Unclarity. Maybe, more accurately, unclarity is the fundamental situation when self-cleaning exists. Self-cleaning becomes a confusion, a cloudiness, an interception. From that comes this trans-dynamic desire for repulsion. And the first three sectors, non-injury, refers to basically the dynamic rejection and repulsion that you're trying to destroy, to stamp out or push away that which upsets you or which you can't absorb. The second precept, which looks like it's about feeling, but seems to be about desire.

[01:05]

But actually, in my thinking about this further, I don't think it is. I think the third precept definitely is about desire, which has to do with sensuality and sexuality. It may be more the precise obverse of non-harm, because it has to do with the unwholesomeness of the dynamic of attraction. The second precept, I think, really has more to do with unclarity or with confusion, because it has to do with possession, what possession is. And the precise wording of, a disciple of the Buddha does not take what is not given, is, I think, the indicator of the difference. That is to say, it's not about stealing. I think in our Judeo-Christian tradition, we have a well-developed sense of what stealing is. Stealing is taking something

[02:09]

that belongs to someone else. And the idea of belonging is accepted. Yes, things do belong to me, clearly. Those are your sheep and not my sheep, and this is my blanket and not your blanket, and so forth. And that's okay. The idea there is, yes, that's a kind of given of the world, and that we don't take things that belong to other people. So belonging is accepted as the norm. And our precept, in the West, has to do with respecting the validity of that. I have my belonging and you have your belonging. And we respect our respective possessions. Now, Buddhism, you see, does not really accept this idea of belonging as an ultimate given, or as something that is, in a sense, very real. And several of

[03:13]

the other precepts in this list of ten have to do with possessions, or possessions. One later on, in the lower five precepts, one translation is, the disciple of the Buddha does not possess anything, even the teaching. So, the underlying basis of the second precept seems to be that because the fundamental dualism of self and other is not supportable, although it has a tentative or workable relationship to things, in an everyday sense, it's all right, because it's not fundamentally real or valid. Possession, too, of a self is not something that, if it's an arrangement, it's not something that actually exists in reality.

[04:16]

And therefore, it's not so much a matter of stealing, because fundamentally you can't steal anything, even if it doesn't belong to you. But rather, it has to do with how we relate to one another with respect to the things that we use. So it says, you don't take things that I'm giving to you. It implies a relationship between a giver and a given, which is rather apart from or different than who owns what belongs to whom. Do you see that I'm making a point here? And of course, I think, originally, this precept, I'm sure, came from the sense of Buddhist monks being mendicants. They basically made

[05:21]

a point of surviving in the world on the basis of what was given to them. So there was, in a limited sense, a kind of artificially set-up society of mendicants who were supported by a larger lay community, and they were supposed to live their lives voluntarily by their supporters. This is a very prudent way to keep the monks honest, because if the monks become off, they discover that the lay people are not good people. If their behavior is not good, they don't eat. For the lay people in this kind of arrangement in ancient India, the arbiters were the, you might say, the judge and jury of the monks. And these precepts, as I mentioned in the earlier classes, some of you may not remember, but in the literature of the precepts,

[06:26]

it's the lay people who call the transgression, who bring it to the attention of the Buddha. And they say, they complain. There's a phrase in the formulaic literature in which the lay people, something like grumbling, were upset and chagrined by the behaviors of this lay monk, and they bring it to the attention of the World Honored One. And they say to the World Honored One, this monk is not worthy of our donations. We don't want to support such a person. And so the Buddha investigates, the investigation phase of the precepts takes place, and the Buddha calls the person and talks to him or her about what had happened, and then affirms or denies the existence of the transgression and denunciates the rule from that point. So the case law is kind of built up from that kind of event. So I think the importance of this probably originally comes from the very practical sense

[07:30]

in which the Sangha was set up, that Buddhist monks were those who took only what was given to them, and limited their life to that. But when you examine, well, why is that so? Why was such a Sangha set up? I think that you would have to say that the Buddha wanted to exemplify by the lives of the monks, those who devoted themselves to the teaching, that this is the way it is. That actually this is the way it is for all of us. That the things that we use in order to live are some dynamic relationship to giving or not giving. So there's a lot tucked away in a few words of this precept, because it implies first

[08:40]

of all a certain general attitude on the part of the person trying to follow the precept. That is to say, you are compelled to examine, what does it mean when something is given? Obviously, of course, we know the obvious sense of something gives us something, but it doesn't directly happen that way in most cases. So other than that, what does it mean? And then if there is something given, then there must be some kind of giver, some intention to give in the background that produces the relationship of a gift. So the fundamental idea of a gift is very important here. There's a big article in New England's Coalition Quarterly about the American Indian culture, and the tremendous importance of the gift in that culture. In fact, the title of the cover of the magazine

[09:42]

says, a gift must always move. There's an idea in American Indian culture that you move the gift all the time. Somebody gave something to you, and you moved it away. There's status in that, and society was known by how generous the person was. Interestingly, in our society, it seems to be pretty much the opposite. The status in society is pretty much determined by how much money you have. Even the most disreputable source for the money is somehow, in practical terms, overshadowed in our society by your wealth, and basically your reputation. You're a criminal, really, as long as you haven't been caught. And no one reminds you too often of where your money came from. You're given the seats in the best restaurants, and you're looked up to as an important person, and so on and so forth. So again, our particular historical circumstances with the Protestant Reformation and the whole

[10:46]

doctrinal basis of the dogmy war is those who work hard and so forth. Calvin's ethic, which created the kind of society we have. It's very hard for us to reach in the back of all of that and look much more fundamentally at a worldview, which is the Buddhist worldview, in which the fundamental reality is that no one possesses anything, and possession itself is a kind of tentative, practical arrangement that has no fundamental or actual validity, and it's based on, for the most part, the mistaken or wrong view itself. So what's being looked at here is the difference between the operation, the dynamic operation

[11:51]

in the world, between someone who is vested in themselves, a fixed conception of a soul, a self, a being, or a person, which owns and possesses, and someone who is not operating in that way. Not that, incidentally, a person liberated from a sense of self would necessarily have to be some sort of naked ascetic wandering around in the snow without even wearing shoes. This actually was, you know, many of the, I should just interject here, many of the spiritual experiments which underlie the conclusions of Buddhism were performed quite a long time ago. They haven't been performed recently. So, you know, as you know, we were studying science, we were studying physics, you know, but we hadn't had a lab in 300 years, and so all we had to go on was that Francis Bacon

[12:55]

had done certain experiments, and nobody had troubled to reproduce them. You know, so in India there was a very kind of almost naive openness to every possibility of human life, and there were an extraordinary number of different possibilities that were tried out, and even today in India you find that people literally wander around naked with no possessions, not even clothes, and the climate lends itself to that. And they're kind of expected in a certain oddball way. And, but you know, these experiments were all tried, maybe for several centuries prior to the explosion of spiritual life which occurred throughout Asia, the Middle East, and even Greece in the fifth, fourth centuries BC. So experimenting with what does it mean to possess something was an experiment that was actually performed, and people observed the results.

