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Guided Meditation: 12 Wild Boars

Good morning, welcome to the Insight Meditation Center. Hi, I am Fu Schroeder, the guest teacher of your teacher, Gil Fronsdal, and my good friend. He and I, and Paul Haller, another Zen Center teacher, have been incredibly enjoying a three-week intensive called The Harmony of Zen and Vipassanā. And this is our last day, so it's nice to have you all here. We'll start with some meditation and then I'll give a short talk.

So I'm wondering how many of you remember a few years back a story about 12 wild boars. You know, it was the name of a team of soccer players and their young coach who were rescued from a dark, water-filled cave in Thailand. A lot of attention was paid at the time to the long planning process that resulted in their rescue, including teaching them how to swim, how to use scuba gear, and all of that.

The part that was deeply engaging for the world press was the technique, the danger, and the fear. But at the same time, very little attention was paid, that I could tell in the mainstream reporting, to the fact that the coach of these boys, Ekkapol Chantawong, had spent most of his young life, from the age of 12 until 22, as a Thai forest monk. In a somewhat obscure article called "How Buddhist Meditation Kept the Thai Boys Calm in a Cave," they reported that at the moment the boys were found, they were sitting there calmly. No one was crying or anything, and it was astonishing.

The article then explained that Ekkapol, their coach, had taught the boys to meditate to keep them calm and to preserve their energy through their nine days of pitch-black isolation. On the day of their rescue, each of the boys did an hour of meditation with their teacher before being brought out of the cave, one by one, as I think we all remember. The article included a cartoon that had been circulated in Thailand showing Ekkapol with a lap full of tiny wild boars sitting peacefully in upright meditation, just like the Buddha that he had been taught to be.

So with that story in mind, I'd like to offer all of us an opportunity to sit together for a few minutes, remembering those boys and their teacher, and also remembering one of the rescuers who died in his effort to help save those boys. He too, Saman Kunan^[1], is honored and embraced within this warmly human story.

I think we all know that marketing a product such as meditation is such a challenge for us, as it was for the Buddha, with so little to show for itself. We Buddhists not only just sit together a lot, we also talk about just sitting together a lot, and we talk in order to encourage others to give it a try. As it says on this clever bumper sticker that I've seen in recent years: "Don't just do something, sit there."

So only by that something that we call nothing can we discover for ourselves how an hour of silent sitting, even in the darkest of times and the darkest of places, might literally save our lives. Or even if our lives are not in the end to be saved, the quality of the time we have left might be brighter, sweeter, and more dear.

So please, in the time we have left, find a comfortable upright sitting posture for yourself. Lengthen your spine all the way up from the base. Drop your shoulder blades back and down, allowing the chest to open more fully. Align your ears with your shoulders and your nose with your navel. Take a deep breath. Inhale, and exhale. Again and again, as you have your entire life.

Now rock your body right and left. It should feel very good. Something I really enjoy each morning is this small detail of kind of stretching the ligaments around the spine and the neck. It also helps to find upright, sort of like a plumb line that eventually settles into a steady and immovable sitting position.

And allow yourselves to just sit, like the upright wild boars that we truly are.

The Bunny in the Moon

So good morning again. For those of you who have just joined, my name is Fu Schroeder. I am the abbess at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, California. You're all welcome to visit if you can. And as many of you know, I have been a guest of Gil Fronsdal, your teacher, during this three-week meditation intensive that Gil, myself, and another good friend, Paul Haller, have been offering called The Harmony of Zen and Vipassanā.

So I can safely say that this has been a wonderful way to share the Dharma with old friends who for a long time now have been intent on following the Buddha path together, with all of you. So this is the last day of our intensive. We close tomorrow with a talk that Gil and I are going to share on the Zen Center website, and you're very welcome to join us.

Having spent these last four days of the intensive talking about right conduct, sīla^[2], and about the bodhisattva vow and the 16 bodhisattva precepts, this morning I want to share with you a story of an actual bodhisattva. The story that brought me closer into practice and, finally, the decision to stay.

When I first came to Zen Center many decades ago now, I was told there would be a full moon ceremony on the roof of the Beginner's Mind Temple in San Francisco where I had been going to practice meditation for about a year. I thought the ceremony was pretty strange, and it was also very rigorous. There are about 29 full vows, full prostrations that take place from the beginning of the ceremony to the end, and a lot of chanting.

As it turned out, the full moon ceremony is one of the oldest of rituals that has been continuously practiced since the time of the Buddha. The monks who practiced off in silence in solitary meditation, when the moon was full, they could come together. That was like their clock. So they could join together in a clearing and offer their confessions and repentance and promise to do better. So the monks and the nuns and the laity actually would gather four times in the old days, at each of the phases of the moon, but the full moon was the one that was most common. And we've recently done that as well, and it continues to this day in order for us also to reflect on our practice and to recommit ourselves to the holy life, and in particular to the 16 bodhisattva precepts, the three refuges, the three pure precepts, and the ten grave or clear mind precepts.

