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Give Life to Life - Hogen Roshi · Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha. So I I spent probably five to seven years learning how to set full lotus. And I set full lotus for a good forty years. Forty forty five years. And now my legs are swollen because of the other stuff I'm going through and I can't sit cross legged, so well.
• 0:42
  So you know, stuff happens. There's just a natural evolution to things. So so part of what, I'm sitting in a chair now and maybe I will forever, I don't know. We'll see. Everything evolves.
• 1:00
  Now the first noble truth is what? First noble truth. Friction. Problems, challenges, difficulties. And you have difficulties, problems, challenge, and friction.
• 1:18
  In the beginning, ask Sabina, or in the middle, ask any of you, or in the end, ask me. You know, that is the nature of things. Are always challenges and the challenges are fundamentally, I think things should go differently than they are. I think the world should function according to my opinions is the number one place of friction. So we're doing this thing called the Tadha Sutta right now, the Sutra on Craving, and and it basically starts off with thinking thinking I am.
• 1:58
  So what does that mean? Thinking I am. Thinking I am separate. It's my life and my life is much more important than your life. My life is definitely the the way to go.
• 2:12
  It is the antithesis of loving kindness. Loving kindness is everybody else's life, is at least equal to mine. Everybody else's life is just as valuable if you just look at just the numbers, know, I've got I, me, and my little n of one, and we've got everybody else an n of 8,000,000,000, eight and a half billion. So when we have this, the Tanah Sutta says, points out, it's not a dogma, just points out. It says, the more we are self centered, the more we are I, me, and my, the more challenges, the more difficulty the world has.
• 3:02
  And it doesn't say it in the sutra, but the more loving and kind we are, the fewer problems we have. Simple as that. And what is love? In love, the foundation of love is of course acceptance. You can't love something and say, I wish you would get better.
• 3:24
  You know, I love you if you would only grow under your foot. So we have this particular sutra says, okay, we are abandoning the the stance of love, we are abandoning the stance of of satisfaction, appreciation, generosity, reverence for everybody around us and saying, nope, I, me and mine, it's me. And how do we do that? We we stop paying attention to reality. The reality is, you know, we see 360 degrees.
• 4:08
  The reality is that we meeting people all day long and they're all constantly flexible and changing in different relationships. And we ignore that and we come back and say, oh, who I am is not everything I see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and experience, but it's my idea of who I am. My idea, my small minded idea. And of course, it's obvious that that's not the case when we look at at perception. We've said over and over again, you look at the eye, you look at seeing, everything you see is processed right here, everything you hear is processed right here, everything you feel is processed right here.
• 4:52
  So everything out there is really actually right here. That's not that's not philosophy. And the reason we have such a difficult time with it is we have such fixed views, the fixed view of I am, I, me, and my. We have a fixed view. And the more we have that fixed view, the less we're actually able to recognize reality.
• 5:19
  Oh, it's all my life. Oh, it's all me. And the less, the more constricted contracted our view of our world becomes. The Tadha Sutra, the craving, the weaver, the astaire, the creeper that chokes and engulfs the world, tangles this world like a ball of thread, stamps it down like matted rushes and beads, blocking the way to wisdom and liberation. I'm here.
• 5:55
  I am this. I'm that. I'm bad. I'm good. I'm the best.
• 5:59
  I am, I am, I am, I am, I am, I I I am, I am. Often talk about the inclusive nature of mind. We talk about diversity, inclusivity, and diversity, equanimity, equality, and inclusivity. But when we start thinking about I, me, and my, we immediately say, no. Diversity doesn't matter so much, it's my life that matters more.
• 6:33
  We're not all equal, we're not all in the same boat. My life is more equal than yours, and my mind is not inclusive. Everybody I see is part of my life. Instead, shrink down to, oh, just just who I think I am. So one of the things that we start off with as as children, as you know, we have a conceptual understanding.
• 6:56
  We have to we have to learn how to separate things. We have to learn how to say, you know, this is the left, that's the right, this is the doorway, that's the wall, this is my stuff, these are my clothes, those are your clothes. That's an appropriate evolutionary, differentiation. But then we begin to concretize that into I, me, my. We begin to think, I'm a thing.
• 7:21
  I'm a this. You know, it is true, you know, I'm an old Caucasian guy. One slice of the truth, but there are innumerable other slices of truth. Each of us can say the same thing. You know, I mean, I'm I'm this particular person with this particular education, this particular gender, with this particular and yet, there are also so many other dimensions to who we are.
• 7:52
  Practice is about can I calm down? Can I begin to let go of my all my fixed ideas about how the world and I are? How can I let go of all these, you know, I ams? And actually pay attention to the nature of reality. Now the nature of reality, it is amazing that we are here, that we have these hands, that we have feet, that we can breathe.