[13:57]

They actually observed the results of somebody living their whole life literally possessing nothing. And, you know, the result of the experiment was that, well, you needn't be so literal. It wasn't exactly their point. The point is not whether you actually have a viewpoint or not, but rather what is the underlying psychodynamics of your relationship to the world of people and things. And this was, you know, the Buddha's idea of the Middle Way, that it wasn't that you should live in some extreme literal adherence to these ideas, but rather they should become an interspiritual reality in which your life expresses. And the other stream in Buddhism that this was taken to is the, which I mentioned a few times before, is the rather legendary or made-up figure of Nimalakirti, who was an investment banker, basically, in ancient India.

[15:00]

He was a rich merchant who was fabulously wealthy and had, he lived like a Maharaja. He had, you know, a harem and thousands of servants and palaces and so on and so forth. Yet he was a great, wise Bodhisattva because he did not have any attachment or sense of possession of these things. His only idea was to use them for the benefit of all beings. So the point comes full circle in later Buddhism that, in fact, whether or not you possess something is not the point at all, but it's the underlying basis of your relationship to it that's what counts. I always have to say, or I tend to say recently, that I have to warn people that there's only one Nimalakirti in every kalpa. The problem with such examples or such points being made is that you can always use it from

[16:03]

then on as a rationalization for your own weakness. Another thing that I've discovered in studying Nimalakirti is that Nimalakirti has no disciples. Nimalakirti was a great figure to have out there to make a point, but Nimalakirti was not able to somehow pass on this particularly unusual way of life that is portrayed. Nimalakirti is basically a fairytale figure that probably was invented in China to make this particular point. But nevertheless, I think the dialogue about the issue of possession and how you should live with regard to possession is something that, again, Buddhism did experiments on at all levels.

[17:03]

I think everywhere from the naked aesthetic of Nimalakirti was tried out. The conclusions of this long millennia of experimentation is, I would say, in summary, that ultimately, no one possesses anything, so therefore, it's not what you possess, it's how you possess it. That's maybe point A. And point B is, but that in fact, if you examine closely and rigorously through monastic practice and meditation, what you actually need in your life, that this precept actually turns out to be an expectation to live in a fairly simple way that you don't have a vast excess over what you actually need. And I think that that's actually, although it's never written down anywhere, I would say that that's a kind of summation precept that Buddhists like.

[18:07]

In fact, one of our old seniors in the center, Claude Dauenberg, used to say that that was his summary of all the precepts was, don't harm anything and live simply. Live a simple life. And I think that the ideal for laymen and for monks in a kind of moderate lifestyle in which you take care of yourself, but you don't accumulate things out of a sense of insecurity or greed, is part of what it boils down to when we say don't take what is not given. In that sense, we're using the word given to mean you're given a lot as a human being, what you as a human being deserve to have to fulfill your life. And, of course, you might say the fundamental problem of the whole planet is that there's

[19:08]

enormous inequity in that. Some folks have a great deal and some don't have enough. And it turns out that in the studies I've read and the analysis of the resources of the world, of the food supply and so forth, that there actually is enough to go around. And some. But that it's very inequitably used and inequitably distributed and so forth. And there's no overall planetary agreement about how to make it all work for everybody. As a consequence, there's all these outrageous views about, you know, one percent of the world's population making us use 45 percent of the energy and so forth. This is a potential... You know, to try to ascertain what I need for existence becomes a very difficult question. Because at first, if you were to ask me what I need, I could probably list off many, many things. So to pare that list down and be able to ascertain what you really need becomes a very difficult task.

[20:12]

Well, that's why we should send you to a monastery for a year. Probably. I mean, that's the purpose of monastic life, whether you're a monk or a layperson, is that it makes it much simpler to find out what it is that you need. Because you actually allow yourself to be in a situation where your needs become much simpler. Except they become different, too. Because I have spent quite a bit of time in a monastery, my needs become different. They just shift. They shift from the more overt material things to very subtle sort of psychological things. So that, in a sense, you sort of scale back in one way, but you gear up in another. Because all of a sudden your needs become psychological. I haven't spent probably enough time to get myself rid of those things. But I've found that sort of an interesting dynamic, that the material sheds fairly quickly. But then the needs for attention and recognition and perfection, which can become sort of a need in itself.

[21:15]

Well, for Buddhists, those are the fundamental needs, not the material ones. And those are the ones you work on in practice. And those are the basis of the material needs, really, are corollaries or footnotes to those, of course. And it's the recognition of that that has produced the emphasis throughout Buddhism on a scrutiny of one's inner life as the basis of life, rather than some outward adjustment which doesn't really reach those things. And that's what you say is very true. The monastic life, quite characteristically, and I'm sure this is true whether it's Christian or Buddhist, magnifies tremendously the little irritable details of your life. Someone said to me in Kassihara, if someone looks at you cross-eyed, it's a topic for the staff to discuss. Or the coffee's too strong. The kitchen's making the coffee too strong, it's a big deal.

[22:17]

Or in town, they forgot to get your hand lotion on the town trip. These little details become immensely important in a situation where you don't have very many distractions. And what, of course, that kind of life reveals to you is the extent to which the ordinary distractions and details of everyday life are masking expressions of these subtle needs which we don't ordinarily confront. So monastic life, in this day and age, for most people, is kind of bizarre and somewhat masochistic. But those who do it, and come to understand what it's about, of course, it doesn't make any sense to do it at all unless you're in a mode of change, a mode of growth. You know, you might say, unless you're the kind of car driver who's interested in what's inside a carburetor.

