Good morning. I'm very happy to be here this morning. I've been away for a while and I find myself upon returning home being inordinately happy to be here. And perhaps you will understand a little bit better why I feel that way after I say a little bit about where I've been and what I've been up to. My theme for this morning is the relationship between our apprehending the impermanent nature of all things and the cultivation, our ability to cultivate love and understanding. And to some degree what I want to see if I can do is to illuminate a little bit something

[01:04]

that I've had a glimpse of over the last several months in particular about that relationship. I think that in order to talk about what it is I want to talk about I should first say a little bit about where I've been over the last couple of months. Two days after Christmas I went to India, to the northern part of India in Bihar state which is, I'm told, one of the poorest if not the poorest state in India. And that is also the state where there is this small village called Bodh Gaya which is the place where the Buddha entered enlightenment. And there is in fact a very large and quite splendid stupa there at the site of the Buddha's enlightenment. And the village, which is basically a very small Indian village, is consequently the

[02:09]

place where thousands of pilgrims go to visit this holy site, a kind of hotbed of Buddhist pilgrimage activity. And 20 minutes drive from Bodh Gaya is a rather large city, the city of Gaya, which is second to Varanasi in its importance in the Hindu world. So this particular village where I stayed for about a month is a place where one can feel the presence of the historical Buddha and the continuation of the teachings that came from him and a kind of active expression of religious life and feeling on the part of people literally from all over the world. This is the second time that I have been in Bodh Gaya, but I spent considerably more time

[03:12]

there this time and was surprised that there was so much I didn't understand about this village when I was there before on a much shorter visit. At the end of the month in Bodh Gaya, my husband joined me after I'd finished a retreat there in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Some of you know the abbot of that monastery. His name is Tara Tulku, and he gave some teachings here in June and early July this last year and is our good friend and who asked me to please convey his warm-hearted greetings to Zen Center and in particular to Gringolch. After being in his monastery for a retreat, Bill and I went to Nepal for what was on a calendar two days but felt much longer than that, a very intense visit to the Kathmandu

[04:13]

Valley where, among other things, we visited many stupas that are in that valley, including the biggest stupa in the world, the one that's at Bodh Nath, which many of you probably know at least through pictures, and I know some of you have visited there. A very beautiful and lively stupa with a teeming life going on around it. But there are many stupas in that valley, and it's a very beautiful, beautiful spot. We also were visiting the site of a new Buddhist monastery there, so it was a continuation of this pilgrimage to sacred places in that region. We then, on our way home, spent a little bit of time in Old Delhi and went from there through London and came home, where I then entered into that land called sickness.

[05:14]

I came home actually quite sick with bronchitis and some particularly recalcitrant Indian bug, which effectively stopped me for a month and was its own teacher in a way. In the last ten days or so, I was in New York at the American Museum of Natural History where the monks from the Gyuto Monastery who visited us this last fall were in residence making a rather large sculpture as a special offering for the beginning of the Tibetan New Year. And this particular sculpture is made out of butter and is a remembering of the fifteen days of miracles performed by the Buddha. And so every year around the full moon at the beginning of the Tibetan New Year, Tibetan monks from many different monasteries will make these big sculptures, which include many

[06:23]

Buddhas, great teachers, offering goddesses, protective deities, beautiful flowers, long life meditations, the full display of exuberant Tibetan Buddhist iconography all wrought in somewhat rancid, chilled, Crisco relative. And during the four weeks that the monks were in the museum, 50,000 people came through to watch them work and to talk to them and to be exposed to their atmosphere. And so for the time that I was in New York, I hung out with them and with these people who were coming to visit them. It was a very moving and powerful and amusing experience.

