Earlier part of the week I was thinking that I wanted to talk to you about hearing, hearing the true voice, the true words of nature. hearing the true teaching of the Buddhas. And then as I heard more and more, if I heard more and more cries of suffering during this week of the horrific violence that has occurred this week, I felt that it was appropriate in response to this news, to this hearing and seeing of horrible cruelty among humans to acknowledge it.

[01:21]

And then to acknowledge the question or the feeling of how can we live in a world with such pervasive hostility and such occasional almost unbearable violence. How can we live And what can we offer, what help can we offer in such a world? Those questions arose in me in response to all that we've heard and seen this week. And if some of us ask that question or if that question arises in our heart, we might feel like, what could I offer in the face of such suffering?

[02:42]

I wondered, again, I wondered, what can I offer if I speak to people this Sunday here? And some things came to me. what I can offer is to remember that the awakened people, the great compassionate and wise people of the past, they also lived in times of war. And they had a practice that they were devoted to and which helped them to help others. They had a practice and that practice has been transmitted to us. So I offer you that practice today.

[03:50]

I offer you words about how to practice in the midst of the various levels of unkindness and confusion and cruelty of the world. I'll say at the beginning, the practice I'm recommending can be summarized as, listen. train, hear, and liberate. Listen. Listen to the cries of the world.

[04:54]

Contemplate the cries of all living beings. Observe all living beings. I offer that as the first step. When someone appears to us in a little bit of suffering or earth-shattering suffering, listen to them. observe them. In this room we regularly recite a teaching.

[05:57]

The teaching starts out, we say, KANZHE YON. And Kanzayan is abbreviation of Hail Kanzayan. Homage to Kanzayan. We align ourselves to Kanzayan. Kanzayan, excuse me, Kanzayan, yeah. The regardor of the cries of the world We pay homage to the practice and the way of being. To the being which regards, which listens to, which contemplates the cries of the world. We pay homage to that way of being. And then we pay homage to the Buddhas.

[07:03]

Was that clear? We say that. And at the end of this teaching it says, day and night. Kanzhe on. Moment by moment, Kanzhe on. Day and night, listen to the cries of the world. Moment by moment, listen to the cries of the world. We say that here. And now I wonder, do we here who say that, do we day and night, moment by moment, listen to the cries of the world?

[08:09]

That's the practice which we honor by those words. And I'm suggesting that that is a way to start the process of developing a liberating response to the suffering of the world. And the cries of the world may not sound or look like suffering. They may sound like someone may come up to us and say, you're an excellent teacher. You're a good friend. You're the best person in the room. They may say things like that to us too. But the practice is to listen to that just like you listen to you are the worst teacher in the room.

[09:15]

You are not your really bad friend. You're the main problem around here. You're the reason why I'm suffering. The people who are crying, we listen to them. And the people who are praising us or praising each other, we listen to them. We listen to everybody. We don't take a break when people look like they're okay. We listen to them too. We listen to the beings who appear to be happy and the beings who appear to be miserable. We listen to all of them. We vow to do that. And again, to foreshorten the course, if we learn to listen to the cries of the world, it's not just a favor, it's not just a kindness, it's not just a beneficial thing. It is beneficial, it is kind to listen to the cries.

[10:16]

But it's not just that. It sets the stage for hearing the true Dharma. It sets the stage for tasting the truth of the teacher, of the Tathagata's words. And when we taste the truth, all beings are liberated. We start by listening to the cries of beings who do not yet hear the Dharma. who do not yet taste the truth of the Tathagata's teaching, the Tathagata's words. The Tathagata is an epithet for Buddha. It's for most of us quite a challenge to day and night listen to the cries. moment after moment to listen to the cries, to observe the sights of suffering, moment by moment.

[11:23]

That's quite a challenge. But there it is. This is the great practice of the bodhisattvas of compassion, of the enlightening beings. They aspire to do this. [...] And as they aspire to do it, they become such a person. When we first aspire, we often, after we aspire, we forget. But then we sometimes remember and aspire again. We don't immediately settle into nonstop listening. when we listen. But we listen and aspire. Even when we're not listening, we aspire. I wasn't listening to her, but I was aspiring to listen to her, but I couldn't. I aspired to listen to her, but when she said that, I turned away, and I'm sorry.

[12:25]

I was distracted. The pain I felt when she slapped me I turned away from that pain and I turned away from her. And I'm sorry, I aspire to listen even when I'm insulted, even when I'm praised. So again, first thing I'm suggesting is listen. I also guess I would suggest, ask myself and ask you, do you aspire to to day and night? Listen to drives of the world. Do you aspire to it? If I ask myself, I ask right now, I don't feel any resistance to that possibility.

