Latest / Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks / Karma, Intention, and the Seeds We Plant - Jomon Martin, Zen Teacher

Transcript

Karma, Intention, and the Seeds We Plant - Jomon Martin, Zen Teacher · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Jomon: Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week. So I happen to live at Great Valsen Monastery, and, I also am the teacher for our Zen Community of Oregon outpost in Vancouver, Washington. I'm usually there on Tuesday nights.
• 0:44
  It is a scrappy little group that is learning all the service positions. And so it's lovely to be back here in this really well established and deeply rooted, well cared for place of practice, and such a sweetly familiar place. So summer is ending, or we could say that fall is beginning, and, there are signs of impermanence. Have you noticed any of those? Would you care to shout out some of them?
• 1:24
  It's getting darker earlier. Changing leaves. Changing leaves. That's happening already. Migrating birds, yes.
• 1:41
  In Klatzkenai, there are miles and miles, it seems, of swallows on the wires that are just what are they doing? They're conferencing, they're packing their little suitcases and getting their sunscreen, going to Costa Rica or something. Yeah. So we're gonna approach. We are approaching the autumnal equinox in a few weeks.
• 2:09
  And I just learned about a holiday that is celebrated in Japanese Buddhism called Ohigon. Ohigon. Yeah. I learned about it because we are still trying to name our little sangha in Vancouver. And I got all excited to call it the other shore.
• 2:30
  I mean, right? But this is a in crowd, you know, that's kind of insider baseball, that name. For anybody who's not sort of has never chanted the Heart Sutra, you know, which at the end is basically like, it's it's on the other shore. It doesn't land well is what I have learned and and have and have and have come to believe actually very, very reluctantly have have let that go. So but in the process, I learned that the word Higon, you know, is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit term paramita.
• 3:18
  And this word means paramita or perfections, and we'll talk about the list of the six paramitas. This word also means the other shore. And so Ojigon is celebrated on the equinoxes, a time that is, you know, the equal day and night, right in the middle of things, movement from one season to another. And it's also celebrated as a time to honor the ancestors. So it's a time to focus on these Paramitas and to honor the ancestors.
• 3:51
  The Paramitas being, does anybody wanna shout those out, those of you who might know them? Not a quiz or anything, it's okay. Generosity. Generosity. Patience.
• 4:02
  Patience. Ethical conduct, diligence, meditation, and wisdom. Yes. So it's also celebrated on three days on either side of the equinox. So for a whole week you can sort of land yourself in Ojigon.
• 4:26
  So maybe you can celebrate it here somehow. It'll be September 22 is the equinox, and September 24 would be the Wednesday in the shadow of it. So I kind of fell in love with the whole thing about Ojigon. And one way I was looking at Ojigon is that it seems to have these elements that represent kind of like past, present, and future. So our ancestors being our inheritance, everything that has come before now.
• 4:53
  And then presently, how what do we do with this inheritance? What we do, how that shapes our life, how that shapes our experience in our whole world. And then how taking the vows and and practicing the Paramitas shapes and cultivates what then is to come, how things then come to be. When we strengthen our intention to be of benefit, to bring benefit to others, these are the seeds that are then planted in the universe. So then this formulation led me to look at karma, which, is sometimes defined as the truth that actions have results.
• 5:40
  So all of this is kind of this just I'm still in the introduction of this talk, which is should be kind of scary. I do not mean I don't wanna talk this long, because I really wanna hear from from you. There's a lot of wisdom in this room. I just wanna set it up, you know, but I'm I'm afraid I might talk too long probably. So what I want I do wanna talk about tonight is karma and and and set up some some options for discussion there, not just about how our actions have results, but what comes before those actions.
• 6:15
  That would be our intentions. And there's action and results. And what follows those results? This is something called our dispositions or our propensities, which is a great word, I think. How do the Parmitas come in, and how can we adopt these as our motives, as our propensities?
• 6:44
  So karma is a big topic, and I do not pretend to know all the way down to the bottom. But it's one worth studying, it's one worth looking at, it's worth opening up all of our own direct experience with this, with these truths. Karma means action. And when we pay attention, we can see that what we do matters. What we do matters.
