Good evening. Welcome. Happy Labor Day. And since it's Labor Day, I will be talking tonight about right livelihood, which I consider to be one of the most important Buddhist teachings in terms of our modern society and our situation today. So right livelihood has to do with working and how we make a living, but more fundamentally, it's about the right to live, to life as vitality, liveliness, the right to honorable, dignified, constructive work, and the human right to expression. So traditionally, right livelihood is part of

[01:01]

the Eightfold Path, which is one of the first Buddhist teachings, part of the Four Noble Truths, the First Noble Truth. So probably you all know this, but the First Noble Truth is dissatisfactoriness, sometimes translated as suffering, that things are out of line. Dukkha, the word translated as suffering, has to do with a cart or vehicle that's out of alignment. So things are out of line, out of alignment. And if we look around at the world, we might say very much so. The Second Noble Truth is that there's a cause for this. It's not just random, that this cause has to do with, well, that everything comes together to cause everything else, that everything has a cause, and that everything we do has an effect, but also that this dissatisfactoriness,

[02:03]

this suffering, is caused by our own desires and grasping and attachment. The Third Noble Truth is the good news, that there's an end to suffering. So the Fourth Noble Truth, in which is right livelihood, is called the Eightfold Path. This includes right livelihood and also right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. So I want to focus not on right livelihood, but just to say this is one of many kind of guidances or systems, often with numbers associated, to help us find our way to express meditative awareness in our life, in the world, in our ordinary everyday activity. How do we extend this into the world? So there are also the various precepts. We do follow the Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts. There's the Six Paramitas, or Transcendent Practices, or sometimes

[03:09]

the Ten. And then we have this Eightfold Path. When we say right view, right effort, right mindfulness, right speech, it's not, my feeling of it is, it's not right as opposed to wrong. It's not judgmental. It's about expressing the uprightness of our sitting practice in the world. It's right on. It's the way in which we sit uprightly, relaxed, but paying attention to this experience, body and mind, here on our cushions. So right livelihood is a way of seeing how we live in the world. So there are many aspects of this. I want to talk about it from a number of perspectives and then have some time for discussion. Originally, in the Buddha's time, right livelihood specifically referred to not pursuing a harmful occupation, not living through harmful means.

[04:15]

So it referred to not killing animals. So being a butcher would be an example of not right livelihood. This is an Indian culture where animals are treated with a great deal of reverence. Other things that were in early teachings considered not right livelihood would be making a living through deception, or through cheating others, or trading in arms, or other weapons, or trading in intoxicants. Doing so, anything that violated the precept, including encouraging intoxication. As Buddhism, and Zen is part of Buddhism, is a living tradition, all of the Buddhist teachings we need to look at in terms of what they mean in our own context, so we can have modern criteria for looking at these guidelines. We could see all of these, the transcendent practices, the precepts, and the Eightfold Path as guidelines to how to express

[05:17]

this upright meditative awareness, this connectedness that we can feel as we settle into this practice, how we express that in the world. So in terms of modern criteria, one that seems most central to me is just to have some knowledge of the consequences of our work, to know the effects and products of our work. So you might be working on an assembly line, for example. We don't do much manufacturing in this country anymore, but you might be just doing one piece of, or metaphorically, one piece of some action that leads to some outcome at the end of the assembly line. If that's a constructive, helpful product, then that would be right livelihood. If it's something that's harmful, maybe not. So there are numbers of criterias. Again, there's not one definition of right or

[06:25]

non-right livelihood, but ways of paying attention to this. Generally, activity that is in accord with the precepts, that supports life rather than killing, that supports generosity rather than theft or cheating, that supports truthfulness instead of lies. Hopefully, that reflects respect for all beings. These would be various criteria for right livelihood. Practically speaking, any particular work that any of us might do might have several different... We might assess it in various ways. Another aspect would be just the pace of our work. So whatever it is that we do for livelihood, does it allow us to be aware? So if you're working in some situation where you're working very, very fast and you're measuring things at a very fast pace, you may not have the space or time

