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The 8 Wordly Concerns - Jogen Salzeberg, Sensei · 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.
• 0:26
  Jogen: So it's very good to be here with you tonight. Thank you for coming. I hope it is warm enough in here for you and know that you can always bundle up. Nobody will mind. I'm going to the Zendo.
• 0:40
  Let me bring my blanket and scarf and whatever else you need. I like requests for talk topics, and I received one from Eden, and her email said, Fame, the desire to alter history to be known for causing great change, and quote, sacrificing one's life to a cause. And what was it, like the best French toast in Portland or Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay.
• 1:16
  So I thought I would start by presenting what is an kind of central or core Buddhist teaching that I don't know if you're familiar with. This one is called the Eight Worldly Concerns. Sometimes it's presented as the eight worldly winds, but I like the eight worldly concerns. And like a lot of teachings of the dharma, we can hear them with our perfectionist, or we can hear them with our inner critic, and then all of a sudden we don't get anything from the teaching because we go, Well, I can't do that. Or we feel like Buddha is judging us, and we're like, Well, forget you.
• 2:12
  And we start arguing with the teaching, and then its value actually is lost. Because all of the teachings, I believe, are something we're invited to grow into. It's not tomorrow or even five years from now that we have to fully embody them. They're all invitations in some way to become more free or to become more genuine. So the eight worldly concerns.
• 2:43
  Now, what these are is these are four pairs of seeming opposites that snag us, diminish us, make us act in ways that are less than dignified, make us tight often because we want one side and we don't want the other. That's the whole issue here. We want this part of it, but we don't want that part. In a way, it's saying that, let's say, life is a whole, it's a big pie, and human beings make themselves less free because they say, I like the pie of life, but only the bottom half, please. So these are, first of all, pleasure and displeasure, right?
• 3:36
  So wanting only to feel good, to experience the good, to have the good come toward us in people, sensation, in everything, and then wanting to avoid or not have to experience any of the stuff of life that instinctually nobody likes, like sickness, like being disrespected, like a cold, wintery, cloudy week. I mean, whatever's displeasurable, you know, because you don't like it and instinctively you want to get away from it. Right? So pleasure and displeasure creates attention if we decide, I only want this side, don't want that side, it's not going to work. But even trying to make that work tightens us up big time.
• 4:36
  Then loss and gain, right? So loss and gain in the broadest sense, it's continually in this life, things are going away that we don't want to go away, continually, from different moods that we love, we feel really good, it's going to slip away. People are going to change. Things we had are going to no longer be something we have, right? Just a constant fact and there's almost nothing that's excused from that.
• 5:14
  So if we're caught in the eight worldly concerns, we really try to organize our life so we don't lose what we don't want to lose. We insist on always being excited or inspired or warm or whatever because we are losing those things, so we chase them. And then the other side of that is you could be fixated on gain, on always getting, getting, getting, getting, getting. Like, I know, like, this would be a snag for me. I love knowing there's a tape in the mail.
• 5:53
  I order cassette tapes. I'm Gen X. Or I love knowing there's a book in the mail. That's a little bit getting caught on gain, right? Oh, there's I'm going to get something, that hit of get.
• 6:11
  Then there's praise and blame. And easy to give up stuff, actually, I think, spiritually. A lot harder to work with things like this. So this pair of worldly concerns is we want people to say good things about us when we're there and when we're not there. We want the people we respect and love to only have good things said about them when we're there and not there.
• 6:41
  And we might do lots of things that the wisdom in us would feel like we kind of violated our integrity. We were inauthentic in order to, the old phrase is curry favor. Well, what can I do to kind of squeeze a compliment out of somebody? Do I look bad today? No.
• 7:05
  Like, really? Like, how does my hair look today? Really? Whatever we our style of doing that. And then blame, so we go after praise and we do all kinds of things to squeeze it out of people.
• 7:21
  And then blame is, oh, no. We don't want anyone to reflect our faults to us. And we definitely, even if we did something wrong, we really hope nobody noticed that we did it. And, think about the kind of way you can get nodded up over that if you try to hide something that actually you're responsible for. That one of the tensions here is that it's not possible to be someone who always does the right thing, always says the right thing.
• 7:53
  Especially if you actually engage with people, you sometimes say something stupid, you hurt someone's feelings. You make an off color joke, you forget to do the thing that it's actually your responsibility to do. Right? And somebody notices. Part of life.
• 8:13
  But we can come really tight trying to avoid ever being blamed and only getting praise. It doesn't work. You can't do it. Then the second or the last pair that's related is fame and infamy. And this is the French toast thing with Eden.
• 8:34
  Now, fame and infamy, this was before the media. So I don't know how famous you actually could be in India two thousand five hundred years ago or China. I guess you could write such a great poem or be such a renowned teacher that some people would remember you for generations. But there was no celebrity culture, and yet it was still a big problem. So fame is at its core wanting to be positively known, right?
