Jomon: 00:00

Hello and welcome. This is the Zen Community of Oregon, making the teachings of the Buddhadharma accessible to support your practice. New episodes air every week.

Kisei: 00:24

So I wanted to talk today about the four immeasurables. It's June and the time that I lived at the monastery we usually focused on metta practice in the Four Immeasurables in June and the normal theme for Sashin in June is metta, which is happening actually starts tonight. So what are the four boundless qualities of the heart? We sometimes give them the names loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity. And the teaching is that these qualities, these qualities of loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, or joy and equanimity are innate.

Kisei: 01:23

They're natural to our human heart for for all beings. These are innate qualities of the heart, of our our true nature, of our Buddha nature. And that's, like, prior to all conditioning. So sometimes we use the phrase, like, the ground of our being. These are the qualities of the ground of our being.

Kisei: 01:52

And what's what's beautiful is that, not only are the qualities that are innate with us, the qualities of our natural heart, our awakened heart, but they're qualities that we can cultivate spiritual path and that we do cultivate on our spiritual path. And, you know, there are qualities that are great aids to our to our life, to our living, to our our spiritual practice. I I always think of this, like, try as we might, we can't control the circumstances of our lives. And I think, like, as we practice more and more, like, we we may become humbled by that truth that, like, you know, as we're sitting in meditation, we can't even control the next thought or experience that arises, like, less so how another person is going to feel about us in a given moment or pay attention to us in a given moment, let alone, like, what's gonna happen in our country or what kind of weather we're gonna have this year or in ten years. So we can't control most of the circumstances of our lives, but what we can do is cultivate a heart that responds with kindness or openness or joy when faced with the normal, like, fluctuations of life, the joys and sorrows, the pleasures and pains, the insecurities, the securities, the fears, the stabilities, the losses, the gains that that make up human life.

Kisei: 04:01

So these these qualities of the heart, these qualities that we call the four immeasurables, they are aids. They help us meet and accept our lives, ourselves, our circumstances as they actually are. And they can be like keys to helping us really be with or or meet experience as it as it actually is. Because as we see in meditation, often we're putting a lot onto experience and we're reacting to or in response to all that we put on top of the experience. So part of practice is really kinda getting to the bottom of what's what's actually happening here versus what am I telling myself about what's happening here, which is which is hard to do.

Kisei: 05:07

You know, we're constantly trying to, change, manipulate, get something better, be better, feel safer, more secure, more loved, more needed. We're constantly, like, running from our fear, our distress, our loneliness. We're constantly, like, wanting other people to change in order for us to feel better. Like, all of that is is, like, happening a lot of times before we even notice that it's happening. We're kind of doing that even subtly.

Kisei: 05:45

You know, it's an interesting thing even in meditation. We can learn some technique in meditation, and then we can use meditation to not feel other experiences that may be arising in our body minds. Yeah. So it was just part of why we have so many practices and and and Metta practice, think, and and Pema Chodron talks about this. I I picked up another Pema Chodron book, another one of her old books called The Wisdom of No Escape, and it's called The Wisdom of No Escape and The Path of Loving Kindness, which I love those two together.

Kisei: 06:28

And I wanna I wanna read from a little from the first chapter, because she talks about loving kindness right in the in the first chapter. And, you know, she can be always, like, so so clear and direct in, what comes through at least in her books. So she says, there's a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth. There's a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try to avoid pain and just try to get comfortable. You can see this even in insects and animals and birds.

Kisei: 07:17

All of us are the same. And then she says a much more interesting, kind, adventurous, and joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity, not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet. So she's like proposing, oh, there's this other way of being, which really goes against the grain of some deep seated habit, biological habit to move away from pain and towards pleasure or towards something more comfortable. And she's saying, practice. She's not even using the word practice yet, but there is this other way that we can orient.

Kisei: 08:13

And then she goes on, to lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, To lead a more passionate, full and delightful life than that, we must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is. How we tick and how our world ticks, how the whole thing just is. If we're committed to comfort at any cost, as soon as we come up against the least edge of pain, we're going to run. We'll never know what's beyond that particular barrier or wall or fearful thing. When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are.

Kisei: 09:18

It's a bit like saying, if I jog, I'll be a much better person. If I could only get a nicer house, I'd be a better person. If I could meditate and calm down, I'd be a better person. Or the scenario may be that they find fault with others. They might say, if it weren't for my husband, I'd have a perfect marriage.

