I vow to taste the truth and not to doubt his words. Good evening. It's wonderful to have the frogs back again chanting. So in this ongoing conversation we're having, on Sunday, I gave the Dharma talk on Sunday.

[01:18]

How many people were not there on Sunday? Okay, that's how many of you were there and not there on Sunday. So on Sunday we were talking about friendliness and the good friend, the practice of friendliness. And in the tea, the practice period tea, we've been having an ongoing looking at what is right effort, what is effort and also non-dualism. So just continuing on with the conversation, I wanted to say some more about friendliness, the practice of friendliness, and also sympathetic joy.

[02:23]

So the four Brahmaviharas or abodes of Brahma, Brahma was or is one of the Indian pantheism, pantheism? No. Pantheon, one of the gods who is in heaven. And this particular god, you know, comes and talks with the Buddha and he figures in a lot of the sutras, Brahma comes and sometimes is at the assemblies and so forth. So for some reason these are called the four Brahmaviharas and also the heavenly abodes. And the four are loving kindness or metta, like when we practice chanting the metta sutra, but also I've seen it as maitri, which is friendliness from the word mitra, friend.

[03:25]

Kalyana Mitra is the good friend. And maitri, which is the name of the hospice institution that Isandorsi started, it was called maitri, which means friendliness, and also it has loving kindness as part of its meaning as well. So that's the first, then there's karuna, or compassion, and the third is mudita, sympathetic joy, also translated as gladness. And the last is equanimity, upaksha. So I wanted to look at sympathetic joy and also the practices around these four Brahmaviharas and then see if they can help us to look at right effort and non-dualistic practice. So we'll see what happens.

[04:27]

So sometimes they're called the four social emotions, and they're not in the list of, for example, they're in the eightfold path of right view, right intention, right speech, and so forth, right livelihood. They don't have right friendliness and right compassion, and they're not in that list. They're not understood as practices that will uproot the basic cause of suffering, meaning clinging to a sense of self, craving, the five grasping skandhas. These social emotions or these Brahmaviharas are not meant to uproot that ignorance, but they are an enormous help in helping someone to actually take up the practices of wisdom.

[05:33]

And friendliness, as I said on Sunday, is an antidote to hate. So if you have hateful feelings arising, ill will arising, it's very hard to create a situation of calm where you can actually have insight into the true nature of reality, because your mind is very filled with lots of thoughts of self and other, for one, because the ill will is directed, well, it can be directed at self and others. So they're supportive practices, but you can, as it says in the sutras, you can only go so far, there's still other work to be done, even if one feels great sympathetic joy or equanimity and so forth. There's still wisdom, there has to be wisdom and compassion together.

[06:42]

So the hatred and this, when we are talking about asidya or spiritual torpor, because of discontent and dis-ease and disappointment and so forth, with these kinds of frustrations of not getting what we want, that's one of the causes of feeling ill will and hatred, is frustration, not getting what we want. And the life is such that we don't get what we want, and there are those daily irritations and annoyances we cannot get outside of those. There's a koan that says, where can I go where there's no hot and no cold, where it's not going to be hot or cold, where I'm not going to be irritated and annoyed and frustrated. Where can I go, somebody?

[07:48]

So another antidote to ill will and anger, hatred and anger, is patience. And another one is this friendliness and sympathetic joy in particular. So the mind of someone who has these irritations and which we all do, but when they're unexamined and unacknowledged and unheld and not honored, and when there's no sympathy for ourselves, there's a tendency to strike out at others, and there's a self-poisoning. The sutras talk about a self-poisoning, where you actually poison your own spiritual endeavors, your own spiritual process gets poisoned also, not only people you come in contact with, but yourself as well, maybe more so, more damage done to yourself.