• 7:17
  We inherit the actions of our ancestors, and that's all of the ancestors, anybody who's ever lived on this planet and all of the beings, all of the beings, we inherit this world. And when we look, we can see that what they did matters. So we could just, by logic, extend that to ourselves. We could just see it if we look. And then that implies, and we can observe that, also see if it's true that we are the future ancestors.
• 7:55
  Are we not? So understanding karma, perhaps a way to understand what we do, maybe why we practice, what is the relationship there? And the question I always like to ask is how how do I wanna be? How do you wanna be? We can't know what the future will hold.
• 8:18
  But given whatever is put in front of us, how do I wanna meet this life? So maybe you've all seen the bumper sticker about karma, you know, that it's a bitch or something or karma. It's it's it's far beyond that, but there is that tendency to misunderstand it and and oversimplify it that it's very linear. If you do good things, good things will happen to you. And if you do bad things, then bad things will happen to you.
• 8:53
  But we already know, we've probably experienced that bad things do happen to good people and vice versa. And this even assumes that there are such, you know, good and bad people, which is not actually aligned with the teachings either. Or that karma has some kind of inherent justice in it. Like you must have done something really bad in a past life for this bad thing to happen to you now. There's some idea of deserving.
• 9:22
  And this isn't how karma is presented in the teachings either. There's examples even of a serial killer in the Buddhist time. His name was Angulimala. And he was named that those that that you know, a mala is a mala necklace. And angul is sort of the root it means fingers.
• 9:50
  He would murder people and cut off their fingers and make it into a necklace, this guy. And he became enlightened, or he he committed to the priesthood, to to the to being one of the Buddha's disciples when he met the Buddha. He was about to kill the Buddha. The Buddha stopped him, he was transformed. But nothing happened to him.
• 10:14
  Nothing bad happened to him as a result of all of this other than when he went on alms rounds, people jeered at him and threw stuff at him, but that was about it. So there's no sort of, like, ultimate justice in this in the teachings either. And there's a formulation too that there are kind of three parts of karma. There's the seeds, the conditions for growth, and then the fruit of karma, which is really kind of an elegant formation and one that is helpful, sometimes called the storehouse consciousness, and and that can be applied to our individual sort of storehouse of seeds, but it can also apply to our collective storehouse of seeds that given the right conditions, lots of things can emerge. So our propensities are a result of all that has happened and all that has happened to us, how we understand it, what we think, what we feel, all of our habits.
• 11:21
  These are our propensities, our seeds that are wholesome, seeds that are unwholesome. They're all stored in there wherever there is, whatever there is. It's not a place even. It's something we all can't help but share. So what happens when the conditions are right for seeds to sprout and grow?
• 11:43
  What happens when these seeds may get watered by the circumstances of the world? They may be seeds of anger based on past experience. My first retreat, my very first retreat was a, silent retreat at Brightonbush Hot Springs, so it was super chill and very easy. And, like, anytime you got uncomfortable, you could just go in the hot tub, like, highly recommend. But, you know, they have the little, you know, picnic tables for eating, and it was silent eating.
• 12:19
  I had never experienced this before. It was wonderful, and I loved it. I was, like, super into the silence. When you don't have to say all that, like, hi. I'm Lauren.
• 12:27
  I am a social worker. What do you do? Oh, no. And you live in Portland? Yeah.
• 12:30
  I live in Portland too. Yeah. It's really nice here, and food is so good. And, I mean, that's fine and lovely, but, like, ugh, what a relief. I found the thing that I I I love the silence.
• 12:42
  And so this I'm sitting in at this picnic table, this woman's sitting across from me eating her lunch, and I noticed that she was just chewing incredibly loudly, like just mouth open and just, like, really going for it. And I was becoming just more and more enraged by the minute and just like, I couldn't do anything about it. There's no talking. There's just like, here I am with this situation. And, you know, I didn't have any opportunity to act or react or anything.
• 13:19
  All I could do was just watch it. And at some point, it, like, I realized that this was happening to me because that is how my dad eats. You know, that is like what I was subjected to every day of my childhood, and it just broke. It just broke because I could see it for what it was. It was just this habit that I lived and applied to this completely innocent person in front of me, you know.
• 13:53
  So that's one way of looking at it. So I like to, you know, this this sort of three part thing or maybe the decision to do something is one thing, the action to carry it out is another, and then the result. You know, there's there's that way of of looking at it. But I like this. I'm interested in these two more stops, you know, maybe it's even a circle or something, the dispositions.