• 9:08
  Wanting to have a reputation that transcends your immediate situation. Not only should you be good at something, but people need to know that you're good at that thing. Not only should you accomplish whatever craft, art, discipline, profession, not only should you raise your kids really well, but people need to know that you were a badass dad or whatever it is. On a more subtle level, it's, looking for the affirmation that we exist at all. This is something that you can kind of begin working with, not kind of, you can begin working with in meditation retreats, for example, where we're not talking to each other.
• 10:00
  And for example, like at Great Vow, you're not even supposed to look at people in the eye. And one of the functions of that is you can see, oh, I'm always trying to have my existence validated. I need other people to reflect that I exist. And I want to put aside healthy communities and all of the good stuff about affirming each other's beautiful existence. That's true.
• 10:27
  And there's some other way in which we can get really hooked on being known. And then the other side is infamy. We don't like facing our cosmic significance? What is it? If I don't get the affirmation that I am special in some way, what do I have to experience in myself?
• 11:05
  Again, I'm not telling you go home and like start ignoring your boyfriend so he can like really face that he's attached to your attention. Don't. Nobody do the Like, don't practice the dharma on your partner. But for you, you might check it out. What happens when she ignores you?
• 11:27
  What happens when she's not like, Babe, that was an amazing dinner. You're the best. Okay. So the eight worldly wins, or eight worldly concerns, they're called wins. The idea is that life is full of this weather.
• 11:42
  And further, as Shoto Harada Roshi would say, Zen practice is a means of not being buffeted around by the eight worldly winds, having our own center. I think even more than the Eightfold Path, this is a very helpful template to think about, well, what does it mean to practice as at least to practice as a Buddhist? It's working with these. It's a life of not seeking them or avoiding them. Pleasure's gonna come.
• 12:11
  Compliments are gonna come. People are gonna notice the things you do. You are gonna get some good stuff, and stuff's gonna hurt. You're gonna lose things that you worked hard for. People are not gonna think highly of everything you do even when you did your best.
• 12:27
  And in some way, is so wrapped up in themselves, they don't know anyone else exists. These are also facts of life. A hardcore yogi attitude, and I bring this in just for reference to the tradition. For example, there's a tradition in Tibetan Buddhism called the they're the Kadampas, and the Kadampas was like these hardcore yogis. They were like the most metal yogis, and their aspiration was to go into a cave with enough food that people would forget they even existed altogether and just meditated till they died.
• 13:11
  Never take a student. If someone comes to your cave to teach, like really make them suffer to make sure they really want it, Never avoid any hardship so you would not be able to accumulate food or clothing, like super metal dharma. And for some people, that might be good medicine because their ego really needs strong medicine. But the idea of the hardcore yogi, and maybe, there's a time in our life when we try this out, is you renounce grasping at one of these or avoiding the other. In other words, you kind of lean right into pain, for example.
• 13:55
  Some way that you find there's discomfort in your life, you say, I'm going just experience this discomfort. I'm not going to turn the heat on today. I'm not going to ask my neighbor to be quiet. I'm not going to shift my posture. I'm I'm not going to avoid displeasure or whatever.
• 14:16
  You could try that out. Or, I did this great thing. When I first moved to the monastery, was definitely trying to impress people. And on one of the first meals, I spilled a giant bowl of yogurt all over the place when I was supposed to be mindful. And so I lost face right away and I had to laugh at myself.
• 14:36
  I was I was red with embarrassment, but I also laughed. And then after that, like everything else, the scale was was a lot less. Now, fame, also to reference a tradition in addressing monastics, dougen zenji would tell them repeatedly to avoid fame or seeking fame as if it was a demon coming to steal one's life force. That for a serious practitioner, the desire to be known, and to be known positively and to gather more attention, how many people listen to my podcast? How many people are signing up for my retreats?
• 15:28
  Can I maximize that? How can I maximize that? Not coming from, oh, I really wanna invite people in, but I should be known. He was saying there's nothing that will corrode your spiritual practice faster than actually getting famous. He recognized that the desire to be famous is a human thing, so he was kind of wagging his finger.
• 15:53
  But he was saying that if you become famous, it's highly likely that your practice will suffer if you're not really careful. And that's a kind of interesting thing. You could probably do some kind of translation of that. If people knew you were a badass dad, and then you had, I don't know, a thousand followers on Instagram for like cool dad p d x, and people were giving you a thumb up every time you posed with your kid in front of Hot Lips Pizza or whatever you do in Portland, then what would happen to you? Well, maybe you wouldn't genuinely be showing up as a dad, but you'd be thinking about, Well, people are going to see this, so what should I do now?
