Well, Mel has a cold, so here I am. I wanted to talk about interdependence, a little example of it. I once had a conversation with a very old Sangha member years ago. I was upset that he wasn't washing dishes very carefully in the cold season. And he said, well, Meili, why get upset about germs? After all, we just pass, we share them and they draw us together. Anyway, that is our life. And I've been, a group of us in San Francisco's Zen Center have been reading the Vimalakirti Sutra. So I wanted to talk about, I want to talk about interdependence and moving towards suffering and the Vimalakirti Sutra.

[01:00]

This kind of got started a week ago. I had breakfast with some friends at the Berkeley Bowl restaurant. It came out and there was a man selling Street Spirit, the homeless newspaper that the AFSC puts out and the people who sell it get a dollar and it comes out once a month and it gives you a good kind of survey of what's going on in the homeless scene. And I moved towards him and as I moved towards him he began to speak and I could just feel his need to say something. And what he wanted to talk about was his incredulity that in this country with so much money, some people could be in such extraordinary pain and poverty and other people could be so comfortable. How can people be so comfortable?

[02:07]

He said, looking at me. And that's exactly my question. How can I be comfortable? And I just practically cried as I heard him say it because his question was my question. And we had this kind of real meeting. You know, it feels good when you meet somebody who has your own heart's question. It's an affinity, you make contact. We shook one another's hand several times. So, this story is, his name was Ricardo.

[03:09]

So this meeting with Ricardo is, you know, just a little, a mini story that all of us encounter about, our shared illness, our shared sickness and how we heal in the midst of that. And that healing in the midst of sickness is the Bodhisattva activity. And that's what the Vimalakirti Sutra is about. It's an early Mahayana Sutra. And the hero, Vimalakirti, The name means stainless stain. It's interesting to contemplate. Stainless stain. He's a householder and he dresses in householder clothes and he has abilities that are sometimes inseparable from Buddha qualities.

[04:13]

So in some ways he's in this middle ground. He has super knowledges and unlimited virtues and he's also an ordinary person. And he goes everywhere. He goes into nightclubs and brothels and rich people's homes and so on and so on. no place that he does not go. So he is an unusual protagonist in any sutra, actually, because as far as I know, well, I'll just say most sutras, have some kind of teacher or renunciate, a person who's left the world as the protagonist. And Vimalakirti's position is solidly in the world.

[05:16]

And his tool is Skillful means, or as Robert Thurman translates it, liberative technique. Skillful means. So, you know, we have two ways of learning, two ways of development, roughly speaking. That one way is that we feel our lack and we aspire. We aspire to qualities that we know are incomplete to a more compassionate, a more wise, a more liberative existence. And that's one way that we develop. And then the other way we develop is learning who we really are. What

[06:21]

is the original face, the return to beginner's mind, the letting go of the obstructive rubble, the obstructive constructs and all that stuff that we acquire. the letting go of it, and coming back to the present, which is always available, the beginner's mind that's always there. So, liberative technique has more to do with this return to our whole nature. And liberative technique, skillful means, they teach by meeting the other exactly where the person is, by making that contact which is larger than the differences between the two people.

[07:30]

So there was some liberative technique going on between Ricardo and me, and who knows who was the teacher, who was learning, who was teaching. It's not important, but there was just something going on that made us both feel comforted. And so this kind of activity is going on all the time. So that's the Malakirti's purpose, is to develop all beings by the use of skillful means or liberative technique. So in order to in order to carry on this teaching Vimalakirti becomes sick he decides he will manifest himself as sick with the illness of the world and so he falls ill and he's well known and much appreciated

[08:33]

So all of the lay people who live around come to his house and inquire after his sickness and how he is and what's wrong. And he teaches them. He teaches them about what suffering is, how suffering is our need to ignore the fact, ignore the three marks of existence, that everything's unsatisfactory and that life is transient and that there's no abiding self. And then they leave. And then he thinks, well, now where are the great teachers? Why aren't they paying any attention to my illness? And because Vimalakirti and Buddha are in close contact, Buddha recognizes this thought and the great teachers, the Bodhisattvas and the Arhats are summoned. Buddha calls them and asks them to go and visit Vimalakirti and inquire about his illness, which is the only polite thing to do.

