I was joined by an old friend and her son who is in training to be a rabbi, and he'd just returned from a year in Israel where he had, among other things, been picking fruit for the Palestinians on the West Bank. And I knew from my friend how frightened she was for him. So I was celebrating with her his safe return. And while he and I spoke, he's a very sweet and sincere young man, he asked me what I was going to talk about today. And I kind of grasped my heart and said, morality. And he said, oh, how very kind of you. And very brave. I think it's interesting, ironic even, that priests and reverends and rabbis

[01:06]

are afraid to talk about morality. Who will do it? So, the word ethics comes from a Greek word for character, for our personal character. And the word morals, from a Latin word for social customs, like mores. So from my point of view, it's taken quite a long time for this generation of California, hippie, anarchist Zen students to confront collectively the excesses of the cultural revolution in which many of us took an eager part. In fact, I think that's how most of us got here in the

[02:07]

first place, to the Zen Center. We were in rebellion against what we perceived as the dark values of the mainstream culture. Racism, sexism, capitalism, militarism, and so on and so on. But now in our middle years, we are all called on to look again at what was the baby and what was the stinky bathwater of our revolution. I remembered saying when I was in college to anyone who would listen that I wasn't immoral, I was amoral. I didn't want anything to do with right and wrong as defined by them. I was mostly concerned with the various enthusiasms of my own studies of music, of romance, and

[03:10]

of art. And as a political science major, I even learned about a classical philosophical tradition called hedonism, led by Epicurus. And to my understanding, hedonism was a way of saying that hedonism held that the pleasure, or the good feelings in life, or the essence of human development. And in contrast to Epicurus were the perfectionists, led by Aristotle and Plato and the Stoics. And their view, to my understanding, was that doing things worth doing was the essence of human well-being. And to my juvenile ears, that sounded a bit

[04:12]

too much like the Protestant ethic, which I knew very little about, but had decided I didn't like. So believing that these two systems, the hedonists and the perfectionists, were contradictory rather than complementary, which in fact they are, I think many of my generation, through a somewhat undereducated and youthful, wishful thinking, chose hedonism as a path of pleasure. Well, with my youth long fled, I recently re-read in my new Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy what Epicurus actually had to say. I'm embarrassed to note. What he said in his own words was that excelling at things worth doing, that

[05:13]

is, exercising one's intellectual powers and moral virtues in exemplary and fruitful ways, is in itself the tried and true means to experiencing life's most satisfying pleasures. A little bit of a different story. And then in reading a little bit more from the other camp, the perfectionists, Aristotle is quoted as saying, it's the importance of pleasure in doing a deeply satisfying job, a job well done. So leading the good life in both of these classical Western traditions really came down to pretty much the same thing, a lot of hard work and a deep commitment to moral clarity and behaviors. So at the same time that I was misreading

[06:17]

the classics in my undergraduate years at San Francisco State College, I was also carrying around Mao's Little Red Book in my work shirt pocket. I lived on Ashbury Street and I had bought some posters my freshman year on Haight Street that I decorated my room with. On the left was Fidel Castro and on the right Che Guevara and over my bed a Bank of America on fire. So basically I had an attitude. And I suppose in those days I was as willing on my way to school to pick a fight as I was to fall in love. And pretty much they came down to the same thing, as I recall. But fortunately for me the baby survived and

[07:25]

as for many of us it came in the form of my Buddhist practice and of some many years of psychotherapy and the very good fortune of having a child of my own. As a result I have been able to realign myself with the values of community and with other old-fashioned notions like integrity, sobriety, chastity. And these are the things that I was able to do. These are the same values that I now wish for my girl child. I support and encourage her for the sake of her safety and her maturation as I am now certain my parents wished for me. I found a charming letter in a book I've been reading about, a book about John Adams

[08:26]

who was an amazing man. I didn't know much about him but I do now. And this letter was written by his wife, Abigail, whom he dearly loved, to their ten-year-old son, John Quincy. And he and his father were about to sail across the Atlantic on a mission to France on behalf of the United States and its war for independence from Britain. Hear the mother to her son. You are in possession of a natural good understanding and of spirits unbroken by adversity and untamed with care. Improve your understanding for acquiring useful knowledge and virtue such as will render you an ornament to society, an honor to your country, and a blessing to

[09:28]

your parents. And remember, you are accountable to your maker for all your words and actions. So just what was that stinky bathwater? And what is it that we, as human beings, need to address and to root out from the culture that surrounded us in the 1960s and from which surrounds us now? And perhaps, after all, it wasn't the Protestant ethic that offended us but the lack of ethics altogether. Separating stinky bathwater from the baby is an ancient human problem, and it was exactly the same problem that drove the young Shakyamuni Buddha from his home 2,500 years ago. He left his beloved family in search of some deeper meaning

