I'm always surprised to see how many of us are willing to come out in the rain. First let me wish you all a happy St. Patrick's Day. I made the mistake, perhaps, of asking members of my family what St. Patrick's Day was about and got a proverbial earful. Some of it nonsense and some of it not, so I have a green cloth to wrap my note cards in. That was as close as I got to green so far. So it may be a bit of a stretch, but maybe not. But what I want to talk about this morning has to do with war and peace. And from my thumbnail history on St. Patrick this morning, it seems that at least one of

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the things that St. Patrick is said to have done is to have rid Ireland of snakes, that is, beings which caused or might cause harm. Which is, after all, what making peace is about, isn't it? I've been down with a flu bug for the last six weeks, which has had the beneficial effect of slowing me down. And so I've done a kind of meditation on this war in the Middle East and war as it is showing up in different parts of the world. And in a way, because I was slowed down a lot, paying particular attention to my response and to the response that I hear from others of feeling dismayed and troubled, concerned,

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fearful about what will be the consequences of, in particular, the actions that we have been party to in the Middle East. And it seems that it is way too soon to know. And part of my musings over these weeks has been to think about this as another Dharma lesson, another lesson about the insights coming from the teachings of the Buddha into the nature of things. And I find myself thinking a lot about how we have peace in the world, wondering about how what has been played out in this war is a mirror for what is played out in our lives within ourselves and in our lives with our families and friends, the wars that we have much closer to home than the Persian Gulf, the kind of war that we are getting a glimpse

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of that has been going on for some time, for example, in Los Angeles, the kind of war that comes up in a family when someone does something that someone else doesn't like or doesn't think should happen. I've been particularly paying attention to this celebration of victory that we've been having here in this country and wondering about it, wondering about what that's about. It seems too simple a response to what, as I study and try to listen, try to understand the situation in the Middle East, seems very complex. And yet, of course, it makes sense that we would celebrate that so few of us have died.

[04:16]

And as I think about that celebration of relief that so few of us have died, at the same time I'm hearing reports about all those who have died, whom we don't think of, at least not readily, as us. I heard an interview of a man who's associated with an organization concerned with child development who went to Kuwait and interviewed children between the ages of 5 and 13. And his report of what he heard from those children left me feeling quite deeply dismayed and disquieted. He reported that children under 5 who were kept at home didn't see or feel so much, except when some member of the family was taken by force from the family, but that mostly what he saw that was disturbing was with children who were older than that, usually beginning

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with about the age of 8. Children who talked about seeing a body of someone who had been killed and then brought back into the neighborhood, where the body had been left in the neighborhood, or seeing people hanging from a telephone pole, having been killed that way. Or reports from these children of a father or an uncle or an older brother being taken forcibly in the middle of the night. And so I find myself wondering what will be the legacy for those children having had these experiences. About a week ago, the Red Crescent, which is the equivalent of the Red Cross in the Islamic world, reported that they had taken care of 115,000 bodies, half of whom were children.

[06:27]

So when we celebrate this victory, this relief that so few of us have died, what has been coming up for me is thinking about those children in Iraq and Kuwait and all over the world. What are the costs to our minds, all of our minds, wherever we are, to this kind of conflict and killing and dying? It will be a long time before we know. I find myself thinking about the question, who is our enemy? The Buddha has observed, as have many great saints and practitioners over the centuries, that it's important for us to notice that the person who is our friend today may be

[07:30]

our enemy tomorrow, or the person who is our enemy today may be our friend tomorrow. We've certainly seen that in this situation. And even in the most simplistic terms, I read in the paper and hear on the radio queries about who will be our enemy next, worrying about who will be our friends and allies, who will be our enemies. All of these questions, it seems, come up in our personal lives as well. So there is some big connection between what is happening in the world and what happens in the midst of our lives. And so I keep asking myself, what can I learn? Where do I need to pay attention? And what I keep coming back to is, can I understand how war begins? In this case, how did this war begin? As a way of helping me understand