So back to years ago on that particular evening up on the roof of the Zen Center, the person who was leading the ritual began by telling us a story from a collection called the Jataka tales^[3], in which the Buddha's former lives in both human and animal form are recounted. These stories are particularly popular with children, in that humans and animals in the stories are virtuous and brave, and their leader often gives their own life to save the lives of others. Just as Saman Kunan had done in Thailand about five years ago, that leader in a future life turns out to be none other than Shakyamuni Buddha. So often the Jataka tales include an extensive cast of characters who get into all kinds of trouble, whereupon the bodhisattva intervenes to resolve all the problems and bring about a happy ending. This is the kind of story I think we all like best. So here's the one that altered the course of my own life.

Once, long, long ago, a monkey, an otter, a jackal, and a rabbit resolved to practice charity on the day of the full moon, believing that a demonstration of great virtue would earn them a great deal of merit. When an old man entered the forest begging for food, the monkey gathered fruit from the trees and the otter collected fish, while the jackal pilfered a pot of milk curd from a nearby farmhouse, having called out in a not so very loud voice, "Does this belong to anyone?" Well, the rabbit, on the other hand, who knew only how to gather grass, felt very sad at having nothing to offer the old man, until realizing that she could offer her own body by throwing herself onto the fire that the old man had built to keep himself warm.

And just as the rabbit leapt into the air, the old man revealed himself to be Śakra^[4], the lord of the gods, who then saves the rabbit friend by transforming the flames into lotus petals. Śakra, being deeply touched by the rabbit's virtue, uses a nearby mountain to form the likeness of the rabbit on the face of the moon for all to see. It's said that the lunar image is still draped in the smoke that arose when the rabbit cast herself into the flames.

I don't know how many of you have looked at the moon to see the rabbit. I think mostly in the West, we are taught to see an old man's face, but the rabbit's there. It's quite a wonderful full body, the ears, the haunches. And next time the moon is full, take a look, see if you can find the rabbit.

This story of the bodhisattva giving her life for the welfare of another had a big impact on me at the time. My life had really kind of worn out trying to get something or somebody who would make me truly happy. So it was a remarkable idea to me that giving could be the true source of happiness for a human being like me, rather than getting. So the next step was to try and understand what it means to truly give.

Alongside the bodhisattva vow and precepts are a set of six practices for training a bodhisattva for a life devoted to the welfare of others. And among these practices is dāna pāramitā^[5], the perfection of giving, the first of what are called the six perfections^[6]. So these six perfections can be thought of as a kind of bodhisattva training program. A program that was explained by the Buddha in very simple language so that almost anyone could understand and practice them.

So these six: giving is the first, morality or ethics (right conduct) the second, patience, enthusiasm, concentration, and wisdom. They can also be thought of as antidotes or antibodies to what the Dalai Lama has called our pathological emotions: greed, hate, and delusion. So giving is what conquers greed. Patience conquers hate. And wisdom conquers delusion. The other three perfections involved in transforming our afflictive emotions are the perfection of ethics or morality, the perfection of enthusiasm—we all need that—and the perfection of concentration.

So all six perfections are packaged together in a particular order so that each in turn supports the next. For example, giving supports ethics, as in giving your word or giving your fair share. And ethics supports patience, as in, for example, waiting patiently for your turn, or waiting for negative feelings to subside before you speak or take action. The perfection of patience supports the perfection of enthusiasm by helping us to find a balanced response to the arising of our human passions, our likes and our dislikes. The perfection of enthusiasm in turn supports our ongoing commitment to a life dedicated to the well-being of others, a life concentrated on the practice of the six perfections, a life of becoming who we are truly meant to be: bodhisattvas hard at work for the well-being of the entire world.

So such a life is manifested in the story that I shared with you of how the image of the bunny got onto the moon. And although we can't really see a vow or an intention to live by vowing, such a vow informs everything that we do in our life and in society. It informs how we work, and the kind of work that we do, and our collective effort to take care of it all. So work as practice, which is easy to say but it's not so easy to do. Learning to engage in work as practice is at times even harder than the work itself. This is something we specialize in at Green Gulch Farm, there's lots of work. And yet, as the Buddha famously said, enlightenment is the path, is what we do, and the path is enlightenment. In other words, awakening is a direct reflection of how we are living our life each and every day.

The mind that is distracted, lustful, or hateful can't see the path of liberation right before your eyes. And yet the Buddha hangs out with minds that are distracted, hateful, and lustful in order to show us the way of kindness and generosity, selflessness and peace. The very thing I think we are trying to do here as well, you know, hang out with our minds and together show the way to peaceful abiding together.

And for Zen Master Dōgen, the founder of my tradition called Sōtō Zen, awakening is seated meditation, is the bodhisattva precepts, is learning the backward step that turns your light inwardly, is the practice-realization of totally culminated enlightenment.

