who we are, and I'm looking forward to hearing from him. He's shared a lot of his trials and tribulations and a lot of our trials and tribulations, and when I think of him, I think about the mystery of how people are connected to each other. And that's usually something to do with what he's talking about, so I'm looking forward to hearing from him today. Thank you. Good morning. That's exactly what I'm going to talk about. Well, first of all, I want to acknowledge for the last eight months or so, nine months, I typically listen to the lecture in the community room. We have, we pipe this microphone in there and people can listen to the lecture in there and typically who goes in there are families with children.

[01:26]

My wife and I have a nine month old son and I typically listen in there. So I just want to acknowledge the people in there. Mira. Pay attention. Leo, how you doing man? And Sam might be sleeping, that's my son so I won't call him. He's not sleeping. So this is more or less the end of the first week of our fall practice period. which we call aspects of practice. We have two practice periods each year. And in the spring, we have a more formal, traditional practice period with a head student. And the practice period is led by our avid Sojin. And in the fall, we have a shorter, less formal practice period, which is led by the senior students.

[02:30]

and typically is focused on a particular theme. And this year the theme is ethical conduct or ethics and the Buddhist precepts. And this is timely for the community because very recently we've completed rewriting our ethics guidelines for the community, which I think took like three years and involved many people. I was closely involved with about a year and a half of it. And I'm not gonna refer specifically to the ethics guidelines in my talk too much, but I do want to acknowledge that that is the background. And we, our board president, Peter Overton, spoke Saturday about it a few weeks ago. And I think that the Ethics Guidelines were published and available on the shoe rack, but I checked this morning and it looks like they're out.

[03:35]

So we'll get them a new stack out there so that everybody can have a copy. And we should actually have it posted too. So, what I want to talk about is, Alan Arcanto gave a class on Thursday going over the history of the precepts institutionally. how they originated within the Buddhist religion and how they developed over time. He talked about the Theravāda or the Hinayana version of the precepts and then talked about how they changed with the Mahayana. and the Zen school of Buddhism, which we're Mahayana Buddhists.

[04:39]

So we have a formulation of the precepts, which is a bit different than how they were originally formulated after Buddha's death. So he talked a bit about the history. I'm gonna talk about, or try to talk about, how the precepts relate to practice. and how actually they could be seen to arise from practice, to originate in practice itself, or arise from zazen, how the precepts come from zazen. And so just so that everybody has at least heard the precepts, I'm going to read you what our precepts are as we have formulated them for our once a month bodhisattva or repentance ceremony, where we reaffirm the precepts as our practice and in our life.

[05:47]

And we recite them in a ceremony, which I'm sure many of you or most of you have done. There are 16 precepts, and the first three are, I take refuge in Buddha, I take refuge in Dharma, I take refuge in Sangha. Then there are the three pure precepts, I vow to refrain from all evil, I vow to do all that is good, I vow to live and be lived for the benefit of all beings. And then there are the 10 grave or prohibitory precepts, which are, I vow not to kill. I vow not to take what is not given. I vow not to misuse sexuality. I vow to refrain from false speech. I vow not to sell the wine of delusion. I vow not to slander. I vow not to praise self at the expense of others. I vow not to be avaricious.

[06:49]

I vow not to harbor ill will. I vow not to abuse the three treasures, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. So it's very easy to experience the precepts or see them as rules and external, something imposed upon us, something institutional or something that comes from the outside. But what I want to try to talk about is how the precepts aren't external. In fact, they are natural outgrowths of our life and our experience of our life, especially our experience of our life if we practice Satsang. So I wrote down a few ways to express this, that we become aware of the precepts as being true for us if we're cultivating awareness of the present moment, which is our practice of waking up, if we're trying to wake up.

[08:12]

In this way, maybe the most famous fascicle that we study as Soto Zen students is Dogen's Genjo Koan, which Koan means case or problem or a riddle, riddles that we use to kind of wake up, to experience the present moment. And the particular koan, the Genjo Koan, it's translated in a lot of ways, but I'll translate it as Genjo Koan is the koan of our everyday life, the koan of our life. And one way to look at the precepts is that they are the answer to that koan. They are the answer to Genjo Koan. So I think that this means that the precepts are different than how we usually think about rules, or commandments, or moral axioms.

