About a year ago, after September 11th, on Sundays this room was full of people, really packed.  Many people came here for a number of weeks.  Much more fully attended Sunday programs than usual.  I don’t know all the reasons for people coming here at that time.  Perhaps one of the reasons was people were wondering what do the people at the Zen Center say at a time like this.  What response are the disciples of Buddha considering in response to such events?  A year later I think we’re still considering how does a disciple of Buddha respond to the current events of this planet, to the violence and counter-violence that is happening and being contemplated.  Does Buddhist practice really relate to world peace as it says it wants to?  Some disciples of Buddha may say what we’re doing here does help world peace, some may say we don’t know if it does, but we must try to find a practice, try to find a way of living that encourages peace and harmony among beings.  We haven’t yet achieved it, but we’re still looking for it.  We’re still somewhat devoted to the issue of what kind of a life promotes the reduction of hatred.  How can we who have bodies and minds care for these bodies and minds in such a way that that way of care promotes the giving up of hatred?  At least, in this person.  Maybe if this person can give up hatred, can find where it comes from, examine it carefully and calmly and gently and patiently, maybe this person can let go of hatred.  Maybe if one person lets go of hatred that would encourage another.  Maybe that’s a way.

Recently, 22 of us from this community went to Japan to do a memorial ceremony for the founder of our lineage in Japan.  This Buddhist monk, his name was Dogen.  He actually founded a temple, which we went to and did the memorial ceremony for him.  The 750th memorial ceremony for him we did at the temple he founded.  His temple is called The Temple of Eternal Peace.  Now this Temple of Eternal Peace has been there for 750 years, during which time Japan has had lots of wars.  And the world has lots of wars.  But the temple is still dedicated to the work which some people feel they want to devote their life to: the work of peace and harmony and appreciation in the hearts of humans, rather than hatred and war.  So we did the ceremony there and I think before and after that ceremony we visited the temple of the founder of Zen Center, who we call Suzuki Roshi.  We visited his home temple of the West side of Japan, Eheiji, the Temple of Eternal Peace is on the East side, on the Japan Sea side of Japan and Suzuki Roshi’s temple is on the Pacific side of Japan.  The last evening we were in Japan we took Suzuki Roshi’s son, who’s the abbot of his old temple, out to dinner for his birthday.  The place we went was a hot springs overlooking a body of water and one of the members of our group said to me ‘What lake is that?’ and I said ‘That’s called the Pacific lake, the lake of peace.”  A day or so before, after we got back from doing the memorial ceremony, we had tea one morning with Suzuki Roshi’s son, the abbot of the temple we practiced at, and Suzuki Roshi’s wife, who lived at Zen Center for almost 40 years and is now living back in Japan.  She came to have tea with us.  And so since she came to have tea with us we had tea with her.  She’s 88 and she’s in very good health.  And one of the members of our group said ‘to what do you owe your excellent health?’ and she said something like ‘exercise every day, don’t hate people, and have conversations.’  Simple, but the not hating people is kind of hard.  Actually, the exercising every day is hard, too.  And if you hate people then it’s hard to have conversations.  But we need all three, I think.  Not hating people is not enough, we need to talk with these people that we don’t hate.  Because some of them hate us.  And they need to find out, through our conversation, that we don’t hate them – if we don’t.  And then the conversation went on and she said something like ‘around the time of September 11th what did you do at Zen Center?’  I think she said something like that.  Maybe.  I noticed there was a little scurrying about in my mind trying to think of something we did, something good that we did, in the face of these events, and some things that we were doing in the face of these events.  So there was some talk about what we were doing in the face of such hatred and violence.  But after a while she kind of said ‘well, I guess we should just practice meditation, practice Buddha’s way in our temple, together.’  And when she said that I must say I felt a little relief that she was letting us just do our practice.  Maybe that is related somehow.  Maybe that is our basic response to these events.  But I don’t want to mention that now or later as a way of patting ourselves on the back and saying ‘well we’re practicing here and that’s helping world peace.  We’re practicing here and that’s appeasing hatred, quelling hatred, promoting compassion.’  I don’t want to say that we’re doing that.  I want to look at how to do it.  What do we need to face, what issues do we need to become aware of in order to actually not hate.  In order to generate actual not-hating.  There’s many kinds of hate of course, many situations for hate.  So there’s the hate of walking around in a Buddhist temple, being a practitioner in a Buddhist temple, and then somebody walks up to you and behaves in a way that is from your perspective kind of unpleasant or maybe not respectful towards you.  Or maybe they’re doing something which has nothing to do with you but which you consider to be unskillful.  Like maybe they spill their soup all over themselves.  Or maybe they don’t eat their soup.  And you think they’re either careless or wasteful.  And you don’t like them.  Now of course if they intentionally spill the soup on you, you might not like them either.  As a matter of fact you might then hate them.  It could happen in a Buddhist temple.  Someone could spill soup on you.  We have formal meals here in this meditation hall.  Our other meditation halls also have formal meals.  In those meals we take turns serving each other.  So people sit here in meditation posture and other people bring them the food.  When you’ve had enough, for example if someone’s pouring you soup and you’ve had enough you take your hand with your palm up and you lift your palm up.  That’s a signal to them to stop pouring the soup, that you’ve had enough soup.  One time I was serving soup at our mountain monastery, and I was pouring the soup and I think it was, if I remember correctly, split pea soup, kind of thick soup.  I was pouring it in and the person I was serving, one of my dear senior, one of my older brothers was receiving the offering and he didn’t raise his hand.  So I just kept pouring.  And the bowl just kept filling more and more and then it started oozing over the sides onto his hands.  I don’t know what led to me finally stopping; maybe I just finally ran out of soup.  Then he did some kind of clean-up operation on his hands and maybe his robes, it was a really big mess.  But you know, I didn’t hate him for not giving me the signal, like, you know, ‘you should’ve given me the signal so that I didn’t do this amazingly stupid thing.’  I didn’t get into that, and I didn’t feel like he hated me either.  He just sort of cleaned up the situation.  I didn’t check with him afterwards, ‘Did you hate me when I spilled that soup all over you?’  But I didn’t feel like there was any hate.  I just thought it was something that happened and now I can tell you about it.  A monastic event.  At a restaurant you usually don’t have to signal necessarily with your hand to the waiter.  But at a monastery they just keep pouring.  So learn this one [he does the signal].  So we don’t always hate each other here.  But sometimes I think people do hate each other here.  In this temple devoted to giving up hate, we hate each other.  

