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Lightly Guided Meditation

Welcome. How's this sound? A little loud? Yeah, not loud? Okay. Welcome to each of you. We'll sit until the top of the hour. I'll lightly guide us, then offer a talk.

Just as we begin, using the ambient sound, people trickling in, to bring you more deeply into the moment.

We treat all phenomena as a gateway, affording ourselves the relief of not needing to sort out the pleasant and the unpleasant. Everything helping us arrive.

And we breathe, sensitive to the whole body, as if the whole body were breathing.

Come back.

This realm, samsara^[1], is relentlessly presenting options of what might be, what should be. And so often we're seduced into optimizing the moment.

Maybe it's safe enough to let go. To not read the tea leaves of pleasure and pain. To be present is to be utterly undefended against imperfection.

Announcements

Welcome, everyone. Time to see, are there any announcements?

Nancy: Hi, it's Nancy again. If I could get a couple of volunteers to help just take out trash and recycling? It'll take about 15 minutes after the Dharma talk. Thank you. Anybody else? Thank you. Great.

Host: And I have an announcement or two. For any newcomers, I like to mention that we do have a dana^[2] box, a donation box, on your left just as you walk inside. A blonde wooden box with slots for both the teacher and to IMC. We also have an electronic device that we call a kiosk on the counter, just to the right of the door in the social hall. It's easy to use, but if you need to learn how and want to, I can explain it.

I would like to welcome our teacher today, Matthew Brensilver, one of IMC's longtime, somewhat frequent guest teachers. Matthew.

Reflections on Thich Nhat Hanh's Teachings

Thank you. Welcome to all. Welcome to the online crew, I see you.

In January, Thich Nhat Hanh died at the age of 95, which was, I think, about seven years after a major stroke. When I heard, I didn't find myself especially emotional. But then I looked at some pictures of him. I found myself crying, just seeing his face and all that is conveyed by his face.

One of my first deep encounters with Dharma was a Thich Nhat Hanh young adult sangha^[3] in Los Angeles. I had a passing academic interest in meditation but had never really encountered the Dharma. I had a couple of apartment mates at the time. Two friends moved out, two new people moved in, and they were both long-term meditators. They told me that they were going to have a housewarming party, which was their way of not freaking me out that it was going to be a gathering of the sangha.

At the time, I was working in residential treatment with adolescent boys. It was really intense, beautiful work, and really intense. I had no idea about self-care or anything like that. Every day I just sort of left it all on the table, and would come home kind of wrecked—heartful and wrecked. I remember one of those nights I barreled in the front door after a long day, and a group of people were sitting around candlelight talking about love. That made an impression. Like, okay, this is a parallel universe, kind of. I sat down.

I hadn't heard from the group in 20 years. Everyone went their own ways. I hadn't heard from them in literally 20 years. And a week before Thich Nhat Hanh—who people call Thay^[4]—died, somebody started a thread out of nowhere.

I went through different relationships to his teaching. At times it reached me, at times feeling somehow kind of sentimental or idealistic. And I found that as my own practice, my own encounter with the Dharma deepens, what a text, what a person, or what a tradition does to one's heart changes too. You really see how much you might have missed in earlier encounters. With his teaching for sure, I see tremendous depth and grace.

So I did not have a lot of contact with him, but I did practice at Deer Park outside San Diego and joined peace walks in Los Angeles, and later taught with some of his monastics. He left a kind of mark, and so I want to pay tribute to that.

Who can you really trust when they talk about love? Who has earned the moral credibility to actually say love, and it's trustworthy? One way of earning that moral credibility is to encounter tremendous hardship and persist in a sense of devotion to love. Thay was on the front lines of war, of religious persecution, of exile for almost 40 years. And so when he says love, I take that seriously. When he persists in the belief that our redemption is through love, I take that seriously.

This is him in conversation with bell hooks^[5] in 2000:

"Martin Luther King was among us as a brother, as a friend, as a leader. He was able to maintain that love. When you touch him, you touch a bodhisattva^[6], for his understanding and love was enough to hold everything to him. He tried to transmit his insight and his love to the community, but maybe we have not received it enough. He was trying to transmit the best things to us: his goodness, his love, his non-duality. But because we had clung so much to him as a person, we did not bring the essence of what he was teaching into our community. So now that he's no longer here, we are at a loss. We have to be aware that the crucial transmission he was making was not the transmission of power, of authority, of position, but the transmission of the Dharma. It means love."