[09:29]

It means that, like I said, they're not external. They're not a priori. They're not platonic. They don't exist before we exist. And I'd like to say that they're not human nature. And sometimes it may be easy to think that, well, the precepts are part of our human nature. But I think if that were true, human history would look quite different. That's kind of obvious. So during my talk and during Aspects, we have this reader. that we're referring to. So I'm going to read a passage from one of the lectures from the founder of this temple, Suzuki Roshi, that kind of captures a sense of how precepts are rules that arise from our experience. This is Suzuki Roshi.

[10:31]

This morning, I want to talk about Zen, Zen precepts. As you know, the real meaning of precepts is not just rules, but is rather our way of life. When we organize our life, you see something like rules. Even though you are not intending to observe some particular rule, the rules are always there. As soon as you get up, in order to wake up completely, you wash your face. That is a precept, one of the precepts. And at a certain time, you eat breakfast. When you become hungry, that is, you are observing some rules when you eat breakfast at a certain time. This is a brilliant passage because we don't have to wash our face in the morning. It's not our human nature to wash our face in the morning. But we come to wash our face in the morning because we're paying attention to our lives. We're paying attention to our experience. And we find that washing our face in the morning helps wake us up. Just like when we pay attention to our body and notice we're hungry, we eat.

[11:35]

Now eating is probably more human nature than washing our face, but the point remains that they're not just there without our doing anything. The precepts or these rules are there because we're paying attention to what's happening to us. And I think the proposition of the precepts for us is Or the suggestion is that when we pay attention to our life, when we practice zazen as a way of paying attention to our life, each waking moment, then some rules, guidelines naturally arise. And the ones that naturally arise are the ones that we have. This makes a lot of sense to me. And sometimes people, when they refer to the 10 prohibitory precepts that I read, they say, well, those sound so constraining, or they sound, and I never quite got that, because they don't sound, they sound like common sense in some way.

[12:54]

Here's another passage from the same lecture by Suzuki Roshi which talks about this, and talks about it in pointing us in the direction of how to practice the precepts, that is, how to observe them. We can be aware that they seem natural and wholesome and worthy, but we also have to live our life in accord with them in some way. He says, if the precepts are just some moral code, which we have in our mind, those precepts will not work at all. When you forget all the precepts and without trying to observe them in the same way as you eat when you are hungry, then naturally precepts are there. When you forget all about precepts and when you can observe them quite naturally, that is how you keep the precepts. So he's saying that we don't just... in practicing,

[14:16]

and sitting in Zazen and waking up to the present moment, we don't just notice that these are wholesome things to do. By waking up, it helps us to adhere to them. It helps our activity as well as our perception. One other thing I'll just mention briefly that's in our reading that that is consistent with saying the precepts as sort of a natural outgrowth of our experience or somehow naturally occurring. In Akin Roshi, he's talking, he observes when talking about the precepts that, and I was listening to something at KQED a few weeks ago about I think it was called Radiolab.

[15:20]

And they were talking about how early children have a sense of conscience, of right and wrong. It's very early. It's very early. And Robert Aiken says something of the same way. Same thing. Parents and nursery school teachers know that there's no one with a keener sense of justice than a small child. His piece is bigger than mine. How many times have you heard that? So as children, we have a sense of what's fair, because we know what suffering is, right? We know that we can get a smaller piece. But the next step, and the step that I'll continue to talk about, what arises, I think, as we mature, And as we observe our life, is that if I don't want to suffer, I don't want to make others suffer.

[16:23]

Empathy. So that's what I want to talk about next. When we practice, when we wake up to the present moment, what we discover is that... Read what I wrote here. That there is no separation between ourselves and others. Between ourselves and the world. That in some manner, that actually there's no self and other. There's no self and the world as two separate things. That there is only a seamless fabric of experience, of cause and effect. And that that fabric includes everything. That means that everything we do matters. Our actions ripple through the entire universe, and the entire universe is ourself.

[17:25]

So if everything is ourself, why would we want to harm anything? In the other Suzuki Roshi lecture in this booklet, which Alan read from the other night, And I think Ron referred to it as well in his talk last week. It is kind of a lecture where Suzuki Roshi is trying to say in another way what I was trying to say. And that is that there is really only one precept. And that precept is that there is really only one thing. And that is reality. And that one thing is also our self. And... I guess I could read what he says here.

[18:34]

All the precepts start from this precept. Without understanding this precept, our precepts don't make any sense. One reality which we cannot divide by 3 or 6 or 16. He's using those numbers, 3 or 6 or 16, because we have 16 precepts. So other ways to refer to this one thing that we have, words that we use as Buddhists, we talk about interdependence, that everything is dependent on everything else, and that you can't take one thing out. It's impossible without everything disappearing. Another word that we use is co-creation. That all of us and all things are co-creating the universe every moment.

