Wise Society

the teachings are not something as i often say that you need to take notes or remember there's no exam there's no quiz and they're really more of a reflection of meditation and tonight in particular because of some topics that we find difficult i don't want to teach as if i know the answers my wife would be very smiling happily smiling when i say this but offer it really as a as a contemplation and as a reflection and what i'd like to talk about tonight is why is society and part of the reason for doing this is that last month after i finished giving that talk which included the long and quite wonderful story of sir gawain and what it is that women want those of you who attended it's a story i love to tell part of my reason for telling it was actually in response to the supreme court decisions recently especially that about access to abortion but other things as well and the story really links that to that in a certain way but i didn't do it explicitly and i felt wrong afterward like wait you know i didn't really say what i wanted to say so let's try it in a different way tonight the first thing is to say that it's a mistake to believe that dharma practice the inner practice of liberation is an individual matter one of the deepest realizations that comes as we meditate as we pay attention as we live a life of care and loving awareness and mindfulness and so forth is the growing sense of interdependence that there's absolutely no separation between our body and the body of the earth and our life in the dna and body of the biosphere and the food we eat and the beings that we live with that we are completely interdependent and so when i think about teaching meditation and dharma and so forth one of the things that's really obvious is that it has to include our embeddedness in the community in which we live mahatma gandhi put it explicitly he said those who say that spirituality has nothing to do with politics do not understand what spirituality really means they come together and there are many many teachings about why society there's a beautiful book called the buddha's teachings on social harmony social and communal harmony by bukuboti with a couple hundred pages of passages from the buddhist texts and teachings on this very topic in one passage in angutter nikai and the buddha says there are four types of beings those who practice for the welfare of themselves those who practice for the welfare of others those whose life and practice is neither for the benefit and welfare of themselves nor of others and finally those who practice for the welfare and benefit of themselves and others and this is his invitation for a wise way of practice and again in another text in the map mahaparinibana beautiful texts where he talks about why society he says how can people live in harmony if they meet together and listen to one another respectfully and depart in harmony they will prosper and not decline if they honor the healthy laws and traditions of the past that other human beings have passed down they will prosper and not decline if they don't forget those lessons if they care for the vulnerable in the society the children those who are ill anyone who's vulnerable they will prosper and 19th not decline if they care for their natural environment around them they will prosper and not decline why society so this is a divided time we all know this it's reflected in our divisive politics which are more about fear and loss of power than love we all know this so then how do we go about attending to wise society and it has the kind of courage that is in part the courage of tenderness and vulnerability for mutual respect and there's a story i've read before maybe even sometime in this last year but i'm going to read again because it's illustrative as was the sir wayne story last week it concerns a monastery that has fallen on hard times once it was a great order with many houses and monks and nuns but with the rise of secularism and the decline of those who wanted to join monis the monasteries we can see it in our modern culture it gradually declined until there was only the mother house and an abbot and four others all 70 years of old age now in the woods surrounding this great monastery there was a little heart that the wise rabbi who lived in the town used to use as a place to meditate and the monks who were tuned into their environment could sense when the rabbit had come the rabbis in the woods and at one point they just looked at themselves and said we are a community in decline we are about to lose our order i wonder if the rabbi has anything he could help us say to help us some advice so the abbott went to greet the rabbi and his old friends they embraced one another and gazed at one another you know it's tough being an abbott went over we took him to the spencer abbey to see father thomas keating one of these great greatest um catholic cistercian monasteries and we stood there um and thomas keating was this great big tall monk wearing black and white sort of penguin style robes and arjun cha was wearing his sort of dusky forest off orange robes and he was sort of short and squat and they looked at each other and the first thing josh said to thomas keating we were in the kind of in the courtyard with the hundredth monks who lived there in the abbot he looked at me said i'm so sorry i'm so sorry it's kind of a weird greeting and i was translating and thomas keating said you're so sorry what kind of greeting is that and achancha said you're the abbot and then he turned around and he said to all the people monks gathered there he said you have no idea how hard it is to be an abbot you should really treasure this man and keating had this big smile on his face after that so the abbots they embraced and they talked about how hard things were in this world for those who are devoted to a spiritual life and the rabbi said i don't really have any advice for you the only thing i can tell you is some sense i have that the messiah