It can be hard to trace the influences of one's teachers on one's own being. Myself now doing some teaching, I am cognizant that I'm sort of plagiarizing all of my teachers all of the time without being aware of it. It feels like it's my original thought, but it's not. It's because they become part of us. When we encounter a teacher open-heartedly, we distill out the medicine that their goodness has for our own heart, and it becomes a part of us. It feels native to our heart, and so it's hard to tell what is them and what is oneself.

Thay's teachings have had a major impact on Buddhist practice in this country and many countries. One of the things I remember most was his body, the way he moved. It just had a kind of moral force to it. It was like it was the teaching itself. I'm not temperamentally a patient person, but to see him take a step kind of issued this commandment to get still. All of my movement or impatience or the activities of my mind in those moments just had this kind of absurd look in the mirror of his presence and stillness.

I heard that after his stroke, two monks would stand at each shoulder and two monks at his legs, and they would support him in taking mindful steps—even given the compromised state of his body. I'd watch him move to and from the dais^[7] around the monastery, through the streets of Los Angeles, and I think about what he said:

"The kingdom of God is available to you in the here and now, but the question is whether you are available to the kingdom. Our practice is to make ourselves ready for the kingdom so that it can manifest in the here and now. You don't have to die in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. You have to be truly alive in order to do so."

So much wonder in that. What is the kingdom of God? I would hear that in his ecumenical style of mixing Buddhist and theistic language, and I had no idea what that meant. But the best instructions are the instructions that evoke sincerity and curiosity and wonder. What is that? How do I make my heart available to the kingdom?

He says, "No mud, no lotus." And that is really a poetic way of rendering the path of purification. Some of the military metaphors around purification—like killing the kilesas^[8] (the defilements, the forces of greed, hatred, and delusion)—use really strong language about the force, energy, and effort actually required to meet the depth of the forces of suffering, of Mara^[9]. But this is rendered much more gently: No mud, no lotus. Of course there is mud; there is great suffering. And that is the compost and the fertilizer for our growing freedom.

In this way, life becomes a doorway. As our teacher said in the sit something like, "To be present is to be utterly undefended against imperfection." That is beckoning us into this path of purification, where anything and everything is a kind of doorway into a deeper presence.

He emphasized the non-duality of wisdom and compassion, often rendering that as understanding and love. Sometimes it feels like we have wisdom over here and love over here. On the wisdom side, it's like every phenomenon, every arising is a gateway to emptiness. And then on this side, there's an image of love pervading all things, boundless, measureless. We can be attracted to one side or the other, but Thich Nhat Hanh articulated the non-duality of wisdom and love. Specifically, he tied the notion of egoic identification with deficits of love.

The real power of the Buddha, he wrote, was that he had so much love. He saw people trapped in their own notions of a small, separate self, feeling guilty or proud of that self. And he offered revolutionary teachings that resounded like a lion's roar, helping people to wake up, to break free from the prison of ignorance.

And indeed we do see that. I think ego is a function of fear, and its hallmark is defensiveness, and its expression is clinging. The more energy we actually divest from the egoic knot, the more it flows into wholesomeness, into love. And so wisdom and love are connected.

This is again Thay:

"If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink. The river is immense, and it has the capacity to receive, embrace, and transform. When our hearts are small, our understanding and compassion are limited, and we suffer. We can't accept or tolerate others and their shortcomings, and we demand that they change. But when our hearts expand, these same things don't make us suffer anymore. We have a lot of understanding and compassion, and can embrace others. We accept others as they are, and then they have a chance to transform. Understanding someone's suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love's other name. If you don't understand, you can't love."

Understanding is love's other name. That is very beautiful. It speaks to this insight we develop over the Dharma life: that the more deeply we look into conditionality, the more reason we will have to love, and the less tenable hatred becomes. Hatred is never the last word. It may be an important first word, but it is never the last word. And so, understanding is love's other name.

I've returned to his reflections on anger often, and I see it as a kind of service. He was ordained quite young and was a monastic for his whole life, and yet he was doing what he could to try to speak to a lay life—the life of family and relationships, the joys of that, the spiritual opportunity of that, and the tremendous suffering of it.

His book Anger comes up in my own reflections and talks often. His counsel was not to suppress anger, not to vent (he called venting anger "rehearsing it"), and not to pretend you're not angry. But to basically care for it as one cares for a child. He says:

"Just like our organs, our anger is part of us. When we're angry, we have to go back to ourselves and take good care of our anger. We cannot say, 'Go away, anger, I don't want you.' When you have a stomach ache, you don't say, 'I don't want my stomach.' No, you take care of it. In the same way, we have to embrace and take good care of our anger."