[07:33]

to bring mindfulness to your body and mind as you're working. That would be another criteria. This isn't to say that many of us in the modern world do what's called multitasking. Now, it's not that you shouldn't do that, that that's not right livelihood, but can you, as you deal with the various different aspects of your work, be present with each one? You may be shifting from one to another. So again, I don't want to encourage some simple definition or understanding of this. All of Buddha's teaching are guidelines, and we could also say questions, something to look at, a way of paying attention to what we do. I want to talk about this in terms of our society too, but first just in terms of defining what might be right livelihood for us. So from a deeper perspective on right livelihood,

[08:37]

you know, people should have some means to support themselves by doing some meaningful activity to allow human integrity and dignity and uprightness, employing your interests and abilities, and bringing that creatively, bringing creative energy to your work, to contribute constructively to our world. Our world and our community needs that. So again, this is maybe an ideal, but it's a way of looking at how do we find our way of living, and what is our livelihood, and does it allow us to creatively express our own inner dignity? So I think right livelihood is an ethical issue in a lot of ways. Practically speaking, of course, in our economy now today, in our society, there's lots of

[09:41]

unemployment, there's lots of underemployment. This includes numbers of people in our own sangha. So this teaching of right livelihood, I think, you know, we can think about it individually, but I think for our society and country and world to think about right livelihood is very relevant to think about it in terms of our society. So just looking at a news story today, there's not much hiring, there's a widespread loss of job security. Economists now, government economists now predict that it won't be until 2014 or later that we can expect to regain most of the 8.4 million jobs that have been lost in this recession. And maybe more difficultly, that's a word, the new jobs that are going to be made to fill onto two categories according to this news story. Professional fields with very high pay,

[10:46]

like lawyers, research scientists, software engineers. So we have some of all of those in our sangha. And then aside from that, lower skilled, lower paying jobs, home health care aides, store clerks, those kinds of jobs. So we all need jobs to some way of livelihood to, you know, pay the rent, to pay our bills, to take care of this life, to take care of ourselves and our families. But from a Buddhist ethical perspective, there's also the equally the question of how jobs can allow some dignity. So I think, so I want to include that. But one of the economic aspects is the idea of the living wage that, you know, so basically from just basic principle of decency for our society.

[11:48]

And this, of course, unfortunately is not the case now, but people should be able, people who work, who give themselves to their work, who give their energy to their work, should be able to make a living from doing that and support their families. I looked in Wikipedia, which is, scholars don't consider a reliable source, but you can find some things there anyway. According to Wikipedia, living wage as a kind of idea goes back to Pope Leo XIII in 1891. So it was originally a Catholic idea to truck that people should have a, not just a minimum wage, but a wage that actually supports them to live. This seems like, you know, part of our American idea of right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If someone works, they should be able to support themselves. And I, just a little bit about that. It said that in the United States, the state of Maryland, several municipalities and local governments have enacted ordinances, which set minimum wages

[12:56]

higher than the federal minimum for the purpose of requiring all jobs to meet the living wage for that region, practically. This usually works out to be $3 to $7 above the federal minimum wage. And it mentions San Francisco and Santa Fe, and Washington, D.C. and Albuquerque have passed, the cities that have passed wide-reaching living wage ordinances. And interestingly, in Chicago, there was also a living wage ordinance passed in 2006. So that was just before I moved here, so some of you may know more about this. Apparently, it passed the city council that was vetoed by the mayor. Interesting. Anyway, living wage, again, this is according to Wikipedia, living wage laws typically cover only businesses that receive state assistance or have contracts with government. And now there are other similar ordinances in Boston, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.

[14:00]

There's at least 140 living wage ordinances in cities throughout the United States and campaigns underway in many cities, colleges, and so forth. Anyway, I think that from the Buddhist perspective of right livelihood for people to be able to make a living at it seems reasonable, part of what I would think of as right livelihood. But again, I want to come back to talking about how this applies to us personally, and just some perspectives on that. But I also want to talk about it in terms of our society, that not just should it be a living wage, but that there'd be some kind of, again, these criteria for constructive, wholesome activities. So there's an issue, some of us were talking about this yesterday in Zen history about Zen and war. There's been criticism of some of the Japanese Buddhist teachers,