But then there’s another kind of hatred which is a little bit different.  Although we hate each other very seldom do we, so far it hasn’t happened that any of us has gotten armed and gone after anybody else.  Usually when people hate each other for stuff like spilled soup, often they start working on it in themselves.  

And the basic principle of the practice here is summarized by saying that the accomplishment of the protection of all beings comes through the examination of our own mistakes.     Not the examination of other people’s mistakes, not through talking about other people’s mistakes.  That sometimes might be helpful, but that isn’t really what protects people.  What protects people is for me to examine my own mistakes.  If I hit someone, generally, that’s liable to be a mistake.  Beings, including me, are protected by me examining that mistake.  The path here is not the path of no mistakes.  The path is the path of examining mistakes.  Again, this is on the personal  level, one to one in the community.  

Another kind of mistake that’s going on in this world is the mistake that arises from, excuse the expression, a kind of archetypal bonding, a kind of mass bonding with some image and also some collective sense of what is right.  A whole civilization whose values are religiously based, where there is pressure from inside and outside to conform to certain beliefs, and where a certain element of the society, a big element of the society, a mass element of the society achieves coherence—cleaves together—and bonds together, which is very powerful.  This bonding together is the source of cultural achievement, and also generates, almost always, the projection of a hated, evil other.  When a group of people can bond together and conform to some value together, at the expense of their differences—putting aside their differences for the time being—there’s a great power and usefulness in that.  A great cultural achievement can come from that.  You can put on some good shows.  You can build pyramids.  You can have big rallies where a million people come together and rally around a symbol, where our differences are suppressed, where conformity is held up as the main point.  

