The talk you're about to hear is by Zen teacher, Sensei Amala Wrightson.
Today is the 18th of April 2023. And this evening, we're going to take a little bit of time to look at why we celebrate Earth Day. It's coming up this Sunday morning. And people may wonder why we have this this Earth Day ceremony and day of action. Suddenly, Earth Day is not part of any Buddhist canon that I know about. But it is, I think, meaningful for us to mark mark this day.
Earth Day began. In 1970, when people were starting to become more aware of the destruction and pollution that was happening to here on earth and a water. Just to take one striking example. In 1969, a river in Ohio caught fire due to the chemicals that were in it at the time. It's since been cleaned up. But this was this was a time when there was a real awakening of people's awareness of these things - they were starting to impinge on people's sense.
So first, they began and it continues to be a time for raising awareness. Or you could even say, of an act of remembrance. Mindful the word for mind, non mindfulness Sati is actually closer to it. The original etymology of it is, is recollection or remembering. And our planet is certainly in a process of being dismembered. And we she needs us to remember her. The fates of human activity on on our biosphere had become so intense that a new geological era has been named after the time we live in the Anthropocene. There are different opinions about when it actually started. But the point is that human human actions can now be read in the rocks, is quite, quite extraordinary. And it's how we're having that much of a fear was somebody puts this as the human human mind has the power to heat the atmosphere. That is heating the atmosphere.
Our planet needs to be recalled, especially by those of us who are one way or another caught up in the the what we could call the dominant paradigm of an industrial consumerism. It's actually pretty hard to avoid being caught up in one way or another. But we do know that the big corporations and the very rich are particularly implicated in this and have to be woken up to that fetch and continue to be woken up. This this industrial consumerism is is based on this idea of exploitation of nature's resources, and including her animals, and often people as well. And the idea the sort of guiding principle behind it is to externalize the costs of whatever we make as much as possible. So that we can make bigger profits on what we sell, and the whatever we make is to be sold and consumed. So that we can keep expanding our wealth. And this is a material wealth of comfort and ease and entertainment and so forth. So focused is this paradigm on growth that it can hardly even pronounce the word recession has to say instead shows find Mu Using negative growth to be avoided at all costs is this notion of shrinkage. And of course, it is very painful. recessions are very painful for many people. And yet, and yet, we do have to find a way to reduce consumption. We, as people have pointed out many times, we can't keep growing, we've only got this one planet.
So we have three elements in our Earth Day. The first one is setting. The second one is chanting and prostrations. And the third one is work. And we can say that these three elements cover mind, speech and body. And the first one is, is probably the most important setting. When we sit, we pay attention to the mind the body mind. And we have this opportunity to dissolve mistaken views about herself and what we deem other, including the environment. Try to avoid using this word environment because it is so bland and abstract. It kind of epitomizes this objectification we have the earth that we undertake so much of the time, that the the one of our deeply held deeply mistaken views is that the environment is out there. It's it's dead matter. But if we said if we pay attention, if we steal the mind, then we can begin to see that we are the earth and that we hurt sometimes the earlier experiences we have or are the sudden non separation from something right in front of us the sunlight on the ground or autumn leaves falling or sparrows chirping. But we are equally long with these things, the drought in Somalia or the war in Ukraine. And to face these zones of of our suffering, we really are also called upon, we'd need to touch on our deepest inner resources so that we can really open up to the truth of what is going on. So want to explore a little bit through some a passage. Some of the reasons why sitting is not just sort of a nice thing to have, but actually an urgent task for us all. And I'd like to read a little bit from a book we've dipped into already once and another teisho It's called Zen and the Art of saving the planet. And its authors is tick not Han, but actually it's a it's a compilation of tick nuts, hands teachings from other places, plus, reworking of some of his teachings by his students. It was published quite recently and certainly after talking about how ahead his major stroke is a little bit in the back about the process of collecting the book material
so there was a kind of a core team of editors who work together with Sister true dedication and she seems to be the main other writer in the book
It was took not Han had his stroke in 2014. And they say in the in the this passage at the back. This book is the fruit of a diverse and vibrant spiritual community working together to bring today's rich body of teachings into print. Since his stroke in 2014, tea has been a warrior, a silent sage and a boundless source of love, trust and support as we continue his work. So, this is a sort of bringing together of historical his teachings around grappling with human predicament, and in the in this day and age here now.
