Good morning. There are a couple of practice details I would like to mention before I go to my remarks for the morning. One is that before, at the very beginning of sitting and at the very end of sitting, I want to encourage you to do that swinging motion where in the beginning, you begin with a big full stretching swing to the right and to the left and then let the next swing be a little bit smaller and the third swing quite a bit smaller so that you go from that gentle moving to sitting still and sitting straight. You are more likely to sit with some ease in your posture. And two, at the end of the sitting, to do the same thing in reverse, move a little bit to the right and then to the left, and then a little bit more fully to the right and the left.

[01:07]

And the third swing, a big full stretching, one way or the other. This moving, going into sitting still and coming out of sitting still, is something that I remember Suzuki Roshi emphasizing a lot whenever he would teach us about sitting meditation. And out of my own experience, I've discovered that his emphasis on this practice of moving in relationship to sitting still is very useful and important to pay attention to. Sometimes when I've been sitting in a meditation hall, I've been amazed at the end of the period when the bell rings, people kind of pop up with great speed. Who can get up there back on their feet the fastest? Kind of like a marathon.

[02:08]

And I wonder how carefully can one attend to taking care of legs and hips and back, take care of the physical body if we just spring forth like that? Because, of course, we have this opportunity to be mindful of whatever we're doing, not just when we're sitting still in the most formal posture. I also think that this practice is very important with respect to the cultivation of the quality of relaxation and ease in sitting. And it's very easy, especially in sitting meditation, to start being very strict with oneself. You know, this kind of intense forcing and pushing quality in the mind that leads to our not taking care enough

[03:10]

of the physical body. The other practice that I want to say a few words about is that of doing walking meditation or any moving in the meditation room or outside in a clockwise direction. There's no magic about it. There's no monster that's going to reach up from out of the ground and grab you by the ankles. It's simply a convention and an agreement among us about how we move, which means that whatever moving happens, particularly in the meditation room, if it's all happening in the same direction, there's some degree of calmness that isn't there when people are turning both clockwise and counterclockwise. And one of the things that we've discovered, those of us who do longer retreats, especially for a weekend or particularly when we've done a whole week together, is that not everybody knows what clockwise is.

[04:21]

That's not unusual. And there's usually at least one policeman in the group who gets very upset and angry at everybody because they're not doing it right. So those of us who don't know our right hand from our left hand, don't know about clockwise and counterclockwise, give such minds the opportunity for practice. Nevertheless, in the Buddhist tradition, when we practice in an environment where there is some marking of the Buddha's mind, and wakened or realized mind. We always keep that emanation of realization on the right shoulder. And so we always move in reference to, so if we're circumambulating a stupa, which is of course a very old and much honored practice, we always go in this direction as the hands of a clock move.

[05:29]

But we're doing it with this sense of keeping the right shoulder faced towards the Buddha, because then we're turning towards the Buddha, that reference towards the source of realization and true teaching. Now, in the Bon tradition, which is the ancient pre-Buddhist religious tradition in Tibet, their convention is exactly the opposite, to always turn counterclockwise. So I think it is useful to keep in mind that this is an agreement. And of course becomes then the opportunity for cultivating mindful awareness. Well, what direction am I walking in? And if I can realize, well, I'm not sure what clockwise is, that acknowledgement of I don't know can be the doorway for cultivating awareness about what clockwise is or what counterclockwise is, which leads to what I wanted to talk about this morning.

[06:38]

For those of you who were here last week for the one-day sitting, my apologies because I'm still on the same subject. I may be for a while. As some of you know, Bill and I recently went for a short but quite wonderful and very stimulating visit to Vienna and to Paris. And the consequences of that fling have been a kind of noodling and needling in my mind about the nature of suffering. A few days ago when I was talking together with a friend with whom I practice, we practice together, my friend was commenting on how supportive she finds the Buddha's teachings, what's called the first turning of the wheel, the first public teaching that the Buddha gave in Sarnath after his awakening.

[07:53]

And in that teaching he presented what has come to be called the Four Noble Truths. The first Noble Truth being the fact of suffering. And the second being that there are causes for suffering. It doesn't just kind of happen randomly. The third being that there can be a cessation to suffering. and the fourth truth being the explication of that path, the so-called eightfold path that leads to liberation or the cessation of suffering. And my friend was commenting on how, as her own practice has developed and matured, she has come to appreciate how accurate, how in fact truthful, the Four Noble Truths are. Who was the detective? I remember from the radio.

