Good evening. Yesterday, in this room, we had, well, in the morning, a half day sitting and then a Bodhisattva precepts ceremony with a large number of people here and eight people receiving our 16 Bodhisattva precepts. We had a very full zendo. I want to talk about these precepts tonight in terms of some of the challenges they offer us in terms of current situations in the world. So many of these 16 precepts are relevant in different ways.

[01:04]

Disciple of Buddha does not kill, so no killing. That's maybe foremost, most relevant to what I want to talk about tonight, but also not lying or telling the truth, including speaking truth to power, including all beings, taking refuge in the Buddha and in Sangha and in the Dharma. Not speaking of the faults of others is relevant. Not praising self at the expense of others. Not harboring ill will. All of these are challenges in terms of how we talk about and how we respond to the violence in our society. How do we integrate, harmonize differences and the underlying sameness and wholeness as described in the Harmony of Difference and Sameness we just chanted.

[02:29]

So we had another school shooting This past week, this seems to be an ordinary event now in our country. Seventeen dead in Florida. Some Ancient Dragon Sangha members support gun rights and You know, I don't know. Certainly, we could have more sensible gun control laws in this country if it weren't for the NRA and the money they give to congresspeople and media. How do we talk about this? How do we disagree respectfully, but disagree?

[03:35]

So I don't like guns myself. They make me uncomfortable. My only experience of guns, I had an uncle in North Carolina who was a hunter and liked guns. in my teens once, this was back during the Vietnam War, and he knew I was against the war, so he took me dove hunting. So he knew I was against the war, so I think that was part of it. So I was shooting at doves. Of course, this was, I didn't kill any doves. I don't think he did that day either. That's my only experience of using a gun. Anyway, we have this culture of violence in our country. It, of course, includes these many cases of mass shootings.

[04:46]

And I've heard that the actual number of deaths total and homicides total in this country is decreasing, but we have these incidents of mass shootings. Horrible. But this culture of violence seems to be pervasive. And I think it has to do also with not just the guns that are too easily available to people with mental illness or people who harbor ill will against other people and to children and laws that make assault rifles and so forth are easily available.

[05:54]

But it also has to do with the violence of our foreign policy. So going back to the Vietnam War, 50 years ago, 1968, There are many 50th anniversaries coming up this year. I may speak about Dr. King. Martin Luther King was killed. I talked about this some on Martin Luther King Day earlier. And we've had a series of talks not recorded due to technical difficulties. Hopefully this one will be recorded. Some of you don't remember the Vietnam War or Martin Luther King.

[06:59]

He was not just a civil rights leader who spoke of nonviolence and had a dream, but was campaigning for poor people and for economic justice when he was killed. And a year to the day before he was killed, spoke out strongly against the Vietnam War and talked about A culture that is involved in wars and atrocities and spends an inordinate amount of its budget towards wars has a strong moral shortcoming. He said, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, he said, a year to the day before he was killed, is our government. And in my opinion, and we can agree to disagree and discuss these things, but in my opinion, that's even more the case today.

[08:05]

We have, the Vietnam War was, there were many atrocities and since then, we've been in a series of endless wars. And this is, Not just a partisan political matter. The gun debate seems to be that. But it's a bipartisan agreement, pretty much, for these wars. The war in Afghanistan now being the longest war in American history. The Vietnam War. I'm going to talk more about Dan Ellsberg a little later, but in the Pentagon papers that he released proved that the presidents, all the presidents who were involved in that war knew that it was not winnable.

[09:10]

And the war in Afghanistan is similar. And the war in the Middle East that we inflamed or that George W. Bush inflamed by invading Iraq was also, is also, what it means to win that war is, it's a meaningless question. And yet we, each president continues to send more troops or continues to say, well, we're going to win this war. Anyway, it's, The wars have continued. There's wars in Syria. We have military presence all around the world and a huge amount of our country's budget is devoted to weapons. It seems like the weapons manufacturers dictate our foreign policy. So President Eisenhower, who was a great general and a good Republican president, warned that, as he was leaving office, that we would be controlled by the military-industrial-congressional complex.

