Right Livelihood
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Opening with a Spanish reading of Pablo Neruda’s famous poem “Ode to Common Things,” Zuisei speaks of Right Livelihood, the fourth factor in the Noble Eightfold Path.
Sensei speaks of work, both as sacred labor, and as the act of relating to other people and to things. We have to work, we have to make and buy and use and eat things. The question is how do we do this so we don’t hurt ourselves, each other, and our planet. So right livelihood is about living rightly—about caring deeply about our work and one another and the things that support our lives.
This talk was given by Zuisei Goddard.
Transcript
Transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Oda a las cosas
Amo las cosas loca,
locamente.
Me gustan las tenazas,
las tijeras,
adoro
las tazas,
las argollas,
las soperas,
sin hablar,
por supuesto,
del sombrero.
Amo
todas las cosas,
no sólo
las supremas,
sino
las
infinita-
mente
chicas,
el dedal,
las espuelas,
los platos,
los floreros.
On Monday, I set about writing a talk on Right Livelihood. On Thursday, I wrote the last few lines and then came down to sit. Halfway through the period, a voice in my head very clearly said: It's the wrong talk.
I've heard that voice before, and except for once, I've always ignored it because it's a little inconvenient. [Zuisei and audience laugh] I have always regretted it every time that I've ignored it. I tried for a while on another day to fix what I had written, then I gave in and started over. When you give a talk, there's actually three talks: the one you thought you gave, the one you actually gave, and the one you wish you'd given. So, this is a talk I wish I'd given, and I hope for all our sakes that it's the right talk. It isn't that the first talk was the wrong theme—right livelihood—but I feel that I wasn't saying it rightly. So, I hope that this is saying it rightly, at least to some extent.
I started with the first short section of Neruda’s well known “Ode to things.” I'm sure you know that he's one of the best known Latin American poets, one of the most loved certainly in his country. In fact, he was so loved that he once read to a stadium filled with 100,000 people. Can you imagine a poet filling a stadium in this country? Not just once did he do this, he did this actually twice, the second time to a mere 70,000 people after he had come back from his acceptance speech in Oslo. That second time he was in Chile, in Santiago, in the National Stadium. He read from the book that he's most known for—Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. The 20th poem begins:
Tonight, I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’
It's the theme of the book and it's the best known poem. When he got to it, it is said that 70,000 people got up and started reciting the poem with him. I think about that and I get chills. So, in Chile, children grew up reciting his poetry. They knew it by heart.
The poem below is from his “Ode to things.” I started by reading it in Spanish because… I can [Zuisei and audience laugh] and you should never miss an opportunity to read Neruda in Spanish. Also because the English doesn't quite do justice to the music of his poetry. That first section of “Ode to things” says:
I have a crazy,
crazy love of things.
I like pliers,
and scissors.
I love
cups,
rings,
and bowls,
not to speak, of course,
of hats.
I love
all things,
not just,
the grandest,
also
the
infinite-
ly
small—
thimbles,
spurs,
plates,
the flower vases.
I've been making my way systematically through the Noble Eightfold Path. Right Livelihood is the fifth factor. Technically, the next one I had to do was Right Action, but I knew that I was coming here and I felt it would be more appropriate to speak of Right Livelihood in a lay center. The usual definition of Right Livelihood, or the way that we consider it in our order, is work. Work is spiritual practice. It is how to support yourself and how to do so in such a way that it is affirming of your life and others’ lives. One of the things that I think about a bit in my work at Dharma Communications at the monastery, that I've actually always liked to think about, is things and the creation of things—all sorts of things: cups, rings, and bowls and thimbles and spurs—but also dreams, thoughts, and words. So, I decided to speak of Right Livelihood mostly in terms of right relationship, which Shugen Sensei has called the ninth factor in the Eightfold Path. Right relationship is that love for all things: for physical things, for people who make these things, for the people that we interact with, whatever our job is, and love for that labor itself, whatever your labor happens to be.
So, Right Livelihood is Samyagājīva. The Buddha defined it in a Buddha-esque way— as the opposite of wrong livelihood. So it is not engaging in a profession that does harm to others. Technically, this is business in weapons, in human beings, in meat, in intoxicants and in poison. I was remembering that I read somewhere about a man who had made his fortune making rat poison. Apparently, he was very good at it. He made quite a bit of money doing this. He would go to parties and regale the guests with detailed descriptions of the ingredients in the poison and the way that the rats would die. The guests were both, as you can imagine, horrified and enthralled. There was something about it. This is where the precepts get a little tricky, don't they? I mean, what would happen to the city without rat poison, or without that poison for bedbugs, or water bugs—as you Americans, so endearingly call them. In Mexico, we call them by their true name, cockroaches. Given their size, no euphemism can disguise them. So, I guess, somebody has to do this work, but, technically, this would be part of wrong livelihood.