[08:57]

Dates me, I suppose. The truth, ma'am, nothing but the truth. Pardon me? Jack Webb, of course. How could I forget? My friend was saying that she felt a kind of support and stability in being able to reference the Four Noble Truths because they were, out of her own experience, so accurate. And of course, I think for each of us, it may take us some time to pay attention in our lives and in what we observe about human life in the world. to begin to realize that the first noble truth, that suffering is a fact of our lives, is a fact of human life, is a fact of living for all beings. First of all, what's the big deal? And second of all, well, maybe not, maybe not always.

[10:03]

We have a kind of period of arguing about whether this is in fact a true observation or not. That process of asking myself, well, was the Buddha right? Is it true that our human life is marked by suffering? The particular kind of suffering that came up for me as a result of this trip, which I've talked about last week and is still very much with me, promises to be with me for a while. has to do with the particular kind of suffering that is the consequence of turning away from our suffering. Not being willing to pay attention to the suffering that we have. Agreeing consciously or unconsciously to not speak about, not see, not know about the suffering that is so.

[11:07]

In particular, this came up for me as Bill and I tried to find indications of some acknowledgement of all the people who were killed in the Second World War. We really looked and looked and looked to find markers or memorials of some sort or another, both in Vienna and in Paris. Now I think that this looking, somebody who was here last week said, what a creepy thing to do on a vacation. How could they possibly have gone off to those two beautiful cities on a fling and been looking for something like that? But you know, it can't be helped. And in fact, for those of you who are only thinking about the Buddhist path, I want to forewarn you. Once you start this inquiry, this mode of inquiry, at a certain point there's no saving you.

[12:16]

All we can do is offer condolences to each other because, of course, once you start waking up, once you start practicing waking up, once you start practicing noticing, you can't go back to sleep with quite the degree of ease and comfort with which you went to sleep before. and it's, I'm sorry, but that's how it is. So even on a fling I notice that there is a way in which my own inner inquiry about suffering and about my own capacity for corruption, the capacity for corruption that seems to exist at least potentially, the capacity in all of us, just keeps coming up. It's something that I've been wondering about and thinking about for a long, long time. So this inquiry was, of course, stimulated by a visit that we had just before we left with a woman that I know from doing a long retreat together three and a half years ago, who is herself Jewish and German and lives in Germany, although

[13:35]

has finally decided that she cannot continue to live in Germany because she is so filled with fear in living there. And so she's in the process of getting ready to come and live here at least part of the year. And she's visited with us for about three days and the three of us had quite a long conversation about this. whole question of not knowing about what happened in the years leading up to the beginning of the Second World War and the whole period during which the Nazi regime was in power in much of Europe. One of the things my friend told me was about her own family and I can't remember if it was her father or her grandfather who was a doctor. And a person in the city where the family lived, of great respect, and had quite a flourishing practice as a doctor, was a kind of pillar of the community that he lived in.

[14:49]

And so, as the Nazis came to power, he and the rest of the family couldn't believe that anything terrible would happen to them, because they were, of course, fine, upstanding members of their community, and it would not be so terrible. And of course, in the end, the entire extended family was killed, with the exception of my friend and her mother. And as I've begun to be interested in this period of history in the world, I hear this story, I read this story over and over again. People who couldn't believe that anything terrible would happen to them. It was all going to happen to someone else. And so didn't pay attention to what they could see if they were willing to look and see. I'm reminded of my dear friend Nancy Wilson Ross who went to Germany with her first husband in the late, it went in 29.

[16:02]

29, 30, 31. And she was already by then a writer of some recognition here in the United States and had a contract with the Saturday Evening Post to write a monthly article. She and her husband were at the Bauhaus. Her husband was studying and she was taking classes there also. And she had this contract to write a monthly article for the Saturday Evening Post. So she wrote her first article. She sent it to the Saturday Evening Post. And it was her observation about what was happening on Main Street in the smallish city where the Bauhaus was at that time established. And of course, what she saw was all of the evidence of the rise of fascism. She saw all those elements. And so that's what she wrote about.

[17:06]

I was thinking, I want to dig out this article because I haven't read it for a number of years. It would be very interesting at this point now to read it. Because, of course, the Saturday Evening Post received the article and printed it, and then got thousands of letters of outrage. about this woman who had written this article that was bashing Germany, talking about all these outrageous things that she was predicting would happen. And they subsequently cancelled their agreement with her. Please don't send us any more articles. And of course, what was so was that what she saw very clearly, particularly as an outsider, came to pass. I remember one of the things she observed was going to visit the home of one of the professors at the Bauhaus. And at one point early in the visit, they had very exciting paintings hanging on the wall of the living room.