[13:28]

I have been practicing it. I do forget sometimes, but I never regret it and I have no resistance to do it other than when I don't do it. My not doing it is my main resistance. My habit to get distracted and think something else should be done when I hear the cries, when cries are given to me. I think it's fundamental to benefiting this world. Next phase, not exactly more difficult but also very challenging, is the training phase. For people who are listening, for people who are regarding the cries of the world, then we have training. The training can be called Zen training. Zen training is especially offered to those who are practicing the way of listening to the cries of the world.

[14:41]

It's their training their body and mind so that they can listen in such a way that they will be able to hear the true Dharma. And if they hear the true Dharma, then they will be able to maintain and transmit the Buddha Dharma and liberate suffering beings from confusion and cruelty, from being cruel to others and from not being compassionate. They'll be liberated from being cruel to others and they'll be liberated from not being compassionate to cruelty. The training, the Zen training, the Bodhisattva training. The Bodhisattva, the Zen training which makes it possible for us to hear the true words of nature, the true words of Buddha nature.

[15:50]

The true words of the mountains around here and the streams and the ocean and the sky and the trees, the true words of all that is the word of the Buddha. But most of us have to train our body and mind in order that our ears and eyes will open to the true teaching. Last Sunday, Abbess Foo Schrader talked about the practice of total combustion. Something like that? The practice of total combustion. In other words, today I would say it's learning to hear, and in the moment of hearing, that you Totally listen. Excuse me, not the hearing.

[16:53]

In the moment of listening, you totally listen. You're completely consumed in the sound of the bell, in the cry of a child, in the insult of an adult. You hear the insult and you completely hear it. You hear it so much that you don't have a comeback. You don't have a comment. You don't have an argument. You just hear what they said. And what they said is just some human being talking. And the words they used are dead. they're referring to something like, if they're talking about you, they're referring to somebody who's not there anymore. What they're referring to is already gone.

[17:57]

But sometimes we listen to the words as though they were really about something other than just cries. We have to train ourselves in total combustion if we want to hear the true Dharma. So if someone is complimenting you or someone's insulting you, if you hear someone crying out in pain, in the total combustion of hearing that cry, of listening to that cry, you will hear the true Dharma.

[19:03]

The true Dharma is not the cry, but it's right there It's right there in the cry. It's like another sound in the sound. It's like another word in the word. It's always there in every cry. But we must listen and we must listen totally in order to hear it. Someone told me recently about a kind of a criticism, not exactly an insult. Well, sort of an insult. It was a criticism of him. Someone said, you know, not directly but indirectly, someone said, you know, he's a big problem at Green Gulch. He's really interfering with the practice.

[20:06]

He's making it hard for people to practice. He's driving people away from Green Gulch. Someone told me that. Someone said that about him. And then after he told me, he said, and of course that person is really insane. They're crazy. But then they told me that after they thought that about the person, they kept thinking about that person over and over in various renditions of how stupid that person was to think that they were the problem. in the practice here. And the person felt really bad about repeatedly thinking about what a below average person this person was. They were starting to feel really bad about the way they were thinking about the person who said this thing about them.

[21:08]

And the person asked, do you have any advice? And I said, well, actually I think when you first heard this criticism of you, it doesn't sound like you listened to it. It sounded like you listened to it a little bit, but then your mind went off into some comment, some shrinking back and coming back with something, you know, something relative. Most people who are not appreciating us are not thoroughly enlightened. So it's often the case that when people really appreciate us, it's correct that they're a pretty reasonable person. And people who degrade us, it's true, they've got a problem. They're going around degrading anybody, especially you. But when you're being degraded, when it seems that you're being degraded, or that somebody else is being degraded, you can learn to see the difference between hearing it completely and hearing it somewhat just enough to come back with some self-promoting response or self-protecting response or other putting down response or lifting self up and putting others down or lifting self up putting others down and also like pretty much just like slandering that person and also etc.

[22:44]

lots of, what do you call it? Reactivity around not totally being consumed by what you heard. And, you know, missing that chance to, you know. Wow. That was an amazing insult. That was terrific. Wow! And just totally be into that. And completely hearing the insult, ooh, I hear something else. I hear what I've been wanting to hear all my whole life. I hear the top. And the Dharma doesn't sound like, well, actually, you're quite good.

[23:48]

And it doesn't sound like, well, that person's right. And it doesn't sound like anything. It's not a sound of the world. It's a sound of reality. It's an inconceivably beautiful sound. And when we hear it, then we can respond to the suffering beings in such a way to transmit what was heard. This training is also called, you know, sometimes we say, today I say, listen. Listen completely. Train to listen completely. Train to listen totally. That's also called just sit.

