Good morning. The last time I was sitting in this seat, after a lecture, a couple of people came up and said, excuse me, but would you please tell me your name? So, maybe I can introduce myself for those of you who don't know what my name is. My name is, this is always an interesting exercise, what is my name? One of my names is Yvonne Grant. But I have other names that I actually have a deeper connection with. Many of us who have been ordained, all of us who have been ordained have Dharma names, names that are given to us by our ordination teacher at the time of ordination.

[01:06]

And as we go along in our lives and our practice, we hopefully grow into those names. So one of the translations of my Dharma name is Ocean Roar. And I have a friend, one of my Dharma brothers, addresses me in various playful and teasing versions of Ocean Roar. It's a little startling to receive a letter, dear Ocean Roar, how are you today? That is not what I want to talk to you about this morning. What I would like to talk about and have us consider together is actually a practice which I've brought up before but which has been working in me again still over the last couple

[02:10]

of months and with some particular potency this week. As some of you know, there is a practice called evoking the names of the Bodhisattva, Bodhisattvas one could say. That is to call upon the name of the compassion Bodhisattva for inspiration in practicing listening without judgment or reaction. To call upon the Bodhisattva of wisdom for that seeing clearly and deeply without judging or reacting and to call upon the shining practice Bodhisattva for inspiration for that action which is without judgment or reacting. And in particular what is arising for me, what has been arising for me this past week is listening and that acting which is called speaking.

[03:16]

They have some relationship to each other hopefully. So the last two days or so I've been asking myself with respect to what has arisen, with respect to the practice of listening especially. Are the questions, how am I liberated? How do I become free from whatever binds me or hinders me or keeps me imprisoned in some way? Keeps me from the possibility of that happiness which is not just on the surface but goes so deep. What is it that hinders any of us from that condition which the Buddha talks about, the

[04:20]

cultivation of awakening? I'm struck over and over again by how much seems to fall away, how much of the binding seems to fall away when I'm able to practice listening without judgment or reaction. I think for us as Americans in particular there is some amazement that comes up in many of us when we discover how little we need to do, we so emphasize doing in our culture. It's such a marvel to discover how much becomes possible as a consequence of a kind of listening

[05:21]

that might be characterized in this way. So what I'd like to do is to tell you five short stories. I hope they're short. That have to do with learning something, my learning something this week about listening. The subtext, for those of you who know me, you know this subtext. I'm always amazed at the true teachings that arise in the midst of our everyday lives and come from sources other than those that are in book form that say Buddhism on them. How much truth arises off the pages of the New York Times or a book on endangered species that my husband brought home from the Academy of Sciences or the true teaching that arises

[06:31]

from sitting in my little interview hut listening to a friend tell me about his or her practice. Stories close in and stories from far away carry teachings. And I'm not sure if this has been an unusual week. It seems unusual and yet more and more I think every week is unusual. So let me begin with the New York Times as a Dharma text. A few weeks ago I was in bed with bronchitis and I engaged myself, propped up in bed, gasping for every breath in the way that happens when you get congested like that. I amused myself with a stack of old and unread New York Times, my favorite kind.

[07:37]

I find that if I read the newspaper too currently it has a certain hook that if it sort of molders around on the table or in the corner for a week or two or a few months or in some cases maybe even longer, the really important news surfaces and I can let the rest of it just float away. So I spent several days going through and clipping and chuckling over various and sundry New York Times articles. So I was in the groove so to speak. And earlier this week I read what was for me a stunningly current issue from about a week ago I guess. In the Arts and Leisure section there was an article about Ladysmith. Some of you know Ladysmith, the black men's choir from South Africa

[08:39]

that many of us know about because of their Graceland tape and record that they did with Paul Simon. This particular article was about them with regard to a play that they are now involved in that's been in Chicago and is about to go to New York. And the leader of the group is quoted in this article in ways that I was affected by. So let me just go through a few things that came up for me that pertain to the practice of listening. They talk about the kind of music that they sing as Isikathamnia. It's Zulu so who knows how to pronounce it properly.