[18:14]

The kinds of things that were coming out of the Bauhaus community at the time. And six months later, when she and her husband went to tea at the same house, All those paintings were gone. And what was up were completely innocuous, traditional pastel landscapes, teacups, safe art. She said within a few months of their arrival, already people began to be afraid, began to hide anything that might be controversial. and yet didn't take seriously the implications of what that fear was rising out of. So it interests me a lot that right now we have this remarkable interest in going to the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

[19:19]

I don't know how many people go to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. A lot of people don't even know it exists. It's kind of the West Coast version of the Holocaust Museum. I recommend to all of you, if you're ever in Los Angeles, that you go and visit. It's very well done. Very powerful to be there. To stand in front of a bunk bed that was taken from Auschwitz and then look at a photograph taken when it was filled. One bunk bed filled with... I don't remember now how many people in one bunk bed. Hard to imagine all these people could be crammed in this one little space. So what I'm bringing up this morning for our consideration is this paradox that what we don't see, what we don't know about won't hurt us, that idea.

[20:29]

And what seems to be more accurate, which is what we do know about, we can do something about. We can take care of in the moment, in particular. And how our ability to not fall into corruption, in small or big ways, really depends upon our willingness to see trouble, to see what is so within ourselves, within our own mind stream, and also in the world around us. That when we have a kind of collective silence, we can go to a kind of collective harming that can be truly terrible. This issue is, of course, coming up for many people in China right now because many Chinese people don't really have any idea about the abuses of human rights that are happening in China and under the Chinese regime in Tibet, for example.

[21:42]

I remember a while ago watching someone in the Chinese embassy in Washington, as he watched a documentary of what the Chinese in power are doing in Tibet. And his insistence that quickly the video should be turned off. You could see him suddenly in a kind of alarm. because all of his conditioning, everything he'd been trained to understand about what is so in his country was being challenged by this film footage. So many of the Chinese who have come to this country talk about how their own education and training was such that they had no idea of the kind of harming that is being done

[22:45]

under the current regime in China. I just don't know. There is a man at the Hoover Institute at Stanford right now who has just written an autobiography. He was not political. He was not in any way involved in politics. And yet, somehow or another, he was seen as a kind of threat and ended up being in a kind of concentration camp for 19 years. And his autobiography is his story of what that was like. How he came to have that happen and what his experience was like. I heard him interviewed recently and I was really struck because his description of himself at the time that he was first arrested was You know, he came from a quite well-to-do family. He was going to school.

[23:47]

He was interested in girls and kind of intellectual things. And all of a sudden, here he was being called a threat to the state and put into a forced labor camp. He said, where was I? How could I be so oblivious to the world that I lived in? failed to see what was right under my nose. I keep coming back to the stories about the people who are willing to see what is so and do what they can. The remarkable stories of being able to do far more than one could imagine. Of course, what is so compelling about Schindler's story?

[24:49]

A man who was himself rather unlikely to be able to do what he did. Or what happened in Denmark, where the Danish people collectively said no. We will not turn our backs on the Jews and the gypsies. We'll get them out of here to safety. And they were able to do that. They were able to do that. Almost without exception. But did you tell me the number of Jews that were killed was something like three or seven? And it wasn't like there were 15 Jews in Denmark to begin with. Some of you have heard me tell a story of washing a window in the Zendo at Green Gulch one time during a retreat.

[25:56]

A window that was kind of hard to get to and from the outside was up on the second story. So there was no very steep incline and no way work with a ladder from the outside. A window that actually was three windows that were awning windows that opened out this way. I had to climb up on a kind of bookshelf to clean the windows. This was during a retreat and we were all assigned to some part of the meditation hall to do some cleaning and we each had a very small area and we were to clean that area for an hour. was not what you call a quick cleaning. And I remember when I first looked at the windows, which I was in charge of cleaning, I couldn't imagine how I would clean the outsides. So first of all, I had to figure out how to get up to where the windows were and I did something precarious like a chair on a bench.