[15:07]

other Buddhist teachers in Japan during the first half of the 20th century, who not only went along with the militarism then, but actually actively supported it, a few of them. And I think as Zen people in this country, we should also be aware of the militarism of our own economy. So, of course, the touchstone for this goes back to a great Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, in 1961, talked about the military-industrial complex. I want to read a little bit of what he said, just because it's so relevant to us today. He said we should, he was concerned about the new conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large army, the arms industry, the total influence, economic, politically, the spiritual, Eisenhower said, is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government, our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our

[16:12]

society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex, the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. So we have the situation now of corporations and weapons companies who have a great deal of control over our foreign policy and over our society as a whole, with overwhelming lobbying of legislators, as Eisenhower warned. So we've lost manufacturing, of course. This isn't news to companies. There was something recently in the news about CEOs who had managed to ship, the more jobs they've managed to get rid of in their companies or ship overseas, the higher, the more millions they earned.

[17:14]

But what we do have is weapons manufacturing in this country, and now almost all congressional districts are impacted by potential base closures or closures of military research, regardless of how the legislators or their constituency feels about military spending. So right livelihood becomes an ethical and moral model for assessing a society's livelihood as well as individuals, and I think is a way of thinking about how we renew the sense of ethics in our country. Again, I don't think right livelihood is something that we can measure by one index. I don't, I think, for some reason, I don't think it's something that we can measure right, working in the military or for the military might be right livelihood. There's the model of the spiritual warrior, and I do think that, you know, my own belief,

[18:20]

there's a tendency towards nonviolence in Buddhism, often not historically enacted, but there are times when we need a military and police force and arms and so forth for real defense, to help with kinds of harm being done in other countries for peacemaking forces. The problem really is when we have politicians influenced by weapons manufacturers to the extent that we have preemptive wars and invasions and occupations, this becomes a problem for all of us, actually, in terms of what other kinds of livelihood is available. I have a quote from Bobby Kennedy, too. Maybe I'll shoot a little bit of it. Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values

[19:20]

in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product, if we judge America by that, counts air pollution and cigarette advertising and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts locks on our doors and jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder and chaotic sprawl, all as part of gross national product. He was talking about this in 1968, you know, how much more now? So, I talk about this stuff in the context of precepts and thinking about what is going on in our society in terms of what is wholesome, what is positive and constructive. How do we support that in looking at and being aware of our society? So, I think principles of right livelihood applied to our society would be very helpful. There are ways to think about not just quarterly profit margins, but really

[20:21]

what, where are, where are the resources of our country being allocated? How is that constructive and supportive of people expressing positive, upright life and vitality? So, I do think this teaching has a lot to say to our society now. And I wanted to say that, and we can talk more about that, but I want to also turn to our own personal directions towards right livelihood, practically speaking for each of us. You know, we, in our sangha, we have actually quite, it's very nice that we have a diversity of livelihoods from lawyers to teachers to parents to therapists to artists to yoga teachers athletes, quite a range of what people do, students also. How do we

[21:32]

see in this difficult world, particularly our own direction towards right livelihood? Again, not seeing it in terms, judgmentally, in terms of right or wrong, but seeing what helps support our uprightness, our awareness, our own sense of uprightness in our life, our own support of the people around us and of our awareness. So, I don't have answers about this. I think it's important that we ask good questions and that we think about these things together. One direction towards this, going back to showing my age, Joseph Campbell, the anthropologist, talking about follow your bliss. So, what is it that gives you energy, that gives you vitality? Practically speaking, of course, many of us, maybe any job we have has problems, has parts of it where, you know,

[22:39]

we don't like some of the people or there's some parts of what we have to do. I don't like giving grades. I work as a teacher as well as this kind of teaching, but, you know, it's part of what I have to do. I have to give grades and sometimes I've failed students and I don't like to do that. But anyway, this idea of following your bliss, I was talking recently about this question that Suzuki Roshi asked, what is the most important thing? How do you find what's important to you? And it's not that there's one most important thing. How do you see your own interests and abilities? How do you appreciate them? And then, how can we find a way creatively to apply them to doing some work in the world that is constructive and helpful? So, you know, one extreme example of this I've mentioned, I was a