[10:32]

He decided to leave out the word congressional at the end. So this whole culture of violence that goes from the war in Afghanistan to the endless shootings, again, challenges us to how do we respond? How do we respond in terms of our bodhisattva intention, our bodhisattva precepts to support not killing, to support life, to support truth-telling, to support including all beings, to not speak of faults of others, but still to talk about the truth of the situation. It's not about harboring ill will against anybody, but how do we look at this situation? How do we, instead of encouraging violence both in ourselves and institutionally, how do we encourage kindness, encourage compassion, encourage non-aggression in our own lives and in the world around us?

[11:53]

So last Hiroshima day, I participated in event down in Hyde Park at the place where the first nuclear reaction occurred on the campus of the University of Chicago near a statue by, now I'm forgetting his name, the sculptor who created that statue down in Hyde Park. Anyway, there's the site of this first nuclear reaction by Henrico Fermi. Charles Strain, who's in the Buddhist Apostolic Chicago and is a professor at DePaul University, wrote out a little flyer called Endless Wars, which I've kept in the front, and you can pick up a copy and it's in our front window, talking about nuclear war and the endless wars.

[12:54]

He says, one key characteristic of empires and one cause of their collapse is endless warfare. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been involved in over 100 military conflicts. A Military Times article in 2015 estimated the cost of current conflicts at almost $5 trillion. This includes homeland security and care for wounded vets, as well as direct costs of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Back in 2006, it was estimated that the war in Iraq had led to 650,000 civilian deaths. That's more than 10 years ago, and they've increased since, continued since then. And the flyer talks about U.S. currently deploying about 1,800 nuclear weapons, another 6,800 in reserve, and the effective nuclear weapons.

[13:55]

And the need for renewing the current weapons that are nearing the end of their shelf life, the cost of that. And Charles talked about one such bomb detonated over the loop would immediately kill 770,000 people with another 1,100,000 casualties. And he also talks about the psychological effect of that, the psychic numbing. So since Hiroshima, we don't talk about these things, we don't think about these things. We have to go on with our lives, and we do. Part of awakening includes awakening to this violence at the heart of our current culture. How many of you do not know who Dan Ellsberg is?

[15:06]

Okay. There's a current movie out called The Post with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks. It's really a good movie. I recommend it even though it's been overshadowed by a number of other really, really good movies out now. It's about the release by Dan Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers. which were instrumental in, well, and certainly in President Richard Nixon resigning. Dan Ellsberg was a high-level civilian official in the Defense Department, and he at the risk of his own imprisonment for life, released what came to be called the Pentagon Papers. When was that? In 1970, something like that.

[16:11]

And they detailed this study that he had been involved in making for Defense Secretary McNamara under President Kennedy about the war in Vietnam. And it was published in the New York Times, and it was published in the Washington Post, and that's what this movie is about. It's a really good movie. It's a really good movie about an important piece of history. And the documents in these papers, which he copied secretly from high-class secret documents that he had access to because he had top-secret security clearance, detailed how every president from Eisenhower on who had sent troops to Vietnam knew that the Vietnam War was unwinnable and continued to send more troops. I got to know Dan Ellsberg in 2006, the year before I moved here to Chicago.

[17:19]

I was living in Berkeley. And at that time, just to finish about the Pentagon Papers, he released them. It was a big federal case. He was in hiding. They finally caught him. And Richard Nixon called him the most dangerous man in America. And Richard Nixon was just very upset about him and did things. And the Watergate burglars actually were involved in doing things like burglarizing Dan Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office to try and get evidence to smear him, to discredit him. That directly led to Richard Nixon's resignation. So, and because of that, the charges against Dan Ellsberg, he was being prosecuted for violating the secrecy of Medford, releasing these papers, and would have gone to prison for

[18:29]

120 years and knew that, he did it knowing that it would cost him the rest of his life in prison. But because of what the Nixon administration did, that tainted the prosecution and the judge throughout the case permanently. So he never had to go to jail. And it directly led to the threat of impeachment and Richard Nixon's resignation. Anyway, I got to know Dan Ellsberg in 2006 when I was in Berkeley. And at that time, the war in Iraq was raging. Again, another war that was not winnable. And the presidents knew it. I don't think that anything I'm saying right now is arguable. I'm sure there's somebody who would, but under false pretenses, we invaded Iraq. There were no weapons of mass destruction. President Nixon and Vice President Cheney and Colin Powell lied to us to invade Iraq because there was so much anguish after 9-11.

