Good evening, everybody. Thank you for being here. We may be getting a slightly different version of this talk than the one I prepared. I've been sick all day, and I'm really spacey, so I'm not quite sure what's going to come out of my mouth. But it gives me a good excuse, if there's anything I say that you don't like or agree with or that seems sort of off, then it's because I'm sick. So when Christina invited me to lecture this evening, and thank you very much, I went to Michael and I said, well, what do you think I should talk about? And Michael told me. He said, why don't you talk about relationships in the Sangha? And I think that for me, it's important or it's a good idea to go and ask somebody else what I should talk about, because it's not a subject that I don't think I ever would have, it's not a subject I think I would ever have thought of on my own.

[01:07]

So the last time I spoke, I spoke about time, which is a subject I never would have thought about or lectured about. This was also Michael's suggestion. So what we get, what I get when I go to somebody else for a suggestion, is a stretching of my own ideas, which I think fits in pretty well with the theme of tonight's talk, which is Sangha, the relationships within Sangha. So, as you know, most of you, if not all of you, the Sangha is one of the three refuges in Buddhism. We have Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And I think that because of the order, we're sometimes tempted to think that they are in descending order, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, but actually I don't think that's true. I think that they're all on a line, all level.

[02:12]

You know, we need the Buddha, we need our own capacity for awakening, we need the Dharma, which is the teaching about the way things really are, and we need the community of those who support us in our practice and who look to us to support them in their practice. So all of these things are essential. And when we say we go to refuge to the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, what that means is that refuge is customarily where we go to seek safety from danger, whether danger outside or whether the dangers that we find in our own minds. Somebody, I once heard say, you know, my mind is not a place that I should be wandering alone. Direct adult supervision is required, and that's certainly true for me. The original meaning of the word Sangha, which is pre-Buddhist, means something like a gathering

[03:16]

of the clan. It's when, you know, the clan, I guess the elders and the rest of the clan members would come together to discuss something. And the oldest meaning in Buddhism is, of course, the community of monks and nuns. And we have, over the centuries, come to expand that meaning quite a bit. So the community, the Sangha that we speak of, is the community of all of those who practice together, or sometimes the community of all living beings who, by their very existence, support each other. So it's a meaning that has evolved over a long time. And community, Sangha, is a basic human need. It's not a luxury. It's a basic human need, which is more often than not denied in this culture, which has been atomizing the individual, at least since the Industrial Revolution.

[04:17]

So what we come up with is the fractured self, the self that is cast off, that is no longer connected, the unconnected self, which is a byproduct, by the way, of capitalism run amuck. So we are no longer part of, our identity is no longer based on such things as clan, or village, or extended family, or guild, or religious order. And increasingly, not even on the nuclear family, which we have come to see, at least in the West, as increasingly fragile. The basic unit of society has become the individual. Every man for himself, and devil take the hindmost, seems to be the way things are. So this creates in us this yearning for community, for Sangha.

[05:22]

And many of us come to Zen Center, at least in part, looking for that. So Zen Center, this Sangha here, is a community of interest and shared endeavor. And I think this is true for almost all of us. When we come, we come because we have some vision of our self as damaged, or in need of repair. You know, that's sort of the shadow side. On the other side, we often have this moment of awakening, this moment of bodhicitta, this moment of seeing the possibilities in our lives. But I think more frequently, we're able to see the broken places in our self, the places that we believe is in need of repair. And so we come to Zen Center, some of us, and for the first time, have an experience of community. And this can be overwhelming. This can be overwhelming. And we can fall in love.