[07:25]

I want to say one last thing about this business of being sick. The last week I was in India, my bronchitis was so bad that I couldn't breathe very well. It gave me a new relationship and understanding of the breath and the fragileness of our life. So I went to Delhi, which is very congested and has a very serious air pollution problem, not being able to breathe very well anyway. It was very interesting for me to notice my state of mind and notice what I did and didn't notice in that situation, being in this, particularly the old part of Delhi, which makes New York look calm, sparsely populated, and quite benign in contrast. One of the things that I was reminded of again in being in India and Nepal is that in that part

[08:34]

of the world, and I know in other parts of the world as well, but particularly there, life seems very basic. Birth and death are at one's fingertips at every minute. And so there don't seem to be as many distractions away from the truth of our human life, as I experience here. Relatively simpler life, and of course being in a retreat situation, that's even more the case. It's also, I find, much more difficult to do almost anything. The kinds of things that we take for granted, like paper, are very hard to come by in India. I did notice that there was toilet paper for sale in Bodh Gaya, which I don't remember several years ago.

[09:36]

A kind of treasure. We even bought toilet paper and put it on the offering tray some days. I was also not quite prepared for some quality of a kind of police state. The presence of armed soldiers almost everywhere. And because we were primarily with Tibetan people in the several places where we were visiting, I had a sense of the kinds of restrictions that the Tibetans in exile are living under, even in India, where they are certainly significantly freer than those Tibetans who are living in Tibet under the Chinese government regime that has been in place there now for nearly 40 years. So by the time we got on the British Airways plane to come home,

[10:39]

which was our first visit to the Western world, and spending a little time in London and then coming back here, I was surprised at the kinds of things that I noticed and enjoyed. Going into the airport as we got off the plane in London, and going into the bathroom where there were clean toilets, toilet paper, running water, cleanliness, and I had a kind of experience of delight and appreciation. I also thought, how long will I remember this? How long will it take me to forget and assume that this is the nature of the world and not be touched and appreciative of the abundance of things that make our lives so easy? Continually, I am struck by how lucky we are to be able to breathe this clean air.

[11:50]

There are days in Delhi where you cannot see across the street, and that is not an exaggeration. The particulate matters are visible and dense. But we also, in the West and in this country in particular, enjoy a kind of freedom, which most days I imagine most of us are not even aware of. But believe me, when I find myself in an atmosphere where there is a kind of looming presence, watching everything you do and say, that atmosphere changes in a way that is very penetrating and difficult. In the context of the kinds of limitations and difficulties that I experienced in India and in Nepal,

[12:56]

I find the penetration and capacity for liberation from the teachings of the Buddha more vivid than ever. I remember the first time I went to India and had a sense of a kind of readiness for violence and conflict there. And I remember then and again this time thinking, this was exactly the right place for the Buddha to come and live. This teaching that he gave about living our lives based on non-violence is very important in the world of human life, and particularly important in this great country where he lived and taught. Somehow, during this time in India, I once again could see much more clearly, somehow, than I do here, the places in my own activity, my own mind field, if you will, where I create obstacles and certain kinds of suffering.

[14:06]

I have this experience of running into myself, running into my mind, running into my habits with a kind of clarity and vividness. I was, of course, on a retreat where I was hoping to have that be the case, but even so, I ran into the difficulties that arise when one has expectations of how things will be. The kinds of difficulties that I run into when I have a clear sense of what I like and what I don't like, and how surprised I am when what I like goes away and what I don't like keeps arising, and how much suffering comes from that kind of picking and choosing. And, of course, once again, seeing, being reminded of how important it is to keep in mind what is my deep and clear intention for this morning,

[15:17]

for the day, for this week, for this period of retreat, for this year, or for my life. I want to talk a little bit about the butter sculpture as a kind of meditation on impermanence, because I think that what the monks of the Gyuta Monastery were doing in the month that they were in the museum making this big sculpture out of butter brings up a lot of the issues that arise whenever we consider the impermanent nature of all things of our lives, of the detail of the world we live in. The butter sculpture is made on, this particular one, anyway, was made on five plywood panels, which measured about, I would say, a total of 12 to 15 feet high,

[16:20]

and they were set alongside each other so that they made a total structure of about 18 or 20 feet long. And then in front of these plywood panels were two long shelves, one a little higher than the other. And on the plywood backings there was a kind of painting that looked like leaves or vines with sections that were round where the butter sculptures, the individual pieces of the sculpture, could be tied onto these wooden backings. I have no idea how many individual pieces there were, maybe 40 or 50. Some of them very small, flowers. Some of them big pieces, maybe this big. One big piece that had two huge dragons going up the side, each dragon measuring about like so.