[19:44]

Another phrase that comes to mind is everything is relationship. That our understanding of ourselves and our universe is our understanding how we relate to everything. that every moment we are creating the universe along with everything else in the universe. So in some ways this sounds to me kind of highfalutin. It's kind of abstract or it's often difficult to understand. So in preparing for this talk I was trying to think of a way that I could say something or we could do something now that would demonstrate this idea of interdependence or co-creation.

[20:53]

And I thought of something, and I don't know if it's going to work. So this is an experiment. So I don't know. Many of you have probably read Thich Nhat Hanh's commentary on the Heart Sutra. And he has this chapter where he talks about a piece of paper. And he talks about how everything in the universe is in this piece of paper. The sun, the trees, the soil, the people who work, you know. He goes through each kind of ecological explanation of how everything is in the piece of paper. So what I want to try to do is get a glimpse of how when we experience ourself, That truly, in ourself, is everyone we've ever come in contact with. That you, right now, are co-creating me.

[21:58]

And that, in fact, everyone who we have ever had contact with, related to, and also everyone we haven't, but we'll leave that aside for the moment, is inside of me. Is in me. So what I'd like to try to do is I'd like everyone to sit Zazen right now if you're not already. And take a minute to do that. And unlike when we sit Zazen, normally I'd like everyone to close their eyes. And I'll give us a few minutes to do that. And I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna do before I do it. Once we've been sitting for a little while, in a very short time, I'm going to speak some people's names. And I want us to sit with that name, like sitting Zazen with that name.

[23:03]

And that means that you can repeat the name to yourself to sort of let it hit you, let the name hit you. But don't grasp and don't start spinning out some discursive thought about it. Just feel the name in your body, in your mind body. And then I'll wait a bit and I'll read another name. And then I'd like to talk about it. Okay, so let's sit Sazen with our eyes closed. Naan.

[24:18]

Sojin. Abraham Lincoln. George Bush.

[25:56]

Okay, those are the only names I'll read. So I'll be eager to hear what other people's experience was, but if I do this exercise, I do feel these people in me as part of me. And it's sort of beyond words. I mean, it's beyond, obviously, with someone like mom, it's huge. But to try to reduce the experience for me, to try to reduce the experience of who these people are, to influences, factors, you know, socialization or what I read in books. None of that does it justice.

[27:24]

These people are in me. And so that means that, you know, I said mom. That means that my mom's mom is in me too and her mom's mom. Abraham Lincoln's mom is in me as well. And then I think about turning it around in a terrifying idea. What if I did this exercise with the people in my life and the name that I read was Greg? That's terrifying in a certain way to me and it brings home how everything I do matters in relationship to everyone I know.

[28:27]

And we could talk about this for a long time. I mean, in that moment, those people, like I said, I want to hear what everyone else thinks, whether they have this experience, but in that moment, Those people are creating, when I become aware, they're creating me, but I'm also creating them. Even Abraham Lincoln, every time I think about Abraham Lincoln, I'm co-creating him, even now. So we talked about the precepts, and Sojin has mentioned this a couple times in the last week or so, is that in one sense, in the relative sense, they're rules. And then from the side of emptiness, they don't exist, the precepts don't exist.

[29:31]

That is that you can't kill, you can't steal, you can't lie, because if everything is one, you can't take anything out, without taking it all out. Now, in this exercise, I feel that as well, that co-creation happens. My impact or my mother's impact on me, I mean, it happens no matter what I do or she does. What we do doesn't matter. Co-creation happens no matter what. It's just the truth. It's the absolute truth. But yet, it really matters, doesn't it? Everything we do really matters. How we co-create absolutely matters. So it's not so far from this experience for me to the three pure precepts.

[30:33]

I vow not to do evil. I vow to do all that is good. And then the third one, which sometimes seems so hard to understand, I vowed to save all sentient beings. We were talking Thursday about Shakyamuni and the difficulty Shakyamuni had in recognizing women as practitioners. And although he ended up doing it, he didn't actually end up completely doing it. And we can look at Buddha's history and see how women have not been treated as equals. And we deal with this today. This is a huge issue. I was thinking about my talk last night and I say, you know, we can save Shakyamuni Buddha. He's a sentient being. By dealing with this now, dealing it in our waking moment, we save him.