[06:24]

We can fall in love with the Sangha. We can fall in love with the idea of the Sangha, as it fills a long yearning in us. And this is the stage of infatuation. And, as in all love affairs, after the infatuation ends, the difficulties set in. So, after a while, we kind of look around, and we see that this lovely Sangha is made up of human beings, with the full complement of emotional, social, and every other kind of problem. And that can be somewhat, you know, disruptive to our infatuation. And then we notice that the leadership can seem very conservative, slow-moving, unresponsive. And we learn, we see, as we've been here for a while, we see that it doesn't really matter

[07:28]

who is in any given position, because it's not a matter of personalities. The personality of the organization is conservative, and we keep safe what has been handed down. You know, this is the positive side, we keep safe that which has been handed to us. The negative side is that we do move often too slowly for the taste of many people. And it's difficult for us to know how things should be done, because the process is often pretty opaque, and the same type of decisions seem to be made over and over again. And it can be very frustrating to people, particularly if they're new, particularly if we're new, because we don't understand how things are happening. They're not happening at a pace that we're comfortable with, and they tend to be the wrong decisions, so we think. Another difficulty that we encounter in the Sangha here, and this I think is built in,

[08:29]

and I think it's pretty important, and I also don't think there's anything we can do with it. We all stand, if we are here for a while, we all stand in multiple relationships to each other. There's nothing clean and clear-cut about our relationship. If you live and work on the outside, you go and you go to work, and your boss is your boss, or the person who works for you is the person who works for you, and you may or may not see them outside. Your landlord is your landlord, what have you. But here at Zen Center, we are all practitioners together, we are often roommates, we have a landlord-tenant relationship with Zen Center, we are workmates, boss, some of us are supervisors, some of us are not supervisors. And this is complicated because sometimes the person who is the supervisor is no longer the supervisor, and some of you will know Barbara Cohn, who is now the head of Austin

[09:31]

Zen Center. Her first job at Zen Center was being my assistant when I was Tenzo, head cook. She was the person who was right under me. And her last job at Zen Center was as the president of Zen Center, and I was her assistant. So we have these very complex relationships. We also have the relationship of student and teacher. We have friends, we have enemies, we have lovers, we have ex-lovers, we have spouses, partners. It gets very complicated. So there's a mishmash of relationships here in the Sangha. So that can be a problem for us, particularly until we learn how to negotiate that. The other problem that we can also run into after the infatuation wears off is that it's not working, it's not fixing me, I'm not better, and I'm still the mess I was when I came in.

[10:34]

You know, this can be very disheartening. When I first came to Zen Center, I was quite young, and at the time I was sporting a mustache. And after I'd been here for a while, I shaved it off. And Isan Dorsey said, oh, you shaved off your mustache. I said, yeah, well, I've been here for six weeks already and I'm still not enlightened, so I thought I should do something different. And he laughed and he said, did you really think it was only going to take you six weeks? And actually, you know, I did. You know, I read all this stuff about, you know, the monk gets whacked over the head and all of a sudden there's enlightenment. Of course, it doesn't tell you that the monk has been in the temple for 25 years, doing the grunt work. So that's another thing that can be difficult. The pace of change that we want to see in ourself, and particularly that we want to see in others, does not seem to go as quickly as we want it to. That can be very discouraging. Another problem, and I'm going out on a limb here a little bit.

[11:40]

I'm a little bit sick, you know, and fuzzy thinking. Is that Zen practice, or at least Zen Center, seems to attract aversion types. An aversion type in Buddhist psychology is someone who protects him or herself, the integrity of the ego, by keeping something like a burnt perimeter around ourselves. You know, this is not a criticism, it's just an observation. There are greed types, there are aversion types, and there are delusion types. But we tend to attract, in my experience, a lot of aversion types for some reason. So what we get is this, and I'm going to steal somebody's line and I can't remember who it is, what we get is this community of loners who can't stand to be by themselves. So we're constantly push me, pull you kind of thing with each other. This also can be some difficulty. So these are some of the problems that happen in Sangha.

[12:44]

But if we weather those, we can come out on the other side of them. And I honestly believe, this is my sincere belief, that real practice does not begin until after the infatuation is over, after the disillusionment sets in, and after we can work through the disillusionment. And then practice, the practice of Sangha, becomes about making a commitment. It's almost like a marriage. You know, one of those old-fashioned marriages where people didn't split as soon as things got a little hairy. So this is difficult for us because we are defined by our culture, which says that as atomized individuals, it is always our right to split if things don't go the way we want. Because after all, we have the right to be happy and to get what we want. It says that on television. So I want to read a little something from the Blue Cliff Record, which I always love.

