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Do What You Can

So welcome to this Sunday morning Dharma talk. For those of you who've been here before, and those of you who may be new, I want to invite back Patācārā^[1]. Patācārā was living on her altar for a while. She was a gift to IMC and IRC. She was one of the most important of the earliest Buddhist nuns, who was a teacher of many of the other nuns at the time of the Buddha. We're very fortunate to have a statue of her, and she's back here today because she lives in Santa Cruz at our retreat center. But the retreat center is about six miles from some of the big Santa Cruz and San Mateo County fires that are happening now. So some of the resident volunteers came here to IMC for shelter, and they brought her along for safekeeping. I am very happy to have her back, and she'll be here for a while this time around. I don't know how long, but it's nice to have her company.

The Fires Around Us

For those of you who are not in the San Francisco Bay Area, there's a kind of ring of fire around us. Just west of here, probably five or six miles as the crow flies, there are fires going on. Down towards Santa Cruz, about six miles from Santa Cruz, there are big fires that are destroying many homes. There are some 70,000 people who are evacuated down there. Directly south of here, or southeast a little bit, there's one of the largest fires in California history in the Mount Hamilton mountains, which is just east of San Jose. Then fires are going slowly up the bay, but the big fires are up in the northern counties in the Napa Valley area. That also is one of the very biggest fires in California history, burning well over 200,000 acres.

They are here in California, and here in the Bay Area, it is intermittently full of smoke. This morning it's relatively clean, but there are times where it's been unhealthy air to breathe. We have people in our community who have lost their homes in the mountains here. It's always tragic. Some of it may be a little bit more tragic than others if all their savings went into their home and everything burned and disappeared in the fire. As far as I know, we don't have anyone who's been injured, but it certainly has a big impact on many of our lives here and what goes on.

To have this happen at the same time as COVID-19, and the wish to be sheltered and to be appropriately distanced from other people so as not to either get COVID-19 or pass it on, makes it challenging. At this time, all these evacuees have to go someplace and are on the move and not at home. So it's a challenging time. They say it's challenging not only because of what's happening right now, but also what's coming. The weather is changing tonight, and more lightning is supposed to be coming. Most of these fires are lightning fires. Apparently, they had about 12,000 lightning strikes in California over the last week, especially last Sunday and Monday. Of those 12,000 lightning strikes, about 500 fires were created all over the state, so fire forces are quite spread thin and challenged.

With all that, there's the context for our lives this week. It's profound for California to repeat what happened just some months ago. We had huge fires last year, and it seems like it's becoming a regular pattern to have these big fires. The weather conditions have changed dramatically to really allow these fires to occur.

The Jātaka Tale of the Parrot

There is a story that begins that once there was a large forest for which there came a big lightning storm. Thunderous lightning struck the tops of trees and frightened the animals and the people who lived there. Some of the lightning lit the trees on fire, and the forest burst into flames. The flames spread to neighboring trees, sparks flew to other trees further away, and pretty soon big parts of the forest were on fire.

This could be a story just a few miles away from here in the Santa Cruz mountains, but it's a story that is said to be told at the time of the Buddha. It's a Jātaka tale^[2], birth stories of the Buddha. They're kind of Buddhist fables, and this one is a fable about a small bird—some people call it a quail, some people a parrot—who found itself in this huge forest fire. The description that's given for the fire back then in ancient India is almost the same description we can use today. It speaks to the reoccurrence of these kinds of dangers, these kinds of human experiences that we live in, and world experiences—the coming through of fire.

In the Santa Cruz mountains here, big destruction happened in the Big Basin redwood forests. The redwoods are more or less okay; they depend on fires to come through. Their whole ecosystem is fire-dependent. But the ranger station at the headquarters there was not fire-dependent; in fact, it got destroyed in the process, but the redwood trees continue.

In this Jātaka tale, there is a small parrot that is able to fly to safety because it can fly above the flames. With a lot of work, it begins to fly above the flames through the smoke, feeling the heat coming up from the ground and from the tops of the trees, and it's flying to the river where it can be safe. As it looks down into the forest, it sees all these animals running and trapped. A deer with its fawn trapped. All these animals that are agitated, screaming, running, trapped, and trying to escape the fire.

This just opens the heart of the parrot, and the parrot said, "I have to do something. I can't just escape for myself." But what does a small parrot do? The parrot goes to the river and dunks into the water to get all its feathers as wet as possible. Carrying the weight of the water and feathers, it flaps back. Now it can't quite fly above the fire anymore, but is just singed by the fire as it flies along back to the heart of the fire, the center of it. And then it shakes out its feathers, so the drops can fall out and bound into the fire. Those drops don't even reach the flames before they sizzle up, evaporate, and disappear. But the parrot goes back to the river and does it again, and again, and again.

