So the recording is in progress. Okay. So, yes, thank you all for your efforts and work to get out the vote. It's so important. And I'm so grateful to you all. And I want to encourage you all in this work, which is so important. So I've been talking about bodhisattva politics. Bodhisattvas, I don't know if there's any non-Buddhists who will be hearing this, but anyway, bodhisattvas are enlightening or awakening beings who vow to free all beings, liberate all beings, vow to support life, not killing. to include all beings, to be inclusive in our awareness and activities. So bodhisattva practice is inseparable from politics.

[01:01]

So we're involved in getting out the vote this week, and I'll be back next week for a couple talks. The basis of our practice, well, for many of us, meditation, Zazen, is to connect with, commune with the ultimate, the universal, to commune with ultimate wholeness. And our practice, though, is to bring that into our everyday activities. to the particulars of the phenomenal world. So our practice gives us an opening to something that goes beyond, but then that is a support, that transcendence is a support for sharing that in the world. So our practice is to express something deeper in the particulars of our phenomenal world. And so does that tradition that I'm in, and I gather that

[02:04]

many of you are in. We have teachings about this, like the Sandokai, the harmony of difference and sameness, how we integrate the oneness of all beings with each of the particulars, the integration of the ultimate and the particular. And we have many Bodhisattva figures as examples of this. So, I'll be talking today about Maitreya, the Bodhisattva of kindness, who is the, will be the next future Buddha. We see that suffering is both personal, psychological, and it is collective and communal. So to engage in all the activities of the world is part of that, and to express values. So our Bodhisattva values I think are quite in harmony with foundational American values, aspirational values of our country.

[03:11]

And this applies to leaders, governmental leaders, as well as to all of us as citizens. So this includes... Dedication, caring, caring for all beings, caring for ourselves and all beings, inclusivity, compassion, empathy. So I've been talking about this the last couple of days. And then something that we got into a little more yesterday, I'll just repeat, that it's easy nowadays. to feel overwhelmed or hopeless. That's available and actually that's encouraged by the powers of the beast. We will not go out and try and encourage people to go. There's a whole industry of encouraging hopelessness and encouraging feeling overwhelmed and that's not realistic. So I talked about this yesterday. All actions have effects. We don't know the outcome of our activity And that's a mystery, and that's also as it should be, because we're especially talking today about Maitreya Bodhisattva.

[04:22]

This is about seeing the range of our activities in time as well as in space, so we know that our work to get out of the boat, will have an impact not just in this country, but in the whole rest of the world. We live in the most powerful country in the world, and so we have extra responsibility and an extra ability to respond and getting out the vote and encouraging people to pay attention to how they're voting, what they're voting for, and what they're voting against, and so forth. So I talked about this yesterday in terms of Samantabhadra the day before, in terms of the kind of honorability Tishvara. Now I want to talk today about how Maitreya represents Bodhisattva politics. So Maitreya is the Bodhisattva who is predicted to be the next future incarnated Buddha, manifested Buddha, as a human-type Buddha being.

[05:32]

But Maitreya doesn't, and we don't know when that will happen. There's all kinds of predictions about that in the canon. Some of them include a thousand or a few thousand years. Some of them include 10,000 years anyway. But Maitreya is the bodhisattva who is concerned with the future because he's the next future Buddha. And He also represents humility because he's not yet a Buddha, but he's a Bodhisattva. So part of our practice, of our Bodhisattva practice, is humility. And seeing leaders who represent this humility, not just take power for themselves, but... seeing our own limitations. So Maitreya represents that as well, to accept our limitations, but to be responsible and act for them and to care for future beings, to protect the future, to be aware of the future.

[06:45]

So just to show an image, I don't know if this is going to come through, the most famous Buddhist statue in Japan, which is a statue of, actually from a Korean, uh, sculptor of Maitreya as a bodhisattva, kind of sitting up in the meditative heavens waiting to become the next Buddha and considering, contemplating how to free all beings. So again, this is awareness of our activity of our politics in time, in time frames, as well as in space, as well as in terms of all of the different places in the world that the results of this election will have great impact. So 47th ideal includes very wide time frames.

