The ancient teachers have said, bring forth as much as you can of love and respect and faith. Remove all obstructions and wipe away all dust. Listen to the perfect wisdom of the gentle Buddhas, taught for the wheel of the world and for heroic spirits intended.

[01:41]

Bring forth as much as you can of love and respect and faith. And I would suggest that faith doesn't mean that you believe necessarily in something that someone else says, although you may. But that bringing forth as much as you can of faith means bring forth as much as you can of what is most important to your life. Bring that forth when you listen to the perfect wisdom of the gentle Buddhas. Bring forth with respect and love what's most important in your life. And with that before you, with that in your heart, remove all obstructions and drop all dust, all tates, and listen.

[03:22]

I guess most of you have heard and seen again and again images and sounds of horrible violence and cruelty and hatred in our state, in Sacramento, in Los Angeles, in the Sierras, in the beautiful Sierras. Horrible hatred and crime between us human beings right around the corner. And over the hill from here, we have a prison where we have a death chamber for those murderers.

[04:53]

Surrounded by all this hate and revenge, do you still have faith in nonviolence? Do you still find a way to love and respect all life? A non-white person who lives with me very closely said that, He's not so sure anymore about the death penalty. Maybe he agrees with it now when he hears about somebody who sees a non-white person and thinks, oh, here's a good opportunity to kill somebody who's not white, so I'll do it.

[06:10]

How can we continue to practice love and compassion and patience? The Buddha said, if someone is really cruel to you, if someone's really cruel to you, really, really cruel. And then he went into graphic details about cruel things that people could do to you. And he says, if they do those cruel things to you and you get angry and you hate them, you're not my disciple. He was really, really, he was really, really strong on nonviolence. He was also strong on protecting life.

[07:33]

If someone is being cruel to someone else, or even being cruel to you, it's good to protect the life, to heroically protect the life from the cruelty, but not to get angry, not to hate. if you want to be a disciple of the gentle Buddhas. I've heard that Martin Luther King was converted to nonviolence. He wasn't always convinced that nonviolence was the way.

[08:35]

He wanted to protect the lives of the black people that he loved who were being killed and tortured and severely discriminated against. He wanted to protect their lives and promote their welfare. And at one point in his work to protect his congregation, his community, he had in his basement, I hear, an arsenal. And he had a little army of bodyguards around him. And then the house in which his babies lived was blown to bits. And he changed his mind about violence. He was shown where it goes.

[09:40]

It just feeds it to hate back. So now with so many people hating, How can we not hate back? This is very hard for us. With so many people hating, how can we not want to send them to San Quentin? For some of us, how can we even not hate the people in San Quentin who execute them? the guards and the governors who execute the people who hate and kill. This is our state of affairs. In a way, this is part of what's going on.

[10:44]

Bring forth as much as you can of love and respect and compassion and what is most important to you. And clear away the obstructions to that love. And remove the dust and understand the perfect wisdom of the Buddhas. Until we understand the perfect wisdom of the Buddhas, our love is always in jeopardy. We're always in danger of reverting to hate and violence ourselves.

[11:56]

I think so. So as much as we can of love and compassion and respect, practice that now. But then also listen to the teachings of wisdom so that we can purify our love, so that we can find a love without attachment, the love of the Buddhas which has no attachment. The love without attachment, the universal, unhindered, unobstructed love without attachment that can never be converted to hate. that always comes back with love, no matter what happens, that always teaches love and perfect wisdom.

[13:05]

Do you want to find such a love? Well, if you do, if I do, if we do, we bring forth as much love as we have now. as much respect as we have now, as much faith in that love as we have now. And then listen to the hard teachings of wisdom. Hard because they're different from what we think now. Hard because they require us to give up what we think. If we want to understand the wisdom of the Buddhas, we have to forget about all our preconceived ideas. We have to give up all our preconceived ideas, which we tend to hold on to in order to negotiate through the day of suffering.