[23:19]

I mean, most drivers aren't interested. They just want it to work. But some people really don't want to drive a car unless they know how the carburetor's built, and they're very likely to pull up the hood and take it out and take it all apart and look at what's there. For those people, monastic life is the tool in order to perform that dismantling. And it provides you with a very intimate knowledge of that kind of inner workings of our psyche. And a great deal of the access to what to most people seems like a kind of mystery, which is the inner workings of the human psyche, that really don't require much more to enter than a kind of simplified grid of life, like monastic life, with some long periods during the day in which you're not doing anything to distract yourself, like satsang. And then all of this quite suddenly and remarkably and powerfully surfaces.

[24:23]

And so, of course, the inner meaning of a precept like, do not take what is not given, becomes much more of a theoretical interest when you live a training life. And I keep having to point out to people who come here, for instance, without much real knowledge of Buddhism, that the kind of life that we're living here is quite artificial in a sense. It's a kind of treatment. It's not the way Buddhists live, in particular. People often come to me and tell me, they think, this is the way Buddhists live. And they think, why do Buddhists live in this odd, rather restrictive sort of way? Maybe they're some kind of obsessive, compulsive sort of people who can't cope. This is why they're living this way. Well, I mean, true for some people, maybe that's all right. But the basic idea is that this is the way that you live for a while, in order to enable whatever life you return to to work better.

[25:26]

And, you know, there are many traditional Buddhist cultures in which the ideal was that every adult should spend some time in a monastery or a group in life, in order to illumine their ordinary life with that kind of experience. So, you know, people, even yesterday on the radio, I was still hearing news commentators teasing Governor Brown for living in a room with a mattress on the floor. That image has really crept into the mainstream of people's consciousness. They were talking about the new governor's mansion, whether the new governor would live in it or not. And somebody who was involved in it was saying, well, I've never had a governor, and probably never will again, that chooses to sleep on a mattress on the floor, and so forth. But, you know, Governor Brown did spend quite a few years in a monastery, and he may be the kind of person that finds value in that sort of simple life.

[26:32]

And yet, in our society, that kind of interest is considered to be a bit bizarre, as though it's almost not normal or something. It's also very threatening to a lot of people, because it's pointing out that one can live successfully simply. And I think that that threatens people almost more that they find it bizarre in sort of a defensive way, and that they don't want to be reminded that because when they're out spending mega-dollars, trying to make themselves comfortable, to be reminded that you can, in fact, be comfortable with very little. Well, maybe at the present time it seems to be, but the point I'm making is that for large sections of the world, and for large parts of our own history, that was not considered threatening, it was considered admirable. And so I'm just pointing out that the kind of culture that we're in right now is quite distant from the roots of this kind of teaching, whereas even in our own society, 200 years ago,

[27:33]

it would be considered an admirable and rather highly developed form of life. So our own roots in this regard have become quite distant. And so even in the Catholic tradition, which is one of the foundations of Western civilization at the present time, a person in public life who is attempting in some small way to remind himself or to continue to follow what at one time was the highest form of life, that religion is considered a little bit strange. So we have developed a kind of culture which, far from being skeptical of the idea of possession, almost worships it. That possession is, you might say, our highest goal. Maybe it's the hidden underpinnings, you might say,

[28:34]

the unwholesome underpinnings of what we would treat in our society as possession. That you have your possession and no one will mess with it. And that's freedom. You have your camper, your property or whatever. And you know, in our society, it is acceptable to kill somebody if they enter your property and confuse the plea. That's non-crime. It's self-defense. And if somebody enters your property, your house, and you ask them to leave and they don't, you pick up a rifle and kill them. Of course, the circumstances may vary, but you can be considered that you responded admirably and appropriately. Whereas for Buddhists, the whole thing, and for the American Indian culture, the whole concept is a bit crazy, actually. The idea that one can own land is, you know, it's not that you own land.

[29:43]

That's not the primary reality. The primary reality is there's a social agreement for everyone to mutually support everyone else's property rights. What you really have when you own land is an agreement by society to back you up if anyone threatens it. You know, you can call the sheriff or whatever. Somebody comes here, we can call the sheriff. Withdraw a gun, they'll call them away. And that's what it means to own the land, in a sense. So, I'm not saying, you know, you shouldn't own land or something. But I'm just trying to fill in the background of this idea of what is given or what is not given. The Buddhist view would not necessarily be to say you shouldn't own land. In a sense, you can't get away from some practical arrangement of articles of use in society.

[30:44]

But rather that one would hope if we had a society which could see through it and not see it as something ultimate or final, but rather see it as the arrangement that it is. This would be the difference. And to see land as not something which is possessed, but something which is given. That is to say, here it is. And one can use it in various ways. You can either use it for flooding or you can use it appropriately. You can use it so that it continues to produce things for you. You can use it in such a way that it ceases to be useful in a very short space of time. And I don't think we should be romanticized in the ancient world or other cultures and think that we're the only society that has exploited and used natural resources badly. I think, actually, at various times, most of the world has. And this is a universal human problem that Buddhism has referred to.

[31:46]

And I think it's been a problem for every culture in every age, including society, which I think did better than we did. Anyway, they did better because there was fewer. I mean, they didn't have big machinery to do what they did to the land quickly. They just did it slowly in that part of the land. It was more in the pace of the land itself. So, I think the issue that Pat brought up is, what is enough or how much do you really need? This is an extremely variable thing. For people that lived in caves as hermits, all you needed was a warm cloth. And you didn't even need warm clothes because many of these yogis produced heat by yogic practice. And they could stay warm in the cold just by concentrating. So, you didn't even need warm furs or something. You could do without that. So, once you start experimenting, you realize there's an enormous range of what is enough.

[32:52]

And, again, I don't think this precept is necessarily trying to point you towards some standard of living which is considered appropriate. Because that may vary a lot depending on your situation. What's appropriate for a monk may not be appropriate for a layperson and so forth. What's appropriate for a person in Moraine County may be different than what's appropriate for a person in some other part of the world. But, at the same time, the underlying basis of how we relate to the world that we find ourselves in has to do with whether we are relating to objects of use possessively or non-possessively. So, for a Buddhist, freedom is the freedom from the idea of possession. And possessions are considered to be a bondage.