So Right Livelihood is not engaging in any of these. There was a long list: reading marks on cloth gnawed by mice, offering blood sacrifices, making predictions based on the fingertips [Zuisei and audience laugh], laying demons in a cemetery, snake charming. It goes on in that vein. None of these things are Right Livelihood, but of course, also, not lying, not cheating, not stealing, not profiting at the expense of others. Just the other day, here at the temple, I got a phone call from a Con Edison man. He was very gruff on the phone, very abrupt. He said, "I want to speak to the owner." And I said, "Well, he's not here." He said, "Well, we have not received any payments on this account, and we're shutting down the electricity in an hour." I said, "Oh, that's not good." Then I flashed on a call that we had gotten at the monastery, exactly the same thing, except somebody else picked up the call. They told me, "Oh, the Con Edison man is on the phone. He says they're gonna shut down the electricity." I was like, that's not good. As I was walking to get our bills, I realized the monastery doesn't have Con Edison. It has NYSEG. So, I got on the phone this time and said exactly the same thing I had said to the man at the monastery, I said, "We don't have Con Edison. We have NYSEG." The first time, at the monastery, he hung up. The second time, he started to say something, and I said, "Goodbye," and I hung up. Then, I went to look at the bills, and here we actually do have Con Edison. Luckily, I still think it was a scam because the lights, as you can see, are still on, we have paid, and we're fine. And I wanted to call him back, I have to admit, and say, "Why did you do this? Why do you do this? Why do you think that this is a good way to make your living? How can you live with yourself doing this?" I didn't, but I wish I had. And the same thing happens with Bank of America, somebody called and said, "We're from Bank of America, what's your account number?" When I picked up I said, "Well, if you know that we're with Bank of America, then you should have our account number." They hang up. So, that's not Right Livelihood needless to say.
When I think about it in terms of right relationship, I think of this person and what kind of mental acrobatics they have to do to justify that, to feel that this is a valid and sustainable way to make a living. It's the right relationship to people and things and to the planet, of course, that supports us. The Neruda poem says, Oh yes, the planet is sublime. It's full of pipes weaving handheld through tobacco smoke. He loved pipes. He was a pipe smoker himself.
…and keys
and salt shakers—
everything,
I mean,
that is made
by the hand of man, every little thing:
shapely shoes,
and fabric,
and each new
bloodless birth
of gold,
eyeglasses
carpenter’s nails,
brushes,
clocks, compasses,
coins, and the so-soft
softness of chairs.
In Spanish that is la suave suavidad de las sillas. Yes, you just want to say that, right? Everything that is made by human hands—everything that is created by the human mind—each new bloodless birth of a thing that didn't exist before. The problem is a lot of it is not bloodless, right. A lot of what we create in the way that we create leaves a large wake behind.
Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia said, "Every piece of crap because it was manufactured contains within it something of the priceless, applied human intelligence for one and natural capital for another—something taken from the forest or a river or soil that cannot be replaced faster than we deplete it. We're wasting our brains and our only world on the design, production and consumption of things we don't need and aren't good for us.” He said, “In fact, you can't actually have a sustainable company because you are always taking faster than you can put back. So, really you can [only] have a responsible company.” The same is true for each of us. Can we be responsible individuals in those very interactions in the way that we go about our workday, in what we make whether we make physical things or not? How are we relating to one another? Really, that is the question. What do we say to each other? How do we think about one another? We often forget that. We've heard this many, many times, all of us, that karma is created by speech, and word, and thought. Thought is certainly no less powerful, and in some ways no less evident. We learn to move fast so as not to see what we don't want to see. But really, if we want to see, it's right there in the face of the other and how they're relating to us. So how we think about them directly shapes our world, certainly our interactions, but our world quite directly.
There are so many ways to interact with one another. We can compete, we can cooperate, we can ingratiate, defer and dominate, destroy, in a work environment. It all depends on one thing—how you understand this. That's really what it comes down to. If I approach a situation, any situation, from a sense of lack—there's something that you're going to take from me, there's only a limited number of resources. I was saying in another talk, if I think there's only enough goodness to go around, then I need to get mine. Right. So, if I approach any situation from that sense of lack, I will be threatened, you will threaten me, and I will do what I can to protect myself. What if we see it a little bit differently? See that there is more than enough to go around? There's so much we can't even know how much there is actually. When we say that work practice is doing work as spiritual practice, what does that actually mean? What is spiritual and what isn't? What's important? What's important work, what's an important object, and what can be overlooked? Do some things deserve more respect than others? Do some people deserve more respect than others?