[09:40]

If there are any Zulu speaking people present I ask their forgiveness for my pronunciation. This is a word that means stalking or tiptoeing. And the history of this word, the sequence of meanings from stalking to tiptoeing is itself a kind of teaching because this stalking has to do with the very hard stepping that the Zulu people, especially the warriors and hunters would do in their dancing. And when the various tribes, members of the various black tribes in South Africa would be housed in hostels for long periods of time for work purposes, one of the ways they would spend their time together, time when they were in these hostels far from their families, would be at night to sing.

[10:42]

And as these hostels where the workers would live more and more were in urban areas, stomping so hard that if you were stomping on a wooden floor you'd break it was not so appropriate because the neighbors would complain. So then they did a version. They amplified and altered this stomping to tiptoeing as they made the shift from a rural environment to an urban one. I think there's some teaching there in terms of a kind of dynamic willingness to be dynamically responsive to the environment one is in. The name of this group is, the full name is Lady Smith Black Mombazo. Lady Smith is the name of the place where some of them come from. Black is obvious. Mombazo means axe.

[11:45]

Interesting name, isn't it? The founder and now the leader of the group, Joseph Shabalala, started the group because he over and over again had a dream. And in the dream children were singing in an unknown language. And when I read that I thought, oh, he listened. He listened to his dream. And he and his brother and nine other men came together and began this singing. Now 30 years ago. And their intention, the way they describe, in particular the way Joseph describes what it is they're doing is to bring together history, their heritage, and their spiritual beliefs.

[12:50]

And that they have some great interest in bringing together all nations. So they speak and sing in the languages of many of the nations of South Africa. And he mentioned them. These are the languages that they sing in. Zulu, Sotho, Xhosa, Shangaan, Venda, English, and German. They are singing against apartheid, but they are not taking a partisan stand. They are not siding with any specific or particular group. And Joseph Shabalala said, It will take a long time before peace comes to the grass roots. We are trying to help people listen to each other.

[13:53]

I remember the first time I ever heard them sing. And I felt like my heart would break from the beauty of their singing. I felt my heart break open. So here are now nine, ten men, I think. Joseph's brother was killed by an off-duty policeman as a result of a roadside encounter. And they have not replaced him because they are still asking, Is his presence, is his voice still here with us? So when I put the article down, I remembered again the experience of hearing these men singing. And I thought, My, here are teachers about listening, this kind of deep listening which the practice of calling upon

[15:00]

the Bodhisattva's name to help me be inspired for the practice. Here is some expression, some emanation of this Bodhisattva of compassion. So the second teaching that dropped as if from the sky came in the form of a book. On Friday, my husband came home from the Academy of Sciences and brought with him a book called, Here Today, Portraits of Vanishing Species. Quite marvelous book of photographs, taken by two photographers who studied with Richard Avedon. Can you imagine photographs cropped and taken with Avedon's eye?

[16:05]

Vogue portraits of an owl, or a kit fox, or a salt marsh mouse. They're really marvelous. A short, quite touching introduction by Wendell Berry and a quote from Adolph Leopold. A great reminder about the impermanence of life. In the back of the book, there's a short, less than one page description of the technical details of how the photographs are taken, the kind of camera, and all the particular detail. In the very end of that section, there is this statement that primrose time, mouse time, cuckoo time, and human time

[17:07]

are not all the same. I thought, wow, that's great. Because, of course, the evening primrose lasts one night. The salt marsh mouse lives for nine months. The yellow-billed cuckoo feeds its young once an hour. And then I started thinking about human time. For any of us who meditate, we know how some days a period of meditation seems like, when will it end? Oh, please, ring the bell. And then there are other times when we hear the bell and we think, what happened? We just started. How slowly time goes for children, and as we get older, it seems like it speeds up.

