Good evening, everyone. I want to start with a case from the Book of Serenity. That's one of the Koan collections, the one that we actually use most. It's a case of a collection of stories from Hongxue. whose writings on silent elimination we're going to be studying in the two-month practice period. We're starting Sunday. So he picked these stories. And this one is a little unusual because it's not one of the dialogues from the classic teachers, John Teachers. which most of them are. This is from one of the sutras, from the Flower Ornament, Haravatamsaka Sutra. Very lofty, kind of psychedelic sutra. And he calls this the Flower Ornament Sutra's Wisdom. This is about, well, one version of what Shakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha, whose birthday we celebrated yesterday, what he said when he, what he realized, what he saw when he was awakened, when he became the Buddha.

[01:19]

So the case says, the Flower Ornament Sutra says, now I see all sentient beings everywhere fully possess the wisdom and virtues of the awakened ones, but because of false conceptions and attachments, they do not realize it. So that's the basic story. That's what the Buddha realized. And in the commentary, it says more about this truth. One of the Chinese Huayan commentators, the School of Chinese Buddhism, based on the sutra, called this the opening up of the causal nature, the cause of the Buddha's awakening. And he commented on the practice and vows of Samantabhadra, the great bodhisattva of devotion and active practice.

[02:26]

He called it opening up the source of the nature of beings. The nature of beings is that all beings everywhere fully are endowed with the wisdom and the virtues, the kindness of the enlightened ones from the beginning. And this chapter on manifestations, he goes on to say in the commentary, this is a later commentator, Wansong, children of Buddha, there's not a single sentient being who does not fully possess the wisdom of the enlightened ones, only because of false conceptions or error or attachments, they do not realize it. So there's a note that says, ordinary people conceive illusions. Those of the lesser and provisional greater vehicles, the Mahayana, have attachments. There's error in both. It says, if they give up false conceptions, then omniscience, spontaneous knowledge, and unhindered wisdom can become manifest.

[03:34]

It also says that the metaphor of an atom containing a scripture as extensive as the universe. So in the YN Sutra and the Flower Ornament Sutra, it talks about Buddhas everywhere. So we celebrate the birth of the Buddha, historical Buddha, 2,580 years ago, according to some accounts. But in this sutra, it says that there are Buddhas everywhere. on the tip of every blade of grass, there are innumerable Buddhas. In every atom, there are innumerable Buddhas. So part of what it says that when the Buddha realized that, was awakened, when the Buddha became the Buddha, he realized that all sentient beings everywhere are fully endowed with this wisdom and virtue. only they don't realize it because of false conceptions and attachments. And then the Buddha, well, he said with his unobstructed eye of wisdom, how wonderful and how strange.

[04:41]

How is it that these beings all have the wisdom of the awakened ones, but in their folly and delusion, they don't know it. They don't see it. How strange. I should teach them the right path to make them abandon illusion and attachment forever. so that they can perceive the vast wisdom of the enlightened ones within their own bodies and be no different from the Buddhas. And a later commentator says, sentient beings contain natural virtues as their substance and have the ocean of knowledge as their source. So this is what the Buddha saw when he became the Buddha. This is what all Buddhas see when they become the Buddha. that illusions and attachments block us from seeing something that is already here from the beginning. It's not that we do this practice in order to realize or create something new. It's to see what is already here.

[05:43]

We don't have to realize some special exalted state. It's already here. And these illusions and attachments, I would add, as we, well, first of all, the Lotus Sutra, just to give another source for this. This other great Mahayana, Bodhisattva Sutra, the Sutra of Bodhisattvas, of enlightening beings, dedicated to awakening all beings. It says that the single great cause for a Buddha appearing in the world is to awaken beings, to help relieve suffering. That's the only reason for Buddha's appearing is because, you know, we don't realize the wisdom and virtue. We don't realize that actually we can all just live together in peace and happiness. We don't have to struggle. We don't have to hate and cause division.