[13:48]

This is Case 52. Zhao Zhou lets asses cross lets horses cross. As many of you know, the old Zen masters used to take as personal names the place names of where they taught. And Zhao Zhou lived by a great stone bridge. And Zhao Zhou may mean stone bridge, I'm not sure. A monk asked Zhao Zhou, For a long time I've heard of the stone bridge of Zhao Zhou, but now that I've come here, I just see a simple log bridge. Zhao Zhou said, You just see the log bridge. You don't see the stone bridge. The monk said, What is the stone bridge? Zhao Zhou said, It lets asses cross. It lets horses cross. So we are often, I think, because of familiarity or whatever, we are often in the position of not seeing the stone bridge. We see the log bridge.

[14:51]

We see the faults of our fellows. We see the faults of the organization. We see the faults of ourselves in our own practice, perhaps. But we don't customarily, many of us I think, see the stone bridge. And so this is important. This is another thing to get through in order to make a commitment to practice in Sangha. And so maybe when we've made this commitment, what we find are more difficulties usually. And one of the difficulties that I think is very important and often very troublesome for people is that if we stay, we make an unwitting commitment to being known, to being known, to be seen through. And this is painful and threatening to many of us

[15:53]

because we only want our good side to be seen. We only want to, I only want you to see what I choose you to see of me, which is usually the flattering stuff, right? So there are a variety of devices that we can use to hide from being known. And the first one is we can withdraw behind the mask of everything's ducky. You know, fine, I'm fine, everything's fine, you know, it's lovely, you know, it's a great day. There's that. Then there's the withdrawal behind a mask of coldness and hostility. You know, that's my favorite. And third, there's one that I really appreciate because it's so unique to Zen practice. It's withdrawal into form, especially the forms of Zen. This is what I call going into Zen princess mode. This is when, you know, your gashos are perfect.

[16:57]

You know, your hem is perfect. You never say the wrong thing. You're always doing the right thing. And you let people know. And you let people know when they're not doing the right thing, but very gently and very quietly. So this is a retreat into form. We hide behind form to avoid being known. And, you know, we all do this to some extent or another because it's very scary to be known, right? But I honestly believe that just as, you know, practice in Sangha only begins after infatuation and after disillusionment, some personal practice of transformation begins with transparency. So only when we allow ourselves to be known by another person or persons does that transformation begin to work in us. There's another koan in the Blue Cliff Record.

[18:02]

A monk asked Yunmen, how is it when the tree withers and the leaves fall? Yunmen replied, body exposed in the golden wind. It's a beautiful image, but think about it. It doesn't sound very comfortable. You know, there you are sort of, I always imagine like being sort of naked on a cliff. You know, the sun is shining, the wind is blowing, and there you are, you know, bare-ass naked on a cliff and freezing. So this is what being known can feel like. And it's very scary. It's uncomfortable, it's frightening, and it's necessary. And for me, in my practice, it's important, and this is something I give you to think about, that there is nothing about me that somebody doesn't know. Now, this doesn't mean that everybody knows everything about me. It doesn't even necessarily mean that my teacher knows everything about me, but there is nothing hidden that somebody doesn't know. And this, I think, is a tremendous release.

[19:07]

It allows me not to have hidden places. There's anything that's going on with me I can talk about with somebody. I think this is very important because we do tend to hide, and I think that the forms that we cultivate can be perverted to allow us to hide even more. One of the mediums of being known, of course, is in the teacher-student relationship. So, we're very lucky here at Zen Center in that we have asked many people to be teachers. And what this means is that when you come to Zen Center, it's not like you have to cotton to the person in charge or find someplace else to go. If you don't like one person, there's probably somebody else who's a teacher here who you can have some rapport with. So we're very lucky in the richness of our teachers

[20:13]

and the diversity of their paths to practice. Having said that, I'd like to go out on another limb a little bit and say something about this business of being a teacher. I think it's important for a teacher to remember that he or she is only such by a kind of grace at the request of the Sangha and because of some sort of longevity in practice. And a teacher is essentially a guide who has gone a little bit further than the person behind him or her and tripped over the rocks in the paths and can turn around and point to the rocks. Now, pretty much we'll probably trip over them anyway, but maybe one or two our teacher will be able to show us to avoid. And it's important, I think, that a teacher is willing to acknowledge that he or she has tripped over those same rocks.

