Can you all hear me okay? Yes, okay. I took a look around to see who was here and it's wonderful to see all of you on this beautiful Saturday morning. They're friends from BCC, I see people from Arcata, I see people from the music world, I see This is the remarkable opportunity that comes with this bizarre circumstance that we're in with the pandemic. So we're learning how to deal with that. I want to begin by just reading a verse from The Adhita Pariyaya Sutta, which is otherwise known as the Fire Sermon. And I'm not going to read, I've sort of abridged this, but it gets to the point of what I think is on my mind.

[01:11]

Monks, all is a flame. A flame with what? A flame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion, a flame I tell you with birth, aging, and death, with sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, and despair. So today I notice is the weekend of the full moon. and we would customarily have our bodhisattva ceremony today. And so, while we're not going to do the whole ceremony, I'd like to begin by chanting the sangamon, the verse of repentance.

[02:14]

And I invite those of you that know it to put your hands in gassho and chant this with me three times. All my ancient tangled karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion born through body, speech, and mind. I now fully avow all my ancient tangled karma From beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow all my ancient tangled karma. From beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind,

[03:21]

I now fully allow. So this is the avowal, the acknowledgement of all of our karma, our present karma, our past karma, the karma that the actions that we see and the actions whose roots and branches we can never fully encompass. And that's a meaningful acknowledgement, particularly today in our country in view of the really deeply troubling events that have been unfolding for the last two weeks in the midst of the pandemic, uh, the surfacing of, uh, racism, the surfacing of hatred, uh, the surfacing of systems of white supremacy.

[04:28]

And, um, I've been thinking about this for the last two weeks and I've been aware that I'm scheduled to give this talk and basically I have to confess that the pieces of my talk are sort of laying all about my mind today, like shards of broken glass. Each one of these pieces, and I have pages of notes, is shiny and sharp. And I really don't know quite how they fit together. So I'm fitting them together for myself and whatever I think, the reality is that each of us has to fit together the pieces of our thinking, the pieces of our action and words and the pieces of our life for ourselves.

[05:40]

So I'll begin. I want to call, the names of just a few of the black people who've been killed by police in our recent memory. There's George Floyd in Minneapolis. There's Breonna Taylor, who was shot by the police in her own home in Louisville, Kentucky. Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Eric Garner in New York City. Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Tamir Rice, age 12, in Cleveland. Since 2015, more than 2,000 Black and Hispanic people have been killed by police.

[06:48]

This is more than twice the rate of white Americans who've been shot by the police for a population that in aggregate reaches about 20%, about 25% of the population were black and Hispanic. So also we remember Ahmaud Arbery. who was killed, chased down by racist thugs in Georgia. And we remember Trayvon Martin, age 17, killed by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman in Florida. And while we're at it, I want to call the names of Derek Chauvin and his fellow officers, Thomas Lane, Dow, Alexander Quang, who together killed George Floyd.

[08:10]

I include the police here because While I'm appalled and angry at their actions, I know that I cannot imagine their fear and their suffering in those various moments of conflict. And also what I believe, and I'm not asking you to accept this, I'm just inviting you to think, I believe that in many circumstances, the police force enacts the shadow of our own delusion and fear. And I include myself here. And whatever race of the police officer may be there, again, they're enacting, to me, they're enforcing a system

[09:16]

of white supremacy that they may not even know that they participate in. So we sit here in our flames. And while I recognize that the flames burn hotter in some other places and among other people than perhaps on my quiet block in Berkeley. The destruction and the violence on lives is very near and the grief is terrible. There's a burden of responsibility and along with many of you, I am trying to see what exactly I can do.

[10:20]

I am listening. I am watching. I am not knowing and bearing witness. In faith, as Jerry was talking about last week, in faith that an appropriate and appropriate responses will arise. Whether they succeed or fail. So just to break my own rules for speaking from the Dharma seat, I want to call out President Trump and the administration for what I see giving the permission

[11:21]

to take the lid off of a situation that already that has always existed but with that permission they give power to separation to chaos to hatred and violence when a president says dominate the protesters. When he says, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Echoing Miami's white supremacist police chief Walter Hedley in 1967, who himself was then, his words were taken up by presidential candidate George Wallace the following year. When a president and his administration call up a massive police force and armed federal forces using flash bang grenades and rubber bullets to clear away peaceful protesters so he can walk across the street with an unopened Bible in his hand to take a photo op.

