This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video above. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

Generosity, Care, Cookies and Airports

Welcome, welcome everybody. It's such a pleasure to practice with others. Even if I'm alone in this room, just knowing that you're on the other side of these screens—so thank you.

So Gil Fronsdal, Max Erdstein^[1], and I are teaching a course on ethics. I think it's maybe eight, nine, ten, or eleven months long, and it's a lot of fun. You know, sometimes this whole topic of ethics just feels like, "Oh, really? I don't want to be told a whole bunch of rules." The sense of morality just feels heavy and something that's not so interesting. But we're approaching it in a way that I'm finding really delightful, and I know some of the students are as well.

The way that we are approaching it is less as a set of rules, because that's only marginally helpful. What's really helpful is some ways to navigate our lives, some ways to make decisions, to help us with decision-making and choosing which direction to go or what to do. These types of things are really helpful and useful.

In this ethics class, we started with some foundations: this idea of wholesomeness and this idea of care and compassion. We're now into the precepts^[2], looking at each of the precepts and spending a little bit more time with each one. We recently finished the second precept: to not take that which is not given. It's a little bit of a stilted way of saying it; it's kind of like saying "not stealing," but Buddhists have a little bit higher or different conception of it, in that things have to be offered. We get into all these questions about ownership and offering and all kinds of things. But that's not what I want to talk about tonight.

Instead, I want to talk about this idea of how we navigate our lives, how we make decisions in so many of the mundane things that we do. I know sometimes when we think about the Dharma and the teachings of the Buddha, we might have these really lofty ideas, which is fantastic, and certainly, there are plenty of those that can be helpful and supportive. But we might also sometimes feel like we don't really bring the Dharma to some of these little corners of our lives, these mundane corners of our lives.

The last few times that I've given a talk on Monday nights, I talked about some of these mundane things, like New Year's resolutions, and how we can bring the Dharma to them. I'd like to continue in that vein and share a story that we shared in the ethics course and to talk about some of the ideas. But I'm going to bring in some other ideas just to highlight how there are so many different practices or teachings that we can bring to ordinary activities in a way that supports us and nourishes us. They can coach us, guide us, and inspire us without feeling like this heavy, burdensome thing that we have to do on top of our ordinary life. Instead, it gets woven in and integrated in such a way that it's a support.

The Cookie Thief

There are two stories that we talked about. One was with the second precept, and another story we talked about at the beginning when we were talking about some of the foundations of ethics. They have a common theme, and I'm sure you'll pick up on it.

This first story I'm going to share is, in some ways, kind of silly. It's a poem that rhymes, has a particular meter, and is colorful. Part of the beauty of it is that it's kind of mundane, but there can be some real depth to it as well. I tried to discover when it was first published, and I couldn't find it. I did find some reference that somebody had said it first came out in the '90s but was originally written in the '80s, but I didn't actually see the publications at that time. And honestly, I don't even remember where I heard this first. It might have been in a Dharma talk. That's how all of us Dharma teachers operate—we co-teach or listen to other Dharma teachers, and we just pass around all the same stories. So hopefully, you haven't heard this one too many times.

I won't say the name of the poem and the poet until the end. Here we go:

A woman was waiting at the airport one night, With several long hours before her flight. She hunted for a book in the airport shop, Bought a bag of cookies and found a place to drop.

She was engrossed in her book but happened to see, That the man beside her, as bold as could be, Grabbed a cookie or two from the bag in between, Which she tried to ignore to avoid a scene.

So she read, munched cookies and watched the clock, As the gutsy cookie thief diminished her stock. She was getting more irritated as the minutes ticked by, Thinking, "If I weren't so nice, I'd blacken his eye."

With each cookie she took, he took one too, When only one was left, she wondered what he'd do. With a smile on his face and a nervous laugh, He took the last cookie and broke it in half.

He offered her half, as he ate the other, She snatched it from him and thought, "Oh, brother. This guy has some nerve and he's also so rude, Why he didn't even show any gratitude!"

She had never known when she had been so galled, And sighed with relief when her flight was called. She gathered her belongings and headed for the gate, Refusing to look at the thieving ingrate.

