Stream audio:
Talk Notes
Good morning, my friends. As always, I'm very happy to see you here both in person and on Zoom. We have Kate and Jeff and John and I'm sorry I can't read the bottom right person, but ah, hi Bob. Thank you very much for being here.
So, our theme this year is the six perfections. And when I think about studying the six perfections, I think about learning to play a musical instrument. And in case you do not know, I'm probably the least musical person you will ever meet. Keeping a rhythm, hitting a pitch is mission impossible for me. So when I first begin playing and I love Native American flutes, everything is awkward. I mean, it's still awkward because I don't practice enough, but my fingers don't land where they should. The timing is off. The sound is uneven. So, if I judge myself by the standard of perfection in those early stages, I would quit immediately. I wouldn't I would burn the flute. But if I stay with it, something begins to shift. Not all at once, slowly over time. And not dramatically, but gradually the hands learn how to close those finicky holes on the flute. The ear refines. The body becomes more at home with the instrument. And I also become more at home with the mistakes I continue to make. I recognize them. I say, "Ah, there's that mistake again." And the paramitas kind of work like that a bit. The parameters are not asking us to be flawless, perfect practitioners.
They're training us to become more skillful, more responsive, more intimate with this life we are actually living.
So we will have the rest of the year to practice with intention with the paramitas, the six perfections, and that is a beautiful idea. It is also a phrase that can get us into deep trouble because we hear the word perfection. Most of us actually don't experience it as perfection. We hear never-ending relentless pressure to be better than we actually are. And that has never been the intention.
We hear an implied external standard and often we don't even know what our own standard is based on much less the standards of others.
Well, my standards were based on conditioning and according to the report cards frequently delivered by my parents throughout my youth, I was not a failure. Maybe you too ended up with a story in your head that whatever you do will never be quite good enough. So I would like to offer you all a private side quest.
Please investigate your relationship to the word perfection.
If you find that perfection rubs you the wrong way, that it creates a hostile internal environment for your practice, use a different phrase. Maybe you want to stick with paramitas, which it's a foreign word. We can give it our own meaning, the meaning we find true in our heart. We can use values, virtues, guacamole, I don't care. But make it something that allows you to lean into this practice.
So what are we actually seeking to perfect through the paramitas? Not a flawless personality. I want to be clear on that. Not a spiritual resume. What is being shaped slowly and often invisibly is our character in the deepest Buddhist sense. The paramitas train the heart to be more responsive, less defensive, more permeable to the needs of the moment. Over time, generosity weakens the reflex to cling. Ethical conduct refines our sensitivity to harm we see or cause. Patience steadies the nervous system and softens anger. Effort builds reliability. Meditation stabilizes attention. And wisdom loosens our fixed ideas and views.
What is perfected is not the absence of human limitation but a maturation of how we meet our life. Our character becomes more trustworthy, more flexible, more able to remain present in the middle of difficulty. This is the quiet work of the paramitas. This is the quiet work of the paramitas.
We imagine somewhere in our background the suggestion that a good practitioner should eventually become unusually calm, unusually generous, unusually unruffled, unusually wise. And then we look at our actual lives and our practice.
Zen practice begins somewhere much simpler and much more demanding. Zen works with what is real, what exists right now. This breath, this body, this moment of irritation, this moment of care, not a perfected vision of ourselves that we imagine might appear someday, but the living conditions of this very life. It starts with me and who I am. The conditioning I bring to the table. The fact that I couldn't sleep last night. All the years of zazen practice. That I am loved. That I love. That I forgot to fix my breakfast. This random collection of factoids that could be seen in a positive or negative light depending on our mood or disposition.
Before going further, it helps to remember something very basic about the entire Buddhist tradition. Across cultures, across centuries, across philosophical schools, the teachings have only one fundamental aim, the end of suffering. However elaborate the philosophy becomes, however poetic our beloved sutras are, the root question is always the same. How does suffering arise and how does it cease? That is why the same core insights keep appearing in different forms throughout the tradition. Whether we are reading early teaching, Mahayana sutras or Zen text, we keep encountering the same gravitas, the same compassion, the same practical concern with how human beings can live with less suffering and cause less harm. And the paramitas belong right into the center of that all. Dale Wright in his book, The Six Perfections, helps us work through those descriptions of perfected saints. They are better understood as a philosophy of self-cultivation, a framework for training, a set of guiding orientations that gradually reshape a human life when practiced sincerely over time. This is very important for us as practitioners because somehow we still assume that perfection is the goal. Yes, it is and it is not. But we cannot wait for ourselves to reach it because we may overlook the very real ways practice is already changing us. Because we are not perfect, we conclude maybe we should wait with our next step. Maybe we think that nothing much is happening. But Zen is not interested in imagined futures. Zen is in interested in what actually unfolds.