[23:41]

few weeks ago at this Western socially engaged Buddhist symposium at, in Western Massachusetts at Zen Peacemaker's Order. And amongst the many people there, John Kabat-Zinn spoke and told his story. He's someone, some of you know his name. He's written a number of good books and he's had actually considerable Buddhist training, but, you know, tries to avoid talking about Buddhism. He did there since everybody was Buddhist more or less. But he has worked for many, many years in the medical profession, bringing meditative practices into the mainstream Western medicine, into hospitals, such that now they've done experiments and demonstrated that meditative practices of calming and stress reduction actually are helpful in healing. And Western medicine now recognizes that. So he's, you know, he has trained people who are

[24:47]

training people and doing this in hospitals all over the country. And it's generally accepted in other ways, also talking about this. But he told about his own story. He was a student at MIT in biochemistry or so, I don't know, some technical topic. And he decided he didn't really want to do that. And he said that he, for himself, he defined a job as something I'd love to do so much I'd pay to do it. And this may be an extreme example of following your Bruce. And maybe it reflects a kind of, you know, privileged background, and it's not possible for so many people in our country and in the world. So that attitude, I just thought I'd throw that in, you know, something I really, to do something that I'd really love to do. So much I'd pay to do it, he said, anyway. But I think as, again, in the context of this very difficult economy, where many of us are

[25:49]

unemployed or underemployed, how do we think about how we creatively extend what we do in the world? David's not here tonight. But our former treasurer, David Hill is kind of my poster boy for Right Livelihood. So I'll tell us his story. He was working as a stock trader and didn't like it. And he's a marathon runner, now an ultra marathon runner. He also likes dogs. His father is a veterinarian. So as many of you know, he started the Chicago Dog Runner and has this quite successful business now where he himself goes running many dogs for exercise. And he has, I don't know how many people now, eight or 10 people working under him doing that throughout Chicago. So it's just, it's an interesting example. And maybe, you know, a unique example. But to combine things that you like doing or that you're interested in and find a way to find a need that you can serve. So, you know, I think also that our work, whatever work we do,

[26:57]

is a creative kind of expression. And I talk a lot about how Zazen is a kind of creative expression that supports all our other creative expressions. So whatever kind of work we do, it's possible for that to be a way of expressing our meditative uprightness and creativity. I don't think this is just something that has to do with very glamorous or creative jobs like being an artist or a soccer coach. I think anybody can be in regular ordinary jobs can find a way to bring their creativity to it. So I've heard numbers of stories about this and seen it. Somehow bus drivers. I've heard of stories of several bus drivers who somehow just by their cheerfulness and awareness and greeting people, you know, change, you know, change how people feel about

[27:58]

their day. Give people a kind of good, you know, kind of start to their day. I've, you know, just at the grocery store, cashiers who are present and aware and friendly and kind and actually engage their customers. It's maybe a very brief exchange, but there's a way to make a difference to smile, to be friendly, to be human in whatever, in many kinds of work. So it's not about right livelihood as finding some particularly, you know, fancy or exotic, you know, dog running kind of work, but in whatever you do, how can we bring our best creative energy to it, to seeing the people around us and the people we work with and bringing positive energy to that. I think of a woman who sat in my group in the Bay Area who was a paralegal and she told a story

[28:59]

once of one of the lawyers she worked for, a woman who was very grouchy, let's say, and kind of nasty to the people, the other people there. And Rose just decided she was going to be, you know, not in any special way, but just be friendly with her. And then one, I forget the exact story, but one day this lawyer, she just said, I'm sorry, I've been really mean to you, haven't I? And she kind of shifted. So how we change the people around us, how we extend awareness and kindness, it's kind of mysterious. We have to be patient. Sometimes the person who gives you a hard time at work, maybe you're a teacher, may have something to teach you. And how do we see the virtue that they have? And that doesn't mean to ignore the ways in which there may be causing harm. And then how do we help them to not cause harm? This is all tricky. And this is all part of this