[09:43]

And they are all reluctant to go. they're reluctant to go because Vimalakirti has had little incidents with them in which he has been critical of their teaching. Is this skillful means or not? It's interesting. But he has noticed that in their various ways that they teach, they have taken just a little bit of pride in their position or identity or teaching. And he has noticed this and just slipped that edge of emptiness in and they have been corrected. And even for the great teachers this has not been easy. So they are reluctant to see him. But finally Manjusri says, I will see him. And the plot begins to thicken. Here are the two great beings, Vimalakirti and Manjusri.

[10:45]

So Manjusri comes and inquires about the illness. Why are you ill? And now this very famous passage where Vimalakirti explains this illness Manjusri says, Householder, when comes the sickness of yours? How long will it continue? How does it stand? How will it be alleviated? Vimalakirti replied, Manjusri, my sickness comes from ignorance and the thirst for existence. And it will last as long as do the sicknesses of all living beings. Were all living beings to be free from sickness, I would not be sick. Why? Manjusri. For the Bodhisattva, the world consists only of living beings. And sickness is inherent in living in the world. Were all living beings free of sickness, the Bodhisattva also would be free of sickness.

[11:46]

For example, Manjusri, when the only son of a merchant is sick, both his parents become sick on account of the sickness. of their son. And the parents will suffer as long as that only son does not recover from his sickness. Just so, Manjusri, the Bodhisattva loves all living beings as if each were his only child. He becomes sick when they are sick and is cured when they are cured. You ask me, Manjusri, whence comes my sickness? The sicknesses of the Bodhisattvas arise from great compassion. So, this is a very powerful statement of the inter-beingness of our suffering. That's in some contrast to the earlier Theravadin teaching about the nature of one's own suffering.

[12:51]

Anjusri, my sickness comes from ignorance and the thirst for existence. That's the traditional statement. and it will last as long as do the sicknesses of all living beings. The Bodhisattva sickness is not private. The Bodhisattva sickness is completely related to the sickness of the world. And so we Because the nature of sickness or suffering is separative we tend to feel that our suffering is private and that's one of the great difficulties. We get so immersed in the privateness of our grief and in that isolation that we feel with our suffering

[13:58]

we make up all kinds of stories about it about its origins and its continuing and we analyze and we interpret it and we build it into the various stories that we have and it seems as if our suffering has this separate quality from the world and yet while it has a certain individual seal or color or smell we also know very well that our suffering is not private that what we do to ourselves when we begin to practice if not before it's quite clear that what we do to ourselves we do to others and that Others, good, other people by both goodwill and ignorance are always causing us suffering.

[15:09]

And we acknowledge the fact of our ancient twisted karma. So on the one hand our suffering appears private and on the other hand we know that it's not. And one of the manifestations of practice, what we learn in practice gradually opens us up. What we learn in practice is gentleness to ourselves and to others. And what we also learn is that pain is inevitable and we make our suffering. We craft it out of who we are.

[16:11]

And that what we suffer from so much is the resistance that we have to our pain. Is wanting not to be with our pain. and that our healing has to involve a willingness to be with the pain without resistance. But Zazen encourages us in our ability to just sit with it and to breathe with it. We had a very nice talk on Monday. Andrea gave a talk on Monday about being with pain. and the various excursions she has made, and she speaks for all of us, in trying to avoid the pain, and the various acting outs, and the various fantasies, and the periods in Zazen in which one just is not there, has just checked out.