So in case you're not familiar with this book by Dale Wright, The Six Perfections, I really recommend it warmly. It's the best I've read on the paramitas. It's a little bit on the geeky scholarly side, but if you can indulge me, this is a really good book.
So in Bendōwa Dogen writes practice and realization is are one not two stages not first we struggle and later we arrive and the same is true for the paramitas.
Practice itself is already the function of awakening. This is very good news for us imperfect people. Our imperfect sincere effort is not outside of the paramitas. It is exactly where they take shape. So today I want to do a very surface level walk through through all of all six of them. not as impossible ideals but as a living practice that unfolds right in the middle of our actual lives. And as we move through them, I invite you to keep asking one quiet question. Not am I perfect at this, but what is actually changing for me? What is softening? What is becoming more possible in this life?
You know, generosity is always everybody's favorite paramita because we can feel it instantly immediately in our heart when we're generous, when we give.
And generosity in the Buddhist tradition is not primarily about heroic acts. It is about loosening the deep human habit of centering everything around the small self. Generosity opens circulation. It creates relationship. It interrupts the reflex to grasp and to hold. Maybe we find our generosity to be lacking. We notice that we give and sometimes we hope that it's really appreciated and liked. We offer help and sometimes we feel tired afterward. We share and still notice self-reference woven through the act.
If perfection is our measuring stick, the absolute perfection, we might miss something important. We might miss the fact that we are in fact giving more freely than we once did. We might miss the moments that when the heart opens just a little bit more quickly than it used to.
Dogen says to give a flower or leave to the wind is an act of giving. a flower, a leaf, something very ordinary that didn't cost us a cent offered into the great movement of things. Zen works exactly right there. Not in some imaginary perfection of generosity, but this moment of willingness to offer what we actually can.
You might quietly reflect where in the last year or two has generosity become even slightly more natural, slightly less effortful, slightly less guarded. This is how the paramita of generosity grows.
The next paramita is ethical conduct. Wright emphasizes that Buddhist ethics is fundamentally rational. It is not about constructing a morally spotless individual. It is about becoming more sensitive to how our actions affect the web of life around us.
We take the precept sincerely and we don't want to do any harm. We intend to speak truthfully and act with care. And yet and yet we miss the mark over and over again. Sometimes even intentionally.
If we are fixated on perfection, we may only see the failure.
Our practice, however, asks us to look more carefully at what is actually happening now. Are we noticing sooner than we once did? Are we pausing a little more often before speaking? Are we repairing a little more quickly when harm occurs? These are not small things.
Not committing wrongs, practicing the many kinds of good naturally purifies the mind. Dogen. Naturally, over time through lived attention, ethics matures inside the conditions of a real human life and we begin to feel our way forward.
So the next paramita is my personal favorite. Patience can be described as the capacity to remain present with difficulty without immediately reacting from fear or aggression. It sounds simple until we watch the human nervous system in real time. Irritation can arise. Tightening happens. Heat moves through the body. Muscles tighten. Well, this is part of being human.
I really appreciate Jack Kornfield's playful take on this. If you can sit quietly after difficult news. If in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm. If you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy. If you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate. You can fall asleep after a day of running around without a drink or a pill. If you can always find contentment just where you are, you're probably a dog.
Don't we love that about dogs? They don't care if we had a crummy day. They just come at us and wag their tails.
So, we practice. And maybe irritation still comes, but maybe we stay one breath longer. Maybe we recognize it one breath sooner. Maybe we recover more quickly after being hooked. Or maybe we even recognize the hook before we swallow it whole.
Zen is very interested in these small real shifts.
You all know the line to study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. This forgetting is not a disappearance of human reactions. It is the gradual loosening of how tidily we organize ourselves around them. Each time irritation appears and we are willing to stay present even imperfectly, the paramita of patience is alive.