[17:24]

So each monk would be working on a particular piece of plywood, making the Shakyamuni Buddha or Maitreya or Atisha, a great teacher who took Buddhist teachings from India to Tibet, or various goddesses, a compassion figure, a beautiful figure of Tara, white Tara, which was perhaps eight inches tall and maybe four or five inches wide. The hands, less than half an inch. Each finger formed with the hands in a mudra, hand posture, jewels and eyelashes and hair and crowns, all molded out of clarified vegetable oil, which was then worked with in big pans of ice water.

[18:28]

And the room the monks were working in was also kept cold, because of course the whole sculpture will melt if it gets too warm. The artist monk who was the most skilled and practiced creator of these images could make one of these very complex figures in about 24 hours. But most of the pieces took the monks anywhere from two days to 16 days per piece. And the level of detail in the creation was quite remarkable. The people who were coming to the museum to watch the monks work and to see the pieces that they were making consistently said, isn't there some way we can spray something on these sculptures so we can keep them? And the monks would nod and say, well, but we are intentionally making these pieces out of butter. We've chosen this medium.

[19:34]

Of course, if we were making this in Tibet, we would be making it out of rancid yak butter. And the animal butter lasts a little longer. It's a little easier to work with. But nevertheless, when spring comes, it will melt. In fact, the last butter sculpture I saw made was in India three years ago. And the afternoon of the day the sculpture was put together, after the ceremony for which the sculpture had been created, the sun shone through the Bodhi tree and started melting some pieces of the sculpture. And the birds came in and started carrying off bits of it for nest building material, etc. So in that instance, it didn't even last a day. In the museum in New York, it will last for anywhere from a week to a month, depending on the weather. So everyone who came to the museum, almost everyone said,

[20:36]

how can you make something that takes such care and attention and have it melt in a short time? Don't you like making flowers rather than figures? Don't you like chanting rather than doing this tedious sculpturing, or as the monks call it, working butter? All these questions that have to do with struggling with the impermanent nature of the material they were working with. And struggling with perceiving a very beautiful object, understanding that it won't be here for very long. Struggling with all of our habits and assumptions about doing what we like, having preferences, all those kinds of considerations that came up in that circumstance

[21:42]

where the monks were sitting cross-legged with their hands in ice water from 10, 15 in the morning until 5, 30 or 6 in the afternoon. And then they would go back to the apartment where they were staying and do more working butter until 11 or 12 at night. People understood what they were seeing when they saw these monks sitting patiently, carefully, making one little rose petal after another, putting it together. And these are the kinds of questions that came up. In response to these kinds of questions, over and over and over again, the monks would say, I don't have any preference about whether I'm making flowers or a Buddha image.

[22:42]

I'm thoroughly and wholeheartedly making the figure or piece that I'm working on. I will make it as well as I can. This is my offering to the Buddha and to the people of New York on the occasion of the New Year in remembrance of the time of great miracles when the historical Buddha lived. And you could see from the faces of the monks who could speak English that they had a kind of surprise in being asked such questions. Not surprise in the sense of, oh, that's a dumb question, but the kind of surprise that comes when it's never occurred to you to doubt what it is you're doing. That what you're doing doesn't have anything to do with being given praise because you're a great sculptor or being part of the monastery that wins a prize.

[23:47]

That you would do whatever you were doing even if you were making this particular piece in a room by yourself where no one else would ever see what you were making. Not that the monks don't enjoy doing what they're doing, but that they are wholeheartedly doing what they're doing in the moment with a kind of generosity and delight that is the quintessence of real liberation. One afternoon after I'd been in the museum with the monks for a few days, I went back to the apartment where they were staying for lunch. And sitting in the bathroom, I noticed on the shelf two porcelain figures.

[24:51]

European Louis XIV court figures made with the same kind of detail that the butter sculptures were made with, only they were made of porcelain, glazed, quite nicely done, very pretty figures. The hand on one of them was broken and was sitting on the shelf. And I was struck by how much this figure, these two figures actually, were going to last for quite a while. And that for many of us who were seeing these sculptures made of butter, what we really wanted was to see those figures made of porcelain. And I thought to myself, doesn't this sum up in some essential way the difference between our culture and that of the Tibetans?