Kisei: 09:39

Or if it weren't for the fact that my boss and I can't get on, my job would just be great. And if it weren't for my mind, my meditation would be excellent. But and this is, you know, this is the heart of loving kindness, which she's gonna say next. She says, loving kindness, maitri, which is the Tibetan word for loving kindness, maitri. It's really beautiful word.

Kisei: 10:09

Maitri towards ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. Maitri, metta, loving kindness means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves.

Kisei: 10:36

Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now just as we are. That's the ground. That's what we study.

Kisei: 10:59

That's what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest. So I can feel my heart saying yes, yes, yes to those last few lines, and, you know, she's saying something about practice that we've probably all heard hundreds or thousands of times. We've probably all maybe even said to ourselves, maybe even a few times today, some of these words. Like, oh, it's not about getting comfortable. It's not about improving myself.

Kisei: 11:35

It's about accepting myself just as I am. And we've probably had insights on various levels about what she just said, and still we need the reminder. Still it can feel like, wow. I know that, and I'm hearing it for the first time. And that's how the dharma works.

Kisei: 12:00

That's how love works. I was reading a book by a developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan, and she studies relationship and she was talking about research that I'm familiar with involving mothers and infants and how they respond to each other. She was talking about that research being really groundbreaking because there was this idea that, like, infants didn't feel. That was, like, kind of an early, early belief about babies, like babies didn't feel. And this research was really showing, like, babies are very sensitive and feel a lot and and have relational, like, ability right from the beginning.

Kisei: 12:47

And so this is what she says, and and when I read this paragraph, I felt like I was reading a dharma teaching, which I think happens a lot. Maybe you've had this experience as you've been practicing of the dharma teachings are just everywhere. They're in any book or movie. They're just going to start hearing or seeing the dharma everywhere. But this is what she says, Their research was challenging an orthodoxy of separation.

Kisei: 13:15

We are born alone. We die alone. That's the orthodoxy. By revealing a reality of relationship, finding and losing and finding again. This is the rhythm of relationship played over and over again in the games that delight babies and young children.

Kisei: 13:39

It is the rhythm of love. So how many of us have this orthodoxy of separation ingrained in us? Somewhere in us, we have this belief that we are alone, separate from the world, that no one understands us or some some flavor of that. And you could say that dharma practice or the dharma challenges this orthodoxy, this false orthodoxy by revealing a reality of relationship just like this research was revealing a reality of relationship. Interconnection, non separation.

Kisei: 14:27

That's what's being revealed to us as we practice dharma. Like, oh, I'm not alone. Practice is that so she was referring to in the research that, like, there would be attunement between the mother and the child, and then there would be a kind of going out of attunement. Maybe the mother had an itch or made a face, and then there was a feeling of separation from the baby, and then they would reattune. And so there was this, like and that, she said, is healthy attachment.

Kisei: 14:58

There's, like, the loss and then the coming back together, and the loss and the coming back together. And that's something that's so familiar to us as as children. And that's so familiar. I mean, that's practice. Right?

Kisei: 15:12

We we find it. We remember. Oh, yeah. It's just about being right here. Oh, this is love.

Kisei: 15:23

This is acceptance. This is interconnection. And then we lose it. Like, what am I doing again? Like, why am I sitting here?

Kisei: 15:33

What is my practice? And then we find it. Oh, the breath. There it is. And then we lose it, and then we find it.

Kisei: 15:42

And and sometimes, like, if we can feel like we've lost it for days or hours or months, and then we hear a teaching or we sit down again or we open to the sky or we take a deep breath, and there it is. We're found. And I love that line of, like, it's the rhythm of love that delighted us as children. Like, it just reminded me that that finding and losing, which we can sometimes feel a lot of dismay about of, like, oh, I lost my practice, like or why does it have to be so hard? That it can actually be a delight, like, oh, actually, I found my practice instead of focusing on the losing.

Kisei: 16:30

We can focus on that just like that rediscovery. That's some that's an insight I had at some point in my practice where there was that switch from, being so, like, fixated on the missing, like, oh gosh. I just spent ten minutes daydreaming instead of sitting here, or I could have been practicing, but I, like, indulged in all of these other things or all of these other thoughts to, like, the the miraculousness of finding my breath again. The the miraculousness of, oh, right here. Oh, right here.