[08:36]

the wars that I engage in in my life and within myself. So the other reference point for me in speaking this morning has to do with the marriage of my eldest child and my son yesterday. A friend of mine, a month or so ago, said, maybe you're sick because your son is getting married. And I thought, oh, how silly. But who knows, maybe she was right. It turned out to be much more difficult, much more of a major marking in my life than I had quite expected. And I decided early on that it was probably not a good idea for the mother of the groom to be the officiating priest. Somehow seemed unseemly for me to be offering my son and

[09:42]

his bride their vows. So a friend of ours, who is an Episcopalian priest, presided at the ceremony. And the theme that he spoke to in the ceremony had to do with love, that love which we all yearn for, and peace. And he talked about how at times of great joy and great sadness, we come together in whatever has arisen in our lives by way of opposition, opposing between us, we lay down in our coming together around those occasions of great joy and great sadness. And I was struck by how accurate that seems to me. So I found myself wondering about this laying down process. If I can lay down whatever war

[10:46]

I'm having with someone who was for many years my dear, dear friend, and who has in more recent times come to think of me with some opposition, maybe some days as her enemy. And yet, the two of us could be together at this wedding out of our love for my son and his bride. So what is that process of laying down and what does it involve? How is it that we can under some circumstances be willing to lay down our fear, our anger, our opposition? And can we find some way of doing that a little sooner and a little more often? It seems to me that the teachings of the Buddha and the experience that arises out of the tradition of practice that we are endeavoring to follow here at Green Gulch and in our lives

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together has very much to do with this process of laying down as we do at these times of great joy and great sadness. So I ask myself, well, how do we do that? And I think there are many suggestions about how we can do it. But over and over again, I recognize that the how of it depends on my actually doing something about whatever arises in me that brings up opposition with another or it brings up opposition within me with myself. This is where I begin to sound perhaps like a broken record, but I keep coming back to the efficacy of some of these very fundamental

[12:58]

practices. The one about paying attention, developing our ability to pay attention to things as they are. It sounds so simple, doesn't it? And I guess it is, in a way, quite simple. It just isn't easy. And yet what I've discovered is that my ability to pay attention grows as I have some intention to develop my ability to pay attention. My commitment to learning how to pay attention, particularly in the midst of those situations where what is arising in front of me isn't thrilling me, particularly when it's about myself or someone I love or some situation where things haven't turned out the way I wanted them to be and where I get to run into the limits of what I can control and what

[14:08]

I cannot control. Paying attention to things as they are. Immediately then what comes up is paying attention, among other things, to the impermanent nature of all things. The impermanence of what I like so that it goes away sooner than I wish it would and how long it takes the impermanence of what I don't like to come about. Remembering that things change, including who is my friend and who is my enemy. How do I cultivate peace within my life, within myself, in my interactions with my family and my friends, my neighbors? In particular, how do I cultivate peace with someone that I don't like or don't trust,

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who does something that leaves me feeling frightened or angry or full of aversion? What I would propose is that it's a good idea to start where it's easy and not try to start where it's hard. Creep up on the hard situations. I also am struck by how important in this business of making peace, how important it is to, at times, when it's possible, to speak up, to speak out. I've been very interested in the situation that has occurred in Los Angeles with the arrest of Mr. King and the now-famous videotape of his beating and arrest by some of the members

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of the Los Angeles police force. How many times have a similar kind of episode occurred and what is the difference? The difference is that somebody who had a new video camera, probably wasn't even so sure how to work it, picked it up and taped what he saw and then sent it to the local news station where people have been watching this particular tape describing a specific situation in a way that no one can argue about. It's a version of speaking up. And without doing anything else, there looks to be some bringing of conscious awareness to a situation in which there has been, probably

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over some extended time, great suffering, all of the elements of what we would ordinarily call war. Thich Nhat Hanh, in the precepts as he describes them, talks about cultivating our willingness to speak out when we witness injustice, even if it means to do so risking our own well-being. Our willingness to do that as something that is important for us to do. And I think in my own life of the situations where particularly out of fear, I didn't speak up and in retrospect wish I had, and those situations where I did speak up, and thinking about the suffering that resulted and trying to consider where that edge is, when is it appropriate and when is it causing harm.