that you wait for is somehow among you what a strange things to say but that's what he said in the old habit of the monastery went back after seeing the rabbi and they asked what did he say and said well i said strangest thing he said the messiahs among you i thought what could that mean could it mean that one of the monks is the messiah do you dispose the habit you know he's our leader for more than a generation on the other hand he might have met brother thomas certainly brother thomas is a holy man a man of light certainly he couldn't have meant brother elrid elrid gets crotchety at the time but come to think of it even though he's a thorn in people's side when you look back at it elrid is virtually always right often very right maybe the rabbi did mean brother elrid but sure not surely not brother philip philip so passive a real nobody but then almost mysteriously he does have a gift for somehow always being there when you need him he just magically appears by your side maybe philip is the messiah of course the rabbi didn't mean me he couldn't possibly have meant me i'm just an ordinary person yet supposing he did suppose i'm the messiah oh my i couldn't be that much and as they contemplated in this manner the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect on the off chance that one of them might be the messiah and on the off off chance that each monk himself might be the messiah they began to treat themselves with extraordinary respect because the forest in which the monastery was situated was beautiful and it happened people still came to visit or picnic on the lawn or wander some of the paths and go to the old chapel as they did without even any words they began to sense an aura of extraordinary respect that now began to surrender surround the five old monks and began to radiate out for them and permeate the atmosphere of the place just like the mata you were just doing there was something strangely attractive even compelling about it and hardly knowing why they began to come back to the monastery more frequently to picnic to play to pray they began to bring their friends and show them and their friends brought friends then it happened that some of the younger ones who came started talk more more with the old monks and after a while one asked if he might join them in another and another and so within a few years the monastery had once again become a thriving order and thanks to the rabbi's wisdom a vibrant center of spirituality and light for the community and all those around them and i suppose as the fairy tales go it should be they lived happily ever after or something like that so what does this say to us first it talks about quieting the mind and opening the heart and listening deeply listening with respect to one another to ourselves to our own body and heart to those around us including those who we might judge or disagree with initially kind of reflecting about this how much respect do you give to those you disagree with and what would they feel from you not that you have to the same ideas but is there that spirit of respect can you see them all as merten says see the secret beauty behind their eyes can you see them all somehow with the heart open even if you disagree can you see like kuan yin with the eyes of compassion and the thousand arms and a thousand eyes you've seen those images of pablo ketchus farah kuan yin the goddess of infinite compassion and she's called she who hears the cries of the world she listens to everyone's heart and the dharma or the teachings is the medicine for the world and part of this medicine is the invitation this capacity that we have to listen deeply and to listen with respect why society the teachings of the dharma beginning with the buddha's four noble truths say that suffering for us as human beings in this human incarnation exists anybody not have that you can have your whatever you paid back i'll wish you well but it's not how it works is it there is suffering individually and globally and it has its causes the second noble truth the causes of suffering are greed hatred and ignorance and the more that we live with and promote and embody greed or hatred and all of its judgment and anger and so forth and ignorance the more there will be suffering and yet the opposite instead of greed the more there's generosity instead of hate the more there's love and care instead of ignorance the more there's wisdom and truth seeing truth-telling then the greater happiness and well-being it's not very complicated a little bit i'm not quite sure the word i was going to say horrifying to look around the world because there are so many avenues that are promoting greed in our culture promoting hatred promoting lack of truth and ignorance and the point isn't to fix it but on the other hand the point is to see it clearly because without seeing it we can't go another way and things can seem like they've always been that way you know but they haven't and they don't have to be i was so moved today when i listened to a little bit of the broadcast of the pope apologizing to all those people now elderly native people of canada could be the u.s as well who were stolen from their parents and put into these residential schools you know which were places often of torment and abuse for for a hundred years and he apologized he said there's there's no excuse but the amazing thing is that it was taken for granted for a long time and yet when we hear now and see we know how wrong it was and this is especially apparent to those who are not part of the dominant dimension of the culture the women and the bipap people let me tell a little moment i had led a series of meetings for the buddhist teachers from around the world for 30 40 years and brought teachers together and one year back in the early 90s we brought llamas and swamis and mamas and a lot of western teachers together with the dalai lama and arms allah and there we were seated in his kind of palace and part of our reason to come together