[24:51]

When we sit, we hear totally. We see totally. We feel our posture totally. We hear our breath totally. We think each thought totally. That's the training. It's called Zen. It's called just sitting. It's also called basic bodhisattva training methods. It's called generosity. When somebody insults me, do I actually think, thank you very much. I have no complaint whatsoever. Do I actually think that? And not sarcastically. And am I uplifted by being able to feel that way? Well, if I do, yeah. If I do really feel that way, I am uplifted. How wonderful.

[25:54]

How wonderful to feel how wonderful when you're being insulted. One time I was in the position of being so-called the teacher in a class at this place, over in the Wheelwright Center. And one of the students raised his hands and he said, I'd like to just tell you that at dinner before the class, I told a bunch of people at the dinner table that you were a crappy teacher. And I laughed. But then after I laughed, I felt so great that I felt like, wow, there was like almost zero resistance to the accusation of being a crappy teacher. I wasn't exactly happy that he was saying those things about me at the table. But I wasn't unhappy either. But I was happy that I was totally, almost totally like no resistance to him saying that to me.

[27:01]

I was so happy and that I enjoyed hearing it. I won't say that at that moment I also heard the true Dharma, although I might have. I'm not sure. I was busy. I was kind of a little bit excited how happy I was. It's, you know, I came to Zen Center to learn to be happy no matter what people say about me. Before I came to Zen Center, I didn't know how to do it. I mean, I didn't know how to do it means it didn't happen. And I trained at Zen Center for quite a while. And then finally, somebody said, I told people you're a crappy teacher. And it happened. I don't know how it happened. But when it happened, I thought, yay. Yay. And I did say, well, let's have some more insults. I just thought, that's great. This is what I want to learn. I want to learn. to listen completely and not have any kind of like reactivity, any kind of like other stuff I'm doing.

[28:13]

But the training is, you know, it's really extensive and challenging. And in order to do this training, we need good friends. Even to start listening, I think we need some good friends who would suggest that to us, who would suggest, listen to the cries of the world. This is the way to Buddhahood. This is the way to enter the path of liberating beings from suffering, is listen to all the suffering. Listen to the suffering, listen to the suffering. And if you learn to listen to the suffering, If you train yourself in listening to the suffering, by listening to the suffering and then train yourself, you will hear the true Dharma. And then when you hear the true Dharma, you will be able to help people. You will understand how beings can be helped, which is basically teaching how to hear the true Dharma.

[29:23]

When they hear the true Dharma, they will not be violent anymore. they will not be frightened anymore. They will just listen and liberate. Again, we may try to listen. So the person I told you about came and told me, this person was trying to listen, but this person came to me and told me about his listening attempts. He said, you know, in parenthesis, it's understood. I'm trying to moment by moment practice regarding the cries of the world. But right now I'm having a hard time because this person said this thing and I was thrown into a poisonous sea by my response.

[30:30]

And again I said, listen to your own cries totally. When we miss totally listening to others, we don't hear the true Dharma, then we're in trouble. Then we can listen to our own trouble that we get when we miss the listening. Listening to our own suffering is included. If we listen to the suffering of others and listening to the sufferings of ourself, and we do it totally, we will hear the true Dharma and all suffering and distress will be relieved. If we listen totally we will see the practice of perfect wisdom and in that wisdom all suffering and distress will be relieved.

[31:36]

And we also chant here the Heart Sutra. a perfect wisdom. And the bodhisattva in that scripture is the bodhisattva who regards the cries of the world. The one who, the being who's regarding the cries of the world is the being who sees the way things actually are who realizes the way they are, and in that realization all beings are liberated. It's not even that she liberates them, because she understands that she and others are not two. She understands that the Buddhas and crying beings are not two. Therefore it isn't that she saves all beings, that she liberates all suffering, that reality, the understanding of that reality is the liberation.

[32:39]

And in order to train ourselves, we need to talk to somebody about our listening practice. And if we think, you know, I think I actually listened pretty well that time, we can say that too, and the other person can say, boy, you listened pretty well that time. And then we can think, oh, maybe I didn't. Or we might say, as many famous people have said, teacher, please teach me please open my eyes, open my ears to the true teaching. And the teaching might say, how dare you come here and try to get something from the words, from the dead words of humans.