[30:01]

personal practice of right livelihood. How do we express our Buddha nature and share it in that kind of situation in our work in the world? So I wanted to talk about this on both those levels in terms of, you know, how to think about our own activity in the world. And also how to think, how to have this as a kind of way of thinking about our society. I think our society needs right to have a kind of context of right livelihood. I don't know what the, you know, non-Buddhist way of talking about that would be, that President Obama or somebody could kind of, you know, start a campaign for. But we need to shift how we think about our economy in this country. So that's what I wanted to, those are the perspectives I wanted to put out there tonight. And I would love to have some discussion. One of the things we do here is, you know,

[31:05]

to talk together. And so comments, questions, responses, other perspectives, please feel free. When you were talking earlier about right livelihood being kind of an ethical based thing, you can't have something that's very kind and generous that you're doing that might have roots that are a little bit more crooked or unethical. So it's hard to really maybe like with all the bureaucracies that we have, it's hard to be true to be doing that right livelihood. Yes, thank you. That's right. So when I,

[32:07]

so the point about what does right mean, I think I've been talking about this in various contexts, that we can easily get caught in some idea or ideal of purity or something like that. We're living in, we're all part of the context of a world in which the environment is being damaged and so forth. And there are, and people are being damaged by the way things work in our country. It's not about finding a right livelihood where we're totally pure. You know, there are people who try and do that and go off the grid and live, you know, out in the woods and bless them. But we're here in Chicago. So how do we be in the world? It's not a matter of being some ideal of perfection or purity. How do we see the various criteria for what we might call upright livelihood and do our best in the situation we're in? And if things are really, if we feel like what we're

[33:14]

doing is really destructive, then maybe we, you know, might look at how to shift what we do. But there's a way to bring some uprightness into, for most of us, into the work we already are doing. But it's an important point. It's not about some perfect livelihood that doesn't exist. Or maybe it does. Maybe some of you have that. That's great. But here we are in the world. This is a practice for human beings, not for super-beings. Yes, Dawn? In Basil's field, in research, science, ecology. This is Dawn's husband, yes. So, he loves it. And he feels that what he's doing is right. But I know that there have been times when he's come home and told me about some of the research

[34:15]

to see, not even here in Chicago, but just over the past few years, different research that he's done. And where we've had disagreements where I'm like, what the hell are you doing? Like, that's not right. You know, so he's really had an explanation to me. And then, you know, even now, you know, even people, there are a lot of people, even colleagues that don't maybe agree with maybe the research, you know, because people are always going to agree and they think it's wrong. Maybe that's wrong, you shouldn't be doing that. And that way is wrong, and you shouldn't be doing that. So it's interesting, because I see that all the time. And so he's always, so, you know, there's some defense there. Yeah, and I think that's why I was trying to talk about different indexes of different criteria for this idea of right livelihood.

[35:16]

Right. And I feel like he feels that he's doing good, and I feel like he's doing harm. You know, so, but I think that there's just a disagreement between, you know, any of the play and scientists. Yeah, the example of the military is a particularly interesting one, I think. There are meditation groups in the Pentagon. There was a meditation group in the Air Force Academy in Colorado. I don't know if it's still going on. So I don't like it that there are, you know, pilots flying around with nuclear weapons. But I'm glad that some of them have some meditation experience. Maybe it gives them more of a chance in any way that for military people to have some settledness is a good thing. And maybe they can resist more easily orders from politicians that are misguided or harmful or criminal, which we've had.

[36:17]

So this realm of ethics is not about, you know, in, I guess, the Ten Commandments is, thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not. Our sense of ethics in the Bodhisattva precepts is, well, what about this? So just not killing and supporting life. Well, so we should consider our diets. But that doesn't necessarily for everyone mean being a vegetarian, although it might. There's, you know, it's the question is, how do we see what we're doing and look at it? How do we bring awareness to it? It's not, it doesn't seem to me as black and white. Yes, please. To add on to what you just said about, you know, not killing, I think it was in Rev. Anderson's book, Being Upright, where he talks about farming practices and that even just farming vegetables can kill a lot of birds and insects as well.

