I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Good morning. I don't know that intimidated is quite the right word, but I know that whenever I sit up here and we say that verse together, I always feel a little awestruck by being in this circumstance. But I also have some feeling that maybe together we may be able to feel our way along

[01:06]

into something that is penetrating and useful in our lives. And that all we can do is to keep that intention together as we meet various of us in this wonderful room on Sunday mornings. I feel very much like the proverbial blind person, groping along, trying to feel my way, what it is I want to try to talk about this morning. What I want to suggest has to do with knowing someone or being known. And I think that I can suggest the territory a little bit by telling you how this issue has come up for me. As some of you know, this past six months or so, I've been involved with the consequences of people close to us in our lives as practicing Buddhists, and for me in a personal way as well, with several people who have died and taking care of the residual effects after their deaths.

[02:37]

And in one instance, someone returning to her home in India so that it is in fact a kind of dawn. Our friend Nancy Wilson Ross died in late January. Lama Govinda died actually a year and a half ago, but in late April, his wife went back to India. And at that point, I began to have a kind of experience of both Lama and me being an hour in my life as if they had died. And then in June, my stepfather died. He had been my stepfather for 46 years, so he was a very real person and figure in my life. And particularly with Nancy and with the Govindas, I'm still up to my eyeballs plowing through all of this stuff.

[03:39]

of their lives, journals and manuscripts and paintings and Buddhist practice objects and clothes and blankets and pillows and toothbrushes and teeth and, you know, the whole business. And what has struck me in doing this work of laying things to rest and bidding them farewell and good speed is a kind of irony in coming to know each of these people in a way much better than I ever knew them when they were alive. I had a very vivid experience of that the weekend after my stepfather died when I went through a picture album that he had put together when he was very young. And I had a sense of him a certain dimension of his life which I had known more out of having hints about certain aspects of his life and things that he was interested in and cared about.

[04:54]

But when I looked through this picture album, it became much more vivid and palpable in a way. I've very clearly had this experience with Nancy and particularly with Lama Govinda and been struck by a kind of poignancy to seeing more clearly who each of these people have been and understanding more clearly what they were trying to do in their life's work. and struck a bit by how much they tried to do what they were doing in their lives alone, partially because they had some vision of their work, their life work, but also out of some instinct which I think is more widely shared, perhaps for all of us, certainly for many of us.

[05:59]

which comes from a kind of hiding of our fear, our fear of being judged and found wanting, our shame at being who we actually are, and being afraid that if anyone else knew the truth, they wouldn't love us and care about us and appreciate us. A kind of fear that somehow what we do in our lives won't be good enough or quite up to the standard that we have announced is who we are, our identity out in the world. And along with that sense of uncovering someone who was in a way a bit hidden, What has come up for me over and over again is some experience of feeling deeply moved by these people's effort, in spite of and including everything, to live their lives as well as they could.

[07:12]

And a feeling, on my part, of being deeply moved and encouraged by seeing more clearly what it is that they were trying to do in their lives. I'm also struck by how many opportunities there were that slipped by all of us for joining together to do something which is more our common work in the world. And that has to do with answering what Suzuki Roshi used to call our heart's desire. That inner request which arises when we're quiet enough to listen. I think that some of this fear that we have of being known, or fear that we won't be known, or fear that if we were known, if the truth was out, the jig would be up and we would be alone and uncared for, comes from an inner judging

[08:24]

which often resides in our habitual activity and language and thought in a way that we don't even hear it or know that we have this judging, this voice. In the Mindfulness Sutra, and in fact in the whole tradition in Buddhism, that has to do with the practice of and cultivation of mindful awareness, there is some acknowledgement of a kind of wall or barrier that arises between our intention and our ability to be present by a certain kind of judging. And I think that out of some fear that arises in most of us, if not all of us, we have some inclination to try to control things, to control the circumstances that we're in, control ourselves and the people that we're with, control anything and everything.

[09:39]

Where these inclinations reside in our habitual activity and thinking tends to be in that aspect of our life where we're the most asleep, where we go on automatic. And a lot of what we mean when we talk about practice or having practices in the Buddhist tradition has to do with activities or techniques for bringing our attention to our physical body, to our breath, to our state of mind, to the emotions that are arising and falling away that will allow us to wake up in just those aspects of our lives where we're the most asleep. That is where we are acting in some way that's habit. These ideas we have about who we are are so strong

[10:51]

Some of you may remember an old woman who lived with us at the city center a number of years ago, Mrs. Fisk. Mrs. Fisk came to live with us when she was about 80. And she lived at the city center for about four years. She was frail enough so that she could not go downstairs to the Zendo. So she would, in the morning, sit in her room And sometimes she would come to the Buddha Hall, where we would do morning service, and join us for chanting. And some days she would just do her morning practices in her room. And I, at the time, lived in the city and would, in the morning, go to say good morning to her. She was a very small woman with carrot red hair. very merry, twinkle in her eye. She would always say, good morning, Yvonne.