[31:37]

So this exercise also helps me to understand all the ways we talk about Buddhas and ancestors. Everyone is our Buddha and ancestor, and we are Buddhas and ancestors too. And maybe it's worth reading Dogen talking about Buddhas and ancestors. This is one passage from Ehe Koso Hotsudanam. I didn't say that right, but... Buddhas and ancestors of old were as we. We in the future shall be Buddhas and ancestors. Revering Buddhas and ancestors, we are one Buddha and one ancestor. Awakening Bodhi mind, we are one Bodhi mind.

[32:45]

It really is true. What do you call Paris? Well, I want to leave time for questions. There's a lot of other stuff on my little thing here. Well, a couple of other things to say. During the Bodhisattva Ceremony, also called Repentance Ceremony, we chant all my ancient twisted karma.

[33:55]

From beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. It's very easy sort of to try to struggle with this vow as the ways that I've screwed up, the ways I've broken the precepts. But another way to experience that vow is a vow to wake up to that endless change of co-creation. Because the twisted karma is not just what we did yesterday or we did 10 years ago, it's what everyone has done over all time and space. That is in us. And waking up is waking up to that. And so, the vow to practice and

[34:57]

the vow to repent. I mean, we could look at it in one way as, I repent because I lied yesterday and I took an extra cupcake and so my wife didn't get a cupcake, or something like that. That was a glib. That's one way to repent, but it's kind of, it's off in a certain sense, because it still brings it into the realm of ego. I know what's right and wrong, and I did wrong, and I'm in control. And there's another way to repent, and that is to say, I don't know, and I'm going to let go in this moment and try to wake up. And in some manner in the Mahayana tradition, that's true repentance. It's kind of a repentance of humility.

[36:00]

In the Samantabhadra Bodhisattva Sutra, It says, uh, if you wish to repent, sit Sazen and contemplate the true nature of all things. So, uh, I do want to just end saying a little something about the ethics guidelines and the process that went into that. That it's kind of like the same thing. If the precepts are waking up to our life. and dealing with it, I think what we tried to do, whether successfully or not, was as a community, wake up to our community life and come up with guidelines, precepts for our community life. And we tried to do it together. And that's the only way you can do it. You can't do it by yourself. I mean, that's the other thing.

[37:16]

When I said Abraham Lincoln's name, everybody's Abraham Lincoln was their own Abraham Lincoln. You can't reduce Abraham Lincoln to one thing in that moment. Everybody has their own Abraham Lincoln. And in the next moment, if I say Abraham Lincoln, he's completely there for every one of us, too. So when we take care of our life, We're not only, we not only have to take care of our life for everyone else. The only way to take care of our life is to do it with everyone else. It's not so important what I think is right and wrong. What's important is can we work together to deal with our life. Does anybody have anything to say?

[38:23]

Peter. I would just say, ask everyone else. Ask, okay. Yeah. Alan. I started watching my energy these can be seen in a somewhat somber frame. And I'm wondering if you could say something about where's the joy? How did the precepts arise with joy? Or how did the joy arise in the precepts? Yeah. Well, thank you. You know, somebody asked me the same question about my last talk, which was a different subject. Where's the joy? So I must be a rather somber cat. I'm a rather somber character. Well, you know, the second pure precept is I vow to do all that is good. I mean, we don't only matter to everyone and co-create everyone negatively, we do positively too.

[39:36]

I mean, and the most joy that I have All my joy is about connection. It's about my relationships. It's about everyone I love. When I'm feeling joy, I love everyone. When you're feeling joy, you love everyone. Another thing that it reminds me of, you know, it feels to me like, you know, let's say I notice maybe a temptation to do something which might be construed as breaking a prisa. I often notice that the energy is coming from my suffering and my own suffering is kind of prompting that.

[40:40]

And so, the precepts are a good way to clue into my own suffering. Teach me how to pay attention to myself. Anyway, does that answer your question? Okay. Do you want to say something about it? Okay. Sojin. Well, in relation to that, what Alan was saying, The reason that, you know, there's a tendency in prohibitory precepts to think on the negative side, what's wrong, what don't do. But then the other side is the do. Do this. Don't kill. Don't, don't, don't.

[41:54]

Think of do, do, do. And that's the light side or the bright side. They have both sides. And I think that's the connection. Yeah. Yeah, you know that. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you. Well, you know, in the Jukai ceremony, in Take Refuge, we have changed the name to Clear Mind Precepts, but in Bodhisattva we still have Great It made me realize, like, his story never ends. A person's story never ends.