[19:40]

And anyway, there was a torture program that was going on, and is still going on actually, in various places by our government. But there was a, it was sanctioned by a legal brief that was written by a lawyer, in part by a lawyer named John Yu, who was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley Law School. And nobody in Berkeley seemed to care. And so throughout the year 2006, I initiated a weekly vigil and teach-in, which is something that goes back to the Vietnam era of giving talks about current events outside the UC Berkeley Law School about torture and about John Yoo's role, but also about the nature of torture. around the world, in the U.S. part of it. And various people spoke, ACLU lawyers, one brave law professor from inside the Berkeley Law School, Joanna Macy spoke a few times, people from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, like myself, and Alan Sanofky, who's coming here in November, and also Dan Ellsberg came and spoke a couple of times.

[21:00]

So I got to know him through that. all of which is my way of saying I sent him our Ancient Dragon year-end letter this year. And I just received in the mail here Thursday his new book called The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. And as he says in the introduction and prologue, I've just started reading it. And it's powerful. This is about material that he was going to release. At some point, he was thinking of releasing this instead of the Pentagon Papers. He was involved in planning the US policy about nuclear wars under the Kennedy administration. And I guess the Eisenhower administration. He worked for Rick Rand, which is a major Defense Department think tank. He had high, high security clearance. And this is a book that talks about the reality of our nuclear program.

[22:12]

And it's very relevant today with the conflict with North Korea. And again, I'm raising this in terms of the challenge to us in terms of bodhisattva precepts of how do we think about this? How do we think about this in terms of gang violence in Chicago? How do we think about this in terms of aggressiveness and violence on many levels in our society? So I want to read a little bit from the prologue and the introduction. But on the title page, he wrote an epigraph to me. And I had sent to him our year-end letter combined with this flyer from Charles Strain about endless wars and told him that we had that out in the front and have it in our window. So he said, to Taiga and Dan, congratulations on your endless wars project.

[23:13]

But if there is not a surge of enlightenment soon among humans, wars may actually come to an end before long, along with nearly all humans, not all living beings, but the larger ones. Love, Dan. Yeah, so that we won't need to worry about wars. There's two little epigraphs on the inside. The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward a parallel catastrophe. Albert Einstein, 1946. And then underneath that, madness of individuals is something rare. But in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule." Friedrich Nietzsche. So I just started reading this book.

[24:14]

But in the prologue, he talks about, And I'm reading all of this knowing that it's kind of rude because we don't want to think about these things. And yet, our practice is to be awake and aware. One day in the spring of 1961, the whole book begins. Soon after my 30th birthday, I was shown how our world would end. Not the Earth itself, not, so far as I knew then mistakenly, nearly all humanity or life on the planet, but the destruction of most cities and people in the northern hemisphere. What I was handed in a White House office was a single sheet of paper with a simple graph on it. It was headed, top secret, sensitive, under that was, for the president's eyes only. And he goes on to say that that was, that eyes only meant that that was only for very, very, very few people.

[25:21]

He never, this was the only time, he routinely got this because he was at a very, very high level of security. This was the only time he saw something that said, for the president's eyes only. And it was a response to a question that President Kennedy had addressed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which Dan Ellsberg himself had drafted the question. And the question was, Quote, if your plans for general nuclear war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China? And the answer was a simple graph that says that the fatalities in millions would be 270 million the first day and up to 325 million in six months. And then there was another question that President Kennedy, that Dan Ellsberg drafted, signed by President Kennedy that was sent to them asking how many would be, how many.

