The Gift of Attention

This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening. It's always a great honor to be back here at City Center, Suzuki Roshi's home temple, this house of beginner's mind. I serve the community here in a few ways, but tonight, I'm not here in any of those roles. I'm really just here as one student offering a few words to other students in the hope that we can sit together and maybe leave a little time at the end for questions, conversation. I thought I'd begin with really the most ordinary thing in the world. Think of the last time you were speaking with someone you love and you felt their attention start to slide, perhaps in the middle of your sentence, perhaps to the phone in their hand. It's a very small thing. They can still hear you. They probably could repeat your last words back to you, but something had been withdrawn. And you feel it immediately. The same way you might feel a cloud pass across the sun. And now think of the opposite, that rare almost startling experience of being given another person's whole attention, undivided, unhurried. As though for a few minutes, you were the only thing in the world. We sometimes remember those moments for years. We remember who gave them to us. It's one of the greatest gifts a human being can receive. And in our time, it has become one of the rarest. And I don't mean this as a figure of speech. Your attention is quite literally a gift in the oldest and most precise sense of that word. And learning to give it may turn out to be the whole of our path, disguised as the simplest thing in the world. In the Buddha's teachings, the very first of the perfections, the first practice of bodhisattva is to take up his dana. That's usually translated as generosity, giving. When the Buddha taught ordinary people like us, he did not begin with emptiness or with meditation. He began with dana. It is the ground floor of the whole building. Before ethics, before concentration, before wisdom, there is simple giving. And traditionally, dana is taught in very concrete terms. You give food to the one who is hungry. You give shelter to the one who is exposed, medicine to the sick, roads to the monastics, a coin to somewhat begging at the temple gate. There is the gift of fearlessness, the sheltering of a frightened being. And there is what the tradition calls the highest gift of all, the gift of the dharma itself, which is why an evening like this, at least when it goes well, is also meant to be an act of giving. Our own ancient teacher, Ehhe Dogen, took up dana as the first of what he called the four methods a bodhisattva uses to guide beings. In a small and beautiful text, the bodhisattva shesho bo. And what he says about giving is not quite what you would expect. He says plainly, giving is non-greed. To give is simply not to covet. To launch a boat and to build a bridge, he writes, are themselves the perfection of giving. And he insists that the gift need not be grand. To offer a single line of the teaching, he says, to leave flowers to the wind and birds to the season. Even he says to give something to yourself. That too is dana because the size of the gift is not the point. The point is the opening of the hand. Giving for Dogen is a form of non-attachment. Every genuine act of generosity is a small rehearsal of the one thing we most need to learn, which is how to let go. There is one more thing Dogen says about giving that I like to remember. He says the gift need not even be yours to begin with. To carry someone across on a boat, to pass along a line of truth you did not invent, to leave flowers you did not grow. All of this is giving because what you are really offering was never the object in your hand. It was the turning toward. And he suggests that a true gift moves in both directions at once. The one who receives is helped, but the one who gives is also quietly loosened, changed, carried a little further along the way. Giver and receiver are joined for a moment by the very thing that passes between them. I always loved that he begins with a boat and a bridge, the plainest infrastructure of an ordinary life. And there is a boat and a bridge we have very nearly stopped building. Here is the strange thing about our particular moment in history. The old objects of generosity have not gone anywhere. There is still hunger, there is still cold. We should still give food and shelter and money tonight and always. But something new has happened underneath all of that. In the last 20 years or so, a number of companies many not far from here discovered that the scarcest and most valuable resource on earth is no longer oil or gold. It is human attention. Your attention. We now have an economy worth trillions of dollars built on a single activity, the capturing, holding, measuring, selling, of the attention of human beings. It is the most sophisticated machinery ever constructed for taking something from you that you did not even know you were giving. And here is what follows from that. If attention has become the most valuable thing we possess, then attention has become the most precious thing we can possibly give. In an age when a thousand brilliant machines are competing for your eyes and your mind every waking second, to turn toward one human being and give them your whole, undivided, unpurchased attention is an act of enormous generosity. It may be the truest Donna we have. It costs you the one thing that the entire world is now trying to buy, but it is yours to give. You can put the phone face down, you can close the laptop, turn your body toward the person in front of you, and give them that very thing everyone else is bidding for. And it's not merely a kind gesture, it is that first perfection. It is our practice. Our tradition already has a name for this and a face for this, and she is here with us. Kansean avalokitesvara kanan guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion. The Sanskrit name avalokitesvara is usually rendered in English as the Lord who looks down, the one who observes the world and its suffering. But as the name traveled east into Chinese and Japanese it was heard a little differently, guanyin kanseyan kanan, the one who perceives the sounds of the world, who hears the cries of beings. Looking or listening, seeing or hearing, either way her compassion is not, first of all, a feeling or even an action really. It is an attention. In some images she has given a thousand arms with which to act, but in the open palm of each of those thousand hands there is an eye. A thousand hands to act with and in every one of them an eye to see