• 14:24
  They they're at the end of it. This this after the intention, after the action, what is left? After the yeah. After the intention, after the action, what is left? It's a tendency.
• 14:37
  It's a propensity. Another way to say it is the more you do a thing, the more you can do that thing. The more you do a thing, more you can do that thing. It's a disposition is a further ease to do that thing. Disposition is also a sense of self, a sense of myself as the kind of person who, well, I'm the kind of person who's not very organized or that's just how I am or I have a temper or I am sensitive or I can't stand hearing chewing noises, or I like to clean the bathroom.
• 15:18
  You know? Who who do we think we are? We we develop this sense of who we think we are even, and then that sets us right up, doesn't it, for for some kind of experience that's already framed, already shaped, already preset. So all of our actions, in other words, are preceded by a sort of doing in which our decisions are made and is this self making. Interesting.
• 15:56
  And I become familiar with the work of a neuroscientist. Her name is Lisa Feldman Barrett. Maybe you've heard about her. She has kind of gone and, like, taken a sledgehammer to the current sort of conventional wisdom about emotions. And she is very scrappy, because she has had to be.
• 16:19
  There's been a real kind of settled in conventional wisdom about emotions, and she is like, this is all mythical, what you've been saying about emotions all this time. I think that the world of emotion science is a lot of elbows and, you know, kind of trash talk actually from what I've read. So she's she's pretty, forthright about her work. And I was pretty resistant to it, frankly, initially. Nobody likes to have their beliefs challenged like that.
• 16:54
  But I've come to really notice how her work supports this way of seeing karma, that our experiences are what shape our view of the world. So she says that the brain is a prediction machine, basically, that we react not to what we see, but to what we have seen. I'll quote her a little bit, and then we'll do some examples. Your brain is stuck in a dark silent box called your skull, which is pretty metal. That's not Lisa Feldman Barrett.
• 17:29
  That's me. Day in and day out, it continually receives sense data from the outside world via your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. This data does not arrive in the form of the meaningful sights, smells, sounds, and other sensations that most of us experience. It's just a barrage of light waves, chemicals, and changes in air pressure with no inherent significance. I mean, can you see how this is kind of the heart sutra?
• 18:02
  Y'all don't do you chant the heart sutra? Okay. Yeah. That may be a stretch also, but bear with me. Faced with these ambiguous scraps of sense data, your brain must somehow figure out what to do next.
• 18:18
  This is about keeping your body safe and taking care of it. Your brain can draw on your lifetime of past experiences, things that have happened to you personally, and things that you've learned about from friends, teachers, books, videos, and other sources. In the blink of an eye, your brain reconstructs bits and pieces of past experience as your neurons pass electrochemical information back and forth in an ever shifting complex network. Your brain assembles these bits into memories to infer the meaning of the sense data and guess what to do about it. Your past experiences include not only what happened in the world around you but also what happened inside your body.
• 19:05
  So the last time I saw this, the last time I felt that, this is what happened. And then we act first and ask questions later. Personally, I would also add that we are evolved to react to certain cues. And I would as an example, you know, the source of shame is deeply embedded in our need to belong socially. Time was in human evolution that being shunned was a death sentence.
• 19:37
  And so our radar for how what does everybody think of me? Am I doing the right thing? Am I gonna be accepted? Do I belong here? Am I being left out?
• 19:49
  That is a survival mechanism, and it's hardwired, and it's not wrong or bad or shameful. It's it's what has allowed us to evolve as a species, these sensitive abilities that we have. And the pain of feeling, disconnection, or or shame, some brain scientists say that it and I don't love the sort of brain lighting up science kind of making it real, but it apparently lights up the same places as physical pain, which I think is really interesting. So that feeling when you come to a zen temple and you're not quite sure what you're supposed to do or how to be, that's really uncomfortable. Maybe you remember that.
• 20:38
  And the Buddha even told a story about, you know, walking down this the road and seeing something undulating in front of you and jumping back and realizing it's just a rope. You know, who hasn't done that? And, that's just so that we yeah. Sometimes it's wise to act first and ask questions later. Alright.
• 21:00
  So as promised, the exercises, the examples of what we're talking about here. I'm gonna show you some pictures and I'd like you to tell me what you see. Can you see this? I don't know. I know the zoomers might have trouble.