[26:27]

He said the same morning, I drafted another question to be sent to the Joint Chiefs over the President's signature asking for the total breakdown of global deaths from our own attacks, not only in China and Japan, but all the countries affected by fallout. And basically, the answer was another 100 million deaths in Eastern Europe, and 100 million more from fallout in Western Europe, depending on which way the wind blew. So basically, they were planning for roughly 600 million dead. I know from other sources that the Joint Chiefs of Staff back then were really itching to have a nuclear war. He goes on to talk about, well, just a couple of other little things that he says. Most of those who have heard my name at all in the past 47 years have known me only in connection with my release of the top secret study of US decision making in the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

[27:45]

And again, watch that movie, The Post, with Meryl Streep. It goes through the whole story of that. They may also know that I came to have access to that study because I had helped produce it, and that I had earlier worked on Vietnam escalation in the Pentagon, and then for the State Department in South Vietnam. What is less known is that for years before that, I had worked as a consultant from the RAND Corporation at the highest levels of the U.S. national security system on completely different issues, deterring and averting, or if necessary, however hopeless the attempt, trying to control, limit, and terminate a nuclear Armageddon between the superpowers. RAND, an acronym for Research and Development, was a non-profit organization started in 1948 to do mainly classified researcher analysis for the Air Force. So he was involved in planning and working out how our nuclear And just one more thing.

[28:53]

He says later on that they didn't realize then that it is the smoke after all, not the fallout, which would remain mostly limited to the northern hemisphere, that would do do it worldwide. Smoke and soot lofted by fierce firestorms in hundreds of burning cities into the stratosphere, where it would not rain out and would remain for a decade or more, enveloping the globe and blocking most sunlight, lowering annual global temperatures to the level of the last ice age, killing all harvests worldwide, causing near-universal starvation within a year or two. U.S. plans for thermonuclear war in the early 60s, if carried out in the Berlin or Cuban Missile Crises, would have killed many times more than the 600 million predicted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They would have caused nuclear winter that would have starved to death nearly everyone then living, that time 3 billion people.

[29:54]

He also talks about our policy of first use and first strike and so on. Anyway, so I just started reading that book, but okay. You know, I think this has to do with the school shootings. I think this has to do with how we see our life and the world. And it's not that So, you know, we can feel overwhelmed like there's nothing we can do to respond to this and there's the tension between Korea and there's, you know, our seemingly irrational at times current president who has control over the button. But this is something that's been going on, you know, for the last 50 years or more.

[30:59]

And part of what this is about is what Joanna Macy, who was here a few years ago, has talked about. She started talking about the dangers of despair and psychic numbing. And she talked about it directly as a result of Hiroshima and how we, of course, to talk about these things, How can we do that? And yet, if we don't look at... We just get numb. And school shootings too. There's this psychic numbing. Oh yeah, another school shooting. And what can we do about it? The NRA has control, so there's nothing we can do. Well, now these kids in Florida say, no, we're going to do something about it. We're going to make sure that Congress people know that we're going to vote if you take money from the NRA.

[32:05]

How we start attacking this bipartisan missile economy and military economy that controls our country is a bigger question. I think it starts by just being aware, and being aware of how numb we are to violence, and numb we are to aggression, and numb we are to the way our society is controlled by this, is run by this. So how do we start accepting The possibility, as Joanna Macy talks about it, of beings of the future. How do we start seeing a vision of the future that includes kindness and love and generosity? The values of the Bodhisattva precepts, actually.

[33:09]

Life instead of killing. Truth instead of lies. Including all beings. Not speaking of faults of others, but talking about problems without name-calling. Not harboring ill will, but trying to be helpful rather than harmful. It's a huge job, but we have to start where we are. And part of that is to know the situation and awareness.

[34:11]

And... You know, I think awareness itself transforms things. So, I hope that by releasing this information about what he calls the doomsday machine and the way that our nuclear arsenal... He talks about, just in the introduction, he talks about how A lot of our American people's assumptions about our nuclear arsenal are false, that it's not just the President or even the Supreme Commanders who can start a nuclear war. So this is scary stuff, and yet knowing the truth and saying to our Congress people on both sides, from all parties, that this has to be changed is one way to start.

