Astor Douglas, Rev. Master

A transcription of a talk given at Shasta Abbey on Oct 18 2020.

Homage to the Buddha

Homage to the Dharma

Homage to the Sangha

Today I’m going to talk about something that is relevant to our current times which I think all of us have been talking about for weeks now, but it doesn’t seem like it’s enough. There is just so much going on in the world, I feel that it’s good to keep addressing those things that occur to us that need addressing. And as some of you listen to our Dharma talks regularly, you might find that we talk about the same thing over and over again, but what happens with that is that each one of us brings our own expression and our own interpretation of what we feel would be good to talk about and what might help the world out. So that is my intention here.

So what I am going to talk about is balancing and disturbing news. The thing that cropped up is that there is a lot going on in the world that is difficult to hear. And what I am not going to talk about is that you can go and listen to the bad news then turn around and find lots of good news to listen to. That really is helpful and I do that sometimes, just to know what is going on, how people are helping each other out. And I feel that there is a lot more we can listen to in the Dharma that might help us out on a deeper level or a more thorough and satisfying way – and I’m going to touch on a few points about that today.

So what do we do when we don’t want to hear more bad news? One thing I have found that’s very effective is that I’m learning how to offer myself loving kindness. Sometimes I just feel that I have listened to too much bad news and it affects me in a way that it starts to disturb me in a very deep way. And that is not what I want to allow to happen. I find that if I offer myself loving kindness I can balance the news which I feel it is important as a responsible spiritual adult to pay attention to. And I find that sometimes I am listening to news that is upsetting and find that it is really hard to offer myself loving kindness. You know I have to kind of figure out how to do that, it’s not something that I can just press a button or turn on a faucet, it’s not an easy thing for me to do and I am learning how to cultivate that skill; that’s the way I look at it.

So how do you do that when you feel outraged, despairing or confused? One thing that I have found is that if I review my life, I can think of some time or experience when someone offered me loving kindness. And what I came up with this time to offer you as an example is when I was in Berlin, Germany, once upon a time. I was a young adult and I decided I wanted to find something in the city, I don’t remember what it was but I was walking around looking for something, maybe I was just taking a walk, but I got lost. And I didn’t know the language and I was a very shy person at that time and I really got confused and scared. I was really disturbed, I was in a big city, international, I didn’t know the language and didn’t know where I was and I had to get back to the place I was staying at, I knew that much.

Somebody walked up to me, looked at me and said “Do you need some help?” [laughs] And I said “Yes!” I was so delighted and grateful. The person spoke really good English and just told me what I needed to know and I found my way back quite easily. Something about that has stayed with me; this was when I was in about my twenties, so it was a long time ago. It was that act of loving kindness, you know, he didn’t need to do that, but he saw somebody, a stranger, me, and walked up to me and said “Do you need some help?” The timing was perfect and it helped me out. Now with that is a memory, obviously, I remember it, and it’s something that I experienced and I can tap into that if you know what I mean. The memory of it was good and I can tap into that feeling I had when that person helped me out. I feel that that person’s help actually was something I internalised and now I can use that; that feeling of being helped, of loving kindness for myself, if that makes sense. I can use it as a skill to offer myself loving kindness. So I find that very helpful when I look at the bad news, that it is somehow helpful for me to have a sense of wellbeing. That’s part of the balance of listening to disturbing news.

Another thing that occurred to me is that the news is… not addictive as such, but there is so much going on that every day it seems we need to pay attention to the news, whether it is watching where a wildfire is going, or something else, it just seems like there’s a lot. And I realised that I choose to watch or listen to the news and I think maybe I don’t have to be so much controlled by the news, but can choose when I want to listen, in other words, when I am more settled and well-balanced, and I do that and it helps a lot. Take a deep breath and say “OK, now I am ready to look at the news.” And it actually does help.

And I also realised that no matter what the conditions are – and this would be for people who haven’t been practising Buddhism for a very long time, and I think for all of us  – is to realise that whatever conditions are, we can always practice the Precepts, always, always. I know it’s one of the words you are not meant to say, but it is true, it is always a refuge. And I want to read the Precepts for those of you who don’t know what they are, just as a way to give you all who might be watching this now or at a later date an idea of what we as Buddhist monks here follow very seriously as guidelines for what to do. So I am going to read The Ten Great Precepts in a slightly different way to what we are used to.

I will do my best to live in such a way that I will not kill

I will do my best to live in such a way that I do not steal

I will do my best to live in such a way that I will not misuse sexuality or covet

I will do my best to live in such a way that I will not say that which is untrue

I will do my best to live in such a way that I will not sell the wine of delusion

I will do my best to live in such a way that I will not speak against others

I will do my best to live in such a way that I will not be proud of myself and devalue others

I will do my best to live in such a way that I will not be miserly in giving either Dharma or wealth

I will do my best to live in such a way that I will not be angry

I will do my best to live in such a way that I will not debase the Three Treasures.

And I wanted to mention to you all that are watching this on YouTube that you can find really good explanations that some of our monks have done in recent times about the Precepts on YouTube which might help you flesh out what I have just listed, to explain what they are. You can go to this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHquMGPHlL4

This will give a chance to see what we use here as guidelines of how to learn how to act and to help others as well.