[08:53]

And it's likened to, the word poison is used, and it's likened to a snake that's ready to strike, this venomous quality, ready to strike. And also like an enemy who's watching for any opportunity to get a chance to get in there and do something damaging. How it would be if you were really after someone, you'd be watching, ready to get in there, any chance you've got. So this kind of mind is very rough, and can be very damaging towards self and others. Now compassion, this I found interesting, compassion means to suffer with. So you see the sufferings of others,

[09:57]

and you have a feeling, you actually feel their suffering, and what arises is a wish to alleviate their suffering, to do something, to steer them away, to take care of beings who are going through these difficulties, suffering with. Sympathetic joy is to rejoice with, to see the happiness of other people, the good things that happen to them, and to have gladness and happiness for them. Now this is interesting, cruelty is rejoicing on people's suffering, rejoicing over people's suffering is cruelty. So this hatred that we have that's kind of unexamined and unstudied and not held, is kind of in a latent way,

[10:58]

kind of ready to strike out, impedes our own spiritual practice and also blinds us to the good qualities in other people. We don't see them because we're kind of blinded by this poison. So we can't see other people's virtues, and we can't see their suffering either, because there's just this ill-will and irritation, we don't see their suffering. And I think it's, although it wasn't in what I was studying, but it occurred to me that that is one of the six realms called the Asuras, or the fighting gods, they're sometimes called. In Buddhist cosmology there are six realms, the heavenly realm, the fighting gods, or Asuras, human realm, animal realm, hungry ghosts, and hell realms. So the Asuras, they're competitive, they're fighting, they're aggressive, and one of the reasons it's hard to practice in the realm of the Asuras is because you don't notice anybody's suffering, you're just...

[12:02]

It's like someone told me they're leaving real estate because part of being in real estate is you look upon everybody as a possible client, and all your co-workers you're in competition with. And the feeling in her office was such that she couldn't stand it anymore. Everybody, you couldn't trust what people were saying because everybody's trying to one-up each other to get the client to make the deal. That's the main thing, to make the deal. And then anybody you meet in a social situation, someone's family, gee, I wonder if they're selling their house pretty soon or might want to buy, so that you're constantly looking for an opportunity. She couldn't stand it anymore. Maybe that's like the Asuras, kind of real estate agents. Gone awry. So failing to see the virtues of another or their sufferings because you're just irritated all the time. So it's very important, I think, for our community life and our individual personal lives, interactions,

[13:05]

interpersonal and intra-personal, our own inner selves, to be aware of these tendencies we have and how they're operating. So the sympathetic joy, rejoicing with, it's very similar to... All the four Brahmaviharas have a similar kind of meditation wherein you start... Well, it says you have your lunch, you eat your meal, you wash your bowl. This is in the Path of Purification, the Visuddhimagga. This is the classic manual of Buddhist doctrine and meditation. And it talks about, you go on your alms rounds, you get your bowl and then you take care of it and you find a quiet place, just like in the Fukanza Zangi. For zazen, a quiet place is suitable. You find a quiet place, you get your cushion ready, your kusha grass,

[14:06]

and then you sit upright and then there's a meditation that you can do to enter the Brahmaviharas, to enter these heavenly abodes of equanimity and sympathetic joy, friendliness. And you start with yourself. You start in terms of metta or loving-kindness. You start, may I be happy. May I. You start with you. Because if you're not friendly with yourself and there's self-hate going on with you and there's no loving-kindness for you, it's very hard to express loving-kindness for others. You may give it a try, but there will be this one's own unexamined... I know this is kind of psychologically talking, but this is Buddhist psychology too. One's own unexamined hatred or non-friendliness or non-loving-kindness will get spread out to other people.

[15:08]

So you start with yourself. May I be happy. May I be free from illness. May I be safe. You wish these things for yourself. And then the next group you include in that wish. In the metta suttas, may all beings be happy, but in this meditation you start with yourself. Then the people who are dear to you, who you feel loving-kindness for maybe already, without too much difficulty, then kind of indifferent people, or not indifferent but... Well, it says indifferent, but it means neutral. You have neutral acquaintance you neither dislike nor like particularly, but you wish them all the best and may they be happy and free from illness and free from fear. And then to your enemies, people you actually know that you carry some ill-will for, fear about, or anxiety in enemies. And then that goes to the entire universe.