was to reaffirm our ethics and talk about some of the difficulties that had been happening with various buddhist masters not speak of you know clergy and other religions and political figures coaches and all those things the abuse of power but we wanted to address it directly so we had this meeting and brought these things forward to see how can we operate in a way that's safeguards students and teachers it was very moving actually and not easy because there were some people in the room that everybody knew had been perpetrators of the suffering but anyway at one point one of the tibetan nuns who'd come tenzin palmo she wrote 12 years in a cave she lived in a cave for 12 years an amazing wonderful woman talked about how incredibly hard it was for the nuns and for the women in tibetan buddhism and how the men had the good food and the warm places the monastery the women were working in the kitchen or outside and you know how difficult it was and the dalai lama began to weep he said i knew it was hard i didn't know it was this hard and then sylvia wetzel a teacher from germany said your holiness can i teach you a meditation that's great you know the tibetans would never dare to do that but you know how we are as westerners we're weird and kind of willing to stick our neck out and every kind of gasp and he said of course so she said i want you to look around and the room was filled with all this beautiful tongues and imagery and statues she said and now close your eyes she guided him and everyone i'd like you to quiet now and imagine that there's a little reversal that happened you see the 16 tonkas around the room of the great masters and teachers but now you look at them and they're all in a female form every one of them had been man you know jason kappa and you know whoever these great masters were oh madame's on kappa and you look and you see that there's a woman in every one of these tongues and then you turn around and you look at the altar and there all the statues are of female buddhists and bodhisattvas and then you look to either side and they're all those companions in the holy life with you all these senior women wise women and then you look at your own body and you just go oh my i am the 14th dakini dalai lama and i've always been born in a women's body woman's body because they say that even though men can get enlightened it's much better to be born in a woman's body i tell you the room was in shock and i just loved it it was like one of the great moments because there we were surrounded by the patriarchy which has been a big part of buddhist culture but culture around the world and here was silvia flipping the table in such a creative and wonderful way and afterward the dalai lama cried a little bit and he said i will do my best to help women become empowered even in buddhist tradition even though it's not what our culture has done before and slowly it's happened slowly patriarchy you may have noticed it yeah i mean it's not just there in the religious or spiritual world but we're all worried about climate change and yet when you look at drawdown and the greatest science about what will help reverse climate change as you heard me say the number one thing at the top of the list is not wind or solar power or change in agriculture but the most effective change of all would be the empowerment of girls and women that would change the world more radically so this means we have to listen like the monks to one another in that story with a kind of respect for each being not in the old way but in a sacred way in some new fashion even those we might disagree with like the brother philip and brother elrad and the store and so forth my beloved trudy goodman my partner and wife and also dharma teacher founder of inside la recently went through treatment for uterine cancer she'd been bleeding a bit and got tested and it turned out it was cancer and she had major surgery radical hysterectomy and so forth and we were quite worried but it turned out fortunately to be very early stage and they said this was all the treatment that she needed so she's gradually getting better although it takes a while after surgery but some of the remarkable things about it first of all she wanted a woman surgeon we found the top surgeon at ucla we did it in los angeles together look for this and she said it was amazing i went into the operating room and it was all women the doctors the nurses the everyone there she said it made me feel like i was in the right place and she had the surgery and when she came out the nurse who came to take care of her in the recovery room i came up to see her then and trudy said what's your name she said petra she said what kind of name is that i was sitting looking at my phone or something that just said it's a thai name and trudy said oh my husband speaks thai and i looked up and i said hello and then tai and so forth she said how do you speak tai i said oh i had been a monk in thailand and then she looked and she said ar are you jack cornfield i said yes she said oh my teacher is ajah i grew up in the province where arjun chow was he's my my teacher i know you're a student we have the same teacher and she came and she bowed and she was so excited and she said oh trudy you are the dharma teacher here and it was it was like we were surrounded by these women who were so loving and supportive and when trudy had to get up and do her first walk down the long corridor of the recovery room and back she started to walk very slowly and pecha said to her trudy where is your mind now and trudy said it's it's in my feet that just said yes you must keep it in your body and then she started giving us all these dark teachings of you know death can come at any time you must live in the present and pay attention and so forth and it was it was kind of wild but what's happened since then is trudy has been sharing this whole journey at first she was keeping it private on instagram in all kinds of ways uh telling her story showing