[33:54]

So, it's almost exactly the opposite of what our secular culture has come to adulate. That to own things or to have things is to make worry for yourself. And for others. And one of the main practical reasons, actually, that monks didn't own anything is so they wouldn't have to worry about things. They could travel and wander around and feel quite comfortable. Because everybody knew they didn't have anything. So, if people would leave them alone, they would try to rob them of their possessions. There are some nice folktale-type stories about many teachers who were robbed or approached by robbers. They responded, you might say, very freely because they had so little. They poked around the house and came up with an old piece of cloth or something.

[34:59]

It was all I really had. The robber was kind of left to be abused by that attitude. And, I mean, look at both ways of Christianity. Wherever and whenever, historically, the institution of the religion had acquired these precious lands, gold statues, precious cloth, and so forth. The practice of those following the way has declined. I think that's fairly accurate to say. Buddhism was able to be persecuted in China. The great persecutions came in ways because there was always a kind of conflict in China between the various religious streams of Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism.

[35:59]

But the main persecution of Buddhism in 845 was successful partly because the masses supported it. Because they had begun to perceive the institutions of the Buddhist church as their oppressors. Because over the centuries, the generosity of the land that nobility had left these Buddhist temples with large tracts of land, which they became the landlords of and had tended farms. And Buddhist monks were exempt from taxes and conscription. So, more and more societies began to perceive Buddhism as part of the problem and not part of the solution. And so, after that, the older sects of Buddhism never recovered. And the only sects that survived were the Pure Land sect, which was an emotional sect of the masses, and Zen. And Zen survived because it was a rough-and-ready return, a reformist return, to the original spirit of Buddhist life.

[37:09]

And they, for the most part, lived in the countryside, away from the big cities, and lived very frugally. And so they were respected. They bounced back and, in a sense, took over all of Buddhism in China. And they had courage to build it. Because being newer, and being more close to the original spirit of the teaching, they... So it's very much like, in the ancient times, the lay people, in a sense, exactly judged on the monastic community and engaged in a kind of historical self-correction. And that, I think, probably happened in the Buddhist history. I'm pointing this out partly so that you don't get the idea that Buddhism is somehow beyond criticism and beyond corruption. Buddhism is composed... the institution of Buddhism is composed of human beings, like every other institution, and is as corruptible as the institution in it.

[38:12]

So this preset has been adjusted in various ways over time throughout Buddhism. And even today, we ourselves here in Benton are often criticized for being a little bit too fat or too uncomfortable. Some people would feel more comfortable if we lived more frugally than we did. Maybe because it would fulfill their ideal, their original ideal of how they would like to see someone live, I'm going to say. Of course, Chassahara life is pretty rigorous, particularly in the wintertime. Right now, I'm curious how cold it is down there. We don't get too cold. So we live essentially outside only. And it's not easy life. But our city life, in Greenville's life, is more like ordinary life. So people sometimes wonder about it.

[39:16]

And I think that an understanding of discussion of this question of taking what is not given is something that is an invitation to investigate. It's not something that's been worked out in advance, particularly in our circumstances. Because our circumstances have no precedent. And again, just like with the preset of killing, from one point of view, everything that you get, you take. There is nothing given. So what does it mean for something to be given? What is there to be had, to give? Once you begin looking closely, everything that you have is something that you have to take. So what does it mean? This is the issue that the precept brings up for us.

[40:18]

If someone, for instance, criticizes a sinner and says, you have too much, you've taken what is not given. At what point do we decide that the right amount is taxed? When is it? I mean, actually, anything that we have is something that has been taken from somewhere or somebody. For instance, we're given donations every year. You give us donations. Where does yours come from? Where does it all come from? Well, probably if you trace it all back somewhere. Somebody took something out of the ground. Killed some sheep or cattle. Something out of it. You know, somewhere or other, in the roots of all wealth, something is taken. And... So, the question of what is given is not something that is decided by God or by some arbiter somewhere.

[41:26]

It's something that is decided by you yourself. You yourself have to make decisions in each situation about what you're taking from the world or from people. And, again, just as in the first precept, this has a kind of metaphorical or interpersonal connection too. And it relates to the next precept, which has to do explicitly with desire. And desire is related to human beings having to do with giving and taking. So, in a relationship with someone else, does what we receive from someone, whatever it might be, is it something that's actually been given or is it something that we're grasping at or taking from the person without their permission or without their voluntary consent? Yeah. Well, this is the issue. I was expecting to do no more today than produce the issue for you

[42:39]

and hope that you would have some thoughts to contribute to it. Is there any kind of corollary about the act of receiving? It seems that you cannot take what is not given. The receiver is sort of left out of the exchange. What's the attitude towards receiving? Can you refuse what is offered? Can you take and pass on without desire? If you have too much, what do you do with the receiving? I like the idea of exchange. I think the values associated with the concept of exchange, especially material things, as a medium of value exchange, somehow characterizes the relationship.

[43:42]

I didn't expect this from you. What I read about this particular precept, I always sort of feel like the receiver is sort of dispensing a threshold or something. Well, it's probably not emphasized because that's the easy part. I mean, it's expressed negatively. You're not taking what's not given. I suppose you could equally as well say, receive gratefully what is given. But that's rather easiest to do in comparison to the other. So I suppose the emphasis is on pointing out the aspect of the relationship to avoid, or to avoid not getting involved. Obviously, if something is given, then your attitude is one of gratefulness. And gratitude is the first sign of something opening up, for instance, a spiritual development. Gratitude, you might say, is the fundamental sign of bodhichitta.