[12:41]

That leaves me very angry. I don't dwell in that anger, but I acknowledge it. It's a human emotion. And the task of a practice is to turn that into action, to turn, to use that anger as energy, not as a retributive force, but to turn it so that I can be part of a force that turns our society, that turns our community. I was very moved by something that I got from Vicki Austin, who gave a talk last week in Sacramento.

[13:45]

And she cited something that was written about a, uh, the proprietor of a Indian restaurant in Minneapolis, uh, last week. Uh, his name is Gandhi Mahal and, uh, his daughter writes this. Thank you to everyone for checking in. Oh, I'm sorry. His name wasn't Gandhi Mahal. His restaurant's name was Gandhi Mahal. Thank you for everyone for checking in. Sadly, Gandhi Mahal has caught fire and has been damaged. We won't lose hope though. I am so grateful for our neighbors who did their best to stand guard and protect our restaurant. Your efforts won't go unrecognized.

[14:47]

Don't worry about us. We will rebuild. This is Hafsa, Rahul Islam's daughter, writing. As I am sitting next to my dad watching the news, I hear him say on the phone, let my building burn. Justice must be served. Put those officers in jail. Gandhi Mahal may have felt the flames last night, but our fiery drive to help protect and stand with our community will never die. Peace be with everyone. That's what Hafsa Islam wrote. And I will say parenthetically that there has been a GoFundMe account set up to help rebuild Gandhi Mahal and I sent them a small amount of money because I was very moved by this story.

[15:58]

So everything is coming up together. The terrible and the inspiring. another shard, if you will. I came across this week in a Facebook post, a Facebook post from, uh, my friend, uh, Vimalasara Mason-John. Uh, she's an Anglo-African Buddhist teacher, uh, in the, the head of, uh, the Triratna community in Vancouver. and she's a wonderful teacher, very strong voice, and here's what she wrote. She said, how do I as a meditation teacher teach my black sangha to breathe?

[17:09]

Eric Garner and George Floyd both said, I can't breathe, and still they were killed. How many of us are not breathing, holding our breath when a police car passes us? I, for one, stop breathing every time a police car passes me. I stop and stand still waiting to see if it's for me. This is learned behavior. And in the meditation rooms, we say, you must breathe. How can we breathe with ease when we sit on our cushions, the in-breath and the out-breath strangled by the institutional racism and white supremacy? I can really hear the conundrum.

[18:16]

I can feel it to some extent, but I can't feel it the same way that she feels it or that one of the many young African-American men who walk down our block feels it. And yet our teaching is rooted in breathing. In the breath, we say that The breath is something that we all have. We all should be able to be relaxed and easy in it. And yet we begin to recognize that that may not be possible for everyone. Another shard.

[19:20]

Where is it? Here it is. I'd like to, if you, if you're not familiar with it, I want to show you, oops, It's backwards. I wonder if I could flip this one second. It's frontwards for us, Alan. It's fine. Oh, it is? Okay. All right, great. It's backwards for me. It says, The Inner Work of Racial Justice by Rhonda McGee. And Rhonda is a lawyer and a mindfulness teacher here in the Bay Area, an African American woman. This is a really excellent book. It's a book about the actual practice. What Suzuki Roshi says is that our practice is to include everything.

[20:38]

That's not just the good things or the wholesome things. It's whatever it is that we're feeling. And the, the essence of Buddhist liberation is not just getting rid of what we don't like. So this morning I, you know, I woke up with a, uh, just a, slightly nauseated and very unsteady feeling in my gut. And I was, oh, this is anxiety. I'm nervous about giving this talk, which is actually pretty unusual for me. Now, I'm not saying that, sometimes the talks are good and sometimes they're not.