[33:51]

You need to learn to hear the true Dharma. Get out! That's the way some people have been helped. They thought they were asking to hear the true Dharma, but really what they were doing was they were saying, I want to get something from you. I want to get something from me. In other words, you and me are not two. And based on that, I want to get something from you. And the teacher says, get out. You're not listening. Quite recently, I won't tell you how recently, somebody came to see me. And I looked at her, and she looked so sweet and gentle. And she said, I think I should confess to you that I feel resentment towards you. I'm not kidding. Somebody said that to me. Number one, it's good that they told me.

[35:03]

Number two, it's amazing that they feel resentment toward me. I never did find out what it was about. I didn't say what it's about. I didn't. Somebody else would, and I'm not criticizing anybody who wants to find out. I'm not going to tell you who this person is, but that person can come forward and say, I was the one, if you want to know, here's what it's about. But that's not what I got into. I got into listening to him tell me that he felt resentment towards me. And he also said, which is what I'm here for, to be his friend, right? He also said, and I noticed that when I felt resentment towards you, I thought you, I felt this hostile energy from you towards me. He told me that. He saw that. And I thought, I thought, he said that. I almost got into, that was good.

[36:05]

But I didn't. Now I'm just mentioning to you that that was good. But when I say that's good, I mean I just have that thought and I really think it's good. And then he noticed that when he confessed that he felt resentment and noticed that he felt that a hostile energy from me was coming towards him because of the resentment, he noticed that the hostile energy evaporated. He didn't say the resentment went away, and I didn't ask him what happened to the resentment. I was most interested in listening and in helping him listen to what he was saying. I still don't know what's going on with the resentment, you know.

[37:24]

But anyway, the imagination of this hostility did evaporate for him. And one might wonder, did you feel any hostility towards him? And I really, before we started talking, I thought, I thought just how sweet he looked. How gentle and kind. And when he said the thing about resentment, I didn't feel like he was not being sweet and gentle and kind. I felt like he was doing the practice. He was training himself. He was showing himself. And he also told me, I feel anxious because I feel like I should be offering you something. And I'm not. And I feel anxious that I'm not offering you something. And I said, I hear you.

[38:35]

And then I don't remember exactly what happened, but somehow I managed to say to him, oh, oh, oh, I asked him if he had any requests of me. I just stop here and just say, are you aware of why I'm telling you this? I'm telling you this as an example of training which follows listening, which helps the listening be total. I was trying to get our listening to be total. So I'm saying to him, do you have any requests? And she said, no. And then she said this thing about, I feel anxious because I feel like I should offer you something, like you asked if I had a request and I didn't have one. And then she said, maybe I do have a request.

[39:40]

And I said, I think you do. I think you do have a request. You may not know what it is. I may not know what it is. But I believe you do have a request, and I do too. One of my requests was to ask you, do you have one? And I said, as I often say here, there's many training stories, many Zen stories, which go like this. The student comes, the teacher sees a request and gives a response, and the student says, I didn't ask for that. The student comes and makes a request and doesn't see the teacher respond. The student said, I made a request, you didn't respond. And the teacher says, Yes, I did. Look how I did it. The student goes, oh. We are making requests of each other. We are asking each other, please help me totally listen.

[40:49]

We are helping each other. So another way to say what I said before is listen, And study yourself. Study yourself with a friend to see, with a good friend who's also studying herself. Not just studying you, but studying herself. Study in good friendship to see if the listening is total. In this tradition we do not imagine that you can listen totally without studying yourself with a good friend. Studying yourself totally is the Buddha way. The Buddha way is studying yourself so totally that you forget yourself.

[41:57]

but we need to do this with good friends who are doing the practice too. So for those who are up for listening to the cries of the world and wish to learn to listen to them so completely that they hear the truth of nature and in that hearing liberate all beings. For those beings, good friendship is part of the training phase, the training and learning to listen completely. And so if you by any chance wish to liberate all beings by this process of listening, training, hearing the true Dharma, and thus liberating all beings, thus taking care of the true teaching and liberating all beings, if you wish to enter such a process, just mentioning that in the middle there, the training phase, we do that with good friends.

[43:16]

Listening consistently is quite a challenge, but we can listen. Already we can listen, and we do listen somewhat. We rarely listen. It's rare to listen completely, but we can listen a little bit or a lot, but not completely. We can do that right now. And we can do that more and more consistently. But we also need to train. It isn't just, okay, I'm going to listen. I have to study the person, the listener, to see how thoroughly the listener is listening. Because again, half-hearted listening, if I listen half-heartedly, if my eyes and ears and body are not completely open to the beings of this world, then my body and my eyes and my ears and my mind are not completely open to the Dharma.