• 16:38
  Right? It becomes all about optics. One starts pretending a little bit. One starts contriving a little bit. The other thing about fame, and I hope that any of you, if you have the right intention, become really known for anything you accomplish.
• 17:01
  Right? And that you're able to work with it, skillfully because it's possible. But the other thing about fame, notoriety is notoriety can it be positive? Yeah. There's positive notoriety.
• 17:17
  It's not just bad. Okay. The other thing is that if one feels one is special, it becomes really poisonous to self and other. If all of a sudden, because of the recognition we're getting, we think, Oh, I must kind of be better than other people. Or one of my teachers was saying, People who sometimes get really high salaries start feeling this way.
• 17:45
  They think, Oh, there are people in this world who only make 50 k and I, I make $120,000. Well, that must mean I am especially special. And we start thinking, somehow there's fundamentally different about me as a human being. I'm a little better. I got a little better bits.
• 18:09
  It's not my karmic circumstances. It's not social privilege. It's not I happen to line up with the right circumstances at the right time. I believe in luck. I don't know how many Buddhists believe in luck, but I believe in luck.
• 18:25
  It's, I got some special bits. That's why this is happening to me. It's poisonous, right? Because the ego, which doesn't exist but we think it does, gets stronger. And then it's harder for us to experience our true nature.
• 18:47
  So my, anytime I'm getting any praise around my teacher, he makes a point of saying, Jogan's really inadequate. Sometimes I look at him, and I'm like, okay, thank you. Thank you. I need that. So, fame, the desire to alter history, right?
• 19:16
  What is that? Let's explore that a little bit. First of all, can we decide or intend to be someone who in hindsight will be seen as an alterer of history? Think about that. Think of the famous people.
• 19:35
  Do they think I want to be famous? I don't actually know anybody who's famous. I I don't I don't know. Did Taylor Swift think, I'm gonna make music and be all hot so that I can be famous? Yes.
• 19:52
  Yes. Okay. Well, there you go. There you go. But for the rest of us, but for the rest of us, if we get famous, it probably just kind of happens.
• 20:02
  People just do their thing with their whole heart and somehow conditions are such that recognition happens. It just happens. Very few people can decide to do that. It's not so easy to contrive. I remember, well, I used to be in session meditation retreat.
• 20:25
  And this in the first few years, I would have these fantasies that I was getting interviewed by med excuse me, by music magazines because I was a I was an electronic music producer. It would come up and they'd be like, Adam, we just want to know your top five records because you have such exquisite taste in music. And I would say, Well, thank you for noticing that. And I knew the five records I would tell them, but then I was like, Oh, no. Maybe I should tell them Ij Bam Yasi by Can because that would make me look really cool to these kind of people.
• 21:02
  And I would see all this contrivance in my mind. I think this desire lives in us. But what would we get? So say, Eden makes the best French toast in the Pacific Northwest. What would you get from being famous?
• 21:24
  What is the actual benefit of fame? Now, for ordinary people, there are three things that people want to get, and sometimes it works. If they're famous, they get money, they get sexual power, and they get people regarding us highly. And instinctually, almost all human beings want those three things. They want money, They want people to respect them, and they want sexual power.
• 21:54
  And maybe safety is in there somehow. And those things appeal to our instinctual nature. There's hardly any person if you were like, Okay, I'm a genie, and I can just make this happen, we won't tell anybody. Nobody in this room, maybe one person in this room would say, no, thanks. I don't want lots of money, respect, or sexual power.
• 22:18
  I'll just stay me. But wisdom can see that those things are lined with spiritual danger. Only wisdom can really see that, that, Oh, there's problem in having a lot of resources comes with problems. Or, A lot of problems come with being really attractive to people. Or, actually, being respected is a double edged sword, right?
• 22:51
  Having a lot of influence. Now, are actually, you could probably name a number of them, lots of people who have a lot of influence and use it really well. There are dharma teachers who have lots of influence and use it well. There are many people, philanthropists in this world. Some of them are well known.
• 23:16
  They have lots of money and they are really generous. Not everybody enough succumbs to these instincts. Interestingly, people think the Buddha just told everybody, like, Give it all up, throw your stuff in a pond, and go live in a hut. But actually, no. To people who had wealth, and maybe the Buddha could see that they didn't have nunishness in them, he would never tell them to not be wealthy.
• 23:49
  He would never criticize the wealthy. He would never say, This is unvirtuous. He would just say, Think about how to be generous. You have this power. How can you use it?
• 24:01
  He never said, don't have power. There's actually analogous concept in Vadriyana or Tantra. Right? It's called magnetizing. Is that right?
• 24:15
  Magnetize. And magnetize is if someone has charisma or they're sexy or whatever and they're in the dharma, use that stuff. Have good internal boundaries, but if people are attracted to your energy, great. Let that serve. You don't have to be afraid of it.