She boarded the plane, and sank in her seat, Then sought her book, which was almost complete. As she reached in her baggage, she gasped with surprise, There was her bag of cookies, in front of her eyes.

If mine are here, she moaned in despair, The others were his, and he tried to share. Too late to apologize, she realized with grief, That she was the rude one, the ingrate, the thief.

This amusing poem is called "The Cookie Thief" by Valerie Cox.

This scene unfolds at the airport, and this woman has this entire story created about the person next to her. She's getting angry. She even says, "If I weren't so nice, I'd blacken his eye." This bewilderment and anger is coming up. And then, right when she gets on the airplane and discovers that she has her own bag of cookies, just in that moment—it doesn't take a moment longer—everything gets reinterpreted. Oh, right. I'm the thief. I'm the ingrate. I'm the one that was not behaving so nicely. It just took a flash.

Views and Insight

There are so many things that we can learn from this story, but one thing I'd like to look at right now is the view. The view of this person that was sitting beside her: she thought he was a thief, he was an ingrate, he was rude. She had this whole story created by something he was doing, and that could change in a flash.

These views, these ideas, these opinions—they're really insubstantial. They're fleeting. They are not something that is going to stick around forever. All it took was for her to have one piece of information, to look in her baggage and see her bag of cookies. It's just this recognition that we have ideas, we have views, we have opinions, and sometimes we hold on to them so tightly we're willing to threaten somebody, to blacken their eye, holding these views. And all it takes is one additional piece of information for us to realize we're completely mistaken.

Why are we holding so tightly to our views if they can disappear—poof—just like that, with one little piece of information? She had plenty of data, we might say, to support her view that he kept on taking the cookies. He even broke the last one in half and shared it with her, but that didn't change her opinion. She had already set this view of this poor person sitting beside her. She had already made up her opinion about how he was, even though he did something that didn't suggest he was a mean, ungrateful person or a thief. I don't think a thief would share things.

It's just a reminder to all of us that we have views about ourselves and about others. We may have data to support them, and there are reasons why we have views, but we don't have to hold on to them so tightly. We don't have to hold them so tightly that we're willing to villainize other people and make them the bad person. She says, "If I weren't so nice, I'd blacken his eye." She kind of builds herself up: I'm the good one, he's the bad one. It's this righteous indignation that's building and building until just one piece of information comes along.

Just having one more piece of information or one more idea is enough to completely transform the way that she thought about that whole scene. This is part of what insight is. In insight meditation^[3], we start seeing things, there's this understanding, and then our interpretation or the way we move in the world starts to shift and change based on that new information. These insights are a new way of seeing that also relieves suffering. That's the traditional way that we might think of an insight in this tradition—it's tied to the lessening of suffering because this is all going towards greater and greater freedom.

We might say that the woman in the story had a little bit more suffering at the moment when she discovered the truth, but unfortunately, maybe she didn't take the opportunity to really harvest all the different insights that could have been there.

During this ethics class, we've talked about a number of things related specifically to the second precept: the nature of stealing. What does it mean to steal, and do people really know you're stealing? The nature of ownership. What is it like to own things? The importance of generosity. The importance of communication. A few words between this woman and this man might have made a world of difference. They could have discovered a love of the same kind of cookies, chatted, and become friends. Who knows, if they were both single, it could have been their true love! They were traveling to the same location; maybe they were even neighbors and didn't know it. I'm creating a whole story here, but my point is, if they had spoken to one another, it would have changed things. But they didn't.

The Arising and Passing Away of Experience

This idea of insight is central to this path of practice. The Buddha points to it many times in many different ways. He points to the importance of not clinging to views. Instead of creating views that we really hold on to, there is an alternative. Of course, we're going to create views. It's human nature, and we need to in order to navigate our lives and the world: Friend or foe? Harmful or helpful? The Buddha is not pointing to not doing some of these human things, but rather to holding them lightly. Not clinging to them, and not using them as something to build up or bolster our own sense of self. Instead, we can just say, "Well, it seems like there's a misunderstanding here."

One thing this woman might have learned from this story is something about the nature of experiences. The moment she had this additional information, everything just flipped and switched. There was this one story, this one view that arose and then passed away: This man is ungrateful. He's a thief. He's rude. I can't believe he's taking my cookies. And then, bam, she no longer thinks that of that person.