[17:19]

because living in the present is so difficult and requires such discipline. And little by little we learn that we will survive our pain and we won't be killed by it. we really come to appreciate pain as teacher. There's another quite famous passage, where as this sutra goes on, Vimalakirti talks more and more, has more and more encounters with Mara, personification of delusion and some funny encounters and some serious encounters and it's not clear where the boundaries are and rather than vanquishing Mara Vimalakirti is able to just make space and debilitate Mara with space

[18:50]

And there is this summary of it later in a verse. In order to help living beings, they, that is, the Bodhisattvas, us, in order to help living beings, they voluntarily descend into the hells which are attached to all the inconceivable Buddha fields. In order to help living beings, they voluntarily descend into the hells which are attached to all the inconceivable Buddha fields." That's quite a grand way of describing our experience, is what these sutras do. Now, in a certain way, when we sit zazen, we are sitting in our... a Buddha field. And then, in the midst of this wonderful beginner's mind temple Buddha field, what comes up? the hell realms, sooner or later it manifests and with the help of the Bodhisattvas we descend into those realms and make space in them, make them whole.

[20:11]

So we're always, our business as Bodhisattvas is recycling the pain of the world, recycling our own pain, recycling other people's pain. And as we are able to not be so frightened about our suffering, and to resist it less and less, we are more able to deal with our own suffering and the suffering of the world, and we feel a real appetite for moving out. And one sees it here in the Sangha. People come and they practice for a while, and they turn out more and more regularly, and then they come and they say, well, what kind of job can I do? And this is just a gratitude for having this place and being able to come and having others here and people want to give back.

[21:23]

And so that wanting to give back as one practices just gets larger. And we see it in one another. It's the story of our vocations. You know, I think it's often hard in this life to get a sense of where your heart is and what you want your life's work to be from the heart, this kind of vocational direction. It's often hard to figure that out, but we do. and when we see it in one another it's very strengthening. About three years ago I was doing breakfast at the Dorothy Day Kitchen and my partner was a man about my age and he said that he wanted to keep busy because he had just stopped drinking and he was in all kinds of 12-step programs but he knew that he needed a lot of structure in his life and so he'd come

[22:41]

to make breakfast as part of this program. And then, I don't know, he sort of drifted out and I lost touch with him. And a couple of weeks ago he found my name and he called. And three years had gone by and he'd done this and that. And a year or two ago he'd bought a property It was sort of by accident. He bought five acres of land near Clayton on the east side of Mount Diablo and he had realized what he wanted to do with his life. He bought this land fairly cheap and there were three or four little houses on it that he rents out and he's developing this land to make a retreat center for people in the inner city, people in the shelters, people in the AIDS community to come and spend a weekend in.

[23:45]

And he's got all kinds of, there's an old swimming pool that he's filled in and sort of took me on this tour and showed me what's going to be here and what's going to be here and asked me for my opinions, of which I don't have many because I don't have that kind of visual eye. But, you know, it was his Buddha field. And he was just, he's just completely, completely involved in bringing this, bringing this retreat center about. And, well, that was just a wonderful example. When we see that in each other, and when the story takes that kind of twist say, oh yes, we're all kind of waiting we're all kind of looking around because we sort of know that we are in this sickness together I saw a bumper sticker the other day that if you are aware you are outraged

[25:05]

You know, you look around and it's not good. And yet, how do we address it with this Bodhisattva practice? Howard Zinn, who wrote The History of the United States, People's History, has written another book and he's been talking here and there. And his thesis as a historian is that major social change always starts from the bottom. It starts from people being very concerned about slavery, or that women don't vote, or that restaurants are segregated. It comes from small groups of people being concerned and just not letting the concern go and keeping with it and perseverating until the upstairs politicians have to recognize it.

[26:25]

Most of our histories are written from the point of view of statesmen They're not written from the point of view of where the change happens. So I think that we are quite aware of... We're becoming more and more aware of what we can do. And that there is a kind of political will which is not It's not so visible, but when you begin to move into it, you feel embraced. And I guess I want to come back to the Bodhisattva, to the development of the Bodhisattva personality. this shared sickness means that my personal development is entirely dependent on your personal development.

[27:41]

And that... Just that. I don't want to say any more. So... Maybe we could have some discussion. And after something about her career had been told by her biographer, telephone lines would open.