• 21:18
  Some and if you've ever seen this, I've given this talk a couple places. Maybe you've seen it. Don't give it away. But go ahead and shout out just what's your brain telling you this is? Tree.
• 21:29
  Tree. Dandelion. Dandelion. Bird. Sun.
• 21:37
  Sun. Very good. Alright. Thank you. I will tell you what they really are in a moment.
• 21:46
  How about this? Faucet. Faucet. A pig's tail. A pig's tail.
• 21:55
  Yeah. There's some agreement in there. Anything? A Yes. Worm.
• 22:00
  Fantastic. Thank you. Last one. Volcano. Volcano.
• 22:14
  Temple. Nuclear cooling tower. Nuclear cooling tower. See if you lived in Illinois, I bet you wouldn't say that, but if you've driven past, you know, wherever that was, the Trojan thing before it got blown up, sure enough, it looked like that. Or wherever else you may have seen one of those.
• 22:33
  Okay. So I'm about to tell you what this is. And once I tell you you will not be able to unsee it and that is your brain coalescing around something and all that you've had before is your history of something like this shape up until now and after I tell you it will be forever changed. Are you ready? This is a spider standing on one leg.
• 23:08
  Of course it is. And this is a submarine going over a waterfall. And this is the view from a skier about to go down a ramp into an adoring crowd of spectators. Yeah. Shall we check and see if we're forever changed?
• 23:46
  I think we are. Yeah. Of course, that's a spider. Duh. So what Lisa Feldman Barrett says is the lines and blobs haven't changed.
• 24:01
  You have. So when the conditions come together, to water some of these seeds that are already there, they ripen and our propensities emerged to be strengthened. We tend to assume that we see true objective reality, through the senses and that our mind are and we are responding to this reality. But in fact, it seems like we are really just perceiving a world that is determined by our habits of emotion, perception, and thought, held in this storehouse of consciousness and limited by our experiences. Maybe you are aware that the same piece of news can bring up completely different responses and different people.
• 24:54
  Absolutely. Different people have different reactions to snow, to rain, to sun, to heat, to cold, to flowers. We are all living in different worlds. But there is freedom. There is freedom.
• 25:11
  What if we cultivated specific seeds in our storehouse consciousness? What if we planted seeds of generosity, ethical conduct, diligence, patience, meditation, and wisdom? Can we entrain our motives and shift our propensities in this direction? So I noticed, and I'll I'll just share one more example before I close here and open up the space here. I was visiting my mom last week.
• 25:52
  She's 91, and she still lives in her home, and that's when I'm hoping to help her look at different decisions. She's still going up and down these steep stairs to the basement and doing her laundry. And so my mind visits these visions upon me, you know, of of disaster and my body reacts in real time and I feel this sense of urgency and that I'm compelled to call her and implore implore her one more time to make other arrangements for laundry. My, you know, my best problem solving efforts, is my go to, that they have been thwarted. And maybe in just my telling of this, your problem solving mind has become activated too, or maybe your feelings or thoughts or things, you can notice that we can get hijacked by this process.
• 26:43
  I certainly can, even if it's my mom. So I can take actions that may be appropriate need to be taken. And then what can I do after that? I need to let it go. I need to acknowledge that the karma of this moment, this situation is much bigger than me.
• 27:00
  And whenever I want her, whenever I want her, or whenever I want anyone else to be different than they are, I suffer. And sometimes I incite suffering in her too. I'm sure she doesn't want me to be badgering her about this either. Can I instead be generous to her? I have said my peace and can I be generous, making room for her own freedom and her own self determination?
• 27:29
  Can I just keep doing my diligent best to be in touch with her, to make more contact with her without my agenda? Can I be patient with her? Someone who has lived in her house for fifty years and does not wanna move. How will being guided by the Paramitas change the way that I even perceive this situation? So the more you do a thing, the more you can do that thing.
• 27:58
  That's meditation even too. We have to practice doing the thing, whatever that is. What do you wanna practice? How do you wanna be? What kind of ancestor will you be?
• 28:17
  Thank you for listening to the Zen Community of Oregon podcast, and thank you for your practice. New episodes air every week. Please consider making a donation at zendest dot org. Your support supports us.