So thank you all so much for your kind attention. I've really been enjoying coming to be at Gil's place for this week. So I wish you all the best, and please take care and please enjoy sitting as much as you can.

Kevin, if there are any questions, I'd be happy to respond.

Q&A

Kevin: Sure. We actually have one from Eric on YouTube. He was wondering about the differences between Vipassanā and Zen.

Fu Schroeder: Such a great question, as we've been talking about for three weeks. It's so wonderful. We share the root. We're all disciples of the Buddha. Whatever happened under that tree the morning he woke up—and he didn't really tell us too much other than something like, "I and all beings are enlightened at the same time." There was a non-dual realization between what he saw, the star, and himself. It wasn't separate. It wasn't outside of himself, and neither was anything else. So that's the foundation for Buddhism. Buddhism means awake, for being awake. So you know, "awake-ism."

And Zen and Vipassanā are both devoted to awakening, to what the Buddha saw and how he behaved. So that's the other side. I think one of the things I've enjoyed looking at between Zen and Vipassanā is Vipassanā clearly... it's as Gil was saying, it's retreat practice. He teaches people who are on retreat so you can get really concentrated when you're not doing anything else in the day. We have sesshins^[7], which are very similar. I think those two experiences for all of us are pretty close, because human beings are the same. So sitting for a week, paying attention to your mind is common ground.

Maybe what's a little different—and not different because of any reason other than it's not the kind of teaching that Gil or many Vipassanā retreats do—they don't actually take you outside and do some work together. Zen is really focused on work practice. "A day of no work is a day of no food," what they said in China. The monks couldn't just spend the day meditating, they needed to feed themselves. It was a really different cultural climate. So by the time Buddhism got to China, it became very much ingrained in the activities of daily life.

And I think we spend a good deal of our teaching time talking about how to work with the influence of your meditation, without falling into a kind of enchantment so that you can't actually cut the carrots. Some people sometimes think cutting carrots in a meditative way is really slow. We'd never get lunch out if that was so. So we really oftentimes will put somebody who's a more seasoned cook on the opposite side of the table from a new student who's going like this, and then the person over there is going like that. So we're trying to demonstrate that speed is not the issue, it's focus, concentration. Like Simone Biles doing her routine. She's concentrated and she's moving.

So I think that combination of movement and meditation is what these two traditions emphasize. There's probably a lot more than that, but that's what comes to mind.

Kevin: Alright, thank you. Yeah, we've got a question for you. Since you started practice, did you ever leave the practice? What precipitated leaving, and what brought you back?

Fu Schroeder: Oh, that's good. Well, I left because I adopted a baby. I didn't leave the practice, I mean babysitting, right? I needed practice more than ever having a little infant who was very tiny and she wasn't well. She had some issues at birth. She has cerebral palsy and she has other issues that I don't need to go into. But anyway, she's fantastic. She's going to be 28 next week and will be home, she lives in L.A. She's a great, great human being. So for a couple years I was home feeding the baby, doing things that you do when you have a young child.

And I don't think I stopped practicing. I just wasn't going to the zendo for that time. It was work practice. And then what brought me back into the zendo? I still lived in the community. I've been a resident there for 40 years, so gratefully so. So I was able to go back and take another leadership position when my daughter was old enough to sleep through the night. So anyway, yeah, I don't really think I've taken a break. I don't think there are breaks actually once you start to practice.

And it's like what Gil has taught, and I think is really brilliant: entering the stream is entering the stream, or the current of a river. And once you enter the current, you're in a life of practice, and that's what stream-entering really means. I'm no longer driven by a life of karma, choosing whatever is my selfish view. I'm actually streaming, I'm in the current of a vow, of what I promised. I made promises to live for the benefit of others, just like that story I told about the rabbit. I liked that story, I thought, "Well, I can do that. Maybe I could give myself to something that I care about." Yeah, so we never stop really. I do go on vacation! [Laughter]

Kevin: And one final question: the link for the Saturday talks, do you know where people might be able to find that?

Fu Schroeder: Oh yeah, Zen Center website. There's lots of stuff on there, and it tells you just what to do, what buttons to push.

Kevin: Oh, that's the San Francisco Zen Center?

Fu Schroeder: San Francisco Zen Center, yeah. Lots of programs there too. If you're interested in some of the things we're doing, a lot of interesting things these days, particularly around the BIPOC^[8] community and inviting teachers of color, and talking about the issues of our day, which we have to do of course.

Kevin: Great. Yeah, for everyone else here, if you go to the San Francisco Zen Center website, it's under the calendar, and then if you look under Saturday, May 8th. So that's going to start at 10:00 a.m. if I'm not mistaken.

Fu Schroeder: Right, yeah.

Kevin: Okay, well, thank you very much.

Fu Schroeder: Thank you all. Please take care. It's been just wonderful to know you're out there even though I can't see you, and the YouTube people. Anyway, many blessings.