[35:19]

And then it also has to do with... Looking at our own lives and, you know, the Me Too movement now about treating The way men have treated women in a violent way, looking at how our precept about not misusing sexuality implies using sexuality in a positive way, in a loving, kind way, rather than violent way. All of these things we have to start looking at. They're all connected, I think. So, I don't know if anybody has any comments to add to all this. Michael. Just that this also kind of makes me think about how my aspect of this filming is being afraid or unwilling to face the reality of my own death.

[36:35]

okay yes good yeah right good Yeah, so this is about, right, the school shootings are about how our children face death, you know, and the kids in that school in Florida have been really great and beautiful and brave, saying, hey, well, you know, politicians, you better shape up, and this can happen anywhere. And yeah, and what these endless wars, and I'm not in any way criticizing the soldiers who volunteer and go and enlist and go and get involved in these wars.

[37:50]

I'm talking about the weapons makers who determine, who set the policy. And what Dan Ellsberg is talking about in terms of the nuclear set up in our country is the death of, and the climate crisis is another aspect of this, but the death of our species. This is horrible. And we can't, as Michael says, looking at our own personal death is like looking at, very much like, and our fear of that is like looking at the death of of humanity and all of our efforts and we belong to a lineage and a tradition and a practice that goes back 2,500 years and maybe a lot longer according to the Mahayana Sutras and we're keeping it alive and we're keeping it alive for all the future generations and yet here's this

[38:57]

threat to future generations, at least on this planet. And so yeah, this is powerful, scary stuff. And yeah, we don't want to look at it. Thank you, Michael. Dennis? OK. [...] Yeah.

[40:36]

No, no, just to say there are a number of people in our sangha who are, yeah. It could never have been possible. to feel a little bit special and proud.

[41:45]

Those are powerful instruments. And if you understand the gun, if you know how to control it, people who are in the gun culture can contend for people who don't know anything about guns and are afraid of them. But I think that insofar as there's a I think there's just an awful lot of people in our society who are powerless. gives them very little, if any, choice in the way they can run their lives. They don't have a choice.

[43:18]

They don't have much education. They don't have very many skills. They have very little opportunity to get a decent job. And if they have one, they're scared of losing it all the time. No, I thank you very, very much. I agree with you, everything you said. I'm not in favor of abolishing guns at all. I think for some people, they are a tool. But there should certainly be, there is a possibility of sensible gun control in terms of who has access to them. That's what I was advocating. Yeah, thank you for that.

[44:26]

I think that's right. I think there is a sense of powerlessness for many, many people, and not just people in the gun control culture. Maybe for all of us, we have the sense of, in the face of the very powerful people in our society, maybe all of us feel that powerlessness in one way or another. So thank you for that. Very well said. Other, and the other comments were going a little late, but that's okay. Yes, Jason. Well, two things. The artist was Henry Moore. Henry Moore, yes, thank you. And... I don't know if prayer works in this sort of regard, but thinking about bodhisattva practice and what we can do, simple acts like, you don't know if a smile can affect somebody.

[45:53]

Right. Or anything else like that. And in the face of mounting fears and a segregated city, Thank you for that. And I was going to mention something about Dan Ellsberg, his first trip to Vietnam. He was interested in, because he was working at a very high level as a civilian, but at a very high level in the Defense Department. His first trip to Vietnam he stopped. in Kyoto because he was interested in Japanese culture and he happened to go into a bar and after looking at some Zen gardens and sat down with a fellow American and started a conversation and ended up having a long conversation with this guy who is a Zen practitioner named Gary Snyder.

[47:02]

And that really changed him. That was one of the things that really changed Dan Ellsberg and helped him to be able to see what was really going on in Vietnam freshly. And I forget the exact story, but at some point when he was about to release the Pentagon Papers, he went to visit Gary again in California. Anyway, they were friends. So Gary is one of the founding fathers of American Zen. But that conversation in a bar in Kyoto changed a lot of our history. We don't know what will happen that will affect things. So thank you all for listening. We'll close formally with the four bodhisattva vows.

[48:07]

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