[18:15]

If any of us has ever been in a situation where we've been in a great deal of physical discomfort, in a hospital, where one is receiving pain pills every four hours, and you watch the clock, your sense of time is very different than the sense of time when you've fallen in love. For example. I was really struck by two or three sentences in this section in the book on the technicalities for taking this group of photographs. And because I was reading, I was looking at the book with some openness, looking at it carefully and a little slowly. This wonderful reminder about time came to me.

[19:25]

Such a useful reminder. Earlier this week, I was sitting with a friend who said, today, I would like us to talk about protection. I thought, oh, that's very interesting. And I asked my friend, what do you mean by protection? Can you give me an example? Can you give me some examples of what you mean by protection? And her immediate response was, well, I feel like I'm protected by the practice of meditation and I feel like I'm protected by my meditation cushion. So I asked her to tell me more. So she then told me her stories about what had happened to her during the previous week

[20:28]

on three different occasions before entering into what she perceived as extremely difficult, highly charged conversations. In each instance, it occurred to her that what would be useful for her would be, before we talk, would it be all right if we meditate together for a few minutes? That would help me. And each time, what she told me was, she sat down, she centered, she settled, and she realized, she said, what came to me, what was completely clear to me, was what to do in each case. And of course, what was interesting was that the first story she told me was what was clear to me to do as I was about to enter into a conversation with someone who was extremely upset,

[21:33]

and it looked like they were extremely upset with me. She said, it was very clear that what I should do is sit and listen as carefully as I can without judging and without reacting. Even when her friend, who was so upset, said, you're manipulating me with this meditation business. All right, I'll do it anyway. Say something. You're not talking. You're just playing tricks on me. But after a while, because she was really committed to listening without judging and reacting, the other person began to quiet and settle. My friend said, you know, in the past, in this kind of situation, with this very person, we would have had a big fight, and yelling, and screaming, and I would have had a headache, and it would have taken several days to kind of clean up some mess.

[22:35]

She discovered how right she was, her inclination to just listen, helped her listen sympathetically to what was true for the other person. And in a way that startled my friend, she didn't take on what was coming from the other person. She was just listening. She was just willing to be present and listen. So, of course, the next difficult conversation that presented itself to her, she again thought, well, let's meditate before we have this talk. And again, she settled. She centered herself. And she said, again, I realized, oh, time for me to listen again, keep practicing listening without judging, without reacting. Of course, what delighted me was that she had not ever heard

[23:44]

about this practice called evoking the Bodhisattva's name. She didn't know what she was doing was, quote, a real practice, whatever that means. She was also listening to herself in some way that was deep enough to be quite trustworthy and reliable. I told her she better be careful, this listening business might get to be a habit. And, of course, immediately what I recognized is that there are times when listening can look like I'm listening without judging or reacting, but I'm listening as a way of hiding. That's not what I'm talking about. And that was certainly not what my friend was describing to me. Last Sunday, I went to a dinner

[25:04]

honoring Nancy Pelosi, who was the congresswoman from the San Francisco District. And I was invited to a dinner who has been extraordinarily effective and constant in her work for human rights, and in particular for our Tibetan friends. There were three different people who spoke during this evening. And the three of them had not talked to each other ahead of time planning carefully what they were going to say. They had some shared common concern, that is, the very dangerous situation that the Tibetans in Tibet are in right now. Certainly not the only people

[26:07]

who are experiencing human rights violations, suffering from human rights violations, but they were the primary focus of this particular evening. What was quite remarkable was that three people with some deep common concern came together. Nancy Pelosi was one of them. And what emerged was a description of relationality, that because we live in a democracy, the president or our representative in Congress, or our senator, or whoever it is, is very limited in terms of what he or she can do. Without all of us, doing whatever it is we need to do