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What does it mean to speak or to be silent? Speaking up is a way of bringing awareness to the situation. And speaking up can be very powerful. And, of course, I think it begins very strongly with our ability, developing our ability to speak up to ourselves. What is actually going on inside me? When I see someone and what arises in my mind is aversion, how truthful can I be in speaking to myself about that response and what may be going on? Because it is in that attention, that attending to the detail of experience, that I can then consider the possibility of acting or not acting, that I have a chance to remember,

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oh yes, actions have consequences. This may be a time when being silent or speaking up or acting from some brief inclination towards generosity might lead to harmoniousness or to conflict. So the traditional practices that I've talked about before and that are the concern for those of us who are following the Buddhist path, the practices that are conducive to this kind of attending in our lives, attending in a way that is the basis for peacefulness, for an open and loving heart, include the practice of noticing. One of my favorite practices, the practice of the half-smile, which is interestingly described as the classical antidote.

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To anger. Mouth yoga. Lift the corners of the mouth slightly, a la Mona Lisa. Hold the lift for the space of three breaths. That's it. And there's nothing in the practice that says I should stop being angry, but simply focus my attention for those three breaths on that lifting of the corner of the mouth. And in so doing, what I notice is my capacity to see what's going on in a situation in which I'm feeling frustrated or angry becomes a bit bigger. I may not cease feeling angry or upset, but I'm not quite so blinded. So in that sense, this practice can be a very penetrating aid to staying awake in the midst

[21:36]

of difficult states of mind, difficult situations. The practices, all of the various practices that give us some cultivation of ability to attend the breath as we breathe in and breathe out, no matter what we're doing. We don't lose ourselves. We don't go blind in our response quite so easily when we have established that ability to attend to the breath, which is, of course, the central part of our lives in sitting, in zazen, in walking, and hopefully in the extension of that experience into washing the dishes and driving the car, speaking with a friend or a colleague, attending to our state of mind when we're stuck in a traffic

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jam and can't do anything about it. The great saint Shantideva talks about the cultivation of the practice of patience. And I think a lot of the cultivation of patience is to have the possibility of patience be on our computer screen. If we have it in mind that we want to cultivate our ability to be patient, particularly in difficult and frustrating circumstances, we ourselves can then begin to discover ways of extending the moment of patience to be two moments of patience. Remember, when we were children, having some adult in our lives saying, count to ten. When you're angry or upset, count to ten. It's a kind of patience practice. I think that when we sigh, it can be a kind of patience practice. It's a kind of spiritual

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base on the breath. I'm not nearly so uptight at the end of a sigh. All the practices that have to do with cultivating our ability to listen. The recognition in texts and commentaries that the cultivation of love arises out of our ability to understand. When we understand the causes and conditions of someone's life, we have some ability to be in front of them in some peaceful way that doesn't seem to be the case when we don't understand the causes and conditions of their lives. I'd like to read a section from a talk that His Holiness the Dalai Lama gave on the occasion

[25:02]

of March 10th, which is an important day for the Tibetan people. It is the day which commemorates their standing up and speaking out against the Chinese invasion of their country. It is a day when there tends to be big demonstrations among the Tibetans, both in Tibet and in the Tibetan communities in exile. The days and weeks before the 10th of March tend to be very difficult these days in Tibet because the Chinese regime there clamps down on the Tibetans in anticipation of demonstrations. But there's this one paragraph in the talk that His Holiness gave this year which I think speaks to what I'm bringing up this morning. This is in the context of his speaking of his dismay about the Gulf War and all of the loss