[21:40]

But irrespective of that, I usually don't get too nervous about them. Uh, and yet this morning I was, and I still feel some of that energy in my body because, uh, at bottom, I do not have answers for myself or for you. I just have questions and I'm just watching. But what I realized was that as a matter of Buddhist practice, I actually had to make an effort to include that anxiety and that unsettledness and not exclude it, not trying to figure out a way to resolve it. but just to say, okay, that's the way it is.

[22:45]

And to feel as Vimal Saru was saying that with that anxiety, it was not so easy to breathe. I tried to bring my attention to my breath and I found my breath was constricted. Uh, I couldn't, I couldn't quite, get it down into my belly and have it be free. What that felt like was, uh, I would breathe in and then as I was breathing out, instead of being able to, to do a relatively long, steady, smooth exhale, there was a catch and I had to breathe out quickly and then quickly take a breath in. And I just noticed that.

[23:48]

I just asked myself the question, how can I work with this right now? Not how can I make it go away, but just, okay, let me put my attention on my breath and see where it goes. And it did change. It didn't change categorically, but it changed. And then some other thought bubble would arise. And again, I would feel some sense of anxiety. And again, not to, get rid of the anxiety, but to, but to say, okay, let me try to put my attention on my breath right at this moment. That's relatively because the anxiety and the fear was not so heavy duty.

[24:54]

That wasn't so hard for me to do. Uh, in the case of what Vimalasara was saying that the learned response, Each time a police car passes, that's a much deeper, it's a much more deeply implanted energy or seed or trauma that can affect one before one even is quite aware of it. And still what we have to do is try. So I want to read you an exercise from from Rhonda's book and find yourself a stable upright posture. So see if you can sit upright and just locate your breath.

[26:01]

Whatever your own racial background, allow yourself to consider how whiteness has been the primary racial category of embodied social power in our country and elsewhere around the world. Being non-white has opened countless people around the world to vulnerability, to harm. Non-whiteness has been constructed as embodied social vulnerability. Consider how our state sponsored laws and institutions were for generations explicitly aligned around the commitment to maintain white supremacy, and in a capitalist society, explicitly white wealth building.

[27:09]

Reflect on the vast implications of this. Even now, whiteness is associated with privileges, blackness with subjugation. While other groups are compelled to stand in support of this hierarchy, or to try to avoid getting involved. When consciousness supports it, people of all backgrounds, white allies, and an array of people of color come together to fight for dignity for all. Breathing in and out as you take this in, notice any emotions that arise. I would say notice your emotional response to what I've been reading, notice how you feel about this in relation to your own life and accept even if this troubles you and you reject it, accept the fact that this is your emotion and

[28:33]

I'm certainly willing to, I'm willing to accept that. I'm not prescribing what emotion you should have. So breathing in and out as you take this in, notice any emotions and thoughts that arise. Notice these, then let them go. Again, I would add, you may not so easily be able to let them go. I would say letting go is an expression that we use kind of freely. And it's good to recognize it's not always so easy to let go. If you can, then it's very easy. If you can't, then it's not. She, Rhonda, writes, what choices do you make on a daily basis to ally with others in the fight for equity and transformative justice?

[29:41]

What thoughts, stories, habits, or patterns get in the way of taking additional steps to ally with those fighting for universal dignity and transformative justice? What are some of the specific steps you would personally need to take to break through the barriers to working with others for justice? That's her last question. What are some of the specific steps you personally would need to take to break through the barriers to working with others for justice? When I was thinking about that last question myself, what I realized was that these patterns are so old for me. I'm thinking back to my childhood.

[30:47]

I'm thinking back to how my relatives and my parents in their community, how they thoughtlessly spoke about African American people and how that was communicated to me as a child. And amazingly how this happened even as we had a pretty steady stream of mostly young African American women working in our home through my early childhood. and how I learned to see them, these young women, as other. And they had other lives that they went to, which I knew nothing about. And now, with great regret, I wonder, who were they?

[31:58]

What were their lives? And how deeply was a seed of separation planted in me that even now, at the age of 72, I'm still discovering things about. So that's some of my work. And that's work from the side of whiteness. Those of us in our sangha, in our community, who are Black or Hispanic or Asian, have their own set of seeds and influences and history to work with. And I do wish to know about them. because they are my sisters and brothers.