[07:49]

Maitreya particularly represents that in terms of not knowing when he will be the next Buddha. And this also implies the ancestors. So in the Zen tradition and other Buddhist traditions and in spiritual traditions, we have particular ancestors, a lineage of ancestors who sometimes chant the names of ancestors going back to Shakyamuni Buddha and before, 2,500 years ago or so in India, and then in China, Japan, and now in America. Also, there are ancestors in the Korean tradition, the Vietnamese tradition. So we have spiritual ancestors. We have not just the names of the transmitted ancestors, the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who who we name when we chant the lineage of ancestors, but all the people and all the sanghas, all the women and men who continue to make this practice available.

[09:01]

So this practice of meditation sasana that we've been doing this morning, uh, is present in our world. Thanks to many, many, many, many, many, many, and so forth. People, beings who, uh, took it up in their own time and continued it and carried it forward so that each generation is responsible and empowered to carry on this tradition, to continue the life of Buddha, to put it that way. But this idea of ancestors is important to us, not just in terms of our spiritual lineage, but in terms of political and cultural lineages. So, you know, all of those who fought and worked and struggled to expand voting rights are part of what we're doing these last two weeks of this election to appreciate all the suffragettes who worked for decades and decades to allow women to vote.

[10:16]

And women's vote as well as health care is now threatened. So we call on them to support us to act in this time. So the suffragettes and people like John Lewis and the civil rights movement who worked to support black people and other marginalized people to be able to vote. All of them are our ancestors in this week. They are supporting us and looking forward to us to help continue the right to vote in this difficult time. So our practice is supported by many beings of the past. we are working to help carry, um, sense of caring and justice and 47 values into the future.

[11:18]

So we look at the effects of the climate chaos. Um, and you know, really these horrible storms in North Carolina and Florida and fires in Florida and California and floods and all of the, um, climate disasters that are in our world now, which are brought to us thanks to the fossil fuel executives who ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies knew in the 70s that their business plan would be creating this climate chaos. And they doubled down on it. So there are people profiting on that. Part of what we are working for to get out the vote is to change that. We have solutions technologically from alternative energy sources. We have solar and wind and electricity.

[12:19]

thermal and alternative energy sources, and we have to work towards stopping fossil fuels, towards a Green New Deal, to creating jobs for people in alternative energy systems. This is part of Maitreya's consciousness, thinking about the future, caring about the future and future beings, rather than just drill, baby, drill. Maitreya and the Bodhisattva politics of Maitreya is about seeing this wide view of time. All times are right here. All the times of the past have created this. All the people, all the beings who've worked for awakening and for caring and for kindness and for voting rights and all kinds of other rights they are supporting us now.

[13:25]

And we are benefiting from them. And it's our job, it's our practice to help continue that. So studying time, studying the complexities of temporality. Time is not just linear. Time moves in many directions. And studying history. How do we see where we are at in our work in these next two weeks as part of the product of history and the producer of future history. So this is personal and communal, as is all Bodhisattva politics. Our work to relieve suffering includes ourselves benefiting from our practice, benefiting from our caring, benefiting from our settling into meditative awareness and communing with something deeper. But it's also communal.

[14:29]

So I know some of you are going, many of you are going door to door, knocking on doors this week, trying to encourage people to vote. I did this many years ago in high school in the mid-60s. I went door to door to talk to people about the Vietnam War back when I was working to stop that war. So I have a personal sense of this bodhisattva work through time. I lived in Pittsburgh when then they went to high school there. And, um, so now I'm thinking about Pennsylvania and, uh, what's going to happen there. One of the swinging estates in the country now. So, um, again, we, our work is about, um,

[15:31]

honoring the people who fought for voting rights, the suffragettes, John Lewis, the Civil Rights Movement, and many, many others throughout time. And this work will continue. So, again, we study time and history, and we're part of that. All the times of the future and all the times of the past are right here in some ways. All future beings are the products of the DNA of current beings, current people. So, some other things about Maitreya. This Bodhisattva who is predicted to be the next Buddha, this Bodhisattva who is not yet Buddha, but is... helping to liberate all beings. One aspect of Maitreya is that he studies consciousness, and he represents the Yogacara school, for those of you who know about Buddhist teachings, studying the consciousness of beings, how people think.

[16:41]

So in terms of thinking about consciousness, the vote and this election, to study how people are thinking about voting and about our country and about politics. What values are they representing? What issues, what fears, what concerns? So Maitreya in doing this work is also studying how we think about it. Maitreya is also the bodhisattva of loving-kindness. So his name comes from the Sanskrit Maitri, love and kindness, which is in Pali, metta. So we sometimes chant the metta-suddha over this morning. There was the metta prayer. I think that's the one that my old friend Maile Scott wrote. Yeah, so, and she was a great example of it. It was a great example of my tray energy, thinking about loving kindness and acting for the future and this time.

