You look very alert and perky. That's wonderful. In this Green Dragon Temple, at the beginning of this year, we are having an intensive meditation about 90 of us. And so you're welcome here today in the midst of our retreat, which will go on for three weeks. At the beginning of the retreat, I invited the meditators to look into their hearts and see what Aspiration lives there. What is their aspiration or aspirations?

[01:04]

Someone asked me, is aspiration like wish? And I would say, yes, it's like wish. But it has the word spirit in it. So we usually don't say, I aspire to have breakfast. But you could say, I wish to have breakfast or I aspire to have breakfast. Aspiration, the root of the word could be said to be to breathe upon or to breathe onto something. One definition is a great ambition, a great desire, a great wish. So I ask the people in the retreat to look to see, is there a great deep inner wish in your heart and mind?

[02:12]

I respectfully ask that question not saying what it should be. And now I ask all of you who have come here today as this year begins to consider what is the deep inner desire of your life or desires for this life I see some young people here today and we sometimes say to them what do you want to be when you grow up not just grow old but grow

[03:19]

What do you want to be when you get really big and mature? In the so-called Zen tradition, we use the word Zen, and we use the word bodhisattva. A bodhisattva, bodhi means enlightenment, and sattva means being. A bodhisattva is a being, could be a human being, could have a bodhisattva within them.

[04:23]

There could be an enlightened being in your heart right now. And that enlightened being in your heart could be wishing something. Well, an enlightened being in your heart would be wishing for something. Enlightened beings do wish. They aspire to realize true understanding, true enlightenment about reality in order to benefit all beings. Bodhisattva is the spirit which aspires to realize Buddhahood aspires to realize liberation in order to teach others liberation. Buddhahood is liberation which liberates others.

[05:34]

The bodhisattva, the enlightened being, to such a state of liberation for the sake of liberating all beings. This is called a bodhisattva. In the Zen school, bodhisattva is the spirit of the school, of the tradition. The statue behind me is a statue of a bodhisattva. Two statues behind me are statues of bodhisattvas. The statues in front of me, the big one, is a statue of the bodhisattva of infinite perfect wisdom. And behind the statue of perfect wisdom is a statue of great compassion.

[06:38]

And in front of the statue of the bodhisattva of wisdom is the Buddha Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha. in this world system, who was a bodhisattva for a long time, leading the Buddha in this world historical period. To become a bodhisattva, one becomes a bodhisattva, one becomes a Zen person, a bodhisattva. by developing this great aspiration, by taking care of the aspiration for Buddhahood in order to benefit all beings, by developing that, one becomes a human being who joins that bodhisattva spirit.

[07:42]

I don't know if you want to be a bodhisattva, but I ask you to see if you do, or what you do want to become. What do you do want to do? And if you'll excuse me, I'd like to talk about some people who have wanted to be bodhisattvas, to tell you some of their stories for the next year. And before I tell you the story of one of these bodhisattvas, I want to mention that when you find your aspiration, and in particular if one finds the aspiration to realize freedom in order to free beings, that aspiration, in order to be realized,

[08:59]

to be followed up upon. We need to follow through on that aspiration by training. And so there are trainings which those who wish to be bodhisattvas enter into in order to realize their aspiration. And I will talk a little bit later about, well, I'll talk quite soon, actually, about how to train in order to actualize the aspiration. Once upon a time, I've heard there was a person born in India in the third, no, in the fourth century of the common era.

[10:08]

And he came to be known by the name Asanga, which means no obstruction or free. He was a student of the teachings of the historical Buddha Shakyamuni, And he studied and meditated and he became a great teacher of individual liberation. And after he was a great teacher of the kind of practice which comes to fruit as he became interested in the teachings of great compassion and transcendent wisdom, the teachings of how to liberate others, the great vehicle teachings, he started to meditate on.

[11:21]

But he recognized that the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha were not well understood in India in the ... theory. He understood them well enough himself to obtain, to realize some personal freedom from suffering. But he noticed many other people did not understand them well and therefore were caught in the trap of their own delusion and suffered and did not know how to help others effectively. So he thought that if these teachings, these great vehicle teachings could be realized more this could bring great peace and joy to the land. So he set forth

[12:29]

to contemplate great compassion, and to seek, to request assistance from the future Buddha. The historical Buddha said that there will be another Buddha coming eventually. And that next Buddha would be named Maitreya, which means loving-kindness. And this future Buddha is living now, according to the historical Buddha. It's just the future Buddha is not living among us. Maitreya. Maitreya is a bodhisattva, one who aspires to Buddhahood and will be the next Buddha. This is something which the historical Buddha taught and which Asanga heard about.