[11:55]

And how are all the monks and monkesses? She had been studying Zen for many, many years and had also been a student of general semantics and was something of an actress. And she spent those years with us Doing her best effort to practice the Buddha's way, to meditate, she gave away most of her possessions so that by the time she died, everything she owned could be fit easily into one small cedar chest, maybe this big. But it was only after she died that I realized that in many ways she had, as much as any of us, been hiding. I discovered that her hair was indeed not red. It was quite gray.

[12:57]

And I heard just a few days ago from a friend of mine who was very attentive to Mrs. Fisk and helped take care of her, that one day, not very long before she died, he had said to her, Mrs. Fisk, I would like a picture of you. So she produced a picture of herself at about age 26. He said, you know, that's not the picture of her I wanted. That was somebody I didn't know. I wanted a picture of her the way I knew her. But it was the picture of herself at 26 that she thought to give to her dear friend. She was a closet smoker. So after she died, I discovered that most of her clothes were covered with all of those telltale holes that cigarette smokers have in their clothing. But she, of course, very carefully covered up with these wonderful silk scarves. And a fair amount of movement.

[14:03]

And in the end, the last week of her life, she was mostly frightened of dying. even though she had spent many, many years with that needing of birth and death, which is inherent in the practice of meditation, in the practice of attending to the breath. One of the students who practices with us here is just now in France with Thich Nhat Hanh, and he just sent a letter in which he reported a session of a lecture that Thich Nhat Hanh had given recently in which he talked about his meeting last year with our friend Nancy, who wrote some books on Buddhism and on Zen, and in her own way, practiced the Buddha's way also for a number of years. And Thay said in his lecture that when he went to see Nancy,

[15:11]

when it was clear to him that she was dying of cancer, what she could say to him was, I've forgotten everything I've studied and learned, and all I know right now is that I'm afraid, and I'm afraid of dying. I was really struck by his reporting at that meeting with Nancy because my experience with her was that she tried to hide that fear and it was usually only if you happen to be up when visiting her late at night and all the guard would be down and we would have some accidental meeting in the kitchen over a glass of milk or checking on a noise in the basement or whatever, and she would admit that she had not been sleeping because some fear had come up in her.

[16:25]

What happens when we allow ourselves to know our fears, when we allow ourselves to meet ourselves as we actually are, and in so doing, become more visible to each other, I think is an opportunity for us to in fact keep each other company, give each other some support, to know who we are, and to understand the perfection in our imperfections. I think that the Buddhist tradition and in particular the meditation traditions that are the heart of Buddhism can be a kind of source and resource for us in allowing ourselves to simply be the way we are at any given moment. For example,

[17:33]

If we are doing some sitting or walking meditation, where part of our practice is letting our attention come to the breath as it is, there is a kind of line between controlling the breath so that it will be a good breath. The kind of breath we've all learned is a so-called good breath. It should be slow, and it should be deep, and it should be even. and we should feel calm. And so as we're sitting or walking, we may find ourselves managing our breath as we manage other aspects of our life. But when we do that, we are missing the point, because it is in that breath which may be less than ideal, which may be high in my body or rather rapid, or have some quality of raggedness or roughness to it, in noticing those characteristics or qualities of breath, that I can also then begin to understand that when my breath has those characteristics, that gives me some clue about my state of mind.

[19:01]

about some tension in my neck or back, some tightness in my stomach. And it will be in noticing the raggedness, the fear or anxiousness or tension or anger, which allows me to bring some gentleness and some attention to the detail of my physical body and my breath. and the circumstances to which I have this response. And it is in that meeting that I can be fully awake to what's going on at this moment. And it is in that moment of seeing how things actually are that I may have some insight about my capacity to meet whatever it is including fear and anxiety and anger, with a kind of calmness and capacity for concentration, and eventually, if I can cultivate some patience, the cultivation of compassion and wisdom, that these things are not separate from each other.