[16:09]

And then those are kind of the four groups, self, dear ones, neutral ones, and enemies. And then the next part of the practice is to drop the distinctions between all four so that no one of those groups is any more important than any other. And the story around that is if a robber were to come and you were with you and a dear one and an acquaintance, indifferent, and an enemy were all together and the enemy said, the thief, it says, says, you know, I need the blood of one of you, so who's it going to be? And if you were to say, you know, if you offered up, say, well, this guy can go, that wouldn't be, you know, dropping the distinctions. But if you said, I'll go, that also would be, that would be, you know, drawing the blood of someone as well. All the distinctions drop away in this

[17:11]

where you don't make a distinction between all four. It's a realm where it's equal to all those four. So it's a meditative, you know, state. So the sympathetic joy, the proper way to do this meditation, you don't start with someone who's dear to you. I think this is very interesting. They say that a person who is dear to you is not the proximate cause, the near cause for this meditation, nor is someone who's passed away, you don't think of them for starters, and a person of the opposite sex, they caution about that, although it could be same sex as well, someone you have a particular attraction to, you don't start out with them. You start out with what they call a boon companion. A boon companion,

[18:11]

and the way they describe a boon companion is somebody that you know of who is constantly glad, someone who laughs first and speaks afterward. So you can think, now do I know anybody like that, who's a real jolly old fellow, who's filled with a kind of hearty gladness, hell fellow, well met, who laughs first and speaks afterward. That's who you start with for sympathetic joy, because when you think of that person, you kind of feel it already, kind of growing in you. Somebody that you know, just imagine you meet them, you haven't seen them in a while, that feeling that you have, that's this kind of gladness or sympathetic joy. And then you go to dear ones and the indifferent and the other ones, but you start with this boon companion. I think it's so great, a boon companion. So one would think,

[19:15]

well, gee, sympathetic joy, wouldn't it be easy to rejoice in the happiness of others? But actually, if we look closely at our life, we see it's sometimes not very easy to rejoice in the accomplishments of our fellow practitioners, and we actually end up feeling jealousy and envy and covetousness, which I talked about on Sunday, but I just wanted to say it again. Envy, it comes from the word that means to look out, videre in Italian, to look, to look out. So it's a feeling of discontent and resentment aroused by contemplating another's desirable possessions or qualities with a strong desire to have them for oneself.

[20:15]

That's envy. So this looking out and contemplating what other people have, that's desirable, and then wanting it for yourself. So it's a very, the light is not turned in, it's a looking out. So when something favorable happens, that may be what arises, rather than the sympathetic joy or covetousness, and the word covet is to desire that, it's very similar to envy, to desire that which is another's, or to crave, but the root of it is different. The root of the word covet means to smoke, to cook, to move violently, agitated emotionally. So it's very, you really had a strong image, you know, of what it's like

[21:18]

to crave and covet, looking and wanting what other people have, like a hungry ghost. And a hungry ghost, which is one of the six realms, is, you know, it's never satisfied, it can't be fed, it has, you probably know, it has a teeny tiny mouth. I mean, this is the image, the kind of graphic image, teeny tiny mouth, and a very distended stomach because it can never get any nutrition, and it's agitated, you know, because it can't be fed. So that's like this coveting, and it means to smoke, you know, to be over a fire, you know. It's a hell realm too. Hell realms are fire and so forth. So sympathetic joy is an antidote to this, to actually call up this gladness that you do feel for your boon companion. Another way to foster

[22:20]

or access sympathetic joy is to review the spiritual accomplishments of the noble ones, you know, of the teachers and the Buddhist practitioners of the past and present that you know, to review their spiritual accomplishments. That is another antidote to ill will and hatred, and also calls up sympathetic joy. The one that I find is maybe even more accessible than the boon companion or spiritual teachers is the joy we have when we see, and I think we can readily feel this without resorting to finding a quiet place and setting ourselves up for a particular meditation, is when we see children, babies, like starting to walk. Like Lucas, for example. Those of you who have been watching Lucas kind of go from baby

[23:22]

to then taking some steps, and it's like you just are rooting for him, and there is nothing held back. It's just total joy. This is sympathetic joy and gladness. You have no, there's no reservation. You just completely feel it. So for children often, and I think it's because we have no, our own self-worth or something is not involved in that, or our own, there's no comparison. We don't have to bring our self and our own comparative mind in there. It's just free sympathetic joy and gladness and also for a young person's like athletic prowess or something, to see a kid hit a ball or run or catch or play soccer,