Oh, irrevocable
river
of things:
no one can say
that I loved
only
fish,
or the plants of the jungle and the field,
that I loved
only
those things that leap and climb, desire, and survive.
It's not true:
many things conspired
to tell me the whole story.
Not only did they touch me,
or my hand touch them:
they were
so close
that they were a part
of my being,
they were so alive with me
that they lived half my life
and will die half my death.
Let it be known (these are my words, not Neruda) that not only have I loved those things that leap and climb. But I love the blender, the stethoscope, the computer and the desk that it rests on, the MetroCard, that crack on the sidewalk on my way to work, the rumble of the subway train, the sound of car horns, and that woman sitting next to me who's wearing my mother's perfume, or the young boy with his skateboard wedged between his feet, a man selling fake glasses on the corner of 42nd and Broadway. Let it be known that I love them too.
Right Livelihood, I think is about living rightly, completely, living awake. It’s about regarding all the many things and moments and individuals that conspired to tell me the whole story as Neruda said. They are the whole story. What other story is there? Not only did they touch me or my hand touch them, they were so close that they were a part of my being. We are a part of each other's being. That coworker that annoys you, that intransigent boss, are a part of your being.
This week in particular, I’m not sure why, I have been thinking about all of you, who for the past 15 years, every week come to do the flowers, to do the altars, to repair everything that needs repairing in this building, to scrub the toilets. You have transcribed and designed flyers and made phone calls and written emails. You take care of the books, and your hands touch these walls, and the earth, the tomato plants upstairs. Those hands that know the feel of a hammer, know the feel of scissors and thread, of the crooked color printer. Week after week, you come and you do this with no thought of reward. You do know there's no reward. [laughter] Well, actually there is, the work itself, the doing of the work itself. Those of you goddesses, who've taken care of Sanjay better than we could have at the monastery, who care for our teacher, when he lets you. Through times of great change, you have stayed constant. That is Right Livelihood. That's living rightly, fully, and doing sacred work. Just as taking that seat is. Taking the seat of enlightenment is doing sacred work, to sit day after day, quietly, in order to understand yourself. You know, it actually doesn't really matter who's sitting up here. It doesn't really matter what they say. I mean, a little inspiration helps, yes. But you already have what you need, you have your body and you have your mind. I've said that you don't even need a cushion. It's a little more comfortable, but you don't even need a cushion. No matter who sits here telling you what, you're the one who needs to turn the light around. You can and you do on this day and many, many days. You already have, you also hear this all the time, you already have everything that you need, but don't ever forget that because we do, we do forget. Sometimes when things get hard or things are overwhelming, or when it's difficult. When something happens that just shakes us deeply, we forget that really all we need to do is sit down for just a couple of minutes, close our eyes, almost close our eyes, and turn the light around.
It's not completely true that it doesn't matter what we say up here. It does matter to some extent, of course, what we say. Don't get fooled by the word sacred, just as with the word spiritual. A thing doesn't own sacredness, but it doesn't lack it either. So where is it? Where is that sense of sacredness? It doesn't take much, actually, to see the light that all things have. But you have to open your eyes. Sometimes with people you have to work a little harder because they talk back, but it's there. It's there also. In our case, paradoxically, you have to close your eyes in order to see. As you know, that's only one side because there is always that moment in which you stand up and step out, and you have to keep them open. You can see that everything is in fact illuminated. You see that you're the one who creates and the one who destroys. It is said that one of the Desert Fathers would weave baskets by day, and at night he would destroy them—every one. And he would do this every day. Every day he would weave baskets and every night he would undo what he had done. Why? Where are the fruits of your labor at the end of the day? Do you know? Do you know what your weaving is? Are you aware that you're weaving, or are you just waiting trying to move through to the next one and the next one, waiting for the end of the day when you can just relax, veg out. Actually, we shouldn't insult vegetables, they're fully alive. [Zuisei and audience laugh] If your focus is on getting things done, there's a slight problem that they never are. They're never done, no matter how hard you work, how much you work, they are never done.