images and she's gotten back hundreds and hundreds of responses from women who say people don't talk so much certainly in her generation our generation about their uterus and their ovaries and surgery and the female organs and um and trudy just as she does just put it all out there and she said in this time when in the culture the feminine is not being uplifted but in ways is actually being denigrated it really feels important that we come together and see the beauty of the feminine and that we we uplift it together in some way and then petra said listen you are the one to heal yourself you must you must listen to yourself and i felt during this whole process these different levels of experience one that was predominant at times was a concern and a worry will she be okay i love her or you know all the thoughts that we have especially for the almost the week that we had to wait for the pathology report to find out how far the cancer had spread and what kind it actually was and finally we got this very good report another dimension at the same time was almost as if i could become vast and silent and say well this is human incarnation old age sickness and death are part of the noble truths of what the buddha spoke about it's what comes in a human incarnation we may have many of them in fact and that's what's happening now and there's this vast perspective and the dharma is to hold it all in compassion and to see it clearly but not to be so caught by it so now i want to move on and talk about something related and even more difficult which is abortion and i want to talk about it through the lens of sovereignty from the talk last week for those of you who attended what it is that women want and from the lens of respect because it's so polarized and whatever your views about it this is a reflection it's a time to meditate and consider because it gets so polarized on one side in the polarized view it's always bad it's a terrible thing we must do everything to stop it you know that view the anti-abortion view and then on the other side it can be called a simple procedure you know it's a medical procedure people should have the right to their own medical procedure on their own bodies but of course it's not just a medical procedure and it's not just one thing or the other and to listen with respect requires a kind of vulnerability and tenderness as we struggle with it long ago when i was much younger i was with a woman who got pregnant and it was a little bit of a dangerous pregnancy because she got pregnant on a coil in a way that wasn't necessarily healthy and we also were really not ready to have a child and so we decided together to have an abortion and it was hard it wasn't just an easy thing you know it took a lot of consideration and care and thoughtfulness and pain in some cases and struggle so the idea that abortion is not nothing just a quick procedure isn't the truth my dear friend yvonne rand who died a few years ago was one of the main dharma successors of suzuki roshi in san francisco zen center and she used to host these ceremonies that came from japan for water babies and it was a ritual primarily for women although men could attend who had lost babies through miscarriage or abortion if they chose that or other reasons still birth and women flocked to them because they held in their bodies the kind of loss in some men too that it represented and there was no judgment in it it didn't say this was wrong or this was right it was just a tenderness holding our human incarnation saying this is one of the things we have to struggle with it's not nothing and i know if i talk really personally back in some of the deepest places in my meditation and my inner exploration where i had the sense the vision the experience of past lives and being born and steepest meditations and breath work and so forth a few of those births and deaths was a tiny little embryo which either miscarried or got aborted and i remember feeling i didn't have a personality i didn't have a life i didn't know anything but i could feel i was alive and i wanted to cling to that life as all life does and then it was gone wow and then i could feel the cycling to come back again to take another birth you can believe what you do i'm just reporting my experience does this mean that therefore we should ban abortion not in the slightest women need the sovereignty over their own bodies and hearts and it cannot be dictated to another human being and if my daughter caroline was to come to me and say that she wanted or felt that it was right or she needed to have an abortion i would want my daughter to have that choice as much as every other woman now the truth is that more women die in pregnancy in the us than any other developed country because we don't care for them so well the majority of abortions to women in their 20s who are already moms and overwhelmed and can't take care of more children or have some other part of their life for their reasons that they cannot and the truth is that society doesn't support mothers and children and you know that we are something like 30th or 50th on the list of developed and developing nations in terms of how much our society supports women and child care it's crazy it's 10 times or 50 times as much in other countries as here so what does this mean it means it's not a simple thing it's tender and vulnerable it talks about the mystery of incarnation it happens just as i described feeling that experience and being born again and again for several times in that way it's certainly not the purview of others to tell a woman what she should do even though i can respect those who are the most caring on the pro-life side i can listen and really respect that my deepest respect is for the sovereignty of women themselves this is really a reflection of our practice of mutual respect of not lording it over another being but meeting them as they did in that monastery seeing each other with the eyes of deep respect the buddha's teaching on