[27:09]

to educate ourselves about what a particular issue is, and what are the possibilities, and with some care and consideration expressing ourselves about what we want to have happen. So one of the relationships that emerged from this evening was how much President Clinton can only do what we make it possible for him to do, that is, we have to speak. What was so moving to me in listening to the three speakers Sunday evening was how much was happening in the room had to do with a kind of open-hearted listening to each other. Out of some concern, not just with ourselves personally, but out of some concern for how we conduct ourselves

[28:10]

as a nation, as members of the global community. And how much what was going on in the room was not people taking positions, but speaking to each other in a way where we were all willing to be affected by each other, by what we heard. I'm not used to having that kind of experience in circumstances that have to do with politics and politicians. I was quite surprised. And I noticed that I was not the only moist-eyed person in the room. The last story I'd like to tell you is a story about something that happened

[29:11]

about a week and a half ago in Dharamsala in North India. It's not really a village, it's more like a little city. But by our standards, small. The site and seat, if you will, of the exile, Tibetan exile, government in exile, and where His Holiness the Dalai Lama lives. And during a conference there with His Holiness and Buddhist teachers from the West, from Europe and the United States, one of the days of the conference was set aside as Women's Day. And there was one nun, a Westerner who's been ordained as a Buddhist nun, who lives in Assisi,

[30:13]

and who is quite an inspiring practitioner. And she told the story of her ordination and her initial years of practice and her great gratitude for her teachers and for the kind of training that she had received. She had done a period of 12 years of retreat in a cave. She's a very serious practitioner. It's called go for broke. She talked, as she spoke, in terms of her own story but also the stories of her Dharma sisters, the women who have taken the path of monastic ordination. Particularly Westerners, but not exclusively. What a difficult time they had. How, unlike the monks,

[31:16]

they don't have any source of support. The nunneries are poor. There are not very many of them. What teaching is available is very intermittent. How hard it is to practice in the more isolated way that the nuns are experiencing for themselves in the West. But mostly what she talked about in very simple, personal terms was how discouraging and how hard it was to sustain one's energy for practice because of the absence of a kind of larger support. And at the end of her talk, His Holiness was quiet for a while. And then he said with tears in his eyes,

[32:17]

I had no idea it was so difficult. I was quite struck by his, this story about his willingness to hear something that doesn't go along with the sort of official information which he's on the receiving end of. I think he'd been prepared, if you will, by a very tough German woman who is a lama in the Tibetan tradition, who in her presentation on women's mourning said to everyone gathered, sitting in a great big room, at the end of the room, a great big, huge, golden Buddha, she said, I would like to, she addressed herself, Your Holiness and respected lamas and colleagues, fellow teachers, would you please

[33:20]

let me guide you through a meditation? She said, please close your eyes and imagine that we're all sitting in this big room and at the end of the room is this very beautiful figure of the Buddha in the form of a female, in the form of Tara. And hanging on the walls are 40 thangkas as there were in the room. And every painting is a painting of a Buddha or a Bodhisattva and every one of them is in the human figure of a woman. And all of you men who are here are quite welcome to join us, but would you please sit in the back of the room? And when you come to the retreats, you're very welcome to join us, but would you please take care of the garden and the cooking and the children? She went on like that for a very long time.

[34:32]

And when she was finished, she said, this is our Buddhist history. And His Holiness said, history. History, even in this world. It's pretty good preparation for the nun from Assisi. So, here is this wonderful combination of listening and speaking. His Holiness said, we will start and support fully a nunnery here. Immediately. And I will within six months call for a Vinaya conference and we will look at the rules for the nuns

[35:38]

and the monks and make them the same. No small job because he's bucking a lot of traffic. He has at different teachings encouraged the ordained women to come and sit in the front. And even with his presence and the degree of great respect that the lamas have for him, this was too much for them. And there was lots of hissing and psss, telling the women as they would come forward to get back where they belonged, the back of the bus. So, if he keeps his word, and I have some confidence that he will do everything he can to keep his word, he's going to need lots of support. But he listened.

