Sensei Baiko Myoho came through the Zen Center Los Angeles gate in January of 2001. She received Jukai in 2005, Tokudo in 2013, Denkai in 2020, and Dharma Transmission from Roshi Egyoku on April 16th of 2021. Sensei Myoho began serving as the Zen Center’s Temple Development Steward in 2013 and is a Co-Steward of Shared Stewardship. She served on the Executive Circle for 13 years and has served on the Board for 19 years. She has an M.Div. and a STM from Union Theological Seminary, New York in the Philosophy of Religion, and received a Ph.D. from Drew University, and taught Philosophy part-time at El Camino College in Torrance, CA for 20 years.

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Once in ancient times, when the World Honored One was at Mount Gurdakutra, he held up a flower, twirled it, and showed it to the assemblage. At this, they all remained silent. Only the Venerable Kashapa broke into a smile. The World Honored One said, "I have the eye treasury of the true Dharma, the marvelous mind of nirvana, the true form of no-form, the subtle gate of the Dharma. It does not depend on letters being specially transmitted outside all teachings. Now I entrust Maha-Kashapa with this." The verse, in handling a flower, the tail of the snake manifested itself. Kashapa breaks into a smile. Nobody on earth or in heaven knows what to do.

Good morning, Bodhisattvas. Good to be here with you. This morning I'm zooming into your zendo from Palm Springs. It's going to hit 113 today. But I'm quite comfortable. Thank you to Sensei Nenzen and Rebecca and all of you for the invitation to be with you this morning. Really appreciate it.

Let's take a moment. This is something we do at the Zen Center before every public meeting, event, or talk. Let's take a moment to acknowledge that we are all now sitting on Native American land that was stolen by Europeans of the past. Let's acknowledge, remember, and offer blessings for all the Native people on whose land we now sit.

And let's keep our palms together for a moment of silence, healing, thought, and love for Sensei Koan. I practiced with Sensei Koan at the Zen Center of Los Angeles for many years. He's the guy that shaved my head at my tokudo. He also patiently trained me in a lot of different positions, but especially how to do the dentsho position outside the Buddha Hall, which for some reason I was more afraid of than any other position. And he always greeted me with a nice, "How the hell are you, Myoho?" So let's just remember him and wish him well.

The last time I talked about love in this kind of setting was on Valentine's Day in 2019. I was inspired by Roshi Bernie Glassman. He's kind of created a love koan for me that's been in my head since Love Bernie Day, which was what we called the memorial for Bernie Roshi. And someone at that service shared something about Bernie that he said at a Bearing Witness Council at Auschwitz. He was distilling what our practice was all about. And he said, he just said something very profound that hit me that day. He said, "It's all about love, man." And for those of us that knew Bernie, you can just hear him saying it. That expression of what it's all about said by that good man, that mensch in that place, Auschwitz, where the opposite of love had once reigned, is so powerful that it's been living in me ever since.

At my Shuso Hossen, I think it was six years ago or something, when someone asked me, "How do you define love?" Without thinking, I replied, "Love is when we acknowledge the interconnection between us." I hadn't pre-thought that. I don't know how that came out of my mouth, but I've been pondering it ever since. When I say love one another, I'm really saying, realize that I am you and you are me. I'm saying Buddha recognizes Buddha and Buddha bows to Buddha.

I also received a deep influence to keep talking about love by a longtime ZCLA Sangha member named Doju, who suffered from Lyme disease for many years. He had a rough time during the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, he asked me, "Myoho, why don't Zen Buddhists talk about love?" Mostly you don't hear it too much, but I said, "Well, I'm a Zen Buddhist and I talk about love." We had many conversations. We really both talked about the power of love, a kind of magnetic force that exists among all beings, but that's rarely noticed. Unfortunately, later he was overcome by his Lyme disease and it seemed to have affected his brain and he committed suicide. So I remember him every day and I send love out into the universe.

In a way, the word love gets overused or weirdly used. It's lost its meaning. We use it so casually for everything that we need, desire and admire. We say, "Oh, I love that color on you. I love pizza. I love you and I can't live without you." We say it to mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and friends. But do we really know what we're talking about when we say, "I love this" or "I love you"? Or we don't say it, we don't have to say it at all. We just be it.

The ancient Greeks identified six different types of love: Friendship, sexual love, charitable, forensic, and English. What does it really mean? What is love from a Zen perspective? I would like for us to realize what Roshi Bernie meant when he said "It's all about love, man." I want us to come to a deeper understanding and I want to come to a deeper understanding of my own words: "Love is when we acknowledge the interconnection between us." I would like us to realize what it meant when Mahakashapa smiled when the Buddha held up a flower.

