Right Relationship as the Ninth Factor of the Path

Shree and Ashwini

To begin, let me tell you a story. It starts in San Francisco, in the Marin Headlands, just north of
the Golden Gate Bridge. A young Indian woman named Ashwini is driving her car. One of her
coworkers is sitting next to her, and the two of them are chatting animatedly. At one point,
without any warning, Ashwini suddenly veers off the road, stops the car, and says, “You drive.”
Her coworker, confused, gets out, switches places with Ashwini, and as she starts driving.
Ashwini in the passenger seat closes her eyes and keeps them tightly shut until they get into the
city proper.

As they’re crossing over the bridge, Ashwini explains, I can’t see a bridge. She says, sometime
back, I made a vow. I promised to not look at the Golden Gate Bridge until I could do it with
Shree. And then she tells her coworker their story. Shree and Ashwini had met in Nepal, where
they had fallen in love. Ashwini was on a kind of last hurrah trip before an arranged marriage,
and Shree was the manager at the hostel where Ashwini was staying. The connection was
instantaneous. But while Shree accepted that she was gay, Ashwini did not. This was not
without reason. Same sex relationships were illegal in India until 2018, so you could end up in
prison for life for loving someone “against nature.”

So Ashwini’s plan had been to marry a man her family had chosen for her in the hopes that this
would somehow make her right, that this would give her the life that was expected of her. But
when it was time to leave Nepal, she decided not to get on the plane at the last minute. The
decision was rash. It was unreasonable. She had only spent a few days with Shree But soon
she would learn it was the best decision she had ever made, because being with Shree was
easy. It was right. But living out their love in India was not, so the women decided to move to the
United States, where they could be freer with one another.

Ashwini gets a job in San Francisco and plans to travel ahead, but before she leaves, she
makes her promise. She will not look at the Golden Gate Bridge until she can see it with Shree
because it is the symbol of the life they’re building together. They both know it’s an outlandish
promise: “I will not look at this 80-feet-tall, 4,200-feet-long bridge, the most recognizable, most
visible, monument in the United States, or one of the most visible. I vow not to see until I can
see it with you.” It’s a little bit like saying I will not attain enlightenment until I can do it with you.
Another outlandish, beautiful vow.

So Ashwini goes ahead, filled with anticipation, and Covid strikes. Three years go by and many
complications before Shree can join Ashwini. All of that time, Ashwini does not look at the bridge
once. But when she picks up her wife at the San Francisco airport—because the two of them
got married in Australia as soon as the world opened up—that’s where she took her first. They
pulled off at Crissy field. They spread out a picnic blanket. On the left, the pylons of the bridge.
On the right, a swath of beach. The Golden Gate straight ahead. Ashwini pulls out a glass and
says, “What do you think?” Shree clinks their two glasses together and she says, “It is beautiful.”
Neither one of them was looking at the bridge.

What Is Right Relationship?

All of life is relationship. We’re in a relationship to ourselves, one another, to all manner of
beings and things. Our relationship to places, to memories, to our stories, to our dreams—
everything is in continuous relationship, constantly interacting with everything else. So the
question is not whether we affect one another. We affect one another all the time. The question
is how to go about our relationships so that they help and not harm, so that they’re able to
receive and to offer the love, attention, and care that we all want. This is what right relationship
helps us do: to treat everything and everyone right.

But right here, as in, the noble eightfold path, is not the right of right and wrong. It is the
rightness of what is skillful, what is helpful, what is loving, what is true.

If we look closely at the path—made up of right view, right thought, right speech, right action,
right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration—we see that undergirding
all of it is relationship. All of it is interaction.

Our Interbeing

In this study, right relationship, let’s use the image of a house. First we need the foundation,
which, in Buddhist terms, is our interbeing. This is the late Thich Nhat Hanh’s term for
interconnectedness. Interbeing is the recognition that nothing exists by itself, that we need
everything in the universe to be what we are, and that this is true of everything.

Take this apple, for example. Let’s say that this particular apple traveled from a farm in Yakima,
Washington. This is one of the places that Pink Lady apples are grown. On a fall day in October,
it was carefully handpicked by a woman named Adele. Adele is a native Washingtonian, and
she lives in Yakima with her husband and her two kids. On the morning that Adele picked my
apple, she was wearing denim overalls and a red and white plaid shirt. She bought these at a
secondhand thrift store on Main Street that donates part of their proceeds to an organization
protecting women against domestic violence.