[25:53]

That they are interested, that they even imagine making something that takes them 16 days to make, and they make it out of butter. And we have made something carefully and beautifully out of porcelain, and are heartbroken when it breaks. I found myself remembering the juxtaposition between those two figures and the figures made of butter almost every day since then. And I found myself in contemplating those figures and the butter sculpture, asking myself, do I enjoy one more than the other? Ironically, I think there is a way in which I enjoyed the butter sculpture in a way that included its impermanent nature.

[26:58]

Looking out the window this morning and seeing drops of rainwater hanging on the branches of the crabapple tree in front of the house, catching the early morning light, there is a way in which I enjoy that drop of water catching the light that includes knowing that the drop of water will be gone in a few minutes. I think we sometimes have some idea that if we really deeply consider the impermanent nature of all things, that we will lose something. There is a kind of fear that comes up for many of us when we turn towards this quality that the Buddha pointed out to us in his teachings. But in fact, my experience is that we do not need to be afraid,

[28:05]

that there is in fact a kind of delight and liberation that comes from our including that quality, the nature of things, in what we apprehend. The other quality that I noticed about the way the monks were working, and it came up for me also when I was in India, and I spent a lot of time looking at stupas. The big stupa at Bodh Gaya is maybe ten stories tall. It's very big. And it's surrounded by a big garden that's filled with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of small stupas. And many of those stupas are made of the broken fragments of very old stupas that were broken.

[29:09]

There's a kind of attitude of seeing what's in front of you and putting it together and continually renewing some inclination to make an architectural monument that reminds us of the mind of enlightenment, reminds us of great teachers, provides a place where people can come together and do various religious practices. So it becomes a place where a kind of social activity occurs that has a religious intention informing it. And in looking at all of these stupas and the using of old fragments, if nothing else is around, taking bits of rock and stacking them up to make a big pile, that's a kind of stupa.

[30:11]

A quality of using what's in front of us, but also some attitude of taking care with whatever materials are in front of us. And of course the butter sculpture was a quintessence of this, taking care with the detail of what was in front of us. It reminded me of a story that our old friend and teacher Harry Roberts told us. Harry was a North Coast, part North Coast California Indian, part Yurok, and was trained, although he was only part Yurok, he was trained as a shaman or a medicine man in the Yurok tribe. And his teacher started training him when he was very, very young. And this one story he told about the headband that's made for one of the ritual ceremonies is a story that he named the brush dance headband.

[31:18]

The brush dance is a dance which is done to this day by the Yurok as a special kind of healing dance. And the people who do the dance wear certain ritual clothing, including a headband that is made up of the feathers of certain birds, including the flicker. And Harry's teacher asked him about why he was taking a certain kind of care repairing an old headband, which to Harry's eyes, he was at this point young, maybe seven or so. To his eyes, the headband looked fine. Why was his teacher, his uncle as he called him, going to all this trouble, spending days repairing the headband, when to anyone who would be watching the dance, they wouldn't be able to see that there was anything wrong with it. And for days and days and days, Harry's teacher wouldn't answer the question.

[32:23]

He just kept asking Harry to answer the question himself. And every time he'd come up with an answer, his teacher would send him back and say, no, that's not good enough. Finally, after some days had passed, his teacher finally said, if I don't make this headband as perfect as I can make it, and I put it on for the brush dance, I will know it's not perfect. I will know that I didn't do the best I can do. And so I will not be able to participate in this dance with the kind of full-hearted participation that will in fact bring healing to the sick person or people that we're doing the dance for. It has nothing to do with what anyone else sees. It has to do with what I know about what I've offered.