[44:46]

It's not something you have to develop. Gratitude is, you might say, the ground thought of human existence when it's not covered over by anything else. And this is something which is not easily demonstrable empirically, unless you happen to meet someone who's fundamentally very grateful about it. Oh, if you, there's that book, a movie by Ted Rosenthal called How Can I Not Be A Mumbler? A man who's quite healthy suddenly discovers that he's a mumbler. And because he never did possess anything in his life, and his life was sitting through his fingers, his most cherished possession was in the process of being lifted away, what he suddenly experienced was an immense sense of gratitude for each moment, which he very eloquently talked about. And he found, I'm talking about this kind of empirical demonstration of the point,

[45:50]

what he found is that whenever the doctors started to tell him about some new treatment they'd heard about and come up with, they wanted to try on him, he found that sense of gratitude vanished, and he'd get very depressed. When he thought there was some actual hope that he could survive, in a conventional sense of a human being, that's what is there when you don't have anything else on your mind. So, you might say it's natural. We have this odd phrase in our meal chant, we chanted it when we came to the practice today, of the natural order of mind, which actually, Bakerish made it up, he didn't know he was in the original, he came up with it, he accepted it, and it means something like a mind of gratitude, a thankful mind. I think it's a mind characterized by a realization that everything is given,

[46:58]

that nothing belongs to you or can be taken for granted, everything is a gift or something to be grateful for. So, that maybe could be the two parentheses next to the precept, you could say, do not take what is not given, and in parentheses you could say, everything is given to be grateful. But I think the one we need more is, do not take what is not given, because in ordinary life, that's the one we tend to stumble over most frequently. And to come to this state of mind which you can maintain, of actually feeling grateful for everything, including... You know, there is an idea in Buddhism called mudita. This is just an example to show you how difficult this is. Mudita is a word with no English equivalent. There's not a word for it in our language, because one has words for things we know about,

[48:02]

and we don't really know about this, but mudita means to experience joy at the good fortune of another. And it means, and to bring it home to you, what it means is if you're working with a colleague in an office and they get the promotion you wanted, what you feel is a tremendous sense of joy about their good fortune. We don't have a word for that. I think this is a good way of, like, nourishing. Like, isn't that sort of... Aren't we really talking about nourishing? Like, anything that we nourish. We nourish ourselves and others, and that's wholesome. I was just thinking, as long as we nourish something, it feels like that's the important thing.

[49:06]

Rather than worrying about whether we possess something or not. Yes, I think that's true. But nourishment is a rather broad word. It doesn't necessarily mean... You could also speak about breakfast cereal nourishment. It's a kind of specialized use of the word. We don't have a precise vocabulary for that particular state of mind. But I think in German there's a word, mitfreuen, which means to rejoice with someone, or to rejoice at someone's joy. And curiously enough, English seems to lack this concept of a specific vocabulary. That is actually not considered the highest form of gratitude or compassion in Buddhism. It's the next highest. The highest form is that you don't feel anything special,

[50:09]

which is called equanimity. This is something that immediately people have some reservation about. It's what sometimes is translated as detachment. We don't like detachment too much. We feel as though one should... that you should be able to feel your gratitude. Buddhism, having gone through this stuff a great deal, understands the twist that these things can take. And the gratitude that you're aware of is not perfect. I mentioned last week the subtle quality of spiritual pride. And what I said about Ken Rosenthal and being grateful and so forth is good, but from a yogic or subtle spiritual point of view,

[51:15]

there's something a little bit imperfect about it. The most perfect form of gratitude is one that you're not even consciously aware of and have no special idea about. I know a few years back there was this poster that was very popular. It showed a little boy on the beach with his arms outstretched looking at the sunset and it said something like, the natural state of the human mind is ecstatic wonder. I never felt entirely comfortable with the poster. Although it seemed to express the zeitgeist of the moment, that kind of thought that was going around. Maybe we needed that kind of message at that time. But you know, this would not be an expression of a fully developed mind from a Buddhist standpoint. This would be some preliminary stage. Because the natural state of mind for a Buddhist

[52:19]

is not anything in particular. And something quite ordinary, actually. Something with no special content. And ecstatic wonder is, you might say, a conditioned or limited state, too. And gratitude is, as such, a limited state. So, the highest form of non-possessiveness is what we call the pay shot. Which, again, has no exact equivalent in English because pay shot, which means something like equanimity or sameness or evenness, even-mindedness. We talk about the whole even-mindedness. It's an even-mindedness which is produced by meditation practice. It's not just a kind of temporary lack of desire

[53:23]

or interest in something, but a fundamental grounding in the unconditioned, which is not affected by anything. Or you might say, affected by everything equal, but maybe more accurately. So, even-mindedness means a kind of affective resonance with the whole world at once. As Fr. David said, people often ask him about celibacy. A Christian would ask a traditional question. Again, celibacy is something that doesn't have much good press in the last few centuries. But he said that, in a strict sense, celibacy means to be in love with everyone without any narrowing down, because anyone in particular becomes an unconditional kind of affection for everyone. And you don't narrow it down. And that if it's not that way, it isn't true celibacy.

[54:24]

I don't know if he would agree with me. But anyway, this is very similar to... I'll get to you in a second. This is very similar to, I think, what Buddhism means by rupesha. It's a kind of even-minded warmth that emanates in all directions without hindrance or without barrier. And I would say it's the fullest expression or resolution of this precept of not taking what is not given. That is to say, you experience everything you meet as a gift. And because everything you experience is that way, you don't notice the gift quality of anything in particular. It just looks like everything else. So the actual effect of this kind of attitude,

[55:31]

when it is lived, is one of quite complete flexibility, of softness, or... There's a whole string of technical terms in Buddhism that all mean something like pliancy or flexibility. There are six of them that are often used to express a wholesome state of mind or a thankful state of mind. And they refer to the ability of something to be stretched or hammered or changed or shaped. It is to say that one's consciousness is able to take the shape of whatever comes before it. And so sometimes the awakened consciousness is likened to a mirror. And the mirror reflects whatever is in front of it without changing it.

[56:35]

You might say the ordinary mind of a more closed person is like a funhouse mirror. It has built-in curvatures to bend everything in the long way or something so that things are kind of bent like a gravitational field in towards some deep-seated sense of possessive selfness which is really not, in its root, to have much to do with material possessions as we talked about in answering the question. It has much more to do with the details of your life, your personal relationships, your decisions, your judgments, and so forth. It then has to do with how many TVs you own. Yes, you had something there. Well, it ties in, I guess. It emanates from Brother David. But he was talking at one point about gifts.