[33:04]

And I recognize that from what we call the white side, which I have some doubts about because each of us, there's no such thing as whiteness. Whiteness is instructed. it's a constructed reality uh and there are all kinds of manifestations specific manifestations of experience and of oppression that different ones of us experience on the basis of our background on the basis of our growing up and we do need to unpack that that's the actual practice of Buddhism is not about having some experience. It's actually about transforming our minds, transforming our thinking so that we can transform our lives so that we can enact the Bodhisattva vow that we're going to chant at the end of this session.

[34:29]

uh, the vow to awaken with others to help go across these various mental divides, which create real divides of power, real divides of resources, but they begin in our mind. And so this is a work that we can do, but we have to do this work, recognizing that it is never separate from the actual manifestation of that thinking, the way it comes out in the world. So it's not just some, I think this way and you think this way. It's like we are enacting what we think with our words, and with our deeds and the goal of enlightenment is not an experience it's actually action.

[35:34]

The goal of enlightenment is to change the way we live which inevitably means actually changing the way we think of ourselves and recognizing that ourselves are in no way distinct from all of the others, all the other beings that are around us. And you can extend that to the planet itself. So all of these, all of the realities of our world are actually one manifestation. So when we talk about racism, we're also talking about taking care of our environment. We're taking up, we're looking at how we eat, how we live, how we use the air and water around us.

[36:41]

All of that is part of one integral system and right view. The first step on the Eightfold Path is actually to see the ever-changing dynamic of that system. To see that it is always flowing and that we are not separate from it, we are part of it. And so I think I'm going to read you one more poem, and then I'm going to stop and leave time, a little time for questions. And I wanted to leave you with, to come back to the beginning, to come back to the reality of racial oppression in our society, and to read you a poem

[37:45]

This is by uh this is a poem that you you may have heard before it's by Langston Hughes and it was written in 1951. He was a great African-American poet uh and it alternately it's some it's titled Harlem or it's titled uh sometimes A Dream Deferred. What happens to a dream deferred Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat or crust and sugar over like a syrup sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. or does it explode?

[38:50]

So thank you. I want to turn it over to, I guess, Blake to call on the hands. Is that right? Thank you. Thank you, Hozon. So we have some time for Q and A. I invite you to raise your blue hand, which is if you go to open the participants and you'll see some buttons there for the raised blue hand, all of us are getting this. And then I will call on you and you can, uh, lower your hand and unmute yourself. And please don't forget to mute yourself. Um, after you're done asking the questions and also please be concise and, um, I invite people who haven't spoken to speak if you'd like to. First up, Ross Blum, please unmute yourself and ask a question.

[39:56]

Good morning, Hozon. Thank you so much for your talk. Thanks, Ross. I heard the term before about that whiteness is a construction or made up, and I was struck then and now reminded And I'm wondering if you could explain, is that in a Buddhist context that the construction is the skandhas? So all races are constructions or is it something specific to the idea of white construction or whiteness? No, I think it's, I think, well, um, you can think of it in a Buddhist, in Buddhist terms, uh, which, which would make total sense in terms of identity. any kind of identity, which is why the Buddha himself spoke about issues of color, of varna, and caste as constructed. And what he said was, I don't see somebody as a Brahmin by virtue of their birth or their community.

[41:02]

I see them by virtue of their actions. And so in that sense, he opened his sangha to people of all different castes and also to women, which was a radical act. So there you have the Buddha from a Buddhist side looking at the question of construction. From a social history side, what we see if we look back at at even Western history is that certain, even within recent history, you know, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, Irish, they were not seen as white. And gradually, because of the workings of the system, they get seen as that Jewish people weren't. You know, I mean, I don't know about your experience, but I was very carefully trained by my mother to perceive antisemitism.

[42:12]

And she was right. I wasn't just making this up. I was experiencing it. So what we have is a consolidated sense of whiteness is not strictly accurate. And yet, by virtue of the fact that you can actually see a facial differentiation, say, between the skin color of African-American people, Asian people, Hispanic people, and so-called white people, to some degree, that becomes a marker for this identity. But it's in Buddhist terms, in human terms, in physiological terms, It's a construction. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. Um, next up, uh, Kelsey, um, and as Kelsey unmutes herself and lowers her hand, I invite everybody, if you'd like, you can type a question, uh, in the chat box, we'll try to get to it.