Now up in the high heavens, there are gods, called devas^[3] in India, who are living lives of pleasure, luxury, and ease. They look down to see the fire below and the forest burning, and they see this little parrot going to the river, getting water, wetting itself off, and shaking its water over the flames, doing it over and over again. They laugh at it a little bit and say, "Look at that silly parrot. The parrot can't make any difference in this big fire, and it's not what it should be doing." They're a little bit dismissive of the parrot, except for one of the gods.

One of the gods is quiet and very thoughtful, and decides to go visit. The deva shape-shifts into the form of a great eagle, comes down, flies next to the little parrot, and says, "Parrot, parrot, my friend, what you're doing is hopeless. Let me give you some advice: you should really go and save yourself. Go someplace where there is no fire. Go to the other side of the river and be safe."

The parrot says, "Many people give me advice. I don't need advice. What I need is someone who can help me."

That went right into the heart of the great eagle and this deva. The god looked around and saw what was happening in the fire. The deva saw the animals who were struggling and trapped, maybe screaming with the flames coming, and felt, "Yes, I want to be a being like this parrot. I want to be a being that helps." So the deva made a decision: "I'm going to also help this parrot."

As the heart opened up of this deva, so did the tears. The tears started streaming down off the beak of the great eagle, off its feathers, off its face. The tears started falling and falling. Because it was the tears of a deva, the tears were immense, and it was almost like it was raining across the forest. All those tears that came from the deva's wish to be of help and to dedicate itself to make a difference then quenched the fire, stilled the fire, and ended the forest fire.

So that is a fable we're told in ancient India. It ends with a little line that says, "And in that lifetime, I was the parrot"—this is the Buddha speaking.

All these Jātaka tales are stories of the Buddha in different past lives before he became a Buddha. They say that in each of those lifetimes he had to learn a lesson. Here in the lesson of being a parrot, he learned the lesson of perseverance, the lesson of compassion, the lesson of "we do whatever we can." We're not expected to do more than we can, but we do what we can.

Doing What We Can

Now this idea: do we do what we can? Are we doing what we can to help this world, to help the forest fires of our lives? In ancient India and the Buddhist teachings, fires are very symbolic, both of the danger of fires themselves, but also other fires that exist—the fires of greed, hate, and delusion. The Buddha talked about four great perils^[4]: the peril of fire, of floods, of kings, and bandits. The fires inside of us, the floods inside of us, the kings inside of us, and the bandits inside of us—those can all be dangerous as well.

The fires are symbolic of greed, hate, and delusion. And greed, hate, and delusion, in some huge way, also have a role to play in the environmental changes, the climate changes we have. Without really looking deeply into ourselves, are we really going to quench the fires? So this idea: we do what we can, no matter how small it is, like the parrot. And like the devas, we let our hearts break open; that's where the compassion resides.

Why I say this is that it's certainly a deeply, fully sad thing to have people lose their homes, lose their lives. People die, people get sick, and people get afraid. There's grief to be experienced in this regard. But how to experience grief? How to experience sadness? How to experience the pain of the world without getting agitated, without getting contracted, without spinning out into discursive thought? How to connect to it with a broken heart, an open heart, so that the compassion that's in there, the care, the love, can come forth out of us?

That's the function of Buddhist practice. Buddhist practice really shows us the path or the way in which we can engage in the world effectively. One of the key lessons of Buddhist practice in the depth of it, is the lesson not to be calm, not to be peaceful at all, but rather the lesson of not giving in to the forces of agitation. Not giving in to greed or hatred, or not succumbing to fear in a way that makes us agitated.

There's a huge difference between saying, "Let's try to be peaceful and calm," versus saying, "It's just not worthwhile for me to now get involved in spinning out in my discursive thoughts. It's not worthwhile for me to latch onto the blame that I have, or latch onto self-criticism, or to latch onto anger." It's not worth latching onto or picking up certain things.

To learn that lesson through practice, to sit quietly enough, attentively enough, and to watch carefully and see very clearly what it's like for the mind not to latch onto any of these things, and to see what it's like to latch on. As we latch on, to see what is lost. To see how it doesn't really serve us, that there's a loss in that. This is a phenomenal lesson to learn: it's not worth it, it's not appropriate, there's a loss in getting caught and agitated.

It doesn't mean we don't care. We can actually care better from that deeper place inside. We can care better for the world. We're wiser about the world when we don't give in to all these other things that keep us spinning out and preoccupied and concerned. Of course we do—it's not a crime to do that, life is challenging. But the practice can teach us to learn to recognize it. It takes a while sometimes; it takes months and years to really start seeing that it's not worth picking up clinging, it's not worth picking up latching on.