[37:20]

And I think it kind of, with Right Livelihood, it seems to be balanced with Right Effort. Would you rather give money to a butcher that is mindful of what he does, or a psychotherapist that violates ethics to mislead patients? Right. Yeah. And so the point is to pay attention to these questions, to live with question. And yeah, agriculture is also very problematic now. I was listening to some new information about agribusiness, you know, as opposed to the old, I don't know if there's still family farms. I guess there still are some, but there's a great deal of what we eat that is poisoned, knowingly. There's horrible stories about the way that chickens are raised, and that pigs and cows are raised,

[38:21]

which leads me to not want to eat them, not because of the killing, but because of what the effects are on soil, on agriculture, and so forth. So yeah, it's a complicated world to live in now. Any other perspectives or thoughts or reflections from any perspective? Yes, Brooks. I worked for some years in advertising type of office environments, and the last one I had for quite some time was in a catalog company. And there was a lot of power structure in that place. Like, they would make the deadlines as tight as possible to save money and things like that. And I was kind of this middle person, whatever. I felt like there were a lot of things about it that made it, you know, there were things I didn't agree about, management and stuff like that. But when I would come back from yoga, I felt like, you know, I had these smiles to offer people.

[39:26]

And so I felt like in that sense, I really had a lot to offer. And now, you know, bit by bit, I've become a full-time yoga teacher. But now it's funny because I wonder, because there's so much benefit, like, I feel like my ego might feed off. Like, when I go to the different places, I feel like people are so happy to see me. And it's like, am I just being greedy for this kind of situation I have where I get all this affection in my life? And it's sort of like, well, maybe that's okay, but I do it by myself. You guys just, let me know if you see that question. I had been having a thought that sort of ties into this, but it's a quote from the Dalai Lama.

[40:42]

I can't remember the context exactly, but he talked about enlightened self-interest, and basically how much of the good we do in the world can be, you know, we can acknowledge that our motivation can be because it feels good. And which made me think the other week, I think in Sashin, I came to you and I said, I'm having such a good time. I'm enjoying my zazen so much, it feels selfish or greedy. And you told me how important it was to enjoy for all beings. I don't know, I just keep sitting with that. Somehow that, I think that can, I find that happening in work too, in my artwork. Yeah, so in zazen, I talk about enjoying your inhale and exhale. When we get up from our sitting and go into our work life, whatever job that is, how do we bring some presence, you know, as Brooks was describing too, and some kindness to the situation?

[41:50]

It's not always easy, but that makes a difference in the world. So there's so many levels of this, to enjoy what you're doing, to bring your most wholesome, creative uprightness to the situation. And also then, but then also there's looking at what's the product or the effect of that. So, you know, in advertising, you know, that might be doing something constructive, letting people know about products that they actually could benefit from. Or it might be in kind of getting people, tricking people to, you know, buy things that are not so good for them, you know, and you have to look at that. So it's, this isn't easy, but I think it's an important part of our practicing in this world, in this society. Yes, Jeremy. Before you had mentioned a talk that you went to by Joan Halifax. Yes. And you talked, she had talked about kind of tapping into this compassion that doesn't kind of train your energy, it's kind of there, it's universal.

[42:58]

Yes, yes. Universal compassion, yes, right. So is our pursuit to bring right livelihood into our life more so, how do we realize that kind of universal compassion in our daily life? Is that kind of like really what we're trying to do? Yeah, well, one of our most important precepts is that we're doing this together with all beings. We sit together, we're supporting, each of you here is supporting everybody else here to be here, to be present, to have a chance to look at our lives, to actually engage in how to be creative about bringing more energy to that. So, yeah, this is something we do together with everyone, and we have the precept of benefiting all beings. So, you know, part of the problem for Zen at War in Japan and leading up to World War II was that there were Zen teachers who thought, okay, this is what's happening in our society.

[44:02]

Let's just be wholehearted about it and show them how to really, you know, totally give yourself to doing this, to wholeheartedly doing this act of killing lots of people. That's a problem. So we have to look at what's happened, what the result of our work is, but also what is the spirit of our own energy and how does that support the people around us? This is a very challenging question. I don't have answers. I want to bring up the question for all of us. We have a chance, especially for a sangha like this, where we're in Chicago, in the world. How do we extend this space that we connect with of zazen into our life? And it's not about simple judgments either. So, yes, universal compassion. Thank you.

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