[06:46]

And how do we share this? So Buddhism has continued through many cultures, and this karma of illusions and attachments, as the Dharma, as Buddhadharma has come to America, we see that this, we see this as a personal matter, that we see our own patterns of grasping and anger and confusion and fear, and we see the pain beneath that. So a lot of American Buddhism has attracted Western psychology and Western psychologists. But we also see that this is not just a personal matter, that this is a societal matter. that there are social causes, that it's not just a matter of personal karma, that we are all impacted, each of us impacted in various ways by the karma of our society, the legacy of racism and slavery, the legacy of

[07:57]

persecution of immigrants and refugees throughout our history and today, the legacy of the attacks against the Native American culture and people. So all of this is by way of introduction to talking about a very important event in American history that happened 50 years ago, tomorrow. April 4th, 1967. And just as the Buddha's words are important to us today, so are the words of Dr. King 50 years ago tomorrow when he spoke about Vietnam. In a speech he gave at the Riverside Church in New York, I happened to be nearby that a week ago, he talked about breaking the silence.

[09:08]

He said, a time comes when silence his betrayal, and the time had come for him then in terms of the Vietnam War, and of course the time is here now in terms of many things that are happening in our society. So we're all caught by our personal illusions and attachments, and part of our work in practicing sitting upright, being present, settling, calming, Sitting still for 30 minutes or 40 minutes, seeing how our thoughts and feelings are, is to see our own patterns of greed, anger, and confusion. But also, those are conditioned by what's happening in our world, what's happening in our society. 50 years ago, tomorrow, well, I'm going to read some of the words of Dr. King and comment some.

[10:17]

He said, that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a more difficult one. In other words, the time has come when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. And back then, it was very clear that there was a time of war. We forget there's war going on now. It's not in the news. It's just, you know, I mean, do we even know there's a huge war going on all over the Mideast that our taxes are paying for, that our government's weapons are being used by Saudi troops to bomb civilians in Yemen and so forth? So Dr. King said, we must speak with all humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

[11:24]

So this speaking of limited vision is one of the core teachings of Buddhism. And Dogen talks often. Dogen, the great founder of our tradition in the 13th century in Japan, talks often about seeing how we don't see. I can't see this wall behind me. Some of you can't see the walls behind you that I can see, and so forth. We see from the perspective of our own situation. And part of what we learn from doing this practice and doing it regularly So for those who are new here tonight, I recommend doing this practice regularly. But what we start to see is that, is the limitation of what we can see. And that's an important kind of knowledge, the knowledge of what we don't know. So Dr. King speaks of this, we must speak with all the humility appropriate to our limited visions, but we must speak.

[12:31]

So I just took excerpts from this long speech, and I'll read some of these excerpts, because it's such an important speech in our whole history. So he said, over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silence and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path At the heart of their concerns, this query is often loomed large and loud. Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Well, of course they do. Dr. King got into a lot of trouble, even from his friends in the civil rights movement. And it's not an accident that he was killed a year to the day after this speech. And he was killed while he was on a campaign helping sanitation workers in Memphis strike, trying to campaign for a living wage.

[13:42]

And we're still very far from a living wage for many Americans. So, there's so much he said. I'll read a little more. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam And the struggle I and others have been waging in America, a few years ago, there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then there came the buildup in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken and eviscerated. So I would say today, the government's new budget has more than eviscerated all expenditures for education. It's promoted at a time when there seemed to be a bipartisan move towards ending mass incarceration and ending privatized prisons, which has been a continuation of slavery, actually.

[14:52]

There's now increased, this government is trying to increase privatized prisons, taking away funds from education, of course, from trying to take away funds trying to take away health care, taking away jobs. And Dr. King says, perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. And that's still true. There are, for black people, for minorities, for many minorities now, there are very few jobs. There's no living wages for many people. Very little opportunity. And there's lots of opportunity in the military and the new budget.

[16:01]

is increasing military and we don't need more military. They're building more submarines to attack ISIS in the desert. I mean, it's literally psychotic. And we have a president who's talking about carnage in the streets of Chicago and threatening more carnage to stop it and threatening to send in troops while he's shredding budgets for education and housing and jobs and infrastructure. Okay, so what Dr. King said 50 years ago tomorrow is as important as ever. And we forget that part of the problem that faces all of us in Chicago has to do with the wars that have been almost continuous in the last 50 years, and the huge military budget that has been continuous and increasing in the last 50 years. So a time comes when silence is betrayal.