[27:02]

And then I got up on top of the bookcase where I kind of teetered But what I discovered was that I couldn't tell how to clean the whole window, but I began to discover how to clean a part of the window. And then, oh, if I push it a little bit farther, I can work my hand a little bit farther. So that in increments of exploration, I discovered finally how to clean all of the windows on both the inside and the outside. But in the beginning, I couldn't begin to see how to do it. In fact, all I could see was, oh well, I can clean the inside, but that's all. So that I can't do the outsides was what first came up. I thought of that experience a number of times because it was so much a lesson about just do one step at a time and let that step lead to the next step.

[28:02]

That's really what I'm talking about with regard to how we respond to suffering in our lives or in the world that we live in. If we can take on, pick up our willingness to see things as they are, it isn't just suffering that we'll see, we'll also see joy. We'll also see beauty. We'll also see surprising moments of kindness. Interestingly, we don't seem to be able to know joy if we're not also willing to know sadness. They go together. So what I want to encourage for myself and to invite each of you to consider is that this first teaching about the fact of suffering is not nearly as down and dour as it may seem upon first meeting.

[29:29]

that a lot of our suffering changes just with our willingness to be present with what is so. It's not quite the monolithic event that we thought at a distance. And how we can be surprised by ourselves or by another person by discovering capacities we didn't know we or that person had. I had a conversation with Jack Kornfield the other night. We both have been bebopping around here and there and so haven't talked to each other for a while. Jack had just come back from a retreat with Michael Meade and an African man that he's done some men's retreats with. And they had done a men's retreat with gang leaders in Los Angeles.

[30:33]

He said, a very unlikely crowd of guys to be hanging out with the fact of suffering and the more tender underbelly. He said, you know, here were these really scary looking men, men who by their reputation left me feeling a little quaking. But he said, in fact, after we slowly began to be willing to talk about was the suffering in their lives. And he said, without exception, what arose was vulnerability, were tears, was a willingness to acknowledge suffering, and a great relief that there was some circumstance in which someone would be willing to be a witness knowing what was so in these people's lives.

[31:38]

I was very struck by an article in the New York Times a few days ago about a young man quite well known in the whole neo-Nazi event in Germany. A kind of a symbol, figurehead, leader in the whole neo-Nazi movement, if you will, that's happening in Germany, who, in showing up, being present, being aware of what had happened as a result of killing someone, gave it all up, and is, of course, now in great danger by his former colleagues, because in his giving up what had been the path of his life, he becomes a kind of threat to his former colleagues. But as I read this description about what had happened to him, I realized a lot of it was the consequence of his willing to be present, to pay attention to what he was actually doing in the moment.

[32:53]

Somehow, something happened that he wasn't anesthetized in that particular moment of violence, why the practice of cultivating mindful awareness is so powerful. If we're willing to stay present with what is so, we don't have to fix or do anything. In time, just seeing more clearly what the consequences are of our behavior is enough. We don't have to force ourselves to change. We willingly stop doing the things that lead to suffering, because none of us wants to suffer. We all want to be happy. The Buddha suggests that there isn't anyone who doesn't want to be happy. It's always interesting to think of someone that we've set up as our arch enemy, some real villain, and to try on the possibility that even that one wants to be happy.

[34:00]

Even a little kid found with 13 or 14 siblings and near relatives in absolute squalor says to the social worker who's come to haul these kids out of misery, will you be my mommy? Will you take care of me? It's incredible. inclination for living that happens from the time we're very, very little. It's only when we keep ourselves at a distance from what is difficult that what is difficult seems like Mount Everest, seems impossible to be with. I feel like sitting and listening to people who come to talk to me about our inner life is a great privilege and a source of great teaching for me.

[35:34]

Because every day what I hear are stories about people's courageous turning to mindful awareness of what is so. and slow unfolding of their own discovery of their ability to be liberated, to liberate oneself from suffering. Tara Tulku, who was my dear and beloved teacher, used to talk about people being of three types, like three different kinds of pots. One pot is turned upside down like that. So whatever great teaching or truth that gets poured on the pot just spills over, right? And then there's the kind of pot that's like this, but all filled with dirt and garbage and slime and cracks.

[36:42]

There's lots of cracks in it. So you put all these great teachings into this pot, and they all leak out, and they get kind of sullied with all that stuff in there. But then there is the one who's like the pot that is upright, clean, no holes or cracks. that can hold what is so the true teachings. It's a great image. Because it is true that when any of us is in this condition, that's it. Just have to wait until The causes and conditions are such that we get ourselves turned right side up and clean up our act, so to speak. It takes patience and great kindness, but it does happen. I've seen people whose whole lives were dedicated thoroughly to that condition.