[28:58]

And the first call that came in was from Berkeley, California. And the caller was concerned about her accepting money from Anastasia Samosa. Yeah. other people. And I was really brought up short by this. And it was truly a great lesson in that nothing is satisfactory. But I just want to say one other thing. Her biographer, when questioned about this, spoke for her and said that she will not deny the act of charity to anybody.

[30:07]

Yeah, well, as you say, it's a good lesson. Our hands don't stay clean. Yeah, it recently came up for me, you know, there was an action, I've been somewhat involved in the headwaters. effort and some earth firsters went into Eureka to the Democratic headquarters and they surprised after the so-called deal was made and they spread cow manure over the floor and they made a statement and then they cleaned it up and they left the office cleaner than when they had come but still it was a very controversial action very controversial And I don't know, but I think it's wonderful. I think we need all kinds of voices. David.

[31:26]

Yep, there, we're going through this game. Now, where is the fault? Where is the tension? I have no answer to this, to this day. I wonder what we were doing, what they were doing, who was serving whom. Yeah, yeah, it's quite a story. I guess you came out with a

[32:54]

A difference. You were not quite the same. I'd like to go back to the story and ask you to develop a little bit more what you said about Vimalakirti debilitating Mara with space. What did you mean by that? How is that expressed in the scripture? Yeah, well, it's a little... I have to tell a story, or quote-quote. It's a very complicated question. But there's an interlude between... At one point, there's a certain ruler who comes, whom we merely... Vimalakirti, addresses, and this prince, the translation of his Indian name is Ruler of the World, has a thousand maidens who are his consorts, so to speak.

[34:14]

And this guy tells about a Mara coming up to him and saying, I think this is how it would be, give me the consorts. And then Vimalakirti sees what's going on and he says, look, ruler of the world, this is Mara and he's trying to entice you into a deal, don't do it. And Vimalakirti says, give me the thousand women. And the ruler of the world says, but are you supposed, you're not supposed to have women like this. And Vimalakirti says, give them to me and I will convert them. And he does. And then the ruler wants, then Mara wants the women back again. And now they're all converted.

[35:17]

And Vimalakirti says, okay, Now you can all go back tomorrow. So here is the principle of evil surrounded by these one thousand enlightened women. Poor evil. That's the kind of play. So is that enough? I don't have another one, I have the same one. Could I tell a story? Yes. I can't remember, I can't attribute this because I don't remember, but it was a story about Mara and Buddha was sitting in his cave and Ananda was attending him and Mara came knocking at the door. And Ananda said, do you have no shame? Don't you remember the Buddha already bested you and you have a lot of nerve showing up. The Buddha's not home. And Mara said, but I really need to talk to the Buddha.

[36:20]

And the Buddha could hear this was going on. So he said, Ananda, I really am home. And he welcomes Mara like this long lost friend. Mara, how are you? How's your health? And Mara says, oh, well, I'm all right, but I'm not I'm a little dissatisfied. I'm really, here's the trouble, I'm tired of being Mara. I'm tired of being the bad guy. And I want to switch places with you so that I can be the Buddha for a while and you can be Mara. And the Buddha says, do you think I have it so easy? Life is not so easy being the Buddha either. And no, yeah, you just do your job and I'll do my job and we'll just continue on. I don't remember if there was any other punchline. This is giving Mara all kinds of acknowledgement, recognition, space, and, you know, we all have a role to play, and our hands aren't clean, even though we'd like them to be clean. Thank you.

[37:21]

Guy? I recently had an experience, somebody approached me for help, No, protect yourself. But in my heart, her story was so, it was a story I knew. And my heart wanted to respond to her. And so I couldn't figure this out. So I went to sit with her. And the only solution to being with this person was to almost be in Zazen when I worked with her, and to make this enormous space, and to do hardly anything at all, except eat it. But I found it quite frightening. So the skillful means business isn't a cakewalk. It can be full of, for me, enormous difficulty really trying to approach somebody. Maybe you could say something about it. Well that is, I knew I wanted to say something when I was talking and I wasn't getting to it. How much our development depends on extending ourselves in this risk-taking way where we really do see our edges.