[17:48]

So the effects of this, just to say it, the effects of this election is not just about the next four years. It's not just about the world of 2024s that we're at, but about the implications of that for all times. So we're working to get out the vote for the next four years, but we're also working to get out the vote for people and other beings 50 years from now, 150 years from now, 500 years from now, and more. This is a crucial, pivotal election, and people will be studying what we are doing 25 years from now, 20 years from now, 200 years from now, maybe. We're still studying what Abraham Lincoln did to free the slaves. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, one of the current candidates for president thinks that Abraham Lincoln

[18:54]

um, made a mistake and should have made a deal to, to, um, you know, to make a business deal to save the union. And of course that would have, would have meant continuing slavery. And there is still slavery in this world, but to some extent it was abolished. Um, one of the other things about Maitreya is, and this loving kindness, this caring is, um, that exemplars of Maitreya, um, are willing to seem foolish. You know, maybe we're foolish to be spending all this time, you know, working for this election. We each have other things we could be doing, right? But Maitreya is willing to be foolish. Her caring is about being open, caring, not vindictive, not cruel. So traditional examples of Maitreya, you've all seen, if you've gone to a Chinese restaurant ever, you've seen Hotei, who lived in the 10 hundreds, was a Zen monk, the fat, jolly, laughing Buddha.

[20:09]

In China, images of him are just called Maitreya, Milofi, Miroku in Japanese. So Hotei was considered an incarnation of Maitreya. It was an historical person, but now he's just this jolly, laughing Buddha. So laughing is part of the tradition of Maitreya. Being happy, looking forward to the future, turning the page, going forward, not back, and so forth. Some of you may know of the great Japanese poet-monk Ryokan, who was also very foolish, but caring and loving to take the children and Anyway, so I wanted to mention some exemplars in our time of Maitreya energy, this energy of loving kindness. of caring about beings, caring, uh, helping to awaken beings, but also seeing this in the perspective of deep time.

[21:13]

So, uh, you know, in, in my, this is a compassion book about the Bodhisattvas. I mentioned modern English and for my tray of, uh, one example is the hippies in the sixties, flower children. Uh, I was sort of part of that. Uh, and, uh, you know, that, They were looking forward to the future. And here we are. And so Tom was shaking his head. But yeah, Nick talking about peace and love. John Lennon talking about give peace a chance and so forth. So that's one example of kind of my train energy in our culture. Is there anybody here from Ohio or Indiana? Anybody? No? Well, people from Ohio or Indiana might know who John Chapman is.

[22:17]

Does anybody here know who John Chapman was? You do know, but you don't know him by that name, probably. Anybody? No. Okay. Well, we know him as Johnny Appleseed. And he was this frontier guy who planted apple orchards in Ohio and Indiana. He actually started out in western Pennsylvania where I grew up. But he was looking to the future. You don't plant trees for the next four years. You plant trees for the long term. Where I live now, just north of Chicago, there I hope you can't hear all those sounds that are coming from my computer. Anyway, yeah, looking towards the future. Planting trees is a basic Maitreya practice, just like getting out the vote is a basic Maitreya practice.

[23:19]

Caring about the future. So our efforts in this election, so as I said yesterday, whatever the results of this election, our work doesn't end with the election. And of course the election won't end with the election day, because who knows what happens. What else? What other kinds of mischief might appear before we settle on a new president? But whoever the new president is, our work as in terms of 47th politics continues and will continue. So how do we work for peace? How do we work for kindness? How do we work for including all beings, even those who are marginalized? So I want to mention One last exemplar of Maitreya, who I mention in the book too, who is my friend and mentor, Joanna Macy.