[14:22]

which we think we need to hold on to in order to understand how to conduct ourselves when affronted by violence and hatred. But actually, our best response will come when we let go of our preconceptions. But this is hard for us to do. That's why, first of all, we bring forth love and respect, and then we listen to the teachings of wisdom, which are fundamentally to give up our preconceived ideas, all of them. Our preconceived ideas, which are basically our ideas of existence and non-existence.

[15:34]

We see each other. We see someone, actually, and we think that someone we see is other. If we look in the mirror, we may think, oh, that's not other, that's me. But otherwise, we don't understand that we're always looking in a mirror, a mirror that's in our mind. We're always looking at our mind. Our body and mind create images which our body and mind look at and think that those images are somebody else. And we hate the things in our own mind sometimes.

[16:49]

Sometimes we're attached to them. but both hatred and lust are based on attachment to our own thoughts. Clearing away the taints, clearing away the dust, means clearing away the dust which is that we think other people are out there and actually exist out there. Not just that they appear and disappear, not just that they seem to come and go, but they really exist. This is one of our basic preconceptions. And another one, which is basically the same but just turned around, is that we think that some things are actually completely not there. Like this person, this murderer, there's no goodness there at all, therefore we can kill it.

[18:01]

And that's what the murderer probably thinks too, the person that he or she is killing, there's no goodness there, there's no beauty there. It seems to me that each of us have to realize the truth in order to convert this world from ignorance and falseness. And all of us have probably some work to do in regard to having some dust in our eyes, which means that we think that living beings Living beings, living beings are other than us. Even my language is that I often say, when we meet others. But really it's when we meet living beings who are not other.

[19:03]

That's the reason for protecting and respecting all living beings is that they are our life and we are theirs. But when living beings appear in forms of extreme suffering and reactivity to their suffering in the form of violence and cruelty and insanity, It's very hard for us to meet that, to meet this living being, to meet and to love and to respect and to forget about our preconception, our deep preconception that that really is not me. that that really is existing out there, and there really is a non-existence of beauty and goodness before me.

[20:20]

Existence and non-existence have been annihilated in this case. In order to understand Buddhism, in order to understand Buddha's wisdom, we have to give up the idea that goodness or evil are annihilated. Things appear and disappear, but annihilation is added to disappearance. Annihilation is a preconception we add to the disappearance of something. And we can do this from an early age. The baby, when the mother goes out of the room, goes around the corner, the baby can think the mother is gone forever. Not just disappearing, but like gone.

[21:28]

So the baby screams in horror. and the mother comes back, usually, because she can't stand that scream. That scream of ignorance And when the mother comes back, the baby thinks, this mother really exists. And she's not me. We need to learn this delusion living beings are not our self, that they're other.

[22:41]

We need to. We can't avoid this. Our nervous system doesn't develop properly unless we enter into this delusion process. So anyway, we've gone through it. We have this tendency. We together all think that there's somebody other than somebody called self. sometimes called myself, sometimes called me, and so on. In order to understand how to be like a Buddha, how to meet violence with love and convert violence and violent, insane beings In order to do that to the fullest extent, we need to get over our own delusion. That's what I think.

[23:49]

And this thought that arises that I say, I think, this thought is not my thought. It's not your thought, it's Buddha's thought. It's the thought that is our actual life together. It's the thought which gives up the preconception that we're separate and that we exist or don't exist. But this thought, these preconceptions are also, we say, you know, wipe them away or remove them. But this is not, this is not to annihilate them because nothing is annihilated.

[24:55]

Nothing lasts and nothing is annihilated. This is hard for us to understand. And wisdom is to understand the middle way, which is avoiding the extremes that we last and that we're annihilated. Avoiding the extremes of our ignorance, our delusions last, or that they can be annihilated. Our deepest, most dangerous delusions are not annihilated and they don't last. Our deepest goodwill does not last and is not annihilated.