Violet, the owner, is a survivor of domestic violence herself, or, as she likes to say, a thriver
after. She always sources her clothes very carefully, but still, most of them are originally made in
Cambodia, Vietnam, or Honduras. The shirt that Adele is wearing was made by a young woman
in Tegucigalpa. Fabiola, who is the youngest of five kids, has worked at a clothes factory since
she was about 15, and on that same morning, when Adele was at the farm, Fabiola was thinking
it was time to look for better work. She goes over to her neighbor Neon’s house on her way to
work, and, chatting, she tells him as much.

Neon has always had a soft spot for Fabiola, because she reminds him of his late daughter, and
so, at night, as he is lying in bed with his wife, Carmen, he says to her that he too thinks Fabiola
can do more than make clothes. Carmen, for her part, is only half listening. She kind of nods in
the dark because she’s only half listening because her mind is on the surprise party she’s going
to give her son, Felipe, who’s 28 and is coming home in a couple of months from Colombia,
where he’s been working construction. At the birthday party, Carmen introduces Fabiola to
Felipe, and the rest, as they say, will be history.

Now, on the day that Adele brings her creative apples into the barn, a young man named Adam
is packing the crates. He’s wearing a pair of deer skin gloves made in Canada by a Quebecois
named Albertine, who has a fondness for whiskey and a limp. Adam will carefully pack my apple
in a crate that will be trucked in a refrigerated container to Auckland and then onto a ship on its
way to Panama. But on the way, my apple will touch the lives of hundreds, thousand, millions of
people: the drivers, custom officials, their wives, their children, the food that those children will
eat, and the people who grew that food, and the clothes they’re wearing, the people who made
those clothes, on and on and on. A net spreading outward from Yakima to the rest of the
universe and beyond, infinitely, with my Apple as its central node.

Finally, on a warm November day, I’ll go to the grocery store after my morning run, I’ll pick a few
apples, and I’ll bring them home to enjoy this afternoon after recording this talk. I will cut up a
few pieces of my apple and share them with Lucas, my French Bulldog, which I brought from
Mexico to Panama, who will happily chew the apple, and then he’ll lie down on the balcony’s
cool tiles. I’ll go to my desk and begin to write, bits of apple in my body, and in his as well, as
bits of life, thousands of lives, millions of lives, indistinguishable from mine and his, as they
always were. Interwoven. That’s the foundation.

The frame of the house is a deep kind of care, what I like to call regard. To relate well to anyone
or anything, we have to care about it. This may seem obvious, but how many interactions do we
have in a day that are painfully lacking of care?

We just have to look at our ailing Earth. It’s a clear example of that—our fragmented society, our
perpetual conflict, our violence. We’re even uncaring toward ourselves. Think of what you do
with those aspects that you don’t care to look at, those aspects of yourself that you feel
ashamed about, that you don’t like. Chances are, you ignore them, you avoid them, you pretend
they’re not part of who you are.

So regard is the willingness to turn torward, instead of away from. To want to see and to
understand ourselves, one another, and the world. It’s the right kind of want, the best kind of
want.

Recently, I was reading a book that illustrated in a number of ways that plants show deep regard
for one another. They somehow know who’s a stranger and who’s kin, and they help each other
thrive. They make room so other plants can get light. They send nutrients through the roots. We
know that trees do this too. Warnings when predators are near. If plants can care, so can we.

Appropriate Attention

Over the foundation and the frame of the house, we can build the walls. In right relationship, this
is really attention, specifically what the Buddha called appropriate attention. I think of it as
having three main qualities: respect, reflection and focus.

Respect comes straight out of that regard—that is, respect for me, respect for you, that comes
out of that recognition that we deserve attention. We all do simply because we are. There’s
nothing else we need to do. Nothing else we need to prove. Others deserve my respect. I
deserve my respect simply because I am, because they are, because we inter-are.

The second is reflection. As we relate to another, a person, a thing, to reflect on whether that
interaction is causing them or us suffering, and then reflecting what it is that we can do to stop
the harm, reflecting on whether we can increase the good. This includes checking our
perception, because often, when we think we’re seeing another, what we’re seeing is a
projection of our own minds, right? We make others in our image. We make the world in our
image. So through reflection, we check, is this true? Is my understanding accurate? If it isn’t, we
ask—particularly if there’s a person in front of us, but even when there are things—them show
us, reveal to us who they are, what they are, so we can better understand. If it’s a person, to
really listen so we can see them and not our idea of them.

The third aids in those two, which is focus. In paying attention, we do so completely without
distraction, as if there isn’t anything more important, as if there isn’t anything else to attend to,
because in that moment, there isn’t.