[21:13]

This is the practice of humility. Something else I think that's important for a teacher is the ability to not be a teacher all the time, to be transparent as well as demanding of the student, to be willing to be seen, to make mistakes, to accept responsibility, to apologize, and to admit shortcomings. And in my opinion, if you encounter somebody who has an obvious need to be a teacher, to be seen as a teacher, who can't step down from the role of a teacher, my suggestion is to head for the hills because I think there's something very wrong there. This is not a man or woman of no rank. And I think a teacher should also be willing to show up in the Sangha as a worker among workers. The word Tathagata, as you know, is often translated either as the one who has just come

[22:16]

or the one who has just thus gone. I like thus come, so for me, the Tathagata is the guy who shows up. Shows up when there's work to be done, shows up for meals, shows up to interact with people on the level of people. Bai Zhang, the founder of Zen Chan, monasticism in China, when he was a very old man, insisted every day on going out to the fields with his hoe. And the monks, trying to be kind to him, said, you know, the teacher is venerable and too old. Well, he doesn't have to work anymore. Let's take his hoe and hide it. And he can go in and have a nap or drink some tea or something. And Bai Zhang, his response to this was, a day of no working is a day of no eating. So, enough on that perhaps. Oh, one more thing about this teacher.

[23:16]

A teacher also, in my belief, should have either his or her own teacher, or at least a group of peers who can and is willing to call them on their stuff, because we all have stuff and it all comes up. And if a teacher does not have that, he or she will inevitably start believing their own press releases, which is really big trouble for everybody. So, you know, if you're looking to maybe connect with a teacher, you might kind of look around and find out who their teacher is and, you know, what they do. And, you know, I think most times you'll be pleasantly surprised, but it's worth looking at. So, as Sangha members, I'm going on to a different subject. As Sangha members, I think perhaps our most important practices are tolerance, patience, and forgiveness. And I'm uniquely able to talk about these

[24:21]

because I have very little tolerance, very little patience, and forgiveness is almost impossible for me. So I have a lot of struggle with these things. But, you know, proximity, the kind of proximity that we live in here together, breeds problems, so that we have to try for these things as best we can. And if we're not perfect, as we won't be, we can at least try for restraint. I think restraint is important. Restraint of body, speech, and mind. So, restraint of body. We're lucky, we have very few fistfights here. You know, I can't remember the last time somebody threw something in the dining room. Actually, I don't ever remember that happening. But the person that we're having trouble with, we can at least bow. We can at least be polite. We can hold the door. We can do these small things with the body that is restraint of body

[25:25]

when we want to cut off, diminish, ignore. And as a last resort, we can avoid the person that we can't find in our heart to be with. This is restraint of body. Restraint of speech is pretty obvious. Not speaking ill of the person, either to them or of them, behind their back. And restraint of mind, or generosity of mind. I like to think that we can practice generosity in our mind by what I like to call generosity of the story. So, when we observe each other, of course, all we really see are the behaviors. You know, so-and-so did x, y, and z. And inevitably, we make up a story about that. You know, she did that because, or what she was really doing was, etc. And our stories about people that we have a hard time with

[26:33]

tend to be pretty negative stories. Oh, she only did that because she doesn't respect me and she's trying to, you know, trying to diss me. You know, he only did that because he's trying to get out of work. You know, whatever, you know. Whereas with people we like, we're a little bit more generous. What we can do, particularly with people we don't like, is look at the behaviors and very deliberately work on two or three different explanations for them. Some of these will be more generous than the explanation that usually comes up. But it will show us that our stories are just stories and that there are multiple stories that can fit any particular set of behaviors or actions. So this is one form of restraint of mind or dealing with, you know, patience with another. Another thing that I find very useful is when a person comes up in my mind