[57:39]

He was? On a tape that I was using. And he was saying that everything is given. And there are sort of three aspects to gifts, which is acknowledging, accepting, and sharing. And I think that, yeah, I guess it's my way of sharing something. When you sit and you realize that every breath is a given gift and the process becomes very quick of acknowledging in each moment the newness. And in a few years of sitting and reflection and trying to follow this practice, I think the insight can come home to you. It's not that difficult, particularly if you're well prepared for it

[58:40]

and your life has led you that way. And I think that if you continue that insight and try to bring your life into accord with it, that's also not so hard. But then the real work begins, which is, what do you do about the world that you live in? And the fact that this way of life that you're trying to follow is not understood or shared by many. Not even the insight which underlies it. Then you have some real problems that are not soluble exactly in quite the same way as one works on oneself. So this is part of what being a bodhisattva means, is that you don't think of your own practice as finished

[59:43]

as long as that world exists. You don't ever come to the sense of, oh, I am now finished and I will now relate to the unfinished world. That would be a kind of subtle return of a sense of self, in a way. There would be a sense of bounding in that. And that Buddhism did tend to, because of its emphasis on withdrawal and meditative trance and so forth in India, there was a tendency for that kind of attitude to creep in, natural enough. And as a corrective, there was a corresponding notion which became stronger and stronger in Buddhism until it pretty much took over, which is that the terrain or domain of your spiritual work is everyone, not just yourself. Or, to put it another way, the boundary of yourself extends to every self. And if that, by including or acknowledging the incompleteness of our world,

[60:48]

spiritually speaking, that's the only authentic way to complete your own practice, to absorb the suffering or incompleteness of every being. And the actual test of these precepts really doesn't fully emerge until that's the terrain which you're trying to apply. So, what do we do about the fact that almost everything we own, or have, is stolen, one way or another? Even the Buddha, he's big. He's smuggled out. Almost all of the Oriya-waras, you've seen all the Rikuris, he's stolen. That's how it got there.

[61:50]

And, you know, if you trace the origin and source of many of the things which we take for granted in our life, you know, it's taken from somewhere, or somebody, or something. And what do you do about that? Becoming a naked ascetic doesn't really help it at all. In fact, it may actually decrease your opportunities for being influential in a situation. But it definitely was tried, and it may still be an option for some people. On the other hand, if you just go about your life in a complacent way, without examining this thing, that's not going to be so workable either. Yes? One thing comes up when you ask, and somehow it will change,

[62:54]

because people are a bit thirsty to say a lot of things. So, where's the limit? People might feel they should say this, because they want to please, or whatever reason. So you take something that, sometimes you're not given anything, or often you get something in return, but you don't know what kind it is. The Theravadas, you know, take these precepts quite literally. And I read recently that in England there's a Theravada group, of Caucasians, not Sri Lankans. And they have a little, I'm using this as an example of what she said, they have a little explanatory flyer they give to visitors to the monastery or the temple. And one of the things it says is, the monks are not allowed to ask for anything.

[63:58]

So please be sensitive to that, and try to anticipate their needs. Because the rule is they're not allowed to ask for anything, food or whatever. So if you don't give them anything, they'll just sit there, be cold and be hungry or whatever. And, you know, we don't follow such an idea literally, but still it's an interesting idea. And there is, in a sense, a practice of that, that you wait for something to be offered to you. And if it isn't offered, you just accept the situation in which it's not offered, and you don't ask. The problem with taking these precepts with that kind of literalness is that it makes you think as though you're following the precepts. Pardon? Well, anyway, it gives you the sensation of completeness.

[65:01]

And in a sense, you see, the Bodhisattva path emphasizes the reality of the incompleteness of the situation, including the precept. The precept is not complete. And even if you don't ask for anything, even your bread, there's still some level in which you can't follow the precepts thoroughly. So, but this is an interesting practice. I sort of remembered this. They also, following the more detailed precepts, there are things like a monk, a cherubic monk, is not supposed to be in a room alone with a woman. That's one of the minor rules. And so they have to be chaperoned by somebody else. There has to be another person present. Which, I'm not sure if that really needs to be so in our age,

[66:11]

but maybe at the time it needs to be. And so they have these elaborate rules about when women come to the temple, they have to be, they have this rather elaborate social setup so they can actually talk to the teachers, because they're not allowed to be alone. It makes it sound as though these monks are rather dangerous people. They wouldn't be dangerous people. Well, it actually emanates more from the latter, that there's a kind of Indian cultural concept that men created, that women are the dangerous side of the pair, and women are sort of uncontrollable, and you have to keep them at arm's length. It may have been a vast projection of the man's own problems, but you find throughout the literature of celibate communities of men, a sense of, we'll talk about this in more detail next time, more pertinent to the third precept. The third precept literally, again, says,

[67:14]

no wrongful use of kama, which means sense organs, and there are six of them. But that's almost always been interpreted to mean sexuality. But literally, it simply means your eyes, your ears, your nose, your tongue, your sense of touch, your body, and then sexuality would be a kind of subcategory of that. And then the sixth one would be the mind organ, which is your brain, your thinking apparatus. These are the six senses, and kama refers to all of them. And next week, we're not quite finished yet, are we? Oh, yes, we are. I'm intending to have us discuss that one, which brings in the whole question of celibacy and the understanding of sexuality and marriage and all of that,

[68:16]

and Buddhism, which is a rather complex subject. And it's one of the areas in which the Zen Center has made the most experimental adjustments to the tradition, although what we're doing is not unique in Buddhism. It's not in the mainstream, and by any means, it's an unusual adjustment, which remains to be seen how well it will work. My mind is jumping back and forth around having hoped for this culture, and I was wondering what you thought about the idea that perhaps just clicking on the mattress might have made it more understandable to the lecturers if he had been a better example in a lot of other ways. Well, yes, it may be that the discrepancy or the incompleteness of his efforts were noticed by the lecturers,

[69:17]

and he'd probably be the first to admit that. Do you have a comment? It seems to me that the culture is looking for something. I mean, they liked it when Jimmy Carter carried this empty bag over his shoulder, turned out later it was empty. They were looking for something, but they're very quick to be cynical. Well, people are not looking for symbols. If they find out that's what they are, then, of course, the whole thing backfires. And maybe it's simply that these things, if you're going to do them at all, they have to be done with authority and authenticity or else you may be better not to do them. I mean, it's true, if your basic life is quite conventional, having some little corner of your life which you publicize as aesthetic is not really going to wash in the long run. Maybe that example of being a lot fiercer is destructive because being a lot fiercer didn't make any effort to disguise the fact that he was a rich layman, a rich banker.

