And hello again and welcome to the people online.
Just recognizing today as I tried to have a Dharma talk that's prepared but not overprepared. And then events in the world happen and I'm not sure where they fit in but I want to acknowledge that local and and global. You know, we've got another weekend bombing campaign and then I heard the name of our Wilderness Dharma partner, Luba on the memorial service, which is new to me. And we'll just feel into that and and really take the opportunity to ask or to look at the big questions of why we are here. You know what what are we doing here? First there's the the big three: suffering, old age and death is the big question and that is the the focus of Buddhism and Zen. And the other one is compassion. And so everything we practice is really a focus on those.
Ao we'll jump in and see where that where that lands. I was, I worked on the President's Day holiday. It was scheduled to be a holiday, but I worked and at the hospital there's it's a skeleton crew there that day. and some minor issues came up and so I was looking around at who was available to direct around to address them and I looked at the calendar and it showed that everybody was here today which I knew wasn't true and was frustrating. In fact, I was a bit angry at the the person who was supposed to be doing the scheduling because now I don't know who to talk to.
You know, and then the thoughts arise of, well, gee, you know, what's it just doesn't understand the seriousness of us having this information about who to call and maybe a little bit lazy and then come to find out that well actually that the names had all been updated on the schedule, but it was a new version of the schedule because toward the last minute I had asked for a new version of the schedule be to be created. And there probably would have been time to get it out on the Friday except that I asked him to take on a couple of other projects. So, looking at these unassumed or these assumed intentions we'll carry that into the topic of today. We've been studying the parameters and Raizelah has already done a talk on Dana Paramita but as Chris said last week it's our favorite one. So I want to look at really a very specific element of generosity.
I had an insight into this element of generosity with a philosophy paper that I wrote in college that I thought I had done a really excellent job, a strong argument of just totally skewering the author of the paper that I was reviewing. And the professor came back and said, Well, everything you said was correct, but you weren't taking the generous interpretation of what he was saying. That in debate maybe you go for or in law you go for whatever you can. But the intention here is that we try to understand their argument as well as we could possibly have made it if we were trying to make that argument. So what I want to look at today is generosity in our interpretations of others actions, generosity in our assumptions about intentions. This goes beyond forgiveness. And forgiveness is highly recommended. Forgiveness is challenging. Forgiveness has a lot of resources in Zen. It's something that we that talk about that it comes up through the years of our study.
It encourages us to seek out our blind spots and our confusions and and recognize that everyone is acting out of blind spots and confusion.
But I want to go beyond forgiveness to actually recognizing that we don't know everything, right? I mean, that's kind of the another core Zen principle is questioning what it is that we think we know and especially when it comes to other people.
Chris also mentioned the Dale Wright book on the paramitas is the old standby book. So I when I was thinking about doing this talk, I got out my old Dale Wright book on the paramitas and ironically I was surprised to find just how much lack of generosity I had toward Dale Wright in reading them because the book was just peppered with these comments on what he wrote like this isn't right and he doesn't understand the dharma and oh that was probably 15 years ago that I was writing that. But does he understand a little bit? Yes, he understands a little more now, right? Yeah.
We take that from our perspective of approaching the whole of life as both and in the moment. What am I experiencing? What am I experiencing? And a recognition that the separation is a delusion. In our meal chant, we talk about the three wheels, giver, receiver, and gift.
And maybe when we're looking at the interpreting what the actions and the statements of others are, we could form a similar, you know, there's the giver, receiver, the gift. There's the me, the you, and the what we're talking about. And when it comes to others, there's no separation between myself and the person who I believe is wrong and whatever it is that I think they're wrong about.
And we wrap in generosity to that. This effort to reach out with doing a little bit more. Reach out with a little energy to explore that.
As it's mentioned plenty Hannah a few times mentioned that we are a this is a practice of lists. We have all the lists. So the the four unlimited emotions are loving kindness, sympathetic joy, compassion and equanimity and this also doesn't quite fit in there. Or maybe this is a specific application of that. There's something missing which is this. Maybe we'll call it an intellectual empathy. Right? The empathy is being able to feel from the perspective of the other person. And a piece of that is being able to think from the perspective of the other person. Of course, we have to start with generosity focused inward.
As I think about how we often mess that up with feeling guilt in a nonproductive way, that's just pain. That is basically just violence to ourselves. So all of the studying that we're doing is within that context of what makes the world a better place and is not just violence to ourselves.
Maybe another step besides forgiveness on the the path to trying to look at the intentions of others is the the Buddhist practice of imagining that everything that anybody else in the world does is because they're a Buddha and they are doing it for your benefit. This is a practice I learned about from Jack Kornfield in his book, Path with Heart which is just a carrying on of ancient teachings.
Boy, imagine that. All right. Every time you get cut off in traffic, every anytime somebody says a rumor about you, it's for your benefit.
That's a wonderful practice to put us in the mindset and that's also not quite what I'm talking about because that we do that practice purely to focus on the benefit of it and not really believing that they're doing it because they're a Buddha for my benefit.
So we keep studying.
It's a quote from Nancy Mujo Baker said notice the moralistic connotation of these words. These words being that somebody else is wrong and somebody else is at fault. An assumption that things or people should be other than what they are. Notice the should here. When we find fault, not only do we have a preference, but we are ready to reject something. To exclude it from our world and definitely from ourselves. Often what we think of as false may not be at all. Especially when whatever it is is not harming others and is just something I reject in myself. Thank God I don't have her elbows. Although I think a lot of times we have perceptions about what is harming others or is harming me.