[10:32]

to life. And to our very great fortune, he found what he was looking for. And he found it by sitting all by himself under a tree, and he located it inside of his very own human mind. Just as the ocean, O monks, has one taste, the taste of salt, my teaching has one taste, the taste of liberation. According to the Buddha's teaching, there are basically two ways that we can understand ourselves and the world around us. One way is through ignorance or delusion, and this way is the most common, and it's very easy for us. In fact, according to the Buddha, we're born to it. The other way is through wisdom and

[11:37]

truth, and it's not so common, and it's quite difficult for us. Our task in this life is to grow an ability to tell one from the other, to tell ignorance and delusion from wisdom and truth. And this is precisely what we mean in Zen by the word practice. This is our practice. And like a healing salve, it applies to everything that we do, we say, and we think through the actions of our bodies, our speech, and our minds. In other words, all of our behaviors and all of the consequences that result from the choices that we make day by day, year by year, throughout the course of our lives. For some of us in the human family, those

[12:40]

choices have included very harmful behaviors, such as addictions to drugs and alcohol, or to sex or possessions or power or ideas. They've also included harmful behaviors of speech, such as lying, conceit, and slander. They've included repeated outbreaks of violence and theft. In the extremes, we record these behaviors in our daily newspapers. In fact, it's pretty much what we mean by the news. Yesterday I was looking at the Chronicle, and there are a few headlines I wanted to mention. A Laughing Driver Runs Over Man. No Jobs Waiting for Pedophile Priests. Dead Bodies Placed at U.S. Embassy in Liberia. That was yesterday's paper.

[13:47]

I haven't seen what's in the paper today. So, what I'm talking about are not just the extreme violations of human decency that have plagued our planet for all time, but also the minor violations by which many of us have learned to navigate in this so-called modern world. All the little white lies, all the flirtations, the strategizing, and the sedations. And I also want to talk about the Buddhist path as an alternate route to human happiness, safety, and freedom. It's a path of simplicity, of virtue, and of humility. And as my new young rabbi friend said to me, it's a path

[14:50]

of humility. He said yesterday he was so grateful to learn from an older rabbi that humility is not about lowering yourself. It's about raising up all of those around you. In its basic formulation, we can think of Buddhism as the study of ethical cause and effect. And, to put it most simply, that good leads to good, and bad leads to bad. And that there is a path that runs between these two called the middle way. Oh, I'm sorry. So, the middle way, as the Buddha described, avoids the extremes between severe goodness

[16:04]

and severe badness. And I think, as we can all see in our political spectrum, that the far left and the far right look very much like one another through the convictions of self-righteousness. And this is not the middle way. The middle way is a path that requires of us our fullest attention and our deepest commitment to telling the truth, especially to ourselves. There's a well-known Buddhist story about a man who's being chased by a tiger. And he comes to a cliff and climbs down a vine, only to discover a second tiger is waiting for him at the bottom. So while he's hanging there, he notices a fresh, ripe, wild strawberry growing from the side of the cliff. And he picks the strawberry, eats it, and says,

[17:08]

How delicious! The practice of the Buddhist path, such as articulated in the sixteen Bodhisattva precepts of our tradition, requires that each of us face each situation just like that. Not going back, not going forward, not being particularly brave or particularly frightened. Simply meeting precisely what is. So I think for those of us who were raised in a predominantly secular society, on notions of civil liberty, of personal and religious freedom, and of human rights, and who have lived through the cultural revolution of the 1960s, it may come as a bit of a shock to

[18:16]

encounter the elements of the Buddhist tradition which mandate a serious, personal, social ethic. And particularly in regards to issues that many of us fought very hard for. Sexual freedom, freedom of speech, and also the freedom to intoxicate ourselves in any way whatsoever, as often as we pleased. To a large extent, we demanded the decriminalization of our path of pleasure. And I wanted to say that at this point I thought, well, I bet they're going to worry a little bit about where I might be headed, or where I might be coming from, for that matter. And

[19:17]

I wanted you to know, for me personally, this ruling by the Supreme Court regarding gay and lesbian rights was a great joy and relief. For too long, this part of our human population has been gravely abused. And as with sexism and racism, it's high time it was overturned. So I don't find any conflict in discussing morality and human rights, because the precepts are not about rights. They're about the obligation that each of us faces to confront in ourselves what we consider to be our own wrongdoing. There's a simple criteria for us in understanding wrongdoing, and that is whether or not we're causing harm to ourselves or to someone else. We do have the right to sleep with our best

[20:26]

friend's wife or husband. And we do have the right to drink a quart of alcohol a day, or to smoke a pack of cigarettes, or to sell defective products. We have that right. So, it's not our rights that give us pause or that make us well. Something else is needed, something that comes from inside, in the secrecy of our own hearts, where we take and hold our vows and our promises. Only each of us can heal from inside that which has been broken. Quite often, my daughter will say to me, after she's done something that she knows she's not supposed to do, I didn't do that. And when I question her, she says, are you calling me a liar? You know, it reminds me of Marlon Brando in The Godfather.