[70:21]

He did everything exactly the way a person in his ranking station would do. He even went to cabarets and throttles and racetracks and bars and everything. He did all the things that everybody did. And the point of it was that because his actual consciousness was quite pure, he was actually not pushed around or moved by any of that and therefore to be a very effective bodhisattva. And one of the dramatic... I may xerox up before the class ends a few excerpts of the Vimalakirti Sutra, but one of the many dramatic episodes has to do with the gods raining flowers down on the assembly that are around Vimalakirti. And the flowers stick to the robes of all the monks in the audience. They don't stick to Vimalakirti, and the monks do. There's a rule, you're not supposed to have any adornment on your body. Trying not to have to raise the rule

[71:22]

on Vimalakirti is fine. He's very relaxed. And he says, you know, what's the problem? Why do you have these flowers? Why do you have these flowers? The point is that his consciousness was not involved with it at all, so they weren't sticking to it. Another very funny thing that happens in Vimalakirti having to do with men and women is a goddess comes to talk to one of the monks in the assembly, Shariputra. Shariputra represents in Buddhism a kind of uptight monk in his role. And Shariputra is always being lectured to by these wiser, broader beings. He's always got the rule in front of him. This goddess, this wise being, is saying, but you're a woman. You can't be a Buddha. She says, I'm not either a woman or a man.

[72:24]

My mind is not either masculine or feminine. So he says, oh, come on. So she magically transforms his body into her body and her body into his body. So she looks down and he's got her body. And she's got his body. And she says, well, now what do you think? And he doesn't know what to think. And it's a kind of little morality play about the... The Buddha actually does not have anything to do with whether you're a man or a woman. It has to do with a level of consciousness which is pre-sexual, you know, trans-sexual. And Vimalakirti Sutra is one of the few pieces of literature that actually makes it explicit. Most of the others don't. And the underlying message there is the same as

[73:29]

the former story about the clouds, that the bodhisattva mind is based on this radical or far-reaching equanimity which is not limited by any concept or any or any category. And that these precepts are descriptive utterances concerning the shape and appearance of this mind, actually, rather than the behavioralism. Maybe we'll leave it at that during the bell commencing. And next week... I have no special readings for you this week, but next week we'll discuss the next one. How many more questions are there? Three, officially speaking. ... It took a long, long time for the acceptance of that

[74:30]

method of progression to build up. So in the same way the idea of Dharma or of a way, or the Tao, some underlying principle of the way things go is something which I think it's rather hard for us to have a sense of. Maybe we find that it offends our our sense of individualism or freedom or something. We feel that we should be free to create our own Dharma and shouldn't be under some constraint of of of some other thing. But that's a little bit like saying we should be free to fly. We human beings should be free to jump off a roof and fly. And there's no reason why we should be restricted from that. The reason that we don't think that is because

[75:31]

I suppose somebody tried to fly. That was all the experimentation that was necessary to determine that it was not something the average person should really attempt. The equipment simply wasn't there. It's not in the Dharma for us to be able to fly. And in the same way there are certain things which we'd very much like to have be the case. For instance, we'd very much like for all human beings to be wonderful and good and behave the way they should, and they don't. And, you know, really one of the starting points of Buddhism practically speaking is that one has to get through one's head the fact the inescapable fact of what we call suffering, which means really that human beings don't intrinsically have it together to behave very well unless they're trained. We do not come out of the womb finished.

[76:32]

And this is, you know, the Dharma of our particular nature, the kind of consciousness that we have and the kind of beings that we are is that we are not finished beings. There's some special work that we need to do in our life to complete our potential, and this is called practice. And, again, in oriental society, the idea of living your life without a sense of practice, in traditional society anyway, is rather bizarre. It would be like not being human or being like some aboriginal hairy creature. But I think for us, our image is more that as much as possible we should live free from all constraints or limitations

[77:35]

and do what we want to do. It's just a very different idea. And, you know, as I think maybe others have mentioned, in Chinese and foreign languages, there is no word that corresponds to our English word freedom, because it's not an observable fact for those cultures. Rather, there are words like being in accord with or the feeling of being one with the Dharma in a way that you feel your inward feeling is you feel good, you feel at peace. You have the feeling of freedom, but it isn't, you don't have some arbitrary ability to do whatever you want to do. I mean, I think for Americans, freedom includes the ability to throw a tin can down

[78:37]

and just leave it there. That's part of what we think should be within our... Maybe that's on the edge, and now there's some new interest in trying to... But, you know, the initiative that's up is really to try to legislate that by greed, basically, by making it valuable monetarily. We're hoping to change people's behavior. Rather than, I think, you know, in Japan it's much more the sense that you don't have a law about it that would be kind of absurd. But rather you simply train your children to pick no one and throw things on the ground, which is shameful. You know, you always put things in the trash can which would be considered low class and extreme to just throw something down the street because someone else has to pick it up. You know, so it's incorporated within what you just grew up with. You wouldn't defecate in your pants, you know.

[79:41]

That would be considered, you know, pretty weird if you did that as an adult. I mean, I think we accept it to that minimum degree. I don't think any of us would consider that to be, you know, a rap thing. You know, it all has to do with where you draw the line, I suppose. But the idea of Dharma is more that real freedom or real liberation really means to find a sense of accord with the Dharma that's all around you. Which requires practice. You can't just do it instinctively. So again, part of what it means to take refuge in Dharma is to be willing to hold, to expose your own presuppositions about things.