Kisei: 17:18

So this, you know, finding and losing and finding, it's you know, another thing about it is we're never far away from it. So we might feel temporarily lost, but, like, as we practice, I think part of the faith is that we're we'll we'll get found. We'll get found, and we can trust that that all the sense of lost or being lost is is just temporary, that it it's not true. It's not truly true. That some part of us is always actually right in in it.

Kisei: 18:03

There's this, koan phrase, a coin that's lost in the river is found in the river. We we are that coin. We are that coin is our true nature. Love is that coin. The river is us.

Kisei: 18:19

And we identify with the coin, though. Feel like, oh, it's lost, and then I have to find it again. It's like, oh, actually, we can, like, sink into the river, and then it it's never lost. It's still in the river. And I was reflecting on this.

Kisei: 18:37

I have a few dear friends who practice in the Tibetan tradition, and I've had some experience in that tradition as well. And in the Tibetan tradition, one of the first practices that people go through is a practice called Nundro, where you do preliminary they call them preliminary practices a 100,000 times. So you would do a 100,000 bows, a 100,000 atonement chants, a 100,000 offerings. And then, you know, as you go through that, then you might learn different practices and you would also do them for a number some number of times. I practiced for a little bit at Tara Mandala and, received a teaching, then I had to do it a 100 times.

Kisei: 19:29

I just had to do it a 100 times, and I had to keep a journal of every time that I did it. And you actually, like, count how many times you do it. And there's something there's something about that that I'm appreciating, just like reflecting on this teaching by Pema Chodron and just like hearing the dharma over and over and over and over and over again and doing the same practice over and over and over again. That there's like a sense of, oh, if you do it a 100,000 times, it's in you. You know something about bowing that you did not know before.

Kisei: 20:11

And and, you know, similarly, we don't count, but, you know, similarly, like, if you do breath practice for a year or ten years, you know something about it that you didn't know before. If you work on a koan, I've I've shared this line that, that Chozan said once, but we were, like, embarking on a practice period, and we were doing this practice of sitting like a mountain. And she came in to the Zen Do, and she didn't do this very often when I lived there, but she came into the Zen Do and she sat down and she said, If you do this practice every day for the next sixty days, that was the length of the practice period, it will change you. And that's I think that's kind of the trust of embarking on the practice and just doing it over and over and over again. Hogan said, to those of us who ordained and lived at the monastery for at least seven years if you ordained, he said, you know, after that seven year period, the dharma is in your bones.

Kisei: 21:16

How many vows? How many chants? And you chant the same chants every day, every day, every day. It's kind of like that a 100,000 times. And so, you know, similarly, like in our practice outside of the monastery, it's that, like, we do the zaza.

Kisei: 21:38

We sit down, we hear the dharma, and we keep hearing it. And, you know, as we hear it, maybe a 100,000 times, like, we start to know it on a deeper and deeper level as we come back to the breath or to kindness. Thousands and thousands of times, like, we begin to trust that, oh, and it's not a conceptual thing. It's not like, oh, once I get to 10,000, then I'll have it. It's like, it's just that act of coming back, coming back, doing the practice, doing the practice that it starts to to live in our bodies.

Kisei: 22:21

It starts to live in our bones. The point is repetition. A 100,000 times we lose it and find it again, and then we really start to trust that we will find it, that that love is us, that loving kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity are really our nature, really our our heart's natural way. And and the thing that can be tricky about this, which is why I'm lingering here, is like the the recognition, the experience of gratitude or loving kindness or presence or ease, or equanimity. That that actual recognition, that actual experience, it takes an instant.

Kisei: 23:15

It just it happens, and when it happens, it's so natural. It's like we've always known it often, And then we forget, and then it can feel so far away, and and then we might doubt might come up of, like, oh, does this practice really work? Like, where did it go? And so, like, what actually, like, takes the time? It doesn't actually take time to, like, metta or to experience joy.

Kisei: 23:48

Like, those they arise sometimes unbidden. But the, like, cultivation, the real trust, the real refuge, the real reliability of knowing that that is an aspect of our true nature. We're never apart from it. That's what takes the 100,000 times of coming back, coming back, coming back, coming back, rediscovering, rediscovering, rediscovering, rereading books that we've read a 100,000 times, rehearing the same teaching from different mouths, you know, sharing the same thing at closing circle over and over again. But it's not the same thing.