[44:24]

And I can notice without talking to anybody, or I should say, I can notice without noticing that anybody's helping me, that I'm not listening completely, that I'm somewhat closed to the cries I hear. I can notice that. But really I just don't know who's helping me do that. Somebody's helping me do that. And I just don't notice. Actually, the person I'm listening to might be helping me do that. Like sometimes I'm talking to someone, or they're talking to me, and I see tears in their eyes. And when I see tears in their eyes, I sometimes think, maybe I'm not listening to them. Maybe. If I'm listening to others, I think in the training of listening totally, the question, maybe I'm not listening totally, I think that question would be quite appropriate a lot of the time.

[45:37]

But even if it's there, a friend might say, something that helped me realize another dimension of my partially opened ears and helped me say, oh yeah, there was some resentment. And by confessing that and saying I'm sorry, the root of that closed reception of others melts away, and then openness to the Dharma is there. I'm not exactly trying to recruit people but I do ask you do you wish to hear do you wish to learn to open to the cries of the world and do you wish to learn to listen to those cries totally in order thereby to hear the truth and in hearing the truth

[47:19]

deliberate beings? Do you wish to? And if so, are you getting organized so that the training part can be functioning? Are you working with good friends to support the training of your listening to total training? I wish to open myself to the cries of the world and I wish to make that openness total. But part of that is to notice I wasn't totally open on that case and then to confess that I wasn't totally open and to say, I'm sorry, but I still aspire to be totally open.

[48:42]

and to invite others to say to me if they feel that I wasn't totally open to skillfully help me notice where I was closed so that I can admit it and say I'm sorry and try again. We often say that, and I also think that you mentioned this also last Sunday, that someone, a Zen master said, what was the practice of the Buddha during his whole lifetime? And the Zen master answers her own question, and she said, an appropriate response. That was what the Buddha was doing. The one who hears the true Dharma, the Buddhas, all day long they're making the appropriate response.

[49:49]

But in order to make that appropriate response, they have to be in the listening to the true Dharma mode. And in order to be in the listening to true Dharma mode, the Buddhas are listening to everybody totally. So on one side we listen to the words of the world, to the cries of the world. When that becomes total, then we can make the appropriate response. And this is a Chinese expression, so one translation of this response is appropriate response. But literally, the characters are facing, one, teach. Those are three characters. Facing, and the next character is the character for one, and the next character is to teach. And one could be one, like facing oneness.

[50:59]

The Buddha faces oneness. The Buddha is always watching the oneness of Buddhas and living beings. And facing this oneness with the suffering of the world, the Buddha teaches. Another meaning of one is each. The Buddha meets each person. And meeting each person totally, the Buddha teaches. I would say it's both. The Buddha is facing the non-duality of enlightenment and delusion, and in that non-duality the response comes. The Buddha is also facing each individual cry, each individual frown, each individual tear. And facing that tear, the Buddha teaches. But to teach this way, we must train ourselves to listen and to see Totally. And the way to do this is to study ourself with our good friends.

[52:06]

Now I've repeated this enough, so I think maybe you got my message. And you can probably almost remember it. It just has four parts, right? This is actually Anna Thorne's teaching class on the Four Noble Truths now at Green Gulch. And I just thought when I said four, I said, I wonder if these four are the same as the Four Noble Truths. Of course they are. First truth, suffering. The truth of suffering. The truth of suffering is that beings who aren't completely enlightened are crying. Listen to that truth. Number two, second truth, there's a reason. The reason that they're suffering is because they haven't been trained thoroughly.

[53:10]

They do things incompletely. They eat oranges incompletely. They hear sounds incompletely. And because they do, they suffer. We have this truth of suffering, which we should listen to. Second truth is we need to train ourselves, because if we don't, the truth of suffering will be all there is. Number three, cessation. Cessation of suffering. What is that? Hearing the true Dharma. Number four is the path. What's the path? The appropriate response. So what I was talking about today could be seen as the four truths of the Buddha. particularly rephrased for the time of war, for a life where there's pervasive hostility and horrible violence.

[54:20]

This practice is for such situations. It may be appropriate to mention that in order to do this practice of listening and training and hearing and liberating, we need to be joyful about it. We need to be really joyful about how wonderful it is that by doing this practice we have a way to live and help this world to say we need to be perky, maybe going a bit far. But almost we need to be perky, like, you want to come into the world and do this practice? Yep, I do. I'd love to come into the world of suffering and listen to beings and study myself and hear the Dharma and thereby, hearing the Dharma, liberate all beings.

[55:30]

I would love to do that. I'm so happy to have the opportunity. Let's go. I saw quite a few people leave during this talk. And, you know, I observed them leaving. I watched them go. I practiced while I saw them go. I didn't get into anything but they're going. Going. Gone. Gone entirely. Welcome enlightenment.

[56:24]

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