Another thought that came to my mind about balancing and disturbing news is to look at ourselves. And I’d like to suggest that this might be a good time that we could look at our moral values, and see if we feel like they are threatened and how that might be so. And I ask for us to focus on what is it that is useful in terms of moral values and what is it that is important and what is it that is worthwhile. I think it is a good time to review those things because there is a lot going on that is incomprehensible, confusing, hard to understand – hard to know what the future is, etc. And it can kind of leave us with our cages being rattled, if that makes any sense, and it’s just a good time to review these things to bring some life into them. Maybe there are some things that we no longer need to do, attitudes that we have brought to certain values that just are not great anymore because they just don’t work – or something we did as a teenager that was too long ago.

But there are times when we can draw on these values; we do anyway, without our even knowing it; that is what we do when we make judgements about certain things and it might just be a good time to review that. And here’s a question for all of us: Can we be honest and answer the following question “Do we have biases that predetermine our opinions?” Now that’s a good one. I think it might be helpful to look at that and to see what it is that we bring to a certain situation, i.e. bad news. And again I ask are these biases useful, are they important or are they worthwhile? And to be honest with ourselves and see if we come up with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ or whatever. I am not suggesting anything for yourself, it is something we all have to do individually, on our own. So if we see on the news a person we don’t like, do our automatic biases kick in immediately? I just offer that.

Besides just looking at these values, it might be time to renew them, to bring some new life into them, to bring them into current times, to commit to them in a new way. And also to remember that we have the Precepts as our guide and this is what we do, again, as Buddhist monks.

Now I want to move on to a story that I found very inspiring. It was an article by Marcella Mulholland in a magazine called El Semanario. The title was On finding solace and solidarity in a broken-hearted world. And the person writes that her beliefs have been crumbled when she looks at them in relation to current world conditions. One example is the American ethos which says ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’. She questions that, saying “Why should I do that when there are a lot of real life stories where there is inequality in the world? What good it is going to be for me to pull myself up by my bootstraps?” Which means for me that when you say ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’, it means grow up and just learn to live with disagreeable situations. So it doesn’t really help anyone else.

And the second belief that she has had crumble is the phrase ‘Justice for all’. She said “How can I believe something like that when I look around and there is a lot of real life stories where justice is not being ‘for all’, in fact there is a lot of injustice.” The author felt broken hearted by what she knew and what she saw. She then said that upsetting current conditions that are prevalent have her attention. In other words, things are so bad and so disturbing to her that it has got her attention, right? You know, finally, it takes us a while to realise that things are not great, but once we do, our attention is on it. Maybe that is why we watch so much news, I don’t know. And she said that that paying attention can be devastating; very honest person, it can be. She also writes that she wasn’t alone with her broken-hearted thoughts and feelings as she found out that there were many people who also shared them; she had a community to help her.

She writes:

“Despite the challenges of social distancing, I believe there remains no better antidote to despair and hopelessness than finding other people who feel as I do and working alongside them to fix what is breaking our hearts.”

And to help her heal her own heart, she has her way of doing things. This is what she writes “First, I let myself feel it all: the grief. I surrender to the grief.” Her response can then be feelings of a broken heart, but she writes “Maybe what the world needs is more broken hearted people. Next I look around and ask myself, who else is emotionally destroyed by the state of the world and what are they doing? What help are they offering?” And then she says “How can I help?”  And that begins her journey to start engaging with others. With these questions and actions she says “Soon enough, I become a helper too. Working alongside other broken-hearted people is the most healing practice I know.”

Now this person started on her journey not so long ago because she is part of what she would call Gen Z, (Generation Z, born somewhere between 1997 and 2010.) In other words she is 22 years old and she has taken this on. She decided at her college that she needed to find a way to fix her broken heart. She wore a big sign saying “My heart is broken, is yours?” And she went out into the crowd of college students and on her arms – I find this endearing – she took a permanent pen marker and wrote on her arm the people in her life who had helped her out, because she had been scared to do this. But from her doing that a lot of people would come up and say “My heart is broken too, what can we do about it?” So this has been her life and now she is doing something very effective with helping out with global change in helping other people. I find her advice very comforting in a way that is very realistic and something that I pay attention to and I have to say “Yay!” Here she is, 50 years younger than I am, that’s a lot, half a century and she has got things to say that I find actually will help the world and something that we can all follow in her advice.

So on reflecting upon very serious problems we have these days like wild fires, climate change, pandemic, political unrest, systemic racism, unemployment etc – can anything be done to help our people, our world? I say yes there is. One thing is to talk with people with the attitude of curiosity about the other person, not with your biases, but curious about what they are going to say. Ask them “We do have problems these days (pandemic etc) and they are overwhelming, what do you think can be done about them?” In other words not coming to talk with people with preconceived ideas but more with an open mind.

I think it’s really good that we don’t isolate ourselves in these times; it doesn’t really do us a lot of good, because when we are alone too much our minds start spinning our own story and I don’t know that that can be all that helpful. Talking with others helps us to connect so we don’t feel so alone and overburdened by the world’s problems. Maybe there is something you can do to help, that we can all do to help, something on a small scale, something do-able. It will help us to move in a direction of helping, of making our world a worthwhile place to live.

And I want to end with a saying from the Shōbōgenzō that Dōgen writes that I find helpful; it’s in the chapter on the Buddha Nature. What he says is this:

You should investigate thoroughly through your Buddhist practice that each and every seed, along with each and every flower and fruit, is the product of an honest and sincere heart. There are seeds within fruit and even though the seeds are not visible, they become trees with branches thick and small.

Thank you.