The other problem is that we're usually moving too fast, which means things don't have a chance to touch us, and we don't have a chance to touch them. If all of our attention is on getting the job done, there's not much left over for another. The good news is that the other doesn't like that and they'll let you know, as I said before, if you're paying attention. I experienced that very directly. Not that long ago, I had a conflict with someone at work. It was basically because I wanted something done. I wanted it done in a particular way, and I wanted it done at a particular time. I was pushing, and I couldn't really see. I couldn't see the person in front of me. It came to a head and our teacher intervened and suggested that we sit down and talk to each other. He asked her to tell me the ways in which I had hurt her, and he asked me to listen, which I was ready to do. What I wasn't prepared for is that when we got to the meeting, she pulled out a sheet of paper that she unfolded several times. It was quite big, with very, very small writing. It was all the notes that she'd taken of all the ways that I had hurt her. In fact, she ran out of room and started to turn the paper. So there was writing around the margins and upside one side down and it came around to the other side. That's what got me because what she was saying was not a surprise. Again, if you're paying attention, you know yourself. So what she was saying didn't surprise me though, it was good to hear it. But it was seeing a visual representation of all the ways in which I can hurt another person that really stopped me. That was just a representative sample. I'm sure there's many more ways. Afterwards, I thought, what was I trying to protect? I wantes to get the job done, yes, but for what? Let's say that it was done a little bit later, or not exactly as I wanted it. What's the offshoot of that? Me. My image of myself and how I perceive me and how I want others to perceive me. What did I think I needed to get that I didn't have? When you put two people together conflict is more likely than not given enough time for them to be together. It's not inevitable, if it was we wouldn't be practicing. It’s not inevitable, but we do have to be willing to slow down.
This is Neruda again:
I love
all
things,
not because they are
passionate
or sweet smelling
but because,
I don't know,
because
this ocean is yours
and mine;
these buttons
and wheels
and little
forgotten
treasures,
fans upon
whose feathers
love has scattered
its blossoms,
glasses, knives and
scissors—
all bear
the trace
of someone's fingers
on their handle or surface,
the trace of a distant hand
lost
in the depths of forgetfulness.
When I was typing this line, I thought it said lands—the trace of a distant lands lost in the depths of forgetfulness. And that would work too. When you forget yourself there are whole lands on the handle of a shovel. Generations of men and women in a table made by hand in that little corner store that's been handed down in a family, and it's been loved. It's been loved. That's really the key, isn't it? When you love what you do, then what you touch springs to life. It's not just a business transaction. If you happen to buy and sell things, it’s not just about buying and selling.
I struggle with that quite a bit. You know in our work we have to make money. It's so unsatisfying when it's just about that. And now, since it's done on the web, there is so little connection. There was a man, an antique seller in Italy, and his store was ramshackled, it was falling down. He didn't have a lot of money. He was selling these antiques, and this woman came, an American, very wealthy. She was going to buy a pair of cherubs. He quoted an exorbitant price. She took out her traveler's checks and started to make a check. He pushed her out of the store. He turned purple with rage and pushed her out of the store. He said, "I can't do business with you. I can't do business with you." She kept looking at him, like, I'm ready, I'm ready to pay. He's like, Get out, get out of my shop. A friend of his was standing nearby and said, "You need the money. What happened?" And he said, "You know, if I was starving, that's one thing. But I'm not. She didn't even she didn't even do me the courtesy of assuming that I would try to take advantage of her." He said "I'm a business and I'm a merchant. She didn't try to haggle. She didn't even try to bring the price down. I mean, it would have been shameful for me to give them to her at that price without any interaction." He said, "I'm not going to do business like this." Imagine, imagine if this was how we did business.
This is why I'm so against Amazon, it's like selling at a loss. Which is okay, you know, we all like a sale. But the amount of work that went into a book, let's say, the resources, just the water, the trees, the time, not to mention the writer’s work. For three dollars, for dollars, ninety-nine cents, is that really what we think things are worth? Really? No wonder we're perpetually dissatisfied. We don't do that just with things but with people. Not just in human trafficking, but filling beds in a hospital or in a nursing room or to reach a quota, acquiring good students for the school's reputation. I mean, there are so many areas, I think, in our life where the tail is wagging the dog. It's amazing to me that we're not distressed, more distressed, or confused, at the very least. Well, maybe we are confused and that's why we're here. Or we are not confused enough to know that it doesn't have to be this way. So, here we are, on this gorgeous Sunday morning, spending time sitting quietly, so that we can let ourselves be touched by one another, by things, by that trace of a distant hand, lost in the depths of forgetfulness, having forgotten ourselves to come back to the world, which is in fact of our own creation.
This is what the Buddha saw. This is why we can't say we're a victim and that things are happening to us. As Daido so often would say that what we do and what happens to us is exactly the same thing. That's why we can be free. That's exactly why we can be free. So, living rightly doesn't mean living perfectly. It means living humanly, touching and letting ourselves be touched. So we shouldn't forget our power, which is enormous. It's more vast than we’d like to think because it's a little frightening. But without it we would stay imprisoned, we would stay bound. So, living rightly doesn't only mean these things, it also means that all of it as Neruda said is so close that it's a part of my being. It’s not forgetting that all of it is so close that it's a part of my being. And, you know, actually with respect and humility for Neruda’s words, I would say, it is so close that it was, is, and always will be my very being.
Explore further
01 : Ode to Common Things by Pablo Neruda
02 : The Responsible Company by Yvon Chouinard
03 : Right Livelihood