• 24:40
  So, you know, talking about these things often can so easily sound like it's going to be either or for somebody, but I think everything is kind of mixed. If fame, we there's going to be a little bit of, Oh, that's We get power like, Oh, yeah, that's not so good, but then, Oh, yeah, this is good. There's a Zen saying that dragons and snakes swim together. So dragons are good in dharma, in East Asian Buddhism. It's not like slay the dragon, and snakes were not so good.
• 25:19
  Kind of we both are a dragon and a snake. It depends on the circumstance. It depends on how wakeful we are, how in touch with our bodhichitta, our desire benefit to others we are in any given moment, how we'll use different forms of power. What would be wrong with causing change and not being known for it? Or why not that?
• 25:53
  So it is entirely possible, I think, that tomorrow someone cures cancer and somehow they get everyone around them to agree, Don't put my name on this. Or someone, I don't know, negotiates a peace treaty. Right? Someone gets president Trump to retire. They say, I have an island I'll give you.
• 26:19
  It's really good. Forget Greenland. This person retires, they would give them the peace prize, but they say, Actually, I don't want to be known for it. Entirely possible. There's a practice in Zen temples called secret virtue that I think is really cool.
• 26:37
  And secret virtue is you generally, you would get up in the middle of the night and you would do stuff for other people and you're only on like four hours of sleep, so that's a big deal. You do stuff for other people and you make sure they don't know that you did it. You get up and you make pancakes for everybody and they're sort of sitting when the cook comes in like, Oh, pancakes. And you just are back in your bed so that nobody can give the credit to you. You kind of cover your tracks.
• 27:07
  What would be wrong with doing what we like fulfilling the potentials in life that we want to fulfill, but not having any optics around it? Maybe that would be actually even more satisfying. Now, should talk about how do you work with this? So if you have this desire strongly, some kind of desire for fame or to avoid infamy, what can you do? One thing I think is interesting and a helpful contemplation is to investigate, what does it mean to be known?
• 27:48
  What is the knowing of you by others? Is that a thought they hold in their mind? But how long does that thought last in their mind? Think of somebody you respect. Okay.
• 28:05
  So, you had a thought, but now it's gone. How long does that last? And even someone who's been really important to you in your life, how often are you present with that? People someone cured polio. That's amazing.
• 28:26
  Who in this room knows their name? That's like the most amazing thing ever. Someone you do? What who's what's the name? Jonas Salt.
• 28:34
  Say it again? Jonas Salt. Thank you, Jonas. That's amazing because polio sucks, but Jonas cured it. I'm really impressed, Kevin.
• 28:49
  Truly. Oh, I'm really impressed. So you reflect on what would that mean to be famous anyway? Like, I mean, some I I I poo poo social media too much, but like someone people giving a thumb up to your, like, cool thing you did, what does that really mean to you? What does that really mean to them?
• 29:15
  People say stuff, people think stuff. What is being known? If we really examine it, its compellingness might diminish. And then the other thing I think is helpful is, when we have one of these desires, and if it's strong and persistent, tease out what else is there. Because again, we might have this sense that I need to be famous or that's the image.
• 29:53
  I need to be interviewed by Spin Magazine. And what's really embedded in that is I I just have this need to put out what's in my heart into the world. And the, you know, the self image kinda grabs a hold of that and adds its little extra thing. Right? Or, I have a competency and that needs to be manifested in the world.
• 30:20
  Right? And the symbol in the mind of manifesting that competency is I'm famous. Other people reflect to me my worth. But at the heart of it, that's not it maybe. At the heart of it is I have something I can contribute.
• 30:38
  Right? I want to contribute that to the maximum degree. So I think the last thing that Eden said was sacrificing one's life to a cause. And was there quotes? I think there was quotes around it.
• 30:55
  No. There was. Okay. Sacrificing one's life to a cause. I mean, that's beautiful if it's genuine.
• 31:08
  Right? And what if the overblown personal emphasis is removed? Then what remains in the desire? Join with some kind of movement. Or to join a lineage of art or activism or dharma, to make one's life an offering.
• 31:31
  And I think sacrifice is an interesting word because it means the act of making sacred. So we make things sacred by everything it takes to prioritize that thing. It takes a lot to prioritize anything in this time because there are so many seeming options. So, if you become famous, may you use it beautifully. If nobody cares what you do, may you or if nobody reflects that what you did with your life was awesome, may you not believe that that means that's true.
• 32:20
  Right? So, let me repeat the eight worldly concerns in case this is something you'd like to reflect on. Pleasure and displeasure, loss and gain, praise and blame, fame and infamy. Those are the eight worldly concerns.
• 32:48
  Jomon: 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.org. Your support supports us.