[17:08]

So Dr. King talked about trying to, back in that time in the civil rights movement when he was encouraging nonviolence, and I would encourage nonviolence because, you know, I don't know if nonviolence in all cases is, you know, sometimes we need police, sometimes we need soldiers, sometimes. Nonviolence seems to be more effective, I think, anyway. But Dr. King was talking about angry young men at that time who were asking him, what about Vietnam, since our nation was using massive doses of violence to solve its problems and is still doing it? What about, you know, why should we be nonviolence? And so Dr. King said, I must speak clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. For the sake of these young men, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands of trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

[18:21]

And I would say that still the United States is the greatest purveyor of violence and mass weaponry in the world today. Fifty years later. Of course, there are Islamic terrorists. There are terrorists everywhere. It's funny when there's a shooting and the shooter is Islamic or African-American, they call a terrorist. If it's a white Christian shooter, oh, he's just sort of deranged. They don't use the word terrorist. That's strange how that word is used. Dr. King quoted One of the, he called him one of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam, Thich Nhat Hanh, who's still alive. Thich Nhat Hanh said, and Dr. King quoted him, each day the war goes on. Talking about the Vietnam War then. Hatred increases in the heart of Vietnamese and in the heart of those, heart of those of humanitarian instinct.

[19:32]

The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. Sound familiar? It is curious that the Americans who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism," unquote. So that's from Thich Nhat Hanh. And since we invaded Iraq in 2003, we're doing the same in the Middle East, creating jihadists, encouraging Muslims to hate the United States. Although that's, you know, it's not all Muslims hate the United States. We have Muslims in our sangha. But our new budget proposal seems to support only the American arms merchants, not people. Not so. So being silent about this 50 years after Dr. King's speech tomorrow, I can't do that.

[20:38]

So continuing to quote Dr. King a little bit, if we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. And do we have any honorable intentions in the Mideast today? I have to wonder. It will become clear, Dr. King said, that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony, and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to go China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam, immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play. Then he said, the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. And if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing clergy and laymen concern committees for the next generation. Well, he was certainly right about that.

[21:41]

And he talks about concern about Guatemala and Peru and Thailand and Cambodia and Mozambique and South Africa and so forth. And here we are. He didn't mention the Mideast, but here we are. So Dr. King continued, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present. policies, a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift, is approaching spiritual death. So there are people now, starting tomorrow, April 4th, the 50th anniversary of Dr. King speaking out against Vietnam, going to May 1st, who are calling for many actions to respond to what our government is doing, stripping all money for health care, for education, for the arts, for science, for cancer research even,

[23:11]

for infrastructure repair, putting more and more money for a military that is, it doesn't, you know, we don't need all these fancy weapons. But what Dr. King says about a revolution in values is exactly what we are about here. this ongoing awakening of the Buddha, this realization that all sentient beings everywhere actually fully possess the wisdom and virtues of the awakened ones. And yet there's all these attachments and illusions. So how do we dispel them? In the next two months leading up to May Day and leading up to the climate marches April 29th, there will be opportunities to do many things, march in the street or respond to Congress people.

[24:26]

There are many possibilities. And there's not one right response. So this meditation practice gives us a kind of base of calm and flexibility. Being able to stop and sit and just witness to our own frustration and anger and fear to not need to lash out and start screaming about our anger, but to just, you know, okay, what do we do? It's a tremendous inner dignity to being able to stop and sit upright and face it all.

[25:27]

And then we have to respond. And there's not one right way to respond. We each have our own way to respond. but we can each find our own balanced presence, and we can talk about it together in sangha, and we can share information about different approaches to response that are happening, and we've been doing that. And this practice, again, can give us some balance and some communion with his background values, this background sense of, well, what the precepts, the Buddhist, the Bodhisattva precepts remind us of. The intention to be helpful instead of harming. The intention to support all beings. Like the chant we did says, may all beings be happy.

[26:32]

To be respectful. And yet, to speak truth to power, as Dr. King said, being silent. There's a time to be silent. There's a time to just sit and be, okay. To face all of the thoughts and fears and feelings and sadness and everything that's going on in ourselves and in the world. And then, okay, what do we do? How do we respond? And not be self-righteous about our ideas about it. So, anyway. I felt like I had to say something on this occasion. And everything Dr. King said 50 years ago tomorrow is still totally important. Maybe even more so. So maybe I can stop now. Anyone who has any response or comment or question, please feel free.

[27:38]

Gershen. Okay. But it's an important... I mean, we're thinking about it because it's 75 years, and so people are raising it, re-evaluating it, considering it.