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of life. He says, Too often situations that turn explosive as a result of neglect at the early stages, when diplomacy and peaceful methods are not adequately applied. The result of neglect at the early stages. A contributing factor to such hostilities is the, quote, strategies, end quote, that many nations adopt in an attempt to achieve a balance of power that is supposedly in their interest. Above all, the worst contributing factor to conflicts such as the Gulf War is the arms trade in which individuals and nations indulge for financial gain. Such trade seems senseless, irresponsible, and completely lacking in human considerations. If we want to avoid such tragic confrontations, we must pay greater

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attention to situations of potential conflict right from the beginning. We must also change our limited selfish strategies and interests and strive for a greater sense of responsibility beyond one's immediate area. Such a concept will not only preserve peace for one particular nation but will lay the foundation for a lasting peace for all. So, if I extrapolate from those comments by His Holiness, who is someone many of us recognize as an example of a deeply cultivated and peaceful person, a man of peace, I would like to ask what he is suggesting to us and what is suggested over and over again in the Buddhist tradition

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is pay attention, and in particular pay attention early on. How often what leads to anger can be averted if I am willing to pay attention when I am still only mildly irritated or confused or frustrated or disappointed, and that if I pay attention then it doesn't grow to a kind of monster which takes me away. I think that what the Dalai Lama is pointing to is the possibility of being committed to a process and not to an outcome. If what I am committed to is staying in dialogue with my neighbor and not being committed to having

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my neighbor agree to what I want to have done with our shared driveway, we won't shut down to each other. We will stay engaged. Pay attention to instances of greed in our individual lives, in our area, in our state and country, and see what the implications of that are. Unbridled greed are, and consider the antidotes, the practice of generosity. To the degree that I can pay attention to those instances of self-interest that arise,

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I can begin to pay attention to when my self-interest is instead of concern for others rather than a self-interest which includes the well-being of others. My experience is that over and over again asking myself that question, is what I am about to do instead of including others or does it include some concern for others? That question applied in a timely way helps me think for a moment about what I am about to do, both in my inner life and the life that I lead engaged with others, in the community, in the sense in which I am a member of the larger community called the United States and the world. So I would encourage all of us to pay attention to our yearning for peace in the world, whatever

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our response to the war in the Middle East may be, wherever we stand politically, if you will, to let this experience which we have just been through and are still in be a reminder, a spur to looking more closely to the detail of our daily lives, to the detail of the potential for war and peace within ourselves and in our lives with our family and friends and neighbors and extended community. And to take on as a serious endeavor the possibility that if we can find a way to be at peace with those of us who are sitting here in this room that there may be some effect which we cannot even imagine.

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Maybe it's not the trickle down, it's the trickle up, the ooze effect. Thich Nhat Hanh talks about how when the boat people were fleeing and being badly overcrowded on the boats, very often the difference between a boat capsizing or not was the presence of one person, calm and peaceful. And of course the Buddhist tradition is very much about cultivating individuals who by their presence in the world help all beings as examples of, as a reflection of the possibility for peace in the world. Realization, peacefulness and joy. We have no idea what the effect can be in

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our world if one of us can be deeply dedicated to this way of being. This capacity for open-heartedness, for joyfulness, for harmoniousness, seems to be the most to be a capacity that we all have, a yearning which we all have. And yet how often we think, well I want someone else to do it. I want to set someone else up as the person who's going to do it right. If each one of us were to take this on, this path of peacefulness in a radical way, think of how many people would be affected by the group of us in this room, beyond what we could

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count. So as we enjoy the rain, which we thought would never come, as we enjoy the arising of this moon cycle, which is the moon of budding trees, the moon that is associated with the alders that are beginning to bud out, the as spring arises, please, in whatever ways we can, let us join together and with ourselves in cultivating whatever capacity we can find for peace in ourselves, with some trust that it will have some effect. Commit ourselves to paying attention to the things as they are, and cultivating our ability to be present with things as they are with

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a peaceful heart. And when a not so peaceful heart shows up, to take care of it with peacefulness and kindliness. Thank you very much. May our intention, may [...] our

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