[27:35]

that I'm having a hard time with, I will say, you know, may X be happy, may I be happy, may all beings be happy. So to try and counter that thought each time with the loving thought, whether the loving thought is felt or not, it can still be a loving thought. So in my experience, sometimes, particularly if the difficulty is deeply rooted, it can take a very, very long time. And what we can do during this long time is not add, not create new karma to the best of our ability. And because our practice is based on the bodhisattva vow to save all beings, you know, we do practice together and we vow to work not just for our own liberation, but for the liberation of all beings concurrently. And this vow that we take can create a radical reorientation

[28:37]

in our concept of self because the vow to save all beings extends the concept of self to include what was formerly thought of as other. So there's an extension of the idea of self to include the other. And this, I think, is one of the powers of the taking refuge in Sangha. This is, I think, the essence of taking refuge in Sangha is that we give up the idea of an individual self that can be separately happy when others around us or not are in distress. Dogen Senji, in the Shobogenzo Sui Monki, says this, Students who have been moved to study the way should merely follow the rest of the assembly in their conduct. Don't try to learn the essential points

[29:39]

and the examples from the past right away. It is best, however, that they be fully grasped before you go alone to practice in the mountains or conceal yourself within a city. If you practice by doing what the assembly does, you should be able to attain the way. It is like riding in a boat without knowing how to row. If you leave everything up to a competent sailor, you will reach the other shore, irrespective of whether you know how to row or not. If you follow a good teacher and practice together with the assembly and have no concept of the self, you will naturally become a person of the way. So, we not only live for this extended sense of self, of Sangha, of community, but we allow others to live that way for us. Do you see what I mean? It's a mutuality, an interpenetration.

[30:43]

I'd like to read, I'm almost finished here, but I'd like to read one more little thing. This is also from the Blue Cliff Record. It's one of my very favorites. It's Case 23. I won't read the whole thing. Once when Bao Fu and Zhang Jing were wandering in the mountains, Bao Fu pointed with his hand and said, Right here is the summit of the Mystic Peak. Zhang Jing said, Indeed it is. What a pity. I've always loved that. So, you know, the good news is that just here is the summit of the Mystic Peak. And the bad news is just here is the summit of the Mystic Peak. You know, the good news is that we have each other. And the bad news is that we have each other. And so what is the assembly?

[31:46]

What is the assembly tonight? Is it a box full of animals making noise? Is it a vast Buddha field full of Bodhisattva Mahasattvas? Is it a group of men and women who are doing their best? Yes, yes, and yes. So for better or worse, you are the we of me, and I am the we of you. And that's all I really wanted to say tonight. Do we have time, John, for a question or two? Okay. If there's anything anybody would like to say, we can do that, or we can go here. Yeah, Anna. So you said something about the perfect gassho. And I agree with what you may know.

[32:49]

This story was told a couple of years ago, and I remember it. It had a perfect gassho. One fist in the nose, one fist in the mouth, one in the elbows. And I've been instructed to try to do that, and I think a lot of people have. And I'm just wondering, you know, I know what you're talking about with that mind frame of, I'm perfect, I'm doing it perfectly, but isn't there also, I just want to make sure we're all on the same page here, isn't there also a way of expressing devotion and doing something very specific and careful? Oh, absolutely. You know, it's like what I was saying about the stories. The same action has multiple stories to explain it. So I was talking about that kind of thing as a way of hiding. But it can also be a way of training, or a way of expression, or because this is the way my teacher taught me,

[33:51]

and because of my respect and affection for my teacher, this is the way I'll do it. Yeah, so it's not the action so much, it's what's behind the action. And for me, a good question is, does any given thing make me more or less available to the people around me? So that's kind of like a rule of thumb that I think can be used for a lot of things. And I tend to be kind of sloppy myself, and I should probably get it together a little bit more. But yeah, I think it really depends upon what's going on and not just the activity. Thanks. Anybody else? Yeah. So in Buddhist psychology,

[34:57]

and you can find this if you want to look it up, it's in the Vasuddhi Magga, The Path of Purification, there are three basic types of people. I mean, this is incredibly simplistic, right? There's the aversion type, the greed type, and the delusion type. And what these are, are they're all functions for protecting the integrity of the ego. So a greed type protects him or herself by gathering things in, money or sweethearts or cars or fame or advanced degrees or whatever. And so we build the wall with ice cream cones. An aversion type protects him or herself by keeping everything at a distance. Can't get close enough to breach the walls, can't get close enough to hurt me. The delusion type finds it all much too scary and complex and chooses just to space out, dissociate.