[26:07]

Actually, goodwill and hatred exist in a middle way. They both seem to appear sometimes and disappear. But we add on to that they last or are annihilated. These are our preconceptions. The appearance and disappearance of things, we don't preconceive. We watch and are surprised by the birth and death But we add to them the extreme views, the preconceived notions of existence and non-existence. These are what we need to let go of. And learn to be intimate with the appearance and disappearance of the world. which means, for example, to be intimate with the appearance and disappearance of suffering, and the appearance and disappearance of self, and the appearance and disappearance of beings, and even of other beings.

[27:23]

And to be intimate with that without adding, this exists, or this is annihilated, Being with things in that way without adding this is called the middle way. The middle way is the way of peace in the world where there appears to be violence and cruelty. The Buddha's teaching is proposing that there can be a middle way of peace and love in the world of suffering and cruelty. But it doesn't say that this cruelty or this kindness last or are eternal. And it doesn't say that kindness or cruelty are annihilated.

[28:31]

It's more like often we use the image of we move, we go through the weeds, we part the weeds or the reeds or the tall grasses. We go through the tall grasses. We find our way. We gently part them and go straight forward on the path of gentleness and kindness, which also doesn't last and isn't annihilated. We don't try to get rid of anything, anybody. Just maybe let me get by, please. I'm trying to walk through here.

[29:38]

The other night I was talking about this middle way of avoiding the extremes of existence. Everything exists and nonexistence. Everything doesn't exist. The extremes of eternalism and annihilationism. And afterwards a woman said to me, it sounds like being all alone. I think that's what she said. Or it sounds so lonely. And I said, we spent nine months in this series of classes establishing a context of love and compassion before this teaching was offered. For nine months we talked about how to be constantly attentive to compassion and kindness and joy. And now we're looking at this teaching of giving up all your preconceived notions, but that must be understood as in the context of great love.

[31:07]

Otherwise, it might seem cold that you don't get into wishing that this lovely person would go on or wishing that this terrible thing would be annihilated. We need to actually not even hold to the idea that anything can be annihilated, because if we think things can be annihilated, then we'll want to annihilate certain negative things. But if we don't hold to the idea, if we can't even conceive of something being annihilated, we won't kill. because we can't imagine killing something, annihilating it. We don't fall into that. And similarly, we won't attach to things and hold them and be possessive if we don't really think things go on.

[32:15]

So greed and hatred, I would say, will go on as long as we hold to existence and non-existence. And our love will always, until we understand that this other is an illusion, our love will be towards objects out there. And our love will then always have attachment associated with it. Until we clear away the dust of other, we won't know Buddha's love without attachment. But won't that be like being all alone? Well, in a sense, yes. Then there will just be one life.

[33:17]

There won't be two anymore. There won't be self and other. And there has to be a great feeling of love in order to accept that there aren't two lives here. There aren't ten. There aren't a zillion. There's just one life. Now, one life can appear in infinite ways, but they're not separate, even though the ways it appears are as beings who think they are separate, like us. We do have this dust in our eyes, But again, removing it does not mean annihilating it, because that's not the middle way to annihilate our delusion.

[34:23]

And it doesn't mean just to let it go on and say, well, I hope I can get by with it. And sometimes it doesn't seem that bad. There she is, and she's quite cute, and she lets me hold on to her. She's my girlfriend. She's my mom. She's my child. And I'm attached to her, and it seems to be going okay. Well, yeah, for a while. For a while, but not always. Sometimes she wants to get away and do something that would mean that you would lose her. So then you're tempted to hold onto the ponytail. And maybe pull the ponytail hard. And a very nice person can wind up pulling the ponytail on their beloved daughter very hard, or their beloved son, or beloved boyfriend, or girlfriend, and then pulling a few hairs out maybe.

[35:29]

and so on up to you name it. We're talking about eventually this kind of attachment can lead to true violence, rapid, high-velocity control trips that rip people to shreds who you don't respect because you think their other. We really do not respect people fully if we think their other, because we think the self is best. which is right. It's just that there's only one self. There isn't two. There isn't a first-class and second-class and third-class self in this universe.