[24:25]

Some of you may know about Joanna's work. I was in classes she taught when I was doing my master's and became friends with her and worked with her in the 80s and 90s under nuclear guardianship program. But she has this, Joanne has this, and now is working on the work that reconnects, to reconnect people to the deep time, as she calls it, the beings of the future. So again, it's important to understand that the hard work you're doing going door to door, trying to encourage people to vote, is something that we are all doing for the long haul. Change happens. I was talking yesterday about in terms of how hopelessness is not realistic in terms of the changes that have happened within our memory, the Berlin Wall coming down,

[25:29]

gay marriage being legalized, many examples of apartheid in South Africa. Change happens, even when it feels discouraging and it feels hopeless, change happens. And we don't understand how. So we don't know the outcome, the particular outcome of our work. Some door you knock on, you may talk to somebody and encourage them to vote, and that may encourage them to encourage others to do who knows what positive things in the world. So this is something, this bodhisattva politics, as I'm calling it, is something that's been transmitted for centuries and centuries, millennia. And we're part of that pattern. Joanna represents thinking about, has worked very hard on, she does workshops where some people are imagine themselves as beings from the future 50 years from now 100 years from now and and the other people are people from our time and then there's this dialogue between the future and so how do we befriend beings in the future they're um

[26:50]

There are our ancestors in LA, too. They are looking back at us as we struggle in this difficult, difficult time, in this totally crucial election. And there are various ways of seeing our work And I can go more into that in three ways that Joanna sees this. But anyway, maybe that's enough. And I want to have time to hear your responses or your reflections on deep time and Bodhisattva politics and how important this is. These next two weeks are to beings in the future, in the near future, in the distant future, to beings in the past whose work we are continuing.

[27:53]

So I'm going to stop there, but I'm interested in hearing your comments, responses, reflections. Thank you all very much. So, Rob, maybe you can call on people in the room there or anybody who's online. Anyone have a thought they'd like to share? I have an idea to throw out there, and that is... Stephen Jay Gould is a scientist who specialized in the study of evolution, and he coined the term punctuated equilibrium. And the examples that you mention all seem to fit this pattern that he described, which is things go along very steadily, and then suddenly they jump.

[29:01]

that that's the way that evolution works. It's not a continual change. There tends to be an equilibrium that's established in speciation, and then there's some sudden alteration, whether it's an environmental cause or interspecies issues or whatever. And that seems to describe our historical situation well. I mean, when Gavin Newsom legalized gay marriage in San Francisco, I thought that was just so far-fetched. And then a few years later, it was the law of the land. Things happen so fast when they do happen. And it seems to me that this election may be one of those inflection points where there's a sudden, you know, a seismic shift where the plates realign.

[30:07]

So at moments like that, that effort in the right direction and with the right intention matter the most because If you deflect something... We hear about these asteroids that are coming to smash into the Earth, and if you deflect just a slight amount, it'll go off and it'll miss us. Well, we have this big orange-haired asteroid that's about to crash into the Earth, and we just want to deflect him a little bit. I'd like to deflect them to Pleasanton myself. Anyway, I think that we're at that moment. The most we can do. There's only 13 days left. How much can we jam into those 13 days? Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yes, I totally agree.

[31:08]

And inflection points, you know, I was talking about women's suffrage, women getting the right to vote just a century ago, basically. And, you know, that's one of the issues that's central now because now women are losing their right to health care, have lost their right to health care. And some politicians are even saying women should not be allowed to vote anymore. There are local legislators and congresspeople who are saying that. So, you know, I think that's right. Change happens suddenly after lots and lots and lots of work. So that's the work we're doing. And this is this critical time, as you're saying. And, you know, there's this other idea about bodhisattva politics that Bodhisattvas from other world systems, whether it's other solar systems or other dimensions or whatever.

[32:10]

In the Buddha Sutras, the Bodhisattva Sutras, there are depictions of many Buddhas and Bodhisattvas from all kinds of places. And one idea that I talked about with Joanna is, and it actually is partly historic too, that there are Bodhisattvas now lined up waiting to be born now because they know this is a critical time and what we do as bodhisattva practitioners right now has the most impact. So it's at critical times when we can make the most difference. And I want to say, whomever becomes the president, And I say that with trepidation, but our work will continue. So that's important too. But yeah, we have the really unique opportunity

[33:10]

in American history to make a huge difference in the next two weeks and the next, actually the next couple of months, because I don't think that it's going to be settled by this one day of election. So this is a wonderful opportunity. We are blessed to be here now. So yeah, and changes happen again. Suddenly, like the Berlin Wall coming down or apartheid ending after lots and lots and lots of work by lots of people who might feel hopeless sometimes and don't see that outcome. So thank you, Rob. Yes, here we are. Tom. Yeah, we were, oh, I just lost my Zoom. We were having a discussion this morning about the possibility of Trump being another Hitler. I mean, it could leap in that direction as well.