He described this approach to peace talks, to actually expressing anger. Neither suppressing it nor acting it out. To talk about anger, to confess one's anger without doing it in an aggressive way, is very vulnerable. It's more vulnerable sometimes to say "I am angry with you" than to say "I love you."

He articulated a few gathas^[10] to support the conversation. They are diametrically opposed to the core energy of anger, which is to declare our invulnerability, our independence, to declare our certainty, to be an island. The very truth that we are angry is a testament that we can be hurt, that we have been hurt. And so he invites us into the courage of meeting this interpersonally.

In the context of relationship, he offers these three statements. One doesn't even have to make these statements aloud; even just to reflect on them is potent enough to do something to one's heart. I would go to the person I'm angry with, after having practiced and done my best to manage, to take good care of the child of anger. The statements, the confessions, the pleas are:

I am angry. I suffer. I'm doing my best. I need your help.

I think what I find so touching about that is it is exactly what anger wishes to conceal—namely, our dependence. And here we just come right out with it: I need your help.

Thay highlighted non-duality in a particular way: that all things inter-are. His committed practitioners formed the Order of Interbeing^[11]. All things inter-are. At first, it sort of sounds like a philosophical analysis of interdependence, of dependent origination—that this is because that is; when this is not, that is not. But it feels like more than a philosophical reflection. It is being invited into an insight into emptiness.

"If you're a poet, you will see that there's a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there's no rain; without rain, no trees; without trees, we cannot make paper. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. It's not so difficult to see, because when we look at this sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here, and mine is also. So we can say everything is in here with this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here: time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, and the heat. This sheet of paper is because everything else is."

If that's a sheet of paper, what are you? That can stop us in our tracks.

This understanding provides a basis for non-division, for compassion. And it points to this suggestion: no birth, no death. There's no coherent place to demarcate a life, a birth, a death. We think of our body as ourself, belonging to ourself. But if you look deeply, you see the body as the body of your ancestors, of your parents, of your children, their children. So it's not me, it's not mine. Your body is full of limitless non-body elements.

To die, in our notion of death, means that from something you suddenly become nothing. From someone you become no one. That is a horrible idea. That makes no sense. If something has not been born, will that something have to die sometime? This, he said, was the key to fearlessness. It's often said ignorance is the fundamental wellspring of suffering, but I often have the thought that fear is even more foundational than ignorance. And so fearlessness, he said, is the ultimate joy.

This understanding reframes how we construe death and endings. Thay did not talk about reincarnation as a seed consciousness reanimating a new body. No, it's the sum total of our lineage and the effects of our life on everything else.

And so, one last piece. This begins a talk with Thay saying, "She was 20 years old when I first met her." It's kind of like a record scratch. Kind of like, wait, 20 years old when I first met her?

Indeed, it is a love story. He describes being a 24-year-old celibate monk and falling in love with a nun. He said, "As a monk, you're not supposed to fall in love, but sometimes love is stronger than your determination." This is from a series of talks given in 1992—he was 65, I believe—called Cultivating the Mind of Love. He's falling in love, and she seems to be falling in love too. He has a sleepless night and tries to write poetry, but can't even get one sentence down. He's trying to redirect the intensity of this falling. He's up late at night and desperately wants to go to her room, and indeed she has a similar kind of longing. But because of his vows, his commitments, and his vow to protect her, he does not go.

They decide together, given their vows, that they must be away from each other. They have to be apart in different monasteries, and so she's about to move somewhere else. He says:

"I remember the moment we parted. We sat across from each other. She, too, seemed overwhelmed by despair. She stood up, came close to me, took my head in her arms, and drew me close to her in a very natural way. I allowed myself to be embraced. It was the first and last time we had any physical contact. Then we bowed and separated."

So what to do with that despair, with that poignancy, with that longing? What to do with it?

No mud, no lotus. Through a kind of alchemical process, that is transformed. Maybe we call it sublimation, maybe we call it purification, but there's a way he's describing of redirecting his own narrow, personal longing into the channel of a greater love and prosocial commitment. He says, "Over time, my love for her did not diminish, but it was no longer confined to one person. I began to see her everywhere."

This is a sacrifice and a renunciation. It's one that he made for her, and for himself, and for us. We are the inheritors of that gesture. We're the beneficiaries of that love.

And so the question then is: what will we do with Thay's love?

Let's just sit for a moment.

Thank you. Thank you for your attention and practice. To the YouTube group, thank you. I wish you all well. I offer this for your consideration; pick up what's useful and leave what's not behind. Okay.