Ken said, we could do many of these things. We have these flashes within us. But it seems like this is going to the fact that now, in a different way than perhaps was true hundreds of years ago, we also are, in fact, the arms merchant.

[40:08]

It's not a metaphorical statement anymore. It's true. We, our taxes, are doing these things. doing it also. We are being the arms merchant. We are being the pirate in some literal sense. It's not just an internal metaphor. So how do we deal with that? How do we take accountability for that outward side and act on that upward part at the same time that we're... We have to forgive ourselves, I suppose, for the part of us that's being the arms merchant and then try to figure out how we can stop selling the arms ourselves. Well, I think that there is We shouldn't underestimate the power of concerted, sincere, Just to bring out a different side of it, humility.

[41:28]

We all suffer from the illusion of a separate self. have the illusion that the pirate could have done something different, that they were in control. Everything anyone has done, and anything I have done or you have done, couldn't be any other way, because that's how it happened. And it is a product of conditioning, and we're so fortunate to be here, not there. And I think if we, when we overestimate our power and our responsibility, we run a big danger. Unless we hold the other side of humility and our powerlessness, and I'm reminded of a tale from the Holocaust

[42:42]

there and saw a guard start to beat a prisoner. And the Jewish person started praising God. And someone turned to him and said, how can you praise God when you see this happening? And the Jew said, I'm so grateful to God for not making me be that guard. I think we need to act from gratitude and humility, not from outrage and horror. Well, I would only say that acting from outrage and horror sounds to me like separation. Thanks very much.

[43:53]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