And all of it feeds our mistaken notions of separateness. I think the paramitas the precepts appreciated Hannah's job of of tying the perfections back to the precepts back to our ethical work
and looking at how that is founded on that fundamental flaw in our perception that there is separateness.
We're having a two for one special today. So I also want to talk about another paramita just so we don't have too much generosity and I didn't want us to to go through this whole series of talks without without hitting dana perfection of concentration or meditation. Meditation is the better translation. Yana was and I actually I'm not sure I didn't verify whether that's a Sanskrit or poly word probably Sanskrit. But through hundreds of years of teaching that word yana became chan Chinese chan which then became in Japan zen. So the very name of this practice is that perfection of meditation. And that word sometimes as we read the paramitas is translated as the perfection of concentration. But it it in the original teachings it didn't mean that. It was they there very clearly chose the word that was the practice of meditation. The practice of sitting down with intention to do nothing. Well, sitting down with intention to to do whatever it is that we do in meditation and not on the benefits that arise from it or or concentrate, you know, those other words.
And yet, ironically, our practice which took that as the name flipped it on its head and brought it back to mean the practice of all of it with Dogen's teaching that everything is meditation. So, it's for us the perfection of bringing all of our lives, everything we do to be this effort that we're practicing in meditation.
So meditation going back let's you know just start I was caught today in our our grassroot hermitage as we chanted that on the just return. So that got me thinking about returning and which is that's you know that's our meditation. So we start with our good posture when we sit in meditation, right? We ought to cover a few of those points of meditation because that's what that perfection is. We sit with our if we're on our cushion and we could be it on the chair or whatever, but we sit with our hips rolled forward a little bit maybe definitely our our back straight unless unless we have some all of our bodies are different. Most of us are able to maintain the straight back and that's highly encouraged if we can make that part of our meditation so that as though we are suspended from the top of our head and as we're putting all this effort into that posture. We can't let go of the effort of letting it go, of relaxing, of letting the shoulders fall down, of not holding the tension in in our hips, of really finding that balance point so that we don't have to put a bunch of extra muscle work into it. So, starting with that point of posture, we bring our mind to whatever it is that we have chosen as our focus. Often times our breath, bring our mind to our breath.
bring our mind to our next breath
and then we realize that we're not bringing our mind to our breath that we're somewhere else. So then we return. That's step four, right? Is is always that returning that coming back to it.
And that doesn't just apply on the cushion. That applies to our our steps every day. Norman Fisher in The World Could Be Otherwise points that out. Zen's approach to meditation is set. Everything is meditation or nothing is but meditation. The meditation is beyond meditation. So there's no need to meditate. Insight is sudden, constant, all pervasive and therefore unnecessary. How do we come to this profoundly liberative understanding by practicing meditation so that we can understand how useless it is? Isn't that typical Norman?
And by continuing to practice meditation, not because it is necessary or even helpful, but because we are bodhisattvas who are dedicated to sharing practice with others. It transcends life and death, purity and impurity.
And then the little piece from Norman that just captures it so much for me. The irony of what we're trying to do. Meditation is a process of returning to our true selves that know that we are nothing other than everything we are not.
our true selves that know that we are nothing other than everything we are not. That separation doesn't exist. And of course it does. We have to get the fork to our mouth. We have to deal with getting up every day and going to work. But we also need to see that lack of separation.
I appreciate it. Again in Chris's talk last week and I don't have the exact words, but something like serenity doesn't mean that it all stops whirling. That the world continues whirling around us. And then of course it's not like we are sitting as the calm with everything going around us. We are part of the whirling too. But when we get to our true selves that is the calm in the middle.
So back a bit to looking at others intentions with generosity. And with a particularly challenging for many of us time for that is when we are looking at what's going on in politics.
Do we so readily reach the conclusion that half of the population of America is purely selfish, unethical or suckers?
We get into this habit often from my experience of talking with people and listening to people of very quickly villainizing.
So, let's come back to looking at our relationship on the precept of not expounding on the faults of others.
A practice recommended by Kathleen Shokai Bishop. Begin by deciding how you will completely relinquish yourself to the life of the bodhisattva in thoughts, words, and actions. Step one. Step two, set your intention to be mindful of words of harm to self or others. Step three, accept the Buddha's boundless loving kindness in each situation. And step four, finally, this is for the practice of the precept to journal, but to explicitly note how we are learning to embody the truth, that truth of non-separation and all of its aspects, thoughts, words, and actions that are affecting our life. And good luck with that. In the study of the the precepts, Rich and I are studying the Opening to Oneness book by Nancy Mujo Baker as part of our preparation for marriage in a few months, which is delightful and I I can't imagine a better study for marriage than to be looking at our ethical stance together and really looking at our own faults together.
I especially appreciate in that book in the Opening to Oneness the new to me interpretation of the absolute. We've long time talked about the precepts as being seen from a literal understanding like we just follow it because it says that a relative understanding recognizing that sometimes just following the words doesn't quite do the job. And then the absolute understanding being the standpoint of non-separateness. And what Nancy Mujo Baker adds to that discussion is an emphasis on that the precepts arise naturally as we have encounters with clear seeing.
that it's not about don't
just following a rule that it's about what arises naturally as we recognize our union our unity with others.
The book opening to oneness is becoming one and that's particularly relevant in that getting married right we're becoming one so there's a little bit more to that oneness and so the last note of that I hope that everybody here will be able to join us in celebrating that marriage with a potluck after our sit on June 7th. So please please come on June 7th and join us.