[29:16]

It just feels like we're on the brink of something so similar to that. So, you know, in some ways an anniversary is just an anniversary, but it's an opportunity. I think we should take this opportunity to consider. And there are refugees from wars that our government helped to start in Latin America who are interned now and waiting to be deported and are basically slaves because they're working for corporations for no pay. And there are people in prisons that are mass incarcerated for nonviolent crimes or violent crimes, whatever, because there are no job opportunities with living wages, who are basically working as slaves. So there was a loophole in the 13th Amendment that supposedly freed the slaves, but actually there was a loophole that allowed mass incarceration.

[30:35]

So slavery is still here, and internment is still here. It's not just in the past. But yeah, thank you for reminding us of that, too. Other comments, responses, reminders? Yes, Eric? It's very interesting because I thought this might be an issue, but it was forthcoming. I told people I came into contact with about this, and the responses were impressive and unexpected.

[31:38]

Not a single person These are things that happen between governments. But they treated me wonderfully. It's one of my favorite countries. And it was just unexpected and very nice at the same time. Hate doesn't have to lead to hate, I guess, is the point. That's right. And I hasten to add, when I talk about the military, I'm not talking about any of the soldiers. It's people who go into the military often with very, you know, often out of economic necessity, but also often out of noble intentions. It's the problem of the, you know, the problem has to do with the money that goes to the military contractors and how they manipulate the politics and the governments and, you know, anyway.

[32:48]

Yeah, thank you for that. Yes, Bill. Dr. King was a Christian. He took off a kind of redemptive view of history. Many of us here believe that the story of this murder is, shall we say, more complicated than you should hear.

[33:49]

It almost seems like a militant Buddhist taking up a politics, shall we say, Yes. lived to teach for 45 years.

[34:53]

Anyway, something to think about. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Am I a militant Buddhist? I don't even think of it as politics. It's certainly not about Democrats or Republicans or any of that. And I don't hate Donald Trump or any of his cabinet members. I wish they weren't causing all the harm that they cause. How do we approach the situation with, not with, how do we transform our anger at the harm that's happening and the people who are being damaged?

[36:05]

Many people, people who are, children who are afraid to go to school, you know, how do we approach that with respect for the whole process? So, you know, I've thought, as those of you who've been here, around here for a while know, I've thought about this a lot. I've struggled. This is something we struggle with. How do we, how do we represent the Dharma and Buddha responsibly in this time and place? We have to create that. It's a totally different situation than anybody faced in Asia. Of course, there were Asian Buddhists who responded strongly to difficulties in their society. So you're raising good questions.

[37:11]

You used the word redemption. I don't feel totally alienated from that word at all. We have to witness to and redeem. There's so much about the American people that deserves redemption. The American people, I think, there's so much to our culture that I love. And yet, there's also the legacy, again, of racism, slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, and so forth and so on. So it's so complicated. I don't have answers. Ben, please help. I don't have an answer. But you're an anthropologist, and you know, you're. So Latin American Catholic theologians in the 60s came up with this interesting concept of structural sin or social sin.

[38:22]

And it seems that maybe one of the contributions that Buddhists can make is thinking about social or structural greed and social or structural hatred and social pollution. And I think Western Buddhism has posted this interesting intersection between the historical Shakyamuni Buddha's teachings, sort of focusing on those individual patterns and ways in which we can, by paying attention to our own habitual reactions, start And I try to take a lot of work that's been done by social scientists and critical theorists in the West about the structural causes for great hatred and delusion and try to think through how those also manifest themselves in our own ancient twisted karma.

[39:48]

And it seems that one of the things that we need to do in order to do that is to definitely be humble. Yeah, humility is part of it. getting time to. This is something we've talked about and I wanted to talk about it tonight because we're going to start a practice period Sunday where we're talking about settling into serene illumination and that's important and we may reference what's happening in the world. during the practice period as well and talk about actions that are happening.

[40:50]

I wanted to give the last word to Professor Cathy, because we have with us a Christian theologian and visiting. And so if you can give us a brief comment from a comparativist point of view. inside the chair. was to anyone that came in that church, let us never do again.

[42:29]

Total feast. And I'll just add as a little note, there's this Bodhisattva practice of skillful means. And it's not like we have an instruction manual of how to be skillful. It's like trial and error. It's like we use whatever's at hand. We try to be helpful. We pay attention. What might be helpful now? So there's a resistance movement happening all around the country to the worst things that our government's doing, and we have to try and support that.

[44:13]

And we don't know what will work, but there are things happening. So there are lots of things to do.

[44:21]

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