[43:21]

Um, and you might want to put the word question in front of the question. So my eyes are drawn to it. Thank you. Good morning, Hasan. Thank you so much for your talk. Hi. Um, I was reading an article, um, and it was talking about Amy Cooper, who was the white woman who the same day, I believe that George Floyd was murdered, was filming an African American birdwatcher, um, in Central Park, that occurrence. And, um, After the fact, she said something like, I never would have imagined something like this would happen to me, or I think implying something like this is something I would necessarily do, like there was some remorse in that. And I just think, I think this is more of a comment than a question, but it ties into practice for me in that every single one of us is Amy Cooper.

[44:26]

And every single one of us has that capacity to react in that way. And just when you were talking about noticing, you know, anxiety about giving your talk, I also was thinking, what do, you know, we can never know, but, and you brought this up too, what do these police officers, you know, what do they feel? And, you know, how are they holding that? Which most of the time I feel like they're not. there's a reaction there, but mostly comments, but I just wanted to bring that in. And also the kind of, there's a reaction for me to try and divide myself from people like Amy Cooper without realizing that really like that could be me. Right. Well, just a, I don't want to answer that question, but two things come to mind. One, I remember in a celebration or a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we had an event in Nevada at the Nevada nuclear test site, and it was a clergy religious event.

[45:39]

And one after another, these clergy people were standing up and saying, how could we have done this? basically saying, I would not have done this. And I was sitting there in the audience and when I got up to talk, I said, I don't know what I would have done. I'm not willing to say, I would not have done this. It really depends on the information and the training, you will do what you're trained to do. And some of our training is explicit. I think police receive explicit training. Military receive explicit training of different kinds. And we receive, every human receives training. And what we're trying to do is replace one kind of training with another kind of training. That's Buddhist practice. That's how we call it practice and training. So we have to retrain ourselves.

[46:43]

But the other thing I wanted to point out was that my understanding is that in the aftermath of that event in Central Park, the African-American gentleman who was birdwatching forgave her, which to me was a radically instructive move. It was very, very powerful. And, uh, you know, also I wonder if my training would have allowed that. Could I have done that? I don't know, but his example is a teaching to me. Um, thank you. Uh, next up is, uh, Haco, but before we get to Haco, a quick question was, what is justice? Alan. Justice.

[47:44]

Okay. That's a really big question. And I want to say, first of all, justice is not, justice is something that's very deeply explored in the, in the Western political and philosophical tradition. It's not so much articulated explicitly in the Buddhist tradition, although there are some passages that you could say speak to that. I think what's emphasized in Buddhism is just. And just is the root of justice. So just to me means a status of balance, that things are in balance, which is why we have the image of justice as this blindfolded lady holding a scale, which is in balance.

[48:51]

But what I would say, short answer, and it's another talk which I've given and will give again, I think very much on my hero, B.R. Ambedkar of India, who speaks about liberty, equality, fraternity. And to me, justice is the intersection and the interrelationship of those three practices, liberty, equality, fraternity. So I said that's a much longer discussion. Thank you for the question. Thank you. Next, Heiko, I invite you to unmute yourself and lower your hand. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Hozon, for your talk. It was like a journey with many different islands of destination, and I'm still looking at the photos. But I wanted to say one that I studied philosophy in college, and our American and Western philosophers, Hume, Locke, Hobbes, all these guys,

[50:01]

I admired and then a second read and you realize they're building in at that level, the enlightenment built in racism and allowed it to be easily, because the words were so beautiful, easily shipped out such that colonialism and racism became one thing and the next thing you know, it's easy to share by the so-called sound bites of the day. But my real question or comment is that, Ozan, you said so nicely, we respond as trained. And as you were reading from that wonderful book, you brought us all to the breath and said, okay, now that thing comes up and we are breathing, but we're not doing anything with it. And I thought to myself, okay, so we bring up the feelings of discomfort and disease, being part of a race that's oppressor and part of a society that builds it in and ships it out to the world. And we will respond, though, as trained.