The Buddha pointed to the value of noticing the arising and passing away of experiences—the arising and passing away of our holding to a view. Sometimes we don't recognize how we're holding to a view until we let it go. It has tremendous power in our life to notice impermanence^[4]. If we notice this intentionally by bringing our mind to it, or when we notice it because it's so obvious, we allow the mind and the heart to linger in the noticing of the impermanence. We do this so that we don't so readily forget it and try to concretize, substantiate, and reify so many of our experiences and our views, because it leads to suffering. Clinging to anything, including our views and beliefs, leads to suffering.

The Buddha was pointing out that our experiences are inconstant, always changing, fleeting; they arise and pass away. But he also pointed to some other qualities of our experiences. This triad of gratification, danger, and escape^[5] is the way that Bhikkhu Bodhi^[6] translates them. All of our experiences can have a sense of gratification. Even if it's really fleeting, it can be fulfilling in some kind of way. They can create the conditions for pleasure and joy. But I have to be careful here—it's not a lasting happiness. It's not a lasting satisfaction, because they're impermanent. In this story, we might say that she was enjoying the cookies. We might even say that she was enjoying her righteous indignation: Look what a nice person I am. I'm not yelling at him or blackening his eye.

But all of these experiences also have danger. Maybe danger is too strong of a word, but it's this idea that our experiences don't last forever. So even if they are bringing pleasure and joy, they're going to end, and that's going to bring sorrow and grief of some magnitude. Sometimes there's this little bit of fear: When is this going to end? Or a little bit of distress: How long is this going to last? That's often bubbling underneath so many of our experiences. In this poem, we see her becoming more and more agitated. And as I said earlier, she missed an opportunity to maybe have a connection with somebody who was traveling to the same place she was.

The Buddha talked about noticing that phenomena arise and pass away, and that there is gratification, danger, and escape. Escape is this removal of the things, wanting it to be different, this ending of leaning forward, this greediness for them. We have this experience temporarily when we meditate. There can be, when we sit, a sense of contentment and quiet, even if it's just for a few moments. Even if that's not our dominant experience, just to know that it can be part of our experience can be enormously helpful. And then, of course, the ultimate escape from the dissatisfaction or the danger of experiences is awakening, where a person is no longer fooled into wanting to cling, substantiate, or concretize our experiences or views.

It's helpful to create the conditions so that we can see the arising and passing of our experiences, and the gratification, danger, and escape of them. This is a big part of why we meditate: just to allow some settling down. If we're always rushing around, we will never really notice, or it won't register deeply enough to let the ramifications affect us—that things are inconstant, arise and pass away, and are changing.

Gate A-4

I'd like to shift gears a little bit and read a second story that we shared in this ethics class, which also features cookies and an airport. This one is a little bit different. At the end, I'll share the title of the poem and the poet. This poem is written more in a prose style:

Wandering around the Albuquerque airport terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: "If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately."

Well—one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled on the floor, wailing. "Help," said the flight agent. "Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this."

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly. "Shu dawa, shu biddak habibi, stanna shway, min fadlik."^[7] (Asking for forgiveness on how terribly I'm probably butchering this, so my apologies. So she speaks this little bit of Arabic.)

The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, "No, we're fine, you'll get there, just later. Who is picking you up? Let's call him."

We called her son. I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane, and right next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had ten shared friends. Then I thought, just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her?

This all took up two hours. She was laughing a lot by then, telling of her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade ma'amoul cookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—from her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powdered sugar and smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it, and they were covered with powdered sugar too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag. Some medicinal thing with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradition: always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, this is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate once the crying of confusion stopped seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

This poem or story is called "Gate A-4" by Naomi Shihab Nye. Naomi Shihab Nye is a Buddhist practitioner, and I believe she's even practiced with the San Francisco Zen Center. She has a Palestinian father and an American mother, and grew up in both Palestine and Texas.

She says, "This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate once the crying of confusion stopped seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too. This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost."

Cookies and airports. May all beings be free from suffering, and may they recognize that not everything is lost. This can still happen.

Thank you.