why society is not about rigidity or taking aside but can you come together and hear one another in harmony meet with respect depart and respect listen with the body and the heart hold it all in compassion one of the things that strikes me in the buddhist texts is that at the end of his dialogue with many people who came to see the buddha and said give me teachings of liberation or compassion or how do i manage my life or what do i do in this difficult human life and all the different problems people gave and the buddha would respond as he did and there's many many stories and accounts of these dialogues they end with him saying something very powerful he looks kindly at that person as he was the compassionate one and then he says now it is time for you to do as you see fit it's a really powerful phrase he gave the best teachings he could he pointed them often they had an amazing experience and he said now it is time for you to do as you see fit he placed it in the good hearts and hands of that individual who was there in front of him we live in a current climate of fear and when we consider why society on different sides there's the fear of the loss of the spiritual you know we live in a society that's partly characterized by the absence of the sacred the loss of values the loss of church but unfortunately the response is more about power you know who's losing power who has power not a response of love or a sense of the sacred but the buddhist teachings for why society say one must look not at the results but at the causes and conditions that allow for respect of the land of climate of one another let's talk about another difficult topic since we're in that deep waters here i hope it's okay for you take a breath i want to talk about our prison system because it fits with tonight's teaching the us has the largest prison system in the entire planet we have less than 20 percent of the world's population and this enormous multi-million person multi-hundreds of billions of dollar system of locking people up and you know you know there is a prison industrial pipeline that goes from the poorest communities right into our prisons you all know this i remember when i brought a group of people together with the dalai lama people who'd been in prison and practicing dharma and somehow got out to try to educate him about the u.s because he seemed to think things were really good here in all kinds of ways and he wanted to know what is your american suffering how can the dharma help so we brought these people together and he was astonished to hear about the prison system and i remember one of the young men said you have to understand your holiness he stood up his name was amos he said man you got to get it they want us in prison in my hood and my neighborhood that was where you were headed so jacques verdun one of our community at spirit rock starting almost 30 years ago began what was called the inside prison project now i think it's called inside out at san quentin and it's now spread to many other prisons and it is a program guiding rage into power and then there's a prison yoga project a prison garden project and you know veterans healing veterans there's all kinds of projects he's done and they're really quite fantastic and in them he's gotten 500 lifers out of prison going through these programs who've changed their lives so i was invited i'd been on his board chaired his board at one point and i was invited to go to a graduation the annual graduation of the guiding rage into power the grip program get a grip and here we're in the auditorium in san quentin where about 120 men wearing mortar boards and caps and gowns like any other graduate and they invited their speaker one of the they'd elected one of them to be their valedictorian who stood up and he spoke for them and he said we have been violent men and the men all said yes and we now pledge to you that we will never do so again we've learned about the suffering of anger and how we create suffering for one another and we are not those people anymore and they all stood up and took this amazing pledge and you could feel the genuineness of it and i gave a talk about the dignity of the human being and buddha nature and every being or something my usual spiel so to speak um but i meant it from the heart and then luis rodriguez who'd been the poet laureate of los angeles this last couple years and a great latino activist and visionary and fine poet got up to read them a poem and he looked around the room and he said i can't read my poem yet there were about 300 people in the audience if you will corrections officials and politicians and the local mayor and people the families of these men and they said you men when you stood up and said you would not be violent man you also gave us an apology you said and they said it collectively and deliberately for all the ways that we have caused suffering to those we hurt to our families to our communities in all these ways we feel that suffering now and we apologize we deeply apologize and you could feel it he said i can't read you my poem because it's not just you who needs to apologize and he turned around and looked at the room of the corrections people and the people from the police and the politicians and various other folks and he said you know it's we who failed you as well almost every one of you was born into a community where you as a child was not protected you weren't protected from racism you weren't protected from the poverty where you lived you weren't given an education that really enhanced your life and protected you there are so many ways we did not care for you or protect you and standing here i offer you an apology on our behalf for what happened to you it was an amazing moment everybody in the room got quiet turned the tables and then he read his poem we're in this together you know when we listen with respect like that story we can see the causes and conditions we can see how we treat the vulnerable among us as the