[24:24]

it's, you don't have to, you don't get yourself in there like, they're doing better than me or I couldn't do that or something. You just, you feel that. So that's another way I feel of, although it doesn't say it in this, I feel that that's some way we can get in touch with our own sympathetic joy, which is our birthright. This is something where we are in sympathy with one another and the joys and accomplishments of our fellow human beings in reality are our own joys and accomplishments based on non-dual understanding. Their joy is your joy, their good thing that befell them is for you too, is in reality. So based on our ignorance of self and other, we are not able to experience this,

[25:28]

we're cut off from it. And then these afflictive emotions of envy and covetousness and jealousy and so forth are maybe not tended to, taken care of. Something just occurred to me there while I was talking, I'm going to lose it. Well, it'll come back. So that basic ignorance, maybe this is what it was, that basic ignorance cannot be uprooted by sympathetic joy and friendliness and so forth, but there are great benefits that come to you and these benefits are, for example, kind of mundane things, but you sleep better, you don't have bad dreams, this is all on the path of purification.

[26:29]

You sleep well, you don't have nightmares and bad dreams and human beings, humans and non-humans alike are drawn to you and care for you. So a situation is created whereby you can actually work on... favorable conditions are created for shamatha and vipassana, for calm and insight and understanding the true nature of self and other. So this will be a help for you, for us, a help for us. I love that it says, you know, you'll sleep better, you'll sleep well and no bad dreams. I mean, this may be just a carrot or something by Buddhaghosa

[27:32]

to get you to practice in a certain way, but anyway. So I wanted to read a story from Ed Brown's book or maybe paraphrase it from... I never remember the title of this book, Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, this cookbook that is laced with Suzuki Roshi stories of when Ed was Tenzo and it reminds me of exactly what we've been talking about. Ed was the Tenzo at Tassara, I think maybe the first Tenzo and Tenzo for a number of years and he has some wonderful teaching stories about what it was like to practice as Tenzo and then bring things to Suzuki Roshi that were troubling him and in this case he was really annoyed and irritated with the people he was working with. Now this is from Asidiya where you're brooding on the people around you

[28:33]

and how they're ruining your practice and making it so difficult for you and he felt that they weren't working hard enough. They were slacking off and the rice never got washed. It took so long for the rice to get washed and they were taking too long breaks and when you watched them work they weren't very present in their activity and he couldn't tell what they were doing and one of the people who worked there said, why do you talk to me that way? And he said, like what? And she said, like you were angry with me about something. What have I done? There's this person working in the kitchen doing her job and he's, you know, whatever they're doing is irritating and bothering him so he's striking out but completely believing that they were not practicing very hard and ruining his kitchen practice.

[29:34]

So he goes to Suzuki Roshi. Finally, I complained to Suzuki Roshi. I told him all the problems I had with people not behaving the way I thought they ought to behave if they were really practicing Zen. Arriving late, taking long bathroom breaks, gossiping, being absent-minded or inattentive. Then I asked him for advice on how to get everyone to work with more concentration and vigor. I mean, that seems like a perfectly good thing to bring to Suzuki Roshi. And Ed says, he seemed to listen quite carefully as though he understood my difficulty and was entirely sympathetic. Parents, yes, you just can't get good help anymore, can you? He thought that's what Suzuki Roshi probably was thinking. When I finally ran out of complaints, he looked at me briefly and then responded, if you want to see virtue, he said, you have to have a calm mind. That isn't what I asked you, I thought to myself, but I kept quiet.