I remember years ago, I was working with my teacher in his studio, and he was dictating letters,
he was taping them in a very small handheld tape recorder, and we had worked for about an
hour or so, a pretty good clip, when the tape got stuck in the machine. I waited for Roshi to open
up the tape recorder, and he carefully took out the very small cassette tape, and just tried to
untangle the film from the spools. It was a mess. I glanced at the stack of letters still to be done
on the desk, and I was sure that he would just throw the whole thing in the waste basket and
grab another tape so we could keep working. Instead, he began to unspool the plastic film while
I watched, and patiently untied the knots, and then winded it back into the tape with a point of a
pencil. At one point, he’d hit another tight knot, and I was sure again, he would just give up. But
then what he did was he just rummaged in his desk, and he took out a tiny, tiny pair of scissors,
and he used them to clip the tape very cleanly, and with two very thin strips of scotch tape,
taped the film together. Then he finished winding it into the cassette. It took about 45 minutes of
painstaking work to do the whole thing. Then he pressed play, sat back in his chair, and we both
listened as his own voice dictated the last letter he had done with just a couple of very minor
blips. When it was done, he looked at me with pleasure. It is that kind of focus, that kind of care.

What Does Love Look Like?

The roof of the house is loving-kindness. There is the habit of asking yourself, what is the kind
and loving response here? Or, as a friend said to me, what does love look like in this moment?
Now, this is particularly important to do when an interaction is causing us pain, because, like the
roof of a house, loving-kindness is protecting a relationship from the elements. It protects us
from anger, jealousy, and indifference. It ensures that our actions, words, and thoughts, are
coming from a place that is good, affirming, and a place of protection, or refuge.

Of course, this isn’t always easy to do. When hurt, our impulse is to hurt. But appropriate
attention shows us that this never leads to peace. It doesn’t make the other happy, it doesn’t
make us happy.

So what if, instead, we try wishing ourselves and the other love and wellbeing in our minds?
This is part of the four immeasurables practice—the metta, or loving-kindness, practice. If
you’ve tried this, you know it is impossible to hold an angry thought and a loving thought
simultaneously in your mind. It is not possible to do that. So by focusing on loving-kindness, we
shift our relationships toward love.

If there are situations in which this feels impossible, that’s OK. The dharma isn’t just a feel good
practice, although it does often feel good. The dharma is a revolution. It’s the transformation of
all that leads to conflict, hatred, and suffering into that which lives as love.

Opening Space

The doors and the windows of the house open up space in our relationships. Our relationships
are hard. Cultivating good relationships is harder. And so we can expect that building that house
of right relationship is going to take time. It’s going to take effort. It’s going to take perseverance.
It’s going to take patience, and a kind of grit. It’s like the grit of a bodhisattva vowing to realize
themselves for the sake of everyone, like the grit of a lover, of a partner, of a friend, who will go
to great lengths to protect and to get up again when they fall, when they fail.

So space is the way that we let in air and light into our relationships. It appears every time we
stop reacting or strive to take a wider view. When we do the opposite, when we choose to live
inside our stories instead of the reality of who we are, we’ve opted to shut ourselves inside the
house, locked doors, drawn curtains, keeping out the world. Space lets us breathe. It lets us
pause and ask what is really going on.

The Courage to Care

That too is challenging, because sometimes we don’t want to see and that’s why the last
building block of the house is courage. I think of it as the nails, the screws, the balls, invisible to
the naked eye, invisible at first glance, but they keep the whole structure together. They keep it
upright. We do need courage to see ourselves, to see one another, to keep caring in the face of
indifference. Of this regard, this is where the term bodhisattva warrior is appropriate.
Reality is not warm and fuzzy. Relationships are not warm and fuzzy. Not all of them, not all
parts of them. So we need both courage and strength to care for what is important—what is
good, not just for me, but for everyone. Because whether we like it or not, whether we’re aware
of it or not, we are constantly relating to one another. It does take tremendous courage.
Courage to take up those relationships, to be willing to study them, to learn from them, and to
commit to doing them.

A Crossing Between You and Me

Maybe a house isn’t actually the best image for right relationship. Maybe it is a bridge. Eighty
feet tall, 4,200 feet long, a crossing between you and me—a millimeter, an instant—not there
when we inter-are. So in one sense, it is unmissable, beautiful. In another sense, before it is
built, utterly, outlandishly improbable. Who would ever think of doing such a thing? And how
would we live without it?

Intervening, regard, attention, loving-kindness, space, courage: the building blocks of right
relationship. May they be of benefit. May they be of benefit and help your relationships thrive.
Thank you for your practice.