• 8:20
  I mean, nobody What in the world why should we expect that we're able to breathe? Sometimes I'm not able to breathe. Why should we expect that we have people treat us the way we want? Why should we expect that we're able to walk? Why should we expect?
• 8:39
  It's a gift. It's a miracle. It's a miracle when things come forward. Everything comes out of the great mystery. Everything comes out of the mystery.
• 8:49
  Everything is a gift. Everything is a gift. So we practice to begin to calm down, to see through our fixed, small, narrow minded views, and to begin to see everything is a gift. Everything is a gift. Everything is a gift.
• 9:06
  And the nature of that gift is love. The nature of that gift is kindness. Everything. There is nothing that's not a gift. Nothing that's not a gift.
• 9:19
  Somebody walking in the door is a gift. Hallelujah. So the Tanha Sutta, you know, as soon as we have that fundamental separation in the in the in Buddhism, we talk about the 12 linked chain of co condition origination. And the very first step is the is the it's the chain of events that lead to suffering, that lead to to bondage, that lead to to to dismay, despair. The very first link in that chain is separation.
• 10:01
  I am more special than you. I am more deserving of love than you. I should love myself more than you. Now of course, the the the flavor of of reality is of course, we're we have different relationships. We have different responses to everybody and everything.
• 10:21
  But the core feeling, it's a miracle. It's a miracle. I can still breathe. It's a miracle. I have this life.
• 10:29
  It's a miracle. Where our thoughts come from? It's a miracle. That core truth is loving kindness. It's a gift.
• 10:37
  It's offering over and over again. And so then some crisis comes along and the winds of change sweep everything away. It's a gift. It's a gift. And something in common which we hadn't expected, it's a gift.
• 10:55
  And somebody we love leaves, it's a gift. And somebody we didn't even know we love, she goes up, it's a gift. And so our practice is how can we take all these gifts, see them as gifts, see them as miracles, and turn our functioning into wisdom. So it may be that everything is a gift, but that doesn't help us with our functioning so much. We have to be able to turn the gifts that we have been given, the unique individual gifts, the prejudices, the the failures, the inadequacies, we have to turn all those gifts into wisdom.
• 11:39
  And it is the turning into wisdom is how we we give life to the many challenges. That turning into wisdom means that first off, we have to be able to accept something. We have to be able to see into it. It's impermanent. It's made up of many parts.
• 11:57
  We have to be able to expand our awareness that it is There's lots of things that are surrounding everything that comes towards us. It is one view. We have to be able to see, okay, there are many different views. We have to know our own heart. And then out of the clarity of all of that, and that's not a cognitive thing, that's an emotional visceral thing.
• 12:21
  Out of Then out of the clarity of all that comes a response. And we turn our challenges into wisdom by this this way, attention, acceptance, enlarging, seeing through, etcetera. All that is the a response. The Tanha Sutta, the sutra on craving, if we look carefully at how things come into being, You will notice nothing comes into being without some kind of futuring, some kind of grasping or craving. You have to look at this very carefully.
• 13:23
  In this boundless world, with a thousand million data points floating into our our eyes, our ears, into our our senses. We shape the world we live in by what our particular constellation of causes and conditions grasps. How we take the the infinite number of percepts that are coming in and how we shape the percepts that are being. We shape them into our particular unique world. And we can say that at a very very deep level, it is it is that that, futuring, that futuring, that future becoming is what the world is made of.
• 14:22
  That the percepts themselves have no particular order until we we they come into us and we somehow say, I want this, I want that, I want to see this, I want to see that, according to our particular karma. So what I'm noticing tonight is I'm sort of babbling. I've got a little fever, but this is such a such an important important point that if we slow the mind down, if we really actually stop the obsessive othering and look directly, look directly, right, at the core of our own heart, we can see this crystalline gift that is our life. And when we see our life as a crystalline gift, then the the mandate becomes, can I share that gift? Can I offer that gift?
• 15:30
  Can I be of service with that gift? Can I infuse my life, whole world with this particular gift that happens to be beating right here in this heart, in this place? So my my hope personally is that that I can see it all the phenomena is just phenomena. Transient is transient. It's like like a dream.
• 16:01
  And in the midst of that, can I have a genuineness and a heart connection that really gives life to life? And that's my wish for all of us is that we can give life to life. And the the mundane way of doing that is generosity and love. Just generosity. So forget all this other stuff I talked about.
• 16:24
  Just be kind. Just be kind. Just be kind.
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: 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 zendesk.org. Your support supports us.