[34:15]

And Rob was saying, you know, we have to win the election, but we also have to win the inauguration. That was a good way of putting it. But anyway, yeah. And what you said about, I really enjoyed what you said about hippies. I was in that generation and, and ended up afterwards thinking I had been very naive, but, uh, but, but, uh, naivety is, is, is maybe it's, uh, it's meta. So. I think, you know, we, we, um, you know, Nixon was elected or whatever, but, um, political world is moving in various directions but culturally we, hippies or whatever we were accomplished a lot and I still listen to those old songs from the 60s and lots of people do and it might seem naive and people talk about our generation selling out and

[35:26]

or incorporate or whatever, but some of us are still here trying to save all beings and spread love and caring. So I don't think it was wasted. I don't think it was a failure at all. So all those, again, I've been using the suffragettes as an example, but all those women who marched and marched and marched for decades and decades They might have felt helpless, but their work made a big change. And, you know, there are, when there's a sudden jump going back to Stephen Jay Gould and jumps in history, as we've talked about, there's also a reaction. So the people who want to take us back to slavery or whatever, or, you know... tell women to stay in the kitchen or something.

[36:30]

You know, that happens. That's part of the process of change. So we have to stand by the positive changes when those leaps happen. And that takes work. It takes, you know, effort and caring and being kind to ourselves as well. So, yeah, thank you. Other comments or reflections? So, I'll turn my audio. I just turned my audio off. Just turn yours on. Turn your mic on. Okay. Good morning. It's Mark. It's Mark. Okay. Patience is also important.

[37:41]

That's part of my training practice. Sometimes we have to struggle through technology. Go ahead when you have a chance. Okay. Hi. I was thinking about the Maitreya perspective, and it seems like to me the practice of embracing mystery would be an important part of this characteristic of Maitreya. And I was thinking that one of the ways dealing with mystery because we usually I think sometimes when we don't know what's happening we don't know what the future holds and there are mysteries and that somehow talking to the future or talking to the future ancestors or the future beings would be a particularly useful practice and

[38:59]

in enacting the Maitreya characteristic. So, just the thought that, you know, embracing mystery seems somehow comforting to me to navigate that which we don't know for sure in this present moment. Yes. Yes, and not, there's a then go on about Not knowing being the most intimate. And one of my favorite American poets says, you know something's happening, but you don't know what it is. We can take that positively as well as negatively. as a sign of despair. We know something's happening these two weeks and the next few months. And there's all kinds of possibility and there's all kinds of people caring.

[40:02]

And people get misdirected in various ways too. We have to just accept it all, but yet we, it's not something we do passively. Patience is, I'll talk about patience more next week, but patience is not passive. We pay attention. Zazen is about paying attention, not forcing anything, not fighting anything, not trying to get to some place, but just sitting and waiting, but watching, paying attention. So it's important to pay attention to what's going on. But we don't know the outcome. We don't know what it is. And so that's right. And we can appreciate that. We can be humble about our efforts and appreciate that it's a mystery. And it'll be interesting to see what happens. Yes. Thank you. Any other thoughts?

[41:28]

Maybe it's time to end this part of the day. And thank you all for your work going out and knocking on doors. It's not easy sometimes, but it's really important. This is a pivotal time in the whole history of our world and our country. Your efforts this week and the next two weeks, whatever they are, will make a big difference. I spoke to Stan Dewey last night. Stan is one of the coordinators of the Carson City Retreat, and he said that they had 17 people at dinner. And I think they're expecting... a steady diet of like 20 people there. So there's a great amount of enthusiasm and resolve that's been mustered.

[42:40]

And I'm not sure if they're going to be seeing this, but I'd like to send my appreciation to them as well. And likewise. I like mustard. Anyway. How many people are there? I can't really tell. There are four in the room here. Okay, good for you. We're gathering more. I think there'll be between 10 and 12 at Ann Johnson's place over the weekend. Traditionally in Buddhism, it takes four people to make a sangha. So, thank you. Thank you, Thay. Have a good day. You too. Is there a closing chant or? Yes, there is. Beings are numberless.

[43:44]

I vow to awaken with them. Lesions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Armagedds are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. Beings are numberless. I vow to awaken with them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. Beings are numberless. I vow to awaken with them.

[44:44]

Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. Thank you all. Have a good day. You too. Thank you.

[45:19]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_91.39