[13:35]

So Asanga thought, I would like to request some assistance from this future Buddha. I know this Bodhisattva cannot come and be Buddha yet, but I would like this Bodhisattva to come and help out, to make an early visit to help us, to teach us the great vehicle so he went on a great retreat a great compassion retreat where he was going to meditate on compassion more deeply than he had been and he was going to meditate on requesting this great to come and appear to him and give him help in understanding the universal vehicle of welfare of the Indian world.

[14:43]

So he went on retreat, this great retreat. Now we have this three-week retreat now. He went on a 12-day retreat. I don't know how old he was when he went on this retreat. I mean, I should say, I don't know how old the story says he was, but the story does say he went on a 12-year retreat. Now we have a three-week retreat. But still, even though this is only a three-week retreat, hopefully we will live 12 more years. And then we could just Well, we could forget 12 years. We could spend the rest of our life meditating on compassion and asking great teachers to help us understand so that the world will be benefited. Not just us, but so that we can help the world with the aid of these great teachings. According to the story, he meditated six years

[16:00]

he felt that the great Bodhisattva did not come to him. He could not see or hear a response to his request and he gave up and left his retreats center. Then he saw something. He saw a person being very diligent The person needed a needle, and the person was rubbing down a block, a big steel rod, to make it into a needle. And he thought, it's ridiculous, but the person certainly is diligent. Someone might actually think, this is not, I haven't heard this part of the story, but I'm inspired to say, that he thought, might think that what I'm doing is ridiculous too, to try to get this next Buddha to come down into the world a little early for a visit.

[17:09]

But if he's making this effort for a needle, I certainly should make a great effort for the sake of the world. So he went back into retreat for three more years, and again he became frustrated. He seemed to become frustrated on three-year periods So again, he gave up. And in the process of leaving his retreat, he saw somebody else being very diligent. It was a person who had a huge rock out in front of his house that blocked the sun. And the person was wiping the rock with a wet feather to wear it away. And again, he thought, awesome. Beat me. He said, okay, I'll try again. So he went back for three more years and meditated on compassion and begged the great loving kindness Bodhisattva to come into the world to teach.

[18:14]

And he couldn't see it. He couldn't see her. He gave up again. After he left his retreat, he came upon a dog. a dog whose back legs were pretty much gone, only had front legs. Back legs were inhabited by lots of maggots. I guess maggots do two things. One is they live off their host. So if you have maggots, they're partly clean. They're eating everything, and they... eating probably the germs that are on the meat, but also they eat the meat, right? Because they're baby flies, maybe. So anyway, he felt compassion for the dog, so he wanted to help the dog.

[19:19]

So he took a rock, at a sharp edge and he cut some of his flesh off what was left of his body after the 12 year retreat and put it down next to the and his intention was to take the maggots off the dog and put them on the fresh meat he felt great compassion for the dog And he felt great compassion for them. But then he thought, but if I take the maggots up with my hands, it might hurt them. So probably the only way to get them off without hurting them would be to take them off with my tongue. So he bent down to the dog and was intending to take the maggots with his tongue. And then there was this big burst of light.

[20:24]

And he saw Maitreya Bodhisattva. And of course he was very happy to finally meet his teacher. And after bowing with great tears of joy for a long time, he finally said, where have you been? Why didn't you come before? I've been inviting you to come for 12 years. Atreus said, I was always with you. I was with you from the first time you wanted to meet me. As soon as you wanted to meet me, I was there. I'm there for anybody who wants to meet me. But if someone wants to meet me and they're not full of compassion, they won't see me.

[21:30]

Just wanting to meet the teacher of great compassion and perfect wisdom is very good. The teachers of compassion and wisdom respond to us when we ask them to come. if we want to meet them. But if we're not practicing compassion, we won't see them. So he practiced compassion enough, one interpretation could be made, to see the dog. He didn't see anything before that. Actually, now that I look at the story, when he saw those people Those very disciples also saw Maitreya. But in response to them, he didn't then go and try to help them. Probably should have tried to help the guy wear the iron down or wipe the rock.

[22:37]

He actually should have stayed there probably. But when it came to the dog, he didn't pass the dog. He stopped and gave his flesh to the dog and gave his love to the maggots. And then he could see Maitreya. But he didn't believe that Maitreya had been there the whole time. So Maitreya said, okay, I allow you to take me with you into town and show me to people and see if they can see me. So he took Maitreya, Maitreya allowed himself into a little crystal light, and he put him on his shoulder and took him into the town and showed him to people, and people just saw this emaciated, crazy-looking yogi with a nearly dead dog over his shoulder. And he could not see Maitreya either. because they hadn't been practicing compassion enough.

[23:46]

So then he actually spent quite a long time with my receiving teachings and he received a lot of teaching and he wrote these teachings down. He was like He was the Bodhisattva's amanuensis secretary. He wrote down these teachings and we have them now in this world. And then later he wrote teachings on his own and when he had trouble he would ask for assistance from Maitreya. So I said, he had this aspiration and he followed through on it. He had the aspiration to get help to come into this world and he followed through on it by meditating on compassion and continuously inviting this teaching to come for 12 years.