C.S. Lewis, a Christian writer, makes a really helpful distinction, I think, between need love and gift love. Need love comes from a place of poverty, greed, and clinging. Gift love longs to serve others and comes from a place of wanting the happiness, comfort, and well-being, flourishing of others.

Thich Nhat Hanh in a book entitled "The Four Qualities of Love" writes, "The teachings on love given by the Buddha are clear, scientific, and applicable. Love, compassion, joy, and equanimity are the very nature of an enlightened person. They are the four aspects of true love within ourselves and within everyone and everything."

So he refers here to four aspects of love. The first one being loving kindness. This refers to the intention and ability to offer joy and happiness to others. To really practice from a place of loving kindness, we must practice the three tenets of not knowing, bearing witness, and action that arises from the first two tenets. Appropriate action. Otherwise, we won't be really helpful to anyone. It's important for us to really understand people, even the people we don't much like.

The second kind of love is compassion. And this refers to the intention and ability to relieve suffering. This involves the willingness to bear witness with our whole being to the pain that people experience. Sometimes it only takes an email or a text or a phone call or a hug to relieve suffering.

The third is what I'll call sympathetic joy. The happiness we feel when other people are happy. And we know how to do this because we've experienced joy ourselves. So this is really a counter to envy, especially when we get envious when somebody else has something good happen to them. Sympathetic joy is the antidote to that.

And four, equanimity. This is when we love in a way that allows people to be themselves. This requires us to stop clinging to fixed ideas that we have about people. It's a radical letting go. And this is a really important one that gets neglected sometimes. As human beings, our physiology kind of perceives things through what's dangerous to us or what might be a problem for us. And so we peg people and expect somebody that might have said something mean last year to say something mean now or those kinds of things. So this is a really radical letting go of all of that and allowing people to really be who they are in that moment. Because people can change and we want to make allowance for that.

These qualities of love are within each of us and we activate them through Zen practice. They are the antidote to the poisons of greed, anger, ignorance, lust and envy. In our practice of zazen, we come to an awareness of a deeper love that is available to and flows through all of us as we realize more and more the facts of no self interdependence impermanence and karma. When we practice, the aspects of love that Thich Nhat Hanh identified naturally arise in us. When we get out of our own way, the love just arises and comes forth. Perhaps we've experienced this. Perhaps some of you have experienced it profoundly. When we find ourselves being selfish or jealous or resentful, it's really helpful to just gently come back to this place of love within us. This is a place of open heartedness.

In our koan for today, we bear witness to the Buddha holding up a flower before an assembly of monks. Kashapa sees this and his face breaks into a smile. This represents Shakyamuni Buddha's first transmission of the Dharma. Buddha recognizes Buddha, Buddha bows to Buddha. To me, this is a great manifestation of love, a recognition of the magnetic force that connects everything in the universe.

Koun Yamada Roshi points us to the heart of this koan when he writes, "We must recognize the world of the empty infinite in this flower and smile." He says that it is extremely important for us to realize that the essential nature of our own self and the essential substance of the universe is one. No inside, no outside. This is to say that the essential nature of each and every being is empty of separate being. Buddha nature runs through each of us. This oneness is a fact of reality and yet we live our lives in delusional separation.

In my opinion, the reason that we get so caught up in the dramas of selfishness, jealousy, greed, anger, ignorance and lust is that we get caught up in need love rather than in gift love. What we do not realize is that we get caught up in need love rather than seeing love as the magnetic force that binds us all together and causes us to serve others. We deny that we are interdependent every time we assert that we are separate, every time we break a precept, every time we speak ill of the three treasures.

We do this even though there are so many hints and signs that we are interconnected. Like the way that viruses spread from one person to another and we all just lived through a great pandemic, global pandemic where we were all connected. It was right in our faces and what did we have to do? We all separated and stayed in our houses and yet we were never really separate. Other things are contagious like yawning or smiling. Totally contagious. Laughter can be very contagious. Or how one person in a bad mood can bum out everyone around them. Just think how much effect we could have practicing loving kindness, compassion, joy, equanimity for these too are contagious.

Love moves through us to always start with I and everything are in this life together. Every time, every moment it's like this. In fact there is no I per se. There is only we. And that we contains all that is, was, and ever will be. This shifts us away from self-preoccupation. It takes us out of thinking that there's a little me inside my body somewhere that is at the center of everything and replaces that with love.

Of course we really hate giving up our ego-based pity parties, our dramas. We all have our little stories about how hard our lives have been and why we act the way we do. But when we let those stories become beliefs about who we are, how we are fixed, we're setting ourselves up for drama. And really stubborn people may live their whole lives caught up in this self-centered drama of their own stories and never really experience life as it is. I don't know. I know I don't want that for my life. That's why I sit every day. And I'm sure you feel the same because that's why you're sitting.