So in this in this
early on in the book
talking about, about our practice about sitting. Even if we want to help the planet and work for justice, human rights and peace, we name may not be able to contribute anything, if we haven't yet been able to fulfill our most basic needs. Our deepest need is not only to have food, to eat, a house to live in, and a partner to love. I've seen many people who have all these things, and yet they continue to suffer deeply. Who those who are powerful or famous, still suffer deeply. We need something more than these material things. We need love, we need understanding. We also need peace, some deep peace inside. Without that we lost. Once we have peace, we can we are clear enough and calm enough to see the way forward. To have peace inside is a very basic need. Without it, you can't really do anything to help others. And so we all need peace, understanding and love. But it seems these things are very rare. You can't get them in a supermarket, you can't get them online. The question is, how can I myself create the energy of peace, of understanding and of love. Meditation is for this. It's a very urgent task. We can learn how to cultivate in any situation, a feeling of peace, understanding and compassion. So this this is really why sitting is the first element of our of our Earth Day celebration. To you could say lay lay a kind of groundwork, the foundation that will enable us to really open to truly remember the Earth. Maybe some sense here, it's dismemberment. Love starts with observing body and mind. All of us have some kind of suffering some pain in our body and in our mind. And so love is needed right away. deep love deep acceptance. Empathy, we call it different things. But it all has to do with embracing gently the situation reality that we're experiencing in our body mind.
There may be suffering in the body or in the mind, perhaps a block of suffering that has been there for a very long time. Whether it has been transmitted to us by our parents and ancestors were accumulated in our lifetime. We have to be able to recognize our suffering and learn how to transform it so we don't transmit it to future generations. CG young great psychologist said that if we could just avoid repeating the mistakes of our parents that will be a huge achievement
and the way the way we we avoid that repeating mistakes of our parents is by learning from our suffering. And, and to Nhat Hanh here says that there's always something we can do to transform our suffering into joy, and happiness. Love. It is only by having the courage to encounter our own suffering, that we can generate the clarity and compassion, we need to serve the world. And probably the number one thing that we generate when we really learn from our suffering, when we face it and accept it is we develop compassion for others, and what they might be going on what might be going on inside them. There's a there's a quote about this, sometimes attributed wrongly to Plato, everybody, you might be kind because everybody you meet is fighting a hard battle.
A yogi, a practitioner, is an artist who knows how to handle their fear, and other kinds of painful feeling or emotion. They do not feel they are a victim, because they know there is something they can do. You listen to the suffering, and you get in touch with it, breathe in and out deeply to see why am I suffering? Where has it come from? Your suffering, your fear may reflect the suffering of your parents, your ancestors and the planet. It also contains the suffering of your time, your community, your society, your nation. It usually feels pretty personal as software as suffering, but it also has this other element to it. This, we could call it our collective karma. And we can help to lighten the burden if we if we don't take it so personally.
It's very important not to cover it up with music, movies or computer games, to have the courage to go home to yourself to recognize and hold the suffering inside and look deeply into it may be the most important thing you can do as a meditator and everybody knows that. This is one of the things that that perhaps we have why we have resistance to go into the mat is because we do face ourselves when we sit in stillness and quiet and turn our mind back on itself.
The meditator breathes in and says, Hello, my fear, my anger, my despair, I will take good care of you. The moment you recognize the feeling and smile to it with love and care, embracing the fear, with mindfulness, it will begin to change. This is this extraordinary thing that just paying attention is already affecting the situation or is really affecting the the thing that has had been paid attention to
its he says it's like morning sunlight shining on a lotus flower. The bed has not opened yet. But as the sunlight pours down the photons penetrate into the into the bone but after one or two hours of being treated with penetrated by the light, the flower opens itself
the world opens itself to us when we when we pay attention to her.
We have the energy of mindfulness generated by mindful walking, sitting or breathing. With that energy we embrace our fear as gently as the light embracing the flower. When the two kinds of energies encounter each other, there will be a change a transformation the energy of tenderness penetrates the fear, anger and despair. You hold it as clearly as you might you hold it as dearly as you might hold a wounded child. This, this teaching about the lightness of our touches is very important to come at things treating them lightly. There's the as the medical doctor from the mid of last century clear weeks, who talks about us facing accepting men floating past how, how difficulties, negative thoughts and then giving them time. This is a huge one. Not expecting to just get rid of these difficult things immediately, giving them time. If the motion becomes very strong, you'll feel it coming up. The way to handle it is to put yourself in a stable position and use your in breath and out breath to make you solid, so it can't sweep you away. lying down or sitting. You focus your mind on what is called the tun Tian. This is the Gemini Ebony's Tandon. Sometimes we refer to horror, the point an inch or so below your belly button. And you can even place your hands there, you concentrate 100% on your in breath and out breath and the rising and falling of your abdomen, then you'll be able to stop the thinking. In that moment, it's very important to stop the thinking because the more you think the more you despair, your despair and fear will carry you away. And just a word of warning when talking about stopping the thought. We do this by indirection we do it by concentrating on the breath, not not through pushing the thought away or trying to get rid of it directly. Rather we keep deflecting our attention to the breath. And in that the fi negative emotion can lose its its fuel its its energy and fade away
Don't be afraid the wave of emotion is like a storm and it will go away after some time. You may breathe in for a count of six or seven or eight or even 10 seconds and you can breathe out for 10 or 15 seconds or more without thinking you'll find relief
focusing on the breath like this is one option. Or just just sitting being aware of feelings and thoughts and emotions passing through us
as if watching, watching a parade watching the the different colorful characters passing by. There's a neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who had a very serious stroke, which she took several years to recover from. But she wrote a fascinating book about her experiences of of both having a stroke and recovering. And she had a particularly interesting perspective because she was a neuroscientist going into this process and coming out of it. But she says something about strong emotion in the book that can be can be very helpful to understand. She says when a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there's a 20 There's a 92nd chemical process that happens in the body. And he's she's talking here about things like strong anger or fear or anxiety. So emotions that we've experienced strongly in the body. So there's a chemical process, which happens with these different strong emotions. After that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop. Something happens in the external world, and chemicals are flushed through your body, which pulls it on, puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body takes less than 90 seconds, I suppose she really means he had metabolized and disappeared. This means that for 90 seconds, you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening. And then you can watch it go away. After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you're thinking that are re stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you're having this physiological response over and over again. So just let me reread that again, because it's a really helpful point. After that, she saying Haftar this first 90 seconds. If you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you're thinking that are really stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you're having this raw response. So to see to look at how we might be perpetuating strong emotions that come up by certain things we are thinking about ourselves and others.