[25:06]

So one could do the same practice. One could do it in this room for three weeks. One could sit and meditate for three weeks. And one could invite the great bodhisattvas to come and teach here. And those of you who are not in this retreat, you could every day go on retreat for five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes, sixteen minutes, once a day, three times a day, you could sit down and be still and meditate on compassion and invite the same Bodhisattva, who used to be the next Buddha, still the next Buddha, you could invite that Buddha to come and teach in this world. you can do the same practice that this great ancestor Bodhisattva did.

[26:18]

One time I heard a Buddhist scholar who observed Tibetan monks and Japanese and Chinese and Korean monks meditating. He said that the Tibetan monks, they sit still and upright, the male and female monks sit, or even the non-monks, the lay people, they sit still, and they chant a chant which is inviting the bodhisattva of great compassion to come into the world, to inhabit their body and mind. They do that same invitation of great compassion to come into the world. But the Zen monks of China and Korea and Japan and Vietnam, they just sit quietly and still and make the same invitation.

[27:36]

They just don't say anything. But in America, I don't know how many of the Zen students understand or want their sitting to be meditation on compassion. I don't know how many of the Zen students wish their sitting to be an open invitation, great compassion to come into this world, a request. There's plenty of room for that invitation. It's not going to crowd your life. compassion doesn't take up any space. Even if you live in a small apartment, great compassion fits in there very nicely. Even in your car in a traffic jam, great compassion can come right in there and fill your car up. I saw a movie once, and I think the name of the movie was God.

[28:40]

But anyway, in this movie, these two guys were driving in a car. One of them was the driver, I think, and the other one was God. And the driver said, I don't believe you're God. And God said, well, what can I do to help you believe? He said, well, make it rain. God made it rain, but inside the car. Yeah. So it was raining in the car, you know, they had a picture of the car, and the car was filling up with water. And it was sunny all around the car. And he said, I didn't mean inside, I meant outside. He said, you should say so. So, a sangha followed through on his aspiration by... by being compassionate a lot of the time. Until finally he really became full of compassion.

[29:51]

And so when he saw that dog, which, you know, and you can imagine when he got close to the dog, it was very... Because this dog smelled really terrible. His, you know, his nose, his human nose really found this really repulsive to be near the smell of this dog. Somebody I know, which just recently told me, near, I take care of a little dog named Rozzy here at Green Gulch. She's now 17 years old. And someone had their face near her face recently when she yawned. And they said it was awesome. Bodhisattvas, the bodhisattva can inhabit our body, which has, our body has sense organs, and we find some things repulsive, but it's possible to

[30:57]

To come near, repulse, enough compassion. Things which our senses say, to get close because we are inhabited by this unhindered, unobstructed compassion. But we have to practice it. We have to train ourselves. We have to keep thinking about it. moment by moment. And when we forget we have to be kind towards our forgetfulness and return to remember. We have to follow through in order for our aspiration to be actualized. So for one who aspires to realize liberation in order to liberate beings, that aspiration would naturally imply an ethical imperative, an ethical necessity to do all the practices

[32:36]

that would be conducive to enlightenment. So ethics is one of the ways to look at the training. But sometimes people think of first, then concentrative, first ethics meditation, then concentration meditation, then wisdom meditation. But there's another way to see it, is that ethics contains concentration and wisdom. You can also say, of course, it contains concentration and ethics. But today I'd like to emphasize that ethics, imagine the circle of ethics, and within the circle of ethics is concentration and wisdom. If you have the aspiration For Buddhahood, then, that aspiration includes compassion and wisdom.

[33:48]

So then your ethics, your ethical responsibility is to act in a way that's conducive to concentration and wisdom. This great bodhisattva which has inhabited now and taught a Sangha, leads a Sangha to teach us that the ethical training is threefold. First, the first aspect of ethical training is the ethics of restraint or the ethics of stopping. The next is the ethics of gathering all wholesome things.

[34:54]

The ethics of gathering actions. The ethics of making all actions beneficial to beings. and beneficial to oneself. And the third is the ethics of maturing and bringing to all beings. The first one is the foundation of the other two. The first one has the nature of restraint or stopping. And based on the ethics of restraint or stopping, we have the ethics, their nature is exertion, is effort. Effort in all wholesomeness, effort in all beneficial action. Under the wholesome comes all the bodhisattva trainings of generosity,

[36:03]

Ethics, patience, enthusiasm, concentration, and wisdom. Under the ethics of serving beings comes everything that would benefit them. Everything that would help them learn compassion and wisdom. One can try to do wholesome activity in the ethics of benefiting beings without first practicing the ethics of restraint, but one will be less successful. So that's why this teaching is to start. Number one, the first of the three precepts is the precept of restraint. The precept of restraint is first.