[20:25]

A few of us are doing a retreat this weekend, I being the only non-lawyer in the group, and we've been talking about how various practices in the mindfulness tradition can be of use to someone who is practicing law. And someone was saying yesterday, talking about his experience in going to work a few days ago, and realizing that he had some butterflies in his stomach and was feeling some apprehension about a rather difficult meeting that he was going to. And that in bringing his attention to his breath and allowing his breath to be full and deep, but also understanding that he was nervous, that he did have some tension in his stomach, he was able to have some calmness and at the same time still feel butterflies and nervous, that those were not mutually exclusive of each other.

[21:37]

Someone can talk about their anger and the way they work with their anger, and in the midst of admitting that they are a person who can feel a kind of abiding anger with the suffering of the world with the kind of harm that this person sees in his work and can then tell me about his stumbling upon some insight about what happens to himself when he says instead of, I hate my enemy, when he says to himself, I love my enemy, And he then experiences a physical change in his stomach, and his body, and his breath. That person being willing to tell me who they are, complete with all of the imperfections, teaches me more deeply than anything else I can imagine.

[22:48]

in that moment of willingness to not hide, to simply say, this is who I am, this is how I respond to these difficult situations in my life. I feel a kind of connectedness and support and encouragement, which I don't experience when I only meet perfection in another person. A friend of mine who's a meditation teacher, one day in a retreat that he was teaching, suggested that wouldn't it be wonderful if there was some hat we could put on where we would all know what thoughts were going on in our minds. I think for some of us we think that's terrible. If everybody knew all the terrible thoughts I had going on in my mind, But there's also the possibility of a kind of relief, because then we wouldn't have to pretend.

[23:58]

We could just be the person we are, with all those goofy thoughts, selfish thoughts, sometimes unkind thoughts. But are we so different from each other in those ways? If in fact we know that each of us is corruptible, that we each have a capacity to do things badly or to cause harm, we may find our ability to be sympathetic with another person who acts on that possibility. We may be able to feel some connection and not separation. And it will be in that connection that we can find ways of encouraging each other and encouraging ourselves. We on the new moon recite the precepts together, and in that practice of saying out loud, these are the guidelines for how to live my life, which I promise before all of you, my brothers and sisters, that I will in the next weeks

[25:20]

attempt to follow. And by saying those promises out loud to each other, we in a way give each other permission to help each other when we don't do it, or to appreciate each other when we do. So what I'm bringing up for us to think about and to consider is not so much some encouragement for the ways in which we hide, but for us to begin to notice the ways in which we hide, and to encourage ourselves and each other to come out from under the hiding a little bit, in whatever small ways we can. And to understand that when we sit together, or when we go and do some walking meditation in the garden, or when we stop in the midst of our activity for one breath, we can practice this attitude, this mindset, even if it's just for one breath, by letting ourselves be open to the breath that we have in those moments and be willing to notice it in all of the particularity just as it is.

[26:46]

and to not continue to hide and manage and control the world in ways that, if we are really truthful to ourselves, we understand isn't very effective anyway. That we can experience a kind of ease and gentleness in our lives, even if it's only for the space of one or three breaths, If we are willing to do that every day, that activity, that practice, that coming to the moment, the breath in this body, for that one or three breaths, or for a period of zazen, or some quiet walking in the garden, will begin to have some effect in our lives at other times. We always think that suffering and sickness and death, even old age, will come to everyone else except ourselves.

[28:03]

And then something will happen to remind us that that's not so. This morning, when you go over to get your cup of tea, you'll walk past the Han, hanging just under the covered walkway. outside the Wheelwright Center, the big block of wood which we hit for announcing meditation or classes or lectures. Please read the verse on the Han and take it to heart. Not because I said so, but out of some possibility that you may actually in the quiet of your room in the middle of the night when you wake up, know that you want to be truthful and present with yourself, and that all you need to do is to dare to do that for one moment.

[29:09]

That we can begin to be present right now, and that if we keep being so busy that we put it off, we may find ourselves actually at that moment of death, present with the fear that we've cultivated and not with our capacity for being present. That we can be friends with our fears and let our fears teach us what it is we actually need and want to look at. The breath is a kind of connecting line, lifeline, if you will, between the body and the mind. If we begin with our physical body and with our breath, we will come to know ourselves

[30:18]

And in that knowing, we may be willing to let others see us. I think there's a way in which we can experience the healing that we all seek in our lives, when we have that experience of being seen and understood, known by another person. And what I'm suggesting is that it begins with our seeing and understanding ourselves. And that the Buddha's way, which has to do with sitting quietly and paying attention to the breath and to how it is in this moment, is a deep and profound vehicle for this knowing. And ultimately, for some experience that we may have of our deep connection with all things.

[31:25]

Thank you very much.

[31:34]

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