So this, this next piece is is against all technology and hands, voice here, and so headed up Zen in a storm.
In 1976, together with my colleagues and friends, in the Buddhist peace movement, we organized relief work to help save the lives of refugees who are escaping Vietnam. In Singapore, we secretly rented three large boats to rescue people and drift on the high seas, and quietly took them to other countries for asylum. At that time, the authorities were leaving the refugees at sea to die, sometimes even pushing the small boats back out. And so if we wanted to help the boat people, we had no choice but to break the law. In one mission, we rescued nearly 800 people in the Gulf of signups I am. But the Malaysian government refused to allow our boats to enter Malaysian waters. During those days we practice sitting meditation and walking meditation and ate our meals and silence and concentration. We knew that. Without that kind of discipline, our work would fail. The lives of many people depended on our practice of mindfulness. But while we were in the middle of trying to find a way to bring the refugees safely to shore, in a country that would accept them. Our relief program was exposed. The Singapore Police came to our door at 2am confiscated my travel documents, and ordered us to leave the country within 24 hours. We still had hundreds of people aboard the boats not yet brought to safety and without enough food or water. Their lives depended on us. We were there were high winds and rough seas, and one of the Bose engines had broken. What could we do? I had to breathe deeply. It was an extremely difficult situation. There were more problems than it seemed possible to solve in the 24 hours before I had to leave. I realized that I needed to put into practice the words, if you want peace, you have peace right away. You have to want it enough. I saw that. If I didn't have peace at that moment, I would never be able to have peace. Peace can be found in the midst of danger. I will never forget every second of sitting meditation, every breath and every step I took in mindfulness through that night. At around four in the morning, I finally got the insight that we could appeal to the French ambassador, who had been silently supporting us to intervene in our favor and ask the Singapore authorities to grant us leave to stay just 10 more days. 10 days might be just enough to get the people to say at the embassy that Ambassador degree agreed, and at the last minute, we got approval from the immigration office to stay. If we hadn't had the practice of meditation, of mindful breathing and mindful walking, we would easily have been overwhelmed by suffering and unable to keep going. We were eventually able to get supplies to the boats. And although it took months to get them ashore, in many years for their asylum claims to be processed in refugee clients, their lives were saved. So good to hear a concrete example of how how sitting practice can be applied in the midst of a really difficult, challenging situation.
Is more, it's more here, but we just so we make sure we say a little bit about our other two elements of our ceremony tomorrow. If we've got time, we can come back to this a bit. Bit more of this. But I want to say about chanting the second element of our ceremony on Sunday
chanting as a way of embodying the teaching, it's another form of size in, but it's also different in that it involves words. And those words, this the the teachings, the Dharma teachings, by our chanting them, we allow them to resonate in us. And we we absorb them in this way, in a in a really, well, if we can say non rational way, because we're not trying so much to understand the words, but to simulate them say, the understanding comes more unconsciously and then can sometimes kind of emerge later. So this is one aspect of chanting. It's also a way of connecting with the benevolent forces of our own particular Buddha Dharma family. Roshi Kapleau I think this is quoted at the beginning of a chatbot he said, Mind is unlimited. Chanting when performed Eagle Asli has the power to penetrate visible and invisible worlds. We connect with some of these visible and invisible worlds through a chanting of the sutras and especially we can we can remind ourselves of all the enlightened ones of for going back for generations back to the border and beyond, whose efforts were on her behalf who whose bodhichitta was directed to future generations us and this can be this can be a source of great strength and sometimes in our extremities, these lines from the chance will come back to us and be encouraging.