[37:09]

It's the first practice to deal with addiction, addictions. It's the first practice to deal with afflictions, with delusions. Before you try to do anything good, first of all, face your afflictions, face your addictions. The first practice, the first ethical practice, the first training is don't move. The first practice is presence. The first practice is let go of being absent. The first practice is be here. Be here, be present, be present.

[38:14]

So in this retreat we have many periods where about all that's going on in this room basically is everybody's present. Not all the time, actually, there's a group of devoted people in the kitchen making food for us in here. But we're being present all day long. Not all day long, but we're being present a lot of the time in here. We're sitting in our seats, like I sit there, and Jeremy sits there. We just sit there. Now, we may think of going somewhere else, but we stop that. We just sit there. We practice being present. We're not perfect at it. We occasionally drift away from being present. But we're training. We're trying to follow through on our aspiration to benefit the world by being present in order

[39:26]

to realize Buddhahood, the first ethical practice is being present. Which also means to stop going someplace else. To stop flowing away or flowing in. Be right here. So, also at the beginning of the retreat I said that Bodhisattva's Practicing solitude. So in a sense, the first precept, the first ethical precept is practicing solitude. Just be solitary. Just be yourself, alone. But also bodhisattvas practice solitude for the sake of service.

[40:29]

The whole point of the solitary practice is for service. We go on retreat and practice solitude for the sake of service. We practice presence for the sake of service. We practice presence so that we can practice all wholesome activities and benefit all beings. The next two precepts are based on practicing presence. So this is a presence center and a It's a solitude center and a social center or a social work center. We're practicing solitude for the sake of society. We realize that to work for the welfare of society, one needs to practice solitude. In order to be of service to all beings, you need to practice presence.

[41:33]

Both a presence center and a service center. The bodhisattva's presence is her service. She's with beings. How is she with beings? She's right there. She smells. She smells them if they smell. And if she feels repugnance because of their illness, because of their sicknesses, if she feels repugnance, she doesn't move away from her repugnance. she can stay present even though something repulsive is in her face. She's trained because she's trained to not move away from here. To not move towards there but move towards here.

[42:45]

Also when we practice when we practice solitude, one of the things that people tell me is when they start, they start feeling lonely and they feel uncomfortable feeling lonely. Part of, oh, oh, oh, and then also they practice And then they feel a yearning for intimacy. They feel cut off and separate. Part of realizing intimacy is to learn how to deal with loneliness. part of realizing intimacy is being able to not run away from the discomfort of loneliness.

[43:59]

And then to take, and when we're not running away from the discomfort of loneliness and we're present with that, to take this presence and bring it to another but to go to the other not to run away from but to bring the gift of presence which is not afraid of being alone and again as you know the word alone means all one when we're alone we're actually all one and when we're all one we feel alone the one who felt not all one We miss our old self. We feel grief of our old self who was afraid to be here. Of the little boy or the little girl who couldn't stand to be here. We grieve him. He's gone. We've outgrown him and we miss him. So when you're still, lots of things come up for you.

[45:05]

Your reward for being still is that certain demons who don't visit you when you're running around will show up If you're running around, what stops you from sitting still will not bother you. But when you sit still, the demons come. In Asia, they have the mythology that when people are running around, hysterically, the demons feel very relaxed and they're drinking lemonade. They're happy because everybody's hysterical and nobody's practicing presence. And the whole world, nobody's present. We're successful. Everybody's working for us. No problem. The demons can relax then. When we're hysterical, when we're crazy, when we're not present, when we're not meditating on compassion, the demons have a break.

[46:14]

They're successful demons. The demon palaces have earthquakes and their lemonades fall from their hands and then they say, well, where are those non-hysterical people? Let's go get them. So then they swoop down or they swoop up. Actually, they come up out of the ground and they say, you know, this is really ridiculous what you're doing here sitting still. Being present is really ridiculous. To say overrated is too much. It's really a waste of time just to be present. You should accomplish something in this life. For most of us, that works. And then we get not present. And then we realize, that's no good. That's not following through on the ethics of restraint, of being present.

[47:17]

When we're present we're ready. When we're present we're ready to be of service. We're ready to practice generosity. We're ready to practice the other kinds of ethics. We're ready to practice patience. We're ready to practice enthusiastic in wholesome behavior. We're ready to practice concentration. We're ready to study the teachings of wisdom. And we're ready to nurse suffering beings, attend to them. And there's many amazing stories about those other two practices, but today I'm emphasizing the ethics of restraint, the ethics of presence, the foundation of ethical practice for the bodhisattva.

[48:24]

And next time I'll talk about the other two aspects of ethical training for bodhisattvas. What time is it? That's kind of a nice number. Thank you very much.

[48:46]

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