[80:45]

And a kind of attitude of radical questioning that can expose these hidden assumptions that we all live with. It partly means also to be willing to question the assumptions of your society which require a certain energy. And it makes Buddhists, particularly in the West, rather like not exactly necessarily in accord with the dominant assumptions in society. I was going to say it makes Buddhists revolutionaries. But I don't think that's probably that may be going a little too far. But certainly to be a Buddhist in the present circumstance makes you a little bit radical. Because you're operating at the level of

[81:48]

basic assumptions and questioning. And as you can see with the next one which is Sangha, you end up through this experimental investigation into Dharma, you end up inevitably creating a somewhat different kind of society called Sangha. A society which is based on the principles of Dharma. Yes? ... [...] Yeah, an entire society can be

[82:53]

completely going in the wrong direction. ... ... ... No, not to put yourself in accord with what the phrase in Buddhism called the foolish common people. And this is a phrase that actually is a technical term. And it means, you know, just ordinary folks that don't have much sense of anything and they do all kinds of things that you had best ignore because there's not much consciousness in it. So you align yourself in Buddhism with a vertical and horizontal society, a vertical society of the lineage or the predecessors of those people in each generation who have seen through the foolish

[83:54]

common people and their doings and comings and goings. And that they are the society that you align yourself with and try to be in accord with. And horizontally, in your own society, you ally yourself or align yourself with those people who are committed to some kind of conscious life. And if naturally enough... Yes? The balancing act then is to be able to function within that society while you're in a central line with a different society. And there's sort of a problem of doing that balancing act. If you have to function every day with certain people of certain values and meet those expectations, yet in a sense you're aligned, try to be in accord with your fundamental way of thinking,

[84:55]

you run into a balance problem. Well that's where the whole idea of Sangha comes into healthy, because the Sangha traditionally, and I want to start with talking about the traditional institution of the Sangha. The Sangha has never been an exclusive club of some kind in which you, there's a wall, there's never been a wall in which the Sangha is separated from the society. And on the whole, the history of Buddhism has been in the direction of breaking down the wall to whatever extent it existed, rather than building it up more strongly. I'm talking about the idea of the Bodhisattva vow of living in the world and saving all beings and so forth. I would say that Buddhism started out with more of a sense of a wall than it later came up with. There was more of a sense initially of the world being, the ordinary world being a dangerous

[85:58]

place for spiritual practice and that one should in some way retreat from it or minimize your contact with it. This tends to emphasize the monastic vocation, and that's what monks and nuns do, and early Buddhism tended to uphold the monks and nuns as the exemplars of those who seek Dharma, and everybody else as being somehow compromised. More and more, I think, partly at the pressure from the non-monks and nuns in Buddhism, who didn't exactly go along with this idea, there was a different movement in Buddhism which maybe was parallel to it, which was more in the other direction, to treat the Sangha not as a refuge from this diluted society that you were in, but rather a refuge for the whole society. In other words, it was ultimately there for the benefit of everyone, and of course for

[87:02]

it to function as a beneficiary, it had to have some function, contact, and role within the society. That is to say, it had to participate in the society to a great extent. But the advantage, the critical advantage of the Sangha for an individual is that it gives you refuge, it gives you a place in which you can, the inevitable conflicts and tensions between the kind of effort you're making to live a more conscious, developed life and the inertia of the society at large, which is always threatening to pull you down from that, is the Sangha gives you support to maintain yourself. And if you look, for instance, at Zen Center, where have all these people come from? Who are all these people?

[88:03]

I mean, how did they all get here anyway? Well, we don't really talk about this too much, but in fact, the fact that Zen Center exists, and it's fairly well known, not only in the United States, but even in foreign countries now, means that from everywhere people find their way here. And whether or not they stay for any length of time or not, the mere existence of such a place, and the fact that there are people maintaining an institutional continuity of Buddhism is extremely important in people's lives. I'm sure you would probably admit that in your own life, that the difference between now and 25 years ago, when there were only a few scattered books that you'd find hidden away in the metaphysical bookstores by D.T. Suzuki and a few other mysterious, exotic things, you know, and now there's all these proliferation of actual Dharma centers, where

[89:11]

there are people trying to live the teachings. It's just a whole different thing. And already I think you can say that 20 years in the time span of Buddhism is not actually very significant yet. But still, even in 20 years, I would say that the founding of all these various Buddhist centers in the West is beginning to have an impact on society at large as well. But it's very difficult for an individual to do much. Most the individual can do is join his or her energy with a Sangha, which can then have a sufficient impact too. So you relate to the society at large best, I think, through the Sangha, rather than, you know, people often talk to me about how difficult it is for them as Buddhists, or

[90:14]

at least feeling some affinity with Buddhism, to try to figure out how to cope with your work situation or something, where other people are not that. And I am expecting, actually, that's the kind of thing that we'll probably talk about as we go on in the class. But I wouldn't attempt to raise your hopes too high on that score. There's not a whole lot you can do, really, as one person. Just, you know, you against the world. But through the support structure of the Sangha, I think you can do a great deal. You know, five or ten people together as a Sangha can do a lot more for themselves and for others than those same five or ten people each operating alone out there. There was a question? Well, to go back a little bit, in this case of the Oriental culture in India, the culture

[91:20]

is so old and there's so much population that after a certain time, one of the reasons we're able to talk about this is because it's a place for the exorcist to heal oneself, to get in touch with himself, whereas in the West, we have a new world, and we're more open to physical possibilities. It's like, sort of like the Rajneesh coming here and he spends his time driving his car and he walks on the highway. You know, whereas we're sort of learning about yoga and dance because the population is so... because we're human, conscripted, basically, and so recognizing our conscription, we're also recognizing our need to experience yoga in the same way. Well, European culture is pretty old. I mean, it's been there for a couple thousand years. I mean, I suppose you could think of various explanations for the difference.

[92:23]

I think, you know, probably the simplest explanation is as good as any, which is that it just didn't occur to very many people. It's something that has to... Well, it seems like it doesn't occur because there's not enough constriction, and that wouldn't... the constriction just is and has to. But even in Europe, somehow, it seems that it can be here, and now there's sort of like nowhere else to go. Yeah, but of course in ancient India there was lots of... there weren't very many people. It's a huge country. It just, you know, there's many possible explanations. You know, one possible explanation which may not make us feel so good is that there is some racial difference. That those cultures and genetic stocks had some more affinity to Yogic experience, I don't know, and were coming around to it a little bit remediately, I think. were coming around to it a little bit remediately.

[93:19]

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