Roshi Kapleau as you always say that, that chanting is like, it's like another form of zazzy. And but I think it's fair to say that chanting is more outward turning, when when we chant were seeking to embrace many beings. It's as if we are in this circuitry of, of bodhichitta receiving it and in the same time passing it along.
And part of the ceremony will do prostrations we chant, we Chan 100 Night recitations of the concert we just did earlier, the eight verse, Kanaan sutra. 10 Verse constitute your other thing, there's only about half of the 108 that we have frustrated with but this frustrations are another form of embodiment and a way of expressing reverence. Certainly repentance can be involved. Gratitude is a big one. So, prostrations can be purifying, and also clarifying. Master Sheng yen stills the story when he was as a boy, a monk, young monk, and he describes himself as being extremely dull witted, and couldn't, even men managed to memorize a few lines of a sutra. And so his teacher suggested that he do prostrations and he didn't did many 1000s of them, but his mind was transformed by this. And he became the Great's scholar and, of course, knowledgeable and memorize many, many, many sutras.
A chanting service is also a kind of as a structured way of expressing our wish to relieve suffering. So it's it kind of sets sets our attention. Somebody described. Speech will deter other chanting as ordered speech, much of our Inner Inner speeches is disordered and all over the place. And by chanting where it's as if we're, we're bringing some order to that space of our mind. We're mind a world of language that we usually experience. And implicit in their own intense sense of seeking out tension. Our intention is that we want to be have some integrity around it, then it's to follow up that intention with some concrete contributions or actions. And that's why we have little time in the ceremony when people make a pledge to donate as well. We used to do this with people using cash. But of course, many people don't use cash anymore. So now, we just make a pledge when you go online to different organizations, and make them make a donation. And then, then, the third part of the ceremony will go on Sunday, we'll be doing some outdoor work. Some some years ago, we planted a whole lot of native trees, flowers and fruit trees behind us here and the in a piece of waste ground that that was full of old shopping travelers and traffic cones and beer cans, and they cleaned it up and planted it. And the trees and plants have really felt flourished in the amount of birdsong we here and this endo has has increased a lot since we once we planted the garden but it's it does have a tendency to revert to its to its earlier nature. So we also go over there periodically and give it a good clean screen out failed and it's it's probably going to be reverting talk to wildness soon but at least on Sunday we'll just be cleaning it up as much as we can. And cleaning up the rubbish blown by the by the wind and perhaps abandoned by various visitors to the garden who liked the fact that it can't be seen from anywhere else. So we'll do this work on this patch of land, get down in the earth and and and experience that you will see reality that can be so fertile all these beautiful trees have grown there
and one of the things that that doing this can help us to remember in this in this extended act of remembering is that we always can have this direct engagement with the Earth and in little ways, nourish life. They may be small, they may only affect a few other sentient beings, but it all adds up our actions matter
if I've got time, yeah, I got a clock here, I want to finish just by reading a poem. This is This is spring poem, so more suitable for those in the in the northern hemisphere who might be listening to this on online. And this is from a from a very fine American poet called Ross gay who lives in Bloomington, Indiana and has fallen in a large community garden. And this This poem is called patience. And it's from Spring POM. Call it slough. Call it sleaze. Call it binary if you please. I'll call it patience. And call it joy. This my supine Congress with the newly launched yawning grass and beetles chittering in their offices beneath me as I nearly drifting to dream, admire the so called weed, which if I had guarded with teeth bared my garden of all alien breeds, if I was all knife and axe and made a life of hacking, would not have booths gorgeous fourth, and beckoning me sort of fell expires ring littered by these sorts of vaginal blooms, which the new bees being bees heed. And yes, it is spring, if you can't tell from the words my mind makes of the world, and everything makes me mildly or more hungry. The worm turning and the leaf mold, the Pear blossoms, howling forth the pungens like a choir of wet dream boys hiking up their skirts. Even the neighbor's cats shimmy through the grin in the fence, and the way this be before me, after whispering in my ear, dip dips her head into those dainty lips, not exactly like one entering a chapel, and friends, as if that wasn't enough, blooms forth with her hair, forehead dusted pink, like she has been licked, and so blessed by the kind of God to whom this poem is a prayer. And this collection of poems is called a catalogue of unabashed gratitude. And if we pay attention, if we quiet our minds, and pay attention to the world around us, then we will be filled, filled with gratitude for this earth, this planet of which we are apart. And perhaps our job as human beings, is to find ways to express this gratitude for this wonderful whose will stop here and recite the Four Vows.
All beings without number to liberate endless blind, passion, Siva, to a rude Dharma gates beyond measure to penetrate way to retain all beings to liberate and strive.
To trade now Am I saying the
right
great time again
too
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