And if you want to seriously dive into patience, I do recommend Shantideva's Way of the Bodhisattva. It has a chapter on patience that is absolutely lovely and it literally changed my life.
The next paramita is energy. Sometimes called joyful effort.
Wright is especially helpful here because he dismantles the heroic model of effort. No martyrdom please. Our tradition is not asking us to maintain peak inspiration non-stop 24/7.
But it is asking for continuity, for steadiness, for the willingness to return across the long arc of a lifetime.
And anyone who has been practicing for a while knows the rhythm. There are periods of clarity and periods when you are really running dry. Times when practice feels vivid. Sometimes when it feels ordinary and boring, and you just really want to get up and reorganize your sock drawer.
If we measure ourselves against an image of perfect unwavering effort, we miss out on a deeper truth. We are still here. We are still practicing. We are beginning over and over and over again. Our mind wanders. We come back to the breath. It wanders again. Back to the breath. Our first moment of being really here is when the end of the meditation bell rings. It's still practice. That matters enormously.
Dogen praises the spirit of ongoingness when he writes about continuous practice. And that doesn't need to be something dramatic. It means ongoing, quiet, persistent, real. Sometimes the most profound expression of the paramita of effort is simply this. We come back to the cushion again and again which takes us right to our next paramita which is meditation. Here we meet the mind very plainly. We sit down. We follow the breath and very quickly the mind begins to move, plan, organize, comment, rehearse conversations that never happen or that never did happen. If we assume meditation should produce a perfectly still mind all the time, discouragement will come quickly.
Zen is working. What is actually happening right now? Oh, I am distracted. Back to the breath. The wandering mind is not the problem. The moment of noticing and returning is practice.
Dogen describes zazen as a dharma gate of repose and bliss. Yes, tell me that in the middle of sesshin when everything hurts. Repose in bliss. Yep. Joyful ease does not mean that the mind stops moving. It means we learn how to sit in the middle of movement without so much struggle.
And over time we may notice something subtle. The return becomes familiar. The noticing becomes quicker. The body learns how to settle even though the mind might still move. This is real progress even though we might not call it perfection.
And then the final paramita of wisdom. I should not say much about this because I am not very wise. So I lean on Wight. And he reminds us that wisdom begins very concretely. It begins with seeing clearly how suffering actually forms in our own experience. How grasping tightens the body, how aversion contracts the heart, and how the world we take to be solid is more fluid than we assume. And again, if we are honest, we see clearly one moment and forget the next. Dogen writes, "When one side is illuminated, the other side is dark.
Our understanding unfolds gradually. And wisdom is not something we can secure permanently. It is something we discover and rediscover in the midst of changing conditions. We might feel very wise one moment we actually may be wise one moment and then the next we lose it. So it's not something to be grasped, not something to be had or owned.
So when we step back and look at the six perfections, the paramitas, through the lens of what is actually real something very humane appears. The practitioner of generosity still notices self. The practitioner of ethics still makes mistakes. One practitioner practices patience and still feels irritation. Effort still gets us tired and yet we look carefully at what is right now and then we may see something else. There is more awareness and space than there once was. There is more pause. There is more willingness to begin again. Yes, the paramitas are doing their quiet work. They're not distant perfections to admire. They are the training of our character. They are a training in how to live. A philosophy of self-cultivation grounded in the very human project that runs through all of Buddhism, the gradual ending of suffering.
Mary Oliver offers these simple instructions for living a life. Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it. So as we continue in this year together, I invite us to stay very close to what is actually here. Not the imagined perfected self, not some distant spiritual finish line, just this moment. With our dissatisfactions, our longings, our love
exactly as it is right here. The path is already unfolding.
The point is never to build a private island of calm and perfection. It is to cultivate the a heart that can remain open and responsive without becoming hardened or overwhelmed by external difficulties.
Compassion keeps the heart from closing and patience allows us to stay in contact with difficulty without immediately reacting. Ethical conduct keeps us from adding more harm.
So let us try to keep on practicing and not to get stuck.
We want to stay informed enough to be responsible and grounded enough to be human and to be practiced enough that our heart does not close.
Just this moment of practice right here the path unfolds. And now we have come to the end of my talk and if you have found anything helpful in it please use it and if not please continue your practice. I did not say a single thing. Thank you.