[21:30]

Are you calling me a liar? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Do I dare? So, the denial and the defense of our bad habits is kind of cute in a child. But in an adult or in the leaders of a nation, it's not so cute. It's quite startling. It should be startling. You know, where are the weapons of mass destruction? And what was President Clinton doing with all of those women who were not his wife, if it wasn't having sex? These aren't questions of rights. They're questions of integrity, of unkept promises, and of ethics and morality. A disciple of the Buddha does not kill, does not take what is not given, does not lie,

[22:41]

does not sexualize others, does not intoxicate mind or body of self or others, does not slander others, does not praise oneself at others' expense, is not possessive of anything, does not harbor ill will, does not disparage the triple treasure of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. The way that these precepts function is they act kind of like a dye to illuminate the borderline between what I see as myself and what I see as the other. And this is the relationship that the precepts call on us to study, that between what we

[23:44]

see as myself and all of you, I promise not to kill you, I promise not to steal from you, and so on. Each of them is about a promise that I make to you. So the precepts are not about making the world safe for me, they're about making me safe for the world. Through the precepts and through focusing our attention on relationships, we begin to see how we are bound to one another, and how the welfare of the world, by extension, depends entirely on our relationships to one another. In the Buddha's great vision, he saw that the world around him was like a Siamese twin to which he was bound by mind, heart, and hips.

[24:48]

And since it's already so, we don't need to make it any other way. The strawberry is sweet and delicious all by itself. The precepts call on us to minimize, if not eliminate entirely, the disrespect and abuse that we cultivated through our delusional thinking. Disrespectful and abusive behaviors happen freely among us, regardless of our age, sex, or disabilities. And the Buddha's teaching is not about who we are. It's not about how we look or what we have. It's about how we treat each other and how we treat ourselves. Basically, it's about love, and all of the challenges that the lover has in the face of their inborn tendencies for greed,

[26:00]

for hatred, and for delusion. And as the Dalai Lama said, after the 9-11 attacks, don't look for blame, look for causes. What are the causes? The primary cause of human suffering, according to the Buddha, is delusion. And the primary delusion is of a separate self. Out of that delusion flow all of the judgments and criticisms based on the appearance of difference between us. For example, there is the delusion of normal and abnormal. If I were to be considered normal, that would make almost all of you somewhat abnormal. Or we could choose someone else and make the rest of us abnormal.

[27:07]

But either way, we have to ask ourselves, what is the point? And I think the point is that we want to belong. It's true of children, it's true of us. We want to belong. We want to belong because we believe that we don't. The hungry snake of delusion and longing begins by eating its very own tail. When we see one another as separate, we begin to look for our own tribe or our own people, those who we like and those who are like us. In other words, those who are normal. Also printed in yesterday's paper, along with the Supreme Court decision on gay and lesbian rights, was a response by a man from Lafayette, California.

[28:12]

The court was politically correct, but it avoids the question that most of us ask. Speaking for most of us, is homosexuality normal? What good for humanity does it serve? I classify it with club feet and cleft palates. All three are accidents of creation, serving no useful purpose, and hopefully can be medically corrected. Do you suppose that he reflected for a moment on the harm that his words might be having on others, on those with cleft palates and club feet? I understand there was even a time not so long ago, after I was born,

[29:20]

that men who found themselves uncontrollably attracted to other men were subjected to electric shock treatments as a method of cure. But apparently it didn't work. So can we begin to understand how such ideas as normal and abnormal can result in crazy behaviors such as those? That things really are the way they are? That I prefer strawberries and do not care so much for mangoes? And how about you? In our tradition, setting the standards for tolerance, respect and devotion to the welfare of others is accomplished through taking and practicing of precepts.

[30:24]

Once we take the precepts, there are no acquittals and there is no possibility of divorce. And that's because we have married ourselves and our own deepest convictions. And of course no one takes the precepts until they fully understand what they are and how they're going to affect their lives. And not before they have determined within the depth of their own hearts that there really is no other choice. And this usually comes with a glimpse of who we are truly born to be, a glimmer in the eye of our own awakening. Thank you very much. www.mooji.org

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