Joko Beck refers to being stuck in the drama of our own personal closets and how we just want to sit in there and be left alone. But when we practice zazen for a while and do sesshin and zazen-kai, a little light starts to shine in our closets and the door opens and wow! There's a whole wide world there for us to experience and we are connected to every part of it. We just need to be aware of it.

One of the best illustrations that I've seen of what she's talking about here, this kind of being in our own little prisons, is in this movie called "Room." Has anyone seen that? This little, this woman, it kind of ostensibly starts out like a Lifetime movie, but it was Oscar nominated. It was a movie that was nominated for the Oscar for the best Lifetime movie, but it was Oscar nominated because it was so good. And it really, I don't know, but I think the creator might have been a Buddhist. It has such a Buddhist theme.

But this woman gets kidnapped by a man when she's pretty young, and she's like 17, 16, something like that. And he repeatedly rapes her and she ends up getting pregnant. And he allows her to keep the baby who's a little boy. And she's in this, she doesn't know where she is, but the little boy calls it Room, where they live. And it's really a shed that's been locked up and she hasn't been out of it the whole time. And this little boy, so he knows nothing but this small little room they live in. And there's a little, there's a TV there, and they have some food to eat. And so he's very, gets very accustomed to all this.

And all along, the mother is plotting on how to get him out of there. And, but he has to be able to understand language and directions before she can do it. So she decides when he's five years old, she's going to get him out of there. And he doesn't really know anything about the outside world, except there's a skylight at the top of the room. And he looks up and he can see blue sky and clouds. And for him, that's his whole world. And the only other people who sees are on television, and those are flat people. So he doesn't really distinguish that they are actual people that are on the screen. But he doesn't know that yet.

But when she decides to send him out of the room and get him to safety, she rolls him up in a carpet that the man that her captive, her captor had had. She wanted him to take this carpet and put it somewhere and told him what to do. And then the little boy is supposed to jump out of the carpet in the back of the trunk when the truck stops and run for freedom. And at that moment, when the little boy comes out of the carpet and looks around and sees the world, he's like, oh, he almost, he almost gets vertigo from it. He doesn't know anything about this spacious, wide world.

And to me, that's the moment we have on the cushion where we've been living in our own little prisons. We're only seeing just a little bit. And maybe in sanzen, we start to see that skylight. And then we burst open to this bigger, wider world and realize we're so much more than what we thought.

So long as we stay stuck in the prison of our own personal dramas, we will continue to create dramas everywhere we go. Do you know people like this? I know people that are not able to have a conversation unless they're creating some sort of drama. That makes me sad.

Love has nothing to do with our stories, even though there's a movie called "Love Story." Love is the energy that runs through everything and everyone and is with us all the time, just waiting for us to notice it. It's our ability to leave our delusions behind and be aware of this moment, just as it is, that opens our hearts to one another. And that's what we're doing.

What if we really could see love everywhere? Then could we love without attachment and clinging? So this is what I meant when I said that love is when we acknowledge the interconnection between us. Love is not about another person, per se. Love is everywhere. We just have to see it. Love is not some rare event that we have to hope for or cling to. It's something we can always experience, like the beating of our own hearts. It can never be lost. And when we comprehend love in this way, we realize that we can stop clinging to others because we're connected to a bigger love.

Everything really boils down to realizing experientially the fact of interbeing, that everything depends on everything. This is what is real and all the Buddhist teachings are related to this fact. This is what he realized when he sat down under the Bodhi tree. And his teachings on impermanence, no self, karma, the precepts, emptiness, all the sutras stem from this fact.

Sitting in this interdependent web of beings and then rising up to the surface, living in this interdependent web of beings and then rising up in a deep experience of love. Love is when we truly experience the interbeing of everyone and everything. And when we act in hurtful ways, we are denying that reality. We're living in the delusion of being separate.

When Roshi Bernie said, "It's all about love, man," I believe that he meant this with interdependence in mind. In fact, I asked Roshi Bernie one time to define what is enlightenment. And he said, "Enlightenment is a greater and greater awareness of interdependence." I see now that another way to put this is to say that enlightenment is love. Love is the connectivity that lies at the heart of the universe. It's the inner interdependence between you and me and you and you and you and us.

In my opinion, the transmission story in our koan is a perfect illustration of love, of what is meant by interbeing. In his commentary on this case, in the Transmission of Light, Master Kazon tells us, "Shakyamuni and Mahakasyapa became acquainted and their life pulses intermingle." Their life pulses intermingle. Please realize your life pulses intermingling with all beings. Love one another.

The Buddha held up a flower and Mahakasyapa smiled. The Buddha offers each of us a flower. How are we going to respond?

I left time for us to have a chat, discussion.