But in the psyche of the people there’s something missing.  Something has been denied, and that generates the projection of this other which is hated and evil.  It’s kind of like it’s happening in this world.  This is going on.  Mass bonding and mass projection of the hated evil other.  Teaching children to hate the other.   Teaching them to conform to these values, and hate those who have different values.  Some people feel like this is the way it is and it’s just going to keep being this way.  And maybe it’s so.  This is where mass hatred and mass armament and mass aggression finds its root.  One might say this is a story I told you.  I certainly don’t want you to conform to what I just said.  The less this mass conformity to some value is known and acknowledged, the more the projection of the evil other and the more hatred is communally experienced and encouraged.  The more that the lack of this knowledge and the claim of having that knowledge (some people say they have that knowledge but they don’t), this again promotes social possession and hatred.  

What are the antidotes to this?  It may be possible that the antidote to this is person-by-person.  Then to gather together individuals who are personally antidoting this mass identification with some idea or value.  To gather them together without forcing them to conform to another value system.  And that’s tricky.  We see these people over there that hate and are being cruel, so let’s make another group that doesn’t do that.  And make everyone in this group not do that.  So we have to be careful now where we are proposing an army of antidoters to the army of violent ones that it doesn’t  become another self-righteous group.  So this bonding on a personal level makes self-righteousness and then such people have self-righteous gods or righteous gods who punish those who do not agree.  I heard the expression the other night, “A punishing god has never switched tribes.”  They always stay true to the self-righteous tribe.  Have you ever heard of some of those ancient tribes who had a god who punished the other, who then said, “I’m going to go over to the other side”?  I have never heard of that.  

Part of what we need to do is to doubt our values.   With archetypal bonding, there is in any group some pressure on us to conform to the values of the group.  Once we learn what the values are, once they are made clear, there is some pressure on us to conform.  It’s very efficient if we would.  There’s some value in conforming to a value.  And you can’t stop it anyway.  We must have faith, but if our faith is not accompanied by some doubt, by some skepticism, by some reflection, it goes into this mass stuck-together projecting system, which also does not encourage people noticing it and commenting on it.  On the personal level, am I noticing my mistakes.  On a group level, am I noticing my mistakes vis-à-vis the group, and the group’s mistakes in terms of creating an environment of coercion and forced conformity with the values of the group.

I think Suzuki-roshi said it this way:  Buddhism is not one of the –isms like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Confucianism and Buddhism.  Buddhism is not Buddhism.  The Buddha way is not to make everybody conform to the Buddha way.  It is to appreciate how everybody’s out of control.  To appreciate beings the way they are, and to appreciate the mistakes that I’m making.  Then I appreciate my mistakes—not that I like my mistakes—I’m aware of them, I’m intimate with them.  I notice how they happen, and I notice where they come from.  And they come from the same place where my view of everybody comes from, namely, my mind.  

In my mind there’s a tremendous variety of beings.  In all of our minds there’s a tremendous variety of beings.  By paying attention to where my mistakes are made, by paying attention to me being an ordinary person who makes mistakes, I become intimate with this ordinary person who makes mistakes.  I become intimate with the source of the mistakes.  I become intimate with the source of all beings.  And as I become intimate with that, I become intimate with what is intimate with the ordinary person.  And what is intimate with the ordinary person is the Buddha mind,  which is intimate with all the varieties of beings and respects and admires and adores all living beings.  