with first. The image is itself the teaching. That true help begins in true seeing, that the hand cannot move rightly until the eye has actually looked. In other images she is simply listening. Her head inclined a little to one side. The way your own head inclines towards someone you are truly hearing. The whole of her awakening is depicted as perfect attention. Turn toward suffering. She does not repair the world from a safe distance. She hears it. She sees it. She attends to it completely. That attending is the compassion. I learned what this is worth and what it costs long before I understood what I was learning. In fact it is where my whole life as a Zen priest begins. A few of you have heard the story I told it once at Tassahara a few years ago and I sometimes tell it at my retreats. When I was in college my roommate got quite sick. His girlfriend and I tried to look after him ourselves, but he only got worse and finally we had to take him to the University Hospital. They admitted him at once and I could tell from how quickly they moved that they were quite worried. They may even have said we should have brought him sooner. I think they did. But what did we know? We stayed with him late that first night until the nurses asked the two of us to go home and let them do their work. And so we went back to the dorm and tried to sleep. When we came back in the morning he was miserable. He had barely slept himself. They had put him on a respirator and it was loud and uncomfortable and he just felt awful. So that evening when the nurses came to tell us visiting hours were over I asked whether I might stay through the night with him just to keep him company. And they said no. And I asked again and promised I would be no trouble at all. I would not get in their way that I would simply sit in a quiet corner with my friend. And they said no again. No visitors after hours. I pressed a third time and then you're supposed to ask things three times. Surely I said there must be some exception. And the nurse again said no. There were absolutely no exceptions except members of the clergy. And something lit up in my head except members of the clergy. Because as it happened I knew a member of the clergy. I was taking a class at college that semester in Zen Buddhism and the teaching assistant was a graduate student from Japan who had trained as a monk at Taitokuchi, one of the great Rinzai monasteries in Kyoto before deciding he wanted to come to the west and earn his doctrine. And his phone number was printed right there on our syllabus. So I called him. And it was in retrospect a strange thing to do. But somehow it didn't feel strange to a 19-year-old on a cold winter night with a friend in the hospital. And so I asked him if I could borrow his robes. And for reasons I still don't understand he said yes. So every night that week I put on amongst robes and went and sat through the night with my friend. In the morning his girlfriend would come and take my place and I would walk back to the dorm and go to sleep. Now I had no medical training of course. I had no monastic training. I had no idea what I was doing. And I really didn't do anything at all except be there hour after hour so that he would not be alone. In the end he recovered and I gave the robes back and we're still friends. But I discovered that I liked myself in those robes. I liked who I was when I sat there quietly paying attention. And it took about 10 years but eventually I was formally ordained and received robes of my own. And now after all that time I've come full circle. I've started serving as a volunteer chaplain at Stanford Children's Hospital near where I live where among other things I sometimes sit with Buddhist families. I was just there earlier today. And again what is it that I give them? Almost nothing. I still never studied medicine. I usually don't even ask what is wrong but it's not actually nothing. Because I come and I spend time and I give them my attention and that's not nothing at all. And you don't need a hospital for this. The same gift is waiting for you at your own dinner table for your child for your partner for the friend who calls when you're tired and have nothing left. You put your phone face down or you do not. Your attention is there with that person or it is not. You are there or you are not. The whole of it is that simple and that difficult. The old texts say that giving is perfected, that it becomes truly the paramita of giving, only when three things fall away. The idea of the giver, the idea of the receiver, and the idea of the gift. As long as there is a me graciously stowing something on you then I am still standing in the middle of the transaction quietly keeping score. The perfection of giving only arises when the one who gives disappears into the giving, when there is just attention and no one left who is attending. Just present without anyone being present. This is why dana is not in the end separate from emptiness from the emptiness we so often discuss from what the heart sutra points us to. Because when you give another person your complete attention something remarkable happens to you as well. For that moment you vanish. There is no room inside genuinely undivided attention for the self and its endless commentary, its worries, its rehearsals, its scorekeeping. To attend completely to another is to forget yourself completely. Dogen's forgetting of the self and the Buddha's first perfection of giving turn out to be a single gesture seen from two sides. You give your attention away and the very act of giving that small anxious grasping self that had been hoarding for a moment, a blessed moment, is simply gone. This is the secret that the attention economy can never afford to tell you because its whole existence depends on you not knowing it. The most valuable thing you own becomes fully yours only in the instant you give it away by choice. There is a discourse, one of the most famous and perhaps one of the most important in the Pali canon on the four foundations of mindfulness, the Satipatana Sutra. From beginning to end it is a teaching about attention. Attention to the body and the breath, attention to what we feel, attention to the mind itself, attention to the truth of things as they are. And at the very end of it, Buddha does something he almost never does, that no teacher almost ever does. He makes a promise. He makes a guarantee. He says if anyone should practice these four foundations of mindfulness in this way for seven years, then one of two fruits may definitely be expected. The highest awakening here and now in this