Kisei: 24:32

We're, like, rediscovering, and every time we rediscover it, it's it's new in a way too even though it's familiar because, I mean, because we're different, because we're never a constant same thing. And I love, you know, I love that line from Pema Chodron of, like, and we'll still get angry and we'll still get anxious. But, like, as we practice, our response is closer to the actual experience, so it can't be, like, a measure of our practice if we get God angry on last Wednesday or if we, you know, still feel that trembling anxiety at times. It's like, yes, we're human. The conditions of being human will continue to arise as long as we're human.

Kisei: 25:33

Some, you know, if we've had intense anxiety, sometimes it does diminish through practice, but often what actually changes is our response to the actual experience. Because like I was saying in the beginning, oftentimes we have the actual experience and then we have all these layers of things we do to avoid it, to not feel it, to try to feel something different, to try to trick ourselves into not feeling it, to blame somebody else. And, like, all of that

Jomon: 26:07

extra stuff, we start to see through more quickly, and we have more and more of the ability to be

Kisei: 26:13

with blame the actual experience as it as it arises. We have the more of an ability to feel or or companion the anxiety with kindness and openness or curiosity and humility, and that's what changes in practice, and that changes everything. There's this poem that I recently discovered. It's called Invite Spaciousness, and she talks about bringing spaciousness to a closed heart and and just breathing with a closed heart. And at the end of the poem, she says, and nothing changes.

Kisei: 26:56

And then she says, and everything changes. And that's that's practice. It's like, oh, the closed heart might stay stay closed, but I'm actually with that experience. And that's where everything changes. I'm not doing all the other things that I do to not feel it.

Kisei: 27:17

And, you know, sometimes that's where we're meeting ourselves. We're meeting ourselves in, like, 10 steps away from the actual experience, and that's the actual experience. It's the it's the whatever it is. Right? It's the distraction.

Kisei: 27:32

It's the, Oh, I'm on my phone. Oh, I'm still on my phone. Oh, minutes have gone by and I'm still on my phone. Yeah, there's this practice called mindful self compassion that was developed by Kristen Neff that's very much rooted in Buddhist teachings, she was researching how people practice and the effects that this practice has on people. And the first step in mindful self compassion is acknowledging what's happening.

Kisei: 28:07

And I love that step because that's like like the actual meeting ourselves where we are. So it's the like, oh, I'm still on my cell phone, or, oh, I'm trying to run away from this anxiety. And, like, just to name that, like, lands us in the experience of what's actually happening. It kind of, like, wakes us up, and then we have the ability to respond to what's happening more clearly. And that's, you know, the next step is like, oh, what's actually what are you actually feeling?

Kisei: 28:43

And and to give voice to that or at least to name it in internally. So sometimes she would say, like, the naming it is just like, woah. I'm having a hard time right now. Like, it's hard to contact anything that's happening, but I can name. Like, this is hard.

Kisei: 29:05

So I wanted to end by reading the this chant that I discovered from Ken MacLeod. I was introduced to it at our sangha in Columbus, and it's like short little prayers for each of the four immeasurables, which I love. I hadn't discovered anything like this. We have, meta phrases for loving kindness, but, I've never had ones for the other four immeasurables. I kind of have made them up for myself, but this is something, from from the Tibetan tradition adapted by, Kem McCloud.

Kisei: 29:51

And I'll drop it in the chat, but I'll read it first. May I be free from preference and prejudice. May I know things just as they are. May I experience the world knowing me just as I am. May I see into whatever arises.

Kisei: 30:17

Loving kindness. May I be happy, well, and at peace. May I open to things just as they are. May I experience the world opening to me just as I am. May I welcome whatever arises.

Kisei: 30:38

Compassion. May I be free of suffering, harm, and disturbance. May I accept things just as they are. May I experience the world accepting me just as I am. May I serve whatever arises.

Kisei: 30:57

Joy. May I enjoy the activities of life itself. May I enjoy things just as they are. May I experience the world taking joy in all that I do. May I know what to do, whatever arises.

Kisei: 31:18

I'll put that in the chat and there could be I've kind of tried to dissect this and you could say that in each of the lines, each of the four measurables can be found. You see the second line of each of them is, May I know things just as they are? Which is the equanimity phrase. And the first lines are compassion, like compassion is often to be free from whatever is causing you suffering.

Jomon: 32:01

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