[51:04]

And so I thought, what do we do? We bring it up, we see it, we feel it, and the embodied being, in my case, Heiko, would respond as trained, yes. But if I could bring it up and let it sit and look for a disembodied being, and I'll thank Judy and Jerry for bringing me into the, circle of Jizo, where the idea is when it comes up, we give it out to the world. And the world has an answer for us so that we can not respond as trained, so that we can allow it to just be. And I think that's where you left us, Hozon, was we sit with it and allow it to be. But I would say we could push it into the non-embodied beings, that is to say the larger self that we are that has other training. and not do anything ourselves. So sitting with it and sitting with it and recognizing are a few options. And I don't know if you could comment to that. Thank you very much.

[52:06]

My comment briefly is that everything is training and that I don't know about the disembodied self. I know all I can know and it's not that It's not that I disbelieve in mystery or forces beyond my understanding, but all that I can, all that I have control over is my mind. And that means what I, what I think, say, and do. And, um, I can be open to what I experienced, which then becomes part of my mind. But anyway, to me, all of that is all of the, I have to be open to training, which means I have to be open to all of the experience beyond me outside, so-called outside of me, which is not really outside of me.

[53:08]

And I want to leave it there if that's okay. Yeah. Um, there's, if somebody could put a link to protests, especially Buddhist led protests in the, Chat that would be nice. Um, there's also Blake. I'm going to also put Afterwards, I'll send out, I have a list of resources, organizational resources and study resources, which I will put out on the BCC list. Yes, please see that, people. There was, of course, a reference to the works by James Baldwin, also mentioned in the chat. for further reference. And our final question is from Emily Perry. I invite you to unmute yourself and lower your hand and ask a question. Thank you, Alan, and thank you everyone for this conversation.

[54:11]

With non-attachment, but in the narrative, I grew up in a mostly African American but multiracial family engaged in liberation theology and civil rights movement. I myself was in the liberation theology movement in Haiti. And in our family, the race was understood as a social construct. A lot of that fell away and there's a celebration of culture and the many different cultures that emerge. When I came to Buddhism and spiritual ecology, there was a very harmonious, natural coming together of those values and a release of the identity politics. And because I've been working in spiritual ecology and climate change work outside of the US and been gone for about 25 years, I've landed back here during COVID and now with

[55:17]

kind of the infection of our racial construct illness in this country all coming out into the light. And there's so much toxicity and the way that we're engaging, we have to engage for the most part through our digital spaces that are in a binary algorithm of zero one. and there's so much polarity that's identity politics and it feels like a lot of shouting and pointing fingers. And I step back and I consider our Buddhist training and I consider spiritual ecology and Alan, what you had mentioned about the interbeing with earth. Do you feel there is a space to bring this understanding into the current discourse? And what thoughts do you have for ways of doing that that can be received and heard?

[56:21]

Thank you. Yeah, thank you, completely. You know, yesterday, when Lori was out shopping, she was listening to the radio, and she was listening to Angela Davis. And I didn't get to hear this, but Angela Davis, completely integrates all of these systemic issues that they're all part of one system. And I also see other people, I can think of Kriti Konko and Kristen Barker and other people who are more directly in the Buddhist world and others of us who really see this as one issue with perhaps different expressions or manifestations, but it's the manifestation of one system. I would hope that whatever political or social movement we build will have that kind of integrative,

[57:31]

And when I say we, I mean people in this country, not Buddhists, will have that integrative understanding and that we'll be able to take leadership, particularly from people of color who have a very evolved understanding of this unified system because they experience it that way. And there's more that I could say about that. What I'd like to suggest, I think this is probably OK. We're going to end. But I need to use the bathroom briefly. I would be willing to come back here at 1130. And we can come back. I think we can use this link. and we can come back at 11 30 and if there are people who want to continue the discussion we can we'll continue the discussion and I just leave that as an as an open option and then so 11 30 which is 15 minutes from now and meanwhile turn the closing over back to Blake and thanks to all of you.

[58:48]

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