very life or if some small trace of clinging still remains, then at least the state of non-return. You just need to practice it for seven years. And then as soon as he said it, as if he can feel some doubt in the room, he begins to take his own promise apart. Maybe not seven years, he said. If anyone should practice this way for six years, that would be enough. And then he continues to bargain himself down. Five years, four years, three years, two, one, maybe not even one year, just seven months. And down he goes, this careful measured precise teacher suddenly sounding almost reckless with generosity until he reaches the very bottom. If anyone should practice these four foundations of mindfulness in this way for just seven days, seven days, one of those two fruits may be expected. Awakening here and now or non-return. Seven days of real promise, of real attention. That is the promise. Now I won't sit here and tell you that I've collected on that promise. Seven days of complete attention is hard. Seven minutes is hard. But I believe this promise because I have felt in small doses on a cushion, at a bedside, alone or with a friend, what even a few moments of undivided attention can actually do. How it changes the one who receives it and empties the one who gives it. And if a few moments can do that, then I am not prepared to say what seven whole days could not. The attention economy does not take our attention collectively. It takes it from each of us alone. That is the design. There is really no shared feed. There is your feed built for you, measured on you, one solitary person. One solitary person at a time. It finds us when we are by ourselves, a little bored, a little anxious, a little lonely. And it offers us something to reach for. And that reaching is the oldest gesture there is. The mind grasping toward a false refuge only pointed now at a glowing screen. We are always taking refuge in something. Every time your hand moves to the phone before you've decided that it should, that is a refuge. A place you've learned to turn when the moment gets uncomfortable. The trouble is not that we take refuge. The trouble is where. Our tradition offers three other refuges instead. Three treasures we bow to at the start of every ceremony. We take refuge in Buddha, not a god to worship but the living proof of what is possible. The promise that a human mind can wake up. We take refuge in Dharma, the teaching, which is a simple but difficult method for seeing our own minds clearly. And we take refuge in Sangha, in one another, in the people who have agreed to sit down and practice with us together. This is what Dogen meant when he said a gift moves in both directions at once, that the giver and receiver are joined by the very thing that passes between them. The Sangha is that joining, made into a life we share. I have come to believe that this third refuge is the one our distracted age has most forgotten and the one it most needs. Because you cannot win your attention back alone. I have tried. You probably have too. The machine was built by a thousands of brilliant people and it runs on every screen you own and it is very hard to out-sit it by yourself, in your own kitchen or on your own couch at 11 o'clock at night. But the one thing it has no answer for is a few people who have quietly agreed to guard each other's attention together, to sit together, to look up together, to turn toward one another on purpose. Which is why I can say something to you tonight that I could never say to a reader alone with a book because you can look around this room. You did not come here to be on your phones. You came to sit together in silence and to give your attention to this moment and to each other. This room is the answer to the machine. It always has been. Every zendo, every sangha is a small and stubborn refusal of a world that would rather keep us each alone. You are already doing the very thing I am describing. You are already here. So this is what I have come to believe. Attention is not a lesser thing than love. Attention may be what love actually is up close. When you take the word away and look at what remains. It is the first gift, dana, the ground beneath the entire path. It is Kanan's compassion, which is nothing other than the perfect hearing and perfect vision, perfect attention. And it is available to you at no cost except the single one that everyone is trying to charge you at your own table tonight. In a few minutes we will chant and then most of you will go home. If you're like me at some point you'll reach for your phone and that's okay. This is not a talk against phones. It is a talk for the person in front of you. And so maybe before you pick up your phone, turn toward them instead. Turn toward your neighbor or your housemate or your partner or your friend. Give them the thing the whole world is bidding for. Just this person. Just this moment. Right here. Right now. Thank you very much. We have a little time for questions. If anyone wanted to ask or talk about anything there's a microphone for you. Dan, thank you very much. It's a great talk. And I've tried over these years of practice to let go of the cynic in me but it still lives deep inside and about halfway through your talk I realized, oh at Zen Center we're taking part in the attention economy because we are and you touched on it. But could you talk a little bit more about the difference between you touched on it a little bit and even equated the attention that we are trying to train with and that we talk about as love but so does advertising, selling us love and sex and sentimentality and could you talk a little bit more about the different kind of attention that we are talking about here? I don't know if it's exactly a different kind of attention. It may be the same kind of attention. I think the difference is that we are trying to help ourselves and each other choose where we give our attention. You know the the precepts that we all agree to follow when we either take Lehi, Jukei or take ordination as a as a priest, one of those precepts is against stealing but we usually don't phrase it as just against stealing we're a little more specific. The precept asks us to refrain from taking what is not given and so I think you know what maybe advertising for a long time and the attention economy now is trying to take what is not given. It is trying to take our attention from us that we've not chosen to give it and that is the difference between stealing and dana. In dana we make that choice of where where to give what to give and so I think our practice is is helping people