[38:30]

I've been work doing, my biggest risk taking these days is going to Bryant Street Jail on Tuesday mornings with my friend Mary Mosine and we run a yoga, meditation and discussion group with twelve or so female inmates. And the last time it was murder. There was a new deputy and she'd given three of the women write-ups before they got to our doorstep. And so here we were about to have this meditation class and the anger level was close to the ceiling. And there were different ways of expressing the anger. And Mary has a very, Mary, we switch back and forth, she was doing the stretches, she has a very grounded presence. And inside of my mind was fury and rage at my threatened you know, my control things were just going. And I was very angry with certain people.

[39:32]

And Mary was very grounded. And when somebody was interrupted or made trouble or snored or something, she would say, yes, it's hard for you to settle down now, but I know you will. Buddha business of predicting goodwill. It worked, because she was into it. It worked. And I felt, one doesn't know how one does. You know, I asked her afterwards if I had seemed terribly angry and she said, no. But what was going on in my mind was so hard. And I learned so much from her. Just that this morning I had a couple of hassles before I got here to live through. And I just had that flavor of her groundedness. It wasn't particularly her groundedness, but she was such a good example of it. It just was there in the background.

[40:32]

Oh yeah, I can go this way and that way and this way and that way, but there is something steady there. Well, on the same subject, I've been involved in some meetings with people, and what's come up is that in certain circumstances, they're afraid. They're afraid of this person, or they're afraid of this situation, or they're afraid of that person. And some of it is, in some situations, the fear is very palpable, you know, you feel a lot of these circumstances, boy, you really can't put your finger on it. And that's a very, that's a very fruitful question. Just like, well, what are you afraid of in this situation?

[41:36]

What is it about your personal dynamic with somebody else? What Larry, what Ty was saying, you know, why is this person that creates a kind of zone of safety, and it calls for this tremendous leap. It's a real act of faith, because you're going into it recognizing your fear. And you may be going into it recognizing the other person's fear or the other person's aggressiveness. And in order to make some kind of transformation, you have to make that leap.

[42:38]

And that's what I get About space. And about... Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. Good answers. Do you want to say something, Linda? Well, it seems to me, thank you, Meili, that I remember things in Refining Your Life. Dogen tells a story, and unfortunately I don't remember the particulars of the story, but the metaphor has stayed with me, and that is the instruction when presented with a challenging situation to create a large pasture, and perhaps he remembered the story. But that really has stayed with me, and I think that the skillful means, and it's quite Every time you have to create a large pasture, it seems to me this has to be done in a particular way to meet the situation, the individual.

[43:42]

But it's quite a helpful instruction, I find. I think the other, as I remember it, is how do you control a cow? Give her a large pasture and watch her. The watching is... It's very important to observe. So there's a non-judgmental aspect. And also a communicative. Uh-huh. And a safety. Yeah. Yeah. Rebecca? Thank you. I think the other part of Places where there isn't the time or the space to use it. That there are guns and bombs and landmines and other things.

[44:44]

I think sometimes we insert spiritual and political practices to get into that space where we're enamored of ourselves. Well, if we're enamored of the skillful means, we're certainly not bodhisattvas. There's also a wonderful story in the Vimalakirti Sutra about a goddess appears and does some outrageous things, but she makes flowers fall from the heavens, and when the flowers fall on the arhats, they stick, and when they fall on the bodhisattvas, they just glide off onto the floor, so all the arhats are having to brush themselves off and are uncomfortable because they're not supposed to have things like flowers on them. So, if, I mean, as soon as one takes some pride or takes any stand or anything like that, you know, it's over.

[45:54]

And Vimalakirti's pure example was to be able to go everywhere, which I'm sure would also include the battlefield, and keep space. And I think that is possible. Don't you? We don't do it too much, but it's possible. The battlefield is so close, just over there, down the street, Russell. These are numberless.

[46:44]

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