[37:50]

At some point, find, discover, oh, I have this possibility also. One of the most inspiring people I can think of is a woman who was like that overturned pot literally all of her life and became this upturned pot with no holes and no cracks and no slime inside the last 10 days of her life as she was dying. It takes as long as it takes. Some of us, especially as Westerners, have a very hard time with the notion of past and future lives, but one of the very comforting consequences of some acceptance of past and future lives is that we're more patient. Some of us, I think, feel like, oh, this is going to take lifetimes.

[38:55]

And if we have a sense that we may have more than one lifetime, we can be more patient. Those of us who think it's just rubbish have a certain pressure. Back here. I think it's up to each of us to decide how we're going to do it. I've been studying and practicing Buddhism for a long time. I first encountered the Buddhist tradition as an undergraduate at Stanford in the mid-fifties. And of course, one of the first aspects of the Buddhist teachings is this first turning of the wheel, the teaching about the Four Noble Truths. And after all these years, I feel like I have, in a way, for the first time, a real understanding and regard for the extraordinary accuracy and depth of perception that is held in the Four Noble Truths.

[40:05]

It's very important news that not only the fact of suffering but that there are causes for all suffering and that there is also the possibility of liberation from suffering. And a very clear, practical description of what that root looks like. When you first encounter sitting and walking meditation, especially when your legs hurt and you think, ugh, 25 minutes, when is the bell gonna ring? Ugh! And you think, I can't possibly stand this discomfort. You think, why would I want to do something like this? And yet, for many of us anyway, there's something very compelling about meditation practices.

[41:11]

There is some part of the mind that says, well, what's going on here? This is one of the ways of cultivating our capacity for awareness of things as they are. And when we voluntarily sit down and sit still for a little while, we very quickly get to see the nature of our mind stream. Little discomfort, quick, I want to get up and move. Headache, I want an aspirin. Not so much readiness to look into, well, what is the range of possibility here? How might I meet this discomfort in my hip or my knee or my foot? Because, of course, having some exploration about the range of responses to physical pain can be extremely useful because at some point in our lives there comes pain, physical or mental or psychological or spiritual pain, which we can't get rid of and we can't do anything about.

[42:21]

We don't know what to do with. And the more we've cultivated some range of responses, the more we have some capacity for equanimity with that which we cannot do anything about. Stephen Levine talks about learning how to pick up five pound weights so that when the 50 pound weights come around, we'll have a little muscle tone. It's a great analogy. I think this kind of doubt or questioning particularly comes up when we do long retreats. Why on earth did I sign up for a seven day retreat and I paid money to sit here? with this aching body. But of course, all you have to do is to do that once and you understand how useful long retreats can be. Somewhere around day four, you suddenly discover capacities you never knew you had.

[43:26]

We have all these funny expressions. There are many ways to skin a cat. I don't know why anybody wants to skin a cat. There are many ways to liberation and of course sitting and walking meditation are only two of the ways. There are lots of doorways into this possibility of liberation from suffering. And what they all come to is different ways of cultivating our capacity to be present, to be aware of what is so. A few days ago, I was working in the garden with a man who comes from Chiapas, a Mayan Indian. He goes to his home country and family for one month every year and the rest of the year he lives here and works because he's able to earn enough money to support many, many people.

[44:42]

He's, among other things, a very good gardener. So we were working side by side, pruning roses and planting some plants working in the garden. He's not someone who talks very much, talks as is necessary. And we worked rather close by each other for the whole of the day and when it was time to eat lunch, we came in and I heated up some rice and tofu and vegetables and we sat and ate together. And I was so struck by the deep sense of satisfaction that I felt at the end of the day to be with this person who was so present, so observant. A way of just working together where we weren't doing any negotiating.

[45:48]

We were just side by side working together. I felt such deep joy being with him. The friend that he, whose house he lives at, said that the first day they were working together in her garden after he'd come home from, he was just in Mexico, in Chiapas. He went on the 20th of December and came back on the 20th of January, so he was down there for all of the stuff that's been happening there. And she said, my friend said, that the first day they worked in the garden, a plane flew overhead. And he said, oh, they shoot people from that plane. Because that's, of course, what he had just been experiencing when he was with his family in the mountains.

[46:49]

I was struck by how much he's been through during this past month, and yet how calm and settled and present he was when we worked together on Thursday. I said, how are your people? How is your family? He said, we are all fine. We are all safe and well. And maybe some good will come from this suffering.

[47:28]

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