[36:01]

And so what the literature also says is that with practice, each of these transform into something specific. The kind of energy that goes into pushing things away transforms into penetrating wisdom, into prajna. So there's that same cutting energy. It cuts through delusion. The desire to have more transforms into the desire to have that which is wholesome, the dharma specifically. And the delusion type transforms into something like the ability not to be caught by stories because you can see that they're all made up. So is that what you were asking? Okay, good. Yeah. When you said the title of your talk, I think it was something about relationship in the sangha, I somehow imagined you were going to talk about

[37:03]

people having relationships together in the sangha. And I sort of wondered why in your talk you didn't include the aspect of couples. Maybe it's because I'm single. In my experience, sanghas come and go, teachers come and go. And the stable thing I hope for is not family. You know, I can't really address that from my own personal experience. When I talk, I try to speak only from my own experience. What I can say is that I've been around long enough to see families at Zen Center and to see children who have grown up at Zen Center and who have actually come back to practice with us. And what I have seen in those children is that because they are raised in a large community

[38:05]

where there's always some adult that wants you around and is willing to hang out with you and talk with you and mentor you, the children that I've seen who have grown up at Zen Center tend to be very articulate, very socially at ease, and pretty stable people. So, you know, even the best of parents are usually only two rather hairy people and with as much love and as much time and as much energy as they have to give. So, you know, to quote a somewhat hackneyed current phrase, it takes a village. And so I do see that... And, you know, I did say earlier that we have become fractured, that originally our need for community is very, very strong. And I really...

[39:05]

Personally, I believe that the need for community extends beyond the nuclear family. You know, I think the nuclear family needs support from a larger structure. Yeah. But anyhow, as I said, since I am single, I prefer to speak out of my own experience and observation. Got time for maybe one more? Yeah, yeah. Please, in the back. You mentioned that there's nothing about you that can't be done to other people. There's nothing that you can't hide that you can do to other people. And this is something that I would say that is important to practice. The practice itself is good. And then you mentioned that from your own experience, you can always share your views about how you feel about uncomfortable people, or how you feel about uncomfortable people. And then I think, given that you say

[40:10]

that it's a nurturing culture, and it's a non-stop nurturing culture, and it's a nurturing culture which seeks to empathize with people. In other words, I'm making connections with people in terms of people and priorities. And then you mentioned value of privacy. So, the question is, how do you perceive the accumulation of egoism as a good practice, as a practitioner, to this day? First of all, I don't think you understand what I said. What I said was not that everybody sees everything that's going on with me and I tell everybody what's going on with me. What I said was, as a matter of decision, as a matter of choice, as a matter of personal practice, I choose not to have any secrets.

[41:10]

So that somebody in my life knows the important stuff about me. There's nothing that somebody doesn't know. There's no deep, dark secret that somebody doesn't know. And that's a little bit different than being completely transparent to everybody. And the thing about, if I understand your question, what we are talking about, which was what I tried to address at the beginning, is that I honestly believe that we are living in a pathological culture which emphasizes, puts a false emphasis on division, on the atomic individual, on privacy, to the detriment of almost every other virtue. And so people end up feeling lost, alone, and afraid. And, you know, when people feel lost and alone and afraid, they'll buy more cars. So, yeah,

[42:13]

I'm not sure if I answered your question or addressed it or not, but there we are. Anyhow, it is 8.30. So, thank you all for sitting in this warm room with me tonight. Appreciate it. Good to see you all. Thank you. They are in detention.

[42:35]

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