[36:31]

But we think so, and as long as we think so, we are a dangerous person. Our respect is hindered by this dust. But again, We can't get rid of the dust. It appears and disappears. Have you noticed? Everybody you meet, a little dust in your eye, and then it goes away. But it doesn't last, and it isn't annihilated. It exists in this middle way, this very subtle way that we have to be loving towards. And at the same time, through being loving towards this dust in our eyes, we can become free of it. By being loving towards these beings who we think are other, we can become free of them, which means free of the otherness, which means free of attachment, which means able to love unhinderedly, if that's an English word.

[37:42]

So we have been studying a story, a Zen story, which is a monk goes to the Zen master and says, when sweeping away the dust to see Buddha, how is it? When you sweep away the dust, when the dust is swept away, when the dust is swept away from your eyes, from your heart, from your ears, from your tongue, from your nose, from your fingers, from your mind, when you don't think there's anybody out there anymore, you see Buddha. You see Buddha. You see as Buddha sees, and you see what Buddha sees, and you see Buddha.

[38:49]

How is it when the dust is taken away, when the externality of the universe is removed, and you see Buddha? How is it?" And the Zen teacher said, one translation is, directly swing the sword. Another translation is, directly slash with the sword. Both, I think, have merit, slash and swing. What is the swinging of the sword? What is the slashing of the sword? It is our mind which cuts through our life, which slashes our life into self and other. But he didn't say, don't slash your life into self and other.

[39:59]

He said, go right ahead and do it. What's the reason for saying that? Why would you recommend that we cut our life into two? That we swing the sword which creates dust. He's talking about when the dust is removed and you see Buddha, how is it? Actually how it is, is that The sword which creates the self and other, it still goes on, but there's nothing but it going on. You're intimate with the creation of self and other. You're intimate with the dust. And then you see there is no dust. But not by trying to stop the dust or stop the mind creating the other, but being right there in the devil's workshop. as the devil, you know, as the delusion is created. Be right there with your mind as it says, this is not me there.

[41:05]

Or this is me. This thing other than me is me. Be right there with the mind as it functions dualistically and creates the dust. That's what it's like when the dust is swept away and you see Buddha. And this practice avoids the dust going on, the swinging going on, and the dust being eliminated, annihilated, or the swinging and the dualistic mind being annihilated. The dualistic mind will continue to appear and disappear until the whole human population has major brain surgery. So this is my talk, which is not my talk.

[42:17]

I didn't think of this stuff. This is just old-time Zen teaching, which is that we need to understand dualistic thinking in order to be free of it. And we need to be free of dualistic thinking in order to realize Buddha's compassion fully. Understanding dualistic thinking is not to annihilate it, and not to let it just run on eternally. It's to understand how it appears and disappears, and be free of it, and have the dust swept away, even though it comes right back, and then sweep it away again, and it comes right back, because we have a brain which generates dust moment after moment. But we don't need to be fooled by it.

[43:21]

We can understand it and be free of it and act in the way of freedom from dust. We can realize the perfect wisdom of the Buddhas. That's the proposal of the Buddhas. I'm trying to convince myself to practice this way. I'm trying to convince everybody to practice this way. I can't quite say that I'm totally convinced, but I'm on the convincing program. If anybody has a different understanding of Buddha's teaching, I'll listen to it. But this is mine. This is the deep wisdom work that I find is necessary in order for me and all beings to realize infinite compassion.

[44:34]

unhindered compassion, unhindered by dust, infinite wisdom unhindered by dust, without having dust lasting and without having dust annihilated, without having me and you lasting and without having us annihilated, without having our separation lasting, without having our separation annihilated. In other words, by realizing the middle, which is very subtle, but being taught for 2,500 years somehow. Under often incredibly difficult circumstances. Like now. And sometimes even harder than right now. Maybe this afternoon it'll be harder when you're in a traffic jam trying to get out of here.