That's a very different perspective than the perspective that, "Oh, you're supposed to be peaceful." Because then we can argue, well, being peaceful is okay, but this is not a time to be peaceful; we have to be involved and concerned and get active. But instead of saying we have to be peaceful, what Buddhist practice teaches us is we don't have to latch on, we don't have to get caught.

The Mountains of Sickness, Old Age, and Death

This is a profoundly deep and important lesson, not only when there's a forest fire around us, but also for the fires of sickness, old age, and death—the inevitable fires that life comes with. Just as it's natural for the fires to go through redwood land, it's natural for human beings to get sick, if they're lucky enough to become old, and to die.

What do we do then? An allegory I told last year: the Buddha was talking to a king, and the Buddha asked, "How are you?" The king said, "Well, I'm preoccupied with the things that kings are preoccupied with—sensual pleasures of all kinds because I'm wealthy, having a lot of power, conquering neighboring countries, warring, and all these things. I'm busy."

The Buddha then shared this allegory. He said, "Imagine, dear King, that a messenger comes from the east and tells you, 'King, the mountains of the east are rolling forward towards the capital, towards your palace, towards you.' And a messenger from the south comes and says, 'The mountains of the south are rolling along, crushing everything in its way, coming to you.' The mountains of the west, the mountains of the north—they're all converging on you, crushing everything in their way until it comes here. Given that, what would you do then?"

And the king said, "In that case, I will practice the Dharma."

And the Buddha said, "That's good, that's right, because the mountains of sickness, old age, and death are coming rolling along. And that's coming for all of us."

There will come a time, hopefully for all of us, that if we can be conscious as we come across these big challenges, the nature of our practice becomes really central to how we meet them. It becomes a time when we're no longer like the parrot—we can no longer even do a little bit to help ourselves. The end is coming.

Here is where that Dharma lesson is so important. If we know so clearly, even as we're facing death, that it's simply not worthwhile. It's not useful, it's not pleasant. There's a deep, great loss to latch onto fear, to latch onto anger, to latch onto disappointment, to latch onto resistance. To be fighting, to be hating, to be aversive, to be afraid—it's just not worth latching onto that, being involved in that. We can see so clearly what is lost as we latch on, and so then we don't do it.

The consequence of that is that we come back to a place of peace, without being told that you should be dying peacefully. Without being told that you don't have to think about all these thoughts about the future, the past, what if, and what's going to be. It's so obvious that you're better off not going there, that you have a home, you have something precious and valuable here and now, even as you're dying. You don't want to lose it; it's not worth losing it. That's where wealth is. That's where value is. That's where a deep sense of meaning even is. That is lost as we latch on.

That is one of the deepest Dharma lessons we can learn as we keep doing this practice, keep being mindful, and keep seeing and learning and recognizing what's really going on, moment to moment, in this life of ours, and how we respond and how we react. And when the time comes for the heart to open and for our metaphoric tears to flow freely and put out the fires of the world the best we can, then may it be so.

When the time comes and we experience great loss, we don't have to be afraid of the deep emotional feelings that come with that. If we can meet those and open to them with our mindfulness, if we can learn how to have strong, powerful emotions of even sadness, and pain, and loss, and even fear, and we've learned not to latch onto anything, not to add anything extra, not to spin out in discursive thoughts, but just have this deep respect for what the heart is feeling. I think that is what the story tells about the deva who wanted to help and just started crying; that's where the healing began happening for the forest.

To allow our humanity, allow these emotions to come, but to learn not to resist, not to hold on, not to cling. Not to get involved in discursive commentary and judgments about it. This simplicity of just letting it flow. So we learn this lesson and apply it in so many different places. Sometimes it applies in ways that we want to help the world, sometimes we apply it so we help ourselves and allow what's inside to be healed and opened and met with respect.

We'll use those lessons at a time when there's no help possible, in the sense that we're really up against our own death, perhaps, and the mountains have finally come. Even then, to meet that without slipping off into discursive thoughts, slipping off into attachment and clinging—this is a powerful and valuable and meaningful way of living and dying and finding our way.

We live in a world that's full of danger, there's no denying it. And we live in a world where we can practice. This practice for our hearts makes all the difference in the world.

Don't be the parrot that escapes the fire and doesn't help. Be the parrot that escapes the fire just enough to help, and comes back and helps. Don't be the deva that is aloof and dismissive of what's happening in the world. Be the deva that wants to come and help, whose heart opens up, flows, and is that way. Please practice. Do the mindfulness practice, do the meditation practice. It's one of the most powerful and significant things a person can do with this life we have.

So on this day of forest fires all around us, maybe they're all rolling towards us. May we remember to practice, and may we remember the many ways that we can get our feathers wet and shake them out. There's no amount of helping which is too little. We do what we can.

Thank you so much, and I look forward to seeing you next Sunday as well. I think maybe I'm teaching a retreat next Sunday, so we'll see what happens.