The ordinary mind  does not adore all living beings.  Hopefully, it adores some.  But it may not adore any.  Or it may adore a few.  But ordinary mind does not adore all—that’s an ordinary mind.  Got one?  And that mind is subject to hate because of that.  Got one?  The recommendation of the meditation of the Buddha is not to deny that you have such an ordinary mind, but to cultivate and care for the ordinary mind.  Become more and more appreciative, tolerant, patient and respectful of your ordinary mind and become more intimate with it.  And as you become more intimate with it, you become more intimate with the mind that does appreciate every single manifestation of life.  You become more and more intimate with this mind that does not hate anything, no matter what.  And that mind already is taught in this tradition as non-dual with the mind of all beings right now.  It is the mind which is non-dual with the beings of all the –isms on the planet.  It is the mind which is non-dual with all the people are caught in a mass epidemic of hate.  

If you’re not caught in a mass epidemic—fine—but we’re all caught to some extent in a private illness of some limit in our appreciation of some form of life.  There’s somebody who we don’t respect.  There are some behaviors that we think are unadorable or just simply stupid.  Like in certain parts of the country people can have sympathy for terrorists, but not for the president.  In other parts of the country, the president’s fine and they hate the terrorists.  Everybody’s got their limit.  These are our mistakes, which we come by honestly by having human delusions.  We make mistakes based on these delusions, and the protection of beings comes from examining these mistakes.  We become intimate with them.  By becoming intimate with them--by being patient with the pain of making them and with their consequences, with being respectful of ourselves, too, as we make them, and gentle with ourselves, and quietly and carefully examining the causes and conditions of these errors--we become intimate with our ordinary humanness.

 Then we start to see how this ordinary humanness is not the same as a mind which does not hate anybody.  It’s not the same.   And it’s not different.  It’s not bonded with the divine mind which loves all beings and it’s not separate.  As a matter of fact, bonding with the divine is part of what leads to the mass hatred.  That we feel bonded to the divine makes us project the other evil one.  By meditating on how ordinary we are, and how that ordinariness is not bonded with nor separate from supreme enlightenment, we start to realize, and--without trying to be an non-hating person--manifest benevolence.  Not by trying to not be what we are, but rather by admitting who we are, intimately.  

And, if someone wants to join us in this practice of being an ordinary person for the welfare of all ordinary beings, we welcome them.  We adore them.  We respect them.  All we let them be different from us.  Even though they said they wanted to do the practice with us, we start to notice they’re doing it differently than the way we told them to do it.

 Someone said to me, “You have just the students you deserve.”  When I first started teaching, especially when I started training priests, I thought my job was to make them into little me’s,  like—what is it?  Austin Powers.  Or even make them exactly the same size and shape of me.  And you know, for some reason or other, I wasn’t successful.  I couldn’t-- I wasn’t able to--coerce them into conforming with being me.  They tried, actually, for a while.  But, you know, somehow it didn’t work out.  So I switched policies to helping them be them.  Like, you know, them, like other-than-me.  Not me.  What could be more obnoxious?  Because we’re talking about another version of what?  It’s not just another version of a person, it’s another version of true practice.  There’s supposed to be the only true practice, so how can there be another version of it?  No--The true practice is like this, not like that.  This is self-righteousness.  Have you ever noticed that?  This is the right way.  That’s a different way, and that’s the wrong way.  This is a really important thing we’re doing here so that’s, like, a mistake.  No one possesses ultimate truth.  

A catch phrase I heard was, “the truth will set us free, but doubting it will set us freer.”  So I’ve got my truth and you’ve got your truth.  Doubting my truth sets me free of my truth so I can appreciate your truth.  Doubting my truth, seeing the mistake in my truth of what I think is helpful in this world, doubting that—and doubting it means opening up that my truth is not the same as Buddha’s truth and it’s not separate--doubting my truth, I become intimate with my truth and I become clear in my truth.  Doubting my mind, I transcend my mind.  I transcend this ordinary human mind.  But it isn’t that you just in general doubt your mind.  You doubt your mind specifically in this moment, the one you’ve got now.  You have to be checking out what you think, what you believe, and doubt that.  Take it lightly.  Let it go.  It doesn’t mean that you take other people’s minds heavily.  It just means you take them respectfully and appreciatively and adoringly.  Or you don’t, and then you notice that you’ve got a disrespectful, unadoring, unappreciative ordinary mind.  And that protects this other being from such thoughts.  By examining them.  Maybe this is our practice.  Or it’s a story about our practice, which might be helpful.  