[36:39]

During the conference, many different sticky topics were brought up. This was a conference dedicated to sticky topics. And over and over again, His Holiness would say, talking, for example, about the role of psychotherapy in relationship to Buddhist teachings and practice. He said, we have to do what is appropriate, what is effective. We are not teaching Buddhism, we are teaching liberation. We're not perpetuating some old form, we are teaching liberation. And he then brought up something that I have never read or heard about. He said, in the old times, in the monasteries,

[37:52]

there was always a lama who was the counselor. Not the guru, not the teacher, but the counselor whose responsibility it was to be there to help take care of a practitioner's emotional and psychological difficulties and problems. Wow, that's pretty good. So, I would invite each of you to consider, for yourself, consider listening as a practice. Hang out with, if you will, cultivating each of us our capacity for listening without judging and reacting. This has to be

[38:54]

a dynamic practice, and it has to, in my experience, include a willingness to listen, to notice when I'm listening with judgment, when I'm listening with a reactive mind. Because, of course, if I'm not willing to notice that kind of listening, I will not be able to see things as they are. Which is quintessentially the essence of this listening. Listening without judging and reacting. That is, listening without too much aversion or too much attachment. A very dynamic process. There isn't some place called now I am listening that is going to look the same, feel the same in every given situation. It's constantly, responsibly in relationship to everything, everyone around me

[39:57]

in any given moment. So the only way I can get it right, if you will, is to be willing to get it wrong when I get it wrong. Oh, look at that. I think this approach is a kind of can't-lose approach. There's no way in which you can do it wrong, because every time you, quote, do it wrong, there's something there to be taught by. If I have the possibility of being open-hearted, of having that response of, oh, isn't that interesting. There is, in a dedication verse that I love and recite very often, there is this line about cultivating equanimity without

[41:00]

too much aversion or too much attachment. And I'm always quite touched by the fact that the line doesn't say, oh, I'm not going to do it. It doesn't say, without aversion and without attachment. And I feel somehow like I may be able to be a little bit more on the map. You know, one of the grave precepts about not harboring ill-will doesn't say, don't be angry, don't harbor anger. So when anger arises, that's what I get to notice. Oh. And what are the causes and conditions of this quality of mind? Well, I was a little worried about could I tell you all those stories and not have your legs go to sleep.

[42:00]

Maybe this is time for us to conclude. So you can see why I thought this was a humdinger of a week. Dharma teachings pouring in from every corner. But in fact, I have to say that I think that's true of every week and of every day. If I'm only willing to be present. Jack Kornfield tells a wonderful story about when he first came back to the United States after having been a monk in training in Asia for a number of years.

[43:01]

I can't for the life of me imagine what he was doing in Las Vegas in his monk's robes, but anyway. It's such a great story. It may even be apocryphal, but it's such a great story. We just have to suspend that particular question. He said he walked into this big casino and there on the wall was a Dharma teaching. And wow, even in a place like this you have to be present to win. So, if I call upon the Compassion Bodhisattva, Avalokiteshvara, for inspiration as an example and inspiration

[44:05]

for listening without judgment or reaction, I will be cultivating my ability to be present. If I call upon the Wisdom Bodhisattva, Manjusri, for that inspiration and demonstration of how to see without judgment or reaction, I will be present. I will be cultivating my ability to be present. And maybe if I have cultivated those two capacities, then the inspiration of the shining practice, Bodhisattva of Samantabhadra, will be such that my action will not take me away from being present, but will be a further cultivation for presence, action free of judgment and reaction.

[45:10]

So I'd like to close by dedicating our practice of sitting together and considering these practices, our practice of bringing our attention, our body and speech and mind, to sitting together for this time, that all beings may have happiness and the causes of happiness, that all may be free from suffering and the causes of suffering, that all may know that sacred happiness which is devoid of suffering, that all may know equanimity without too much attachment or too much aversion, and that all may live believing in the equality of all that lives.

[46:07]

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