buddha said the homeless the dhaka you know those children who were brought here as young children and still can't live lives even they never lived anywhere else and our political system doesn't care for them we're in this together you know i led a men's group with robert hall at spirit rock some years ago in the evening we had a circle where men would get in the middle and tell stories of their lives and one guy who was in the middle said he had a radio show in los angeles of blues he said and i i'm on whatever it is kpcc or something like that every sunday night and i get lots of fan letters from people who love the blues but i especially get letters from men who are inside prisons because this is one of the things they have is the ability to listen and i got a letter one time from this man joe johnson and he said i so love your show i listen every week i'm a great fan of the blues and i'd like to ask you know would you play some of the early classics blind leonard jefferson and muddy waters and some of the other great blues masters so the week after he got the letter he said this is going out to a man joe johnson who clearly knows the history of the blues it's an honor to play these songs for you joe and he played some of the great old classics and two or three weeks later he received a note from joe johnson thanking him saying thank you thank you for playing those for me and then he said it's the first time in my life i can remember hearing my name said with respect how about that talking about causes and conditions and respect for one another we're in this together okay one more story since we're talking about difficult things and we're reflecting we're meditating let's talk about war it's so easy to get fixated because there's a lot of propaganda you know that word it's flying around baby now it's true that what putin is doing in ukraine is terrible but there's also terrible wars all around the world that we're not paying attention to you know in sudan and in myanmar and so many other places but if we look at causes and conditions we have to understand something different if we look through the eyes of the dharma and respect for one another i was at arjun jamiyan's monastery as a monk in the melee peninsula in his monastery which was a meta monastery that was the main practice of loving kindness was in a a rubber forest going up the mountainside and there was a lot of fighting at that time there were communist insurgents in the mountains in the thai military there was during the 1960s and early 70s and sometimes at night there would be fire fights around when it got close you could actually see the flash not [Music] big fire available that was close to the monastery i was sitting in a clearing doing my meditation and there was an older monk there and a helicopter came over the ridge about a mile a mile and a half away and it started dropping canister bombs you could see the explosions up in the top of the ridge and i said to the old monk well they must have come to bomb those you know communist insurgents or whatever you call them um who were fighting down here last night and the old monk looked at me and he said nah i said what do you mean he said oh those insurgents they live in caves about oh 10 kilometers north two valleys over and there we know where they live i said well why are they bombing here and he looked at me and he said there aren't that many of them if they kill them all off who would give them the helicopters and all this money the pentagon's so happy that we have russia as a new enemy again returned as an enemy you know we who are the largest weapon suppliers on the face of the earth and then worry that we're not safe so we look at causes and conditions if we look with respect what does it mean to see honestly and listen deeply to the cries of the world as kuan yin does what is the answer it starts in our hearts quiet the mind open the heart listen with respect to see each other with respect to see ourselves with respect and to have both the vast perspective that this is human incarnation it's not pretty it's magnificent and beautiful and creative in all these ways and it's also difficult there is suffering but there are causes and conditions and it can increase or decrease and if we honor one another the sovereignty of one another with respect if we listen in ourselves in a deep way text says others will be cruel we shall be kind thus will incline the heart others will kill living beings we shall protect them thus we shall incline the heart others will steal or be greedy we shall be generous thus shall we incline the heart others will speak falsely we shall tell the truth speak truth thus we'll incline the heart others will be arrogant we will have humility thus we shall incline the heart others will be unmindful we will listen with mindfulness thus we will incline the heart others will lack wisdom and compassion we will develop wisdom and compassion thus we will incline the heart you become a buddha you steady your heart you listen you trust your body you see how difficult it is to be human and how magnificent and beautiful you see that suffering isn't the end of the story otherwise we wouldn't have tutus in the dalai lama and you know we wouldn't have wangari mathai and or ellen sirleaf and all these nobel laureates who rose above the suffering of the world and show us there's another way you are one of them and when you meditate meditation is just a kind of preparation for living wisely then in the end you can listen to this one question what would love have me do today with all these things we're concerned about can we listen can we approach them one another with respect quiet the mind feel the vastness of life would love have me do today so these are reflections for you on difficult topics they're not answers they're not saying how you should be as the buddha says now it's time for you to go and do as you see fit but they're reminders of something that you really know and that you can trust