In a world where a lot of people are not yet into noticing their own mistakes, they spend most of the day noticing the mistakes—to put it mildly—of the evil other.  They rant all day about the mistakes of the evil other, with no reflection of who is talking and how a person feels:  could that person…? does that person ever make a mistake?  If we can make the practice of noticing our own mistakes something which protects the beings we meet, this will be a great joy to us and them.  And they will gradually notice that we appreciate them.  We will appreciate them as we notice that we don’t appreciate them.  If we keep noticing that we don’t appreciate them, we gradually start to manifest appreciation of them.  We see what an unappreciative petty little thing this is, and we see actually these people are pretty good compared to me.  I mean, I just saw this person appreciate somebody.  Pretty good.  And the appreciation grows through awareness of my own ordinary pettiness, my own stinginess, my own impatience, my own roughness, my own lack of mindfulness, my own inattention to the processes of conforming for my own safety to a group value.  Noticing these kinds of things, noticing them, noticing them, and becoming joyful in the process of noticing.  Perhaps it could spread.  Perhaps you could join others who have a different style of noticing and notice that you don’t like that they’re noticing in a different way.  Admit that mistake and again gradually start to think, “You know, they ‘re actually pretty cute.”  

Now I see with the students we have, although they’re different from what they really should be, they’ve got something else that’s really wonderful--called not-me.  

And so, we allow ourselves to practice together with all beings without making all beings into a tightly coherent mass, which is the danger to this planet.  But I think maybe if  you’re scared, you know, you need these tightly congealed masses of people to protect the people.  There’s a little bit of that, isn’t there?  In order to have an army you’ve  got to get it to tightly cohere, yes, right, to have an army you’ve got to get them together, to conform: “Ah, excuse me, sir, I think maybe…”  “Shut up.”  “Could we please…”  “No, shut up.  Follow orders.”  “Yessir.”

 This makes a nice powerful machine of destruction.  You give a command, and everybody goes with it.  Put up a value, everybody says, “Sieg Heil”.  No hand does not raise.  If one doesn’t, everyone looks—and it raises,  maybe.  The mass is very organized.  Another phrase I heard was “What individuals in Germany were organized as well as the Gestapo?”   Mass movements can get very well organized, but can the practitioners be that clear?  So, in order to balance or counteract that kind of mass organization,  we have a lot of work--to be clear about how the practice works, to study and listen to the teachings, to respect other beings and watch how poor we are at it, and to gradually evolve together.   We evolve together not by making everybody the same as us, but actually by appreciating each other.  And that’s hard.  And the other way is really not possible either, that it looks like we can get people to conform.  We can get that impression if  we just get everybody to put aside anything different—then project the difference.

Fortunately in American we do not have yet a tightly coherent mass.  There is still a little bit of allowance, or a lot of allowance, for difference of opinion and to be able to express it.  And that’s good.   Now we need to develop awareness of the little processes of hate in ourselves.  Maybe that will be helpful at this time.  

We are not the same as the divine, we’re not conjoined with the divine, and we are not separate from it.  We should not identify with it, or dissociate from it, but find out what intimacy with the divine is.  In this way, our ordinariness  and our divinity co-redeem each other.  We don’t know if we will ever be successful on a big scale, but maybe we can encourage each other to do the little bit that we can do by working on ourselves, and bringing our practice to each meeting with other people.   Letting them practice or not practice, or I should say, practice the way they want to practice.  Try to find, again, any sign in ourselves that we don’t respect the way they’re practicing.  Admit that disrespect, and admit that disrespect, and admit that disrespect, and admit that disrespect until we get low enough to see something to respect.  To come off our high horse, get down on the ground, with the bugs, and see how wonderful people are.  Express that appreciation.  In that appreciative environment, maybe they can also start to notice their ordinariness and come off their high horses.  And we can all get down so low that there’s nowhere to go except forward on the path.