[30:35]

I gave it some time to turn me around. Was I going to spend my time finding fault or seeing virtue? It had never occurred to me that I could spend my time seeing virtue, but my teachers mentioning it made it seem obvious. So, we can see virtue. I think we can just decide to see virtue. Right there, in people's, whatever is irritating us and making us so annoyed and impatient and making us want to strike out, if we look carefully, we can see sincerity, we can see effort, we can see suffering that's there, that's part of why the person may be going kind of slow that day or we can see physical pain, we can see loss, we can see people

[31:38]

really trying hard, which is virtue. I think it is possible to see that when we're not blinded by our own aggressive, angry, hatred, irritation, annoyance. We can actually turn that. We can turn that. And Suzuki Roshi said, you have to have a calm mind to do this. You have to have a calm mind. So part of these meditations on friendliness and sympathetic joy and loving kindness are to help us with this calm, calmness. So anyway, it's a very happy ending. Ed goes back into the kitchen and whenever I found fault with someone, I would remind myself to look again more carefully and more calmly. I began to recognize people's basic good intention to sense people's effort. The effort it took even to stand on the spot

[32:39]

and be exposed for all the world to see. He'd catch glimpses of our shared vulnerability. And it got to be quite laughable at times. Once I asked someone to get 18 cups of black beans from the storeroom. About 20 minutes later, I realized he hadn't come back. How difficult can it be to get 18 cups of beans? I righteously raged to myself as I headed for the storeroom. Before arriving, I cautioned myself to look for virtue. What was going on? Sure enough, there he was sorting through the beans, pretty much one by one, making sure that each was not a stone. I felt a surge of impatience and then I thought, well, he's being thorough. He's being conscientious. I don't know, I don't remember what I said, but my response was at least somewhat softened. Something more articulate than, you idiot! And so forth.

[33:39]

So, as a help for our calm mind, calm ourselves, see if we can see virtue. So, you know, as someone may say, well, this effort is real, that's fine and dandy, but that's just gradual practice and what about sudden enlightenment and non-dual practice that's self and other, right? I mean, so, I'm just going to try and tie it up here. This is this little book translated by Thomas Cleary which is called Minding Mind and it has different teachers just giving meditations, just giving instructions and, you know, I guess what I want to say

[34:51]

instead of maybe reading this right now is to do this kind of effort, whatever it was I've been talking about, to just make an effort without any ulterior motive, just to make the effort if it's friendliness or seeing virtue or just make the effort without adding any more like maybe this is going to do something or this is going to help me become enlightened or it's just, just stop with just making the effort, whatever the practice is. There's myriad practices. Whatever it is, to just make the effort right there without adding anything to it is how I understand the right effort. And this is a question, this is Hong, no, this is a Korean master, Chin Nool, and someone asks him,

[35:52]

you say there's two categories of sudden enlightenment and gradual practice. If enlightenment is sudden, what's the need for gradual? This is what we've been talking about in the tea. If practice is gradual practice, why speak of sudden enlightenment? Please explain the meaning of sudden and gradual further to eliminate remaining doubts. And he answers, as for sudden enlightenment, as long as ordinary people are deluded, they think their bodies are material conglomerates and their minds are random thoughts. They do not know that inherent essence is the true body of reality. They do not know that their own open awareness is the real Buddha. Seeking Buddha outside of mind, they run randomly from one impulse to another. So we believe

[36:53]

that our mind is random thoughts, that our body is this conglomerate thing, and we do not know that inherent essence, I would understand that as Buddha nature, is the true body of reality. They do not know or we do not know that our own open awareness is the real Buddha. So our own open awareness is the real Buddha is just do it, just make the effort. And there's the real Buddha right there, whether you know it or not, whether we experience it the way we think we're supposed to experience, that's all adding, that's all extra. So, our own awareness, our own open awareness is the real Buddha. So in another chapter in here,

[38:05]

Hongren says, he gives a long, long, beautiful explanation or teaching, Taisho, about practice and zazen and then at the end he says, I have said all these things based on the sutras and the teachings of the ancestors, but my understanding is not complete. So, if any of you do understand, please, please take care of my disciples first. If you do understand, please take care of them. Which, this kind of confession that he will teach and he will teach according to his understanding and what the sutras say and what the ancestors say, and yet he hasn't completed and this is how I feel. So, but still,

[39:06]

I'm going to talk about these things. And if each one of you understands, when you understand first, please, then you teach too. Because it feels funny in the mouth, you know, to talk about. Well, the frogs have stopped, so I think it's time to end. May our intention May our intention

[39:58]

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