[42:56]

It just never ends. It's just amazing. And that means, I guess, that my story never ends. It's very hard to... Yes. from the story of this difficulty with accepting, or struggle to accept, in the other side. And where that led me was that even in full awareness, And so, on the one hand, in awareness to have the humility to know what you don't know, and that you really are required, you have to work together, those to me, that in a way puts it in a nutshell.

[44:23]

Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, that makes sense. It's good to talk and reveal ourselves and reveal. and ask and listen. When we chant, there's that one echo where we say, we refer to the ancestors both hidden and revealed, acknowledging that what we don't see and hear and don't experience is part of it, is completely intervened as well. Ross. I have an idea or think that the concept of being interrelated is something very deeply rooted in our being, that we're all interrelated. Well, Ryan's got an answer for you, but I'll give you mine first.

[46:07]

Interconnectedness isn't just empathy or identification. We're related to people that we don't identify with or that we're in confrontation with. That's what's defining our interrelatedness at that moment. The other side is, though, that for me, when I look deep enough, I can empathize with even people I disagree with profoundly. I can see how they might feel the way they feel. Because we're just, we're malleable, you know? the intersection of causes and conditions, and all of our causes and conditions are different.

[47:08]

You know, I was thinking about this in terms of like, we have a community and there was a fair amount, some conflict and disagreement when we were coming up with these ethics guidelines. But we had to work it out. And I was thinking, well, what if Karl Rove walked into the Zendo and started sitting with us? You know? Do I sit? He said, well, what I want to do is take him out back to the Zendo and get him to taste my Birkenstocks, right? But you can't. No. You know, you have to sit next to him, too. And you know, if he was in our sangha, you know, we don't kick him out. We don't, we practice with him. Right? And think about how hard that would be. But yet, that's what we have to do. Ron, and then, what's your name?

[48:17]

Trevor. And then Kate, but I don't think we have, what time is it? Five after. Five after. How about, can Kate, can you sacrifice? Thank you. So, Ron Ed is up, hand up first. When I drive, I drive four days a week to San Francisco. In the morning during rush hour, I drive up Fremont Street and then up Pine Street. And everybody's going to work. And you see lots of people out on the street. And, you know, you have to stop at every stoplight so I have a chance to look at people every morning, month after month. And all these people, I don't know any of them. And some of them are attractive, some of them are interesting, some of them are very bland and, to me, whatever biases I have, they look, you know, that person just sort of looks sort of faceless or, you know, there's nothing really interesting about them. And I think, if I look at my own life, and I think of all the little dramas, incredible variety and detail of drama and

[49:24]

ups and downs and progression and regression and circles and all the rest of it. I think every one of those people that I'm looking at has the same exact complexity in their life. To me it looks like they're just somebody walking down the street and they don't look particularly interesting. Well, some people do, some people don't. I've gone through all these different changes and all these different dramas and I'm going through them right at that moment. But to me it doesn't look like anything is happening. But I know that there is. So to answer Rob's question, that's how, if you really think about that, if you project all of your drama out at everybody else and realize they're probably going through all the same kind of dramas in their own version. Yeah, that reminds me that, and this might be oversimplifying or even incorrect, but I do think that deep down there is something that we all want, the same thing, one fundamental thing, and that is to feel whole.

[51:03]

And, you know, causes and conditions can cause people to try to feel whole in very, very different ways. Trevor, and then we'll be done. I was going to say about the Karl Rove thing. Well, two things actually. One, knowing here, I don't think really know this Karl Rove, like on a personal level. As much as we hear about it on paper and stuff, like, where he'd come in and sit down, like, not personally, I'd be like, yeah, I'd love to sit down. learn, like, you know, see what's going on there. I mean, there's probably so much to learn from somebody like that as compared from, like, your neighbor that you know, like, every single day, because they're so different from such a big circle. And the other thing is, like, I think, like, there was at least one teacher that came, he was like a doctor, he came from the sick and not the awareness of their self and why they take the way they do and why the world runs with it.

[52:15]

They don't need that much help as compared to where Karl Rove would come in here looking around and I'm nervous and want to sit down. That's the guy that I want to get a hold of and talk to more than someone who can already handle himself. I mean, if Karl Rove became a member of Berkeley's Ancestor, I mean, it's hard to imagine other things that would be as good for our practice. I mean, really. All right, we got it. Thank you.

[52:43]

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