[33:24]

So for each of these monks spending a month making this big butter sculpture, it was very clear that they were not making it because there were so many people coming to see the sculpture, but because each morning they were saying to themselves, I want to make the most beautiful piece of sculpture I can make. I want to make my best effort to make this offering. It has nothing to do with how long it will last. It has nothing to do with how beautiful people tell me it is. It has nothing to do with whether someone says, oh, what a great sculptor you are. It is my best effort in this moment. There is some way in which this consideration,

[34:33]

this contemplation of the impermanent nature of things, leads us to loving-kindness and an open heart. I've been asked this question many times. And I've been asking myself over and over again, what is the detail of that connection? I'm not sure that I can talk about it, but I know from my direct experience that there is a connection. There's a way in which the busloads of young schoolchildren who came to the museum and sat next to the monks and watched them working butter understood that they were in the presence of people who were joyful and loving, that there was about this whole room full of people together, not just the monks but everyone who came to visit, to watch, to talk to them,

[35:39]

had come away with some experience of joyfulness and an open heart. There was one man, an older man, who came back to see the monks working five different times. And one morning he walked in, and Gensamten, who is the very tall elder monk who is the main artist of the group, who speaks very little English, although I must say by the time I saw him in the museum he had begun speaking some English, so his months in the United States had produced a little language. But even so, he didn't really speak or understand much. But he looked up from his work and he saw this man and broke into a big grin and held up his hands and motioned through body language, this is your fifth time, this is in the midst of thousands of visitors,

[36:42]

but Gensamten recognized this man. So the man later told me that he went home that night and his wife said, why do you keep going back? And he said, I can't tell you why, but I want you to come with me tomorrow, because then maybe you'll understand it. So he came the next day with his wife and we began talking and he told me his story about having been there before and how Gensamten had said, oh, you've been here, this is your fifth time. And I asked his wife if she understood any more about why he kept coming back and she said, oh, yes, I understand it completely. He's fallen in love. And he nodded and he said, yes, that's right. He said, I don't understand it because we don't talk to each other, we're just sitting here together, I watch these men working

[37:45]

and they smile and greet me and show me what they're doing and I leave the room and I feel wonderful. The museum staff said the same thing. One afternoon we discovered that the Museum of Natural History has a very large collection of Tibetan Buddhist art. They have over 300 paintings, hundreds of bronze pieces, all of them originally from Tibet, a number of them purchased from the Chinese as a result of the Cultural Revolution and the kind of raiding of the monasteries that happened. So one afternoon the staff said to the monks, would you like to come and see the collection? They had five or six big binders, thick, with photographs of everything in the collection. So the monks went through the photo albums and picked out the things they wanted to see

[38:48]

and we then went down into the bowels of the museum and they opened up the big archive chambers, which were in themselves quite remarkable. The monks were looking at things that had been in monasteries where some of the elder monks had lived and practiced. There were pieces in this collection that had come from their own monastery. It could have been a very bittersweet encounter. They were completely thrilled to see these beautiful things, some of them hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years old. They were deeply grateful to the museum staff for taking time and being so kind to trouble themselves to bring these things out and show them to them. I didn't sense any shadow of regret that these things were no longer in their monastery. They were thoroughly delighted to be able to see all these beautiful things.

[39:54]

And then they went back upstairs to finish making their sculpture. And of course what came up for me was thinking about all of the things I might be feeling if I was in their shoes. And I began to wonder, I'm more upset about seeing these things which came from their monastery than any of them seems to be. Isn't that interesting? So somehow these people who are following this path, which follows, which flows from the teachings of the Buddha, are truly liberated from a kind of clinging, from trying to change that which they cannot change. An ability to be fully and openheartedly in the moment which allows them to greet whoever or whatever arises before them

[40:56]

with a full, open heart. And I am struck by the possibility of that for myself and for all of us. I hope we can find ways of continually reminding ourselves of this possibility to allow ourselves to consider and notice impermanence in whatever way it shows itself and let it take us as deeply as it will. This has something to do with taking one step at a time, thoroughly and completely. I think that this is the basis from which we can surprise ourselves deeply. Willa Cather has said it very well.

[41:58]

She wrote once, Where there is great love, there are always miracles. Miracles rest not so much upon faces, or voices, or healing power coming to us from far off, but on our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what there is about us, always. Thank you very much. May our intention May our intention

[42:44]

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