[45:40]

A few weeks ago, someone said to me, this doesn't sound very difficult, but anyway, someone said to me, you know, we've asked people not to eat muffins in the Zendo. Do you know about the muffins at Green Gulch? We serve muffins. Are there going to be muffins today? Huh? Are there going to be muffins next week? No. No. Next Sunday if you come, no muffins. Because it's Sashiv. But anyway, this week there's one last chance to have muffins. But if you have these muffins, you're not supposed to come in here and eat those muffins. Do you know about that? There's like a muffin patrol at the doors. Check your muffin at the door, man. We run a clean outfit here. We don't have any muffin crumbs in our meditation hall. You have to eat it before you come to question or answer.

[47:09]

You know about that? Anyway, I heard about this. I didn't know about this policy, but anyway, I heard. The person told me about it. The reason why they told me was because some people bring a muffin in here and put it at the seat for the speaker to eat. they're in question and answer. And they thought, well, you know, it's going to confuse people if the speaker's eating muffins and they're, you know, like, you know, what is it, the speaker gets to make a mess but nobody else does? So maybe better if you didn't have a muffin too. And I thought, well, you know, I can be a big strong guy and say, okay, I won't have a muffin. But what about the other speakers? Maybe they need a muffin. So I said, why don't you go and talk to the practice committee of Green Gulch and decide whether you actually want all the speakers, not just me, all the speakers not to have a muffin.

[48:18]

And if that's the policy, I'll go with it. But I don't want to make a big deal and make a big sacrifice, just I'm not going to have a muffin. Unless you really want to ask everybody, just no muffins for the speakers. Okay, what's this about? Why did I bring that up? Does it seem like a difficult situation to you? Not so difficult, right? But somebody could have gotten angry. You're asking me not to have a muffin? After all that work I did, now I'm going to go work some more and you're asking me not to have anything to eat? Oh no, I'm not asking you not to have anything to eat, just eat it outside, don't eat it in the... I need two muffins, you know? Is this kind of situations in which you're practicing sometimes, right? Not so difficult, but are you practicing? Are you remembering? Are you watching that sword between you and the muffin limiter? Are you there practicing in these situations?

[49:20]

Not so difficult, right? Not so difficult. Maybe difficult, but not so difficult means, well, we don't have to practice now. I mean, this isn't like a life and death situation. I'm not going to get violently angry at this person for asking me not to have a muffin, so I don't have to practice now. I'll just get a little bit angry at her or a little bit self-righteous or whatever. I don't have to look at, you know, is there a self and other appearing here? Is this me coming to talk to myself? Is this one being? You know, I'm practicing now. When does it get hard enough that you start practicing? Do you have to wait until you're talking about, you know, like... a murderer, and that's when you start practicing no dust. No, you got to practice every opportunity. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to start when it gets tough. So, yeah, like yesterday, you know, I went to meet my father-in-law and mother-in-law to tell them about some very difficult family matters.

[50:32]

That was a little harder to remember. What is going on here? And then it gets harder and harder sometimes, but anyway, it gets hard. And sometimes it's not so hard, but we have to learn to practice it moment by moment so that we can practice it when it gets hard, when the big, big bad other comes. And see, cut through that dust. Cut through that dust and meet whatever it is without dust. But without dust means you're right there with the creation of the dust, and that's how there's no dust. There's no dust by the very nature of dust. There's no dust. By the very nature of dust, there's no dust to wipe away. But we have to face the dust as it's created to see that.

[51:36]

Otherwise, we are sitting ducks. Sitting ducks. rather than sitting magicians. We are actually magicians who create illusions in our own mind all the time. We have to not be fooled by our own magic. We have to be alert in order not to be enchanted by our own mind, which tells us that that person is really existing out there. And to ignore that is also to be enchanted. To pretend like this person isn't or is you is to demean the enchantment and therefore to be caught by it. You have to respect this enchantment in order to be free of it. So now you can go out and have your tea in the land of enchantment, or you will be assailed by the delusion that there's somebody other than you out there.

[53:06]

And see if you can notice that you think that. See if you can notice how you create other people, how your mind creates other people. and how that's a big deal and very difficult to stay with the creation of otherness and all the anxiety around that. Here's your chance. Have a nice tea.

[53:31]

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